Here in the waiting room, every single one of us wants the assignment. With centuries of seniority, I pull rank. It’s amazing to be a baby, even briefly.

So I get the job, and in I go. There’s the whoosh, the familiar pull, the awareness of gravity and substance coalescing around me. A double drumbeat at the center, my borrowed heartbeat. And then it’s all sensation: soft cloth against my skin, my sudden weight supported by strong, encircling arms, the smell of breath and flesh.  Air, not just the concept of space, but real air that wriggles with bacteria and viruses, that vibrates with sunshine and cosmic rays, floods in and out of my brand-new lungs. A voice murmurs above me, a voice I recognize but can’t put a name to, because at the moment I don’t have words. I barely have thoughts.

What I do have are five senses all firing at once, light and shape flooding my unschooled eyes, an urgency in my center that, as I recall from previous experiences, signals hunger. Altogether, it’s an onslaught. No wonder the original occupant of this body felt the need to step out for a breather. I don’t fault him. He’s certainly a he; I can feel a tiny penis stirring above testicles the size of almonds.

No consciousness is ever fully prepared for the birth experience. Death is a cakewalk by comparison, although good luck trying to tell that to the earthbound. The “living,” as they call themselves.

There’s no guarantee that it will be all soft blankies and cuddling arms. I’ve stepped in for more than one poor soul who, knowingly or not, signed up for a rough ride, left abandoned in a dumpster or squalling and shuddering as its drug-addled parent fired up another pipe.

But this kid has landed well. I can feel the mother’s heart through the skin on my cheek as I root and search with my mouth. Her scent floods me with comfort and desire, love on a level so intense that this little guy may search the rest of his life for its equal. A hand, huge and gentle, cradles my head, helping me. Something pushes into my cheek; instinct turns me toward it and I open my mouth to seize the nipple. My tongue and throat know just what to do and I forget everything else, focusing all my being on the workings of my jaw, the glorious pressure on my gums, the flavor of her skin, and as the liquid begins to fill my ravenous mouth and surge down my throat, I am suffused with an oceanic joy, an all-encompassing unity, a sense of total belonging.

Except it’s not me who belongs here. As soon as the first swallow hits the infant stomach, I sense the return of the original occupant. He’s insistent, impatient as they always are, as though they weren’t the ones who asked for relief in the first place. So before I even have a chance to savor the satisfaction of a full tummy, I’m pushed right back out into the ether.

Just like that, here I am back in the waiting room. The others erupt with questions: How was it? What did you feel? What did you see? Could you tell which country you were in? Did you taste anything? They hurry to plumb my earthly memories before the impressions fade like they do after every life, always more quickly than you think they will. It’s like trying to hang onto the details of a dream.

I ignore the questions, my attention focused on a message from the higher-ups. It’s brief, but freighted with meaning: Ready now?

I shudder, or I would if I had a body. Not quite, I answer. Soon.

Soon, they repeat. A warning.

Time doesn’t work up here like it does down there, but the truth is that I’ve been in the waiting room longer than any of the others. The higher-ups have made it clear that I’ve worn out my welcome. It’s time to move on, to accept assignment to another full earthly incarnation, cradle to grave.

There’s an alternative: final dissolution. Death after life, you might call it. The spirit is indestructible, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be divvied up and dispersed, so diluted among the nonphysical cosmos that it’s basically ethereal plankton. Use it or lose it.

Not much of an option. You’d think my choice would be a no-brainer, but you’re hardly in my position. After hesitating for this long, I know I’m not going to get away with a scenario that has short-lived baked in, like embedding myself in a fetus whose mother is a Zika carrier. No, I’ll be expected to choose an assignment in a peaceful, developed nation, Finland maybe, born to sane, educated, solidly middle-class parents who are thrilled to be having a kid. Assuming the planet holds out, I could be stuck down there for a hundred years.

My last full life was, from outward appearances, fortunate. I was neither too poor not too rich, my family was no more chaotic than most, and for most of it I suffered no major physical disabilities. But that life’s generous span made it a heartbreaker. Live long enough and your one guarantee is loss, inevitable and inescapable. I’m not ready for that again, not yet.

