“Why Rhinnick?” she asked.
“Why Rhinnick?” said Abe.
“Yeah,” said Vera, in that informal way of hers. “I mean, you and Penelope can do anything. Why’d you send Rhinnick to stop Isaac?”
An excellent question, I think you’ll agree.
“It’s hard to explain,” said Abe.
“Just try your best,” said Zeus, helpfully.
Abe paused to marshal his thoughts, and proceeded as follows.
“It’s important to understand that Penelope and I follow the same rules as everybody else. Our expectations give this place its shape. It’s just that we, for whatever reason, have a lot more impact than most. And we can control it. Up until now, that’s worked out pretty well. But then Isaac found a way to steer the combined expectations of all the sleeping ancients, and when he used them to make changes, it took practically all my power to keep the world on an even keel. At the same time Penelope was — well, let’s just say that she and Ian were making things difficult. They decided to have a baby, of all the horrible ideas. And then—”
“A baby?” Vera said, great-scotting, and one could see what she was driving at.
“Un petit bébé?” cried Nappy, “’ow eez zis possible? ’Ow can someone in ze afterlife ’ave un—”
“Sorry, sorry,” said Abe, waving them off, “it’s a long story, and I can’t get into it now. But the upshot is that I’ve had my hands full. I still do. That’s why I wasn’t able to be much help to Rhinnick.”
“But why push everything on him in the first place?” said Vera. “I mean, why Rhinnick, in particular?”
“I thought that would’ve been obvious,” said the mayor. “It’s Rhinnick’s ego fabularis. It came in handy. See, Rhinnick views the world differently than we do. He thinks we’re characters in a novel written by some cosmic author.”
“He thinks that because it’s true,” I said, piping in a bit austerely.
“Well, it gave you an advantage,” said Abe, turning toward me and failing altogether to shrink in the face of my cool asperity. “Isaac kept making retroactive changes to the world — changing things in a way most people wouldn’t have noticed. Erasing teleportation. Mucking around with time. When Isaac changed the minds of the sleeping ancients, he retroactively changed the world, and almost everyone fit these changes into their own expectations — what you might call their world view. They believed that the world had always been the way that Isaac had reshaped it. Almost everyone but you,” he said, eyeing the undersigned benevolently. “See, everyone else expects the world to be rational and consistent — they expect history to stay as it always was, and they expect things to chug along in a more or less predictable way. But not you. You expect revisions. You believe your author changes things on a whim, and that he rewrites history, character sketches, physical laws, and anything else whenever he likes.”
“Well, He does!” I said, briefly eyeing the sky in search of thunderbolts en route to quelling Abe’s bit of heresy.
“The upshot is,” Abe continued, aiming a smile in my direction, “you were uniquely qualified for this quest. You don’t expect The Rules to matter. You don’t think things will make sense. When a retroactive change happens, you see the change for what it is. You don’t trick yourself into thinking things have always been that way — you just remember how things were, see the change, assume that the author has made revisions, and carry on. Only someone who had that kind of perspective — that way of seeing the world — could navigate his way through Isaac’s changes, remain unchanged himself, and—”
“But I didn’t remain unchanged!” I protested. “Whole chapters of my biography were consigned to the cutting-room floor! Past sequences that are clear in the Feynman mind have been blotted from my past, and minor characters who ought to remember hobnobbing with me are left in the dark!”
“Sorry. That was me,” said Abe.
“You?”
“I hope it wasn’t too inconvenient. It’s just that you were a hospice patient on the lam, and I didn’t think you’d be much help in stopping Isaac if everyone kept trying to lock you up. So I did what I could to alter people’s memories — making practically everyone forget whatever it was they knew about you, so they wouldn’t get in your way.”
I stood there for a space, gaping like a beached herring, for the eternal blister’s comments had unmanned me. I mean, I understood Abe was purporting to explain why it was that Rhinnick Feynman, devoted servant of the Author, was The Man The Hour Produced, but I can’t say that I kept up with the explanation, it having landed with a thud right between the Feynman eyes. As for the Feynman ears, they registered various grunts of appeasement and enlightenment issuing from the other members of my troop — they seeming to have collared the gist of Abe’s revelations a touch more readily than I.
“So let me get this straight,” I said, pressing every available grey cell into service, “you’re saying that my past hasn’t changed. That everything remains how I’ve remembered it all along?”
“That’s right,” said Abe.
“You mean, I was a hospice patient. I did square off with Peericks, and I did spend years and years alongside Zeus—”
“That’s right,” said Abe.
