Afterlife Crisis

by Randal Graham

  Perceiving that she was correct in her diagnosis, I offered reassurance.

  “Egad,” I said, massaging the lemon and arranging myself into something that resembled a seated position, before following up with a question aimed at eliciting an important piece of news, viz, where in Abe’s name we were. For once I’d opened my eyes and shaken the cobwebs from their moorings, I perceived that we weren’t, as you might have envisaged, lying in a tangled heap at the bottom of an elevator shaft, or a dumbwaiter shaft if you want to split hairs, but rather closeted in a smallish, unfurnished, and generally unadorned room which lacked any apparent doors, but featured one wall that appeared to be constructed of a thickish pane of glass — think of it as a cross between a monastic cell and a dryish sort of aquarium. Beyond the glass wall was a corridor, across which I could see another room identical to the one in which we found ourselves, apart from the fact that it was empty.

  It looked as though we were on display in some sort of zoo, and the exhibit across the hall had been taken off display to be deloused, or fed, or something of that order.

  “We’re locked up,” said Vera.

  This surprised me.

  “Zeus too?” I asked, still massaging the loaf.

  “Terrence,” said Zeus.

  “Or Terrence, if you prefer,” I said, peevishly, “I’m in no mood to split straws.”

  “Yes, him too. They think he was working with us.”

  “Working on what?”

  “Escape, I guess. They found Zeus’s keys in my pocket.”

  “Terrence’s keys,” said Zeus.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “Who are who?” said Vera.

  “The ‘they’ you mentioned. The ones who found the keys and think he’s working with us.”

  “Oh, them,” said Vera. “The guards.”

  “But Zeus is a guard.”

  “Terrence,” said Zeus.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and winced for a space, as the conversation was doing little to ease the growing ache behind the eyes. “Perhaps,” I said, “you could supply a brief news update, starting from the conclusion of our descent in the dumbwaiter.”

  “Dumbwaiter?” said Zeus, or Terrence if you prefer, reminding me that he had suffered his own bout of unconsciousness before the trip in question, occasioned by Vera’s deft use of a heavy vase.

  Vera ignored his interjection.

  “I suppose I woke up in here about half an hour ago,” she said. “You were both out cold. I was checking to make sure you were both all right when a couple of guards came up and banged on the barrier.”

  “You mean the glass?” I interjected.

  “It isn’t glass,” she said. “It’s gobbledygook.”

  She hadn’t actually said the word “gobbledygook,” but rather something about coherent energy thingummies suspended via somethingorother. Seeing that I seemed satisfied by this response, she moved on.

  “Anyway, I asked them what was going on, and they said we were to be held for questioning. Then Zeus woke up—”

  “Terrence,” said Zeus.

  “Or Terrence,” said Vera, patiently, “anyway, he woke up and demanded to be let out.”

  “He can’t have been too persuasive,” I said.

  “I suppose not,” said Vera. “The guards called him a traitor and said they’d found his keys in my pocket when they pulled us out of the dumbwaiter wreckage. Since you and I weren’t supposed to be out of our rooms, they figured we were making a break for it and Zeus was helping us out.”

  “Terrence,” said Zeus, rather doggedly, which I suppose is to be expected.

  Vera ignored the interruption.

  “They didn’t seem to know what to do with us. I think they’re waiting for the Regent to come back and make some decisions about the three of us,” she concluded.

  “Grrnmph,” said Fenny, who I now perceived was sitting behind Vera, nibbling on somethingorother.

  “Oh, right,” said Vera, picking up the little chap and tickling his chin. “Four of us. Fenny’s here too.”

  I’ve never subscribed to Oan’s Sharing Room philosophy, or believed in Vision Boards, the power of positive thinking, or the capacity of the universe to eavesdrop on your thoughts and manifest your desires, but had I done so, I’d have thanked the universe now for paying attention to yours truly and conveying Fenny safely to the cell. For my heart leapt at seeing the little chap whole and uninjured — it was about the best vision to meet the Feynman eyes all day, and something to which I might have devoted a considerable amount of space on any Vision Board I might have thought of preparing. Hamsters, you see, aren’t immortal — or at least I don’t suppose they are — so his welfare had been a matter of deep concern.

