Afterlife Crisis

by Randal Graham

  The room in which our party dined was about as opulent a joint as you could imagine. The dining table, for starters, was laid out with a feast the likes of which I’d never had the pleasure of inhaling, and featured all manner of dishes calculated to throw even the most indifferent tastebud into ecstatic fits. The room’s walls were covered in silk, and tastefully decked out with about a gallery’s worth of painted portraits, landscapes, and abstract whatdoyoucallits. The perimeter was dotted with pedestals, stands, and tables of various heights displaying sculptures, busts, urns, shields, and other objets d’art which would have produced a pang of envy in any curator who knew his stuff. Much of the artwork seemed to reflect a singular theme or style — a style which I hadn’t hitherto come across. Oasis Chic about sums it up. The lion’s share of the pieces featured not-so-subtle hints of some far-flung desert kingdom. There were landscapes showing sand dunes, desert flowers, and oases, and several depictions of some sandal-wearing, authoritative beazel smiting sand-encrusted underlings with a rod. A number of the sculptures on display were hewn from heavily pitted reddish stone, others from a shiny black material, and still others seemed to be made of pure gold. Some of the more bewildering works depicted weird chaps who looked all right from the shoulders down, but whose upper slopes had been replaced by the heads of birds or dogs — a peculiar arrangement, and one which seemed unlikely to withstand scrutiny by any licensed biologist or physician. The whole collection had a certain somethingorother about it . . . what’s the word? What do you call it when there’s a stately sort of ancient grandeur which is dashed impressive and imposing and makes you feel like a smaller than average ant staring up at a mountain? Dynastic. That’s the bunny! There was something dynastic about the Regent’s art collection, and it conveyed a flavour of magnificence, resplendence, and unapologetic majesty of which I heartily approved.

  One particular piece of artistic flotsam caught my eye as I passed a plate of potatoes to my left. It was the centrepiece on the table. In any normal house this would be a bowl of flowers, a line of candles, or something of that order, but here, chez Regent, the table’s centre was home to a squat pyramidical thingummy carved out of some material I couldn’t quite place. To say the thing appealed to my own artistic sensibilities would be to deceive my public — indeed, it’s fairer to say I would have flung the thing from me if I’d found it in my home. But feeling that nothing could be harmed by a bit of kissing up to the host, I opened the conversation by complimenting the eyesore.

  “Attractive little bijou,” I said, nodding toward it. “Is it granite?”

  “Onyx,” said the Regent, a tad more peevishly than I’d have liked.

  Memphis growled as if he didn’t think much of my conversation.

  “Oh, ah,” I said, adding a spot of Pheasant à la Regent to the plate before me.

  “It’s the prize of the Regent’s collection,” said Norm Stradamus, presently coping with the potatoes.

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “It looks valuable.”

  “It’s priceless,” said the Regent, who seemed to be on a diet, judging by the lonely spear of asparagus taking office as the sole occupant of the Regent’s plate.

  “The Regent uses the pyramid as focus for her powers,” said Oan. “It amplifies her connection to the universe, allowing her to use the Laws of Attraction to great effect. It’s truly remarkable. I’ve seen her perform wonders you’d be hard pressed to believe!”

  This seemed to draw a sniff of approval from the Regent, which surprised me. The last time Oan had taken a stab at barking about the Regent’s powers, she’d drawn a glower of disapproval and a command to hold her tongue. But this time ’round, the Regent sniffed and nodded Oanward in a way that seemed to say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

  This sparked the Feynman imagination. This was, as noted above, the second time the topic of the Regent’s powers had been ventilated in my presence. She was an ancient, she had powers, and she could use what Oan called the “Laws of Attraction.” I’d seen these laws at work before, they having been in full effect during the previously mentioned cavern sequence. On that occasion, the forces of darkness in the form of the City Solicitor had rolled up their sleeves and set about the task of doing a bit of no good to Penelope, Ian’s wife, and had used those laws to such a degree that words like “ultra-powerful” and “omnipotent” came to mind. Both Penelope and the City Solicitor had deus ex machina’d all over the place and thrown their weight around like a couple of gods intent on starting up new religions. If the Regent had a modicum of this power — if modicum is the word I want — then I perceived she’d have no trouble snapping her fingers and sorting out any number of difficulties; say, by way of random example, restoring a pal’s missing memories or putting the kibosh on a few unfortunate marital mix-ups. I earmarked the Regent’s powers as something worthy of further study.

