“Did you go and put on the repellent?”

  “I did, why?”

  “After I just told you the smell turns me foul?”

  “Well, you were the one who started going on about AIDS. I just…”

  Graham hung up the phone. It didn’t matter that he was forty-something and a doctor of sciences; it was just as hard getting their attention now as when he was six.

  Before he could get in the pharmacy door, his attention was captured by a neon sign across the street. The words ‘Wu-Shun Karate’ lit up the night sky like a flickering epiphany. Instantly, he dropped the shopping list and wandered across the street like a toddler, chasing a bouncing ball. Cars braked hard and swerved but even that was not enough to break his spell.

  He peered through the dojo’s front window at an older man dressed in a black kimono, chopping and kicking at the air. Though he couldn’t hear because of the wind and rain, it was obvious that the man inside was screaming and shouting with every strike; probably some mystic verse passed down through the ages.

  What struck Graham the most was that this man looked no different to him. He was as old as him, if not older and he was balding in all the same places. What really stood out, though, was the size and stature of his stomach. He looked as if he were in the final trimester of a pregnancy that wouldn’t end. His belly was even bigger than Graham’s. That, if anything, made him feel like this was the kind of place where he belonged.

  He stayed for some time with his face pressed against the glass watching as the man in black instructed a class full of wide eyes pupils. There was not one distracted face on the mat. Each stared with gripping attention as if whatever was being taught to them could decide the fate of another man’s life.

  He wanted to know what they knew. He wanted to be able to do what they could do. He wanted to be dressed in black, sitting cross-legged with everyone else too. And that’s when the man caught him looking.

  He looked just like a black bear, standing there with his hands by his side and his gigantic belly, sticking out from his black kimono. He had the face of one too; a look in his eyes that was part curious animal and part savage beast. He looked like he could tear the face off the side of a mountain, and yet, at the same time, he had this attentive ponder, as if he were weighing up whether it was worth the bother.

  Eventually, he walked right to the front door. And it was scary as hell too.

  “What’s your name?” he said in a thick British brogue.

  There was no kindness in his voice whatsoever. Put the man in a suit and he could be bouncing a club or making rounds for loan sharks and the mafia. But he wasn’t in fancy clothes. He wasn’t in a tank top or a tracksuit either. He stood there in the doorway with his hands cupped around the knot of his black belt, looking meaner than any bear and tougher than any golden gloves boxer.

  “I’m Graham,” said Graham.

  He sounded nervous and a little fraught, as he bloody well should have been. The man in black didn’t twitch a single muscle. He stood there still like a wax statue; barely breathing. Graham, on the other hand, was on the verge of coronary.

  “I am Master Wu-Shin,” he said, in his thick British brogue. “But those who learn my way know me as The Master.”

  His face was shaped like a Buddhist temple.

  “Are you ready to learn the art of the whispering tree?” he said.

  Graham floated towards him; he could not escape his gravity.

  “Yes,” said Graham. “I want to learn.”

  “Very good,” said The Master. “Then I shall show you the way.”

  Track 7 (Yellow)

  Graham arrived home close to eleven; hours after he was meant to be. He half expected an inquisition or at the very least, some cynical slights on his fidelity; not that he had ever cheated or was even capable of such a thing, but that wasn’t exactly how most arguments played out. At the very least, there should have been some form of conundrum and on his part, a simple and timely explanation.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m home.”

  But there was no response.

  It was odd that not even the dog should be barking. He peered into the living room expecting everyone to be laid out on the sofa or on cushions on the floor. The television was on but there was nobody watching. So he went to the kitchen where he could hear music blaring. The radio was on, yes, but there was nobody was dancing.

  Every light in the house was on and yet still it felt like nobody was home.

  Half the chairs were flipped over and drawers, piled with papers, had been pulled out and were scattered all over the kitchen table. The fridge and freezer doors were both wide open and tap was left on with the water already overflowing and starting to spill on the floor. And finally, at the bottom of the stairs, there was a hammer that was normally kept in one of the drawers.

  “Where is everyone? Guys?”

  Graham slowly crept up the stairs half expecting to stand on a handful of nails or a severed finger. The destruction continued upstairs. Clothes were scattered along the hallway, while in the bathroom, toothbrushes and old razors were spread out on the floor. In the sink, there were splotches of blood that lead out through the bathroom door.

  There had been a struggle here – a violent and bloody fight.

  “In here,” said a woman’s voice, sounding defeated, as if she were teetering on the tip of her very last breath.

  Graham edged towards the bedroom first and snuck his head inside, expecting the worst. It looked like a crime scene photo. Whatever had happened, it had started here. Then he turned away and edged yet again, with fret in every step, towards the children’s bedroom.

  And there he saw her – Mary, his wife - with her legs spread out on the ground. Her body was lumped against the side of the bed, twisted in the most heinous fashion. Her eyes flickered as he stared at her, the inch of faith in her heart, fighting to keep them open. Beside her body lay his daughter Isabel, her body curled up like a ball. And wrapped in his wife’s arms was Nathan, his seven-year-old son.

