7
She slipped on a pair of dark, horn rimmed sunglasses under her veil, grabbed the wicker picnic basket and opened one of the large doors to the world outside. I stepped through behind her and pulled the door closed. The afternoon sun shone brilliantly and I had to shield my eyes from the rays reflecting off the polished granite steps that lead down to the street. Ten steps down, I turned to look at the facade of the building I had lived in for the past two days. The two heavy doors were set in a twelve foot tall Gothic arch of rough cut limestone. One large circular stained glass window looked out from high in the wall. A square bell tower stood on the left hand corner of the church and stretched twenty feet taller than the highest part of the wall. Wire mesh screens covered the small open arches of the belfry to keep birds out.
Poppy was halfway down the steps when Antonio got out of the driver's side door of a glossy black Cadillac. It was a long, early sixties model in perfect condition. Antonio quickly walked the shorter way around the front of the car and took the picnic basket before opening the back door for her. He wore black slacks and shoes, the same white short-sleeved Cuban shirt, now buttoned correctly, and a black chauffeurs hat that covered most of his white hair. He kept his hand on the open car door and watched me as I slowly descended the steps. I eased in and sat on the large bench seat next to her as he closed the door.
The car was large inside. The back seat was set five feet back from the front and was obviously designed for chauffeuring duties. The grey leather upholstery and grey carpet looked brand new as did the burled walnut inlays in the armrests and the dashboard.
Antonio placed the picnic basket on the front seat and sat down behind the wheel. She gave a one word command in Spanish as he started the engine and drove away from the church toward downtown L. A.
We had traveled about a mile away when she took a four inch long black cigarette holder out of her purse along with the familiar orange and white pack. She looked over at me behind the opaque lenses and held out the open pack, offering me one. I took one and watched as she placed hers in the end of the slim, silver tipped holder. She then slipped the end of the holder through the wide fishnets of the veil, opened a polished cover in the wooden armrest of the door and depressed the cigarette lighter. I shifted the cane to my left hand and depressed the lighter on my side.
I couldn't help but feel a small amount of remorse for questioning her gift of the cane and wondered if she thought I was questioning her hospitality as well. I was of course, but didn't want her to think so. The point was moot now, I'd said my piece. I made up my mind to remain silent until we reached the picnic spot or until she spoke to me, and I wondered in the silence about what answers would come at the end of this ride.
Her lighter popped up first. I watched her profile as she lit her cigarette. She was the epitome of elegance, and of enigma. My lighter clicked and I looked out the window as I smoked. It was a beautiful day. 'I need to call Henry tonight, I should have called him last night. He'll never believe this story,' I thought, replacing the lighter and closing the cover.
Antonio drove slowly through residential areas and stayed off of major thoroughfares except to connect to the next neighborhood. She looked straight ahead and spoke to him only once more. I looked straight ahead too, sneaking glances at her when I could. Her right hand was placed on top of her left and showed the tattoo I had seen earlier. It was flat black and stood out dramatically on her fair skin.
We drove alongside the short, fence that bordered the large Evergreen cemetery[7]. Three small, monument covered hills rose above one another beyond the green. Antonio slowed almost to a stop as he turned right into the cemetery.
I turned back to her and opened my mouth partially, but found she was already looking at me. I wanted to say something but stopped. One corner of her mouth curled into a smile as she spoke. "We're almost there. I hope you're hungry."
"Yes I am," I said, regaining my presence of mind. I looked out the window and continued waiting. 'A picnic in a cemetery, different.'
Antonio drove at a respectful ten miles per hour.
The headstones got older the farther back into the cemetery we went. Two groundskeepers on large, three bladed riding lawnmowers drove next to us and kept up for a second before peeling off together like formation fighter planes weaving quickly in and out of a long row of granite monuments. The first section of cemetery we drove though was dotted with the light brown rectangles of fresh graves along with fresh flowers and mourners, but on this back part, on the third hill, everything was green. Old grey soldier's crosses, headstones and large vaults stood lonely, vacant and abbreviated like the remnants of a lost city. There were no flowers or visitors in this oldest section, only groundskeepers, birds and squirrels to keep the dead company. Looking around this deserted area with all its green grass and trees, the idea of a picnic seemed less strange. This was probably the most peaceful and secluded spot in the city.
We drove out of sight of the mowers into a section of large tombstones and vaults with dates from the late nineteenth century. Antonio eased the Cadillac down a narrow lane between the plots, and then stopped in the middle of several medium sized family vaults.
"We're here," she said, crushing out her cigarette.
Antonio got out and opened the door for her, then for me. "This is a beautiful spot Poppy. I wouldn't have thought of this," I said adjusting the cane underneath me. The sounds of the far away city were barely audible.
"Follow me," she said to me as she took the basket from Antonio. "It's over here." She said something to Antonio in Spanish as she looked over at his watch. I followed her into the cemetery as he drove off.
