by Max Ehrlich
He stepped out of the ear and raised his umbrella. The wind howled about him, slanting the hard rain under the umbrella and onto his body. In a few moments he was soaked. The umbrella, bellied by the wind, fought against him, twisting in his hand. It threatened to collapse at any moment. He decided it was useless and threw it away. It bounced and spun on the ground, gyrating crazily under the gusts.
He picked out one of the trees at random. Rain whipped his face and drenched him as he ran to it. He walked around the tree, staring at the bark.
He ran to the second tree. Nothing. And the third. Nothing.
This is crazy, he thought. He was insane to be out here, running around in this park like some grotesque and drenched zombie. If he had any sense, he would go back to the hotel.
The fourth tree. The fifth. The sixth. Nothing.
Then he realized he had made a mistake. Stupid, stupid. Idiot, idiot. He had been looking at the tree bark from the eye-level of an adult. He was six feet tall. But it had been a boy who had carved the initials. That meant the initials would be carved perhaps a foot lower down on the bark, it they were visible at all.
The rain was relentless. He had to get close to each tree so that he could see the bark at all. Then he saw them—the initials.
They were very faint, so faint that he had almost missed them. They were bare impressions in the bark. And, as he had calculated, about a foot lower than his actual line of vision. But he knew instantly that these were the ones he had carved almost half a century ago. He stood there in the rain, staring at them stupidly. It was an old tree. It must have been an old tree when he had carved the initials. And he must have cut them pretty deep. Otherwise, the new bark would have grown completely over them.
He reached out his hand and traced the outline of the initials with his forefinger. There were two sets.
J. C.—E. K.
As a boy, he would have carved his initials first. The name of the boy always came first. Steve loves Sally. Tom loves Elaine. Tony loves Rosa.
His initials then, had been J. C.
X equals J. C.
Chapter 18
When he got to the hotel, he peeled off his wet clothes, then soaked in a hot bath for an hour. After that, he asked room service to bring him two double Scotches.
He called the reception desk and was delighted to find that he could get a direct flight to California leaving from Bradley Field, between Hartford and Springfield. The drive there wouldn’t take too long, and he could turn in the rented Pontiac at the airport.
The whiskey began to warm his stomach. He felt a pleasant glow. He had been uptight too long, and this was the first time he’d really felt relaxed. He drank the second double, thinking, this is where I began—Riverside, Massachusetts. No, that’s wrong. I started from a lot of places, way, way back to the beginning of time, probably. Or when Man, with a capital M, first began. Maybe in my first reincarnation I was some kind of Neanderthal—dodging mastodons, throwing spears at wild pigs. Dragging my woman by her hair to my dark and stinking cave, beating her with a club if she didn’t behave. Making noises instead of words.
Many lives. I have lived many lives. So has everybody else.
Say that again, and see how foolish it sounds. Nobody, but nobody, will ever believe me.
He felt very good now. J. C., he thought. I wonder what that stands for? The initials seemed familiar. J. C. Penney, the chain of department stores. J. C.… J. C.… Could be anything—John Carroll, Jacob Cohen, Jackson Coolidge, even Jesus Christ. He laughed.
Suddenly he remembered. He had never called Bentley. Old Hall ought to know what had happened here. He dialed the parapsychologist’s private number.
“Hall. Pete Proud.”
“Yes?”
“I found it. The town.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m positive. A place called Riverside, Massachusetts. X lived here. George Washington slept here….”
There was a silence. Then:
“Pete. You sound as though you’ve been …”
“Drinking? I have. I’ll admit I’ve had a few. But I know what I’m saying, Hall. I’m sober enough for that. I used to live here. Right here….”
Again, silence. Then he heard Bentley breathe into the phone:
“If this is really true …”
“I told you it’s true. I’m flying home in the morning. Tell you all about it when I see you.”
“What flight are you taking?”
“The morning flight from Bradley Field.”
“What time does it get in?”
“Twelve o’clock noon.”
“I’ll meet you at the airport,” said Bentley. His voice shook a little as he said goodbye.
The voice coming over the PA system was nasal.
“This is your captain speaking. We are approaching an area of moderate turbulence. Please fasten your seat belts.”
Peter buckled his seat belt and stared out of the window. They were somewhere over the Rockies. The plane trip seemed interminable. He remembered somewhere that it was an hour longer flying west to Los Angeles than east to New York. Something about the winds.
He’d have to figure out some way to get back to Riverside soon. This was the first week in April, and the spring quarter at UCLA didn’t end until the tenth of June. He knew he couldn’t wait that long. He had to start digging again, like an archeologist looking for artifacts that might clue him in to some lost civilization.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. He thought of what had happened to him in the last few days. Who would ever believe him? Hall Bentley. The people who took reincarnation on faith. But nobody else. He had a message to the world—nobody dies forever. But nobody would believe it.
