He let himself into the darkened townhouse. The beaded lamp on the foyer credenza threw an asthmatic glow halfway up the stairs. Mother's elevator-chair was at the top of the balustrade. So she was in bed already. The day nurse would have put her down, tucked her in, and left her to the company of the bizarre coterie. He stood with one hand on the newel post, a foot on the lowest step; and he listened. From abovestairs he could hear the sound of malicious laughter and that same ugly sitar music Johann insisted on playing all night.
He started to turn away.
"Aren't you coming up, Alvin?" He looked up as the voice of the woman caught him in a noose of command.
She stood there half-shrouded in darkness, but not even the shadows pooled at the head of the stairs could hide the luminous expanse of thigh and leg her parted dressing gown revealed. She touched the corner of her mouth with a fingertip. Black lacquered fingernail against her lower lip.
He climbed the stairs slowly. Breathing steadily, she waited for him. And when he was one step below the landing she reached out and put her hand behind his neck, drawing his face toward her. She looked down into his eyes and smiled a feral smile of possession. "Your mother is waiting. Everyone's been waiting."
Then she led him up and into the master bedroom where the lights were low and the pale throng moved on a silent tide around the yellowed figure of his mother, propped up on her pillows in the great canopied bed.
It was not as bad a night as it might have been. The blind child was not there. Nor the woman without arms.
He was a Chinese puzzle box: a box within a box within a box . . .
A Russian capsule doll that, when the halves were broken open, revealed a smaller doll nestling inside; a smaller doll that, when opened, exposed an even smaller doll; down and down and down to the most minuscule doll secreted at the core of the largest, so tiny its features were indistinguishable.
Like Gurdjieff and Giordano Bruno and Tesla before him; like Cagliostro and David Hume; like Confucius and Prester John and Livy the historian; and like Brahmagupta, Muhammad, Cassiodorus, and even the poet Sylvia Plath, he had discovered — in a blinding epiphany on no special day, one day — that there was no such thing as luck. Nor such a thing as serendipity, no such thing as synchronism. No single life of random chance existed. No single life was led by any breathing mortal.
He learned: there was only slipping across from one life to the next. One life that gave onto the next, slightly different, and beyond that the doorway to the next life, and the next. . .
He learned that humans were immortal. Life was not of a finite length, not of a proscribed duration; life was serial. Each spark of life — not reincarnated as incorrectly perceived in dim analogue of the reality — traveled through consecutive existences, in contiguous universes, replenished and reformed as a new individual. But each altered from the life just behind; altered still more when it became the next one ahead.
He came to think of the totality of existence as baklava: the Armenian pastry made up of thousands of isinglass-thin layers, one atop the others, so tightly pressed one could not differentiate among them, could not know when one had bitten through to the next.
There was no luck, merely slipping through the membrane into the next universe layer, assuming a new variation of self. And sometimes it was a better variation, and that was a day in which everything went right. And sometimes it was a worse variation, and that was a day in which random troubles compounded till life was not worth living.
Reality was a shunting station, an invisible railroad terminal without end; and through that switching station every soul that had ever existed came and went . . . moving on to its next manifestation of self... all unaware as memory of the transfer was obliterated by passage . . . all unaware that todays self was a vaguely familiar but completely different entity than yesterday's self.
But like Da Vinci and Karl Marx and William James before him, something had gone wrong and he had not lost the memory of where and who he had been. Imperfectly, shadowy in retrospect, neither amnesia nor forgetfulness, came the realization that, like cats nudging each other over from food bowl to food bowl, he was being pushed from life to life by the him behind him. And in turn, he was pushing the him next in line. He could not, he understood, coexist in the same universe with another of himself.
It was a journey without end.
How many hundreds, thousands, millions of lives he had led since he had been born . . . he could not begin to surmise.
And how he longed to find the perfect life. To stop the flow. To halt and feel no pressure to move along. The cop that was the life-flow would not tap him on the sole of his shoe and order him to get up, move it along, buddy. To reach a life that was pleasing, rewarding, supportable. And to stop.
But every him behind him was also seeking the good life; and they kept the pressure constant.
Who would want to be stuck in a life such as the one he now shared with his mother and her society of twisted degenerates? Alvin Justman longed for check-out time.
"Where were you last night?" his mother asked. Her voice was thin and filled with catarrh. How much longer could she live in her condition? The day nurse and the scarred hunchback who told her fortune ministered to the old woman. They bustled around the bed, fluffing, inoculating, moistening, touching the sores. He stared at the tableau and said, "Mother, why don't you let me kill you so you can pass on to the next bright world?"
Her lips trembled before she spoke. "What are you talking about? I raised you. The least you can do is stay by me till the end."
"There is no end in sight, Mother."
"Thank God for the wonders of medical science." A tube clamped to her throat made bubbling sounds.
"Yes. Thank God," Alvin said.
"And so . . ." she said, ". . . where were you last night? The seance had to be put off. We needed that occasional spirituality in your nature that is, my son, a large part of your attractiveness."
"I was out walking, my mother. Communing with the cosmos and the cop on the beat."
