Beforelife

by Randal Graham

  “She was a big woman,” said Ian, adrift on a sea of memory. “McBride, I mean. Not fat, really, just . . . well, large, like the matron. Animal enthusiast. Chestnut-coloured, curly hair. Huge smile. And she smelled like pine needles.” Ian chuckled to himself. He hadn’t thought of Mrs. McBride in years. He’d last seen her at a reunion. She hadn’t remembered him at all, but that was par for Ian’s course.

  “She made us memorize all the words for different groups of animals,” Ian continued. “You know, pod of whales, gaggle of geese, murder of crows, crash of rhinoceroses —”

  “Rhinoceri,” supplied Napoleon Number Six.

  “Fourth grade,” Ian mused, with the expression of a man whose car had stalled in memory lane. “Mrs. McBride was the best teacher I ever had. Field trips every week. Once she took us to Jackson’s Park to teach us orienteering. My partner — Jarrod was his name, Jarrod Bower, scrawny kid, all elbows and knees — anyway, Jarrod fell into Jackson’s Creek and got his foot stuck in the mud. You should have heard him howling about the crayfish. It took an hour before McBride found us in the woods and helped me pull him out. You should have seen —”

  Ian suddenly noticed that the level of interest being invested in his story was markedly greater than the subject of orienteering strictly justified. Seven and a half pairs of eyes were staring at him intently.23

  “Is there a problem?” Ian asked.

  “Your memories,” said Napoleon Number Five, looking puzzled. “’Ow can zey ’ave so much . . . so much detail?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Ian.

  “You recall ze names, faces, smells, ze places you went, bits of trivia from school, ze parliaments of owls, and so forth. Zis eez not normal, Ian — not even for ze princks.”

  “I don’t know,” said Ian, “They’re just my memories. What’s the big deal?”

  “He’s right, sport,” said Rhinnick, shuffling his cards idly. “You’re always telling me stories about your life — stories about your home, your job, Penny — even fiddly little details like Penny’s favourite songs, or the clothes she liked to wear. I mean to say, you even remember the name of your fifth-grade teacher and what she taught you about rhinoceroses.”

  “Fourth grade,” said Ian.

  “Rhinoceri,” said Napoleon Number Six.

  Tonto set her cards on the table and placed her hand on Ian’s forearm, biting her lip. “It’s like I told you before,” she said, “when you first manifested. Most princks have vague flashes of memory — foggy pictures that they’ve picked up from the neural flows. They’re not like the memories you’re describing, not at all. They’re usually just images, Ian, just indistinct, barely connected fuzzy images that a princk’s brain knits together into the illusion of a past life.”

  “It’s not an illusion,” said a chorus of six Napoleons, one Rhinnick, and an Ian.

  “And even those foggy flashes of memory start to fade with time,” Tonto continued.

  “Not mine!” said Rhinnick proudly, “and not Ian’s, either. We’re two of a kind,” he added, generating a round of uncomfortable throat-clearing and mumbling.

  “Ze girl is right,” said Napoleon Number One, fidgeting nervously with the hem of his robe. “Zis is very strange. I mean, myself, I can remember ze final moments before my own death — I was very weak, and lying in ze bed, I remember a few faces, puzzling images, but zey are not so, so vivid as ze stories you describe.”

  “And I remember ’aving un bébé,” said Napoleon Number Four, gazing into the middle distance. “It’s so strange,” she added, “ze child, it deed not come from ze river — it came, somehow . . . somehow from me, from my own body — but ze details I cannot recall. Zey are just — just gone.” This particular recollection was met by looks of revulsion by Rhinnick and the other Napoleons. Tonto took a moment to pat Napoleon Number Four’s shoulder before turning back toward Ian.

  “Has Dr. Peericks spoken to you about this, Ian, about the . . . the clarity of your memories?” she asked.

