Ian had relayed the story of his first meeting with Penny to Dr. Peericks three times over the course of two therapy sessions, and each time the doctor had triple-checked the details. “Are you sure of the name of the investment firm?” he asked, “Tell me the names of all the parties,” “Why did Penny leave the firm?,” “What was wrong with the transactions?” Ian had no idea why Peericks would be so interested. It was as though he was writing a book on Memorable Anecdotes of Minor Civil Servants.
“I think that’s standard procedure,” said Tonto, pulling Ian back to the present. “The doctor has to dig for details. He’s just looking for things that’ll help him prove that your memories can’t be real: little inconsistencies, gaps, anything that will help you realize they’re not real memories. Or he could be double-checking your story against historical records. Like I told you at the river, some of the things you think you remember might be bits and pieces of someone else’s actual memories, someone who spent time re-emerged in the neural flows.”
Tonto could see a shade of doubt on Ian’s face. “Try not to worry about it, Ian,” she said. “Just co-operate with the doctor. I know it might get tiresome telling him the same stories over and over, but —”
“— but that’s not the worst of it,” Ian interrupted. “It’s . . . it’s . . . well, it’s just that Peericks thinks like you, Tonto. He doesn’t believe a word I tell him. After listening to me, taking notes and going over my answers he . . . well he starts on the theme of ‘don’t you think it’s more likely that you’ve got a mental condition?’ or ‘don’t you think we’d all remember if we’d lived another life?’ Then he starts quoting figures about the unlikelihood of death-before-life. I know you both think you’re being kind,” Ian added, somewhat grudgingly, “and I appreciate what you’re doing, but having people try to convince you that you’re crazy, well, it’s —”
“Ian,” said Tonto, failing utterly in her attempt to suppress a look of worry, “no one thinks you’re crazy. We just think that you’re, well, a little confused by the images in your mind. It’s understandable.”
“Pshaw!” said Rhinnick, who seemed to be enjoying this exchange. “What do you mean you don’t think we’re crazy? Of course you do! No need to be delicate about it. Saying that someone’s a bit ‘confused by the images in his mind’ is merely a civil way of saying ‘toys in the attic,’ ‘bats in the belt-loop,’ ‘not playing with a full —’”
“Belfry,” interjected Napoleon Number Two.
“Are you sure?” said Rhinnick, “I could’ve sworn it was deck. But have it your way, of course. The point I make is that we should call a spade a shovel. No use trying to be whatever-it’s-called, politically something-or-other. Call our memories what you like, Tonto, but when it comes down to the nub, if that’s the expression, you think all princks are loopy. Not that I’d hold that against you,” he added, not wanting to hurt his chances of holding other things against her.
“We’re just worried about you, Ian,” said Tonto, pressing Ian’s hand. “We want to help you through this. Beforelife Delusion can be rough. You’ve only just been manifested, and while you ought to be learning how to get along in the world, you’re stuck in here, convinced that you’re . . . that you’re, well, you know —”
“Dead?” said Ian. “Convinced that I’ve died and gone to Detroit? Yes I am,” he added, testily. “And I can’t see why you won’t even try to believe me, you won’t even entertain the thought that I may be right. I mean, you’ve been wrong about one thing already: my memories haven’t faded, not one bit. You said that my memories would start to fade within a few hours of leaving the river, and I still remember as much as I did on the day you found me.”
“But how do you know that, Ian?” asked Tonto, furrowing her brow. “I mean, if you’ve been forgetting things, you wouldn’t remember that you used to remember them, would you?”
“Touché!” said Napoleon Number Three, giving Tonto an appreciative leer.
“Ian used to be a policeman,” said Rhinnick, à propos of nothing.
“Pardon me?” said Tonto, taken aback.
“A policeman,” Rhinnick repeated, popping a potato whizzy mouthward and munching happily. “He was telling us about it when you arrived. Of course, you and your lot — the normals,” Rhinnick continued, his tone suggesting that he didn’t hold with normalcy in general, “you’ll dismiss it all as a fantasy. But he was an honest-to-goodness copper.”
