“Well, yeah, I suppose so,” said Vera.
“What do you mean you suppose so?”
“Sorry. I’m sure she’s fine. Totally fine. It’s just hard to explain the —”
“But where is she?” said Ian. “When can I see her again? How can you see her when you’re in Detroit and she’s —”
“I can’t tell you,” said Vera.
Ian’s heartfelt “But why not?” collided with my own “Well, dash it all!” joining forces and temporarily drowning out the background noise of the shop’s machinery.
Vera made a series of placating gestures, doing her best to make it clear that her “I can’t tell you” ought to have been liberally strewn with footnotes. We bade her continue.
“What I mean,” she began, “is that I can’t tell you very much about Penelope right now. Not without messing things up. You’ve got to realize what a delicate thing the future is. TV is tricky. There’s always a risk that I’ll misinterpret something I see — maybe give you the wrong advice, or send you down the wrong path. If we’re not careful, we could unravel the threads of the future that I’ve seen, maybe even ruin any chance you have of ever seeing Penelope again.”
Ian opened his mouth, perhaps to air objection, but suddenly cheesed it, as though a voice in his head had told him to hear this Vera out.
“Look,” she said, in conciliatory tones, “I can tell you this: I’ve seen you find Penelope. You’re supposed to find her somewhere in the city — somewhere with a lot of water, but indoors. Underground, maybe. It’s hard to say. And I’m not sure when that happens. Possibly soon. But all of the images I’ve seen are . . . well . . . they’re foggy, as though the future isn’t set. One wrong move could ruin everything.”
“But how —”
“Be patient, Ian,” said Vera. “I’ll tell you everything I know. In time. But we have to be careful. I shouldn’t have said anything about Penelope yet — not before you’ve told me who you are, and why you’re here.”
“But you know who we are and why we’re here,” said Ian.
“I know,” sighed Vera, “I know. But that’s partly because I’ve seen this meeting already — through television, I mean. You come in, you tell me who you are, you tell me about Penelope, and I do my best to help you.”
“Fine,” said Ian. “So let’s just skip to the part where —”
“We can’t,” said Vera, exasperation mounting. “Just . . . trust me. I know it seems like a waste of time. But we have to be really, really careful. I mean — I’m not sure why, but I know that it’s important that I help you find Penelope. If I don’t, bad things could happen. Really bad things. But if we mess around with the timeline we put everything at risk. So just pretend I haven’t mentioned Penelope yet, okay? Let’s just start over as though I haven’t said anything.”
“But why can’t you just —”
“Please, Ian,” she said.
Well I don’t know how you feel about all of this recent backchat from the Brown, but I had crossed the “fed up” threshold several paragraphs ago. I mean to say, it’s one thing for a chap to make an appeal for clarification, launching a motion or two for further and better particulars, but Ian had so thoroughly grilled the medium that she was becoming a medium-well. It seemed to me that if someone didn’t put a sock in all of this tedious back and forth, it might go on for a goodish deal of time, and time was not a resource we had in great profusion. I mean to say, no one wished to mention nameless looming perils at the moment, nameless looming perils being a source of some discomfort. But the truth is that there was a nameless peril in the wings, and it was looming like the dickens. The air around Detroit, if you’ll recall, was practically buzzing with aerial missiles scouring the landscape in search of Brown and his companions. It occurred to me that, while aerial drones in hot pursuit might take a bit of time to zero in on us while we were ensconced chez Medium, it was prudent not to take the thing for granted. Push along, I thought. Get down to business. Roll up the sleeves, spit on the hands, and in the Author’s name, shove the currently stalled plot from A to B before grass starts to grow beneath it.
I weighed in, hoping to create some forward momentum.