  “I suppose so,” said Ian, “But he didn’t seem to think that there was anything especially pecu—”

  Several things happened in the moment before Ian could put the “liar” into “peculiar.” It was one of those uncomfortably congested seconds that cannot be fully understood until the events that it contains are subsequently unpacked and sorted out by detail-oriented historians. For the sake of convenience, the events crowding into this particular moment are listed below:

  Rhinnick became aware of a slight tugging sensation such as might be produced by someone picking his pocket.

  Napoleon Number Four sneezed loudly.

  A shadow moved across Dr. Peericks’s office, a shadow that settled briefly behind the doctor’s filing cabinet, silently removed something from the drawer marked A – F, and then disappeared entirely.

  Two thousand, one hundred and forty-three miles due north of Detroit Mercy Hospice, Abe the First — founding father and supremely powerful mayor of Detroit — passed a teacup to his friend, Hammurabi, and asked a question that contained the words “change,” “woman,” “powerful,” and “memory,” not necessarily in that order. And while this might seem wholly unrelated to events transpiring in the Sharing Room (other than in a strictly temporal sense), the exchange will later be of assistance in establishing the continuity of the narrative.

  A junior economist, having just devised an ingenious scheme for ending income inequality, was given a huge raise and therefore scrapped the whole idea.

  A terrified-looking hospice patient burst into the Sharing Room shouting “Help! There’s been an attack!” before being intercepted by two Hospice Goons, who grabbed him forcefully, pinned him against the wall, and made menacing faces in the manner of Goons everywhere.

  And while the Napoleonic sneeze, the tugging at Rhinnick’s robe, the shadowy figure, the fortunes of economists, and the lunchtime conversation of ancient Detroitians are certainly worthy of further exploration, it was item number six — the panicky patient bearing tidings of an attack — that caught the attention of the lion’s share of Sharing Room Residents.

  There was a moment of stunned silence that was finally broken by Oan, who ran to the panicking patient, shooed the Goons away, and grasped the patient by his shoulders.

  “Henry,” she said, staring intently into bulging, terrified eyes, “calm down, Henry. Catch your breath, centre yourself. Now tell us . . . tell us who has been attacked.”

  The patient identified as Henry struggled to breathe between body-wrenching sobs, pulling at his own matted hair as tears flowed freely into his tangled grey beard. He had the look of a street prophet who was convinced that the end was nigh and had just realized, as the last trumpet was sounding, that he’d spent his entire life recruiting for the wrong side.

  “It . . . it was in the doctor’s archives,” said Henry, still trembling. “He’s hurt badly . . . he . . . he isn’t breathing. There’s no blood, but I could see —”

  “Is it the doctor?” Oan prompted, showing remarkable composure. “Has someone hurt the doctor?”

  “No, no, not him,” stammered Henry, blubbering messily and struggling to compose himself. “It was, it was . . . he was standing guard,” Henry continued, “you know how he loved standing guard. He was just guarding the archive door. It’s all smashed in. He isn’t breathing. There was —”

  “Who, Henry?” Oan repeated, patting Henry’s hand gently and doing her best to project calm energy. “Who was standing guard?”

  “It’s . . . it’s Zeus,” cried Henry at last. “Someone has killed Zeus!”

  * * *

  15That is, the 16,983rd year of Abe’s Dynasty. Abe had always preferred the less tyrannical (and more accurate) “Abe’s Mayoralty,” but the acronym “AM” was already taken.

  16“Hospice Goon” was an unofficial title. Officially they were kno
wn as orderlies or, when guarding, guards. They served whatever purpose was required of them, but their primary expertise lay squarely in the realm of Gooning.

  17Female Napoleons are rare, and are frequently misdiagnosed with Arc Disorder.

  18Cathedraphilia, it turns out, is a little-known (and rarely documented) fetish that features numerous sub-fetishes including those relating to bells, spires, and organs. For a more thorough discussion see Bezel Finnigan’s popular text, Building Relationships (which, coincidentally, inspired the Non-Ambiguous Title Movement in 14,386, after complaints from Finnigan’s unsuspecting readership).

  19Vexum sublimatus again.

  20More like a kid at Hanukkah, really.

