Excerpt of Vanishing by Degrees by David Orsini

ARRIVAL

The lift-off comes when we are least expecting it. We ascend as if our bodies are space capsules hurling through an endless void beyond the rims of earth. We’ve been told to be ready at all times. So familiar are the days that precede it, though, so apparently safe from malevolent harm or from murderous enemies, that we are no longer anticipating the rapid fire of a rifle or the barrage of bullets tearing through our flesh and hurling us across the long corridors. Those corridors, spattered with our blood and cluttered with our crumpled or sprawling bodies, go on gleaming with polished surfaces and with the afternoon light of the June sun that streams incandescent rivulets through the panoramic windows. But the sunlight cannot retain the tranquil glow that, only minutes earlier, it brought to the southwest wing of our school in Green Hills, Maine. The glow has turned eerie, touching as it does our fallen and disfigured bodies. 

There has been no Code Red warning. There has been only our split-second awareness that a killer is in our midst and firing bullets from his AR-15.

Even my ability to predict the future has failed me. My devious ways have clouded my foresight. I have not anticipated this terrifying moment when a killer is rushing upon us.  

“It’s Henderson!” Dion Williams shouts, his deep, usually assured voice tightening with fear. 

The jagged sounds of the shooting cause all of us to turn and to pause, though only for a moment. A tall figure at the opposite end of the hall is heading toward us. He is wearing a helmet, a camouflage combat uniform, a flak vest, and army boots. His large, rough hands are grasping the AR-15 that he has just fired. He is Henderson. He’s often posted photos of himself on Facebook and on Instagram wearing that same uniform and wielding the same rifle. With swift strides he is moving toward us, past the sprawled and bleeding body of Ms. Patel, our biology teacher, and past the bullet-battered body of Mr. Marchand, our Advanced French teacher and our JROTC instructor.    

“He’s shooting at us!” Dion yells, still not quite believing what he sees. 

Henderson keeps firing his rifle, moving with methodical steps toward us.

The eleven of us, close friends ever since we bonded in the first grade, have been walking at a brisk pace. We left our biology class only minutes earlier and are making our way at the end of the crowd of other juniors and seniors that, like ourselves, are hurrying on to their next classes in the southwest wing. Now, without another word, we eleven friends and the twenty other students who are there turn from Boyd Henderson and race across the corridor, weighed down though we are by our backpacks and impeded by our scrambling and jostling. Some of us bump against one another. Some of us push forward the hastening figures in front of us. A few of us scream with terror.  

A bullet flies into Alessandro Bianchi, who has been running beside me. His forehead blows open, and brain tissue scatters on the air and on my left shoulder in the same instant that his long, muscular body keels over, rests momentarily on his knees, and then falls face down. 

I keep running, pushing my way with zigzagging trajectory beyond Jayden McDonald, Dion Williams, Shiloh Jackson, and Ari Bachman as bullets mow them down. 

I race past our computer wiz Jason Teng, beautiful Chloe Bradbury, and good-natured Brenda Flynn as they fall away behind me. The rat-tat-tat of Henderson’s rifle is singeing the air with the velocity and heat of its bullets. 

I run faster, always zigzagging through the long corridor ahead of me. I feel flushed. I hear my ragged breathing.

I trip over the fallen body of Sonia Janowski, the sheen of her amber blonde flowing hair covered in blood and with bits of her flesh.

Then, suddenly, our school’s champion swimmer Abigail Emerson and I are the only ones running. 

I am only vaguely aware that she is falling. 

In those final moments, there flashes through my mind the full realization that I am not going to reach the emergency exit door that stands a hundred feet ahead of me. I, Cassandra Winslow, having lived for a mere eighteen years, am being thrown out of life. 

“It isn’t fair!” my mind protests and then protests once more. “It isn’t fair!”

I wince at the burning sensation of the bullets entering my back and the sight of the blood gushing out of my chest. I hear, though only for an instant, the thud-thud-thud of the bullets just before they cut their way into my neck and blow massive holes into my brain.

I die in that very moment, the world that I had known so briefly scattering away into explosive flashes of darkness and coiling back into its own brightness that I can no longer fathom.

This is the moment of my liftoff. My Spirit springs free of my earthbound body. My whole being glows as though it is a ghostly spacecraft in search of a mystical orbit. All at once I am a Shadow, traveling on a beam of light into a supernatural reality. 

I go out of ordinary time and enter the world not of the dead. I have left my dead self far behind me, back there, within Earth that is time-trapped and temporary. Sojourn, the new world that I enter, is also time-bound. But it is tethered to a more quickened, supernatural time that precedes the journey into the Eternal. Spirits, Shadows, and Shades live here. It is a vast world that never seems crowded. Apparitions, Phantoms, and Specters also reside here. Capacious rooms and long, wide halls and corridors fan out with sinuous velocity. Space keeps winding and curving and meandering even as it spreads its voluminous dimensions into still wider rooms, corridors, fields, plains, avenues, and whole cities.  

Eventually, in varying episodes here in Sojourn and back on Earth, I shall be a Shadow, an Apparition, and a Phantom. During the first months of my training in the Afterlife, I shall acquire the appropriate powers of each kind of ghost. Right now, my being is entirely a Spirit only at times. For the first months after my death and all through my training in ghostliness, I shall appear to be full-bodied, even though my body of flesh and blood, yoked as it is to the Spirit-Life informing it, is vanishing by nearly imperceptible degrees. Gradually, I shall be a fully radiant Spirit.

So Mr. Steerforth explains, shortly after our arrival here. Our orientation packet of information tells us that his first name is Robert. He is answering Dion’s question about why our bodies sometimes glow so brightly that the light appears to consume or conceal them or, possibly, makes them disappear. 

“The light here has a way of doing that,” Mr. Steerforth calmly answers him. “For now, Spirit-light will take hold of you every once in a while. It wants you to get used to it. It wants you to be comfortable. So don’t you or your classmates or your teachers worry about losing your bodies and turning into Spirits. Each of you has always been a Spirit. Now you need to learn how to be a Spirit without a body.” 

My earliest experience of the supernatural world is this meeting with Mr. Steerforth. He is a manager of things here, though he is not the commanding officer. Call him a meticulous advisor, if you like. He is one of the leaders who will decide what is going to happen to our group now that we are dead to our earthly lives. But I’ll tell you more about that later.

First, I want to tell you more about Sojourn. It is a natural satellite of Earth that is located in a transitional space between our homes in Green Hills, Maine, and the First Heaven. It is a haven and a temporary place for those of us who are waiting to make the journey to The First Heaven. Sojourn is invisible to even the largest telescopes, the swiftest spacecraft, and the most advanced NASA instruments. We, the earthly dead who have recently arrived here only to discover that we are not dead in Sojourn, have not lost our memories of Earth or our yearning to return to the places that knew us well and the people that gave us their unconditional love. Perhaps, we shall never lose that memory or that yearning. But we are millions of miles away from Earth, which is The Second Heaven and the one that most human beings never recognize as a treasure beyond price and as a world filled with miracle workers and beneficent Spirits.