The Reincarnationist Papers

by Eric Maikranz

  "What's the extra fifty for?"

  "My alibi for tomorrow night."

  "Cool. You were there all night.”

  “I'm going to come by early tomorrow and leave by ten so I can be back by last call and get a ride home with you."

  He pulled up in front of the hotel. "Like I told the man, you were there alone, as usual. I think this is your stop."

  "Let’s hope the man doesn’t ask. Thanks for the help today.”

  "Thanks for paying me, see you tomorrow."

  I waited until he had gone around the corner before I turned my pocket inside out and dumped the dozen or so inch long cigarette butts onto the sidewalk. I crossed the street and walked through the hotel lobby and up to my room without speaking to anyone.

  The perspiration had dried out of the shirt and it clung to my chest like shrink wrap. I peeled it off and took it into the cool shower with me to try to rinse some of the sweat out of it. I got out of the shower without drying off, letting the water drops evaporate in an attempt to cool myself.

  Henry was right, this place was becoming more and more like a prison cell everyday, and I, as its occupant, was becoming a model prisoner, never banging my cup on the bars or burning toilet paper in protest against my condition, but accepting it, more and more everyday. I felt like this room was beating me the same way it must have beaten the others who lived here before. I stepped around the noose and opened the window, letting the sounds of the street fill my silent cell.

  3

  I cleaned off the bed and sat out my equipment for the night's work ahead: black leather jacket, black leather gloves, black high top sneakers, and a green, army surplus rucksack. I hadn't worn the jacket or the gloves since the last job four months ago, work clothes.

  The Necropolis was closed when I arrived. I continued wandering in the area around the club looking for empty liquor bottles in the alleys. I found four intact bottles and made my way to a liquor store for my final items: a large bottle of cheap vodka and two packs of generic cigarettes. I put the full bottle in the rucksack next to the empties and put the generics in my jacket pocket.

  There was already a short line in front of the bar when I turned the corner. I walked to the head of the line and nodded to the doorman as I went inside.

  The club was almost empty when I stepped in. The only sounds inside were of the band setting up their equipment and the clinking of glasses as the bartenders prepared for a busy night. I walked over the black painted concrete floor to the empty back bar. Gently sitting my rucksack down on the frosted glass, I waited for Henry. The blue neon lights underneath the glass were off and the bar looked to be in a state of complete disarray compared to the other larger one. I turned around on my stool to look for Henry at the other side of the dance floor. A steady stream of people poured in and all of the small round tables at the edge of the dance floor were already full.

  I turned around in time to see Henry's silhouette spring from the shadows as the neon lights buzzed and flickered to life.

  "What do you want?"

  "A beer and a shot of Old Grandad."

  Henry raised his eyebrows, "Drinking with granddad, nice. We're hitting the ground running tonight aren't we?" He said, reaching for the bottle of brown whiskey behind the bar.

  I put a cigarette in my mouth and waited for him to light it. "Do me a favor would ya? Take my back pack and put it behind the bar."

  "Sure," he said, striking a match. "I'll run a tab for you too. I though we'd close it out about one thirty or so."

  "Time stamps, Good idea."

  "Yep, you'll be here all night, alone. I'll talk to you in a while, I've got to clean this place up before it gets rockin'."

  He filled the sink and started to work on the leftover glasses from last night. I tilted the beer glass and drank, holding the bitterness in my mouth for an instant before swallowing. The blue white light from underneath made the brown whiskey look like green swamp water. I studied it for a few moments before emptying the shot glass in one quick motion. Its warmth slid down my throat as I clinked the small glass on the glass top of the bar.

  "Another?" he asked, not looking away from the soapy water.

  "Yes," I said in a flat voice. "You better keep those coming for a while."

  I drank at a steady pace, finishing a beer and a shot every twenty minutes or so. To spite my pace, Henry immediately refilled my glass no matter how busy he was. By ten o'clock I was feeling the effects and slowed my pace. He came over, bottle in hand, as soon as I placed my glass on the bar again.

  "What time do you have to split?" he asked, filling the glass to the top.

  "Ten thirty. If I leave by then, I can be back here at one thirty to close my tab out."

  "We'll both be here waiting for ya," he said, putting the bottle away. He leaned on the bar and placed his head close to mine. "Hey, I've set'em up like this for you quite a few times now and I was always curious about why you're so careful in the planning only to get blasted the night you actually do it."

  I looked up at him from the shot glass full of green whiskey and measured my response, knowing that I would have to remember it. "Courage."

  He looked at me for a long time before he spoke, as though he were trying to discern the real reason. "I could see that," he said finally. "Clouds your judgment enough to do it huh?"

  "Something like that," I said smiling. "No more shots Henry, but I could use another beer."

  He refilled my beer glass and shouted to someone at the end of the bar. I leaned back on my stool to catch a view of the band that was tuning up below a lab-coated Vincent Price.

  "Who's up first tonight?" I asked Henry as he passed by.

  "Dr. Kessler and the Spider Veins. They're pretty good, they played here last week."

  I listened to several songs as I milked my last beer. Henry leaned out and over the bar and tapped me on the shoulder during the fifth song.

