Then Again

by Rick Boling

  I started to sit, then hesitated. “I’m not sure I like the idea of sharing all the gory details of my past with you,” I said with a smile.

  “That bad, huh?” She pushed on my chest until I fell into the recliner. “Well, you don’t have to worry about airing your dirty laundry. Much as I’d love to, I won’t be enjoying the show with you. I’ll be monitoring your progress, but this will be a private exhibition, for your eyes only.”

  As the chair adjusted to form-fit my body, she positioned my hands over some controls on the armrests. “Use the trackpad under your right hand to change the visual perspective,” she said. “Under your left is a slider, similar to a fader on a mixdown board. Push forward to speed up the action, pull back to slow things down. The buttons on either side of the trackpad allow you to skip ahead or back in three-month segments.”

  I felt for the slider and trackpad, then located the skip buttons. “I assume the right button is for skipping forward?” I said.

  “You assume correctly, and I suggest you use it often. A digital readout in the lower-left corner of your visual field will keep you abreast of how much real time has elapsed, so keep an eye on that and try to move along at a pretty fast clip. If you get involved in the details of too many events, the process could take days or even weeks. Remember, this is only a preview to help you choose which periods to relive during Stage Two. Now try to relax, and let me know when you’re ready.”

  I made sure my fingers were touching the controls, then gave a quick nod.

  “Okay,” she said. “We’re going to start in the delivery room.”

  I experienced a moment of claustrophobic panic as the dome descended around me, cutting off all sound. Seconds later, a brilliant flash of light left me blinking away stars. When my vision cleared, I was looking down at my mother writhing in pain on a hospital bed. Even though I couldn’t hear her screams, seeing her in agony was gut wrenching, and I stabbed at the forward skip button until I saw myself as a toddler stumbling through thick white sand toward a rolling surf. With the progress back at normal speed, I experimented with the trackpad, using it like a joystick to circle around and view the scene from various angles.

  Spellbound by the sensation of disembodied weightlessness, I watched Mom sweep me up in her arms while I struggled to release myself from her grip. She held me tight as she waded into the water, where I laughed and splashed and grabbed at her swimming cap. After wrestling with my slippery body for about five minutes, she decided she’d had enough and headed for shore.

  Back on the beach, we used paper cups and a plastic bucket to build a crude sandcastle near the edge of the water, then waited for the incoming tide to wash it away. We were rinsing sand off under the public showers when I remembered what Aurélie had said and looked at the real-time digital readout. Over an hour had passed, so I pushed forward on the slider, and soon the playback took on an eerie resemblance to the fabled near-death, life-flashing-before-your-eyes experience.

  Even at fast-forward, it was fascinating to watch myself grow and change, but I knew I would not want to start over that far back, so I used the skip button to jump past the more mundane phases of my childhood. I slowed things down again when I saw myself studying music with Carol Henderson, reveling in the replay of those innocent days before I rebelled against choir solos and stuffy opera recitals. “The Devil’s music,” Carol called it, blaming my exodus on the increasing popularity of rock & roll and R&B. She begged me to stick with the classical stuff, but the dream of stardom—a fantasy bolstered by Elvis and Chuck Berry and dozens of other emerging rock stars—was far too enticing.

  My mother, bless her heart, refused to take Carol’s side in the matter. Even though she had hoped for another Great Caruso or Mario Lanza, she believed in allowing me unfettered creative freedom. She even opened a charge account at the local music store, giving me permission to sign for all the 45s I wanted. And when my twelfth birthday rolled around, she talked my dad into buying me an electric guitar—a Gibson Les Paul Jr. with a sunburst finish. Seeing that guitar brought to mind one of my greatest regrets: that over the years I’d managed to destroy, sell, or hock dozens of instruments, each one associated with an important stage in my progression as a musician. These included the Les Paul, which today would be worth somewhere north of six grand, not to mention its sentimental value as a milestone in my development as a guitarist.