“Ian,” I said, in an unruffled, soothing voice, “kindly cheese it. If the future in which Vera predicts you’ll find Penelope must begin with a scene or two of small talk, viz, we arrive, we make introductions, and lay out the gist of our quest, then that is precisely what we’ll do. If I understand her correctly, her foreknowledge of our quest arises, at least in part, due to her prior televiewing of a preliminary meeting in which we introduce ourselves and dish the goods about Penelope. It accordingly behooves us to have a preliminary meeting in which we introduce ourselves and dish the goods about Penelope, thus laying the foundational whatnot for the conversation that we are already having. Vera has informed you that C is caused by B, and that B is caused by A. Your proposal to skip A is ill considered. You may not know it to look at me, but I’m a stickler for obeying the laws of causality.”
This appeared to strike oil. Ian tabled his objections for the moment, and I pressed Vera for some directorial notes.
“Right ho, then,” I began. “So, we’re to take it from the top?”
“That’s right,” said Vera.
“The cordial greeting, the introduction, the slice of casual chit-chat?”
“Yes,” said Vera.
“And, in the lead speaking role? That is to say, the spokesperson for our side of the conversation . . .?” I asked, although one didn’t need TV to predict the answer.
“You,” said Vera, nodding me-ward.
“Well, there we are,” I said, and flicking a nonchalant speck of dust from my terry-cloth sleeve, I got down to it.
“I am, as mentioned previously, Rhinnick Feynman. I assume that the name Plum will arise, if at all, at some future juncture which needn’t concern us now, perhaps at a time when I’ve adopted some rude disguise or pseudonym to elude creditors, or when the Author has changed my name for reasons that only He can know. But for the nonce, the name is Rhinnick. Not Plum, not Pear, not Orange.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Vera, sticking sedulously to her script.
“How do you do,” I said, nodding courteously. “The fellow at my side,” I continued, “is Ian Brown, very likely a princk, and also a copper.”
Ian winced. No doubt he was desirous of explaining, for the umpteen millionth time, that far from being a copper he was some sort of minor governmental pedant — a regulatory somethingorother — the sort of chap who might fine you five quid for failing to abate a smoky chimney. I checked him with an admonitory finger. For one thing, we’d already had enough peanut-gallerying from Ian. For another, I was convinced that if one bothered to look up “dull” in the dictionary, that would be more interesting than listening to Ian explain his job.
I navigated back to the matter at hand. “We’ve come to you, Vera, with something of a whatnot. That is to say, a problem.”
“Right,” said Vera, nodding encouragement. “Tell me what it is.”
“Ah, long story, that one. It seems that Ian here finds himself treading on one of life’s banana skins. He is, as noted earlier, either a princk like yours truly, full to the gills with recollections of the beforelife, or not a princk at all, with a brain stewed to whatsit through a procedure called a mindwipe. For further reading on the topic of mindwipes, please consult my satchel. It contains a small assortment of leading textbooks on the matter, recently swiped from the shelves of Dr. Peericks.”
I held the satchel aloft, illustratively.
“But getting back to Ian’s problem,” I continued. “The poor fish is, as your televisory powers may or may not have shown you, obsessed with this Penelope person. And Penelope, it turns out, is either his wife from the beforelife or his wife here in Detroit, from a time before this mindwipe thingummy happened. Or — j
ust to give you the full slate of options — if you believe the initial diagnosis of the whitecoats in the hospice, it’s quite possible that Penelope is merely a stray strand of memory Ian scooped from the neural flows, if neural flows are the things I’m thinking of, in which case Ian is merely a recently manifested, garden-variety loony. Suffice it to say that we found ourselves together in Detroit Mercy Hospice, faced with this hard-to-describe mystery, and — after one thing and another — we landed here with an unconscious Tonto, a bewildered Ian, and a Rhinnick struggling to explain what the dickens is going on. Exhibit D over there is Zeus, my right-hand man and gendarme, and the smallish bird beside him is Napoleon Number Four, known as Nappy.”
“Right,” said Vera, who gave the appearance of running through a mental checklist. “Now tell me what you want to know.”
I had no sooner parted my lips to carry on with the exposition when I was, to my great surprise, interrupted by an unexpected voice from stage left. The source of the interjection was the recently mentioned Nappy, who now stepped away from Zeus in order to do a bit of horning-in. I was nonplussed for the second time in about ten pages. No doubt you sympathize. I’m sure that you had, like me, written off this Napoleon as nothing more than a non-participant observer — a sort of general-purpose supporting castmate, present to add colour and interest, but not too deeply entwined in the central plot. Evidently oblivious to her allotted backstage role, Nappy butted in as follows:
“Iz ze beforelife real?” she said.
