“Ahem,” said the muffin jiggler.
“Er . . . right, sorry,” said Ian, propping himself up on his elbows. “Help yourself.”
“Right ho!” said the muffin man, who then flounced happily onto the foot of Ian’s bed.
“It’s not such a frightfully bad place, once you’ve gotten used to it,” he said, tearing off a bit of muffin. “The furry chap’s name is Fenrir,” he added, nodding toward the hamster, “but call him Fenny. Everyone does. I think he prefers it. Welcome aboard, by the way.”
He spoke with the breezy air of the sort of person who might call you “sport,” “chum,” or possibly “old bean.” He’d probably use the word “chuffed” in conversation without feeling the least bit sheepish about it.
“Er, thanks,” said Ian, still straining to catch up with current events. “I’m sorry but . . . who are you?”
“The name’s Feynman. Rhinnick Feynman. And yours?”
“Ian Brown. I don’t mean to be rude, but —”
“Terribly pleased to meet you, Ian Brown,” said Rhinnick, wiping muffin crumbs on his sleeve and extending a hand.
Ian shook it. As he did so, he noticed that he was still wearing the robe that Tonto had given him by the river.
“Sorry, but — how did I get here?” said Ian.
“Plenty of theories on that,” said Rhinnick. “Some say that in the beginning there was this great invisible chap who made the universe, and that Detroit was without form, and void, and darkness spread across the face of —”
“Sorry,” said Ian, achieving a personal best of four apologies in two pages.7 “I mean here, in this room. Where exactly are we?”
“Ah,” said Rhinnick, “Right. We’re in the hospice. Detroit Mercy. You were decanted onto the mattress late last night. Or early this morning, if you want to be technical about it. I watched your guide wheeling you in.” He’d somehow managed to add a lascivious note to the word “guide.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
“That’s Tonto,” said Ian. “My guide. She met me at the river and tried to tell me that I was —”
“Tonto,” said Rhinnick, staring into the middle distance. “Now there’s a first-rate specimen of the curvier sex, what? I mean to say, there I was, cooling my heels in the front hall and having a peep at the new arrivals, when that grade-A exhibit of local fauna floated into the field of view. I was agog, old chum. Utterly smitten. I don’t mind telling you that my eyeballs nearly left position one and ricocheted off the opposing wall. Statuesque barely does the woman justice.”
“I suppose so,” said Ian, “but —”
“What I wouldn’t do with a girl like that,” said Rhinnick, surveying the adults-only cinema of his mind. A clearer thinker might have realized that what he would do with a girl like that gave rise to a much more interesting list.
“I . . . I don’t remember how I got here,” said Ian.
“I shouldn’t expect you would,” said Rhinnick. “You were sound asleep, looking as though a couple of roosters wielding alarm clocks and bugles couldn’t have roused you, not that I suppose they’d try. A pair of Hospice Goons helped Tonto wheel you in. What’s she like, anyway? Friendly girl?”
“Fine, fine,” said Ian, “she seems nice. But listen, I need your help. I . . . I need to get out of here. I need to find Penny. We were standing together at Union Station and then . . . well, this is going to sound a bit odd, but I’m pretty sure a train ran over me. I thought I died. And then . . . well, everything went black and I was suddenly in this river, and didn’t seem to be hurt, and then Tonto came along and gave me this robe and tried to tell me —”
“Ahhh,” said Rhinnick, nodding sagely, “the shingles fall from mine eyes, if that’s the expression. Strictly metaphorical, of course — silly thing to do if you ask me, having shingles on one’s eyes, but there we are.” He then said something that sounded a good deal like “princk,” which is not a word one typically hears before breakfast.
Ian called for clarification.
“You’re a princk,” Rhinnick repeated. “A preincarnator. You did die. No doubt about it. And you can remember your beforelife.” He then hopped off Ian’s bed and stepped toward the door. He peeked through the small, square window as though ensuring the coast was clear.
“You know the truth,” he added, dropping his voice to a whisper. “I know it too. But don’t expect the huddled masses to buy into anything you or I might say on the subject. Most people think that chaps like us ought to be kitted out in those uncomfortable white waistcoats that buckle up in the back. Barmy, if you catch my meaning. Non compos mentis. They think the beforelife is a delusion; nothing more than a mere mental whatdoyoucallit.”