She stared at him through milky irises. "Sometimes I wonder if you are, indeed, my child."
"Sometimes you're not alone in wondering," he replied. Then, cheerily, he asked again, "So there's no matricide in the cards, is that right?"
The day nurse turned to him. "She's asleep again."
"Thank God for the wonders of medical science," he murmured, and left the bedroom. Somewhere behind him a man named Allen was enjoying a better life than the one he had left, fearing with just cause the life that lay ahead. I've got to get the hell out of here, Alvin Justman thought.
But all he could do was apply pressure. And if it was a better life ahead, there would be a him who would resist that pressure, as Alan Justes had resisted until Allen grew strong enough to effect the transition.
And so, for the next nine years, Alvin lived in that dark townhouse with the everchanging clique of human refuse and with his dear mother, thankful for the wonders of medical science.
On a Sunday night, stoking the ancient furnace in the basement, still wincing from the pain of the straight-razor wounds into which they had poured the hot wax, he felt himself trembling with self-loathing and hysteria, and the onset of slippage. He began to cry with relief. Thank God, he thought.
And in a moment he was pressing against the membrane, feeling compassion for whichever him was at that moment emerging into the world of mother and her minions.
And in another moment he was through into his next life, where he was Elvin Luckman, a young man whose mother had just died and who, desolate with the loss, had signed up for the Merchant Marine. Two years later, understanding at last that the extended series of heartbreakingly empty liaisons he had had with women who despised and ridiculed him was an attempt to pay penance for his mother's death, he also came to understand that this life was destined to be a tragic one. His mother's death, an inevitability for which he bore no accountability after they had opened her and discovered the carcinoma h
ad metastasized like ergot in a field of rye, had become the central issue of his existence.
He became celibate, withdrawn, obscure to the point of laying out his clothes and standing his watch aboard ship in harmony with the lines of tellurian force he had found described in a worthless book of crackpot mysticism in a sidestreet bookshop in Hong Kong.
His sanity slipped from him, day by day; and without the companionship of friends he had no sticking-post to which his floating mind could adhere. Strange phantasms and arcane beliefs assaulted him. Standing watch, as the sea billowed around him, he held conversations with himself. And only occasionally was he rational enough to remember that there was a life beyond this one.
Finally, what saved him was the waking terror of the life in which he had been Alvin Justman. The pressure behind him.
The life with mother and her band of freaks.
The life he, Elvin, had totally forgotten.
But there had been another him who had emerged into that monstrous venue; and like Alvin before him, Allen wanted out! The pressure was significant.
And during shore leave in London, Elvin Luckman felt the breath-catching unpleasantness of having eaten too much ice cream too quickly. He lay down in the bottom of the punt on the Serpentine, and in a moment was gone from that place.
Overtime for use of the punt went unpaid and the quayside entrepreneur who rented the little boats not only had to absorb the loss, but was required to pay three pounds six to the son of the man who located the punt.
It is an ill wind . . .
Into a life as William Rucklin. A life working in a vacuum-bead circuit-coding factory in Liverpool. Life without color. Life without change. Life that was no life. Three years.
Into a life as Wilhelm Richter. Life of detestation for everyone around him. He knew how intelligent he was. He knew it was bad breaks, the efforts of those around him who were crazed with jealousy at his gifts, that and that alone keeping him from ascendancy. He despised having to smile at them, loathed having to kowtow to them, hated them for their enjoyment of his subservient position. He knew Iris was having an affair with one of her old paramours, knew that, too; but not which one. Nine months, fifteen days.
Into a life as Waldemar van Rensburg, who lived within sight of The Hague and had a perfectly pleasant, if uneventful, life. Wife, Trina; three children, Hans, Karel, Wilhelmina (after the Queen, rest her soul); small tobacco shop; three weeks in Belgium every year. Only a year — Wilhelm was mad with his life and pushed hard from behind — and he was nudged into the next layer of baklava.
The slippage did not go smoothly.
It was as if he were being born again. Pushing, pressing, thrusting against the membrane. It would not give. As if this entranceway was of a stronger, less resilient substance.
As if someone on the other side were pushing back in the opposite direction, as if the life-flow were trying to run upstream, as if he were going against the grain. He had time to register the anomaly while in the transitional state.
But the pressure from behind him, the pressure of lives as Alan, Allen, Alvin, Elvin, William, Wilhelm — terrible lives — could not be contained. He went through.
In the first moments of his new life, as usual, he was able to remember the totality of his journey. Not each life individually, but a vast panorama of personae, with a few that stood out in sharper relief than the mass. The flamenco dancer he had been; the sandhog digging the Holland Tunnel; the feudal serf; the confidant of the Medicis; the gravedigger in Denmark; the catamaran-riding Melanesian.
In that moment he thought of himself, each time it happened he thought of himself, as Alice had perceived herself: running as fast as he could run, to stay in the same place, in the Red Queen's race.
Then the moment passed, and he opened his eyes, and his face stared closely back at him. He was sitting in an easy chair in a pleasant drawing room filled with books, a fireplace, and the scent of cavendish, and he was not looking in a mirror.
"Waldemar?" the face that was his said.
