The Reincarnationist Papers

by D. Eric Maikranz

  Poppy continued, “The main tenet of Abrahamic faiths is that as men, they are estranged from God by their nature and they are made to feel ashamed to walk around naturally and act upon the impulses they feel. As men, they are told that the only way to overcome this estrangement is to seek salvation from a god that created them with godly desires, and then promptly orphaned them.

  “But it’s different for us, like I told you before we left LA, the same rules don’t apply. You see, the enforcer to this entire hoax is guilt. You ask any devotee, and they will freely admit that. Their system simply doesn’t work without guilt. But ours, Evan, ours is truly Eden. We run through Elysian Fields, free from their bondage, because in our world, guilt has no meaning or purpose or place. This is paradise,” she said in a husky voice, looking at me with a raised wine glass, “and welcome, brother.”

  Diltz and I ate in silence, trying to digest her words along with the meal. Having thought some of these thoughts before, I understood where it came from. We were on the same line, a timeline. She was just further along it than I was, and once again I found myself unwilling to begrudge her any reaction to obstacles further down that timeline.

  “What about Eastern religions?” Diltz asked.

  “The Buddhists and Hindus are little better. Sure, they got it right that we all come back, but they have to taint it again with guilt, only they call it karma. You see, religion is universal in that it doesn’t work without guilt. The tenet of karma states that if you lead a self-deprecating, self-abasing, virtuous life in this trip, that your position in the next will be improved and that your spirit will be cleansed and purified by wasting life after life. The idea that through such toil you will eventually reach nirvana is obviously as misguided as its western counterparts. We’ve all tried it. We have found by the most accurate methods possible that it doesn’t work that way. And that method is experience.

  “The idea of karma, the idea of retributive justice, is as silly as the story parents tell their children about Santa Claus keeping track of who’s naughty and who’s nice. Parents only tell children that in order to make them behave in November and December. It’s the same principle at work, only on a larger scale. It is a hoax. There is no one in heaven or nirvana with a pen and pad keeping score on us. And if there ever was, he died a long time ago.”

  She drank the last of her wine and placed the napkin on the plate. “I should check to see if they’re ready. If you’ll excuse me.”

  Mr. Diltz and I looked at each other between bites, not quite sure how to start a conversation that could diffuse the charged words Poppy had left in the room with us. We ate without speaking until she came back.

  the members of the panel and the gallery were already in place in the expansive grotto when Poppy and I walked in.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Michaels,” said the professor. “I’d like to start with some questions about your first incarnation, as Vasili.”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me about your first memories as a child.”

  I leaned forward and began. “Vasili grew up on his father’s farm. He played outside quite often, usually alone but sometimes with friends. He often played with three brothers around his own age that lived a five minutes’ walk away.”

  “What were their names?”

  “Hristo, Sorgi, and Thaxos.”

  “Last name and patronymic please.”

  “Siltykov, Hristovich,” I said, pouring some water.

  “Tell me more about that childhood,” the man asked, leaning back as though he expected a long answer.

  “There’s not much to tell, really. Vasili lived with his mother and father on an eighty-acre farm near the village of Voditza. He worked on the farm, was homeschooled by his father, and took mass twice a week in town. It was that way until 1915 when the army was mobilized, and he left to begin military training.”20

  “You said you took mass twice a week. What religion?”

  “It was simply the religion back then. I now know it to be Eastern Orthodox.”

  “Was your family religiously devout?”

  “My father was, so everyone was. He was raised and educated in an Orthodox monastery near the Greek border. He taught me the language and the scriptures.”

  “You said you can read and write Bulgarian now?”

  “Yes.” I lit a cigarette as he conferred with the old man and Ramsay.

  “You said you were in the military. Did you fight in the Great War?”

  “I was in the Bulgarian army from 1916 until the armistice was signed in 1918.”

  “What did you do after that?”

  “I returned home and helped my father with the farm for one season. I was in the process of acquiring my own land when my father died. I built a home for myself on the eighty acres and tended the land and my mother until her death the next year. That same year, 1920, I took a wife.” I crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray.

  “Go on.”

  “I met Vanya in Voditza. She was the daughter of the livery stable owner. I went into town to buy a horse and saw her. We were married four months later.”

  “What were your children’s names?”

  “We had no children.”

  “Why not?”

  “Infertility, I suppose. It wasn’t for lack of trying, I can assure you. If any of you have ever tended a large plot of land, you know how valuable farm hands are.”

  The professor stared at me for what seemed like an eternity. “Were the babies lost, or were there no pregnancies?”

  “She never became pregnant,” I said, getting angry with his line of questioning. The young man with dark complexion to his right tapped him on the shoulder, breaking his concentration. I lit another cigarette as they whispered.