“That’s what Tonto said,” said Ian. “But how can they —”
“It’s no good blaming them,” said Rhinnick, stepping toward his bed. “The poor blighters can’t remember. Barely a handful of us have even the foggiest shade of a memory of our lives before the Styx. Everyone else forgets. No clue why. But if you ask most chaps around Detroit to remember the beforelife, the best they can do is shake the lemon and stare dully at the horizon. The glazed eyes, the slackened jaw, the wrinkled forehead: all the signs of a blank slate, if you catch my meaning. And if you’re particularly unlucky they’ll summon the men with the outsized butterfly nets and bung you into a cozy room with padded walls. Committed at the psychiatrist’s pleasure, I mean to say.”
Rhinnick took a seat on the edge of his bed and leaned forward. “I’ll let you in on the real secret, though,” he whispered, drawing closer. “There’s a conspiracy afoot. A dashed clever one, too. One of those — blast it, what’s the word? Clan somethingorother. Tip of my tongue. Means secretive.”
“Clandestine?” hazarded Ian.
“That’s the bunny,” said Rhinnick, “well done you. There’s a jolly well-organized, secretive, clandestine anti-beforelife conspiracy. The people in power know the truth. People right at the very top. And they’re hiding that truth by piling princks into hospices and convincing us that we’ve all misplaced our marbles. A clever bit of planning, when you think of it. Gather up all the people who know the truth, all the people who might oppose you, and bung them into loony bins like this one.”
“Loony bins?!” cried Ian, prompting Rhinnick to leap up and clap a hand over Ian’s mouth.
“Kindly cheese the hue-and-cry routine,” said Rhinnick. “The walls have ears, if you catch my meaning.”
“But . . . but this is a mental institution?” said Ian, shooing Rhinnick away. He struggled out of his covers, got out of bed, and started to pace. “When you said this was a hospice I thought it was, I don’t know, some sort of care facility. A free clinic or something. But a mental institution? I — I can’t stay here. I need to get out. I need to get back to Penny and —”
“Pfft,” said Rhinnick. “The chaps upstairs think you’re unfit to hold cutlery, let alone be unleashed for public consumption. They’ve convinced themselves that you’ve been hoarding toys in the attic. Hallucinations, imaginary friends, mysterious voices, the complete set of psychological whatsits. They’ll keep you locked away in statu quo, if that’s the expression, until they decide that you’ve been cured. Until your memory fades, you’re stuck in here with the rest of us.”
“What do you mean ‘until my memory fades’?” asked Ian.
“Standard procedure with princks,” said Rhinnick. “Their pre-Detroit memories pack their bags and head for the hills within a few weeks, leaving not the merest whiff of the beforelife in their wake. I’ll be dashed if I know why. In serious cases a rusty memory or two might hang about in your neural whatsits, cluttering up the works for a couple of years, but almost never beyond that, barring a few peculiar cases. Take yours truly, for example. A record holder. Eighty-seven years and counting, memory still as sound as whatdoyoucallit.”
“Eighty-seven?” said Ian, agog
.
“Eighty-eight next month,” said Rhinnick, smiling.
“But you don’t look a day over forty-five,” said Ian. This wasn’t flattery. Ian still thought that Rhinnick looked like a fish, but a middle-aged fish at best.
“How singular,” said Rhinnick, “but my appearance is a side issue which needn’t distract us. Steering back to the res at issue, what matters is this: you mustn’t let your memories slip away. You must take decisive action. Jot them down. Tell me about them. Do whatever you can to keep your beforelife fresh in your mind. Otherwise you’ll find that you’ll lose everything quicker than one can say amnesia.”
“But how can people forget their lives?” said Ian, slumping back into his bed. But then his thoughts rewound to the first, foggy moments after his accident. He had been confused. Disoriented. His memories had been indistinct and hazy. He’d gone minutes without remembering he was married, and he’d forgotten that Penelope had been with him at the station.
If I could forget Penny, even for a moment, then maybe my memory is fading. If Penny could slip his mind, then maybe he could forget everything. She’d been the single most important part of his life.
