The Five Lives of John and Jillian

by Greg Krehbiel

  John laughed and emptied a handful of pistachio shells into a large dish that looked like an ash tray, then sat back and crossed his legs.

  “Yes, that is an odd part of the story. Jillian was a devout Catholic and hated anything to do with witchcraft. She wouldn’t even read Harry Potter.”

  “Do you see any significance in that?”

  “What, that the Jillian in my dreams is almost an anti-Jillian?”

  “You always resented her religion.”

  “No,” John said, and shook his head vigorously. “That’s not true at all. Remember that I used to be a serious Catholic as well, and that’s part of why I married her. But I lost my faith, and she got more and more serious about it.”

  “So does that seem like a logical explanation for the dreams? You miss your wife and want to be with her. But she’s dead, so you wish you could go back in time and start all over again. Only this time her Catholicism won’t get in the way.”

  John shook his head. He had considered the idea, but it didn’t fit.

  “Is that what Dr. Freud would say?” he said with more sarcasm than he intended. He hated this constant analysis and second-guessing. “That explanation doesn’t work for me, doc, because I’m no more thrilled with Wicca than I am with Catholicism. If I wanted to re-invent her without Catholicism, why not go the whole way and take religion out of the picture?”

  Dr. Robbins nodded his head and furrowed his brows thoughtfully.

  “Well. Dreams are odd things, and I’m no expert,” Dr. Robbins said. “So let’s move on. You started smoking again. You cut back on your drinking.” Then he stopped and looked up. “Or did you? Did you exchange the bottle for a pipe, or did you just add another vice?”

  John laughed. “I suppose I’ve been drinking a little bit less.”

  “How much do you drink, John?”

  “Six or seven drinks a night, probably.”

  “Which means what, exactly? You’ve been saying ‘six or seven drinks a night’ for years, and it’s difficult to believe you’ve been that steady. That much alcohol is bad for you in a lot of ways.”

  “I realize, doc. Believe me, I realize.”

  “But you do it anyway,” he said, and he waited to let that sink in. “Anything else? Any other medications or drugs?”

  “Just over the counter. Ibuprofen, aspirin, Claritin.”

  “Do you see where I’m going with this, John?”

  “You’re thinking that the drinking and the smoking and the depression and the fact that I can’t get over the death of my wife is making me hallucinate. First the dreams, and then a real-life, waking hallucination.”

  John had considered that possibility as well. Why do I pay this guy to tell me stuff I’ve already thought of?

  “It seems more likely than the idea that Jillian has come back from the dead, doesn’t it?”

  Talking about it all had distracted him, but John suddenly felt the emptiness return. He didn’t believe Jillian had come back from the dead, but he wasn’t sure what he did believe. He felt as if he had nothing inside him at all. Like he was no more than a shell, or an image of a man projected on a movie screen.

  He didn’t expect Dr. Robbins to believe that he had seen Jillian. He didn’t believe it himself. He knew before he made the appointment that there was only one explanation. The best he could hope for was that he’d seen somebody like Jillian and that his mind had filled in the details — perhaps as a result of the visions in his dreams.

  What he feared the most was that there had never been anyone there at all.

  Chapter 2: Dreams

  “The train station’s ahead on the right,” he said in his dream that night.

  They were becoming more and more vivid, unlike anything John had experienced before. For most of his life his dreams had been confused flashes of images and progressions of unrelated scenes that only made some semblance of a story when he tried to remember them in the morning. This dream was like watching a movie, except that he felt as if he knew the man who was driving the cobalt blue BMW.

  The John in the dream did know him. His name was Al. He was John’s first and best client — a developer who purchased abandoned properties in P.G. County, Maryland, and converted them into small office units, with John’s expert assistance as chief architect.

  In the dream it made perfect sense, but in real life John worked for a contractor that sold IT services to the government, and he didn’t know the first thing about architecture — except for the overview he’d taken in high school.

  “So are you sure about this weekend?” Al asked.

  “What about it?” John replied. He was experiencing the moment — speaking to his friend Al — who he didn’t actually know — about a weekend event he knew nothing about — but somehow he knew everything about it. And he knew the back story at the same time.

  Al was a good friend, but he was always trying to get John to go to church.

  “Sorry, Al, but I’m going to West Virginia this weekend. I hear there’s been another Big Foot sighting, and ...”

  “All right, all right,” Al said. “You can just say no, Mr. Skeptic.”

  “No,” John said with a grin, but then his gaze strayed to the train station parking lot and he shouted aloud.

  “Hey. What’s that guy doing .... He’s in my car!”

  The dream took on a kind of fast-forward quality at this point. John confronted the thief, who ran away, which led to a mad chase through the woods as a thunderstorm darkened the sky. John kept pursuing, but the thief was wily as a fox, evading him at every turn

  Suddenly the dream’s perspective shifted, and while he knew it was the same story, it was as if he was watching a different scene — in someone else’s house.

  He watched the last of the evening sun pour through an open kitchen window that was at once incredibly familiar and totally foreign. The light illuminated a thick steam rising from a large pot of soup. Standing at the stove, stirring the soup, was the love of his life, Jillian Collins.