  Fenny’s advent didn’t seem to bring the same wellspring of joy into Zeus’s life, for the latter merely sat on the floor and slumped his massive shoulders in a brooding sort of way, making it clear to all observers that his mood was down among the wines and spirits.

  “I was only doing my job,” he said, glumly, flexing a bicep or two in a manner indicating that his own vertical journey down the shaft had left him aching.

  I did my best to offer aid.

  “There, there, old chum,” I said, realizing as I did so that no one actually ever says “there, there.” I extended a hand and patted a shoulder. “I’m sorry to have gotten you wrapped up in all this. I’m sure the Regent’ll sort things out.”

  “We can’t trust her to sort out anything,” said Vera, chiming in. “Remember what she’s doing to the Napoleons.”

  “What’s she doing to the Napoleons?” asked Zeus.

  “She’s torturing them!” said Vera. “She’s trying to make them reincarnate.”

  Yorkshire Terriers are, of course, widely known for their expressive little faces, and Zeus had managed to keep this trait in his current form. He now contorted the nose and brows in a censorious sort of way, telegraphing a larger-than-average serving of both skepticism and scorn.

  “You people are crazy,” he said, and one could see why he’d arrived at that assessment. I mean to say, here was I, a person Zeus regarded as a new, passing acquaintance, repeatedly insisting he and I were bosom pals who used to be bunkmates in a hospice and that he was, as some earlier time, a Yorkshire Terrier. Exhibit B was Vera, who’d tried in vain to convince him we were Napoleons, then beaned him with a vase and gotten him locked up in some species of cell, now accusing his trusted employer of torturing Napoleons for reasons related to reincarnation. If all of that didn’t paint a picture of self and Vera as pure padded-cell material, then I didn’t know what would.

  “Be that as it may,” I said, “there’s nothing for us to do now but wait and see what happens.”

  Those who know Rhinnick, and know him well, might look askance at this most recent remark, judging it to be strangely out of character. Rhinnick, you might be saying to yourself, is a dynamic bull-horn-grabbing man of action, not a chump who’s content to cool his heels in a cell blithely hoping everything will sort itself out. Rhinnick the gumptious go-getter we know. Rhinnick the seizer-of-the-day we recognize. The chap we haven’t met is Rhinnick the submissive, laissez-fairing jailbird who sits pacifically — do I mean pacifically? — whispering que sera sera and letting the wheels of injustice do their thing. But if there’s one trait I embody more than any other — if there’s one thing that ought to be underlined and highlighted in any book reports or character sketches you write about me once you’ve finished your bit of reading — it is this: I keep the upper lip stiff, I see the glass as half-full, and I readily zero in on the bright spot in any gloomy scene. Whatever trials, travails, and hardships might conspire to blot the sunshine from my life, I can be counted on to keep the eye skinned for silver linings. Take my current predic. Here I was, confined to the Regent’s private hoosegow, surrounded by coherent en
ergy thingummies and guards who had been known to resort to torture. Dire straits, you’d have to agree. And while a lesser man might have failed to see any sun on the horizon, the one thing Rhinnick Feynman is not is a lesser man. For within a couple of ticks of becoming aware of the situation, viz, my incarceration on charges of conspiring with traitorous Terrences, breaking dumbwaiters, rifling through the Regent’s office, and being awol from my room, I had seen the one, shining entry on the credit side of the ledger: it had a stronger-than-average chance of getting me out of my engagement.