  21He was the only one of the six Napoleons currently wearing a helmet. Several years ago they had read a journal article indicating that one in six Napoleons experienced serious head trauma. It was Napoleon Number Five’s turn to bear the risk.

  22Her last name featured three silent Ms and a louder-than-average B.

  23Napoleon Number Two’s left eye had plans of its own.

  Chapter 9

  There’s a broom for every corner — at least that’s what people say. But people say a lot of things, at least half of which are hogwash. People say that cheaters never prosper; that life begins at forty; that love means never having to say you’re sorry; and even — against all common experience — that you get what you pay for. There are even people who’ll claim there is death-before-life.

  A lot of people will say anything.

  The claim that there is a broom for every corner is generally made in a metaphorical sense, often by well-meaning grandparents who wish to convince a recently cast-off or generally unmarriageable grandchild that somewhere in the world, despite the best available evidence, there is a soulmate waiting to sweep said grandchild off his or her recently cast-off or generally unmarriageable feet.

  It’s kind of grandparents to say this, but it’s a lie. The truth of the matter is that corners outnumber brooms by a sizable margin.

  The axiom “there’s a corner for every broom,” while less romantic than its inverted cousin, has the virtue of reflecting a cosmic truth — that just as there is at least one corner for every broom, there is a niche for every person: a single, optimal role for every being in the universe — a unique, perfect purpose for every person to fulfill. When a person finds this purpose, magic happens. These lucky few become the Mozarts, the Gretzkys, the Hawkings, and the Shakespeares — the world-shifting pioneers whose achievements stand as beacons throughout history. But these are rare. Almost all of us, alas, fail to find our special niche, and spend our lives muddling along oblivious to our ideal role.

  In many cases this is tragic.

  Imagine if Mozart had been steered away from music. He might have been a passable pharmacist, but then the world would have missed out on some of its most soul-stirring melodies. And imagine if the woman running the express checkout lane at your corner grocer has the potential to be the greatest mathematician of your age, or maybe the world’s most gifted cellist, sculptor, immunologist, astronaut, or ballerina, but lives her life beginning to end without exploring her potential. Whether by bad luck, lack of opportunity, or the sheer malevolence of fate, she’ll have missed out on her single, perfect role. She might be a marvel of barcode scanning or a conscientious enforcer of the eight-items-or-less rule, but she would leave a tragic void in the space that ought to have been filled by her magnum opus.

  If there is a hell somewhere in the universe, it’s where an all-knowing being tells you what you could have accomplished had you taken a different path.

  There is, in fact, a corner for every broom. But most brooms spend their lives sweeping up someone else’s dirt.

  The broom, for present purposes, is Isaac. And the corner he is sweeping — the role he has occupied for as long as he can remember — is Personal Secretary to Detroit’s City Solicitor. This is not the corner Isaac was meant to sweep. But he’s not aware of that, and therein lies the problem.

  It’s not that he wasn’t suited for his position. Quite the contrary. He was a champion among clerks, the greatest office administrator and file organizer Detroit had ever known. In his first month on the job he had developed an entirely new mathematical system for the purpose of organizing the City Solicitor’s mail. In his second month he’d intuited fourteen variations of the Uncertainty Principle together with their applications for screening the City Solicitor from unwanted interruptions.24 He was a boon to the administrative arts. The City Solicitor — a notably harsh judge of others’ abilities — consistently praised Isaac’s unmatched talents, and often said that he couldn’t imagine what his own life would have been like had Isaac chosen a different career.

  This was a lie.

  The truth is that the City Solicitor could imagine — in horrifying detail — what his life would have been like had Isaac chosen a different path. He didn’t like it at all.

  More on that later.

  Despite the seemingly natural fit between the man and his position, Isaac had never sought the post of Personal Secretary to the City Solicitor. On the contrary, the City Solicitor had met Isaac at the river in the minutes following Isaac’s manifestation and whisked him away to City Hall. The City Solicitor had said that he could recognize potential, read the currents of the river, and predict when Special Minds (capital S, capital M) would wash ashore. He said that Isaac’s was such a mind, and had immediately offered Isaac a position. It was an offer Isaac couldn’t refuse. It included a massive salary and a generous benefits package (such benefits including top-notch dental coverage and the opportunity to avoid eternal imprisonment for refusing to take the offer).

