Time Out of Mind

by John R. Maxim

  “We're back to my having lived before.” Corbin was disappointed.

  “Bear with me, Jonathan.” Don't just listen to your head and stay ignorant, is what he felt like saying, but it seemed unfair to steal Cora Starling's lines. “The full title of the book is The Search for Bridey Murphy. It raised quite a controversy back in the fifties and in some measure it's still going on. It involved a Colorado housewife and an amateur hypnotist who became the author of the book. The hypnotist had regressed the housewife to what seemed to be an earlier life. She was able to describe it in detail while entranced. She knew, for example, that she was born in Cork in 1798 and died in Belfast sixty-six years later. She knew the names of many relatives and neighbors, she could describe the shops and farms, and she related all this in a quite genuine Irish peasant idiom. She provided any number of obscure details, as you are doing, which were later verified. There doesn't seem to have been any question of fraud. None of prior conscious knowledge either. What made the tapes of her hypnotic sessions so convincing was the utterly prosaic nature of Bridey Murphy's life. It was essentially insignificant. Most people who claim to recall past lives tend to be Egyptian princes or French countesses and such. No one ever seems to recall living a past life as a plumber.”

  Corbin seemed only mildly interested. “As I recall, these memories were brushed off as the product of books she read and stories she heard as a girl. And that a lot of her details didn't check out at all.”

  “That was one argument, yes. That she was innocent of fraud but deluded. That she'd picked up her Irish folklore from Irish relatives. Her tape-recorded utterances, it was claimed, were actually a tapestry of fantasy woven from disassociated memories. But no relatives could be found who knew of any of these same details. Or who were born in Cork. Or who lived in the same little Irish village. Or who had even heard of it. The woman knew things she had no way of knowing. She knew things which were literally unknown to any living person until they were researched among long-forgotten Irish records.”

  “But,” Gwen asked, “what about the details that were wrong?”

  “Simple,” he answered. “Faulty memory. She remembered them incorrectly.”

  “That sounds a bit pat, Uncle Harry.”

  '”What would happen if I asked you to describe some marginally significant event in your own life five years ago and do it in detail? You would surely make mistakes substantive enough for me to argue that you probably weren't there. You learned those details secondhand somehow.”

  “Very well.” Gwen glanced at Corbin to see how he was taking this. “The woman in the Bridey Murphy case told the truth as she knew it. Let's say it's possible she lived before. Jonathan is telling the truth as he knows it. Do you think he's lived before or don't you?”

  “Not so fast,” he answered. “First of all, I don't think she lived before. One school of thought, to which I subscribe, is that the Bridey Murphy phenomenon and hundreds of other cases like it have nothing to do with reincarnation and are simply illustrative of ancestral memory.”

  “This argument got a lot of attention in the Chicago press,” Corbin recalled, “because the Colorado woman had family there. As I remember it, they established that she couldn't possibly have been related to a Bridey Murphy in Ireland and therefore she couldn't have had Bridey Murphy's memories.”

  “Who says so?”

  ”I would think she'd know. Or her mother or grandmother would.”

  “Not necessarily, Jonathan. Not necessarily at all. It is a rare person indeed who can confidently trace his lineage more than three generations back. The history books are loaded with illegitimate children. Da Vinci, Alexandre Dumas, William the Conqueror, Richard Wagner, to name just a few. For every acknowledged bastard there are probably hundreds more who simply have no idea. They might have been the product of adulterous affairs, they might have been adopted, they might have been bought and sold. If a child is a result of a forcible rape, he or she is hardly likely to be told. And many women have married one man while they were already carrying the child of another. Genealogy is hardly an exact science.”

  “You're saying I could be a descendant of the baby Margaret had for Tilden. That I'm Tilden's great-grandson, maybe.”

  “I'm saying it's an avenue well worth exploring. It would certainly explain a great deal. If Margaret is your lover at one level and your great-grandmother at another, a measure of ambivalence is more than understandable.”

  “My great-grandmother's name was Charlotte Whitney Corbin. There really isn't much doubt about that.”

  “She could have adopted your grandfather,” Gwen offered.

  Corbin shrugged off the suggestion. “My grandfather looked too much like her. If you saw their photographs you'd think so too. But even if that's possible, it's a hell of a big step between accepting that and accepting that I'm walking around with all of Tilden's thoughts in my head. This genetic memory business is still just a theory.”

  “Not theory, Jonathan.” Sturdevant waved a hand toward some of his psychology texts. “It's fact. Every creature, through every phase of its evolution, has stored away information from generation to generation. That's what evolution is. It's how a species adapts and develops. Memories, experiences, are also stored away in the genes. Our conscious minds prevent us from retrieving much of this information because we can't quite bring ourselves to believe that it's there. So we find other, more comfortable explanations for the odd feelings we all get. For aptitudes that are not found elsewhere in our families. For strong affinities toward particular people or places. For certain phobias that seem to have no basis in remembered experience. That's why hypnosis is often so useful in getting to the root of emotional problems. Under hypnosis, many people are enabled to recall a repressed experience and learn to deal with it.”

  “But not a past life experience.”

