The Reincarnationist Papers

by D. Eric Maikranz

  during my junior year in high school, I knew that I was different, it just took me a while to understand how. My teachers would often catch me daydreaming in class. They reprimanded me constantly for this, but, as their reports later stated, it had little effect. I would “check out” without warning or pattern. These spells, as they were termed, came alone and in connected series, some lasted only a second, and others as long as several minutes. At the time, I didn’t know where I went. The sensation could best be described as watching a movie. At the time I wouldn’t have called it remembering, for how could someone remember something that had never happened to them?

  They came on subtly at first, appearing as ten- or twenty-minute short features, but by the end of that year they were multihour epics that ran constantly and crowded normal thoughts out of my teenage head. Several of them played over and over, while others played only once then went back out of circulation, but after a while, all of them, short and long, began to share something in common, and it frightened me.

  The first scenes were panoramic. They were pastoral, peaceful, even boring at times. Only later was there action, along with strange people coming on and going off camera, often in many different scenes. Oddly, there was no main character, no main focus to bring these strange people together. Only when they began triggering emotional responses consistent with the visual, auditory, and tactile sensations I saw, did it start to make sense to me. All the scenes were set around a central character, an unseen actor that starred from behind the camera in every scene. After sentience, came thoughts, reasoning, and finally identity. He was the focus, everyone interacted with him, everything happened to him, and this meant everything happened vicariously to me because of this strange first-person point of view.

  In time, with practice, I was able to summon these movies at will, experiencing them over and over in an attempt to form a timeline. I found, after a while, the more often I viewed a particular clip, the more intimate I became with it and the more confidence I had to emulate the actions I was empathically experiencing in my head.

  This unseen actor was a farmer, a soldier, and a prisoner. Eventually I learned every detail about this man, down to his favorite brand of cigarettes, and I became adept at all these things he could do, but that other alphabet came first.

  In the fall of that year, I began to write and understand the strange language I’d seen him use. The Ns were backward, as were the Rs, and in addition to several new letters, several familiar ones were not used. I practiced for a full year before I could functionally read and write it without having to slip back into the past of the man who haunted me. In time, I came to know his name, Vasili Blagavich Arda.

  The story of my miraculous new ability to read and write in what I had now identified as Bulgarian, was more difficult to prove to my parents.

  I wrote page after page of text and read aloud to them from Bulgarian books I’d sent for from the University of Minnesota, but all to little more than idle fancy. They were amused at my claim when I first made it, but when I told them it would make sense to any other Bulgarian who read it, they became concerned. When I told them that I knew the language from another man’s memories, they became annoyed, and when I told them that I remembered another life in another land in another time with another family, they became angry, especially my father.

  I wanted so badly to tell them, to tell anyone and have them understand, but the more I told them about my memories, the angrier they became, until I finally fell into a more comfortable silence. That was the last chance I gave anyone to understand me.

  With only two months of high school to go, I told them I was leaving and wouldn’t be back. After all the other shocks I had given them, this one went almost unnoticed. Almost.

  When they accepted that I was really going, my father attempted a half-hearted reconciliation, and my mother gave me the lighter. She must have recognized some of the same Russian Cyrillic letters on its worn surface and thought it was the same as the Bulgarian letters I’d shown her. Two nights before I left, she pressed it into my hand after supper. She didn’t say anything when she gave it to me. Instead, she held me tightly, stroking my blond hair as she rocked us both back and forth at the table. I went up to my room, packed my things, and cried all night.

  The animosity between my parents and I had ended, but the new memories unfortunately did not, and the next night, my last night there, I burned the barn down with my new lighter.

  when my eyes refocused in shelby’s warehouse, the lighter was shaking, still inches above the line of vodka. Concentrate. I drew in a lungful of smoke from the cigarette in the corner of my mouth and blew it at my shaking right hand like a shaman exorcising a demon. I moved my head down next to the floorboards in order to watch the miracle up close. The summoning is always the most exciting part. People carry flame around and use it every day, but only a few ever realize its potential to consume and rage like a monster.

  I slowly moved the lighter closer to the edge of the narrow, wet trail of vodka. I love to summon the monster. The monster that brings the truth back over bridges from the past, the monster that eats little boys, the monster that brings deliverance. I moved the lighter even closer, beckoning it until it came. When the distance to the floor was close enough not to cause injury, the little flickering sprite in my hand leaped from the lighter to the floor and began to run along the length of the inch-wide strip. It had been yellow in my hand but turned blue with a faint yellow outline when it hit the floor and started running. It reached the large puddle and flashed a brilliant blue, lighting up the entire second floor before running silently down each of the long fingers. The room began to fill with light, it was coming.