  “What the hell happened?”

  Mary looked at him as if it were the last look she would ever give him.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  “I know, I’m sorry, I should’ve called it’s just…”

  “I told him you’d be back at nine.”

  Graham looked at his watch – it was eleven fifteen.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I lost track of time.”

  Her face said that she didn’t care. She wasn’t angry and she wasn’t disappointed either. She looked like a week-old balloon as if she were spent of all her colours and siphoned of all her emotion. She looked as if only a single breath of air was all that was keeping her up.

  “Bad episode?” said Graham, staring at the boy in her arms.

  He looked angelic, curled up in her arms – nary of line of worry on his face.

  “What do you think?”

  “Sorry, I got distracted at the pharmacy and before I knew it, time had gotten the better of me.”

  “Did you get the chocolate bars at least?”

  “Oh crap,” said Graham. “I didn’t even go in.”

  Then, as if he had just discovered a precious mineral.

  “Oh shit, the chocolate was for Nathan.”

  If she could, Mary would have given him a slow clap, but the look that she gave him did just that.

  “Fuck it,” she said. “The worst of it is done. Help me put them to bed.”

  Graham heaved as he lifted both children and dropped them into their beds. He remembered a time when they were light enough to be laid out like a placemat. Now they were like a couple of wet sandbags. Neither child seemed to bother, though. They both wrapped up in their blankets and went back to sleep.

  “What’s with the blood?”

  Mary nodded towards their daughter.

  “All of a sudden our girl is getting self-conscious.”

  Between her eyes, at the bridge of her nose, was a big piece of toilet paper, held on with dried blood. It didn’t look like a little nick either.

  “Jesus, are we at that point already?” said Graham, collapsing on the floor beside his wife.

  They both stared silently as if, for the first time in nine years, they had finally had a chance to come up for air. And even now, it was all about to change. Today she was shaving her mono-brow; before he knew it she’d be shaving her head and coming home in police cars.

  “So you didn’t get anything?”

  “No,” said Graham. “I had to do a thing. I didn’t get time.”

  “What thing?”

  “Nah, it’s nothing. It’s just a thing.”

  If it was just a thing, then why did he call it an epiphany on the way home?

  “Well can you go tomorrow then? I really need the vitamins. Plus, Nathan will go ape shit if he doesn’t get at least one bloody chocolate bar this week.”

  “You know vitamins are a waste of money. You get enough from your food. It’s just money down the drain and unnecessary work for your liver.”

  “I need the folic acid,” said Mary.

  “Ah, ok,” said Graham.

  It took a second, but then it hit him.

  “Folic acid? But you only use that when…”

  Mary stared at him. Her face was shaped like a soft-serve ice-cream cone. Then both of them stared at the sleeping children.

  “Oh shit.”

  “I think I want another baby,” she said.

  Track 8 (Red)

  “You look nervous,” said Isaac.

  “I’m fine,” said Graham.

  He looked anything but. He paced back and forth with a look of unease and discomfort on his face. He hadn’t sat down since they arrived and all that pacing was starting to make everyone else in the office on edge.

  “We just follow our protocols and everything will go well.”

  “It’s not that,” said Graham.

  Something was the matter; it didn’t take a doctorate to figure that out. And it wasn’t just Isaac who was picking up on some clear signs of worry. The participants in the study, all seven of them, watched Graham nervously as he walked in troubled circles like the captain of a doomed vessel.

  “You’re about to give everyone a heart attack. You’re scaring me for Christ’s sake.”

  “It’s fine,” said Graham again before taking a deep breath.

  “Then take a bloody seat.”

  “I can’t,” he said, almost on the verge of tears.

  Then he leaned in Isaac’s ear.

  “Haemorrhoids,” he said.

  “Again?”

  It wasn’t just the haemorrhoids, though. There was also the shortness in breath and the constant perspiration; that and the heart palpitations too. It was as if the future was a horror movie that he was constantly playing out in his mind. Not a second had gone by since his daughter was born, where he wasn’t terrified or traumatised by one thought or the other. And now she wanted another baby? They could barely clothe the two they had, let alone cover the cost of school material and circus lessons for a third.

  “I’ll take the interview,” said Isaac.

  “You sure?”

  “It’s cool. Go sit on some ice or something. I have this. Relax. And go see a doctor.”

  “It’s fine,” said Graham. “It’ll pass. It always does.”

  And then he hobbled out of the room.

  “OK,” said Isaac, putting a song on repeat; Grieg’s ‘Morning Mood’. “Let’s talk about death.”

  Isaac dimmed the lights and turned everyone’s attention to a projector where he showed images of the machine they would be using as part of the experiment; where each and every participant would be brought to the point of death before facilely being brought back to life.

  “This is a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine or fMRI for short. Some of you may have seen this type of machine before – maybe in the movies or on a television show, and some of you may have even experienced one in person. What this machine does, is that it allows us to take real-time images of your brain in lots of little slices, like layers in a cake, so we can see which regions of your brain are active when you are consciously reacting to stimuli. And we do this by measuring the blood flow to regions in your brain.”