  “Not usually,” Sturdevant explained. “Past life experiences are easily as significant as the others but now we have another problem. If a patient is being treated by a Freudian psychiatrist, whose discipline does not embrace the notion of an alternate existence, that psychiatrist will probably not pursue any suggestion that the patient is burdened with another individual's memories. A Jungian psychiatrist, who will at least consider the possibility of a subsidiary consciousness, will continue to probe for it while the other will choose a new direction. You, Jonathan, have rejected the idea of seeing a psychiatrist altogether. You're probably correct. It would be a crapshoot at best.”

  “You said subsidiary consciousness.” Gwen Leamas frowned. “Isn't that the same as multiple personality?”

  “No. One is a subcategory of the other, as middle-distance running is to track and field. There are many forms of subsidiary consciousness, not all of which need involve prior existence. Carl Jung, however, was convinced that past lives are very much a part of all of us. That the lives each of us once lived are found in the lives we're living now. Some behaviorists find proof of that statement in the so-called idiot savant who sits down at a piano and plays a Bach prelude upon hearing it once. It shouldn't happen but it does. Retarded individuals who've had no musical training whatsoever become instant virtuosos. Idiot savants just as often become math or language prodigies. Some speak foreign languages to which they've had no exposure and certainly no training. When this happens, by the way, the retarded person is not troubled by it in the least. Unlike you and me, he doesn't look for reasons. He does no conscious rejecting. He doesn't say, I’ve never learned to do this and therefore I can't do it.’ He just does it. He is happily unencumbered by the intelligence the rest of us spend so much time tripping over.”

  “You mentioned Bach.” Gwen leaned forward, fascinated. “What about people who were authentic geniuses, not idiots? What about people like Mozart, who composed a sonata at the age of four?”

  “Or like Sir William Hamilton,” Sturdevant added, “who learned Hebrew at the age of three. But I'm not sure it's genius. Three-and four-year-olds, remember, don't reali
ze that they're not supposed to be able to do these things. In that respect they're like the mental defectives. They don't worry about where the ability came from.”

  “And you think it had to come from some remote antecedent.”

  “Where else, Gwen?”

  “Environment?”

  “There you go, tripping over your own intelligence. Genetic memory is a perfectly logical explanation of childhood prodigy and yet adults resist it because it smacks of a sort of haunting. Worse yet, fatalism. The conceit that we're all masters of our own destiny causes us to deny the simple truth that we are all products of what went before us.”

  “Still,” Gwen answered doubtfully, “these were children. Or the mentally handicapped. Jonathan's an adult.”

  “An adult who admits that for most of his life he felt a vague disorientation, as if he thought he might be someone else. That's quite common, incidentally, even though most people who have such a notion keep it to themselves.”

  “How common?” Corbin asked softly.

  “General George Patton”—Sturdevant scratched his head—“thought he'd been a warrior in many of the major battles throughout history.”

  “That's reincarnation again.”

  “Only according to Patton. I think it was something else. A better example might be T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence of Arabia. He was a product of the British upper classes and yet all his life he felt drawn to the Arabian desert. Some thought pathologically. Then there was Heinrich Schliemann, the man who located and excavated Troy at a time when everyone else believed that the city only existed in myth. Schliemann was hardly a Greek scholar, by the way. He'd been apprenticed to a German grocer when he was fourteen. And yet he could actually feel the city of Troy. He could see it. He could describe the people going about their daily lives.”

  “Like Bridey Murphy.” Gwen nodded.

  “Like Jonathan describing the Hoffman House bar. A comparatively modest vision if you don't mind my saying so and yet the principle is identical. All these people— Patton, Lawrence, the lady from Colorado, Schliemann, and our own Jonathan Corbin—have probably been carrying memories that have been recessing for many generations, perhaps hundreds of generations as in the case of Patton or Schliemann. This would not mean, however, that a Schliemann was the first of his bloodline to be affected by that particular compulsion. He may simply have been the first to do anything about it.”

  With a slow shake of his head, Jonathan Corbin stood up and wandered in the direction of the photographs on the far wall of the study.

  ”I gather you've anticipated my next thought.” Sturdevant followed him with his eyes.

  “You're about to suggest I do something about it.”

  Raymond Lesko turned off Queens. Boulevard, a bag of Chinese takeout in one arm, and walked the two blocks to his small apartment in Jackson Heights. As always when returning home at night, he stayed close to the curb, avoiding doorways and alleys such as the one from which old Mr. Makowski down the street got clubbed last December. Not that he was nervous. Since the Makowski mugging and ever since Mrs. Hannigan got beaten and tied up in her apartment last summer, Lesko had been praying that some junkie kid would be hurting enough to try to take him on one of these nights. Just for the pleasure of snapping his spine and leaving him draped across the top of a parked car. His gift to the neighborhood.

  But it wouldn't happen tonight. Muggers don't like it this cold. They don't like ice and snow under them where they can't move fast or run and where their hands and feet turn numb while they're waiting for the right patsy to come along. Not even if he played drunk, which he did some nights when he knew a couple of bums were looking him over back on the boulevard. One of these days, though. Some night one or two of those pieces of shit would make their move and Lesko's perfect teeth would be the last thing they saw before they went to meet Jesus.

