The Clear Light
Between the smells of blood and greenery, Jack catches a whiff of jet fuel. Above, framed by a leafy screen, an airplane crosses a swatch of pale sky.
Time contracts, then dilates. He can feel each one of the people on board, senses their anxiety, flinches at their fear. All he can do is watch helplessly as a hand other than his own guides Ajira 316 along its course.
Hugo, Jack thinks. He wasn't wrong about him. Hurley's got this now.
From deep inside he whispers to one of the passengers, My love. Maybe he still has enough powers to reach her with this message as she hurtles away from the Island at hundreds of miles per hour.
Even though she's thousands of feet up, she hears it. He knows this with the same certainty that this is it, he's really dying. One more pulse, and both the message and the rest of his blood leave him.
Oh, Kate. Oh, my love.
Then she is gone. Jack is left alone with the coagulating iron smell of his wound, and the panting dog that flops down beside him. Vincent licks his face clean, and Jack doesn't even mind the wet tongue, the dog's faintly meaty breath.
He closes his eyes, and falls into dark silence.
Jack's body, that poor broken thing clad in bloody blue, lies beneath him now. He looks on with faint detachment as Vincent gives it one last nuzzle, then trots off into the forest. He turns his attention away, with no more regard for his body than for wet and stinking clothes tossed into the washing machine after a long run.
Something pulls him upward, or is everything receding? The dead human shell fades beneath him as he leaves behind the hands which once sliced through muscle to reattach nerves, or combed Aaron's hair; the arms which held Kate close; the urgent flesh which strained inside hers and groaned in love. All of it fades away.
No longer distracted by his body, he sees clearly the traps set all around him. The Island (but it's not really an Island, is it?) is peppered with ghosts who struggle like flies trapped on sticky-paper. They clutch at him from all sides, their squeaks like demented bats begging him to stay, stay, stay.
You could see her, they whisper. At her house. At your mother's. You could watch her when she sleeps, as she showers, pours her morning coffee. Keep track of the boy as he grows up. Find out if your sister gets better, is no longer crazy. Don't you want to see? Don't you want to know?
Jack turns away, just as he did from his inert flesh. The chattering ghosts fall back, pushed aside by a light which bears down upon him like the single headlamp of eternity.
How can something contain all colors, yet be no color at all?
Jack tells himself that he's ready for anything, even hell, but nothing has prepared him for this monstrous, endless emptiness. It creeps inside him, filling him with nothingness until he can't even tell where he ends and the colorless light begins.
Clarity fills everything. If he had arms or legs, he would scrabble away fast as he could, just like the crabs Claire used to chase on the beach.
His.
He.
Jack.
That's all which remains. As he struggles, the clear light opens before him, waiting.
How can something be truly nothing, and yet so full of presence, of truth?
It waits.
He could lay himself aside, set down his Jack-ness just as he laid down his corpse. All it would take is one yes, one crack in the wall of himself, one final loosening of ego's grip.
It waits for a second, a moment, an eternity. It can wait until an end that will never come. Instead, it's he who can wait no longer.
As he turned from his body, from the chattering ghosts, he turns from the clear, colorless light. I can't, he says to himself.
Something kisses him, not like the ones he remembers from life (soft green eyes gazing into his as full lips slightly part, her strawberry breath drawing him into tender nibbles which burst into red flame), because he has no mouth. Even so, it feels like a kiss, one of pure, distilled compassion.
It seems to say, That's all right. Better luck next time.
The perfect clarity which filled him slowly congeals and thickens into the cleanest white he has ever seen. None of the old words can describe it: snow, bleached bone, beach sand. All colors blend to form the thick, white light which supports him. He never knew that white could have so many parts within it, could contain such a rainbow, and it fills him with surprise and delight.
The white folds and corrugates into roughness. Endless, billowing forms spread out across an empty sky with no beginning, no end. Words come to him from long ago, Advanced Calculus at Columbia University, was it?
Mobius strip.
Toroid.
The endless surface goes round and round, launching him into another cycle of repetition. But smooth, without seam or boundary. The white forms congeal again into something reassuring and familiar: clouds, with their familiar lumpy shapes, tinged with blue on the underside.
Jack has never been so happy to see blue.
Nor is he floating amongst them. Instead, they drift from behind a screen of tiny scratches, each nick filled with flecks of brilliant sunlight. Whenever the light catches one in just the right way, he blinks.
A window. He's looking through an airplane window at a sea of cumulus, gilded by sun, shadowed in blue.
He shakes his head as if waking from a dream, or falling into one. It all rushes back to him. The presentation at the International Neurology Society in Sydney, the applause, his award for stem-cell grafting in spinal cord resection. The cheerful, congratulatory email from his dad afterwards, even though it was three in the morning Los Angeles time. The pang of sadness when his text to his son David went unanswered. Never mind, he'll check his phone again as soon as they land.
Again he shakes his head, then turns, because someone has spoken to him.
From across the aisle, a dark-skinned, middle-aged woman smiles at him, and it's as if the sky split apart, and every angel descended to earth through the opening. Over the whine of the engines he swears he hears her say, "You can let go now, Jack."
He fights confusion. Did she just say his name? He doesn't know her from Eve, not a relative of a patient, nothing. As she looks away, he chalks it up to jet lag and the residual fog of an impromptu nap. He gratefully accepts a drink from the flight attendant.
Maybe he was white-knuckling it more than he needed to. Something nags at him, some memory or half-dream. At first he shakes it off, but when the plane buckles and lurches, a terrible fear shoots through him.
It's happening again, he thinks, then just as swiftly tells himself that it's ridiculous. He's flown dozens of times, racked up hundreds of thousands of air miles. Nothing's ever happened. Planes are the safest form of transport there is.
The woman across the aisle watches him again, as if waiting for something. Maybe she needs reassurance too. So he gives her the smile he saves for patients when the scans come back negative, when he has genuinely good news to impart. "I guess planes want to stay in the air, right?"
When she nods, she loses the supernal air about her. Instead, she shrinks down to an ordinary passenger across the aisle, waiting just like him for a routine landing and taxi into the LAX terminal after fifteen hours in-flight. He could do with a shower, a call to Dad to let him know he's back safely. And even if David thinks it's old-fashioned, he'll call him too.
She returns his smile. "Sure they do."
(A/N: Instead of calling the afterlife parts of LOST the "flash-sideways," the creative team called it thebardo, the in-between state between physical death and reincarnation described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.)