The Reincarnationist Papers

by D. Eric Maikranz

  I looked out to sea. “It’s nice.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said, starting down. The lantern he’d left at the bottom of the tower illuminated the nautilus-like spiral of stone stairs below us.

  “What’s in there?” I asked, pointing to the narrow wooden door opposite the one leading into the house.

  “Stored goods and supplies.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Come, let us eat.”

  the hot days passed quickly. Clovis left me alone to my fishing and walks along the deserted beaches while he ceaselessly tended his garden, swept at the ever-encroaching dust, and practiced his calligraphy and swordplay. He spoke only at meals and in passing around the house. I felt he did so out of habit more than courtesy. Either way, I relished the solitude and the opportunity to live his slower pace of life for a while. Clovis came out to see me on the morning of the fifth day.

  He sat on the beach next to me. “Any luck?” The three tall, thin poles of polished bamboo stood erect in the sand.

  “Not yet.”

  “Do you mind if I try one?” he asked.

  “Please, show me how it’s done.”

  Clovis pulled up a pole and retreated back up the beach until the baited hook showed on the end of the clear line.

  “These poles look fairly new, where did you get them?” I asked.

  “They were a gift from Nusel’s father. They are easier than using nets.” He drew the pole back over his head and cast it off to the right in a sharp whipping motion. “I always have better luck farther down,” he said, settling onto the sand.

  “Clovis, I want to thank you for allowing me the time to be alone these past days.”

  “It is my way.”

  “I’m glad you suggested this. Thank you for inviting me.”

  He nodded curtly and readjusted the pole in his hands, and I sensed that my thanks somehow made him uncomfortable.

  “By the way, how are you coming with your demons?” he asked.

  I turned toward him, surprised by his direct question. His stone-like profile remained locked on the spot where the fishing line disappeared into the swells. “I’m still wrestling with them. How about yours?” I countered.

  “Mine?” he asked, the visible corner of his mouth curling into a wrinkled smile. “My demons,” he mused. “I have spurned them all, and held my demons close; lest I fall, and they lose their host.” He turned and faced me. “That one is mine,” he said with a wink.

  “Do you still feel that way?”

  “What way?”

  “That you must spurn them,” I said, pointing across the sea as though the rest of the world lay in wait beyond it.

  He nodded slowly for several seconds. “Evan, ours is an inherently lonely existence, because of what we are.”

  “And what’s that?” I asked quickly.

  He turned toward me as though surprised at my question. “Why do you ask that question of me when you already possess the answer? We are the singers of goat songs. We are Zeus’s Dioscuri sons,”34 he said, his voice rising with emotion.

  I narrowed my eyes at him, confused.

  He shook his head impatiently. “We are their victims, their hostages,” he said, pointing beyond the sea as I had done. He faced straight ahead and took a deep breath to collect himself. “It is all so different now, Evan. At times it is difficult to know where we stand in a remade world. Yes, quite difficult.

  “The Greeks and Egyptians of my youth believed in the transmigration of the soul, they believed in us, or at least the possibility of us. But those days are gone, and now the true tragedy is that their beliefs, which served us so well, have failed them so miserably. That failure is because the standards of those beliefs were too low, too tangible. You see, if their godly goals are not high enough, then the common man can stand on tipped toes and touch the top of the portico, dwarfing all gods within. At that point, the system becomes valueless and without hope. In the end, those men who, through courage, had stood as tall as their gods, eventually showed cowardice and slunk away from the mirror, not in fear, but in loathing, for their once lofty gods now showed the same tangible flaws as their aspiring worshippers.

  “Their problem with our limited divinity, if there is any divinity within us, is that they will see what we have as too modest a goal. Lately, I find myself wondering if they are not right.”

  I lay back on the warm sand and looked up into the endless blue as I absorbed his words. I looked back up the beach to the lone tower of the lighthouse and wondered if this hermitage was his answer to them.

  “Is seclusion the answer?” I asked him and then offered an answer before he could reply. “Indifference seems to be the way most of the group deal with it, barring the doors of their ivory towers against the normal world.”

  “Held hostage in those towers, of stone or ivory,” he said, nodding toward the lighthouse.

  “If a hostage in a tower, why not of ivory?” I asked.

  “Why not indeed, why not of gold?” he countered. “Are you still not within the confines of a tower? But this cuts to the heart of your quandary, does it not?”

  Even after days of idle contemplation, Clovis could still see the conflict in me. “Looking at it simply, I suppose it does. If I have the opportunity to choose the material of my cell, why would I not?” I wanted to tell him that the conditions of his exile, though beautiful, were as unacceptable to me as those of the Iowa Hotel, but I checked myself and continued. “I simply want to live as comfortably as possible.”

  “And who should blame you? If your quandary is as rudimentary as that, then you toil for naught.” His tired eyes met my questioning glance. “Why would you put yourself at peril?” he challenged. “Surely, the risk in Samas’s offer is the only thing that has deterred you up until now.”

  “Yes, but the risks do not apply to me—”

  “And the rewards are great and immediate,” he said, finishing my sentence.

  “Yes,” I conceded.

