I guess you could say that work had a way of hounding me.

Mr. Plotsky pointed at me, gasping and glaring. “Holy Angel, what kind of monster are you!?” His dress shoes echoed on the restroom tile as he staggered back in shock. The fine folds of his dark green suit sliced the air. Even his tie seemed hostile.

My head bobbed on my inhuman neck as I lowered it in shame.

A panicked Mrs. Plotsky clip-clopped forward on her low-heeled shoes, offering a nervous, black gloved hand to Andalon.

“Quickly, sweetie,” Babs beckoned urgently with her hand, “come here!”

Andalon stuck out her arms, with her palms facing the Plotskies. “No! Say sorry to Mr. Genneth!” She looked back at me. “He’s doin’ a good job.”

I started crying all over again. It was very unbecoming of me.

“No wyrmeh shamin’!” Andalon said. “Shamin’ is bad!”

Suddenly, Ileene’s parents were very confused.

Mrs. Plotsky scuttled back, pinning her navy blue pillbox to her bouffant ‘do with a push of her hand.

I chuckled tiredly.

“To make a long story short,” I began, pointing at both of them with a single hand, splaying out two gloved fingers, one of which was a growing claw, “you two are dead.” I pointed my thumb at myself, “I’m a neuropsychiatrist going a metamorphic episode,” and, lasted, I pointed at Andalon, “and this is Andalon, and she might as well be the Holy Angel’s little sister.” I waved my hands at my surroundings and then bowed respectfully. “Welcome to the afterlife.”

Mrs. Plostky’s eyes widened at the sight of my claw-finger protruding beneath my gloves. She squirmed within the confines of her dark blue ink-roller of a suit.

“What’s wrong with your face?” Jed said, pointing at his own.

I closed my eyes. “My Dad just died.” I sniffled.

The news of my personal tragedy took the nerve out of Ileene’s parents. They saw the man in me, and not just the transformee beneath the hazmat suit.

“How can we be dead?” Babs asked, stupefied—not that I could blame her.

Much to my surprise—and pleasure—Andalon took the initiative. She solved this dilemma all her own.

Stepping back, Andalon placed her arms at her side and bowed, much like I had.

“Hello, Mr. Jeddy and Mrs. Babsky,” she said, “I am Andalon.”

Babs was taken aback when the little spirit-girl offered her her hand.

“C’mon. Let’s go for a little walkie,” Andalon said.

She showed assertiveness: when Babra didn’t immediately respond, Andalon grabbed her hand and walked off with her, the mother forcing herself to oblige the blue-haired waif. Babs and her husband yelled in alarm as Andalon rapidly pulled Mrs. Plotsky toward the wall, only for the yelling to fall away for an instant and then come roaring back with a vengeance as the Plotskies realized Andalon and Babs had phased through the restroom’s teal-tiled walls. They phased back through a second later.

A crude method, yes, but definitely an effective one.

Andalon looked Mr. Plotsky in the eyes. “You wanna go for a walkie, too, Mr. Jeddy?”

He shook his head in a very clear “no”.

Good job, I thought.

She beamed at me.

For a moment, things got very quiet. I asked the Plotskies to take a seat on the porcelain bench jutting out of the wall by the door, if only to give me a chance to explain the situation, which I did. I was about half-way through my explanation when the Plotskies suddenly found their tongues and discovered they were brimming with questions, and so my explanation had to take a back seat. It took a couple of seconds for Jed and Babs to choose a question to ask me instead of forcing their way through by trying to talk over one another. I just wish it hadn’t forced me to confront the coldest, hardest answers I had to give right off the bat.

“Yes,” Babra said, agreeing with her husband’s choice, “what about our grandchild?” She clutched his hand tightly.

“You’re not the first to ask about the baby.” I shook my head.

I glanced at Andalon. Please, don’t say anything about it. It will only upset them.

She nodded.

“Well,” Jed demanded, “what is it?”

I lowered my head. “It wasn’t viable.”

They double-taked, looking about in disbelief and dismay. Their heads trembled, and tears glistened, gem-like, in the corners of their eyes.

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“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, bowing again—neck and all. But it did little to quell their heartbreak.

Drawing close, Mr. Plotsky gently grabbed his wife by the shoulders and turned until their eyes met. “Babs,” he said, “whatever happens to us, we’re still together.” He shed a single tear. “I’m sorry for blaming you for what happened to Ileene, and for what happened to the baby. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Mrs. Plotsky stared at her husband through her tears, and then lightly nudged his hand away with the back of her own. “Your mind’s going the way of your hairline, Jed,” she said, with a bitter smile. “I died… a failure.” A lifetime of suffocating rebuke weighed her head down. “My father thinks I’m useless, my sisters say I’m useless, my own daughter says I’m hateful, and you,” she looked at Jed, “you always just stood off to the side. You never took my side, just because you never wanted to stir up trouble,” she added, mockingly.

Suddenly, my console buzzed within my hazmat suit. I pulled it out. Messages torrented onto the screen.

“Fudge…” I muttered.

I didn’t have the time for this—so, I’d have to make some time.

I closed my eyes for a moment and focused, booting up a doppelgenneth to take command of my body. I knew the instant he came online, and thought the lightheadedness was barely noticeable to me anymore, I doubted I’d ever get used to the feelings of my bifurcating consciousness moving my body. Depending on how much I focused my attention on being my doppelgenneth, I could feel completely in or out of control of my transforming body’s response-lagging movements.

