Who Is Brian Quinn?

Space-Time Flux Thingy...

This was not what I had expected. I'm not sure what I had expected. But this was not it. I mean, you have all these notions about what happens when you die. But this, this was beyond ludicrous. Downright ridiculous.

Me, Manfred Milner adrift in a rickety wooden row boat on an endless ocean with no land in sight. Just the wide surging waves lifting and setting me down, making me dizzy and nauseous and annoyed.

The sky above shone a uniform blue, the sun blazing down mercilessly like those stories you hear about castaways or plane crash survivors or whatever. Anyway, that's me, that's where I ended up after having my head blown off by that imbecile, Stan Bernie. I had all these high hopes there at the end of entering the mysterious beyond where dreams and reality intertwine. Imagined I'd be able to hunt that no good Quinn through the corridors of time and space or some such nonsense.

Instantly after receiving Bernie's slug straight through the cranium I woke up in a warped little wooden craft and after overcoming the initial shock of being dead I started rowing. Immediately I got a splinter. Figures. I'm no sailor. Can't really even swim. I had started rowing with only one oar and then I got the splinter. Deep in my thumb. I started cursing the sky, the sea, myself and the reckless way I had thrown my life away. I didn't have to let Bernie kill me, that's the truth. I could have twisted that gun out of his knobby fingers and clubbed him with it like a baby seal.

But I let him kill me. Nothing more brutally final than a bullet to the brain. But what's a brain? In the end, I guess it's just a piece of meat that gets turned off for a second only to get turned back on in some other time, other place, other dimension. Maybe that's the soul, the little guy that lives inside your brain and when your brain gets splattered on a wall the little guy just keeps on going, wondering what happened to his cozy little home.

So there I found myself, drifting like an orange peel on the currents. Of course I had nothing to eat, but I'm dead so who cares? After a few days of this floating, with nothing but water on every side, I took to my usual sedentary lifestyle, that is, lying on the bottom of the boat with one leg dangling over the side, gazing up into the sky. And here's another weird thing, I couldn't sleep. I didn't get tired. As much as I lounged around being tossed by the waves, I never went to sleep. Disconcerting. Downright boring.

So I started consciously trying to sleep. I'd close my eyes, steady my breathing, I could feel my pulse slow and grow faint, breathing faint, totally relaxed. I did this several times a day for a few days. I didn't feel a bit tired but I started getting cranky, pissed off. I started to theorize that it was because I wasn't dreaming. No dreams, and my psychological health was beginning to suffer. At least that was my theory. So I kept trying. Trying to sleep.

About the tenth day it worked. At least I think it did. I started up out of what must have been a light snooze, banged my head on the side of the boat and realized I was beached. Hurray, I guess. And that splinter seemed to have worked its way out of my thumb. Maybe things were looking up.

Raising myself from the floor of my craft I looked around. An island, or at least a beach, tropical of course, fitted with the usual palm trees and low brush, I squinted at my surroundings and lay back down, holding a hand to my head. After a few minutes I got up and trudged up onto the beach, leaving the boat to flounder in the shallows. I didn't want to see it ever again. I walked into the low brush trying not to think too hard. Even in my most forgiving of moods I can't put up with outright cliche, and that's what I was being faced with here. A B-grade Hollywood location set, complete with coconuts, sand crabs and the occasional seagull. What am I doing here? I thought to myself. I'm supposed to be dead.

Making my way through the brush I realized that it only went about thirty feet and then became beach again. I found myself standing in sand with the ocean stretching out before me. Where am I? I thought. I decided to proceed up the beach, following the waterline in a wavering and seemingly endless curl toward the horizon. The wind kicked up sand bringing the smell of saltwater and dead crab. Suddenly I tripped on a piece of something submerged in the sand. Going to my knees I swore and grabbed at it, turned out to be a rusty stove pipe. I dug it out and pulled it erect. It stood about five feet and was a reddish brown color, eaten away by sand and wind.