As far as death went, Jean didn’t figure his was half bad. He was a disjointed consciousness, in a peaceful state of half awareness. There was nothing to see or feel No thoughts to think and no real thinker to think them. There was just a vague awareness of being, like the moment between dreaming and waking when you know that you are, but not who or what you are.

It was peaceful, not that Jean was aware enough to notice. Soon, or perhaps after millennia, there were moments of lucidity in which Jean lived again, if only as a memory of himself.

It happened slowly at first, awareness of himself coming and going in cycles. The moments of awareness and memory built up over time, combining together to form simple thoughts that spanned centuries. He remembered his name, Jean-Luc. And he remembered that he preferred just Jean. He remembered he had parents who loved him, and a sister, Jeremy, who picked on him endlessly, but who he loved anyway. And he remember, when he was 12 years old, the pain of losing her to a drunk driver. That was when he and Sam became close. Sam began showing up everyday to hang out and play games, or invite Jean back to his house. Jean had lost an older sister but gained an annoying younger brother.

For centuries Jean existed, half aware of himself and his life, but removed from it, disassociated from it. He knew the loss of his sister had hurt, but the pain wasn’t his any longer. He didn’t wrestle with his thoughts, or struggle with habit or addiction. There wasn’t even any embarrassment when he remembered the time Sam made him do comedy.

He was an observer, whose only thoughts and feelings existed in the memories he experienced. Aimlessly Jean’s mind slipped between memories, becoming more familiar with himself and his memories as he drifted. After the memories, came dreams. Absent new stimuli, his mind had begun creating new experiences wholly from recycled memories. It was in these dreams that Jean finally began to come back to himself. As he did, he recalled a mental trick that professional remembers used to improve memory. Jean wasn’t necessarily looking to improve his memory, but it seemed to him that memory tricks also helped to organize thought. That was the part he was interested in. Especially the mind palace technique.

A mind palace was a mental construct, often visualized as a home. If you have something you need to remember, you place a representation of that thing somewhere specific in your home. So if you need to remember butter you might imagine placing a stick of butter on the counter in the kitchen. Then later, you use this visual as a mental cue card when you do the grocery shopping. It gave Jean a plan for adding a bit of stability to his afterlife.

It began as a room, featureless and shifting with Jean’s wondering thoughts. With his only senses being memory and self awareness, his stream of consciousness was no more stable than a dream. Through trial and error he learned how to use memory as metaphorical stand-ins. His room, for example, wasn’t blue. It was the color of the sky, and the ocean, and freedom. It was the color of boundless horizons that bounded the human world and dared them to go further. It wasn’t blue, it was a bunch of associations working together to form the concept of blue. Little pixel-like blue-references that he combined into four solid walls of blue.

People were harder. He put up pictures of the people he loved, and found he had trouble recalling details. Memory was his medium, but it seemed like he was limited to halftone creations. Feeling like he could do more, he tried remembering his favorite “comfy chair” from growing up.

It was at his grandmother’s. He, Jeremy, and their cousins, would fight over it. This probably was just because there were more people than seats, but the value was still real. He imagined sitting in his prize after a game of rock paper scissors. Memories of comfort and security washed through him, as he felt the wood under his hands. It was still more memory than experience, a prop on the stage he was setting, but it was stable.

Soon he had his room furnished with items from his strongest memories. Each piece was a mosaic of memory and metaphor. He had a couch with a coffee stain on it. His sister had been about 13 and was drinking an iced coffee, even though they hadn’t been allowed to drink coffee growing up. When she wouldn’t share, he tried to take it from her. It spilled and she swore it would stain and that he’d get in trouble too if they didn’t work together to clean it up before their parents got home. It hadn’t stained in the end, But it was a memory that made him smile looking back. The couch had other metaphors and memories connected to it. Memories that gave it details and solidity. Even though the stain had never been real, it too had gained solidity in the telling and retelling. The couch hadn’t stained, but his memory of it had, and he was grateful for the connection.

In this peculiar afterlife he shaped memory and metaphor into a mind-palace that nearly felt as solid as a dream. He created rooms for memory and rooms for fantasy. In doing, he discovered the key to creating pictures of his family. Instead of still-images, he framed memories. At first he had a hall of doorways to these memories, but there wasn’t a connection between the hall and the memories. Eventually he took a cue from scrap-booking, and personalized each door-frame to create stronger associations with specific memories.

Jean wasn’t sure if this purgatory of memory was all he had to look forward to. Something he’d created on a whim that made him question everything. He had built a door leading out. He hadn’t even meant to. His mind-palace was truly a palace at this point, but it felt more like a small family home, with an unnecessary number of doors. It made sense for his home to have an entrance, the context of the house demanded it. It was a wooden door complete with a spy-hole. And that was the problem. His mind seemed to have developed an exit. If he was brave enough, he could look out.