And she’d said it with a good deal of heartfelt what-do-you-call-it. The lower lip quavered, the eyes glistened with dew, and the overall demeanour spoke of one who felt she’d raised an issue of planetary importance.
“I ’ave to know,” Nappy continued, looking even more vehement — if vehement means what I think it does — than ever. “Iz it real?” she repeated. “Are zese memories zat we ’ave real, or are we-all-of-us . . . you know . . . crazy, like zey told us at ze ’ospice?” She chewed a lip or two, denoting a level of angst that was a notch above what one expects of a mental patient on the lam.
Dashed silly of her to get so worked up about the issue, if you ask me. I mean to say, she needn’t have troubled Vera with this line of questioning at all, the undersigned being fully armed with the facts required to provide a fulsome answer. “Yes, you silly girl,” I might have said, “the beforelife is real, the Author wrote it, and He wrote yours truly, Rhinnick Feynman, with full knowledge of its nature and existence. Now get back to whatever it is that you and Zeus were doing for Tonto. Important issues are being discussed.” Is the beforelife real, egad.
I say that I might have said this, but didn’t. This was not only because Nappy’s inquiry had not been addressed to me, but also because its intended audience, viz, the medium Vera, weighed in with her own rejoinder straight away.
“I don’t know,” said Vera.
“You don’t know?” said Ian, agog.
“I’m sorry. I don’t,” said Vera.
“You don’t know?” I asked, intrigued.
“No, I don’t,” said Vera.
It appeared she didn’t know. Dashed disappointing, what? I mean to say, when one consults with mediums one expects a certain amount of cryptic shilly-shallying, indicated by slippery chunks of dialogue along the lines of “the answers that you seek are heavily veiled in the mists of time,” or “the truth is obscured by the uncertain threads of whatnot.” But “I don’t know” is not generally on the menu. This straight-shooting, garden-variety ignorance unmanned me.
“But dash it,” I said, the old frustration creeping in, “why don’t you know? For one thing, the beforelife is manifestly real, patently real, as real as the teensy, winsome, button nose on your face. For another, you’re a medium. Knowing things is what you’re for. You are uniquely suited to give proof of the beforelife and put an end to Nappy’s baseless qualms. So hop to it, say I. Fire up the television, cozy up to a crystal ball, have a look at my palms, haul out your entrails, shuffle a deck of cards. Do whatever it is you do to inform yourself of material facts. Your assignment: The Beforelife, Fact or Fiction? Discuss in fifty words or less.”
“I’m sorry, Rhinnick,” said Vera, “but it doesn’t work that way. It’s just . . . it’s hard to explain.”
“Take a stab,” I said, tolerantly.
“For starters,” she began, “I’m not a princk. If there’s such a thing as the beforelife, I don’t remember it. And like I told you, TV’s complicated. It’s not like reading a book — you can’t just flip to the final chapter, see what happens, and keep poking around until you’ve found out everything you want to know. Television is more like reading individual sentences from five different books in no particular order. You get a sentence from page thirty-eight of book three, then another from page twelve of book one, followed by the very first sentence of book five, and there’s no way of knowing which page of which book is the source of what you’re reading.”
“Inefficient, what?” I said.
“And confusing,” she riposted. “It makes it almost impossible to see how anything fits together. No one scene gives you the information you need in order to see the big picture. As for whether or not some of the things I’ve seen come from the beforelife — well, I can’t really tell. There’s no way of knowing.”
“So what you’re saying,” I began, assuming the air of one of those top barristers who swoop down on addled witnesses, “is that in all of your past and future viewings, including those in which you envision your future self having a chat with someone or other, your future self has never bothered to pop in a question or two about the wheres and whens — I mean to say, ask something along the lines of “What ho, is this happening in Detroit or in the beforelife?,” or something cagey and underhanded, possibly, “Hey you, howzabout that Abe, mayor of Detroit?”