  “Talking of the Laws of Attraction,” I said, “a rather funny thing happened to yours truly this afternoon.”

  “Forgive me, Hand of the Intercessor,” said the Regent, “but we must discuss the prophecy.”

  I sensed that the air of debonair gaiety was about to wane a trifle.

  “Oh, that,” I said. And if a touch of asperity entered my voice, who can blame me? Not only had I been cut off mid-story, but I’d also been called the “Hand of the Intercessor” again, a title which, as I think I’ve mentioned, was starting to wear thin.

  “What did you learn from Vera?” said Norm, leaning forward.

  “To be quite honest,” I said, easing up to the thing, “I learned nothing at all. I’m afraid that, what with the rush of current events—”

  “You learned nothing at all?” said the Regent, giving every evidence of thunderclouds forming behind her eyeballs — not that they hadn’t been fairly thunderous to begin with. “Her poem may hold the key to reaching the beforelife. It may chart out the path before us. It holds the promise of—”

  “Well, dash it,” I said, “there’s no use carping about it now. As I was saying, what with the recent vicissitudes I’ve been undergoing — say, rising from a longish coma, downing a gaggle of martinis, and spotting Zeus at liberty on the grounds, there was so much pressing material to cover when I met Vera that we didn’t have time to explore the ins and outs of a scrap of verse. We’ll get ’round to it another time.”

  This seemed to annoy the Regent, but she was a host, and I was her guest, so she stifled her chagrin and pushed the conversation along.

  “Who is this Zeus you mention?” said the Regent.

  “That’s what I was about to tell you,” I said. “That ‘funny thing’ that happened to me this afternoon.”

  “Pray, tell us,” said the Regent, thunderclouds receding.

  “It involved one of your guards,” I began, only to find myself being shushed by an under-the-table-kick from Norm Stradamus. This prophet seemed to have sobered up quite thoroughly in the hours since we had parted, possibly having swallowed one of Professor Newton’s wonder pills. I think I preferred the blighter when he was still on the slightly sozzled side of the spectrum. For now, rather than cheering me on with drunken word and gesture, this sober chump sought to quash my conversation and gave the impression — through heavy, waggling eyebrows — that the item atop my agenda, viz, Zeus’s true identity, was something best left under wraps. I ignored the old ass and carried on.

  “It involved one of your guards,” I repeated. “A chap named Terrence.”

  “I know this guard,” said the Regent.

  “You think you know this guard,” I said, seizing upon the critical point, “but you don’t. Not really. His name, for example, isn’t Terrence. His name is Zeus.”

  Reactions around the table varied. The Regent repeated the name “Zeus” in an interrogative manner, trying the name out on her tongue. The dog Memphis tilted his head and said “Aroo,” or something similar. Norm Stradamus sai
d nothing, but merely pinched the bridge of his nose. Oan seemed to choke on her breath a bit and do another bit of swooning, but then chipped in with an “oh, good gracious,” which she followed up with a helpful speech aimed at the Regent.

  “Zeus is Rhinnick’s best friend!” she said. “He told me about him in the hospice. He’s been looking for him for months!”

  “It’s true!” I said.

  “Oh, you must be so happy to have finally found him,” said Oan. “I know how you longed to see him again. And here we see the Laws of Attraction at their best, manifesting the desires of those who focus their intentions. I’m so pleased for you, my darling. I’ll have to write about this in For Love Alone.”