She walked briskly out in front of me. The soft ground under the grass made it difficult for me to walk with the cane and I felt like shouting to her to set the basket down so we could eat here and I wouldn't have to walk any farther. She walked toward one of the larger vaults, a weathered and rain streaked grey one. Two thick columns stood vigil on either side of the wrought iron double doors. Two squirrels scampered off as she approached. The vault was the size of a small carriage house. As I got closer I could make out more detail. The same symbol she had tattooed on the back of her hand was carved into the marble above the arched doors where the family name should have been. It hadn't occurred to me that we might be going to a specific place in here.
I continued my slow steady pace as she sat the basket down in front of the doors and turned to look at me. Fresh purple flowers sprouted from two metal vases in front of the columns. The surrounding tombstones were large and ornate. I glanced at them as I passed; Phillip Clairmonte 1820-1892 was carved into the base of an eight foot tall obelisk, Regina Duncan 1888-1889 lay underneath a weathered and worn, life-sized, kneeling baby lamb.
"This is a very special place for me," she said when I was about twenty steps away.
I looked into her eyes and pointed to the back of my right hand were her tattoo was. She saw my gesture but said nothing and offered no facial expression.
"Why is this place so special?"
"It's the resting place of my benefactor."
The outfit she wore made sense to me now and I felt awkward at being dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. At least they were black. The purple orchids in front of this vault were the only flowers in sight. "Do you visit here often?"
"I come here when I want to think," she said, removing a black skeleton key from her purse. She unlocked the doors and opened them one at a time.
The room inside was lit, to my surprise, by two small skylights. One shaft of light slanted down onto the center of the floor and the other landed on the left hand wall. Polished brass plaques lined the left and right walls above two simple stone benches, one on each side.
She grabbed the basket and walked inside. I took a step behind her, but stopped in the open doorway. She placed the basket on the bench and sat down beside it as she lifted the veil and removed her sunglasses. "Aren't you going to come in?"
Now was my chan
ce to press the issue. "You were going to tell me about this," I said, tapping the brass end cap of the cane on the stone floor.
"Why don't you ask them?" she said, pointing to the plaques on the opposite wall.
'Them?' I thought as I stepped inside. The air inside was cool. 'Them.' I turned my back to her and looked at them. The second square of sunlight perfectly framed and highlighted one of the brass plaques, making the others hard to see. The plaque was two feet wide and a foot and half tall. The only thing on it was a name and year of birth and death, Graciela L. Cruz 1889-1964.
"Graciela Cruz, was she your-, is she the one you spoke about?" I asked, turning to look at her.
She had already placed two wine glasses on the bench next to the basket. "Yes, she bought the church. What do want to start with, red or white?"
"I don't care," I said annoyed at her coyness. I bit my tongue and checked my response before I continued. "White, please."
"White it is. I thought we'd start with caviar and cream cheese."
"Hmm," I murmured. "Was this cane hers?"
"No it belonged to Louis."
"Who?"
"Louis, on this side," she said, pointing to the darker wall behind her.
It took several seconds for my eyes to adjust from the shiny sunlit brass of the other side. Six plaques were set in two rows of three. Names and dates showed on all the plaques. The one she pointed to was in the middle of the bottom row, Louis Lucas de Nehon 1657-1723.
I looked at it for several seconds, reading the date over and over. I gripped the cane next to my right leg and did the math, over two hundred and fifty years old. I thought the cane was old, but not that old. The dragon head seemed to get hotter in my hand as I thought about the significance of such a gift and I was more determined than ever to find out what was going on.
My eyes wandered to the neighboring plaques as I formulated my next question for her. The one to the left of Louis' read Marco Parcalus 1630-1657, the one to the right on the bottom row read Colleen Korin McGregor 1723-1761. I started to see the pattern in the dates and stood straight up to look at the ones above. Nez-Lah 1506-1524, Bando 1524-1540, and Bahram Al-Malick 1540-1630 looked back at me from left to right. The cane clicked on the stone floor as I turned to look the plaques on the other wall. Diana Marie Duggan 1761-1824 was on the top row on the left and Dr. Hans M. Roder 1824-1889 was in the middle. Graciela still shined in the sunlight on the right. The three plaques below were all blank.
My eyes defocused as I thought about my own time line, three lives uninterrupted from 1892 till now. It all began to make sense: the enamel basin, the crude crutch, the McTaggart, and the cane. I ran my hand over the warm brass of Graciela's monument as fragmented thoughts coalesced in my head. She would have been three years older than Vasili. I turned and looked at Poppy. She was staring at me again, but I had expected it this time. "I think I understand," I said, my voice almost cracking.
"I think you understand too," she said. Her facial expression was a blank slate as she continued. "You're like me aren't you?"
I nodded after several unblinking moments. I was too stunned to speak. 'You're like me aren't you?' The words echoed in my head, echoed in the vacuum where my reality had been seconds before. 'You're like me.' I never thought I'd be like anybody, I mean I never thought there would be anyone like me.
She uncorked the bottle and filled the glasses. "Here," she said patting her hand on the bench, "sit down and have some wine."
Sitting down, I held the wine glass with two hands to keep it from shaking. I drank half the glass but it was little help for my dry mouth. "I don't know what to say," I said placing the glass down on the bench, again using both hands.
