Afterlife Crisis

by Randal Graham

  “Are you feeling braced?” asked Norm.

  “I do feel braced!”

  “Well then, cheers to feeling braced!” he said, taking up the shaker and producing another round. This one we consumed by toasting the Regent’s health, and then Oan’s health, by which point we required an additional round in order to toast the health of any we might have missed. It was at this juncture that the two of us, feeling fairly well lubricated, sang a couple of sea shanties before having one for the road, as it were — though not actually for the road, as we Rhinnicks don’t approve of anti-social conduct, especially when we’ve just arisen from a lengthy coma occasioned by a car accident.

  Now where was I?

  Ah, yes. The sea shanties, the final round, the last toast to one and all, the departure.

  The result of all of this whistle-wetting and merrymaking was that, far from being the downcast, drooping, dispirited Rhinnick I had been when first cajoled into trying my hand at interpreting Vera’s poems, I’d become a fizzy rejoicer and a friend to all mankind by the time we slipped our moorings and curvetted our way, arm in arm, through an assortment of hallways, foyers, and staircases en route to Nappy and Vera.

  Norm gingerly piloted me through a security checkpoint — this one involving a stout steel door guarded by a pair of gorilla-sized sentries — when I perceived that the hairs on the back of the Feynman neck were standing on end, as though trying to draw my attention to something I’d missed. And as I was likely to miss quite a lot in my current state — being filled with a gallon’s worth of cocktails and notably effervescent — I took a moment to steady myself, take in my surroundings, and subject them to a more penetrating scrutiny. Surveying my environs, I noted the door, the hallway, the prophet, myself, and a pair of guards . . . all seemed to be in order. I ran through it again. Door, hallway, prophet, self . . . and then it hit me.

  The guards.

  Or rather, one of the guards. They were, as I think I mentioned, gorilla-sized. And the larger of the two — him being drawn from the extra-large economy-sized lot of gorilla-sized sentries — towered to such a height I hadn’t caught his face on my first pass.

  I noticed it now. It was familiar. Indeed, it was as familiar as my own, and in the present circs it was even more welcome.

  “Zeus!” I cried.

  Both guards pivoted toward me.

  “Zeus!” I cried again.

  Both of the guards looked at me as though I’d been having a couple. Which I had, of course, but not on such a scale that I’d been rendered pie-eyed, as the expression is, or unable to identify a pal — particularly a pal for whom I’d been searching for several weeks. I stepped toward him.

  “Stop right there!” said Zeus, raising a hubcap-sized hand in a gesture I believe is taught during the first semester in copper academies. His fellow guardsman tucked in beside him, forming a wall of about 700 pounds of sentry.

  “But Zeus—” I began.

  “Do you know this man?” said Norm, teetering slightly and showing every sign of being as filled to the gills as I.

  “As well as I know myself!” I said. It may have sounded more like “aswellazinomyself,” and been punctuated by a hiccup or two, but self-respect restrains me from recounting all of my dialogue in the somewhat sozzled dialect which I had, for one reason and another, adopted at this point in my affairs. I proceeded more or less as follows:

  “The colossus standing before us is none other than Zeus, my loyal sidekick, pal, and gendarme! We’ve been friends for years and years! We’ve shared too many adventures to count. Why, until we were recently separated by misadventure I never set foot outside without him. He’s—”

  “I’ve never seen this man before,” said Zeus, aiming a fishy eye in my direction and taking a pace toward me.

  “This is the wossname!” said Norm, slapping me firmly on the shoulder and grinning maniacally. Seeing that this failed to impress, he took another run at the thing.

  “The Hand, I mean. Of th’other fellow. Intershesher!” he added, with a note of triumph. “He’s . . . he’s . . . s’an honoured guest of the Regent.” And he, too, finished his oration with a something that sounded like a hiccup.

  “It’s me, Zeus,” I said.

  “I thought you said I was Zeus,” said Zeus.

  “That’s what I said!”

  “Then who are you?” said Zeus.