  I blanched at this goshawful reminder of Oan’s stomach-churning turn at literary composition, while the Regent merely cocked a head at me and thrummed a finger or two on the table.

  “Terrence came to me with no memory. As one who is newly manifested,” she said.

  “But with gunshot wounds!” I said, glad to be saved from further discussion of Oan’s literary garbage. “You don’t manifest with gunshot wounds! And while you might have filed this away as one of those insoluble mysteries, allow me to connect the dots and dish up the hidden solution. This Zeus, recently aka Terrence, has been mindwiped! His neurons have been scrambled, his little grey cells cleaned out, and his memories blotted from the copybook, leaving only a clean slate. This is why he popped into your life free of any notion of who he was, or any stories about the old guys and dolls back at the hospice. But Zeus wasn’t a new arrival. Far from it! He was a longtime resident of Detroit with a whole host of prior experiences. He was my closest pal and man-at-arms for years and years, and one of the founding members of the Feynman entourage. Most recently he was at my side when I was involved in a brief entanglement with the City Solicitor, and Zeus found himself in the line of fire when Socrates let loose with some of his memory-wiping rounds!”

  “Socrates!” said the Regent. Or perhaps “hissed” would be mot juster. The mention of this assassin’s name always provoked a strong reaction, but it was usually one of skepticism or fear — most bimbos didn’t believe in him at all, and those who did would happily run several miles in tight shoes to avoid meeting up with him. But there wasn’t a hint of skepticism or fear on the Regent’s map — not by a jugful. What she displayed was nothing short of unbridled contempt. She’d made the sort of look cats make when the subject of dogs is mentioned in mixed company, or the look a shark might make when confronted by another shark from a rival political party.

  “Oh, you know him?” I said.

  “We’ve had dealings,” said the Regent. She didn’t seem interested in supplying further details.

  “Well, so have I, so has Zeus, and so has the prophetess Vera, come to think of it,” I said. “And in each case we escaped by the skin of our teeth. Vera and Zeus got the worst of it, both bumping up against the Socratic Method and having their memories go phut.”

  “But Vera seems perfectly fine,” said Norm Stradamus, chipping in. It seemed that, after watching mutely as the Regent and I discussed the Zeus and Socrates imbroglio, Norm had at long last concluded that the story wasn’t merely the raving of a martini-soaked reveller.

  “Vera is fine,” I said, “but only because of television. Her prophetic powers have clothed her with the power to peer into both the future and the past, replacing bona fide memories with these visions. Zeus is another story.”

  “Oooohh,” said Oan, still with the soppy melting note in her voice, “I do hope you can help him. All of those years of friendship, all of those shared experiences, all of his past hopes and dreams—”

  “Fear not, old Sharing Room Wrangler,” I said, “for the solution lays before us. Or do I mean lies? In any case, the Regent can fix it. She can snatch up her pyramid thingummy if required, lay into those Laws of Attraction you’re always babbling about, snap her fingers or do whatever it is she does to exert her powers, restoring Zeus’s memories. No fuss, no bother. Probably won’t even break a sweat.”

  Well, I hadn’t expected the Regent to clap her hands and leap about, as these forms of expression wouldn’t have jived with her M.O., as the expression is, but I thought she might have at least smiled at me or nodded approval. She didn’t. She merely leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers in front of her chin, like some arch-criminal about to board his hydrofoil en route to his secret base inside a volcano.

  “That won’t work,” said the Regent.

  “But dash it,” I said.

  “There is no argument. It won’t work. My powers cannot restore what Socrates has destroyed.”

  “But why not? I can’t say that I had a full view of the City Solicitor’s battle with Penelope, but from what little I could hear, I got the impression that you ancient, powerful lightning hurlers can do anything you want.”

  “You fail to understand the nature of Detroit,” said the Regent. And, in what I’ve always thought was something of an odd coincidence, the nature of Detroit appeared to respond.