The stewardess came down the aisle to see that they were buckled in. She had that clinically clean, sterile look that all airline stewardesses seem to have. He had the feeling that she had been delivered to the airplane in one of those refrigerated trucks and then unloaded, wrapped entirely in moisture-free cellophane to preserve her freshness. Her uniform clung to her as tightly as a bandage, as though her body had been melted down in some furnace, poured into this mold of cloth, annealed, and then allowed to cool.
He wondered about her reincarnation. Had this magnificent body once belonged to an ugly old hag? A witch? In her previous life, had she been someone repulsive? A cripple perhaps? Whatever she had been, she had been blessed by a benevolent karma. But her young body would someday age, wither, and die. He hoped she would do as well in her next life.
He had caught a whiff of her perfume as she walked by. It reminded him of Nora. He missed her. He’d call her when he got in; that would be one of the first things he’d do. He wondered what she would say when he told her. But he didn’t really wonder. He had a pretty good idea….
The big jet began to rear and pitch. It seemed to rise several feet and then plummet with a sickening drop. Some angry monster had seized both wings and was shaking the plane as a child would shake a toy. He could feel the seat belt bite into his stomach. The captain had said the turbulence would be moderate. It was a lying, mealy-mouthed word.
Somewhere in the galley, objects clattered to the floor. Dishes perhaps, glasses, bottles. It seemed to him that every seam in the curved wall of the cabin was straining and ready to rip apart, every rivet in the aluminum skin outside crying to be free. It was easy to imagine the entire tail assembly breaking up. That somewhere, some fatal area of tired metal would give way, and they would plummet straight down.
He had never really been a hundred percent comfortable in an airplane. His imagination, he supposed, was too vivid. He thought of all those nuts and bolts and screws and wires and generators, all those gallons of highly combustible fuel yearning for just one stray little spark. Not to mention lightning bolts, and bombs in the luggage compartment, and of course hijackers.
But this time he felt totally relaxed, absolutely without fear. It was remarkable how calm he was.
He watched th
e other passengers. All conversation had stopped. Some gripped the arms of their seats and stared out through the window apprehensively. Others sat stiffly, their eyes closed, moaning softly as the great plane dipped and rose.
Just ahead of him, a woman seized a paper bag from the seat pocket in front of her and retched into it. Across the aisle, another woman sat next to her husband, her face the color of chalk. He could see her lips moving. Her eyes were closed and she squeezed her husband’s hand, sitting rigid in terror, as though waiting for some painful injection from a long, sharp needle.
He wanted to lean over and tell her that she had nothing to fear. The plane, of course, would get through. It almost always did. But in case anything happened, her death wouldn’t be the end. Just the prelude to another life. She would be given another ticket. He imagined her reaction if he told her that. She would think he was crazy.
Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone. They were flying levelly again over the desert. After a while, they were over the city, and the jet began to circle lazily before its final approach.
Now, through the layer of smog, Peter could see the gas stations and the blinking neon lights, the tiny blue and green swimming pools, rectangular and round and kidney-shaped, the arid hills and canyons climbing in craggy patterns like the ribs of a starved lion, and the hundreds upon hundreds of houses, pastel pink and yellow and blue and beige, sprawled through the valley, crowding each other like vivid toadstools.
He could see the freeways with the sun glinting off the tops of the moving cars. He could not see the drivers, but he thought of them now as old souls in new bodies. Now they drove Chevrolets or Pontiacs or Fords or Cadillacs, whooshing along at sixty or seventy miles an hour, on an engineered highway in this so-called Age of Aquarius, in the last part of the twentieth century. But at some time past, in their previous lives, they might have been Roman centurions, driving chariots; or early Christians riding asses; or disciples of Mohammed, riding camels on their pilgrimages to Mecca, across vast deserts. Knowing what he did, it was easy for his imagination to carry him away.
But somewhere on those freeways, sometime today, a couple of those cars would crash and end up as flaming hulks. The bodies of their drivers would lie mangled or burned. But not the old souls. They would simply leave, to find new homes. They would join all the thousands and millions of other old souls, all restlessly flying, around to the mountains and far beyond, to infinity itself, all seeking new habitats in which to rest and produce a new life.
Old souls never die. Nor do they fade away. They merely go on, forever and ever….
The plane landed with a bump, bounced once, hit down hard again, and started to roll. The engines reversed with a banshee roar, and the canned music came on.
A few minutes later he came off the ramp to find Hall Bentley waiting for him. The parapsychologist would not even let Peter take the time to pick up his luggage. “You can get it later,” he said. There was a strange light in the gray eyes. He led Peter to the airport cocktail lounge.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s have it.”
Chapter 19
When Peter had finished, Bentley was silent for a while. Then: “Pete, I don’t know what to say to this. I guess I’m still trying to believe it.”
“So am I.”
“As of now, you’re unique. You’re the living proof of reincarnation. You know it and I know it. But nobody else does—yet. I know this sounds facetious. But the important thing is for you to stay alive until you can really prove it. You ought to be kept in an isolation ward to protect you from sickness. You should be forbidden to drive. Right now, your life is precious. Right now, you’re a bomb with a million times the explosive power of any nuclear bomb we’ve ever invented.” His voice shook. “God, it boggles the imagination. One man, and you’ve got the power to shake the world, reshape the thinking of the whole human race. But surely you’ve thought of all this.”