  “I would make a motion that we change the topic for a moment. I would like to hear the testimony of the witness for the candidate,” the young man on the end said.

  “I concur,” said the old man. Poppy straightened in her chair.

  “Please begin,” the professor said, nodding to her.

  Poppy looked at the old man when she spoke. “It was at my home in Los Angeles—most of you know the place. I went outside to watch the fire brigades pass. I was closing the door behind me on the way back in when I heard the gunshot. I knew the shot was close but dismissed it, along with all the other shots I’ve heard in recent years. I wasn’t concerned until my servant alerted me to a loud knocking on the basement door. Gun in hand, I went down to investigate. Evan Michaels turned out to be the source of the noise. He had been shot in the foot by the police while fleeing the scene of a fire.” Poppy stopped to take a drink of water, and I noticed the rotund man I’d met at the front door the night before perk up and lean forward in his seat in the gallery.

  “I was about to fire a shot next to his head to give him a good scare when he first tipped me off. I remember he had the most peculiar reaction when I leveled the gun at him. He became angry. No, furious is a better word. He shouted over and over at me to kill him. He had this crazed look in his eye that was unnerving. ‘Kill me, kill me,’ he said. ‘I’ll probably just come back again anyway.’ Those were his exact words. That was my first clue, obviously.

  “I took him in, attended to his wound, and encouraged him to stay, in the hope I could pursue my hunch.”

  “How, precisely, did you do that?”

  “The second clue came the same night,” she said reaching under her robe. She produced a pack of cigarettes and held them out toward Diltz, who came over and handed them to the man who had been questioning me. “Can you read the Turkish on that?” she asked.

  He tilted his narrow head back so that the light from the torch on the wall behind him illuminated the pack. “ ‘The Pride of the Turks.’ Why?”

  “It used to say ‘Centuries of Flavor,’ and Evan knew that, even though the slogan changed in the 1970s. I
called the company the following day and checked. I found out later it was because he smoked those same cigarettes as Vasili while living in exile in Istanbul after the Second World War. Two days later, I took him to my funerary vault in Los Angeles and told him about myself. More accurately, he figured it out when he saw the concurrent dates on the monuments. That was the same day I called Diltz.”

  “What was his reaction when he figured it out?” the professor asked as though I were an inanimate piece of furniture.

  “He was quite visibly shaken. He sat down and was motionless for some time. After he came around, he was very inquisitive about me and about this,” she said, looking around the grotto.

  “Is it your opinion that the candidate to your right is a Reincarnationist, like us?”

  My heart quickened as the old man finished the question. Poppy turned to me as she answered. “Yes. He is one of us.”

  The panel was silent for several minutes before the old man spoke. “Let’s take a short break.”

  “I want to know about the fire,” the professor said, starting in again. “Is her story accurate? Were you at the fire she spoke of?”

  I filled my water glass and took a drink as I weighed several different stories in my head. They were all underweight. I thought better of lying by the time I finished the glass. If I got caught in a lie about the fire, it could jeopardize this whole process. That’s the trouble with lies, they have to propagate. They must procreate to cover each other. There is safety in numbers; one lie is never enough. “Yes, I was at the fire. I started it.”

  “Why did you start it?”

  “I was paid to burn the building down.” I saw the large man in the gallery come to attention again out of the corner of my eye.

  “Paid by whom?”

  “The building’s owner, Martin Shelby.”

  “How much did he pay you?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  “How did you encounter him initially?”

  “He was referred to me.”

  “By whom?” he asked impatiently.

  “A former client named Tom Preston.”

  Silence.

  “So may we assume by this that you’re a professional arsonist?”

  “It is what I do for money, yes.”

  “How many fires have you started?”

  “That I’ve been paid for?”

  “How many fires have you started?”

  I took a smoke from the pack on the table and primed my lighter. The tiny sprite flared as the cigarette started to burn. “Hundreds,” I said, closing the lid on the flame.

  Silence again.

  “How did you first get started doing it professionally?”

  I chuckled to myself. “It’s funny, the way it got started. I was caught by the police—more specifically, one cop, a crooked one. He caught me leaving an abandoned apartment building in Los Angeles. He cuffed me and put me in the back of his squad car while he ran my ID for warrants. He didn’t know then that I’d set a fire in one of the interior apartments. I had planned on watching the fire from across the street but ended up watching it from the back seat of a police car.