  "What do you think?" he shouted.

  "You're right, they are pretty good," I yelled in return.

  "No, the time, what do you think about the time? It's ten forty five already."

  "Oh shit. Hand me my gear, I've got to go."

  "This way," he said, leading me behind a black curtain into the storage room. "Go out this door. I'll leave it propped open for you until we close."

  I quickly walked to the bus stop at the side street and waited on the empty bench for the number thirty seven to come. I caught myself tapping my foot in nervous expectation and placed both feet flat on the sidewalk to stop them. I closed my eyes and visualized the flames licking at the support posts. It was working.

  The bus stopped in front of me and I entered it, handing the fare to the female driver without making eye contact. I walked back and took a seat across from the rear door as the bus left the curb. There were six other people on board.

  My foot started tapping again and I could feel the tension rising inside my chest. I wanted to yell out at the top of my lungs what I was about to do. I wanted to shock these six people into my reality. I was about to commune with myself, but I really wanted to commune with them, with anyone. I stared at each one in turn, my foot hammering now. They didn't care. They just sat there ignorant, distant, dead.

  I hadn't told anyone the truth about myself since I'd left home. I'd thought about telling several friends and lovers along the way, thought about telling Henry, but always held back in the end. I always held back and it always seemed to drive them away. I can't lie to myself, I've missed having someone close to me through these eight years, someone who could know me. I almost told Henry several times, but like all the rest, I chose to keep him in the dark, but keep him nonetheless as long as I could. I always prefer an ignorant friend to an enlightened yet unbelieving confidant. I've felt like this many times since I left, felt like screaming at strangers because I didn't have the courage to hazard a friendship. But somehow I always resist attacking them with my story. I resist telling them that all penitent sinners and good little boys do
n't go to heaven when they die, they sometimes come back to LA. I resist telling them that no one up there gives a damn if they've been naughty or nice anyway. I resist screaming at them to quit their dreary jobs and change their dreary lives because if they don't remember, then this is all they'll ever get. I resist telling them because I want to keep up the facade, for my own sake, so that I might still pretend to be like them. In the end, I always take my facade home and tell myself the stories again just to make sure I haven't forgotten them. I forget nothing.

  They must have all tired of me resisting temptation because the bus was empty when it reached my stop. The back doors opened and I stepped onto the curb of the dark deserted L.A. street without looking in the driver’s direction. The bus pulled away and disappeared around the corner, taking all signs of life with it. The surrounding streets were poorly lit and devoid of automobiles or pedestrians. I've always felt at home in this type of desolation as though these abandoned neighborhoods beckoned me to release them from their shame and solitude. I had purposefully picked a bus stop ten blocks from the warehouse and began to walk in that direction, picking up four medium sized stones along the way.

  The lone light down the alley behind the warehouse was still on and shined just brightly enough for me to find the key. I put on the gloves, took off the backpack and stepped inside. A faint air of solvents crept down from the second floor.

  I sat the rucksack at the base of the stairs, removed both packs of generic cigarettes and opened them, taking out four from the full flavor pack and two from the mild. I put the six cigarettes in my mouth, primed the lighter and lit all of them at once, being careful not to draw the concentrated smoke into my lungs. The six burning tips glowed bright red in the darkness. I left the lighter going and placed it on its flat base on the fourth step, then sat each cigarette one by one next to the lighter with their lit ends hanging over the edge of the step so they could burn easily. Placing one of the full flavor smokes in the corner of my mouth, I removed two bottles and tossed them onto the concrete floor of the back room. The wine bottle broke and the gin bottle bounced and landed next to the bathroom door.

  'Perfectly random,' I thought as I inhaled a mouthful of smoke and immediately gagged, forgetting it was a generic. I held it out in my left hand pinched between black gloved fingers. "Gawd, these things are fuckin' awful." I flicked the ash onto the floor and placed the smoke back in line on the step before flicking the ashes off all the rest in turn until they burned down to their filters. When they burned as far as they would go, I crushed out each one on the gray painted floor of the back room.

  I then picked up the lighter, not disturbing the flame, and went upstairs to repeat the same process with the remaining cigarettes. I placed the two black folding chairs across from each other near my point of origin in front of the center post. Each time I crushed one out on the methanol saturated floor I had to be careful to keep my rubber soled shoe on it long enough to keep it from igniting. Sitting in the chair facing the lit windows, I took the last three bottles out of the rucksack, setting the full one next to the burning lighter.

  The light from the flame refracted through the liter bottle of vodka and threw several small spectrums of color across the polished floor. I picked up the bottle, turned it back and forth in front of the flame and watched the tiny rainbows as they danced around the dark room. Cracking the seal, I removed the plastic cap and placed the open mouth next to my own, letting the quick liquid race over my tongue and down my throat, burning as it went. I gritted my teeth before taking a second swallow, then a third. Standing up, I held the bottle by its base and threw long lines of vodka across the floor toward the front of the building. Three, four, five long arcs of liquid splashed to the floor like fingers reaching out from where I stood. With the last of the bottle, I carefully connected all the near ends of the streaks back to my point of origin. When the bottle was empty, I placed it next to the two others and kicked them across the room. I moved the chair back and got down on all fours next to the puddle of vodka then took the still burning lighter down from the other chair in my left hand and with a gloved forefinger drew a line out of the center of the puddle off to the side. After several strokes, I had stretched it out a full two feet. It was no more than an inch wide but was as deep as the puddle itself. I switched the lighter to my right hand and held the flame inches above the end of the narrow line, then stopped and studied the lighter in my hand for a moment. Its Cyrillic letters and red starburst background were easily visible by its own light. My eyes looked at the small flame and defocused as it began to dance in my shaking hand.