Including my afterlife, thought Ian, suppressing any conscious reference to the phrase “till death do us part.”
“Grnmph,” said Fenny the hamster, who failed to sense the mood.
Rhinnick plucked a raisin from his muffin and regarded it philosophically. “They used to try to cure princks on the spot,” he said, apparently to the raisin. “That’s what I’ve read, at any rate — I found a few old manuscripts while poking around in the doctor’s study. Best if you keep that strictly between us, old chap. But according to these books, it seems that ancient psychiatric quacks used to sort out princks through something-or-other called mindwiping. Something to do with bunging princks into the river and letting the water do its thing. Some clever blighter found a way to use the river’s neural flows to wipe out memories. Reset the brain, if you catch my meaning. Format the old hard drive. The chaps they chucked into the Styx were left with only a scrap or two of their pre-chucking memories, almost precisely as though they were newly manifested. Born again, as it were.”
“But they don’t do that anymore?” asked Ian, nervously.
“No, no, old chum. Fell out of favour ages ago. Most folk nowadays have never even heard of it — and if they have, they think it’s a myth. I’ll be dashed if I know why Peericks had a collection of those old volumes in his study —”
“Who?”
“Peericks,” said Rhinnick, dismissively. “Prominent loony doctor. Chief of the hospice. Bit of an ass, really, but where were we?”
“Mindwipes,” said Ian.
“Right. Mindwipes. A distant memory, now, if you’ll pardon the expression. It seems that people didn’t warm to the practice of flinging mental patients into the river. Seemed unsporting, I suppose. Dashed ineffective, too. A fairish number of mindwiped princks turned out just as they’d been before, and their memories of the beforelife slid back into the old brainpan within a few days, boomps-a-daisy.”
“But if the river can make you forget —”
Ian’s question was interrupted by a sharp knock on the door followed by the sound of jangling keys. This was followed by a second knock and a hearty cry of “Incoming!”
Rhinnick leapt onto his own bed and did his best to seem nonchalant.
The door swung open to reveal the back of a red-haired woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform, size XXL. She cruised aftward into the room, tugged a trolley through the door, came about, and smoothed her uniform amidships.
She opened her mouth, possibly to say something or to break into an aria, but you’ll never know which because Rhinnick beat her to it.
“Ah, Matron!” he said airily. “Do come in, do come in.”
The matron shot a harrumphing look in Rhinnick’s direction.
“I thought I might find you here!” she said.
“You have!” Rhinnick assured her.
“But you’re supposed to be in Dr. Peericks’s office,” said the matron. “He’s been expecting you for an hour.” This hadn’t been said in the sing-songy, schoolteacherish voice taught in the nurse practitioner’s handbook, but in the brusque, not-to-be-questioned tone of a Nurse Who Means Business — the sort of nurse who could set her own broken arm while sterilizing a bedpan and directing the birth of twins.
The matron crossed her arms, surveyed the room, and frowned a milk-curdling frown. “Hamster not fed, beds unmade, both of you a mess, and you late for your appointment. What are you playing at this time, Mr. Feynman?”
“Nothing sordid, I assure you,” said Rhinnick, adding as much hauteur as he could muster. “Ian and I were getting acquainted. I’ve been welcoming him aboard, showing him the ropes, making him feel at home and so forth. Playing the debonair and comely host. The new chap seems pleasant enough, notably generous with his muffins and mild in manner. I’m sure we’ll get on famously. And don’t bother about the hamster, Matron — Fenrir’s on a diet. Needs it, too, the fat little lump. Hasn’t run in his wheel for ages. Practically the size of a guinea pig, if guinea pigs are the ones I’m thinking of. Probably not even pigs at all, come to think of it. Have you been introduced to Ian, by the way?”
Rhinnick didn’t bother pausing for a response, or even for breath, but simply pivoted toward Ian while extending one arm nurseward, saying, “Ian, this is the matron — Chief Nurse, Wet Blanket, Scourge of Detroit Mercy. Matron, this is Ian. A pleasure to introduce you.”
“Umm, hello?” Ian ventured.
“Grnmph,” said Fenny.
“Bike rack,” said Rhinnick, which Ian thought was an odd thing for him to have said in the circumstances.
“It’s pronounced bick-EER-uck,” said the matron, stiffly.