  I got to my feet for a better look at it. It ran out to the end of each finger and hesitated, still flashing brilliant electric blue around the room. Then slowly, so slowly I almost couldn’t see it, it began to creep outside the lines of vodka onto the methanol-coated floorboards. I could feel it coming to life. The flames burned in blue and violet as they consumed the vodka and caught on the accelerant. It spread slower than I had anticipated, but it was spreading. And then, like a miracle, it was there in the room with me. The fire got up on its knees and grabbed hold of the center post next to the point of origin. The tiny flames licked at the wood and inched ever upward, turning orange as they began to consume the wood of the post. Fire can do its work once it gets up on its feet and starts moving around. I found this out the first time I summoned it.

  my last week in minnesota, another disembodied memory hit me. It was stronger than all the others and was different in that it couldn’t be controlled. It happened in Macon, Georgia, in the 1970s. He was a young boy named Bobby Lynn Murray. I didn’t inherit many memories from Bobby, and this one, seen through a child’s eyes, is the strongest.

  I watched the small flames climb the post all the way to the top where it met the rafters. I looked at its progress around the room and realized I was the ghost in here; this was for young Bobby.

  He was amazingly industrious for a boy of six, and on that last day he built a tower out of his wooden toys that was taller than he was. The tower stood in the corner of his small room by the window. Its skeleton was made of brightly painted thin wooden rods, joined by round wooden wheels with drilled holes. It had taken him all day to build it. He returned to his room after supper to play with it and reorganize the sticks on the sides so all the colors matched. His mother, Judith, came in at eight o’clock to put him to bed, against his protests. He had wanted to stay up and build his tower even higher. He lay in bed looking over at it, wondering if he would have to move it outside to make it as tall as he wanted to.

  His tower stood silhouetted in front of the curtains. A street light beyond his bedroom window shined every night. Bobby got up and walked over to the tower to reinspect it in the dim light. There were two cords that opened and closed the curtains, but the one within his reach only closed them tighter. He cou
ld see there was work to be done, but he couldn’t tell which rods were which color, and construction couldn’t continue unless it followed the same color code as the rest of the tower. Turning on the light never worked because somehow his mother always found out he wasn’t in bed.

  Bobby had seen his mother’s new boyfriend, William, use matches as a light at night when they all traveled in the car to Atlanta. Bobby had taken a book of matches from the dashboard and kept them to use in case the comforting street light ever went out. He went to the footlocker at the end of the bed, opened the lid, and slid his small hand down one side and into the corner of the trunk until he found the paper matchbook. He walked back over to the tower, took a single match, and tried to strike it by imitating what Will had done. After several attempts, one sparked and lit. The red tip flashed and was completely consumed in a second. Bobby was too busy watching the process of the match burning to notice the light the flame gave off. He was fascinated by the flickering of the blue-and-orange flame and watched it change the blue-gray paper of the match into a blackened, shriveled, and twisted cinder. When it burned down to his small thumb and forefinger, he dropped it and put his scorched fingers in his mouth. The match went out before it hit the green carpeted floor.

  He carefully lit another one, this time studying the colored rods on the floor. He picked up a yellow one and held it and the match close to the tower to check if he was on the yellow side. The flame miraculously jumped off of the match and onto a support rod in the tower. He stood there, puzzled at how this little sprite could jump on its own. The flame raced up the yellow rod, blistering then blackening its paint before jumping over the unfinished connecting wheel on its way to the next highest rod. Young Bobby stood there, hypnotized by the metamorphosis happening in front of him. In minutes, the entire skeleton as well as the edge of the curtains behind it were aflame. The polyester in the curtains dripped burning globs of plastic onto the carpet, igniting it. By the time the flames on the tower had died down, and Bobby noticed what was going on, it had spread to the wood paneling on the walls and ceiling surrounding the window.

  the monster always acts the same whenever it is summoned. It had already moved out across the floor to the front wall and was on its way to the corners. I retreated back from the point of origin toward the top of the stairs. The flames had engulfed the center and forward posts and were halfway up the rear one. By the time I retreated, the yellow flames were three feet tall on the floor. The foot-thick rolling flames on the ceiling were bloodred and much cooler than the ones on the floor, due to lack of oxygen in the upper air. Soon the color of the bottom ones would get darker, orange then red, and then just before it got drowsy and bored, I would free it.

  I stepped farther back from the wall of flames and toward the window. The heat was becoming intense. My leather jacket helped to shield some of its attack. The fire crackled and popped as it took hold on the wood itself. Not much time left. The flames at the point of origin leaped higher than the surrounding ones and formed a symmetrical, volcano-shaped mountain that reached almost to the quiet flames of the ceiling. As the cone rose, it changed from yellow to orange to red at the top. Almost time.