  John knew that face like he knew his mother’s voice. But in the dream she was a stranger, and he knew that he was going to meet her for the first time. Somehow the dream John, chasing a thief through the woods, was going to end up here.

  Jillian savored the heavy smell of garlic and sage. She scraped a meager portion of raw goose into the pot, stirred it once or twice, muttered a few words, and then turned back to her kitchen table, which was strewn with large, colorful cards. She stirred the soup absent-mindedly and ran her fingers along a small collection of CDs, immediately above the portable stereo.

  Suddenly the dream changed and John was back in the chase, flying through the woods, completely heedless of the damage to his shoes and clothes. He ran with a reckless abandon that was both invigorating and completely unlike him. As he ran he felt, rather than saw, that Jillian was trying to pick the right CD while she drew the next card.

  It was the tarot card for the warrior.

  The John in the dream ran madly around the last corner. He knew it was a mistake even before the metal trash-can lid crashed into his face and chest. The force of the blow stopped him dead in his tracks, lifted him off his feet and sent him two feet backwards onto the wet earth. His own blood splattered his shirt and he laughed at himself, then dropped his head in the mud and lost consciousness as a ferocious thunderstorm raged all around him.

  * * *

  Winter nights we sang in tune,

  ... or was that ...

  She is like a cat in the dark and then she is the darkness

  ... He couldn’t be sure, but when he awoke Jillian was nursing him back to health with warm soup. In the world of the dream this was their first meeting, and while the John in the dream played his part in the story, the John who was dreaming was completely confused.

  It seemed to John that he was living two lives, or had two minds. He was simultaneously the John of the dream, who chased a thief through the woods and was now meeting this Wiccan Jillian for the fi
rst time, but he was also himself, and this was Jillian. His Jillian. And that was his last thought before the alarm woke him and he reluctantly got out of bed.

  * * *

  About 10 o’clock the next morning John got a call from Dr. Robbins’ office.

  “Did I miss a payment?” he asked as he answered the phone, expecting the office manager, but was surprised to hear that it was the doc himself.

  “No, John, it’s a little more serious than that,” Dr. Robbins said, and John could tell by the tone of his voice that he was upset. “Before I say anything, John, I promise you I’m going to fight this. My lawyers are already on it.”

  “Fight what?” John asked, getting concerned.

  “I had a visit yesterday from some government goons who demanded to see your medical records. They showed me some document you allegedly signed that gives them the right.”

  John swallowed hard. He’d signed so many things to take his current job, it was quite possible he’d given them the right to see his medical records. He certainly didn’t want his employer to know the things he’d been saying to Dr. Robbins.

  “I told them I don’t give a damn about any signatures,” the psychologist continued. “We have doctor patient privilege and there’s no way in Hell I’m giving them your records. That’s what I told them, but then they came back with a warrant. I had no choice, John. I had to give them your file. Some kind of homeland security bullshit. They do whatever they want and come up with the legal justification later.”

  “Did they say why?” John asked, choking out the words.

  “They said somebody overheard you at a coffee shop having a conversation with nobody, and that you were talking about passwords to government servers.”

  “That’s crazy,” John said. “I told you I’d seen Jillian, but I haven’t had any conversations with her. And I don’t even have any passwords to any servers.”

  “That’s what they told me,” Dr. Robbins continued. “But John, realize this. It’s one thing to have the records. Hell, with technology these days they probably have all my records anyway. They’re all digitized. But it’s another thing to be able to use them. My lawyer has already filed an injunction against them. So all’s not lost. But I did want to warn you.”

  “What does this all mean?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” the doc said in a weary voice. “It might mean that I’m retiring. I didn’t go into practice to put up with this strong-arm crap from goons in rubber-soled shoes. They asked me all kinds of questions about your mental health. None of which I answered, of course. It’s none of their damned business and I told them so. But they implied that you had state secrets and were a security threat, or ... whatever. It’s always the same thing, John. ‘National security’ trumps everything.”

  His work did give him access to some government data, but it was hardly sensitive national security stuff. None of this was making any sense.

  “What do I do now?” he asked.

  “Get a lawyer, I guess,” the doc said. “Look, John, I feel horrible about this. You came to me with the expectation of privacy, and I respect that. I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know how or why this happened, but I swear I’m going to fight it.”

  Dr. Robbins went on in the same vein for some time, and John didn’t catch most of it. He was beginning to have a numb feeling in his brain. When they finally got off the phone, John sat in silence for a few minutes.

  If it was only a matter of losing his job, that was no big concern. He had open offers from two other companies. But if they thought he was a national security threat ....

  That evening he called a friend who worked HR for a hi-tech firm that also contracted with the government.

  “Oh, they do this all the time, John,” he said. “If the public knew about half these things there’d be riots in the streets and cars on fire on the nightly news. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it. They probably found out you were seeing a shrink and wanted to check on you. They have the power, so they use it. Anyway, you’ve got nothing to hide, right? You’re just dealing with some grief issues. That’s completely understandable. It’s not like you’re seeing things or talking to yourself.”

  John thanked his friend for his insights, excused himself, poured a tall drink and spent the next hour in his recliner, staring at the wall.