  Clovis sat up and adjusted his pole a few inches. “It is true that bodily peril holds only a limited terror for us, but there are other hazards best left untried. I know your youthful blood runs hot with want, but keep in mind that Samas knows that too. Why chance it, Evan, when all that is required of you is patience?” He stood up slowly, looking at his twitching line. “Yes, patience.”

  He pulled his pole just as the line jumped. The top of the polished cane arched toward the water in quick, jerking motions. Clovis fought his way back up the sloping beach until a red-and-yellow fish the size of my thigh emerged from the sea.

  “Grab it!” Clovis shouted.

  “It’s big enough to feed a dozen of us,” I said as I pinned it down with my knee.

  Clovis ran up to remove the hook. “This is a rare treat, my friend. These fish are delicious. This is the largest one I have brought to land in a long time,” he said, beaming with childlike excitement.

  “It looks like my services won’t be needed for a while,” I joked.

  He grabbed the fish under the gills and hefted it up. “You can prepare it if you like.”

  “Sure,” I said, pulling in the other two lines. “What do I do?”

  He held the gasping fish toward me. “Here take him. Scale and clean him, then rub salt inside the body cavity. The salt is in the storeroom. We will roast him later tonight.”

  I took the catch from him and started back up the sand. “What are you going to do?” I shouted back. He was already naked and waist-deep in the water.

  “Swim!” he shouted back, before diving underneath an approaching wave.

  the fish stopped twitching halfway up to the house. The horse tied off to the post sniffed us both as I passed. The head and tail of the fish draped over the ends of Clovis’s short kitchen table. The curved blade of the dagger effortlessly laid open the pink flesh. Flies materialized as if from nowhere as soon
as the first handful of fish entrails hit the bottom of the bucket. The sound of their frenzied buzzing filled the house. I brushed them off the fish as I worked, then hurried through the door to the tower toward the storage room for the salt. The dry hinges squealed in protest as I forced the door open.

  Rows of warped wooden shelving lined the walls to the back and bent around the corner out of sight. Open-top burlap sacks sat on the floor holding stores of various grains and seeds. Tethered, drying plants hung down from the ceiling, and one could have easily thought they had grown down naturally from errant seeds that had taken hold in the accumulated sediment on the rafters.

  I stepped in and began checking the clay jars resting nearest the door. Tilting the empty vessels over one by one, I noticed a short bottle hanging precariously on the shelf above and caught it just as it tumbled over the edge. It was clear glass streaked with black on the inside. The black-smudged cap over its wide mouth read India Ink in English inside the Arabic script running around the perimeter. It looked much the same as the squat jar I’d seen Clovis using with his brush.

  I noticed my fingertips were blackened as I stepped up onto a grain sack to put the ink bottle back. My eyes crested the top shelf to find a row of similar empty bottles close to the edge, each smudged and streaked in the same manner. I reached back to place the bottle behind them only to find more. On my toes, I could see them. The two rows of bottles beyond the first were shorter and looked hand-blown from cobalt-blue glass with narrow, fluted necks. The three rows beyond those were small, crude clay vessels, thick dust cloaked the stained black around their long-desiccated cork stoppers. All the rows stretched down around the corner.

  I stepped down off my perch and navigated through the sacks and boxes farther back into the room. Several small wooden crates lay close to the wall on the floor and bottom shelves. Halfway to the corner, I found one open. Scattered pages lie on top of its contents. As I picked it up, the obscuring dust rolled off the page in tiny avalanches to reveal Clovis’s Japanese calligraphy. I couldn’t help but smile as I thought of him, both a prisoner of the past and fugitive from the future. He seemed the picture of patience and perfection, writing stanza after stanza of his epic, each day taking only a page-length measure.

  I fanned through the pages beneath in bewilderment, unable to break away. I could not interpret the Japanese characters filling each sheet, but noticed they seemed unnaturally similar to one another. An uneasy feeling came over me as I inspected them, like shuffling through a deck of cards expecting to find a normal variety of suit and rank, only to find the two of spades following the two of spades following the two of spades. The margins were the same on each page, and identical characters appeared in exactly the same place as though they had been copied from a template instead of from memory. From memory, I thought as I stood up and stepped around the corner.

  Empty ink bottles ran down another ten feet of shelves to the back. I reached down and raised the dust-covered lid of another short crate. The brittle, yellowing edges of the pages cracked as I thumbed through them, again, each one the same. Clovis didn’t put down a single page from a larger work each day but instead stroked the same stanza every day, for countless days stretching back decade after decade.

  My head began to swim as I counted dozens of identical crates filling the shelves around the corner. Had his solitary existence shuttered from the world for centuries devolved to this? I asked myself in vain as I tried to comprehend any meaning from the madness that screamed out to me from the piles of pages.

  My eyes darted from clasp to clasp on the crates, wanting but unable to open them. I sat the ink bottle down, stooped to close the open lid, and folded the page gently into my pocket. The storeroom door creaked again as I pulled it closed.

  I walked back to the kitchen and lengthened each successive limp as I tried to outpace the anxiety that followed me out of the storeroom. I veered off to the right for the bedroom and immediately packed my possessions. I had no thoughts then except to leave that place and pursue a different future.

