The Reincarnationist

by M. J. Rose

  When Julius was a boy, his father used to draw complicated pictures for him and then ask him to find the hidden bird or donkey or urn. He’d stare hard at the drawings, studying the spaces between the spaces, and sure enough, in the places where you didn’t expect them, in the shapes of the emptiness, was the hidden object.

  Hiding in plain sight, his father had called it.

  That’s what the rock throwers had done.

  And that’s how he and Lucas were going to save Sabina. They were going to use the shapes of the emptiness.

  Chapter 31

  Rome, Italy—Wednesday, 11:55 p.m.

  Leo Vendi, the driver of the black SUV, left the plastic bag from Signora Volpe under the front passenger seat, got out of the car, locked it, hid the keys on top of the right tire, walked two blocks west where his motorcycle was parked, climbed on, turned his key in the ignition and sped away. He didn’t think about waiting to see who was going to show up and claim the bag of papers the old lady had thrown down from Gabriella’s apartment. It was late and he was tired and hungry. Leo was a pro, and if someone wanted papers left in a bag, in a parked car, in a residential neighborhood, he would deliver exactly that.

  A quarter of an hour later, while Leo was eating a plate of pasta and drinking a good but cheap red wine, a man named Marco Bianci approached the black sedan, casually picked up the keys, let himself in and drove away. After he’d driven a dozen blocks he finally allowed himself to look in the passenger seat at the bag—it looked full. That was good. He hated to disappoint clients, and he’d already had one serious mishap on this job.

  All that was left now was to meet the priest in front of St. Peter’s after the first mass of the morning. Marco would stay in the car until then; he didn’t mind. He didn’t want to risk having anything happen to his bounty. The priest was going to pay him well for his trouble.

  “You deserve to be generously compensated. These are crimes against our Lord, our Christ,” the priest had said. “It seems like a small thing—a broken window, a pile of papers—but it’s not. It is blasphemy against the will of God. Our very entrance to heaven is at risk.”

  Marco had bowed his head and Father Dougherty had blessed him. Then he had taken the American priest’s money and arranged how the deal would go down.

  Chapter 32

  It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some strange new disguise.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Rome, Italy—Thursday, 7:20 a.m.

  Josh woke up to the ringing of the telephone but didn’t answer it. The ancient vista of Rome and the conversation with Lucas were more real to him than the bed he was sleeping in. So was his headache. No, it was Julius who’d had a headache, in the dream. Josh couldn’t also have one in reality.

  Turning over, he tried to get back to where he’d been. There were urgent decisions Julius and Lucas still needed to make, dangers that had to be thwarted. Josh tried to conjure the landscape that had been so clear in his mind only minutes before. The orange-pink sky. The statue of Augustus. The tall cypress trees. And the problem that needed to be solved: how to save Sabina.

  Was there any way to get back, or had he lost his mental grasp of the membrane that held him tethered to the dreamscape? He rubbed his eyes—the movement hurt his hands. He opened them and looked down. The scratches he’d gotten in the tunnel had scabbed over the day before. Now many of them, too many of them, were freshly opened.

  Fresh blood oozed from the angry lines.

  In a rush he remembered the recent past, the scene hours before, being hunted and then his hunter being hunted.

  Brushing his hair off his forehead, he was careful not to touch the two-inch gash there. But there was no gash. That was part of the memory lurch. Josh was going mad. How could there have ever been any doubt? This was not some crisscrossing of who he was now and who he had been in a past life. This was his imagination spinning out of control, caused by the trauma incurred during the terrorist attack being exacerbated now by new violence. Of course it was, and the sooner he could get out of Rome and away from the endless flashbacks, the better.

  No. Stay. Solve this. Save her.

  He felt as if he was being wrenched through a hole in a wall that was far too small for him. Why was he chained to another time and place and to people who were long since dead? Josh didn’t have an adequate way to describe the agony of being forced back to the present when every ounce of your soul says you need to stay in the past. When you are so certain that the people you love won’t survive without you. If Julius didn’t come for her, Sabina would think she had been abandoned. She would think she was unloved.

  There is no “she.” You’re a lonely man whose imagination is spinning out of control.

  Josh’s body ached as if it had been battered. Josh’s body. Julius’s thoughts. His skin was so dry it felt like sandpaper. His eyes were burning, his hair was dirty, the muscles in his legs felt as if he’d run a marathon. The smell of fire was inside his nostrils.

  Insanity was frightening. Josh didn’t want to analyze and dissect what was happening to him anymore. He just wanted it to cease. He wanted to return to a time before the accident, with recollections that started when he was four years old and got his first camera and he and his father went out into Central Park in the snow so that he could take his first roll of pictures.

  The only way to break this spell was to get out of bed and into a shower. But not even the cold water pelting his body did anything to shake the sense that he was only half awake, that part of him had been left behind in that netherworld with Sabina.

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. This was nuts. There was no woman named Sabina. There was no past. There was only his brain, corrupted by some invisible trauma that had not yet presented itself clearly enough to be diagnosed.