  But they'd have to wait. This, Lesko decided, would be his last night in this apartment for a while. After tonight there could be someone a little more dangerous than a strung-out Queens Boulevard schtunk waiting for him. He might even have company before morning. It would depend on how nervous Dancer is getting right now and how fast he can make another connection. Which probably wouldn't be all that fast. Dancer didn't figure to keep a card file of shooters handy. Otherwise how come he had to find Lesko's name in the newspapers. '”I’m told you're a reliable sort,” Dancer said that first time. “In street jargon,” he told Lesko, “you're said to be a stand-up person.” That's stand-up guy, you asshole. Stand-up guy. “I'm looking for a trained man in need of cash, a man who can be decisive when the need arises, and a man who is dependably discreet. The precise terminology is irrelevant.”

  Dancer had said the two magic words. The first being cash. The second being discreet. Lesko was discreet all right. Discreet enough not to say a damned word to a district attorney looking to find out how Lesko's partner, Dave Katz, could have a log house up in Sullivan County and a condo down in Florida on a gold shield's salary and why he got his face shot off a minute after he took his kids back to his ex-wife's house in Bayside with Harriet looking out the window. Lesko might have let it pass except for that. Dave asked for it. Lesko kept warning him that the bums he was leaning on were going to lean back one of these times and don't give me any bullshit about how you're just doing this for your kids and to climb out of a hole after your divorce because the truth is you got greedy. It wasn't like Lesko didn't warn him that there'd be a bill. He asked for it. But not like that, not right in front of Harriet and two little kids who got their father's brains all over their clothes. Lesko had explained that to the slobs who did it. But it didn't do any good. Guys like that, they don't understand. Even the dago wise guys knew from hitting someone in front of his family, but these were Bolivians, who only know from blasting away at anything that moves and cutting out hearts like they've been doing since before Cortez. And they know from nose candy. Cocaine. Two full kilos of which the woman who was with them tried to buy him off with. The first blast of Lesko’s shotgun exploded the plastic bags she was pointing to. After that it was like shooting through a cloud.

  A stand-up person. Lesko closed his apartment door and threw the deadbolt. He placed his bag of ribs and shrimp on a Formica table and reached into a cabinet for a box of Kellogg’s Bran Flakes. From this he withdrew a palm-sized clump of aluminum foil. The front sight of a Smith & Wesson .38 had cut through one end. Lesko stripped away the rest of the foil and laid the revolver down next to his dinner. Only then did he remove his coat and hat.

  He did not seriously expect a visitor. Not tonight. More likely there would be a telephone call. If the phone rang during the night, especially if it rang late, it would almost surely be Dancer trying to find out how much he knew. Lesko wouldn't answer it. He'd let Dancer stew a while until morning. He'd get a good night's sleep while Dancer stayed awake wondering what he knew and who he was telling. It would cross Dancer's mind to send a shooter tonight, assuming he had one handy, but he wouldn't. Not until he knew more. He would call in the morning and in his oily and tight-assed little way he would demand a meeting. He would use lawyer words like breach of faith and professional ethics and then he would try to set Lesko up. He'd have to. Dancer would have to assume that Lesko was about to put the arm on him for a hell of a lot more than the fifteen grand already in his pocket. He would also expect Lesko to cover himself by stashing his notes with someone reliable. Which meant he had to get Lesko by eight in the morning, latest, one way or the other. No phone call, on the other hand, would mean that Dancer wasn't even interested in talking first. In which case there'd be someone waiting outside his door when he opened it in the morning.

  Saturday night. Lesko wondered if the Islanders were on television.

  “These memories, Jonathan,” Harry Sturdevant told him, “may be no less real than your own boyhood recollections. Accept that.”

  ”I do, I guess.” He moved a step closer to the framed photograph of Theodore Roosevelt grinning next to a ve
ry young Harry Sturdevant and Harry Sturdevant’s father. Corbin found himself wanting to smile. He didn't quite know why.

  “Is there something about Teddy Roosevelt?”

  Corbin shrugged.

  “Is it possible you knew him?’'

  ”I feel as if I did, yes. But it's probably that I've read books about him.”

  “You're rejecting again, Jonathan. Try not to make judgments. How many books, by the way? Did you make a special effort to learn about him?”

  “Not really. Now that you ask, I have picked up a book about him now and then and leafed through it. I didn't sit down and read them, though. They were too ... I don't know.”

  “Superficial?”

  ”I guess that's the word. Yes.”

  “As if they were written by someone who didn't know his subject firsthand?”

  “Yes.” Corbin lowered himself to the edge of Sturdevant's desk.

  “What was he like, Jonathan? I'd like you to try to have fun with this question. Just let your mind flow with it as you look at his photograph.”

  “Very gutsy, exciting to be around.” The beginnings of a shy smile twitched at Corbin's mouth. “More energy than anyone I ever—”

  “Even as a child?” Sturdevant had a hunch.

  ”I guess.” Corbin's smile dimmed and his expression became distant, “I know he was sickly. Asthma. I don't think he was out of the house all that much when he was real small.” ·