"Ja, Waldemar," he replied. "And you are — ?"
"Wallace Vanowen. And I'm not going."
The memory started to slip away.
"Wha . . . what do you —" And Wally Vanowen slapped him across the face as hard as he could. He didn't pull the blow, simply let fly. Waldemar's head snapped around and in that instant his mind cleared.
"Hold onto it, boy!" said Wally angrily, urgently. "Don't let it slip away or who the hell knows what I'll have to do with you . . . because I ain't going, cookie."
"You remember?"
"Yeah, I remember. I remember Alvin and his creepy old lady, I remember that paranoid Wilhelm, remember all the way back to footsoldiering with Black Jack Pershing. You remember that one, the gangrene and the dysentery?"
"My God, I do, yes All the way back then."
"That's nothing to what I remember, son. And it's what makes for a good life. Which is what this is, in case you hadn't figured it out yet. This is the one. The top of the line. The prize in the Cracker Jack box. This is the best possible life that can be led by this series of guys who've been me. And here I stay. I don't budge."
"But you have to."
Wally chuckled, lit his pipe.
Then he went and sat down in an easy chair across from Waldemar's. They stared at each other for a long time.
"They're pushing me from behind," Waldemar said. "I'd be happy to let you have this life . . . but I have no control over the process. I'm nudged, you're nudged."
Wally shook his head. "I don't go."
"They'll make you go! The pressure."
Wally exhaled a cloud of smoke. The drawing room smelled woodsy and comfortably close. In fact, now that Waldemar thought about it, the room — and himself in it — felt more comfortable than anything he could remember. He felt as if he belonged here. He knew, in that moment, that his predecessor in this life, the Wally Vanowen sitting across from him, had told him the absolute truth: this was the best of all possible worlds.
This was the terminus he had sought for uncountable lifetimes.
Here the Flying Dutchman came to rest.
Here the Red Queen's race marked its finish line.
And somehow . . . somehow . . . he would stay here!
His mind scrabbled through possibilities, clawing at one plan, then another, casting them aside like a dog digging through a wastebasket for that bit of refuse producing the wondrous aroma. Somewhere in his past, somewhere in all those lives he had led, was the method, the bit of data, the spark of cunning that would permit him to shove Wally through before him, back into the life-flow, back into the race . . .
Then he would worry about keeping all the others behind him locked out. Jubilation sang along the wires of his soul.
"What makes this such a perfect life?" He had to stall till he could reason this out.
Wally smiled. "The knowledge, cookie."
"What knowledge?"
"The knowledge that I'm not a slave. The smarts to know that I can live the life I choose if I don't let the life I'm in live me. I'm happy in my skin."
Waldemar could not comprehend what Wally was saying. It sounded like errant nonsense, obscurant philosophy of the most sophomoric sort, the kind of twaddle he'd heard from trendy half-wits floating on drugs and cheapjack religiosity. He had led too many lives to go for such simplistic generalities.
But he felt comfortable here. Felt as if he belonged, for the first time in numberless years of lives.
But he listened as Wally told him of this life. And there was nothing at all remarkable about it.
"I get up each morning and make a cup of coffee with cardamon and chocolate in it. I sit and look out at the ridge of hills behind this house; and I watch the seasons change. I dress every day in clothes that I like, that are comfortable, with a pair of old boots that know my feet. I do my work: I translate poetry by Latin American writers for the university press. I spend many hours a day in their words, surrounded by their bea
uty. My friends call and suggest we go for barbecue dinners, and we laugh and make up bad puns. My wife is the part of me I need but don't have the history or space within myself to contain. I have two children, who search through my coat pockets for little gifts when I come home from a trip. I read a book that made me cry this week."
Waldemar felt a subtle shift in his body; as if the blood had sped up in veins and arteries; as if he had gotten late growth in his bones; as if his heart had been touched. Then it passed, and he felt contempt for Wally. To reside in paradise and dine so frugally! The water was deeper, but this fool had no sense of the vastness. He resolved to snatch this Eden from its totally unworthy tenant. And for the first time he contemplated suicide.
Well, wasn't it suicide if he killed Wally? How could it be murder if he killed himself? Two of them could not exist in the same life . . . he knew that. So Wally had to go.
Seeming still to be listening to the dreary panegyric, he looked around the drawing room. He would have to move fast, without hesitation, brutally. He would have only one chance . . . he knew that. They were in the middle of the drawing room. The walls of bookcases were filled with volumes and the three doors were closed. A sofa, a small sideboard, the two easy chairs, a floor lamp, the fireplace.
There was a stand of fireplace implements: tongs, ash shovel, heavy poker. Yes.
He pushed himself out of the easy chair. He was still a bit unsteady. Wally stopped speaking, watching him. "I have to get my sea legs," he said, acting wobblier than he felt. Strength was coming into his body now. He put out a hand toward the fireplace mantel, as if reaching for support. Wally started to say something. He stumbled, took two faltering steps toward the fireplace, and in a rush grabbed the handle of the poker. He spun with the weapon raised over his head, one sharp blow, one powerful smash, an instant, just an instant, and he would be alone here . . .
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