My body donned the hazmat suit’s headpiece and sealed it shut, and then, as I walked out of the restroom, Babra rose from her seat in a start. “Wait,” she demanded, “where are you go—”

—It’s alright, I thought-said, I’m still here.

The Plotskies looked around in astonishment at the sound of my voice filling the air, even though my body’s mouth remained perfectly still. The spirits’ disconcertment grew as they drifted along as my body moved out of range. One moment, Jed was sitting on the porcelain bench in the restroom; the next, he was sitting on air, his and his wife’s bodies trailing after mine, yet without moving of their own accord. Jed didn’t even fall. The same happened to Andalon, but, by now, it didn’t faze her in the slightest—though it did occasionally phase her through the wall (pun intended).

Humor was misery’s favorite accomplice.

“What the Hell is going on?” Jed asked, staring around in confusion as the hospital’s hallway passed him by. It was the world’s strangest safari ride.

It’s like I was trying to tell you, I explained, you’re not just dead, you’re in the afterlife, and this particular piece of it just so happens to be inside my mind.

Jed threw his arms in the air and shook his head. “Everybody’s having an identity crisis these days.”

Babs was getting pretty stressed out: her evasive glances, her bulging gaze. She shut her eyes and clenched her fists. So she turned her fear onto her husband. “You’re chickenshit Jed, as chickenshit, as am I, and now we’re dead and there’s nothing we can do about it. Maybe if you had been braver. Maybe if I had been…”

“Babs,” Jed let out a wasted sigh, “I learned years ago that there wasn’t any point in fighting with either of you. The only people you listen to are the ones who don’t care about you.”

“That’s not true,” Babs snapped, “my sisters ask me to go with them to our father’s house all the time.”

Jed shook his head. “That’s only because they have someone to talk to, because your father certainly won’t—if you’re lucky, at any rate.”

Babs scoffed at him.

Jed continued: “You and Ileene have gotten so twisted up that you can’t see the good in people who mean you well and refuse to see the disregard and selfishness in the people that don’t. Once I realized there wasn’t anything I could do to change that, I chose to make my peace with it, for the sake of our family. I’m not happy about it, but that’s just how it had to be, ‘cause everything else was worse.”

I felt Ileene’s presence in her ghost room, clawing away at the walls of my mind, bubbling with a potent emotional brew: fear, concern, longing, loneliness, pain, regret, and even anger, though it was far more subdued than it had been before.

This, I thought-said, all this. Ileene was tired of it. It made her hate you and hate herself.

“What…?”

Babs turned to me. Slowly, her husband followed suit.

She was tired of all the fighting, I explained. She longed for the mother who showed her how to trim the bonsais in the garden. The one who’d let her eat unbaked cookie dough, and who told her all the reasons why the top marginal income tax rate was “too damn low”, even if Ileene was too young to really understand it.

Babs around—up at the ceiling; at the pastel paintings on the wall, behind spore-dusted glass, trying to find my voice. “Wh-who told you that?” she said, stammering.

Ileene did, I said.

But Mrs. Plotsky smiled. “So, the surgery, it went well?” she asked.

Fudge.

“Fudge?” Babs asked. “What does fudge have to—”

Everything flashed dark for a moment as I closed my body’s eyes and shook my head. Ileene’s presence was gnawed at the walls that held her at bay. I figured it was in everyone’s best interest if I let her out so that she could talk with her parents.

But not here; not out in the real world; not where someone could get hurt if I lost my grip on my powers.

And I knew just the place.

It was time for a change of scenery: a quiet place where I could take the time to share their daughter’s story with them, and not just for their sake. I wanted to get it off my chest. I needed that.

I clenched my body’s fists.

Besides, now was as good a time as any to try my hand at “world-building” like Greg had. I needed to make a mind-world of my own; a place for the Plotskies, where I could settle their issues once and for all, if only just to give me a sliver of peace.

But how?

“Ooh!” Andalon’s eyes went wide. She hopped up and down excitedly. “Ooh! I know the answer! Andalon knows the answer!”

Yes?

“You gotta think hard!” she said. “Here, like this.”

As the hallways drifted past and the sick and the dying and the dead came into view, Andalon held her arms up in front of her as if she was about to punch someone, gritted her teeth, squeezed her eyes shut, clenched her hands into trembling fists, and made a hnnnnng noise—the universal sound of someone deep in focus, and then, all of a sudden, she stopped and let out a chipper “Yeah!” as her eyes popped open and her lips curled in a broad, toothy smile.

I shook my head. Andalon was just on a completely different wavelength than anyone or anything I’d ever known. She was alien and unfathomable, and somehow both complicated beyond belief, yet also absurd and childlike and simple.

If I ever saw my Dad again—be it in this, or any other life—I think he’d get a kick out of hearing about my misadventures, in all their horror and wonder.

In the here and now, I closed my body’s eyes and focused, thinking back to what it felt like when Greg had whisked me away into the world he was building in his mind. It took a second, and I almost started to fret, but then I felt the tug and my eyes fluttered open in surprise, just in time to watch the world blur as my mind rocketed into an unknown sky.

And then everything went black.