  My mouth hung open, and I drew the thin air in long gasps like a trapped miner. I unzipped the left pocket of the jacket and removed one of the baseball-sized stones I’d taken from the alley. The volcano slowly shrank back from the ceiling, taking the darker hues back down with it. Suspended in between the two layers of flame, a foot-thick band of gray smoke undulated softly. I was becoming drowsy and had to fight to keep my eyes open. I bent over at the waist and breathed deeply from the heavier air at knee level before straightening and throwing the stone at the tall window pane next to me.

  The stone struck the surface and continued through normally, but the splintering glass exploded inward as the fresh oxygen was sucked inside. I turned away from the blast of air and flying glass. The monster roared angrily as we both breathed deeply, and I looked up in time to see that the stone I’d thrown had sent a ripple across the flames on the ceiling. The flames were still bloodred at the leading edge of the ripple, but were bright yellow and scrambling hungrily downward in its wake. The thick layer of gray smoke burst into turbulent swirls as it fed on the fresh air. In its changing shapes, I could see Bobby.

  the boy stepped back toward the center of his bedroom. The burning carpet under the tower sent crackling flames racing through its fragile superstructure. The monster hissed as it ate at the thin veneer on the walls. Bobby watched his tower lean to the left and fall over after a few seconds.

  “Mommy!” he shouted in response to the destruction of his work. “Mommy!” he cried out again as he ran toward the door only to find the top half of it already engulfed in yellow and orange. He stopped in his tracks and looked at it as it crawled down the door and the wall surrounding it. His young emotions went from anger to fear when he realized what was happening.

  “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” Bobby screamed until he became winded in the thin air of the room. He stood there breathing heavily and watched the flames eat at the door, little yellow teeth taking small bites in front while the orange back teeth chewed violently. The heat pushed him away from the door, and he walked back to the footlocker at the end of the small bed.

  It had spread across the ceiling and three walls but was only a quarter of the way across the floor. He sat down on the toy chest and fought to keep his eyes open against the smoke as his head began to swim.

  “Mommy,” he said softly. The word came out in a weak exhale, barely audible over the crackling of the paneling.

  “Bobby!” shouted a voice beyond the door down the hall. “Bobby!” shouted his mother louder and closer to the closed door.

  Bobby, breathing heavily, looked up in time to see the doorknob twist. In a motion that was too quick to see, the door flew inward and slammed against the flaming paneling of the rear wall. His mother, Judith, stood in the open doorway, framed in dark-orange flames, and she looked down curiously at her open hand where the doorknob had been a fraction of a second earlier. She raised her eyes in search of her son just as the monster raced toward the fresh air in long yellow tongues. The flames caught instantly on her threadbare blue-and-white cotton robe.

  The intense heat pushed Bobby off his seat and onto the floor. He crawled under the bed to get relief and looked out after the flash subsided, only to see his mother’s thrashing figure aflame in the doorway.

  That was the last memory from Bobby.

  the angry yellow flames boiled down from the warehouse ceiling, knocking me to my knees. I ran a gloved hand over my hair to make sure it wasn’t burning. It wasn’t, but I kept the cool leather of the palm side of the glove on my scorched neck for a second to ease the pain.

  I’d made a mistake. The burn on the floor was going exactly as planned, but I hadn’t expected it to spread this far back on the ceiling so quickly. The bloodred flames had crept silently and unnoticed all the way across the ceiling, and setting the fire free had almost trapped me. The flames edged downward like a giant, oppressing hand.

  I crawled on my hands and knees toward the top of the stairs and stood up only after I’d scrambled, headfirst, two-thirds of the way down. I stopped for a second to collect myself and to listen to the roaring above me. It sounded like a jet was landing on the second floor. I turned, ran down the stairs, and opened the deadbolt. The door opened quickly, and I was met by an onrush of garbage-fouled air. I left the door open and walked quickly down the alley and across the street, stopping beside the building that faced the burning warehouse. Two more windows had melted in the heat, and yellow flames boiled into the night sky. I turned away and stepped into the welcoming darkness of Los Angeles, leaving my monster raging inside the empty warehouse, still looking for the boy it once knew.

  I was halfway down the alley when the spotlight hit me in the back. Turning around, I saw a police car parked at the end of the alley behind me. I continued w
alking down the alley, stalking the elongated shadow in front of me. My heart raced, my mouth was dry, my neck hurt. Calm down, they don’t know it’s me, they can’t know it’s me. Take it easy, keep walking. They’ll question me, maybe take me in, but they can’t put me at the scene except for . . . I ran my still-gloved hand over the front pocket of my jeans and felt the outline of the key to the warehouse door. Fuck, Fuck, Fuck!

  “Stop walking and turn around with your hands in the air!” called an authoritative voice over the cruiser’s public-address system.