He had never considered that there might be an outside. Jean had windows that looked into memories, but no windows that just looked “out”. The door made Jean nervous, and he eventually made sure it was locked. There was some relief in finding out it was, until he considered that maybe he was locked in. Caution warring with curiosity, he looked through the peephole. The door led to a wall of static noise. Taking an imagined breath, he opened the door to get a better look, and sure enough it was like looking at static on an old TV. Not that he tried very hard, but he couldn’t actually leave his house and step into the noise. Now he knew for sure. This was a boundary that didn’t exist in his mind.

Having learned through trial and error that it was best to start with small familiar images, Jean reshaped his memory palace to have the porch from his childhood home. The static wasn’t effected, but a porch now existed. It had pushed the static back away from the entrance. Stepping out, Jean looked around at a world of white-noise.

***

In time, Jean reshaped his mind-palace into an island. On it, he built an island home, complete with a garden, fruit trees and a beach. The island floated on a sea of blue-green plasma that faded into the white-noise in the distance. There was soil and sand on top of the island but, the majority was made of mostly-solid rock. It was also in the shape of an old pirate ship. He was pretty sure Disney’s “Hook” was the inspiration. Either that or “Pirates of the Caribbean”, almost definitely something from The Mouse, one way or another.

“Do you think I should compost my dislike of mega-corps, since the world probably ended?” Jean asked Sam.

It wasn’t really Sam, no more than the compost pile held real compost. He was part memory, part puppet. They’d been friends for years, so Jean thought he did a pretty good impression. He still struggled to get his reactions right sometimes tho.

In scenarios like this, Jean was more director than actor. He crafted scenes and played them out like a kid playing with dolls, reliving arguments about whose turn it was to wash the dishes. He supposed it was kind of like a very detailed daydream. Even his own body was more doll than person, something he had to imagine and remember like everything else. He’d discovered however, that the more consistency he put into his scenes, the stronger the sense of realism he felt.

This fantasy took place outside his beach home. Sam was sitting in a hammock, and Jean was tending his garden, creating and reinforcing the mental connections with layers of metaphor and inspiration. He changed the layout of his mind-palace periodically, especially the exterior. Lately he’d been playing with the idea of travel, but he hated the rocking of ships. His floating island was much more stable.

Every inch of his Galleon-like stone-ship, was both part of the mental landscape and significant piece of metaphor. His flowers and composting were no exception. He had been particularly pleased with his discovery of composting. It was like therapy, breaking down is issues and memories into useful pieces that could be used in his other projects.

“I say Compost the shit! You’re dead, you get to enjoy shit that’s unhealthy for the living. At this point you’ve already lived up to your ideals.” Sam joked.

Jean sighed theatrically. “No, I really didn’t”. The scene called for some introspection where Jean was meant to consider his past failings, some bit of angst to ground the scene a little. So Jean peered off past his imagined friend and shook his head as though in regret.

“So you’re not going to let go of your Mega-corp dislike, in order to recycle that mental energy into something more useful?” Jean had Sam ask.

Jean shrugged, “Maybe I’ll just stop feeding it and see if it dies on its own.”

“I guess that’s a good first step in composting, even if it’s not great for social activism.” Sam decided. “Also, hey Jean, what’s that?”

Jean had seen distant silhouettes or shadows on his storm sea in the past. They were like complex constellations that formed in the white-noise on the horizon. The white noise was the one part of his existence that didn’t follow his script. Because of that, he’d spent a lot of time watching it. At the same time, his scenarios often went off the rails. he was painting with his memories, it wasn’t going to be neat and sensible all the time. Just like a dream, sometimes things just didn’t make sense if questioned. So the obvious and natural solution was to not look directly at the incongruities. He was making it all up anyway.

So when he, acting as Sam, noticed something on the horizon, it wasn’t the first time he’d gotten distracted from his own fantasy. Except now, some of the distant incongruities were getting closer, ruling out the static-noise as a cause. It also didn’t feel like a manifestation of his own mind, at very least it wasn’t intentional. And it wasn’t familiar.

As much as the rock of his island was shaped like a ship, from the top, it was just a blue and white house on a medium sized island. No sails to speak of. A wooden fence bordered the island and acted as rails for the ship. Lightning flashed in the ocean of plasma, and a low rumble hummed along the ground of the ship. Jean considered swapping out the backyard aesthetic to that of a ship in storm. He’d have to pack up a lot of pieces tho, and he wasn’t ready to call this a storm. Frankly, he wasn’t sure what this was, but the islands bedrock had a firmer mental foundation than his wooden galleon.

He decided to leave the back yard in place. His trees could become masts and still serve a similar metaphorical purpose, but his garden of music would end up destroyed. Anything he’d built that changed over time, or that hadn’t had a chance to solidify, would be gone.

He’d have to start every project over. The garden would be the biggest loss tho. Not only would he have to replant everything, he’d have to weed out all the jingles again. Between that and rooting out the ear worms, it was more than he was willing to face without better reason.