  I lingered on the scene of my dad presenting me with the Les Paul on the morning of my birthday, then skipped ahead until I approached the end of my twelfth year. And it was only then that I started thinking about points in time I might want to revisit.

  Shortly after my thirteenth birthday, I became infatuated with a girl who would change the future course of my life. Pat was older, and she not only ended my virginity, but within two short years she transformed me from a nerdy child prodigy into a street-wise rocker. She also introduced me to alcohol and drugs, laying the groundwork for the addictions that would plague me for the rest of my days. I’d forgotten how badly our affair had ended until I noticed the growing animosity between us. And, not wanting to relive our painful breakup, I skipped ahead, slowing down again in my later teens. For a while I became mesmerized, watching myself with all that youthful energy, practicing for hours a day and working with musicians I hadn’t seen in years.

  I was so absorbed in this era that I failed to keep a close eye on the digital readout, and three hours of real time passed before I reached my mid-twenties and the tumultuous period that would both define me as an artist and set the stage for my downhill slide. It was a decade that began with my decision to go solo and ran through the worst of my drug abuse; a time of free love, passionate obsession, and devastating loss that served as the prolog for my slow, steady descent into has-been obscurity.

  Morbid curiosity kept me from speeding through those years, and three more hours of real time elapsed before I noticed the subtle changes in my appearance I’d seen when Heyoka flashed through the venues of my declining solo career. I had no desire to observe my aging deterioration in detail, so I skipped ahead until I saw myself on stage at LeMusique, then pressed the button one last time, putting an end to the review.

  Reexamining the highs and lows of an entire lifetime in less than eight hours was emotionally exhausting, and I emerged from the experience weakened both mentally and physically. The headaches returned, and my listlessness and lack of energy worried Aurélie, so she had Heyoka call in the surgeon and neurologist to take a look at me. Their verdict was that my recovery had been slowed, though not derailed, and that I needed at least a week of bed rest. Aurélie insisted on two weeks, and, to make sure I complied, she moved into my room, sleeping on a rollaway bed and checking my vital signs at regular intervals. One side benefit of this arrangement was that she spent almost all her spare time with me, applying cold compresses, massaging my neck, and talking about her past to help take my mind off the pain.

  Aurélie’s early childhood had been confusing. A precocious child with savant-like intelligence, she was speaking in complete sentences before she was one year old, and had mastered simple mathematics by age two. Her parents—both alcoholics—constantly argued over religion and politics, often fighting in front of her and ignoring her questions. When they occasionally gave in to her foot-stomping demands to be heard, their answers were incomprehensible.

  Her mother, a staunch Roman Catholic, could not accept her father’s belief that all living and non-living things—people, animals, inanimate objects, even forces of nature—had a spirit. About the only thing they agreed on was that the human spirit or soul lived on after death. For her mother, this meant entering heaven or hell or purgatory; for her father, it meant crossing over into the “spirit world.” Priests versus shamans; prayer and hymns versus charms and dances; masks and body paint versus Sunday finery—all very confusing to a little girl whose emotional development hadn’t yet caught up with her extraordinary intellect.

  Her parents divorced when she was three, an
d because of their alcoholism and history of abusive behavior, she was placed in a foster home while Child Welfare agents searched for a qualified family member to assume custody. She remained in foster care until a maiden aunt on her mother’s side agreed—after a little arm-twisting—to take her in. Shortly thereafter, the aunt moved to South Dakota, where Aurélie spent the rest of her youth and young adulthood.

  Though not much more pleasant than her previous home environment (unbeknownst to the Welfare agents, the aunt also had a drinking problem) she made the best of things, entering school at the age of four, and immersing herself in her studies. She breezed through grade school and junior high, skipping several grades and advancing to high school before she turned twelve.