  Certainly, Josh had read hundreds of Malachai’s and Beryl’s reports of children who remembered their past lives with such accuracy that the foundation had been able to find historical proof of some of what they’d lived through. However, all the cynics said that if there was evidence, it was logical to think it had been planted rather than remembered.

  Sometimes, yes. But over and over? With thousands of children? To what end?

  Those kids had been tortured by their past lives. You could see that in their eyes, hear it in their breaking voices. There was no monetary gain for them or their parents. None of them or their families had ever gone public. Other than the Phoenix Foundation helping the child put the disturbing scenes to rest, not one of the three thousand children Beryl and Malachai had helped had ever tried to cash in on their experiences.

  So why couldn’t Josh accept that what happened to them was what was happening to him? Why wasn’t it possible that something had gone terribly wrong long ago in Rome, and now, all these centuries later, he was remembering what he was not meant to remember through some accident of metaphysics?

  What if this woman whose mummified body had been discovered by the professor and Gabriella was named Sabina? What if there had been a Roman priest named Julius whose fault it was that Sabina had suffocated to death in that small, narrow space? Wasn’t that the kind of horrific event that might have karmic repercussions that would reach through time to demand retribution?

  But even if he believed it all, what the hell was he supposed to do?

  He turned up the water. Made it hotter.

  How do you avenge a death that took place in the year 391 A.D.?

  You find the body her soul now inhabits and make it up to her.

  Wasn’t that the thought that had been plaguing him since he woke up from the accident in the hospital?

  Somewhere a woman was waiting for him and he wouldn’t be himself again until he found her.

  He’d been so confused and obsessed with the idea of this woman
it had shredded his already-damaged marriage.

  Somewhere a woman who once shared Sabina’s spirit was waiting for him to help her and get it right this time.

  Lust does not explain itself. There’s no logic to the powerful hunger that can interrupt any single moment and render you almost helpless. Standing in the shower, water dripping off him, trying to make some sense of his messed-up life, the last thing he expected to feel was overwhelming naked need for the woman’s skin—for Sabina’s skin.

  Leaning against the cold tiles, he shut his eyes. He tried, but failed to stop himself. His body didn’t care what his mind dictated. He wanted to find her. Wanted to smell her and taste her and bury himself high up inside of her. He wanted to know her again and disappear with her into that place where passion dissipated every bit of fear and existential panic. It didn’t matter if their joining ultimately doomed them. Being together was worth dying for. All that mattered was that they were connected, that their bodies crashed together again and obliterated all the pain of living in an unfair world. That for a few minutes they could find some ecstasy to succor them through the bleakness and the blackness.

  In the shower stall, back up against the wall, the imaginary lovemaking inflamed him. He was burning up, igniting, flaring and soaring: he was with her for what always felt like the first time.

  He allowed himself to say the word—her name—moaned it out loud as his blood surged through his veins and her curls fell on his face and his chest, and the jasmine in her hair scented the steamy air, and he clutched her thighs as they wrapped around him and pressed himself deeper and deeper and deeper into her, and for a time he believed it was her muscles that moved him forward, forward, forward.

  Out loud, in the cry of release, came her name again.

  Sabina.

  The sound of the final note of a sad song played on the strings of a harp. A long, solemn note, lasting, lasting, lasting and then gone.

  Chapter 33

  The phone was ringing when he came out of the bathroom, and this time Josh answered it. Malachai apologized if he had woken him up, and asked Josh to meet him for breakfast in a half hour in the hotel’s restaurant.

  “We have plans to make,” he said.

  The same phrase that the Pontifex had used in the dream.

  Plans to make.

  “Josh? Are you there?”

  * * *

  There was a basket of bakery-fresh rolls on the table along with tiny dishes of jewel-colored jams and jellies and a plate of butter balls, but Josh ignored the food as he told Malachai what had happened the night before: how he’d been chased, how the thief had been shot, how the shooter had fled and about the elusive dreams of ancient Rome that had amalgamated with his waking nightmare.

  Malachai, his face set in angry lines, asked Josh if he was all right. Yes. If he was sure he didn’t need to see a doctor. Yes, he was sure. If he’d called the police and reported the crime. Yes, last night when he got back to the hotel. If he’d slept at all. No, not much. And then a dozen more exacting questions about what had happened.

  Josh explained it all, including how the lurch had broken through and how Julius had tried to help Josh find a hiding place. When he’d finally finished answering all of Malachai’s questions, he had one of his own.

  “I want to know how you and Beryl authenticate the cases of reincarnation the foundation investigates.”

  “Why do you want to know that now?”

  “I can’t just keep wondering if Julius and Sabina existed. I need to find out for sure.”

  Malachai put down the roll he was buttering and leaned back a little in his chair. “We use all the historical data available to us. And when there isn’t any we do everything we can to make sure that the child we’re dealing with hasn’t been coached and that his or her parents aren’t trying to exploit the child. It’s one of the benefits of our training as psychologists.”

