Out of Body

a short story

The first time he left his body he was in elementary school. Before that he had spent his days in his grandmother’s house. There was a garden and the neighborhood was safe, there were kids his age or thereabouts, there was a television and toys, there was a dog and a cat, there were parks and gardens and even an abandoned house to explore. His parents came after work to take him home, and there he would play with his toys and his coloring pencils, and then his mother would read him a story or two as he drifted off to sleep. There were no limits and no obligations. Never a dull moment. But then, as he turned six, he had to go to school.

At first it was yet another novel experience, exciting just because it was new. There were other kids in his grandmother’s neighborhood, of course, but he had never been around so many, making so many friends, playing games in groups, chasing after girls. That was exciting. Even more exciting was learning things, adult things as he regarded them, letters and numbers and more. But soon the novelty began to wear off, as the teacher repeated the same lesson for the benefit of those in the class that did not get it the first time around, and he always did. And so he found himself experiencing something that was new but not exciting, boredom.

He was stuck in the classroom and could not leave. He asked to go to the bathroom and spent a long time there just looking at the ceiling and the patterns on the floor until someone came to check if he was ok and brought him back to class. After a while he asked to go again but the teacher did not allow it. There was no escape. He felt himself drifting off. The sun was coming in through the window and he was watching the tiny specks of dust dancing gently in the lighted air against the blackness of the board, the monotone voice of the teacher lulled him into a state of deep relaxation, and he thought he was falling asleep, but then his head started to vibrate violently. Before he could be afraid, he was seeing himself sitting at his desk. He was floating above his own body.

He could see the whole class and the teacher too, and immediately got the idea of amusing himself by floating around the room. This got old very quickly. The next idea was to try and play pranks on his colleagues and the teacher. He tried to pull the teacher’s earrings, pick up the chalk to draw something funny on the blackboard or throw some colleague’s pencils off the desk, but none of it worked. Then he decided to finally try what he wanted to do in the first place, to leave the room and roam around, but he found this difficult, and could not go further than the hallway, there seemed to be a tether, and it did not allow him to go very far away from his static body sitting at the desk. And then the teacher called on him to answer a question and he was brought back to his body. He answered the question without difficulty and then spent the rest of the class trying to repeat the experience, but he couldn’t, perhaps because now he was alert, the experience had pushed away all previous boredom and relaxation. The bell rang and the class was dismissed. He ran to the playground to play with the other kids and didn’t think of it again until the next day, when he began to be bored by another lesson he already knew. But perhaps because he was focused rather than relaxed, he couldn’t do it again. The next few months the feeling of boredom returned many times, but each time he would remember the experience and thus was unable to replicate it, it wasn’t a pure boredom anymore. And so eventually he forgot all about it.

In third grade something changed. There was a new girl in his class. From the first day he was interested in her in a way he hadn’t been interested in anyone, or anything, until then. He could not take his eyes off her, though whenever she looked him in the eye, or talked to him, or ran past him, he was embarrassed, and blushed. So all throughout the third grade his boredom during classes was assuaged by the sight of her, sitting next to the window a couple of rows in front of him. Except for the times she would turn her head for a moment or two, he could only see her hair, and always wished he could see more. And yet that was enough, her light brown hair and a glance of her pale neck would put him into a daze. It was one of those days, when she flicked her hair to the side and her neck came into view that it happened again, he felt his head vibrate with intensity and suddenly he was floating above himself, and wasted no time floating towards her. He was floating right in front of her, examining every detail of her face, and she had no idea he was there. The experience seemed to be over much too quickly, the bell rang and he was pulled back into his body again. Once again he tried to repeat it all throughout the year, but with no luck. Then towards the end of third grade she announced she was going to another school, in another part of the country. On the last day of school she said goodbye to all the colleagues, and even gave him a kiss on the cheek, and when she did he felt his head began to vibrate as if he was about to leave his body, but that time it didn’t happen, and she was already saying goodbye to another kid.

