What indeed? She wanted to move, to escape into the daylight. But there was nothing to move, no sense of weight or physical resistance, no place where effort could be applied. It seemed as if somewhere inside her there had to be mental levers that she could push or pull, but she could not find them. Or maybe she had found them, but they were no longer connected to anything. It was difficult to accept that she no longer had a body. That in a world of living human subjects negotiating their way around a physical environment of obstacles and tools and other human subjects, no physical being occupied the place called 'here'. What world could there be for her now?
Then again, how could she tell she had no body? An incongruous thought came: If one of Michaelangelo's great statues were magically endowed with the gift of sight, it would never know its own grandeur.
Then she moved. At first, it felt as if an unknown force had carried her along. Then she realized that she herself had willed it. She had caught herself, she had found her 'levers'. She could turn her point of view left or right, up or down, just as if she was swivelling her eyes, except that now she could swivel through three hundred and sixty degrees. Another lever initiated movement at the pace of a relaxed jog in whichever direction 'she' happened to be pointing. A third acted as an instant brake. After a few hasty experiments, she headed for the window and floated down into the street.
Although there was no need to, she felt comfortable hovering at her old height of five feet five inches. She joined the crowds that pressed forward against the hastily erected barriers. Suddenly everything went black. She had been dodging in and out, trying to get a good view of the spectacle, when one of the bystanders had walked straight 'into' her. She was inside his body! She was not afraid, just curious. She thought she could just perceive vague deep-red shapes in the almost pitch dark. Was that dark line part of a rib-cage? Was that palpitating mass a beating heart? Then just as suddenly she re-emerged through a heavy brown sweater, back into the daylight.
It occurred to her that it was rather strange that the objects of her vision continued to obey the laws of optics, considering that she didn't possess anything to physically 'see' with. She wasn't able to see through opaque objects, or round corners, for example. Yet undoubtedly she was 'seeing' without eyes, in fact, things looked exactly the same as they did when she was 'alive'! Though she had never believed in God, it was difficult to avoid concluding that some supernatural agency was responsible for what she was now experiencing. Then what about before, when she still had a body?
Her thoughts were taking her in a direction she did not want to go. She concentrated on the spectacle, watching with grim admiration as the firemen carried out their well-rehearsed moves. It was clear from their faces that they did not expect anyone to remain alive in the inferno.
She wondered when her body would be found, and whether anyone would be able to identify her. It was clear that no-one was going to attempt to venture into the apartment building until the fire was out. After a while she lost interest. Where to now? She could go anywhere she liked. But as she turned the possibilities over in her mind, they all seemed pointless. She remembered there was a new film that she had very much wanted to see. Prices in the new cinema complexes were exorbitant, but now she didn't have to pay! She headed for the city centre. Gradually, however, suppressed thoughts began to surface. 'What am I? How long am I going to continue in this state of limbo?' The more she thought about the second question, the more she was filled with dread. 'This is where it all ends. There is no escape.' She stopped near a bench where a bag lady was sitting. Hovering next to her for company, she tried to concentrate on the first question.
What am I? At school she had learned about the philosopher Descartes, who said that we are essentially non-physical souls, existing in time but not in space, yet connected in some mysterious way to physical bodies. He had reached that conclusion by a very subtle proof. He argued that since it was possible to doubt the existence of a world outside one's own consciousness, it was at least logically possible that a conscious subject could exist in the absence of any physical objects. It followed, he said, that whatever it is that essentially makes me me, a subject with these thoughts and feelings, cannot be anything physical. However closely the things that go on in my mind may be connected with the physical things that go on in my body for example, my brain my mind and my physical body are still two and not one.
'Well, it seems old Descartes was right!', she thought. 'Here I am, no body, just a mind, a subject capable of thought and will, experiencing the world from my detached viewpoint.' On second thoughts, however, things didn't seem so clear cut. 'How do I know that I have not turned into a tiny germ, too small to see myself in any mirror, small enough to pass through larger objects? Perhaps that is what I have been all along!' She remembered a friend who'd got involved with Scientologists telling her some such fantastic story about intelligent alien beings who had learned to hitch a ride in human bodies. Was that so absurd? It did seem odd, to say the least, that despite the enormously detailed knowledge of the human body provided by physiology, the tiny organisms had up to now completely evaded discovery. Yet the alternative hypothesis that the mind was non-physical meant rejecting the hard-won discoveries of physical science, and its claim to account for all the events that take place in the universe.
Then another possibility occurred to her. 'Perhaps I'm dreaming all this!' Descartes had used the sceptical thought that he was being fed with dreams by an evil demon to demonstrate how it was possible for a soul to exist in a world where there were no physical objects. But in fact it seemed to her that the correct conclusion to draw in her case was the reverse. If she was dreaming, according to her only understanding of the word, then somewhere there was a physical body, asleep, and the thoughts and experiences she was now having were its thoughts and experiences. Of course, Descartes had meant something different by 'dreaming': an experience happening without anything physical for it to happen in, awake or asleep, indeed without any kind of physical cause. But nothing she had so far experienced forced her to accept Descartes' theory.
Neither of the alternatives to Descartes could be dismissed, but did either one or the other have to be right? Perhaps the first was correct, but it was still open to scientific disproof. If exhaustive physical investigations failed to discover any of the Scientologists' 'riders', then at some stage it would surely be rational to conclude that it was, at least, highly unlikely that there were any such things. The second implied that none of the things she was experiencing was really happening. It was something she very much wanted to believe. But supposing things continued on like this for weeks, months, years? Eventually, she would have to take her experiences at face value: the possibility of waking up would recede further and further into the background. What a terrible thought!
There was one more possibility. Perhaps her body was awake somewhere, but deprived of all its senses apart from a remarkable ability to see things from a point of view outside its own location. She pictured the remnants of a brain ticking over inside her charred remains. Surely it was incredible that there could still be anything in there capable of thought, let alone possessing such a seemingly magical faculty of sight. But suppose that had never been her real physical body, but merely the point of view from which her 'real' body, perhaps hundreds of miles away, perhaps in another galaxy, perceived the world? The idea involved no logical absurdity as far as she could see. But clearly the theory could never be tested. One would have to search the whole universe before one could be sure that no such body existed!
The old woman turned to her and smiled. The expression was warm and welcoming. She felt drawn closer and closer. Then she was looking out through the old woman's eyes. She could feel the cool breeze on her face, smell the musty odour of her ragged clothes, feel the reassuring pressure of the wooden bench.
The old woman chuckled. 'That was a nice trip. I wonder if there's anything to eat in the litter bin?'
'Molecules' © Ruth Klempner 1999
'Walkabout' © Geoffrey Klempner 1995