The demands from below pour into the waiting room thick and fast. No surprise, considering the shape Earth is in. It’s rarely the obvious disasters that drive the living to distraction. They’re able to gut it out through wars and terrorist bombings and tsunamis. It’s the dread that gets to them. The unrelenting anxiety that accompanies financial meltdowns, social upheavals, climate change, change of all kinds, too much change, too fast, too unrelenting.

To buy myself a little more of what passes for time on this plane, I volunteer for tough assignments. The higher-ups take me at my word. Without preamble, I’m plunged into the body of a woman. I can’t tell how old I am. I can’t even catch my breath, the blows are landing so fast, battering my face, my belly, my breasts. Hands rip the hijab from my head, taking strands of my hair with it, yank my clothing to shreds, throw me to the ground. My ears ring with the shouts of the men attacking me, the wail of a child somewhere nearby. Blood seeps through my clenched lips as a shard of the host entity pleads with me to keep from screaming. One of my eyes is swelling shut, but with the other one I glimpse my surroundings, the inside of a squalid tent. A refugee camp, I think, but thought collapses into instinct as I clutch my arms to my chest and try to clamp my legs shut. It’s no use. There are too many of the men; how many I don’t know. I’m dragged off the floor, then thrown back down, landing on my face, hips hoisted by brutal hands, and then the hot stab between my legs, the violation I knew was coming. The smell, the searing pain, the building nausea — worst of all, the laughter. It goes on and on. I wonder if it will ever stop. The only thing keeping me tethered is the thought that if it weren’t for me, the woman this body belongs to wouldn’t stand a chance to ever, ever, stop hearing that laughter.

It ends as abruptly as it began, and I’m back in the waiting room, reeling, struck with admiration for the woman who returned. She could have given up, died under those blows, that violation, left the wretchedness behind. Was it the wailing child who prevented her? It’s not for me to know.

I’m not even allowed a respite in the waiting room. In an instant I’m behind the wheel of a car, rocketing down a freeway. The car is filled with people, young, laughing, wild. Music blasts. My head swims, my vision blurring and doubling. I recognize the sensation. I’m drunk. Not just drunk — shitfaced. Terror washes over me as I struggle for control. I glance at the speedometer and gasp, trying to remember how to slow down, but that moment with my eyes off the road is enough. There’s a jarring bump and then lightness. My body strains against the seatbelt: the evening sky inverts, flips upside down, the laughter around me turning to shrieks.

And then a deafening crunch. Then nothing. Then sirens. In a blink, I’m back in the waiting room.

Normally we’re given some time to integrate after intense episodes, but again the higher-ups press me into immediate service. If I had lungs I would be breathing deeply to steady myself as I feel the irresistible force gathering me in, pulling me downwards.

My surroundings come into rapid focus. I’m seated in an uncomfortable chair next to a high, mechanical bed surrounded by monitors and quietly beeping machines. The odors assailing my nose sort themselves into disinfectant, stale air, a faint whiff of urine, and something else that I don’t want to recognize. My left hand, mottled and veined, holds the right hand of the shrunken figure in the bed, a woman, her fingers and palm as soft and wrinkled and limp as old rose petals.

The heaviness of the body I land in is more than physical. I’m a tall old guy, slumped now to bend over the woman in the bed. Here’s the thing about walking in when the host has been around for a while: you’re not just handling sensations. You enter into the emotional climate, the accumulation of memories and the habits of thought laid down by the host entity. He or she is only partway gone, like someone who has just stepped away from an argument to get some perspective but is still considering it from a safe remove.

For the moment, I’m this guy, sitting here watching the love of his life slip away. This is what I dread most, more than violence, more than calamity. I despise grief, I really do. The way it sits on the chest like a giant sack of wet clay. The way it laces sunlight with darkness, its ability to bleed all the color out of the day even while throwing everything into unbearably harsh relief. And the torturous thing is, while this poor slob hopes there is something beyond this vale of tears, unlike me he doesn’t know. As long as he’s still focused in this life, I can’t tell him.

Why in all the worlds would I be in a rush to go through that again?

There are other people in the room with me. A son and his wife, their teenage daughter. The son and wife whisper together in the doorway, no doubt making plans for the aftermath, and plans for me. The teenager leans against the wall, thumbing listlessly at her phone.