The next time it happened he was ten years old, school had ended the week before but summer hadn’t yet started. It was a weeknight. After dinner he played with his toys for a bit in his room but he felt he was getting too old for them. Then he decided to read a book, but none of the books held his attention for more than a couple of minutes. He played some videogames but this too did not excite him. He thought of taking out his art supplies but it would make too much of a mess and then he would have to put them all back, so instead he went to the living room, where his parents had fallen asleep on the couch watching a soap opera. He was going to change the channel when a woman appeared on the screen, she was taking off her robe, revealing her shoulders and back, and then he felt something strange stirring in his loins, his legs felt a bit weak, so he fell back on the armchair at the corner of the room and, before he knew it, he was floating above his body. Meanwhile the scene had changed, the woman had disappeared before her whole body could be revealed, and so he was no longer interested in the screen and decided to roam. The chair his body was sitting on was right in front of the door, so he floated to the hallway and almost made it to his room, but just as he was about to enter it he felt a pull, it was the tether to his body, preventing him from going further. This time he kept trying, pushing himself and being pulled back, to limited success. He didn’t know how long he tried, but the effort must have tired him, because the only thing he remembered after this was his father picking him up from the armchair and depositing him in his bed. Just like the other times, he could not replicate the experience despite the many times he found his parents sleeping on the couch, the television on, the armchair empty. Soon after he left for summer vacation with his cousins, as he always did, down south by the sea, and between the beaches and the new friends, he stopped worrying about the curious experience, though this time he did not forget it, he even asked other kids if they had experienced something similar, but they had not, and teased him for it, so after that he spoke to no one about it.

His parents had meanwhile run into some financial difficulties and the next year they sat him down and told him they could not afford to keep him in private school, so for fifth grade and on, he would go to public school. A couple of dark years followed, but not without out of body experiences, though these ones he would have preferred to avoid. Leaving the safety of a known and curated environment and the investment of teachers in his education and the familiarity of kids from backgrounds similar to his own, he was thrown into a chaotic world of thugs twice his size and half his intelligence, of mockery and shouting and theft and beatings delivered for no reason and at random times, and not knowing where to turn. Fifth grade was terrible, but he mostly kept to himself, and though he had his lunch money stolen more often than not, the violence was kept to a minimum. Sixth grade was much worse, but it did yield a few out of body experiences, the first of which came as he was being beaten to a pulp by thugs several years his seniors, brutes who barely spoke the language, and as the avalanche of dark fists come back for the fourth or fifth punch his head started to vibrate, though he barely noticed it this time, and only realized he was out of his body when the pain and the fear suddenly disappeared, and he saw his body lying on the floor, covered in blood, and the brutes on top of him. A few other beatings followed, and this time he was prepared, by the time the second punch came, he was already floating about and feeling nothing, and only when the beating ended, did he come back to his body. The pain of course was there waiting for him, but at least the fear was gone. This became so common that, the school year not even halfway, his parents made the decision to get him into a new school for the next year, since the teachers were unable or unwilling to do anything to prevent the violence, or to punish the aggressors. But there was one last experience, and this one was different.

After one particularly harsh beating, he was more or less adopted by the leader of a rival gang. He seemed to admire the placidness with which he faced the thugs and so decided to protect him. From then on, he was never alone and there were no more beatings, and no one stole his lunch money anymore. This would have been good enough, but the leader of the gang had taken him under his wing, perhaps because they sort of looked alike, and so invited him to come to his house one afternoon after school. There were two girls already in the house, they were clearly sisters, and they went to another school. The older one walked across the room and kissed his friend, who then took her by the hand to another room, but not before saying to the younger sister, Take care of my little brother. She too was older than him, though perhaps only a year or so, yet that was enough to make an enormous difference, girls mature so much faster than boys. His first kiss was almost unremarkable as she quickly took his left hand and placed it under her shirt, and then took his right and placed it under her skirt while her other hand unbuttoned his trousers. He couldn’t tell when exactly it happened, but he remembered watching it all from above, his body this time did not cease to move. Soon after this episode the school year ended, and he never saw any of these people again. During the summer he tried to replicate the experience, but with no success, and so remained in his body throughout.

Seventh grade was a completely different story. Though it was a public school it was inhabited by a very different crowd. Almost all the kids came from upper middle class families, and he thought often that he was probably the poorest one among them. There were no thugs, there were no beatings and no theft, everyone in his class was the same age as himself and the older kids did not much care about him one way or the other. He felt at home, and safe, once again. Thus he experienced a freedom he never had before, and with it a confidence that other kids, and especially the girls, admired. He even got a couple of girlfriends, though he never got far with any of them, not as far as he would have wished. Still, it was a good year, not once was he prompted to leave his body, and yet he found himself triggering it at will. Whenever a class was too boring, he would concentrate his sight on a single point, and soon his head would vibrate and he would be out and about. He found that with practice he could extend the reach of his roaming. There was still a tether, a hard limit, but it could be progressively stretched, so that by the end of the year he could get out through the window and go as far as the gymnasium, where older girls would be doing a dance routine. The only problem was the return, it was extremely unpleasant, he would be tired, and afterward have a massive headache for the rest of the day. Yet by now he was invested in the practice, and wanted to keep going, to expand his powers, to see if there was a limit, and by the end of the year both the tiredness and the headaches got better, almost negligible. And then the summer vacation offered the perfect opportunity to enhance his powers further.