  A high-school physics teacher was first to recognize her unique mathematical intuition. He introduced her to Heyoka, who befriended the aunt and took the spunky young girl under his intellectual wing. At Heyoka’s urging, she began to explore the complexities of higher mathematics and quantum physics, though her rebellious nature caused her no end of problems in dealing with the conservative orthodoxy of traditional science. Heyoka paid for her to attend a private college, where she often challenged her professors, coming up with unconventional proofs of hypotheses that had confounded mathematicians for decades. This friction eventually led to her expulsion—not because she was wrong, but because jealousy and bruised egos would not allow her superiors to admit that a student could surpass them in their chosen fields.

  Her parents, who had reconciled and split several times, eventually moved to South Dakota, sniffing an opportunity to share in Heyoka’s largess. That plan would fail; however, their proximity presented Aurélie with the opportunity to visit them more often. Unfortunately, her unshakable opinions on what she referred to as “the mythology of religion,” clashed with their spiritual practices, leading to sometimes vehement arguments over her refusal to accept any belief in the supernatural. She did, however, find Heyoka’s pursuit of scientific explanations for so-called spiritual phenomena fascinating, adding her considerable skills to his in developing the procedures they were now testing on me.

  When I suggested to her that the invisible entity she called consciousness could very well be what others referred to as the spirit or soul, she agreed, with reservations.

  “I don’t mind the labels people use to describe consciousness,” she said. “But to say something is non-material or spiritual because it can’t be seen is incorrect. We can’t see subatomic particles, but we know they exist as material elements because of the evidence they leave behind as they travel. The same is true of consciousness. Even before Heyoka proved its existence as something independent of the body, many in the scientific community were warming to the idea, mainly because we’ve never been able to understand precisely what happens at the moment of death. We know the physical causes of death, but the question has always been: what is the essence of life that abandons the body? Where does it go and why? At the present time science doesn’t have the answers to those questions. That time will come, however. Just as our description of the atom went from theoretical postulation to mathematical proof to visual evidence, one day we will be able to isolate, examine, and describe consciousness in scientific terms.”

  “Speaking of labels,” I said, “what about the most famous one? I know you think belief in a supernatural god is silly, but one thing I’ve always had a problem with is that science can’t explain what started everything. Saying it was the Big Bang only begs the question: what came before? Then what came before that and so on into infinity. Even if it’s a never-ending cycle of expansion and collapse, logic seems to dictate that there had to be a beginning, something that created the original universe or at least drafted the blueprint. And since science can’t explain where it all came from except by citing unproven theoretical postulations, what’s wrong with some people calling it God?”

  “Ascribing a name to something we don’t yet understand is okay with me,” she said, “so long as we never stop trying to explain it. But when it comes to clarifying theories about the origins of the universe, you can throw logic out the window. As with quantum mechanics, standard human logic fails when we attempt to explain even basic aspects of the macro world, such as its incomprehensible distances and the anomalies of the space-time continuum.”

  Though sometimes perplexing and mildly contentious, I enjoyed our talks, and after a while it became clear that the chemical brain scrubbing was doing wonders for my overall mental acuity. Another thing I noticed was that Aurélie no longer treated me with condescending sarcasm. As a consequence, our conversations became more relaxed and personal. She would often hold my hands while I talked about the things I regretted in my past, and these were gestures that seemed to suggest affection rather than scientific curiosity.

  This new level of intimacy made it difficult for me to ignore the desire I’d managed to suppress ever since she’d convinced me sex was out of the question. I tried broaching the subject by urging her to talk about her love life, but she wouldn’t take the bait, saying only that after a few years of teenage sexual rebellion and a couple of failed love affairs in her early twenties, she’d given up on finding a mate and become absorbed in her work with Heyoka. Though her abbreviated, matter-of-fact explanation left little room for discussion, I sensed a melancholy in her voice, and it saddened me to think of her as an old maid in the making, trapped in a loveless world of intellectual isolation.