  It all started innocently nine years ago, when I was in the tenth grade. My teachers would often catch me daydreaming in class. They reprimanded me constantly for this, but, as their reports later stated, it had little effect. I would 'check out' without warning and without pattern. These 'spells', as they were termed, came alone and in connected series, some lasted only a second and others as long as several minutes. At the time I didn't know where I went. The sensation could best be described as watching a movie, for at the time I wouldn't have called it remembering, for how could someone remember something that had never happened to them.

  They came on subtly at first, appearing as ten or twenty minute short features but by the end of that year they were multi-hour epics that ran constantly and crowded normal thoughts out of my teenage head. Several of them played over and over while others played only once then went back out of circulation, but after a while, all of them, short and long, began to share something in common, and it frightened me.

  The first scenes were panoramic. They were pastoral, peaceful, even boring at times. Only later was there action, along with strange people coming on and going off camera, often in many different scenes. Oddly there was no main character, no main focus to bring these strange people together. Only when they began triggering emotional responses consistent with the visual, auditory, and tactile sensations I saw, did it start to make sense to me. All the scenes were set around a central character, an unseen actor that starred from behind the camera in every scene. After sentience came thoughts, reasoning, and finally identity. He was the focus, everyone interacted with him, everything happened to him and vicariously to me because of this strange first person point of view.

  In time, with practice, I was able to summon these 'movies' at will, experiencing them over and over in an attempt to form a time line. I found, after a while, the more often I viewed a particular clip the more intimate I became with it and the more confidence I had to emulate the actions I was empathically experiencing in my head.

  This unseen actor was a farmer, an organ player in an Eastern Orthodox Church, a soldier, and a prisoner. Eventually, I became adept at all these things, but the music came first.

  At night I would go to my room, turn out the lights, sit on the floor in darkened silence and fill my head with the haunting sounds of his Eastern Orthodox organ music. Again and again I would watch his calloused, dirty finger nailed hands run gracefully over the rows of keys and levers as I mimicked his playing with my own hands. I memorized one song after another, night after night, until I had enough material and confidence to try it at a real organ.

  Our family drove the twenty miles to the nearest Lutheran church only twice each year, Christmas and Easter, so I wasn't surprised that the minister didn't remember me when I showed up on a Thursday in mid June wearing my best Sunday clothes. I had been concentrating so hard on this new and wonderful skill I seemed to be picking up that I hadn't thought about how I was going to ask if I could have access to a semi-sacred, very expensive piece of equipment. When he opened the door I just blurted it out. "I want to play the organ."

  His first reaction was less than enthusiastic but when I thought up a story and told him that the holy spirit had entered me and given me the gift to play the organ shortly after his Easter mass he had no choice but to agree, under his supervision of course.

  We walked together into the nave of the chapel.
The organ sat in a recessed part of the wall off to the left of the pulpit. The brass pipes ran almost to the ceiling, and the whole thing was much larger than the one I had been practicing with in my visions. The minister reached around back, turned on the electric air compressor and pulled the maroon colored vinyl cover off the keys and levers. The levers were similar to the ones I was used to only labeled in English. He folded the cover and sarcastically motioned for me to sit down and begin.

  The first attempts were awkward, difficult and short. I could get out only a few notes before the discords began to pile up, forcing me to stop. 'It should be easier than this,' I thought. I made more attempts but could never manage to get more than a few bars into any of the songs I thought I knew. I looked over at the minister. His expression was completely blank. I turned back to the keyboard and tried again, this time determined to play through the dissonance. I hit a particularly sour note early in the second bar and closed my eyes in a wince. Eyes still closed, the next three notes came perfectly and by the time I had played a dozen more I was in a spell, watching him play. There had been only a handful of missed notes by the time we had finished the song. I opened my eyes as I held the last note and looked again at the minister. Stunned, his mouth hung open like an idiot. His eyes were focused on my hands and stayed there until I asked him if I could practice again next week.

  When I returned home I knew immediately that the minister had spoken with my mother over the telephone. She said he'd asked if I'd ever played before. I explained to her that I'd wanted to practice for some time now and that I probably didn't play as well as he had said.

  Within weeks my hands ran nimbly over the keys as beautiful East European Gothic hymns sang from the tall polished pipes. I found I knew eighteen songs total and while all were religious in nature, they were ill suited to Minnesota Lutheranism. The minister was impressed by the gift the Holy Spirit had imparted on me, but was disappointed that it hadn't shown me anything more 'traditional'. He stopped my sessions in the end, but by that time it didn't matter, my first attempt at manifesting one of his skills was successful.