  “The Hand!” said Norm.

  “Rhinnick . . . J . . . Feynman,” I said, enunciating as clearly as my current state permitted. And fearing that the name might fail to penetrate, I added the words “I’m your closest pal.”

  The second guard — Zeus’s apparent partner who had, up until this point in the conv., acted as a silent partner, now sidled up to Zeus and eyed me searchingly.

  “You know this guy, Terrence?”

  “This guy Rhinnick!” I said, by way of correction.

  “No, Terrence!” said guard number two.

  “Who in Abe’sh name ish Terrensh?” said Norm Stradamus.

  “My name’s Terrence,” said Zeus.

  “You mean Zeus,” I said.

  “No I don’t mean Zeus,” said Zeus, or possibly Terrence, for it was getting harder than average to keep names straight, particularly in my current gin martini–addled state. But whatever you wish to call the familiar side of beef before me, he went on to say, “My name is Terrence, and I’ve never laid eyes on you before.”

  This smote me like a blow. I mean to say, when you’ve nursed a fellow in your personal bosom for years and years, when you’re vis-à-vis with a chap with whom you’ve frequently shared your last bar of milk chocolate, a pal with whom you’ve plucked the gowans fine, as the expression is, you don’t expect him to disclaim all knowledge of you, deny your past association, and look upon you as one who, whatever his merits, is no more familiar than one of those ships that are always passing in the night.

  I steadied myself on my pins, drew myself up to my full height, and tried my best to project authority.

  “You mean to tell me,” I began, “that your name is not now, and has never been, Zeus?”

  “That’s right,” said Zeus.

  “And you don’t know who I am?”

  “You’re the Hand of the Intercessor,” said Zeus.

  “But apart from that,” I added, grabbing hold of the nearby wall, as the hall in which we stood seemed to be pirouetting more than I should have liked.

  “Does the name Rhinnick Feynman mean nothing to you?” I added.

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Perhapsh . . . hic . . . he’sh a bit confushed,” said Norm Stradamus, indicating me, not Zeus. Then he stared at me intently through one eye, closing the other as though blocking out an extra Feynman or two who had polluted the field of view.

  “You’ve been through one of thosh things,” he said. “Whashicalled. An ordeal. The car acshident. That coma. A few martineesh—”

  And he went on in this vein for the space of a minute or two, elaborating upon the theme of diminished capacity, when another couple of thoughts found their way into my bean. The first was this: Zeus had, when last we met, been shot full of Socratic bullets, bullets which contained the very same memory-wiping serum that had been used to great effect on Vera Lantz. And since Zeus lacked Vera’s television-based capacity for peering into distant times and places, he wouldn’t be able to reboot his memory, as it were, by catching reruns of his past life and associations. The second thought was even less agreeable: it was possible that the Author, in what has been passing lately for His wisdom, had decided to wipe out all past chapters in which the Zeus & Feynman alliance had played a part. It was, I thought, not beyond the Author’s scope to delete the character Zeus and reintroduce him — reusing an old and previously discarded physical description — as a giant guard named Terrence. And whichever of these possibilities was the case, poor
old Zeus would be in the dark, having no memories upon which to draw.

  I saw that this would call for careful navigation.

  Norm was still going on about the brain-fogging effects of gin martinis — a topic on which he seemed to be well informed — when I resurfaced.

  “Tell me, Zeus—” I began.

  “You mean Terrensh, Hand of the Intersheshor!” said Norm Stradamus.

  I was about to explain that it was “Rhinnick, Hand of the Intercessor,” and “Terrence, Guard of the Door,” when I thought nothing could be improved by this correction. I chose instead to shush the High Priest with a gesture.

  “Tell me, Terrence, then,” I said, and I may have poked him on his shoulder, “precisely how long do you remember being Terrence? About six months? Everything before that’s a bit of a fog?”

  “How did you know?” said Zeus.

  “The Hand of the Intershesher is wise,” slurred Norm Stradamus.