  The room began to shake like a freight train getting underway. Plates rattled, a terrine of soup upended itself, and our party of four gripped at the table like we were grasping at life preservers — life preservers, as mentioned earlier, being something you don’t really need in Detroit, but you catch my drift. And just when I thought the rattling might subside, that’s when nature really rolled up its sleeves, spat on its hands, and got down to business with a hearty goodwill.

  The air rippled all around us, like the surface of a pond into which someoneorother has bunged a sizeable brick. The ripple passed through the dining room, distorting everything in its path. Even the Regent, Norm, and Oan seemed to warp, stretch, and contort as the wave passed through them, looking more like reflections in a receding funhouse mirror than honest-to-goodness chumps who’d dressed for dinner. My ears popped, my head throbbed, and all sound seemed to be sucked out of the world. I briefly felt as though I weighed about six hundred and fifty pounds.

  And suddenly nothing.

  The wave passed, the rumbling stopped, and Norm asked me to pass the mustard.

  I stared at the man.

  “But what in Abe’s name was that?” I said.

  “What was what?” said Norm.

  Oan, too, seemed to wonder what I was driving at, for she cocked her head in a manner reminiscent of the dog Memphis. She then made a face which telegraphed a pathetic sort of sympathy, as though I’d turned up for this dinner in floral pyjamas.

  “What’s bothering you, my darling?” she said.

  “The whole rippling, rumbling, world-warping thingummy that just happened!” I said, gesturing vaguely around the room. “The tremor that drove us all to grab the table? The wave of somethingorother that tipped the soup and set plaster falling from the ceiling, the ripple that bent us out of shape, the whole—”

  Here I broke off, for I looked around the room and saw that everything was in order. No tipped soup, no fallen plaster, no disarray. But something about the room had . . . well . . . changed, is about the only way to put it. Like there was a subtle somethingorother that hadn’t been there before. The atmosphere seemed thicker, perhaps. The ambient “feeling” of the room wasn’t right. The entire setting felt wrong in a way I couldn’t put into words, which is saying something, as putting things into words is one of the things that I do best.

  The Regent seemed intrigued, for she’d been staring at me, eyes narrowed, ever since the bizarre rippling sequence had passed.

  “You perceived that?” she said, with a look that had “agog” written all over it.

  “Perceived what?” said Norm.

  “The change,” said the Regent, rolling her tongue on the italics.

  “I perceived it like the dickens!” I said.

  “And you remember it, now that it’s passed,” said the Regent. She didn’t ask it. Sh
e announced it. With an air of mild astonishment, like a seasoned entomologist who has happened upon a millipede wearing shoes. “Tell me,” she continued, “while the memory is fresh in your mind. What changes do you perceive?”

  “But dash it!” I said, “What was that rippling thingummy?”

  “A reality quake,” said the Regent.

  “Good gracious!” said Oan, gasping.

  “Another quake!” said Norm Stradamus, employing one of those whisper cries you sometimes use when you wish to register astonishment without waking the neighbours.

  And while the phrase “reality quake” appeared to be one of great importance and deep meaning for those assembled, it didn’t mean a dashed thing to me, so I just sat there looking baffled. The Regent noticed.

  “Please, Mr. Feynman,” said the Regent, “this is important. Describe any changes you see. Anything that has altered since the quake.”

  I won’t claim to be the most observant fish in the sea, but I always do my best to keep an eye fixed on my surroundings. Having been entrusted by the Author with the task of sketching out the first draft of my adventures, I’m fairly diligent about taking in the local environment with a view to chucking in a bit of description now and then whenever I feel that a bit of stage setting might brighten up the text. Take the dining room in which I presently sat. I had taken fairly careful mental notes of its furnishings and accessories when I’d entered, just in case they might prove useful. I now reviewed these notes and compared them to what Isaac would call my current set of empirical observations.

  Table? Check. Folks seated around it? Check. Dog? Check. Trays of assorted, scrumptious foodstuff? Check. Pyramidical thingummy serving as centrepiece? Check.