“I guess not,” said Vera.
“Might I suggest you change your mind?”
“Change my mind?”
“Well, since these conversations are, in many cases, ones that you have envisioned but not yet had in real life, perhaps you’d care to take some advice, prepare some advanced notes, and ensure that when these conversations happen you are prepared to gather intelligence. Prepare said notes, keep them handy, and allow your future self to get the goods on the beforelife. Then your current self, that is to say, the Vera we see before us, can teleview your future self getting the goods on the beforelife, and then reassure your current customers that —”
“It doesn’t work that way,” she said.
“It doesn’t?” I said.
“It doesn’t,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Well a fat lot of good this television is, then,” I said. And I was about to add, “When next you meet your future self, you can tell her from me that she’s an ass,” when Ian cut me off by re-inserting himself into the proceedings.
“But about Penelope,” he said. “You said that if we explained our problem you could —”
“Right,” said Vera, which seemed to her favourite word. “We’re good to go. I’ll tell you what I know. But this information is just for Ian,” she added, turning to self, Zeus, and Nappy. “The rest of you will have to go upstairs.”
You are, I imagine, expecting me to report that I chafed visibly at this dismissive treatment, experiencing no small measure of chagrin upon receipt of Vera’s order to toddle off. But in doing so, you’ve made a perfect bloomer. We Rhinnicks do not inflict our society on the unwilling. If one places one’s faith in a medium, seeking advice on things to come, the least that one can do is trust said medium with the procedures. If she felt that the next slab of precognitive whathaveyou had to take place one-on-one with Ian Brown, with the rest of us upstairs, then so be it. We Rhinnicks, as I think I’ve pointed out, are easygoing and broad-minded.
Zeus and Nappy appeared to share my tolerant views, and were likewise content to wi
thdraw. We accordingly right ho’d and set off in the direction indicated, Zeus and Nappy carrying Tonto toward the stairs while I followed along behind them, administering spiritual aid.
“Wait,” said Vera, calling a temporary halt. “Zeus, Nappy, just put Tonto in the bed in the larger bedroom. She’ll wake up in about two hours. Rhinnick, you’ll find pens and paper in the second drawer of the bedside table of the smaller bedroom. You’ve left your journal at the hospice, and will want to write this down.”
“Write this down?” I asked, agog.
“Yes,” said Vera, who shifted into a dreamy sort of faraway look before proceeding. “Once you get upstairs you’re going to decide that, regardless of what Tonto has told you, you were created to help the Author by providing a first draft.” Here she cheesed the faraway aspect and resumed her normal appearance. “I’m not sure what most of that means,” she added, “but I know you’ll need pen and paper.”
“Ah. Well. Pip pip, then,” I said, which wasn’t much of a reply, but it was the best I had in the circs.
“I’ve laid out clothes for each of you on the beds,” Vera added. “You can’t keep walking around in robes. They’re too conspicuous.”
Zeus swivelled his bean, met Vera’s gaze, and wrinkled a brow or two.
“You’ve laid out clothes?” he asked.
“Um-hmm,” said Vera. “Just a T-shirt and jeans for you, though. It wasn’t easy finding anything in your size.”
Well it wouldn’t be, of course. The man’s enormous.
“But how did you know that I was —” Zeus began, before stopping himself mid-sentence and allowing realization to dawn. His brow untangled and his face shone with sudden admiration.
“Wow,” he said, impressed.
“Sacre merde,” said Nappy, vulgar.
And so the four of us shoved off, leaving Vera and Ian to conduct their tête-à-tête without the interfering presence of other têtes that might gum up their conversation.
Upstairs, as predicted, we discovered a cozy nook complete with two well-appointed bedrooms, a bath, a small kitchen, and all the trimmings. I installed myself in the smaller of the bedrooms, discovered the foreshadowed pen and paper, and set to musing about the day’s events. Nappy and Zeus, as directed, carried Tonto to the larger of the bedrooms, presumably with a view to continuing with their ministrations.
Beforelife Page 28