  My bag landed in the back of the wagon with a thump that startled the grazing horse. My breath seemed to compress in my chest as soon as I stepped back into the house. The noonday sun glowed through the thatched roofing. I grabbed the dagger that I had left next to the lifeless fish and placed it snugly in my waistband. Cane in hand, I stood in the open doorway looking for anything that I’d forgotten. I forget nothing.

  I recalled memories from Vasili’s time with horse-drawn equipment then slipped the crude bridle and simple yoke onto the horse in the same fashion Nusel had done. The beast instinctively walked to the wagon and backed up to the hitch. I strapped him in, climbed onto the seat, and cracked the reins, sending us both into the hottest part of the day.

  I saw Clovis as I turned the wagon onto the road toward Mocha. He stood naked on the beach, knee-deep in a wave that ebbed away from him. I opened my mouth but found nothing to say. I faced forward, aligned my head with that of the horse, and snapped us both to a gallop.

  i didn’t look back, but I could sense the lighthouse and the trap of his broken existence getting smaller behind me. The sun was intense and sapped the energy from me as I rode on. After several hours, the heat began to induce a strange feeling of communion with myself, not unlike that I had so often summoned through arson. The vast, lifeless expanses of sand and sea on either side seemed an appropriate metaphor for the road I was on.

  I slumped back on the bench seat, letting the reins go slack in my hands as the blazing sun and constant vibration from the road lulled me into a strange trance of acute, yet passive lucidity.

  i snapped out of my trance when the wagon lurched to a stop in front of the livery stable. Both brothers came out to tend the laboring animal. After five long minutes of gesturing, I managed to have Drusel take me to an operating telephone. Half an hour later, Samas’s voice crackled weakly through the line in a warm, full-bodied hello.

  “I’m ready,” I shouted into the receiver. “Let’s do this.”

  When Clovis uses the term “the singers of goat songs” he is likely referring to the origins of tragedy, specifically the ancient Greek meaning which is tragōidiā contracted from trag(o)-aoidiā = “goat song” from tragos = “goat” and aeidein = “to sing.”

  “We are Zeus’s Dioscuri sons.” Here Clovis is likely referring to a little-known fact about the Greek gods and twin brothers Castor and Pollux (the Dioscuri), in that they spent alternate days as gods on Olympus and as deceased mortals in Hades.

  22

  The bark of the tires against the Tunisian runway broke the shield of determined concentration I had donned when I left in the wagon. I had not thought about Clovis since then.

  I assumed that Drusel would take the wagon back to him, but what would I say when I saw Clovis again, what could I say?

  I walked out of the airport straight into the back of a dingy taxicab. I unfolded the note in my pocket and read aloud the name of the hotel Samas had given me over the phone. “Hotel Majeet.”

  The young, smiling cabbie turned in his seat to face me. “I know the place.” He pushed out his lower lip in disapproval. “I take you to a much better place. Very nice, many foreigners like you.”

  I looked at the note and read the name aloud again.

  “Okay, okay, but I think you like the other place better.”

  I remained silent and stared out the open window as he pulled out into traffic. He navigated his tiny car through the narrow, unmarked streets like an experienced ship captain who knew his maps by heart. The passing buildings of simple brick construction with their brightly hand-painted signs would have been at home in Istanbul.

  He stopped in front of an anonymous brown building with a simple Arabic inscription scrawled over the arched doorway. He looked up in the mirror and repeated the name I had read to him. “Hotel Majeet.”

  The script above the ignoble entrance
seemed to say go away to anyone not invited.

  Not caring about the cost, I peeled off a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to the cabbie, lingering only long enough to notice his approving reaction. I had taken no more than two steps away when the cabbie took off, engine racing and tires squealing around the corner and out of sight. Resting white gulls took flight at the commotion and looked down on me with curiosity. The low drone of heavy machinery growled up from the nearby port.

  The old woman waiting behind the high counter of the front room eyed me as suspiciously as the gulls had. Deep wrinkles crept out from the corners of her thin mouth and exaggerated her natural frown. Undeterred, I strode in proudly, set my bag down, and placed both hands flat on the blue-tiled countertop.

  “I would like a room, please,” I said, fully expecting her not to understand a word. The credibility of everything Samas had told me about the job seemed to hang in the lengthening silence before her response.

  “What is your name?” she asked in a cold voice. Her English came without effort as though she spoke it every day.

  I smiled wide. “Evan Michaels.”

  “Here, you’re already paid for,” she said as she placed a key and a sealed envelope on the counter between my hands. “It’s through there.” She pointed a crooked finger down the hallway to my right.

  A feeling of confidence washed over me as I took the envelope and key. “Thanks,” I said, walking past her. “I think,” I mumbled once I was down the hall and out of earshot. The match to the number six on the key chain was at the end of the hall.

  The room was spare in its furnishings, but its bare, sterile walls looked clean. A single small nightstand rested next to the white-quilted bed. A wooden chair flanked the bed on the other side. I placed the bag on the chair, stood the cane in the corner, and sat on the edge of the bed as I tore the letter open. Samas’s booming bravado-filled voice echoed in my head as I began to read.