  “But how exactly do you know these kids haven’t been preprogrammed or spoon-fed their stories? Or that they’re not making them up, influenced by what they’ve seen on television? Children understand what they hear way before they can speak or articulate for themselves. Maybe their parents believe in past-life experiences and talk about them in front of the kids—even when they’re babies or toddlers.”

  “Maybe. We’re not dealing with material objects that we can examine in concrete terms. Sometimes, we just have to trust our training, our experience.” He picked up his coffee cup, sipped at it and put it down. “You’re not done yet, are you? You always have more questions than I have answers.”

  “There’s one case Beryl wrote about where a mother was convinced her daughter was a reincarnation of an earlier child who had died at a young age.”

  “I remember that.”

  “Maybe the mother was so bereft she invented the idea that the new baby had the soul of the dead daughter, and…”

  Malachai pressed his lips together, just enough for Josh to notice.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing, go on,” the psychologist encouraged.

  Josh wondered if something about the case had been a problem for Malachai, but he took the man at his word and proceeded.

  “Maybe the mother told her little girl stories about the other daughter and the child intuited that she would make her mother happier if she took on those attributes and reenacted those stories. There are always other ways that these kids could have learned…that I could have learned the stories I’m seeing?”

  “Of course there are other ways.”

  “Can all of this be wishful thinking?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s your entire answer?”

  “For now. We can go back to that if we need to. What’s your next question?”

  “The majority of the foundation’s cases come from countries and cultures where reincarnation is part of the belief system. Why is that?”

  “It’s far easier for people to come forward when they know they won’t be ostracized. In India, a child talking about her past life will be taken seriously. In America that same child will be told she’s ‘making that up.’ Most people in our country can’t and don’t recognize past-life memories as such when they hear them, because they aren’t yet aware of the possibility that’s what they are.” Malachai leaned forward.

  “If we are going to discuss possibilities, we need to also address the one that reincarnation does exist. Let me ask you something. In the Old Testament, Moses heard voices telling him what to do. If that wasn’t a metaphor—and many people believe it wasn’t—then was Moses insane or did he have psychic ability? I’ll give you another one. Christianity is built around Jesus being resurrected. Millions of people believe this as—pardon the pun—gospel. But what does that say about the apostles who witnessed it? Did someone who had died reappear in front of their eyes? Or was it a mystical experience? Was it wish fulfillment? Or did it really happen? I could go on and on, Josh. Almost every religion is based on experiences that scientists can’t explain. Is everyone who believes wrong?”

  “No, but believing may be a panacea.”

  “Of course it could be, it can be. You’re not the first one to use Occam’s razor reasoning on me. Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler. Yes, certainly, that’s one way to deal with this.”

  “I just want objective proof.”

  “I know. You want a photograph of auras. You want to see angels dancing on the head of a pin.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  Malachai sat back in his chair. “I’m sorry if that’s how you perceived it. It’s just as frustrating to me as it is to you. I thought that by now you’d experienced enough that you wouldn’t be susceptible to this kind of parsing.”

  Before Josh could respond, Inspector Tatti arrived at their table. He wasn’t expected; he hadn’t called. He just showed up, pulled out a chair, sat down, waved to a waiter and ordered an espresso.

  “To what do we owe this pleasure?” Malachai as
ked with a tone Josh didn’t think he was capable of. “And how did you know where to find us?”

  “I called both of your rooms. The concierge said he had not seen either of you leave. He was kind enough to phone up here and confirm you were having breakfast. It is early still, so it was logical reasoning.” He looked pleased with himself as he took a sip of the coffee the waiter had just put down. “Professor Rudolfo died this morning.”

  Josh’s reaction was instantaneous. He thought of Gabriella finding out and fought the urge to get up, go downstairs, hail a cab and rush to her side. She shouldn’t be alone now. This was going to hit her hard. Of course, she’d blame him. Perhaps he deserved it. In effect it was his fault. He hadn’t been quick enough. He’d been in the damn tunnel when he should have been in the main room of the tomb.

  Malachai told the detective how sorry he was and there was no question his sympathy was heartfelt. He suddenly looked exhausted. This was a great blow to the foundation.

  Josh wondered which of them felt worse. Which of them was more desperate for proof that reincarnation existed? The stones had held out hope that the robbery, and now the professor’s death, had destroyed. The stones were once again legend, as much a fable as they had ever been.

  “You didn’t come all the way here just to tell us that, did you? What is it, Detective? What else do you want from us?” Josh asked. He was sick of talking to the police.

  When he’d gotten back to his hotel the night before, he’d called Tatti, who had sent two officers who spoke passable English to the hotel to take his statement about the shooting while at the same time carabinieri had gone out in search of the body.

  “Josh is too upset to follow the rules of polite conversation,” Malachai apologized for him. “Last night was quite an ordeal, as I’m sure you can imagine. What did you find out about the man who was chasing him?”