“Not on those terms.”
“Well, think about it.”
“It scares hell out of me. My God, what’ll I do?”
“What you set out to do. Go back to Riverside. Find out who you were. Get the rest of the proof. When we think we have enough, in terms of real documentation, then we’ll release it. And let everybody take it from there.”
“I’m trying to think of what’ll happen. When people find out …”
“It’s hard to say. We can only try to project. First, I can imagine a kind of worldwide shock, traumatic. For a while, suspended belief, then exhilaration. After that, a mass release from fear. There won’t be that emptiness anymore, the hopelessness we all feel, knowing that no matter what we do in this life, it all ends up in dust and eternity. Death, or the fear of it, haunts us all from the day we are born. But when people realize they’re going to get another chance—Christ, who knows what will happen to them then?”
Bentley went on, speculating. Everyone would find new meaning in life, not just in his own, but in the lives of those close to him, those he loved. People who suffered in life would not be afraid to die. They might even welcome it, knowing they might have it easier in the next life. There could even be a wave of suicides among these people, hopeless cripples, or people with terminal diseases, for precisely that reason. If a loved one died, it would ease the pain of bereavement. It might even be that man’s greedy drive for power and wealth would lose its attraction when he accepted the premise that the worldly goods he acquired in one lifetime wouldn’t do him any good in the next. If he accepted the karmic interpretation of reincarnation, the only carry-overs would be either the good that he had done or the evil he had created. He would be rewarded or punished in the next life according to how he had lived this one. The dog-eat-dog philosophy might very well disappear from the face of the world. People would try to pile up credits for the next life. They would turn away from hate and show compassion for each other, maybe even love. Bentley continued, “But all that’s in the future. Let’s talk about now.”
“Who’s going to believe it?”
“A good question. We’re going to need proof, of course. As of now, we have those tapes in the safe deposit boxes, proving the detail of your hallucinations before you ever knew about Riverside. We have reliable witnesses to the same thing: Staub, Sam Goodman, and even your girlfriend … what’s her name?”
“Haines. Nora Haines.”
“Yes. No problem at this end. The important thing is to prove your former identity at the other end. Hopefully, to meet people who knew you in your previous incarnation.”
“Like Marcia.”
“Like Marcia. If you can find her. If she’s still alive. And others. Prove that you knew things about them that nobody else would possibly know, except in some previous life. It might be wise to tape an account of what’s happened so far and put it in a safety deposit box, too, in still another bank.”
“Even with all that, will people really believe it?”
“No. Not everybody. No matter what proof you show them, and I mean documented proof, hard-nosed proof, there are always going to be skeptics who are going to call this a fraud, a hoax, a gigantic put-on. The world is full of people with a kind of deep-seated masochistic pessimism. They have an unconscious hatred and fear of life and a deep wish for its permanent cessation. And then, of course, there’ll be the others …”
“What others?”
“Those with preconceived notions and fat positions to protect. The Church. You’re going to establish a whole new religion, Pete, and the Church is not about to see that happen without a battle. And reincarnation will create a new religion; there’s no doubt about that. Then, there’ll be certain scientists who think that if you can’t draw it on paper, or see it in a test tube, or prove it by an equation, it can’t be so. And, of course, some psychiatrists and psychologists who’ve laughed at the new Psi sciences. Frankly, I’m looking forward to shaking some of them up. Sure, there’ll be some disbelievers. But they’re going to be swamped by millions of true believers. Bi
llions.
“But never mind all of this for now. I could spend days like this making all these dreamy projections. When do you plan to go back to Riverside?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
“Why so vague?”
“I’ve got to make some arrangements. Talk to the head of my department at the University. I’ve still got to teach the spring quarter.”
“My God,” said Bentley impatiently. “All this, and you’re worrying about a few classes?”
“It’s still a commitment.”
“If I were you, I’d get back to Riverside tomorrow. That’s where the commitment is. But all right. If they’ve been trying to prove reincarnation for thousands of years, I don’t suppose a few weeks more will make much difference.” He paused. “Any idea how you’re going to proceed when you go back?”
He discussed the House Dream and the Tennis Dream with Bentley and the possibilities behind them. Bentley nodded.
“It might work out.”
“On the other hand, I might draw a blank.”
“No,” said Bentley. “I think you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because I think it was meant to be. Ordained.”
Peter stared at Bentley. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not quite sure. I’m not a religious man, Pete, but everything that’s happened to you seems—well, as you yourself said—planned. As though you’ve been tapped on the shoulder by some divine finger. Chosen to deliver this particular message. As a—well, as a prophet.”
Prophet. He thought of Verna Bird. A chill crept up his back.
“Hall, suppose, just for argument, that what you say is true. There are billions of people in the world. Why one Peter Proud? Why me?”