  Chapter 3: The Old Man

  Lafayette Park offered the perfect place to enjoy a lunchtime apple and a pipe. Every morning John stopped at a fruit stand on the corner of Eye and 17th Streets to buy a meal-sized Fuji apple, and when he ran short on tobacco he had two options — Drapers to the east and J.R. Cigars to the north northwest. The small lunch and his walking routine kept him moderately fit, and he tried to tell himself that the benefit of the apple outweighed the poison he sucked out of his briar. Not that he believed it.

  Today he intended to watch the men play chess on the little stone tables, but it was just a cover. He kept half an eye on the games, but most of his attention was on the crowd, irrationally hoping for another glimpse of Jillian.

  Am I seeing her?

  He took his favorite perch on the enormous roots of an old willow oak near the north west corner of the park and began his lunchtime ritual, fishing out the pipe, the packing tool, the pouch of Oxford blend and the matches, and carefully loading three pinches — the first packed loosely, the second moderately, and the third a little tighter. His tried and true packing method gave him a good draw and kept re-lighting to a minimum.

  The old pipe felt good in his hands, and it reminded him of better, carefree days when he could sit in his parents’ living room and watch his grandfather load this very same pipe with his signature Edgeworth tobacco. He longed to go back to such simpler times, with no worries about secret medical histories landing him in the government’s tender care.

  Last night he had replayed his conversation with Dr. Robbins a dozen times. The real question wasn’t what he’d said to the doc, but how much had the doc written down. What would the records say?

  How is it possible that I could see Jillian?

  He looked down at his pipe and scraped a few stray flakes of tobacco out of the bowl.

  Pop Pop subscribed to the old idea of “seasoning” a pipe with a particular blend, and he felt he would “ruin his bowl” if he smoked another brand. If he were alive to see how John treated his pipe he might have taken offense.

  There was a lot of Pop Pop’s old lore that John didn’t buy into — about the proper treatment of iron skillets, wearing wool long Johns, or having a bowel movement at the same time every day. When it came to pipes, John didn’t believe it made much difference if he smoked different blends, so long as he kept the pipe clean. So his Oxford, Smokey’s Blend and (on rare occasions) Cherry Vanilla or even Captain Black took their turns in the old briar.

  The fact that he owned Pop Pop’s pipe at all was pretty remarkable. He’d bought it off of eBay, not knowing where it was from, but then a week later when he was smoking it outside a funeral home, his uncle noticed the pipe and asked to have a look. He said he had recently sold some of Pop Pop’s things at a yard sale, and ... sure enough, there were the initials carved on the stem in a thin, spidery script.

  “I didn’t know you smoked, John. I’d have given it to you, along with all his other junk,” which included a tobacco jar, a couple leather pouches, a rusty old pipe tool, and an ancient lighter that probably didn’t work anymore.

  John remembered buying a leather tobacco pouch for Pop Pop one Christmas when he was a boy, and wondered if he had kept it. The memory took him down an odd rabbit trail of thoughts, including a somewhat disturbing conversation with an aunt. She had a nutty conspiracy theory about his maternal grandmother’s involvement with the occult, and she vividly recounted a conversation about some wizard named Heinrich.

  John dismissed it as old aunt ravings, but when the conversation turned briefly to Jillian, Aunt Ruth remembered that she had a dream about Jillian playing cards with Heinrich.r />
  “Did you recognize this Heinrich?” he had asked, trying only to be polite.

  “Funny you should ask that,” she said in a voice that was so stereotypical “old lady conspiracy theory” that he almost laughed. “He did seem a little familiar.”

  John thought that anybody could seem familiar in a dream, but he said, “I think I remember a Heinrich or two in the family tree,” by which he meant to imply, “that’s probably where you got the idea.” But she didn’t take it that way.

  “Now why would he be playing cards with Jillian?” she asked, as if this was a real-world fact that needed an explanation instead of a detail in a crazy dream.

  A large black ant crawled off a root and onto John’s leg, pulling him from his reverie into the present. Recollections of odd conversations with aunts, he thought, shouldn’t stand in the way of the serious business of searching faces in the park for your dead wife.

  What about other worlds? Is this Jillian I’m seeing from some other reality?

  He’d been reading about string theory and multiverses and other strange ideas recently. He had hoped it might make the idea of seeing Jillian seem a touch less crazy.

  That morning he’d read about a mathematician who said he had not only proven that other universes exist, but that the whole phenomenon started in the last hundred years or so, and that all the other universes sprang out of this one. Some new thing had happened — maybe even on Earth — that caused all the other universes to form.

  Other scientists were quick to label the idea as bosh, but they hadn’t yet found any errors in his equations.

  John was good at math, but not that good. He shook his head and wondered how he could even begin to evaluate things at that level.

  He looked at his pipe and smiled, relishing the fact that there were still simple things in life that he could understand.

  John usually smoked a bowl all the way through, but he had a sudden urge to try a new blend. It was called Little John, and it had quite a bit more kick than he was used to. After a minute he could feel it going to his head and he thought it might be best to stay seated for a few more minutes, but then ....