“The Author hasn’t revised my background? He . . . he’s just written a new sequence in which you, Abe the First, took it upon himself to modify the memories of the masses, erasing bits of the Feynman bio from their brains?”
“That’s . . . one way to put it,” said Abe.
“Well, put them back!” I said, eagerly. “Restore those memories instanter! While I’ll admit that the cloak of anonymity comes in handy at certain times, I want those memories back in place! I don’t mean to get philosophical, but my stories are all I have! You can’t go around erasing what it is the Author wrote. It’s what keeps our threads together, if you see what I mean.”
Here I pivoted Zeusward, and endeavoured to haul the big chap front and centre.
“Take Zeus!” I said. “He may have lost a marble or two and forgotten who he was, but his story — all of his history — stayed in place. The rest of us, having played parts of varying importance in earlier chapters of his biography, are there to remind Zeus who he was, help him knit together the threads, and prod him along in future volumes. If our histories are erased, then who are we?”
This force of my remorseless logic seemed to hold Abe for a space, and he stared off into the distance for a heartbeat or two before resurfacing.
“You’re sure that’s what you want?” he asked. “I mean . . . you want all memories of your history restored?”
“I do,” I said. “My history is what makes me me.”
“And you’re certain?”
“Couldn’t be more so.”
“You ought to be careful what you wish for.”
“I am adamant,” I said, for that’s what I was.
“All right,” said Abe, at length. “I wasn’t sure how to thank you for everything you’ve done for the city — but if this is what you want, then I won’t argue. Now hold on. If I’m going to get this right, I’m going to need Penelope’s help.”
The chap then closed his eyes in apparent concentration, and silently moved his lips in a beseeching sort of way. Then he shimmered like a mirage, and snapped his fingers.
And what a snap it was! Not only did it seem to reverberate through the Feynman bones, but it also had the effect of making Abe disappear in a sudden flash.
I well-I’ll-be-dashed. And I don’t mind admitting that, in doing my bit of well-I’ll-be-dashing, I staggered backward a step or two, overcome by the weight of what Abe had done.
“Rhinnick!” cried Vera, beating Zeus and Nappy by a jiffy or two in hastening to my side and grabbing an arm. Their faces loomed before mine in a concerned, mother-henning sort of way.
“I’m all right,” I said. “
Or rather, I think I will be.”
Their faces darkened. It seemed that something in my demeanour struck them as rummy, and I can’t say I was surprised. And the reason for the rumminess of my d. was not far to seek. In restoring all lost memories of yours truly, Abe had, in that thoroughly thorough way of his, flipped the switch on my own grey cells as well, restoring all of my own memories in the process. My beforelife ones, I mean. They were suddenly plain as day. I couldn’t believe that I’d forgotten them.
“What is it?” said Vera, applying a hand to the forehead.
“Are you all right?” said Zeus.
“I will be,” I said, teetering on the spot. “Only . . . well . . . it all comes back to me now, and it’ll take some sorting out. I mean, why should I act like a messed-up gumbo of my characters? How did all of this Author-worship stuff come about? And why call myself Rhinnick Feynman? The imagination boggles.”
“Rhinnick . . . what are you saying?” said Vera, still mother-henning like nobody’s business.
“I’ll be all right,” I said, marshalling my composure. “But perhaps, from now on, you might just call me Plum.”
About the Author
Randal Graham is a law professor at Western University, where his teaching and research focus on ethics and legal language. His first novel, Beforelife, won the IPPY gold medal for fantasy fiction and was a top ten finalist for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Graham’s books on law and legal theory have been assigned as mandatory reading at universities across Canada and have been cited by judges on all levels of court, including the Supreme Court of Canada and the U.S. Supreme Court. He lives in London, Ontario.
Copyright
Copyright © Randal Graham, 2020
Published by ECW Press
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Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 1Y2
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: David A. Gee
Author photo: © Anna Toth
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Afterlife crisis / Randal Graham.
Names: Graham, Randy N., author.
Description: Series statement: A Beforelife story. On title page, title appears as “Midlife crisis”; “Mid” is crossed out, and “After” is written above it.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200232851 Canadiana (ebook) 20200232924
ISBN 978-1-77041-470-9 (softcover)
ISBN 978-1-77305-562-6 (PDF)
ISBN 978-1-77305-561-9 (ePUB)
Classification: LCC PS8613.R3465 A78 2020 DDC C813/.6—dc23
The publication of Afterlife Crisis has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country and is funded in part by the Government of Canada. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,737 individual artists and 1,095 organizations in 223 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.1 million. We also acknowledge the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, and through Ontario Creates for the marketing of this book.
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