There wasn't a quieter place on the planet than the inside of that car. Peace is harder to come by.

"Mama," I said. "I love you." Just like that, like exhaling after too long a time underwater. And then it was quiet again. I listened to the clock on the dashboard ticking away, the sound of tires swishing by on the wet pavement. My eyes followed a drop of rain as it slid slowly down the length of the windshield, welding to another drop and then sliding again.

The Afterlife Of Lyle Stone

Lyle had been going to the records storage room and somehow had gotten lost, taken a wrong turn somewhere and was wandering down long gray-carpeted hallways with no doors. Music pulsed through the walls, an interminable cello rendition of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine"; the fluorescent lights overhead buzzed a backbeat. He turned down one passageway after another, thinking eventually he would find a door or a familiar landmark or a person who could direct him back to the offices of Stickel, Porter, Rathburn amp; Webb. Then at the end of a particularly long corridor, there loomed a door, heavy double doors actually, with a brass plaque that said Conference Room J. He poked his head into the room and saw maybe a dozen people seated around an enormous mahogany conference table. Apparently he had interrupted a meeting, for the conversation ceased and all heads turned toward him. He was about to apologize when he recognized the faces: Chad Rathburn and two of the attorneys from Estate Planning, and his wife, Jen, was there also, looking very cool and pretty in a pink wool suit. Next to her, Dave Whitsop, Lyle's biology class partner in the ninth grade, squeezed Jen's arm and leaned in to mouth something in her ear. Around the far end of the table, he saw his friend Bill, a woman he had dated briefly in college, and his father, which was puzzling because the latter had been dead for eight years. He started to say something, but his father pursed his lips and shook his head almost imperceptibly, and suddenly it occurred to Lyle that he had done something wrong.

"Lyle" – Chad Rathburn broke the silence – "come in."

There were no empty chairs around the table so Lyle shut the door behind him and remained standing obediently just inside it.

"We'd hoped to give you an opportunity to explain yourself, but frankly" – here Chad glanced meaningfully at his watch – "frankly, we've already wasted a lot of time here and I've got a three o'clock. And I think your actions pretty much speak for themselves."

"Actions?"

"Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it's certainly not the kind of performance we expect."

"I, I don't understand." Lyle felt panic like heat rash prickling over his body; he couldn't remember preparing for this meeting.

"Okay, I won't mince words. After giving a good deal of consideration to the question of your future, and I think I speak for everyone here" – Chad slicked a palm over his balding skull – "there's not much evidence."

The room rippled and swelled as though underwater. Lyle's eyes darted around the table; the faces, lit from beneath by small banker's lamps, glared back green and implacable. He noticed his daughter, still five or six years old, doodling on the legal pad in front of her.

"You're going to kill me, aren't you?" The question popped out of his mouth as unexpectedly as a goldfish.

"That boat's already sailed, Lyle. I thought you grasped at least that much." Eyebrows lifted in amusement, and Dave Whitsop smirked and muttered something about the pope's being a Catholic.

"Pay attention, son," Lyle's father ordered.

"Actually, I think that about wraps it up." Chad began gathering together a sheaf of papers spread out in front of him. "You can leave that way, Lyle." He nodded toward a glass wall at the far end of the conference room. Lyle could see, through the panes, a bruised gray sky – no other buildings, nothing at all. He felt himself sliding involuntarily toward the window and when he peered out, he saw that the building was suspended in a roiling fog. He turned to Jen and pleaded with her; get me out of here, he heard his voice saying, but she returned his gaze impassively.

"Don't be dramatic, Lyle. Just go to hell."

Lyle was falling, a horrible blind free fall that turned his insides to water. Toppling backward, he flung out his arms like broken wings, desperately clawing at the rush of space, and he felt the sickening sensation of air moving right through them. He plunged down and down, endlessly through the void, his body and mind displaced by gaseous terror. At the outer fringes of his reeling, he heard a sound. It was the screeching alarm of crows. Caw, caw, caw. And then his eyes jerked open and he recognized the sound as his own strangled whimpers.

He was in hell. He was sure of that much, though he couldn't see into the blackness. Something was wrapped around his torso like a winding sheet, preventing him from moving his limbs. He listened to his heart stutter frantically and replayed the horror of falling. Slowly, as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he noticed blood-red numbers blinking slowly out of the black: 4:08, they read. Trembling, he reached into the darkness toward the spot above the numbers where the light switch in his bedroom had been.

What appeared resembled in its sparseness the bedroom Jen had had redecorated five years ago. He was lying on a bed raised just a few inches above the bare floor, and he was twisted up in a white comforter. Other than the bed, there were few landmarks in the room for Lyle to seize on. "I see this room very Zen," the decorator had crooned, before removing every throw pillow, every scrap of chintz and bit of color, even the framed photographs of their two children. The only purely decorative object that she'd allowed, an amorphous chunk of granite, was perched on a stand and lit with a halogen spot. Lyle recalled how he had been cowed into approval by the enormous price tag.

He glanced again at the clock: 4:10. Time didn't pass in eternity, did it? Still, he couldn't shake the sensation of being outside his body, a chill awareness as though his eyes were video cameras. Though he recognized every surface and object in the room, they were drained of the pulse of the familiar. He had the disturbing suspicion that if he were to step through the bedroom door, it would open back onto the nightmarish maze of corridors. That was what felt real: the looming conference room doors that had evaporated once he was inside, acne-blotched Dave Whitsop snickering at his discomfort, his wife's placid composure when she told him to go to hell.

Lyle remained motionless in bed and watched the sluggish advance of minutes until the clock read 6:00. Then he disentangled himself from the bedding and forced himself to his feet, mimicking as best he could his usual morning routine. Brush teeth, shower, shave, select a suit and shirt from the closet. Each closet and drawer that he opened contained exactly what it should have, though this did not soothe him. The reflection in the mirror when he shaved looked like the face of someone he knew but couldn't quite put with a name. And when the door opened and Jen glided into the room, a strange voice leaped out of his throat, squeaking with hysteria.

"Where were you? You were gone. I thought you were gone."

Jen glanced at him, her eyebrows arched. "I slept in the guest room. You know, if you could hear yourself snore, you'd do something about it." He reached out to touch her, but she was disappearing into the bathroom.

"I had a nightmare," he said, but there was only the hollow thrumming of the shower.

He couldn't shake it. Lyle moved through the days and then weeks, enveloped in his nightmare. Driving to work on that first morning, he noted that the river of red lights snaking toward downtown Seattle in the predawn looked evil, like brimstone, and the air venting into his car smelled distinctly of sulfur. By the time he arrived at the glass monolith where his office was located and circled, level by level, into the concrete bowels of its parking garage, dampness was trickling from under his arms and down his ribs. He sat in his assigned space on Level 6 for nearly ten minutes, gripping the sweaty wheel and repeating like a mantra, "wake up and get ahold of yourself" before he was able to will himself out of the car, up the elevator, and through the reception area of Stickel, Porter, Rathburn amp; Webb. After that, he stopped parking underground and found a lot five blocks away.