Necropsychology

“Most out of body death experience stories involve speed.” Dr. Lin said this absently for not the first time—or even the thousandth—to Chan. The gray head speaking looked out of focus at Chan, her glossy black hair back out of the way for their research labor.

Today was the day, Chan was determined, she found out why Dr. Lin kept a vase of marigolds on his desk. Every day, every week, every year. Since before Chan came to the laboratory, even, was the rumor.

Chan took a long pause. “You’re right. You know, you’re right. My ex girlfriend had an out of body experience after she fell several stories. Her body was somehow not broken. But she said she was at a lake, wading in, thinking to dive and swim. Then, she woke up. On the ground.”

“Yes.”

“And in middle school. My friend Don said he had an out of body experience— he wrecked dirt bikes. Something about he was on a sand dune, and about to go sledding down it. Then, he woke up on the dirt with some burns and scrapes. His brother could not believe he survived being flung off in a head on collision.”

“Yes.”

“And— and even a third story someone told me once. Involving speed. He was sitting in traffic. Then, a semi came careening toward him in the rear view mirror. The semi was not going to be able to fit between him and the car stopped next to him on the highway.” Chan demonstrated with her slender hands the cars’ positions as they must have sat on that highway. “But somehow it did. He was outside his body, above it, and then next thing, his car was actually crumpled all around him. In the back seat, his baby daughter was untouched, the car not crushed even past the trunk.”

“Fascinating! No out of body walking in some other place?”

“No.”

“Perhaps he is a rare soul whose heaven is in fact, on earth.”

Chan took another long pause.

“Why do you call this the marigold theory?” She drove at the issue of the perpetual marigold vase, determined.

Dr. Lin’s eyes dropped to the bouquet on his desk then. It always had blooms of yellow flowers. Always. Never had Chan come to her boss’s office and not seen the butter blooms there.

“When I was a teen,” Dr. Lin began in an entirely different pace of speech than before, “I was driving around a mountain curve.” His speech was slow and low, measured. “The car went off the edge. Clear through the guard rail. But I got out of the car unscathed!”

“But why these flowers?”

“Marigolds, Dr. Chan.” He smiled serenely, a million miles away on a mountain side. His eyes didn’t even flicker up to hers. “I got out of the car, and saw the mountainside was covered in marigolds. A field of them. Mountainsides of them, so beautiful…” His volume became delicate, as if the rapture of the fields of flowers, all yellow, must not be overshadowed by a loud voice here years later speaking of them.

“So you had an out of body experience, and it too involved speed. Not cars, speed, that’s the thing you see in common in your research?”

Dr. Lin had founded the entire niche field of necropsychology. Most popularly known for this, his marigold-speed theory. Perhaps the marigolds were the first speed-related out of body near-death experience he had ever witnessed, but still, it didn’t explain the always-yellow, always-there desk display.

Dr. Lin did not respond to Chan’s words. Instead as if he had continued uninterrupted, he murmured on.

“I woke up in a hospital. My mother was a surgeon. She had connected me to experimental surgery for a rare brain condition I had, and authorized it the surgery on me. If I had been even a day older— 18– she couldn’t have authorized it. And even so, they wouldn’t allow her to work on me herself, of course. Being my mother.

“But, one second— I walked in the Marigold mountains. And the next I woke up in a hospital.”

“Do you keep these flowers on your desk yourself? To inspire your continued work?”

“To inspire necropsychology research? No.”

Chan let the silence hang. But she couldn’t take not knowing. It seemed the answer would never be given unless she asked again. There was more to those flowers than met the eye. Dr. Lin looked at them too often, with too much anger.

“Who sends you the flowers, Dr. Lin?”

“My mother. She sends me the marigolds so that, even though she pulled me back, I can keep a piece of heaven on earth. She pulled me back, you see.”

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