  Isaac enjoyed his work immensely. It was indoors, for one thing, and involved no heavy lifting. And the City Solicitor was, despite his scaly reputation, an excellent master. He had an immensely powerful mind; he actually understood Isaac’s mathematical systems, helped to refine them, and, in moments of leisure, engaged Isaac in robust philosophical debate. Isaac couldn’t imagine a more rewarding use of his time. Even so, he couldn’t shake the gnawing sense that he’d been meant for something else. For reasons that Isaac couldn’t fathom he went to bed most evenings feeling vaguely unfulfilled.

  In his private, quiet moments Isaac would dream of heavenly bodies carving ellipses through the cosmos, of brilliant beams of light decomposing in crystal prisms, and — most inexplicably — of apples tumbling out of trees.

  But all of that was, as previously noted, reserved for Isaac’s private, quiet moments. It was fantasy, something to be swept away into the unused corners of Isaac’s vast mind. The reality, Isaac reminded himself when gripped by flights of fancy, was that Isaac was the City Solicitor’s personal secretary.

  The reality was that Isaac was late for a meeting.

  Isaac sped on soft-soled shoes through the marble corridors of Detroit’s City Hall, past the mayor’s art collection, over priceless hand-woven rugs, past shadow-veiled shelves of ancient volumes, around a corner and through a thickly engargoyled archway before stepping into the stark, dimly lit and featureless hall that led to the City Solicitor’s office. He nervously approached the office’s imposing double doors, pausing briefly to fiddle anxiously with his tie and cuffs before taking the final steps.

  He had no reason to be fearful, he reminded himself for the twelfth time in the last eighteen minutes. He had attended meetings in the City Solicitor’s office 4,168 times in the last decade alone, and none had resulted in injury. Yet a shadow of an instinct lurking somewhere in the dusty corners of Isaac’s mighty mind shuddered whenever Isaac approached these doors. It counselled flight.

  Probably glandular, Isaac reasoned.

  He’d reasoned that before. It didn’t help.

  Isaac did his best to master himself and, drawing a long, strengthening breath,
opened the doors, bowed briefly in the direction of the City Solicitor’s desk, and scurried toward the secretarial station tucked away in an alcove off to the side of the office proper.

  The City Solicitor had occupied this office — widely referred to as “the lair” — for as long as he’d been Abe’s right-hand adviser: roughly 2,500 years, give or take. It was a cavernous corner office in the upper reaches of City Hall, featuring cherry hardwood floors, elaborate hand-woven rugs, a massive, grated fireplace and floor-to-dizzyingly-high-ceiling windows facing south and west. Had this particular night not been one of those uncommonly gloomy, stormy, and starless numbers, the windows would have afforded a breathtaking view of the River Styx — a view of the river that was rivalled only by the panorama visible from the mayor’s own private terrace. As it was, the windows in the City Solicitor’s office revealed only the remorseless, pounding rain punctuated by lightning-spawned flashes of the churning, roiling cloudscape stretching out to the horizon.

  The weather wasn’t helping Isaac’s mood.

  The interior of the City Solicitor’s office was dominated by an oversized granite desk carved from a single slab of stone. Bookshelves lined with dissertations on natural science, legal and philosophical treatises, and even a few ancient scrolls thickly inscribed with spidery runes took up the majority of wall space in the room. The office also featured an assortment of display cases and pedestals exhibiting various bits of memorabilia that the Solicitor had amassed over two and a half millennia. It also housed an ornate cage fashioned of blackened wrought iron.

  Therein dwelt Cyril, the City Solicitor’s parrot.

  “Squawk,” said Cyril by way of greeting as Isaac passed.

  Attentive readers will have noted that Cyril did not go squawk. He said it. Quite distinctly. With an air of refinement. The Solicitor had taught him this in the hope that unwanted visitors would find it vaguely unsettling.