"It's alright Evan, I understand what you're feeling. I've been in your position before. Take your time, we have plenty of supplies," she said opening the basket.
I remained motionless and must have seemed catatonic on the outside. But inside, I was a turmoil of activity. I felt nervous about confiding in anyone after all these years and yet joyful about the possibility that this could be true. I was anxious to find out more if this was true and I felt uneasy about a new reality in which I would no longer be unique. 'You're like me.' In the past eight years I'd often fantasized about finding someone else like me, someone else who remembered.
I stirred back to life after several minutes. "Do you remember all these people?" I asked, looking at the nine plaques around me.
"Yes, sort of, I don't tend to look at it as remembering them. I was them, each of them. They continue to live in me. One person, the same person in new bodies, including this one," she said, admiring her skinny outstretched arms. "This body will go right there." She pointed to the blank plaque on the lower left side.
I reached down and grabbed the forward edge of the stone bench in a vain attempt to keep my world from spinning off its axis. If she was like me, I began to question who or what I was. This all started when I began to remember Vasili and Bobby. I had always thought of them as precursors to me, it had never occurred to me that I could be a continuation of them.
"Evan?" she said, lightly touching my right arm. "Are you alright?"
I looked at the blank brass plaques on the bottom row which would serve as future memorials. "I ah, never thought of it that way, the way you put it. It changes everything when you put it like that."
"What do you mean?"
I turned around and looked at the oldest plaque, 1506-1524. That would mean she remembered back almost five hundred years, five hundred years old. "I don't know what I mean yet. This is all so... This ah, wasn't what I was expecting today Poppy," I laughed nervously.
She lightly stroked my arm as she refilled my glass. "I'm obligated to tell you this," she said, motioning around the vault with the mouth of the wine bottle. "I wanted to tell you as soon as I was sure about you. Evan, I know what it’s like being in the dark."
"What am I?" I asked.
She smiled for several seconds. "The correct term for you and me is palingenesist[8]."
"What does that mean?"
"It's derived from Greek, it means to be born again in a literal sense. Think of us as Reincarnationists."
I nodded automatically as I contemplated whether she remembered, really remembered, the people on these plaques or whether she was some sort of kook.
"How old are you?" she asked.
"Twenty five."
"No, not this," she said pinching my forearm, "this." She raised her hand and touched her finger to her temple. Her dark eyes burned with intensity.
I knew what she meant, but my mind was still too cluttered to do the math. "Since 1892."
"How many trips?"
"What?"
"I'm sorry. Lives, how many lives do you remember?"
"This is my third."
She rummaged through the basket and brought out the caviar, the rye crackers and the brick of cream cheese. "How long have you known you're different?"
"Eight years."
She looked at me curiously. "That can't be. Seventeen sounds about right for you to change, but you said this is your third trip."
"Yes."
"Didn't you realize what you were when you came back in your second life?" she asked.
Came back. There was that point of view again. "No, I didn't. I started to remember both lives eight years ago."
"Fascinating," she said squinting into my eyes. "How old were you when you died?"
I looked up at the ceiling as I searched for the numbers. "Sixty four the first time and six years old the last time."
"Ahh, that explains it. You never got old enough to remember on your second trip so you remembered both in this trip. Very interesting."
"Trips? That's a very odd term. Why do refer to it as trips?"
"It starts to seem that way after a while. As the years pile up you begin to realize the transitory nature of these physical bodies," she said looking me up and down. The way she looked at me when she said that was unnerving, like I was s
ome kind of walking cadaver.
"You said I wasn't old enough to remember the second time. What do you mean?"
"You said your physical age is twenty five years, yes?"
I nodded.
"Eight years ago means you changed when you were seventeen."
"What change? I'm not sure I understand."
"I'm talking about the change that happened when you began to remember who you are, or who you were before, depending on how you look at it. That's what happened to you, right?"
I nodded.
"That's normal, it happens when the body reaches physical maturity, usually between fifteen to eighteen in each incarnation. The change would have happened in your second trip if you had survived to that age."
That's normal. Normal hadn't applied to me in a long time. 'You're normal like me,' I thought, watching her remove the metal key and open the tin of caviar. "Why does it happen that way?" I asked.
"Who knows," she said shrugging. "not me that's for sure and I've been trying to figure it out for hundreds of years. It's always the same though. You lead a normal childhood, playing and carefree until your body begins to mature, then you're hit with a barrage of memories from the past. Sometimes in takes several years to get them straight in your head other times they fall into place effortlessly. Each time it gets a little easier because you remember being in this same confused state in your earlier trips. But each time there is always an intermission, an amnesic period, I like to call it, when you come into a fresh body until you begin to remember.
"I don't know, it's sort of nice to feel innocent and free for a while before you have to face your past again. Were you happier before you began to change?" she asked.
"Yes," I said without thinking, I didn't have to.
"Hmm, I suppose I am too most times. Have you ever tried caviar before?" she asked, placing a dollop of tiny black eggs on a cream cheese covered wafer.
"No."
"Really, Ninety seven years old and you've never had this," she said, handing it to me. "you are lucky I found you."
The Reincarnationist Papers Page 9