  “Seems like a crackpot to me,” said guard number two, who, despite being nameless, didn’t seem to know his place. I ignored his intervention and pressed on.

  “And how . . . how did you come to work for the Regent, Terrence?” I asked. And as I did, I was fully prepared to slap anyone who responded with anything along the lines of “the Regent isn’t called Terrence.”

  “She found me,” said Zeus. “I was in an accident, she said. The Regent took me in and had her staff nurse me back to health. She’s very kind, the Regent. Very kind. When I was healthy again she offered me a job in her personal guard.”

  “But before this accident,” I said, “what did you do before that?”

  “I don’t remember. The Regent thinks I may have been newly manifested shortly before she found me. But I was wearing bloody clothes. I’d been shot. I didn’t remember any of it.”

  “Aha!” I said, out-Perrying even the cleverest Mason, “That’s because you’d been . . . whatdoyoucallit . . . mindwiped by Socratic rounds! Bullets, I mean. Amnesia. Bloody clothes. Practically all the proof you need.”

  And once again I felt the need to lean on a door frame, though there again it might have been Zeus. This accomplished, I continued.

  “They all support my thesis. You are my good friend Zeus, one who was gunned down by Socrates and the victim of a mindwipe,” I added, connecting the dots.

  This didn’t seem to land with the level of oomph I’d expected. Rather than issuing the communal “ooh” or “ahh” for which I’d budgeted, the persons assembled merely looked at me askance, as if to ask if they could have a shot or two of whatever I’d been having.

  “Look, mister,” said Zeus, laying a catcher’s-mitt-sized hand upon my shoulder, “you’re drunk. And I think you might be confused. All I know is what the Regent tells me. I was newly manifested, someone shot me, the Regent found me, and that’s that. I’m happy here. The people are nice. And I love guarding.”

  This much, at least, lent credence to my version of events. I mean to say, the chap had been a dog in a former life — some form of Yorkshire Terrier if that’s of any interest — and the only things he’d loved more than standing attention at a guard post were chasing postal workers and spinning around three times before curling up for a nap. His basic wiring seemed to be intact, much like Vera’s had been post-wipe. The software may have been wiped, but the hardware was still there and still firing on all thrusters. Even his basic preferences still held. I took another stab at rebooting the system, this time using what had, in recent chapters, become a reliable secret weapon.

  I reached into a pocket and drew out Fenny, presenting him for inspection.

  “My hamster,” I said. “Fenny.”

  It was at this point in my affairs that the Author, in His wisdom, decided to inflict me with about the worse fit of hiccups ever recorded. I hic’d a couple of dozen times in Zeus’s direction after announcing the hamster’s name, the effect of which, I gathered from Zeus’s reaction, was to undermine the overall rhetorical power and persuasiveness of the tableau unfolding before him.

  “He seems very nice,” said Zeus, patting Fenny and chuckling. “But maybe it’s time for the two of you—”

  “The three of us,” I said, not wanting Fenny to feel left out.

  “Maybe it’s time for the three of you to run along and get some rest,” he concluded. And he punctuated this by looking over at his fellow guardsman and winking a conspiratorial wink I found offensive.

  He returned his massive hand to my shoulder as if to pivot me bedward — but as he did, he paused in a marked manner and stood absolutely still, as if struck by one of those thunderbolts you hear about. I knew in a jiffy what had been the cause of this sudden break in the action, for unless I was much mistaken I saw Zeus, as he grabbed me, draw in an extra lungful of breath, via the nostrils.

  I could see where this was headed. Opinions differ in the matter of Yorkshire Terriers, but whatever one feels about them, one must acknowledge that they always have an excellent sense of smell. And it seemed to me that these olfactory gifts must persevere through the reincarnation process.

  I stood straighter. I opened my eyes wider. I willed every pore on the Feynman person to open to full capacity, hoping to push matters along by bathing Zeus in my bouquet. Pheromones, I think they’re called, teensy smellicules which are said to be equally useful in pitching woo or when being tracked by hounds.