  “Like mind reading?”

  “Not at all. The fMRI doesn’t tell us what you were thinking; it tells us where you were thinking – which is just as useful and important. We don’t have machines that can see thoughts just yet, but maybe one day soon, who knows?”

  “Is it dangerous?” asked one participant.

  Isaac had a confused look. He wore it like a medal.

  “Now, you were all explained the nature of this study in your individual interviews. You were all selected based, not only on your prior experiences but also on the fact that you were aware of the dangers and you all signed off on them.”

  “Oh yeah, no,” said The Participant. “It’s not what I meant. I know about the risks, I was just…I just wanted to ask a question.”

  “Ok,” said Isaac. “The machine itself is not dangerous, no. It’s big and clunky, yes, and it sounds like a demolition, but really it’s nothing more than a few magnets that measure the movement of protons in your brain. When we introduce a signal, a certain group of protons will move out of alignment. This is the part of your brain that is working at that moment. Then, those protons move back into alignment, and that is the signal we measure. We send a frequency in, and we measure the frequency back out. Kind of like how whales use sonar to measure the distance of objects in the ocean. They send a signal out, and they measure the time it takes to get the signal back and that tells them how far away something is. Well, with us, we are measuring what part of your brain was active when you had your near-death experience. And our machine here at the university is a 7-Tesla, which is very powerful and allows us to more accurately map your brain. Any questions so far?”

  “We are still getting paid for participating, right°

  “Yes,” said Isaac. “You will all be compensated, as mentioned in your contract, for the time you spend in the lab. If I’m quite right…” he said, flipping through a couple of thousands of sheets of paper.

  Both he and Graham kept terrible records.

  “Eighteen dollars,” said a participant.

  “That’s right,” said Graham. “And your train fare compensated.”

  In all fairness, it was enough just to be a part of something so radical and profound. For most, it was a chance to prove once and for all that God either did or did not exist and to alleviate their fears either way. For one, though, more than anything, it was a chance to earn eighteen dollars and get a free bus ride into town.

  “So let’s talk about what to expect,” said Isaac. “You have all died before; and that, principally, is why you have been chosen for this trial. We had over three hundred and fifty people apply and you, I’m happy to say, are the lucky seven.”

  They all smiled. It was nice to feel special and better than other people. Truth was, though, they were the only seven that had applied.

  “NDE,” said Isaac. “Or the near-death experience is ubiquitous but it is not common. There are ten times as many people who have suffered cardiac failure, been resuscitated, and not had the experience that you have all either claimed to have had or that someone in your family has. That’s not to say that the experience is not physiological by any means. What this says is that, if anything, you are indeed special.”

  Once again, their faces lit up like ripe tomatoes. If he kept talking like this, he wouldn’t even have to pay them the eighteen dollars. Most of them had gone their whole lives without feeling as important as they believed, deep down, that they truly were. And here was a handsome young scientist telling them just that.

  “Now, does anyone know what a double-blind trial is?”

  The participants all shook their heads.

  “Let me explain then. We will be using two drugs during the trial, both administered by a colleague here at the university, a research scientist like myself, whose focus of study is consciousness. As I mentioned, there will be two drugs administered; one of which will be to simulate cardiac arrest, where hopefully we can measure and pinpoint the appearance of a near-death experience; while the other will be a control drug called N-Dimethyltryptamine.”

  Neither participant knew what he was talking about; nor did they care. Most had already signed their waivers and were just waiting for the fun to get underway.

  “Neither you nor I will know who will receive which drug. This is what we call a Double-Blind. Now, this is a near-death experience, so yes, you will have a controlled death experience. I say controlled because at all times, trained physicians will be at your side so to speak.”

  “So to speak?”

  “An anaesthetist and nurses will be waiting in the adjoining room ready to bring you back to back once the magnets are turned off. This takes barely seconds. I don’t want you to feel worried in any way. Think of it like having lifeguards on hand while you take a bath.”

  One of the participants, a seven-year-old pageant girl, wasn’t the least bit frightened. In fact, her face was brimming with delight. Her mother, meanwhile, sat beside her with a smug and pompous look on her face, knowing too well that no other mothers would go to this length for their daughter’s success and glory. Winning pageants meant everything.

  The other participants too had nary a look of fear or trepidation on their faces. A couple passed as unfed and unbathed while another, though dressed in his very best, looked as if he had little else to lose. There was an old lady who looked as if she were supposed to be waiting at a post office, and an evangelist, who sat prim and proper as if Jesus himself were watching.

  “Oh, look,” said Isaac, “Speak of the devil.”

  Standing in the doorway was a strange-looking man who, before he even said a single word, defined eccentricity. He wore an old Victorian suit with a frilled blue scarf around his neck and an odd-looking pendant clipped to his right breast. He held a cane in one hand and a single spectacle in the other; pulling it up to his right eye as he peered at the participants as he might, a rack full of top hats and knickerbockers.