  Well, one engagement, at least. The engagement to Vera might still require a bit of sorting out. But it seemed to me that, as far as Oan was concerned, my stretch in the penitentiary couldn’t have come at a better time. Oan would never hitch her lot to a chap who runs the risk of getting himself bunged in slammers. You can chart one of two courses in life: you can be engaged to an idealistic beazel like Oan, or you can serve a stretch in the jug. Not both. I had this Oan taped out from shoe-sole to hairdo, and was supremely confident that, on catching the merest glimpse of me in the cooler, and on learning I’d been put here after a stint of rifling through the Regent’s files, she would have doubts and qualms about linking her lot to mine and, perhaps after a day or two of letting these qualms fester, hand me the pink slip and leave the Feynman orbit forever. Nothing turns a girl off more than the thought that future contact with her betrothed will have to take the form of a conjugal v., and this was especially true of Oan. Oan had recently struck me as one of those social-climbing, status-conscious types who are drawn to titles and honorifics like a moth to an open flame. She was hoping to tread the aisle with the Hand of the ruddy Intercessor, a rising star in the Church of O, and not some two-bit crook who lands himself in the stockade every time she turns her back. She was signing up to be Mrs. H of the I., not to be a gangster’s moll. I’d have placed a large wager on the prediction that, once apprised of my situation, Oan would shed a tear or two of regret and cast me aside. So as I say, while I’d never really enjoy being stuck in what they sometimes call “the joint,” my current confinement had compensations. And so it was with something of a song in my heart that I counselled patience, advising against any kind of rash act that might cut short our incarceration.

  “But we can’t just sit around,” said Vera.

  “Why not?” I riposted. “What’s to stop us?”

  “Grrnmph,” said Fenny.

  “We have to make a plan,” said Vera. “They’ll be back to question us soon.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. “Television working again?”

  “Standard procedure,” said Zeus. “Besides, they said they’d be back shortly.”

  “They were very upset with Zeus. They think he must be conspiring against the Regent.”

  Zeus gnashed a tooth or two and glowered a bit, and I mourned in spirit for the old slab of beef. I mean to say, here was a man I knew from hoof to horns, as the expression is, and whom I’d readily diagnose as the most loyal slice of humanity who had ever bench-pressed a thousand pounds. And now his loyalty was questioned by his comrades in arms, if you can call fellow members of a Regent’s private security detail “comrades in arms.” Of course you could see their point of view. They hadn’t known Zeus for more than a month or two, by all accounts, and he’d been foisted upon them by the Regent as a newly manifested Terrence, only to have houseguests in the form of self and Vera show up and claim that he was an amnesiatic escapee from a mental institution. A certain amount of suspicion was natural in the circs. Finding him in the wreckage of a dumbwaiter in the company of a pair of awol inmates must have pushed them over the edge, as the expression is, selling the view that this Zeus was a traitor.

  “I suppose we’ll just have to wait and answer their questions,” I said. “All will be made clear. It won’t be long until they realize Zeus wasn’t a willing member of the conspiracy.”

  “What conspiracy?” said Zeus.

  “There’s no conspiracy,” said Vera.

  “There’s something of a conspiracy,” I corrected. “You and I had been planning to set the Napoleons free and drag Zeus along with us, hoping to prod his memory back into working order. Speaking of which,” I added, turning Zeusward, “any change in that department? Did the crash in the dumbwaiter thingummy dislodge any bats from the belfry? Any memories of being Zeus?”

  He merely blinked at me in a puzzled sort of way.

  “Rhinnick,” said Vera, adopting a mother-hennish tone, “I don’t think he’s going to get his memory back. Mindwipes aren’t temporary. I know, I know,” she said, staving off my interruption, “you’re going to say my memory seems to be working, and I was mindwiped too. But mine’s been coming back through television. Zeus is never going to remember being Zeus.”

  “You were mindwiped?” said Zeus, agog.

  “Yes, by Socrates,” said Vera.

  “Socrates!” said Zeus, agogger than ever. “You mean . . . he’s real? And you really did meet him? The other guards talked about him sometimes, but they always made it seem like he was some sort of . . . I dunno . . . some sort of legendary supervillain. A myth. I didn’t think he really existed.”

  “He’s real enough, all right,” said Vera. “He injected me with his memory-wiping venom when I tried to keep him off your tail. I blew up half a block of downtown real estate with him in it and I barely slowed him down.”

  “And then he wiped your memory, too, old chum,” I added, nodding oafward. “You took several bullets’ worth of his memory-wiping Stygian juice straight in the chest while protecting self and others from his attack. Dashed sporting of you, of course, and very much in keeping with your well-known watchdog spirit and your commendable feudal outlook toward yours truly. That’s how you ended up as Terrence, if you catch my meaning. I’d hoped to rekindle the mental sparks and remind you you were you.”