A machine makes a noise. My heart, his heart, picks up speed as a woman in sky-blue scrubs comes in, checks the machine, applies her stethoscope to the inert figure in the bed, feels for a pulse. I watch her as my internal organs retract inside my chest cavity. The nurse steps toward me, puts her hand on my shoulder, meets my eyes with her own, her expression clinically kind. “She’s passed, Mr. Henderson.”

I’m not supposed to go numb—that’s what walk-ins are for, after all—but it’s as though I’m climbing through fog and mud as her words land on me. I’m honestly not sure I understand.

“She’s gone?” I ask, my voice a surprise to me.

The hand on my shoulder squeezes briefly and lifts away. “You and your family take all the time you need.”

The nurse leaves, the family members converge, there is hugging and sobbing and low voices all talking at once, and somehow it all feels wrong. I sense the host entity’s recognition that none of this accords with the spirit of the woman who has just departed.

“I’m going out for some air,” I announce, and unfold myself from the horrible vinyl chair.

“Sure, sure, Dad, I’ll come with you,” says the son, his voice freighted with the need to take charge of me, his newly diminished father.

“No. No, I’ll be fine. You stay and make the phone calls, please. I won’t be long.”

I pace down the wide hallway busy with people enmeshed in their own dramas or absorbed in their jobs, until I reach the elevators, jab a button, float down to the ground floor and stride through the atrium lobby, picking up speed as I go. I push through the heavy glass doors of the front entrance into a shock of air, fresh and cold, swept into the city by an easterly breeze.

A long walkway separates the hospital from the street. The path is wide enough for wheelchairs and the squadrons of visitors that move up and down it, but it’s lined on both edges with tall, mature trees just beginning to unfurl new leaves. Lindens, I recall. A few humps of dirty snow still hold out against the thin sunshine. Forsythia blooms in square concrete planters, its chrome yellow blossoms waving gently. March, then, or early April.

I come to a stop near one of the planters. Nobody speaks to me or looks at me directly; a hospital is a place where people are ostentatious about respecting others’ privacy. I settle against the edge of a planter, letting it take some of my weight and allowing myself to savor the air as it travels in and out through my nose, tousling my unkempt gray hair on the way. If I stay here too long somebody is sure to come and get me, but I make no move to head back.  The daughter-in-law, I suspect, will drag me off to the barber’s before the funeral. Something about that thought squeezes my eyes and I feel the tears cool as they reach my jaw line.

I know I can’t rush him, but the “me” part of me wonders when the host entity is coming back. Often it’s connection with somebody close, a conversation with a lover or family member that does the trick, or else a strong physical sensation. But both of those things have happened on my watch and there’s no sign of him showing up. He’s waiting for something. I have no idea what.

I sit, I breathe, I let the tears roll and chill and dry. I grow cold at the edges. The traffic on the walkway ebbs to a couple of staff members in blue scrubs hurrying in for the swing shift. The breeze quiets down, as does the traffic on the street in front. The light at the intersection turns red. The world takes a pause.

There is a rustle near me, to my left, just above eye level. I turn my head, and there it is no more than two feet away. A small bird, its dark wings fluttering to keep its balance on the forsythia branch whose flowers nearly match the bright yellow of its body. I hold my breath as it cocks its brilliant orange head and regards me with one shining black eye. As I watch, it lifts its throat and utters its call, a chirruping music that the dead woman once delighted in trying to imitate for me, her husband. Of all the species in her birding journal, the western tanager was her favorite.

“Ellen,” I say, speaking the dead woman’s name aloud. The bird trills again and flits away, its tiny body darting up and up into the sky. I feel a vast swell within me, like a silent symphony building to a crescendo, and a rush of joy so powerful that it brings me to my knees right there on the concrete walkway. I open my own throat like a bird and hear my grateful shout of laughter.

And with that, the host soul returns.

I recede into the curious detachment of the walk-in waiting room. Where there is no loss, and no piercing exaltation that only arises through it. And there never will be.

Again with the questions from the others. I let them swirl over me without answering. With a certainty I don’t wish to dilute, I close what would be my eyes and focus my attention upwards, a pure, clear demand. I am met by the bemused consciousness of the higher-ups.

“Well?” they ask, their collective voice expectant.

“I’m ready,” I say. “I’m thinking Finland. What do you say?”

I can’t begin to explain to you what their celestial smile looks or feels or sounds like, but it’s the one thing I carry with me as I jettison the rest of my memory and squeeze into my eager, helpless, newborn self.