“Well, I wasn’t so much a copper as —”
“Brave thing to be, a copper,” said Rhinnick. “Important work. I might have been one too, had my heart not drawn me elsewhere.”
“What did you do for a living?” asked Ian, eager for a change of subject.
“It’s a tragic story, really,” Rhinnick said in a low voice, leaning forward and revving up for a monologue. “My own saga is one of those epic heroic struggles you sometimes get, punctuated with heartbreak and pathos, sure to soften even the sharpest critic’s —”
“Get to ze point,” said a Napoleon or two.
“I was a funeral director,” said Rhinnick.
“Excuse me?” said Tonto, who, for obvious reasons, had never heard of a funeral.
“A funeral director,” Rhinnick repeated. “They direct funerals, obviously. A solemn sort of gathering where sick and injured people are killed off. Sent off to Detroit in style, if you catch my meaning. I’m fairly sketchy on the details, but I distinctly remember directing thousands of funerals. Posh ones, too. The tragedy should be plain to the dimmest intellect: there’s no market in Detroit for a man of my talents, however impressive.”
Ian umm-erred for a moment and made his best don’t-upset-the-mental-patients expression. “People don’t die at funerals,” he said, “they —”
“But Monsieur Rhinnick,” said Napoleon Number Three, ignoring Ian, “last week you zed zat you were — ’ow you say? — a life insurance salesman.”
“A recent revision, I expect,” said Rhinnick, waving off the interruption. “You can’t blame the Author for making changes from time to time. All good writing is rewriting,” he added, reverently.
“Pah!” snorted Napoleon Number Five, adjusting his helmet.21 “Zis business of ze Auteur, Rhinnick, eet makes no sense. So you believe what, zat ze Auteur can revise your life story whenever ’e likes?”
“I suppose he could,” said Rhinnick offhandedly, “but he wouldn’t change it in any material way, I imagine. The story’s outlined, soup to nuts. And one can see the Author’s theme. Funeral director, estate planner, life insurance salesman — the Author, in His infinite wisdom, has written me as a tragic hero; a man possessed of extraordinary talents that are useless in the afterlife. Doomed to wander the streets of Detroit unable to answer my heart’s calling.”
“Your heart’s calling was selling insurance?” said Tonto, doubtfully.
“Funeral directorship,” Rhinnick corrected, laying down his cards. “Dramatic irony,” he continued, tapping the side of his nose. “Very literary. I was once the gatekeeper to Detroit, a whatdyoucallit on mankind’s eternal journey, ushering the recently departed to their new, post-mortem lives. It’s a moment like that, mark you, when you’re biffing along merrily and exulting in life’s largesse, when fate tiptoes up behind you with a length of lead pipe. I’ve been kicked in the pants by the vicissitudes of fate and deposited here, in Detroit, where no one has even heard of funerals. And so I’m forced to seek solace in the halls of Detroit Mercy, comforted only by my penetrating intellect, my palpable machismo, and my near-legendary sexual thingummy.”
Three Napoleons sputtered tea onto the table.
“Sexual thingummy?” asked Tonto, raising a brow.
“You know what I mean,” said Rhinnick, “Sexual whatsitcalled — thingummy — the word’s fallen out of my head — it means skill. Sounds like the front end of a boat.”
“Prowess?” hazard
ed Ian.
“That’s the bunny,” said Rhinnick, “sexual prowess. Anyway, mine is legendary. It says so in my character sketch.” He patted the pockets of his robe and found a crumpled piece of paper in his right breast pocket. With a triumphant flourish, he smoothed the paper on the table, gave a theatrical ahem, and read aloud:
“Rhinnick Feynman, Our Hero. Charming, affable, wise beyond his years, uniquely handsome, possessed of a penetrating intellect, palpable machismo, and near-legendary sexual prowess. His ways are subtle and misunderstood by lesser men. Women want him, men want to be him.”
He waggled his eyebrows suggestively at Tonto.
“But you wrote that,” said Ian.
“I didn’t.”
“Yes you did.”
“No I didn’t.”
“I saw you writing it three hours ago,” said Ian. “You asked me how to spell machismo.”