Some friends from school would be spending a month at a summer camp, and though it was relatively expensive, he had finally got his grades up after the previous two miserable years, and so his parents agreed. Beyond the water sports, the appeal of the camp was primarily that nearby there was a girls’ camp, and one of his friends said that his own brother had, some years before, made contact with them, so they would try the same. They were not successful, only once did they cross paths with the girls in the nearby town, but they were unable to arrange a meeting after dark. Still the camp afforded him the opportunity to test and expand his powers, and this had by now become an obsession, almost as strong as his obsession with the female sex. He would go to bed at night and leave his body, then he would try to roam through the forest to the cabins where the girls slept. It was quite far, but by the second week he was almost at the wooden wall that surrounded the girls’ camp.

It was around this time, when his spirit was almost able to look beyond the wall, that he met another boy who could do the same as him, or rather, he met his spirit. The boy looked much like him, same age and same build, it was almost uncanny how much they looked alike. They introduced themselves and as neither had met another who could leave the body they quickly became friends. They also noted the similarity, examining each other’s bodies, or the parts they both could see. He had a birth mark on his belly, and the boy did not, but other than that, they really could have been twins. There was one other difference, the boy’s eyes, there was no white part around a darker orb as is normal but all of it was an almond shaped blackness, and whenever he looked directly into them he felt extremely uneasy. The boy noticed the uneasiness and so asked what was wrong, and when he told him the boy replied quite naturally, So are yours, I assume it’s something that happens when we leave the body, I was frightened too when I saw myself in the mirror. This was sufficient to put him at ease, as it mostly made him think of how it never occurred to him to look into a mirror while out of his body.

The boy was not in the camp, but instead lived in the nearby town, yet he too had taken as his hobby to spy on the girls. This raised immediately a question, How are you able to roam so far away from your body, the town is very far away. The boy’s answer, however, was simple, he had cut his own tether. He didn’t know this was a possibility, and furthermore, he never considered even inspecting his own spectre, so he’d never even seen his tether until that day, but now it was clear. Looking at the other boy he could see no tether, but looking at himself he could see his own, like a smoky spider web beginning at the base of his spine and disappearing into the forest. Isn’t it dangerous, he asked instinctively, and the other replied, As long as you know where your body is, you can always return, So how do I go about it, That’s easy, next time before you leave your body make sure you have a pair of scissors in your hand, then you’ll see that your spirit body too will have spirit scissors, and then you can use them to cut the tether. He was still afraid to do it, but so as not to appear cowardly, he said he would, and then they agreed to meet the next night, in the same place as always, except now they would both be free.

The next night he did as the boy had told him. He found a pair of scissors, left his body with them, and then finally got the courage to cut the tether. At first he didn’t feel anything different, but when he started to roam towards the girls’ camp he understood how bounded he had been, there was no more effort to stretch the tether, he could not just float but fly, and it was an incredible and amazing experience. With his new freedom he crossed the forest much faster than before and thus arrived earlier than the agreed time, and while he waited for the boy he spied on the girls, this time easily and comfortably with a full, unobstructed view. Perhaps it was because the girls had been drinking and were now dancing half naked around the fire that he didn’t notice the time passing, but then as the girls finally went to sleep he realized he had lost track of time, and his friend hadn’t come. He waited a little more, but there was nothing else to see there, and it was clear now the boy wouldn’t come that night. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to leave his body, he knew that sometimes no matter how hard one tried, it didn’t work. Perhaps he was sick. So he decided to return tomorrow to the same spot, for sure he would meet him then. So he went back to his cabin, not too disappointed, since he was now free, and he had even seen the girls up close, as he had wanted to all along.

He got in through the window and went towards his body lying inert on the bed. To return to it all he had to do was to float above it, and then slowly descend until body and spirit were once again united. Before he could do this, however, he noticed something curious. Though he had ditched the spirit scissors right after cutting his tether in the woods, he assumed the physical scissors would still be in his physical hand when he returned, but this was not the case. In fact, they were nowhere to be seen. It was true that, other than the clothes he was wearing, he had never taken anything with him, but still he was puzzled, so he went to the drawer from where he had taken the scissors, and to his surprise, but also his relief, there they were. He closed the drawer and then saw the mirror hung on the wall. He then remembered the earlier conversation with the boy, and decided to look at himself. And there they were, his eyes, his normal eyes, brown orbs surrounded by whiteness. He didn’t have time to think about what it meant, for he could see in the mirror that his own body was getting up from the bed and coming towards him. He turned around and saw his body standing in front of him, awake. He could only say, I don’t understand, and then a familiar voice that was not his own said, Look through the mirror, and when he turned around to look there was his body beside him, with two black abysses where his eyes used to be, and a terrifying smile.