LEN BIAS: CROSSOVER
A novel
By: Michael D. McClellan | September 19, 2010
"Fractions? That makes no sense. All I want to do is go back to my life."
"I'm afraid that's impossible."
"Look, you can't stop me. I'm out."
I open the door and step outside, making my way across the field and to within five feet of the eastern edge, and then I squat down on all fours. The earth here feels solid but looks like it could snap off under my weight, the way a piece of ice might break away from a larger sheet - like the way the ice had snapped at Hunting Creek Lake that winter day when I was twelve. I still remember the football sailing over my head, hitting the ice and skidding to a stop well out of reach. There had been dares all around, and juvenile taunts going back and forth, and arguments over whose fault it was and who should be the one to retrieve the ball. Somehow I'd let the other kids talk me into a corner - and just like that, it was on me to prove my courage. Even though I couldn't swim. Even though I didn't know I should hunker down and make myself as flat as possible, distributing my weight across a larger area of the ice. Even though the sun had been out all afternoon.
I try not to think about this as I crawl closer to the edge - definitely not the right time. Now I'm on my stomach. I wriggle forward and peer over. Fifty feet of earth and strata sliced perfectly, as if stamped out using a giant Play-Doh mold. Below it, nothing. Blue as far as the eye can see. I back away, stand, and then repeat my inspection of the northern, southern and western edges.
"This is crazy. Can't be happening...none of this..."
I turn, half expecting the farmhouse to have vanished. It's still there. I follow the narrow dirt path back to the crumbling cement steps and push open the heavy wooden door. Alyssa is still at the table, waiting. She sits properly, with perfect posture and legs crossed at the knee. The fireplace crackles and pops behind her.
"Everything I saw last night-"
"-actually happened. Leonard, please sit."
"This place, the magic tricks - who are you? What are you?"
Her eyes call me, hypnotic. I make my way across the uneven stone floor and sit across the table from her. For the first time something in me wavers. For the first time I allow myself to consider the possibility of this being real. And with that slightest of cracks, this thought: What if this isn't a drug trip gone bad? What if it's much more than that?
Don't go there, Len. Don't do it. Shut it down right now.
And yet I can't help myself. I think about the millions lost; my basketball talents, wasted; the chance to prove my place as one of the all-time greats, gone. And yet each of these things pale in comparison to losing everything else: My parents, Jay, Michelle, my youngest brother Eric. My basketball family at Maryland. Coach Driesell. My friends. My aunts, uncles, cousins. If all this stuff is true - if what Alyssa claims happened to me really happened...
"This is hard on you," Alyssa says, "but it's much harder on those you've left behind. They have to go on without you."
"What's happening to me? What is this place? Where am I?"
"You're spirit has laid dormant since June 19,1986." She points at the grandfather clock behind her right shoulder. "Since the doctors pronounced you dead - at 8:51 that morning."
Her words hit me like a sucker punch to the gut. My mind flashes back to the gurney; I see the body covered with a sheet and strapped down with that thick black belt.
"From the beginning, every person who has ever existed crosses over twice - once when they are born, and once when they pass. I am no different than you in that respect. I was born in Wales, in 1750, in this farmhouse. I died 21 years later, on December 7, 1771. My name was Anne Wesley, daughter of Charles and Sarah Gwynne Wesley of Garth.
"We were a peasant family, simple farmers who worked the land and worshipped God, and I lived under this roof until I married a commoner named Daniel Rowland at the age of 17. We had two beautiful children, William and Thomas. Their ages were two and one when I fell ill with fever early that December. Four days later I died from a resurgence of the Black Death. That is when I crossed over."
"Wait a minute - you expect me to believe that you're more than two-hundred years old?"
"As time relates to my spirit, yes."