“Tricky word,” Rhinnick admitted.
“Mais oui,” agreed Napoleons Two through Five.
“May we what?” asked Tonto, because someone had to.
“But the point,” said Ian, pinching the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes, “is that you wrote it. It’s not some holy revelation about your character, it’s just a napkin with —”
“It’s you who’s missing the point, chum,” said Rhinnick. “Think about it. The Author is writing me, yes? And if the Author is writing me as I’m writing my own character sketch, right, then the Author’s writing the sketch. QED, as the fellow said. Even if the words came from my pen —”
“Crayon.”
“Crayon,” Rhinnick continued, “this is a spot-on sketch of how the Author sees me. It’s not as though I’m making it up myself.”
Rhinnick leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and smiled the slightly superior smile that vegans make at the rest of us.
“But Monsieur Rhinnick,” said Napoleon Number One, who had been gazing at the ceiling with the look of a man calculating the tip on his bar bill. “How do you know ze Auteur does not see you as . . . as . . . une lunatique . . . not as a tragique ’ero at all, but as a fool who writes ’iz own self-serving sketches du characteur and worships ze Auteur?”
“Excuse me?” said Rhinnick.
“Well, if you really were, as you say, a characteur in a novel, ze auteur of zat novel might see you as some kind of relief-comique, no? Perhaps une narcissiste, a fool who haz, say, bizarre beliefs about some cosmique Auteur and an inflated sense of ’iz own role in ze story.”
An uncomfortable silence settled in the vicinity.
“Let me get this straight,” said Rhinnick after a moment, apparently unimpressed by this bit of logical jiu-jitsu. “You’re suggesting that I may have been invented by some ordinary, humdrum author who, what? Dreamt me up as a bimbo who believes that I’m a character in a different, made-up novel, and worships some other fictitious, cosmic Author who, in turn, is simply a whatsit, a figment of the real author’s imagination?”
“C’est possible,” said Napoleons Two and Six, demonstrating the Gallic shrug.
“Doubtful,” said Rhinnick after another moment of philosophical musing. “Too confusing for the readership. It’d never fly with a publisher.”
“Fair enough,” said Ian, who’d spent much of the last two weeks learning to navigate his way around ego fabularis. There was no point in arguing with Rhinnick. Most of the arguments Ian could have mustered about the Author had already been deployed by Dr. Peericks on the question of Ian’s belief in death-before-life. Ian’s hypocrisy had limits.
“Look, as much as I’m enjoying this foray into theological matters,” said Rhinnick, “we were in the middle of a game. Are we talking, or are we playing?”
“Right,” said Ian, picking up his cards and — literally, for a change — reconsidering the hand that he’d been dealt. “The bet is to me, the ball’s in the cup, the suit is spires, and the — wait, what’s the value of the card with two crossed swords?”
“Hem, hem.”
“That depends whether the trump is in ascendance or declination,” Rhinnick responded.
“Depends on what?”
“Ascendance or declination,” Rhinnick repeated. “When the trump is moving topwise, the two crossed swords are worthless.”
“Hem, hem.”
“You’re making that up,” said Ian.
“Entirely possible,” said Rhinnick. “And what if I am? It could be a legitimate rule bluff. If I can convince you to play a card out of sequence by inventing a bogus rule that —”
“Hem, hem.”
“But you said a rule bluff was only allowed when the dice are showing at least one seven and —”
“Hem, hem.”
“Who keeps hem-hemming?” Rhinnick asked as he and his fellow Brakkiteers turned in their seats and craned their necks.
“Hem, hem,” said Oan — Caring Nurturer, Lifepath Guide, and Director of Hospice Sharing Activities. She was standing by an easel at the far end of the room wearing the sort of woolly cardigan worn by people who use the word “journey” to describe personal relationships and moments of introspection. A small index card pinned to her sweater read, Hello, My name is Oan.
Her name was technically spelled “Joan,” but the J was silent and invisible.22
Despite the fact that Oan had been running (or “non-hierarchically facilitating”) hospice sharing sessions for 230 years, she had yet to master the art of calling the class to order. She was hamstrung by her philosophy, a philosophy that held that one should never impose one’s will on the “lived reality” of another. “Each of us has a lifepath,” Oan had said on many occasions, “it may intersect the path of another, but can never force another to alter course.”