The trees didn’t block his sight, but Jean still made himself walk across the yard to the end of his home. His path led through a gate onto a sandy beach. It was bordered by a rock wall that made up the ship’s prow. A pair of beach chairs and a beach umbrella sat to one side of the gate, but he walked past them, across the sand. He supposed this wasn’t really a beach, but nothing was really anything in this place, so he wasn’t too concerned. His beach had a hidden pond that he could manifest if he needed wet sand or wanted to soak, but most recently he had been using the beach as a sort of zen rock garden. Now however, he walked past the swirls in the sand and ignored the flow of the garden. Staring at the growing splotch, he walked straight to the chest-high stone wall to get a better look at his heading.

“What is that” Jean asked, this time using his own voice.

“That’s no moon-”

“Sam, That doesn’t work here.” Jean interrupted. He was confined slightly by the scenario he’d created, so his ad-lib-ing as Sam wasn’t going to be seamless. “I think… I think it’s land. What would that even mean.”

There was too much Jean didn’t know about this strange afterlife. Apart from the static-noise that seemed to represent either nothing or everything, Jean had created every object and event that happened here. Jean tried to remove the distant island from his mental landscape, but it just became clearer. closer.

“Yeah, that looks like a port, right? I think I can see other ships.” Sam called from where he still sat in the hammock.

Jean manifested his Mom’s telescope that he’d used a thousand times growing up. His parents probably had it with them when the world ended, it had held up pretty good considering how he and Jeremy treated it.

Sam was right, there were ships. They were in a lot of different styles, and they carried a similar feel to Jean’s island ship. It was as though they had been crafted from metaphors to create something new. Something internally consistent, but outwardly bizarre. They had ship parts, but they connected in odd ways; all the right pieces but in all the wrong places and amounts. One ship had dozens of odd looking oars, with sails instead of paddles. It wasn’t clear if they were intended to go in the water or not. It looked more like a glitch than a ship. But then again, Jean’s own ship had been known to play fast and loose with logical rationality.

As if triggered by the thought, Jean realized his focus on the scene had slipped. “Shit.” he said, his world flickering around him. Sam vanished completely, Planks of wood rolled like a wave across the surface of his island, leaving a ships deck in it’s wake. The plasma sea had become a rolling crystal-blue ocean. At the same time, the wind picked up and whipped across Jean’s former yard. The air pressure changed, and finally his trees unfurled into billowing sail-laden masts.

There had been no chance to save his garden. Jean now stood atop a large wooden galleon, that was sailing much too fast toward a large island. His ship rose on a large ocean swell and the horizon seemed to be bulge around the island. Finally his view twitched and seemed to unfold until the view resolved. It hadn’t been an island, it was an entire coast unfolding across his landscape. It was as if the ocean had been mere mirage, and Jean had gotten close enough to break the illusion. Now he was racing toward port at high speeds, with only one idea for a quick stop.

This wasn’t the first time he’d brought his imaginary ship to dock. But usually he was going a bit slower. Also, usually he was imagining everything, and was arbiter of the scene. Now, he was literally sailing atop a giant wave into the unknown, and wasn’t sure he’d be able to stop in time.

For one, he was pretty sure, the way he stopped his ship was wrong. It worked, because he decided it would work. But if this wasn’t all imagined by his disembodied consciousness, then maybe he wouldn’t be able to stop the ship at all.

The back of his house had a rope ladder that went up to a balcony, and on that balcony was a giant wooden steering wheel. Of course all that had been changed into a more classical design. Jean jogged across the deck and scaled the ladder to the helm in a moment. His timing would be close.

The ocean swelled beneath him, as though to spit him into the harbor at speed. He spun the wheel so his ship was facing straight down the slope of the inbound wave. There was little choice in the matter. If he turned the ship to either side, he’d end up broken apart on what looked like a rocky coast.

The wave flowed toward the harbor, all but the peak being absorbed and redirected to the sides of the harbor mouth, leaving just Jean and his ship barreling onward.

This was a really dumb maneuver. Back before Jean had died, He’d seen a guy on a jet-ski do it once. It had looked cool enough that it was the only way he ever docked in his ghost-ship. Jean figured, James Bond didn’t parallel park responsibly, he whipped the car into place with reckless abandon. This would be like that, but possibly with less plot armor than he’d grown used to.

He would swing wide to the right of the dock, then quickly cut the wheel to the left, turning almost 360 degrees. The move would swing the ships ass around and rob her of her momentum, in Jean’s imagination. If all went well, the ship’s side would kiss the dock, while also sending an impressive wave crashing up between them.

Jean spun his wheel as fast as he could, but his home was noticeably more sluggish.

He was going to plow straight into the dock.

The world flashed.

He was docked.

His ship was reoriented. And there was a person standing next to him holding a clipboard.

Jean heard an odd hum followed by a "tsk" sound, "I hope you don't mind that I helped you park, that was going to be a bit too much excitement for this early in the day. Anyway, welcome to New Somewhere.”

Huh. Jean thought, plot armor maintained.