There was no mistaking the sound of that squeaky handcart. The robot was almost upon us!

Fortuitously the elevator arrived. Nora dragged me inside, pushed a button on the control panel. The door slid shut, just in time!

“Take us all the way down,” I instructed her.

“Oh, no,” she said. “We go up.”

“To the roof?” That made no sense.

“We’re underground,” she said.

“How do you figure that?”

“Because of the pool of water all the way down there.” She looked at me as if I were a child. “And where else do we find water?” It was apparently a rhetorical question, because she barely paused. “We find water at the bottom of a well.”

Her syllogism seemed weak and ill-formed.

Before I could reply that lakes and ponds and rivers were usually encountered on the surface of the Earth—a place I very much wanted to be—Nora reached out to the panel of the elevator. Not finding an up or down button, she pressed the one for the first floor. Or, Tier One, as it was labeled.

“You’ll see,” she said. “This’ll take us all the way up.”

Even with her skewed logic, she was right. The sensation of traveling upwards was unmistakeable.

As I allowed my imagination to play free with the thought of all our contestants from Serpientes y Escaleras—winners and losers—popping into existence deep in a murky and morbidly-lit underground facility, I winced from a sharp unexpected pain I hadn’t felt in years.

My hand, which was brushing against the wall, flickered and disappeared, then reappeared. The pain ran up my arm and across my back like a white hot wire. I clenched my teeth, hopping Nora hadn’t noticed. She’d seen something like this before—also on an elevator—but with August. I did not want her to associate me with him.

But it wasn’t going away, so I had no choice but to shout out.

“Stop!”

She’d already seen my sad state. Her eyes were locked on my arm. Well, it wasn’t much of an arm, to be honest. Immediately she pushed a button and the elevator came to a halt. We were between tiers nine and eight.

“There’s something you should know about me,” I gasped, easing myself down to the floor of the elevator.

Nora sat down to join me.

“I died,” I told her.

You got that? I died! I bet you, dear reader, never saw that coming!

Nor, I realized, did Nora. She seemed quite confused.

“Never give up hope, Sy!” she said, scooted forward to give me a brave and grim smile. She thought I was about to expire right there on the spot! Before she started in with we can beat this together, or some similar cliché, I felt I needed to make a clarification.

“Past tense,” I said, and she seemed to relax. “Back in the early days of the Changes. This,” I tilted my head to look at the surreal syrupy morphing of my left arm, “is the price of being reborn. All in all, it is better than the alternative. Right?”

“I’d say,” she said quietly. “What happened?”

“I don’t recall the particulars. I mean of the life-snuffing event itself. Sal was the one who filled me in on the accident. Though accident was never her choice of phrase. Negligence, she would call it on a good day. Manslaughter, when in her darker moods. She blamed Morris, which I thought extreme. But I guess it all played out much different for her. She had to live with me dead for a couple of years. Lots of emotions, I don’t doubt.”

I went on to tell Nora how that fateful afternoon had begun as just another day at work. On assignment out in a pasture near San Angelo with the most adorable stegosaurus ever! I’d wandered over to have a word with the boys in the production truck and, well, it all went away.

My whole existence, that is.

Like turning off the television during a show.

No tunnel of light. No hosts of angels with lutes or trumpets or whatever they play. No red-faced imps with pitchforks. Not even grandma smiling down at me while holding a pitcher of lemonade. Just nothing. Blackness? Probably. I have no memory, though.

And then, as though no time had passed—it certainly didn’t seem like two years—I was surrounded by a glow of bright green light. There were people around me. No halos or wings, only burly men wearing hardhats and carrying clipboards and rolled up blueprints. The green dissipated like vapor, and I was in a skyscraper, high above a city. The architecture was old, but the building seemed new—there were no walls to define rooms, just support columns and windows. And there, amidst the helmeted men, was Sal. She was staring at me, mouth agape, when I appeared. The men, concerned, turned to see what had caught her attention.

I’m no prude. Let me make that quite clear. But I have never made it a habit of parading publicly in the nude, so I felt somewhat self-conscious that I had materialized au naturel, not so much as a fig leaf or g-string.

It seemed that in the previous two years Sal’s TV career had taken off. She removed her full-length sable coat and wrapped me up in it. She sat me down on a crate of lighting fixtures. There were tears, jumbles of words, and even an outburst of anger when Sal shouted at the gawking workmen to clear off and leave us be.

She had been in charge, at the time, telling everyone how to prepare the upper floors of La Vida Tower for her offices and apartment.

She explained that two years previous I had died in a fiery explosion. Once I’d wrapped my head around that dramatic image, I found myself disappointed by the mundane manner of my return—naked and surrounded by a construction crew.

Sal kept stopping and starting, trying her best to fill me in on my demise, as well as what had happened in those previous two years. As she was explaining that the building I was now in had disappeared and then reappeared and some organization calling themselves simply the Network—who, by the way, held the contract for Sal’s TV show (the show, I should point out, I created for her)—had moved themselves and Sal into the upper floors, my mind was still stuck back on something she said earlier.

About how she had seen my remains after the explosion. All that had been left was a charred and stubby torso.

Those were her descriptive words.

A charred and stubby torso.

How unbecoming!