  Zeus drew another breath, this one deeper than the last. We were, I could see, mere steps from merry reunions. I did the only thing I could. I took steps which I knew, with every fibre of my being, would seal the deal and bring about the happy ending.

  Chapter 21

  I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed the same thing, but it’s often struck me as odd that you can be dashed sure of a thing, knowing with every fibre of your being that you see the path to victory, only to find that you’ve made an absolute bloomer and bunged a spanner into the works, fouling up your aspirations and landing yourself in the ditch.

  It was that way with this recent plan of mine. I mean to say, perceiving that Zeus’s memories were in the process of being sparked by my aroma — memory being deeply intertwined with scent, and scent being the fastest route to the brain of any dog, former or otherwise — I tried to coax matters along by encouraging Zeus’s olfactory explorations with both word and gesture. This was where I made my bloomer. For, as Norm would put it several minutes later, when we were out of Zeus’s earshot and en route to Vera’s room, you can’t go about in a high-security place, smelling of gin martinis, accusing people of being mindwiped dogs, and — this part was key — openly inviting the guards to sniff you. This last step in the procedure, one which I’d pursued enthusiastically, is apt, as I had found, to cause offence. Only a few well-chosen words by Norm Stradamus — a figure of some influence with the Regent’s household guard — enabled me to escape a situation which seemed on the verge of causing a good deal of embarrassment on both sides, and possibly a black eye for Feynman.

  “But I tell you he is Zeus!” I said, pressing the case with Norm Stradamus as he chivvied me down the hall and out of the Zeus-slash-Terrence zone. “I know his face as well as I know my own.” And I think, owing perhaps to the gallon of gin I’d had a short while earlier, I may have added the words “weller, even.”

  “S’all right,” said Norm, who suddenly struck me as even slurrier than he’d been a moment before. “S’okay. You can call him Zeus if you like. Terrence won’t mind at . . . he won’t mind at . . . why did you tell him he was a dog?”

  “Because he is a dog,” I explained. “Or rather, he was.”

  “So . . . issa temp’rary whassit,” said Norm.

  “In the beforelife,” I explained. “The titanic chap you saw guarding the doors is but this fellow’s latest form. He’s a princk. Like me. Like the Napoleons. And like the Napoleons he’s been recycled through the beforelife several times, most recently as a
Yorkshire Terrier.”

  “What’s Yorkshire?”

  “Some kind of pudding.”

  This failed to clarify matters.

  “Look at it from wossname’s perspective. Terrensh. Imagine what he thinksh.”

  “Call him Zeus.”

  “Imagine what Zeus thinks, then, Hand of the Intershessher—”

  “And call me Rhinnick!”

  “Forgive me, Hand o’ — forgive me, Rhinnick. I use the title to show, eh, reshpect.”

  “You don’t see me running around calling you ‘Pal of Regent,’ or ‘Spiritual Advisor of Oan,’ or ‘Chap who won’t believe Terrence is Zeus’ — wait, that last one doesn’t quite fit the pattern. But what I mean to say is that I prefer not to be known as the somethingorother of someone else. I’m my own man, dash it.”

  “We’ll see what Oan has to shay about that after the weddin’,’” he replied, grinning horribly and gargling at me, or possibly chuckling.

  I shushed him with an impassioned gesture. My heated blood, I perceived, had sobered me up. At least that’s how I choose to remember things. The Author may correct me in His revisions.

  “Be that as it may,” I said, “rest assured that I’m as certain of this as I’ve ever been certain of anything. The faithful guardian of recent interest is my pal Zeus, former resident of Detroit Mercy and longtime sidekick of yours truly. I’ve been looking for him for months. I’m not mistaken, and my powers of recognition haven’t been addled by martinis, however dry and expertly made. I seem to be having a good deal more success in keeping an even keel than you,” I added, noting that the High Priest seemed to be something of a lightweight, “and could recite any number of tongue twisters, walk a mile’s worth of straight lines, and recognize missing pals without fail.”