Rhinnick’s lifepath, it turns out, had never led him to pay particular attention to Oan’s sessions, so he went back to shuffling his cards and stealing glances at interesting bits of Tonto.
After several additional minutes of Oan’s completely ineffective hem-hemmery, one of the Hospice Goons whistled the Sharing Room to order. All eyes (except for Rhinnick’s) finally looked in Oan’s direction.
“Good morning friends,” said Oan, “and welcome guests,” she added, smiling serially at Tonto and other DDH guides who were visiting patients. “Let us be present, let us be alive, let us be connected.” She spoke in an ethereal, mystical tone suggestive of incense and crystals. “Today our energies will be focused on the production of Vision Boards,” she continued, placing a bristol-board placard on the easel and beaming around the room.
“A Vision Board,” Oan explained, “is a way of harnessing your own positive mindforce, bringing harmony between your authentic self and the world around you. They help us manifest our own deepest desires through personal mastery of the Laws of Attraction.”
“Sacre vache,” grumbled Napoleon Number Two, rolling his eyes. “Fifty dollars says she has us doing trust falls by ze end of ze first hour.”
“I’ll take zat action,” whispered Napoleon Number One, sneaking a few Brakkit chips from Ian’s pile.
“A Vision Board,” Oan continued, “is a visual representation of those things you value in your own lived reality, a collage of images that will serve as totemic symbols of the threads you hope to weave into the tapestry of your life, the cobblestones on your chosen lifepath. For example,” she continued, opening up a magazine and indicating a picture of an owl, “an owl represents wisdom. If I want to attract wisdom into my life, I cut out the picture of the owl — like so — smear paste along the back of the picture — like so — and place it on my Vision Board — like so. The owl takes its place on my Vision Board to serve as a focal point for the universal energies we manipulate through quantum-mechanical principles. Once the Board is filled with images representing my desires, the Board serves as a medium through which I channel my own energies, to attract these things into
my life.” Oan beamed around the classroom blinking the slow, deliberate blink of the astrally projected.
“Be mindful of the Laws of Attraction,” Oan continued. “Just ask, believe, and receive. The Board channels my requests to the universe,” she added, “and the universe is listening.”
“B-b-but why, w-w-why are you asking the universe for a p-p-p-pack of owls?” stammered the visibly decrepit and befuddled hospice resident Ian knew only as Charlie. He was seated at a table near the easel, twisting the hem of his dingy, greying robe and blinking rapidly.
“That’s flock of owls,” said one of the Hospice Goons, nodding sagely.
“The poster doesn’t attract owls, Charlie,” said Oan, smiling patiently. “It attracts wisdom. The owls are symbolic, purely emblematic referents for those qualities or values I seek to weave into my life.
“I’ll tell you what, Charlie,” Oan continued. “Let us simply open ourselves to understanding the project and get started. I’ll explain as you go along.” She turned to the room at large. “Now everyone get to the cubbies and gather your paste and scissors. You’ll find magazines spread out on the tables.”
The Sharing Room came alive with the sound of dozens of mental patients chattering happily while shuffling across the rubber-matted floors in search of safety scissors, paste, and magazines. Ian, Rhinnick, Tonto, and the Napoleons stayed put, knowing that Oan would not interfere if their personal lived realities directed them to continue playing Brakkit.
“It’s a parliament, anyway,” muttered Ian, apparently to his cards.
“Parliament?” said Tonto.
“It’s not a flock of owls,” said Ian, “it’s a parliament. I learned that from Mrs. McBride in fourth grade.” Ian picked up the dice, rolled an eighteen, and rearranged his cards. All around the Sharing Room Ian’s fellow hospice patients set about the task of assembling their Vision Boards in earnest, including several male patients who’d managed to find photos of Tonto in the magazines provided. Some had already pasted the pictures onto their Vision Boards and were busily willing Tonto into their life paths.
Beforelife Page 9