But for some reason, the first words from my mouth, in, well, two years, were: “So, we’re in San Antonio?”

“It’s not so bad, Sy,” she said. “We have the penthouse.”

And then it was sobbing again.

That green light through which I arrived, or was resurrected, seemed to have been anticipated by two people—two people who came up to pay me a visit before Sal could find me some proper clothes. Parcell Prescott, head honcho with the Network. And Dr. Lydia Hetzel. A doctor of what I was never sure, but she insisted she was an expert on people just like me. Dead people, who came back. (Though she seemed suspicious of me because I returned from the dead lucid, with “full faculties intact”).

In fact, the doctor was leading a confused yet docile woman—as naked as I was before Sal loaned me her fur coat. This woman had come through the other arrival portal which had been hidden from my line of sight by a stack of stainless steel ductwork.

At that point things moved fast, and it wasn’t Sal issuing orders, but those Network people.

It seemed that those portals through which the dead emerged were considered hot properties by the Network. In fact, that was what they built their business model around. Every time new portals appeared, another show would be created.

Even though I was barefoot and wrapped in a full-length sable coat, Parcell Prescott recognized me as the host of Wonders Unfolding (a beloved program which ended only because of my unfortunate death). So, Sal and I were given the task of making a show. A game show. Those were what the Network preferred. A format to separate winners from losers, and send those contestants on to their glorious (or ignominious) rewards.

And in under two weeks, we had our show ready to go live.

Serpientes y Escaleras!

It was a hit from the very beginning.

And because each day—well, Monday through Friday—a new pair of people would come through the portals, we had accumulated a good-sized studio audience by the time we were ready to air our maiden episode.

Neither Parcell Prescott nor Dr. Hetzel seemed unduly concerned that I was never properly processed through a departure portal like all the other resurrectees who magically arrived at La Vida Tower.

Everyone else who came through those portals had little to no memory. Mostly they were harmless, kind of benumbed like a group of retirees on a wine tour. I could never get an answer from Lydia as to why I was an exception. She presented herself as an expert on those sorts of matters—the spooky stuff such as the rebirth of the contestants and the mind reading shenanigans (the other special feature of our show)—but I think her claim of such expertise was, for the most part, bluff.

However, she showed no surprise when I told her I’d almost died the first time I tried to leave La Vida Tower on my own. It was the portals, she said. They emitted some sort of electrical frequency or radiation which kept me and my ilk intact and in human form. If I wandered too far, well, neither she nor the Network would be responsible for the outcome. She did tell me that Sal (and any other particularly gifted telepath) could also function the same as those portals, as long as I kept that person fairly close.

A useful bit of information to know. But it meant that I had to impose upon poor Sal every time I wanted to visit the cinema or pick up some breakfast tacos.

And now, I was gambling that Rose would provide the same protection to me as had Sal.

I admit, I was confused as to why all these portals—1692, if I could trust Nora’s math—weren’t helping me to, well, keep it together. Like it or not, in my current state, I could be used as a sort of compass to track down Rose. It was like playing that old children’s game of hot and cold, except if I strayed too far from Rose, it wouldn’t be me getting cold, but painful nausea, disappearing limbs, and a full-on transformation into something I’d rather not even think about. I’d seen it happen to poor Helen and Darlene.

What a fate!

“Wait a minute,” Nora said, when I had paused in the telling of my tale. “You have to stay close to a psychic? That doesn’t make sense. I would have thought you could use some kind of machine with flashing lights and such.”

“It’s what I yearn for,” I said. “A world made better by technology. But, sadly, there is no such device. It’s all very convoluted—the physics, or, I guess, the metaphysics. Lydia told me all about it once, but if the conversation gets overloaded with words and phrases like transistors, wave amplifiers, electro-chemical emanations, I tend to drift off.”

“I bet you were one off those kids who sat at the back of the class.” Nora was not wrong. She shook her head in pity thinking of young Silverio Morano and his scholastic shortcomings. “Not me. Never!”

“That’s why I’m glad to have you on the team,” I said.

She wrinkled her nose at that. Was I being patronizing? I do that, I’ve been told.

“Well,” she said, changing the subject, “you are looking better. You have color back in your face.”

“That would mean that—”

Nora excitedly finished my thought.

“Rose is getting closer!” Nora leaned in for a better look at me. Had my toupee slipped? “You’re improving slow, but steady. I bet she’s coming up the stairs.”

“We’re lucky she didn’t decide to go down.”

“Rose is smart,” Nora said. “She figured it out.”

“Shall we continue?”

“Sure,” Nora said. “We’re only a few floors away from the top.” Without standing, she reached up and pressed a button and the elevator continued its journey upwards.

The pain in my stomach had gone, and it seemed my arm was stable. For the time being, at least, I stopped worrying that portions of my anatomy might began to wink in and out of existence, eventually to be replaced by rubbery tentacles.

An upbeat musical note sounded, and the elevator door slid open.

Nora stood and offered her hand. I allowed her to help me to my feet.

“Can you walk?”

I nodded, and asked, “Where to now?”

“Oh, it’s my turn to be leader?” Nora laughed. “I love these field promotions!”

I leaned on her and we stepped out onto the topmost level, Tier 1.