  This last sentence, populated as it was by a few too many yous, took Zeus perhaps a half a minute to sort out. Once he’d done so, you couldn’t exactly say he’d been convinced — not by a hatful — but it did appear to give him pause for thought. I suppose nothing causes a chap to re-evaluate his loyalties and beliefs like a pair of sincere well-wishers unreservedly taking up his cause while his fellow guardsmen and guardswomen treat him like a Benedict Arnold, if Mr. Arnold is the traitorous chap whose bit of turncoating has been so widely publicized. Do I mean Benedict Arnold? I should have to check my sources.

  It was while I was musing thus, and wondering if Zeus would ever zero in on the truth that he was now, within this cell, among his true friends, when a noise without caught my attention.

  “The guards are coming!” Vera whispered.

  There was the sound of grinding metal and the turning of heavy locks. Hinges squeaked, and a loud metallic “thud” announced the rather forceful opening of a door.

  This door — somewhere down the hall beyond my field of view — must have opened into an area fraught with activity, for when it thudded open our collective ears were assaulted by a hideous cry the likes of which I’d never heard. It was worse than the cry that I myself had unleashed that one time at the hospice when I found that Zeus, apparently feeling mischievous, had slipped a toad between the sheets of the Feynman bed, a toad which I’d discovered when retiring for the evening and deeply feeling the need for quiet, rest, and repose.

  The scream of present interest was a hideous, echoing scream from a male tenor with a Napoleonic accent. A male tenor N. who was in considerable distress.

  “I think that’s Jack!” said Vera, blanching.

  “Who is Jack?” said Zeus.

  “A Napoleon,” said Vera, her voice trembling. “Not a very nice man. But he says that he’s been reincarnated loads of times. The Regent thought he might be the key to bridging the gap to the beforelife.”

  “But why . . . why’s he screaming?” asked Zeus, a look of deep concern mounting the brow.r />
  “They’re torturing him!” said Vera, still blanching, and her blanching intensified as the voice unleashed another one of those horrid screams.

  Zeus pressed his face against the glass — or rather, the coherent energy thingummy that seemed to behave as glass — in a vain attempt to look toward the commotion. The screams intensified, and Zeus, mirroring Vera, started his own bout of blanching, his own hue edging toward the greenish end of the spectrum.

  I can’t claim that I remained too unblanched myself.

  The hideous sounds were silenced by a second, echoing thud, to be replaced by the sound of boots approaching cellward.

  A troop of guards appeared outside our cell, pushing a cart bearing an array of contrivances that looked to be vaguely medical in nature. There were four of them — guards, I mean, not medical contrivances, which I hadn’t bothered to count. And you can imagine how surprised I was to learn, once this quartet of guards had entered my field of view, that three of them were chaps I’d already met.

  Chapter 30

  I let out a surprised squeak, followed by a loud, excited cry of “Llewellyn Llewellyn! What in Abe’s name are you doing here?”

  “How do you know Llewellyn Llewellyn?” asked Zeus, overlapping to some degree with Llewellyn Llewellyn making a similar inquiry.

  You might have been wondering the same thing, but only if you’ve hitherto failed to make a careful study of my adventures — or if you belong to that class of person from whose memory the Author has seen fit to expunge all traces of my previous comings and goings. But if you have dipped into the archives to any extent, and if you do recall earlier chapters of the memoirs, you’ll remember this weirdly named Llewellyn Llewellyn chap popped up a couple of times during my brief association with Ian Brown. I first met him about the time of the apocalyptic grotto sequence, when he appeared in the company of the prophet Norm Stradamus and the robe-wearing yahoos calling themselves the Church of O. Ian, I later learned, had met this same chap some time earlier, Llewellyn Llewellyn having been the one who pointed Ian and the gang in the direction of Vera’s shop, hoping she could push them along with a touch of prophecy. When last I’d seen him he’d been split apart by a teleportation portal which rather inconveniently opened up in the centre of his person, leaving him bifurcated — if bifurcated is the word I want — in a way that looked as though it might take time to heal. His various bits and pieces had later disappeared, thereby being washed — or so I’d imagined — out of the Feynman life forever. But here he was, apparently whole and undamaged, standing outside the little home-from-home in which I’d been locked with Zeus, Vera, and the hamster Fenny.