They had all these NDEers in a swimming pool because so many near deaths involve water—and not just the drownings. A woman on deck, at the five-foot mark, asked us to picture the moment we left our bodies and found some unearthly world.

There were maybe fifteen of us. Something had malfunctioned with the chemicals that morning. Our eyes tingled. Our arms clasped kickboards and our legs hung, half-bent.

“I saw my father,” said the man beside me. “He was an infant in the mouth of a blue spiral.”

People rubbed their eyes and placidly kicked in different directions, drifting around like lake ice cracking apart. These fifteen who had breached the veil, returned, now floating in crooked lines over bending light.

I didn’t drown. It wasn’t water. Unless the clouds count. I was buckled (dry inside bolted-metal walls and Plexiglas) and flying from Fredericton to Whitehorse in a snowstorm.

***

December dark: out of YVR in a connecting Airbus.

Half the Gin Buck from a plastic highball cup spills trying to get to my lips.

Not another soul knows I am flying. Not another, except the man who will stand in arrivals. I saw him last in 2003, but I know that he parks at the meter, pays nothing, and leaves his Nissan running.

He’s wearing a bomber made of some silky fabric. His sandy hair curls and recedes at the temples. He plans to say, to do, something when we’re alone under luminous green cracks.

Behind me, peanuts spill from Ziploc to palm. The itch and clamp at the back of my mouth. I reach for a button but can’t call. Ice cubes fall onto my jeans. My eyelids sting from the histamine. I am grasping for, bunching in my fist, the sleeve of the one next to me.

Then, touching and fumbling along the floor with bare hands, I find a platform, a stage. Halogen floods me and the world (360º and all-seeing) is, to me, utterly obscured. On a platform, I am seen. I am well-lit from every flooded angle.

***

The platform is in a pool. I somersault into the water at the five-foot mark, the drop-off, and hit my head on the edge.

I feel my way with one bare foot to this edge, and I see a woman glowing in the world’s darkness. “The witch is in for tea,” she says.

She means me, means that I am the witch. I gasp water. I am seen on this stage and this stage is landing between small purple mountains, killing the lift in YXY.

Paramedics gape at the gate. They see me. The screens on the walls see me, and they see me back in New Brunswick on screens of their own—me, in these white sheets and northern lights—they see me and wave. They know where I am (and how and why I came), and everything is going to be okay.­