  “I was nervous and fidgeted as wisps of smoke crept out of the small cracks in the plywood that covered the windows. Anyway, he checked his computer, but I was clean. Of course, that didn’t stop him from keeping me there while he grilled me about what I’d been doing in an abandoned building at two in the morning. I remember him turning sideways in his seat to look at me and it taking every bit of concentration I could muster to make up a story and not get distracted by the smoke that was billowing out of the windows behind him. I told him I was scouting the site for a photography shoot. By the time I was near the end of my story, flashes of yellow were creeping toward the open front door. I knew that as soon as I stopped talking, the cop would turn around, and I’d be done for. So I kept talking. I saw flames starting at the upstairs windows and I kept talking. I was hoping I could keep him distracted. I never looked away from his eyes, even when the flames completely silhouetted his balding head. And still, I kept talking. My story had started to come apart, but I had no choice other than to keep talking. I guess I thought I could keep his attention until the whole building burned to the ground behind him. He must have seen the reflection of yellow flashes in my face or been onto my story about being Rolling Stone’s ace photographer and shooting Bruce Springsteen there next week, because he broke away from me and turned around slowly in his seat until the burning building was in full view.

  “ ‘Holy shit!’ he yelled and then threw the car into reverse. He called in the address to the fire department once he had backed up to about half a block away. ‘Photographer, my ass,’ he said. He then accused me of starting the fire in the building. I told him he had no evidence, and he said he did not need any. I did my best to convince him I had saved the city money, they were just going to tear the building down anyway.

  “He looked back at the fire for a full minute. ‘Do you a favor,’ he said, then he laughed and told me I had that part backward.

  “He made it pretty plain, really, burn down his house for him, and I got to walk away. It took me about two seconds to make up my mind, and we made the plans right there in the squad car. He told me he was in the process of a divorce and that his wife was getting the house. The judge had determined that they would split the sixty thousand dollars’ worth of equity evenly, but his wife couldn’t dole out his half all at once without selling the house, which she wouldn’t do. She was ordered to pay him a hundred dollars a month for twenty-five years, without interest. I remember the cop getting really pissed off just telling me the situation. But if his house were destroyed, by an accidental fire, for instance, he would get his thirty thousand dollars in a lump sum from the insurance company, and his wife would have nowhere to stay. He smiled at me in the rear view mirror when he said this. He took a key off his key ring and gave it to me along with a handwritten address.

  “He told me I would get my ID back the next night in exchange for the key, but only if the place was burned. Otherwise, he said he would say he found my ID on the ground next to the burning apartment building and turn me in.

  “I nodded that we had an understanding, and that was that. I did the job and met him just as we’d agreed. Everything was normal until about a week later, when I got a visitor at my hotel. The stranger explained that the boys in blue said I could help him and handed me an envelope containing an address and two thousand dollars. I had no idea what was up on the cop’s end, but I took the money and did the job just the same. The first seven or eight jobs came like that. Later on, my name just got around town, I guess, because I’ve been doing it ever since.”

  “How many jobs have you done since then?”

  “This last one, the one Poppy told you about, was my nineteenth.”

  “What was the officer’s name?”

  “Shirer.”

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  “No. Not after that night in the diner when I got my ID back.”

  “What was the name of the hotel where the first man referred by Shirer came to meet you.”

  “The Altmore. I lived there until a year ago, when I moved to the Iowa Hotel.”

  The professor shuffled with his notes. I leaned back and stretched.

  “How long have we been down here tonight?” I asked Poppy in a whisper.

  “Only two or three hours probably. Are you getting tired?”

  “No. I’m fine. I feel good. I’ve never shared most of these facts before. It’s cathartic,” I said as she winked at me.

  Ramsay leaned over and whispered to the old man. They conferred for a minute before she straightened and fixed her pale eyes on me. “Mr. Michaels, I’d like to go back and cover the time you said you spent in the Bulgarian Army during the Great War. Please be as specific and detailed as possible,�
�� she said in that familiar Slavic accent. “When were you pressed into service?”

  “In 1915, right after the attack on Romania. I was a stocky young man and was assigned to an artillery company as an ordnance handler.”

  “Did your unit ever see any action?” Ramsay asked.

  “Yes, but not until the last week of the war. But I saw enough in one night to last me a lifetime.”

  “Where did you see action?”

  I was about to respond when I felt Poppy place her hand on my arm. She leaned over and whispered close to my ear. “That one that is asking about the war, that’s Ramsay, the one I told you about in France with the duel and the cane. I think Ramsay was very active in that war, so answer carefully. Part of the trick to being verifiable is your ability to tell the stories of your lives with uncanny detail and accuracy down to the slightest point.”

  I turned back to the panel. Ramsay was still looking at me, waiting for a response. “I fought against the French and the Serbs in the Vardar River valley in the autumn of 1918, but only for a short time, as I said earlier. The entire front collapsed very quickly for us. I was only involved in one battle.”

  “Who was your commanding officer?”