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Life, actually…

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This happened long ago. But then, didn’t just about everything?

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COLD CASE GHOST RIDERS

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 What if the creator of the universe got claustrophobia and suddenly and inexplicably the universe simply wasn’t roomy enough?

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And what if said creator at once realized that by its very definition the universe was everything it could ever be and as big as it could ever get?

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And what if the creator had to really start thinking about whether infinite power and wisdom were infinite and powerful only within the universe’s own boundaries and rules?

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That’s the kind of thinking you do when you are hermetically sealed inside a cold case. A cold case containing you alone.

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A windowless unfriendly metallic air-conditioned coffin, a coffin so snug that your arms folded across your chest press against the sides of the coffin and allow you no wiggle room.

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The faceless people who placed you inside this cold and dry coffin have warned you not to move a muscle because if you move a muscle you must stay inside the coffin twice as long.

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Twice as long as eternity is about as perplexing as the idea of a creator getting claustrophobia and not being able to do anything about it without breaking finely tailored rules.

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In order to survive this icy coffin for eternity you have to figure out what to do with your mind because it is your mind that won’t leave you alone, it is your mind that keeps reminding you that you are unique among heavy-breathing animals only because you can imagine what is not and can rethink your own death a thousand times a minute before it ever occurs, thus making your own death potentially anti-climactic because of all that dress-rehearsing your mind has been doing for so long.

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And even that isn’t true because you somehow know that no matter how many times you die before dying you’ll find death as fresh and as annoying and as terrifying when it finally comes as it has been all those years you have been rehearsing for it.

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So you try to use your pesky brain against itself—that is, you try to get it to think about pleasant things you dream up, since your mind insists on thinking nonstop anyhow.

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For at least for 90 seconds you get some relief because you call up the anecdote your big sister related to you just the day before all this started happening.

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Sister Barbara was lying there some months back just like you are now, inside an air-conditioned coffin hermetically sealed against the staff members of the medical facility who were drinking paper-cupped Cokes and staring right through you when you walked toward the coffin just a while ago.

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In the city where she was receiving her MRI she was at least offered something I was not offered. She could have any kind of music she wanted to hear piped into the coffin as she lay there for a small eternity.

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She elected “her kind” of music and lo and behold, just as she was preparing herself for the thousand deaths of isolation, just as she was trying to adjust to the idea of being cut off from her entire outside life, the song “Ghost Riders in the Sky” started playing and she started giggling and a stern disembodied voice told her through a cold speaker that she must try to contain herself.

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But she got through the experience.

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I could only pretend I was hearing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” since the people outside my particular coffin were making no noise at all and here I was with no ghost riders and trying mightily not to cough for fear of being punished with a longer stay inside the coldest case I’ve never imagined.

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And you know, I was kind of beginning to identify with a claustrophobic creator who just got too big for the universe…or did the universe get too small?

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The ending of this story is kind of pathetic since I never did get out of that coffin and the only comfort I have received from that experience is the knowledge that creators, too, can be trapped forever in a universe too small to contain all the kindnesses we can imagine, too small because in between the kindnesses is the detritus of the universe, the bad stuff.

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I just disregard the idea that all those left-over ghost riders are floating out there between the kindnesses.

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All this is just fine, so long as the kindnesses distract us from that other stuff

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© 2022 A.D. Jim Reed

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