“Ah, right,” said Rhinnick, “Matron Bick-EER-uck. My apologies. But it’s spelled ‘Bike rack,’” he added. “Regional dialect, I expect.”
“As I was saying,” harrumphed Matron Bikerack, “you’re late. You mustn’t keep the doctor waiting.” She shoved her trolley aside and strode due-Rhinnick. She pulled a cloth from her sleeve, spat in it, and wiped a muffin crumb off his face, possibly as her entry in the Least Hygienic Nursing Practice Championships. She uttered a quick “off you go” and tried to chivvy him out the door.
“I can’t be troubled at present,” Rhinnick protested, flailing wildly. “I’m entertaining a guest. Convey my regrets, Madame Matron. If Peericks requires any assurances, please inform him that I’m still as mad as a hatter, if hatters are the mad ones I’m thinking of. Off you go, now, toddle on. Don’t let us detain you. I’m sure you have pressing duties elsewhere. Chop chop.”
This didn’t go so frightfully well. The matron, in response to Rhinnick’s suggestion, did a passable impression of a bomb falling on an ammunition dump, with Rhinnick on the unhappy side of the fallout barrier. The sheer volume of the rebuke was astounding: if eyewitnesses had reported that plaster fell and walls shook, they wouldn’t have been far wrong. Drill sergeants could have taken the matron’s correspondence course. Rhinnick fled the room as quickly as his slippered feet would allow, giving Ian an apologetic “every man for himself” expression as he escaped the matron’s orbit.
There was a silence.
Planet Matron revolved slowly on its axis.
Ian winced and braced himself for the worst.
He needn’t have been so worried. In the wake of Rhinnick’s departure, Matron Bikerack settled into an amiable, non-erupting kind of mood, offering small talk and sympathetic comments as she rummaged through the suspicious-looking contrivances on her trolley. She withdrew a small, octagonal disc that she affixed to Ian’s forehead, lightly slapping his hand as he reached for it. Ian could hear a soft mechanical hum from the disc as the matron looked at her watch and counted the seconds.
It is widely a
cknowledged that the least comfortable form of conversation is the sort that takes place during a medical exam. The impulse to fill an uncomfortable silence clashes against the patient’s basic survival instinct, which strongly suggests that medical experts ought not to be distracted when attaching complicated and uncomfortable devices to one’s anatomy. The usual compromise is to chat about sports and weather.
Ian opted for a less traditional strategy.
“You have to get me out of here,” he said. “I’m not crazy,” he added, contriving to look as sane as possible. “I just need to get home and find my wife. I’m not even sure where I am, or how I’m supposed to —”
“Try to relax, dear,” said the matron. “We’ll be finished up in a jiffy.”
The disc attached to Ian’s forehead made a series of audible beeps and, unless Ian was much mistaken, a bloop.
“Oh, you poor thing,” said the matron, touching a button on her watch and tsk-tsking. “Emergent migraines. Nasty business.” She removed the disc from Ian’s forehead and placed it back on her trolley, rooted around in the trolley’s drawers, and produced a pair of pills and a cup of water. “Swallow those, love,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”
Ian regarded the pills suspiciously. One was blue. The other was red. The scene was strangely familiar.
“Let me guess,” he said, staring fixedly at the pills. “I take the blue pill and I’ll wake up in my old life, or back at the train station, as though none of this ever happened. But, if I take the red pill, I’ll still be here . . . but I’ll understand the truth or something. Is that it?”
The matron gave him a puzzled look. “Well, no, dear, not really. You take the blue pill to stop the headaches and help you sleep. You take the red pill because without it the blue one’ll bung you up like a pound of cheese.”
“Oh,” said Ian. “Thanks. I’ll pass for now. I’m feeling a bit better already.”
This was a lie, but a lie that Ian felt was justified under the circumstances. He had no idea whom he could trust, and he still wasn’t entirely clear about what was happening to him. But from what Rhinnick had told him, it seemed that people in these parts were losing their memories. Ian was no pharmacologist, but the use of pills to suppress memory seemed plausible. And he wasn’t one to accept strange medications from netherworldly nurses. He mumbled a quick apology and returned the pills to sender.
Beforelife Page 4