  During those two weeks, Aurélie kept me from dwelling on the playback of my life by distracting me with instructions on how things would work in Stage Two. She told me I would be in a dreamlike narcohypnosis, and that time would be compressed as it seems to be during REM sleep. Consequently, each period I chose to relive could last months or even years, while only a day or two would pass in real time. She also cautioned me against becoming too emotionally involved.

  “Your body will be in a state similar to suspended animation, but it can still be affected by the emotions you experience. You need to remember that these events have already happened and try not to let the bad stuff upset you too much. Because the stress of the procedure will tax your already fragile metabolism, we’ve decided to limit you to three trips back, each to last no longer than three years. We’ll be monitoring your physiology, watching for any negative changes, and if things start getting too stressful, we’ll have to pull you out. Otherwise, you’ll be in control of each trip’s duration. By concentrating on a keyword, you can stop and return any time you wish, so we have to think of a word that wouldn’t normally enter your mind.”

  I suggested we use “Aurélie” or “Heyoka,” but she said those names were too fresh in my memory. We finally decided on “Husereau,” assuming Heyoka’s middle name was not likely to cross my mind unless I deliberately tried to think of it.

  After we had gone over all the instructions, and I no longer showed any signs of mental fatigue, Aurélie suggested I start considering which periods I should relive. And that, she said, was a decision I would have to make on my own.

  Sword Of Damocles

  My ability to think clearly continued to improve with the daily consumption of Heyoka’s ever-changing mixture of chemicals. However, my decision-making skills didn’t seem to be enhanced at all. Aurélie said the reason I was having difficulty making these decisions was because they were more emotional than intellectual. And she was right. There were so many things I wished I could have done differently, and so many ways those actions might intertwine with other aspects of my life, that choosing which periods to relive became an enormous challenge.

  I found myself considering even relatively minor incidents, times when my selfish actions had hurt others. It was as if Aurélie’s reference to karma had stimulated a desire to make amends now that I had a second chance. I wondered if this wasn’t a last-ditch attempt to cleanse my soul; like the atheist who becomes a Christian convert on his death bed, or a corporate raider who donates his fortune to charity. Did motivation matter s
o long as the outcome proved beneficial to everyone involved?

  Those thoughts led me down a convoluted path of speculation, and I soon realized Heyoka was right when he said it would be impossible to predict the long-term consequences of my choices. Any change I made would interact with other factors in ways so complex that attempting to forecast the end result turned into an exercise in futility. Like ripples in a pond, there would be overlaps causing new perturbations that could lead to results as bad or worse than the original outcomes.

  Heyoka seemed confident in my ability to play things by ear, that all I needed were my instincts and memories to make the right choices or deal effectively with the wrong ones. That sounded good, but I still wasn’t convinced that messing around with fate would be quite so simple. Every time I considered the possible ramifications of correcting a particular transgression, I ended up slogging through a murky swamp of unpredictable possibilities.

  Some of my regrets had to do with girls I had bedded; innocent—or maybe not—adolescents whose fascination with even a minor recording star like me had combined with their naïveté to make them vulnerable. The playback had reminded me of my coldhearted attitude toward many of these young women, an attitude mostly attributable to the fact that I was stoned or drunk at the time. Several had been one-night stands, sometimes with tearful aftermaths that resulted in stalking-like pursuit from town to town. Others were girls who seemed intent on attaining bragging rights, like Old West gunslingers adding notches to their six-shooters.

  In later years, I’d crossed paths with a few of them, some happily married with kids; some who had become ‘professional’ groupies, or roadies traveling with the entourages of stars more famous than I would ever be. Still others were druggies or alcoholics, lost souls in continual pursuit of unattainable relationships with entertainers of almost any stripe. How much my uncaring indifference had contributed to their futile search for emotional fulfillment I would never know. Nor would I know what happened to the ones I’d never seen or heard from again. Had they fallen into intractable depression, maybe become self-destructive? Was I giving myself too much credit, accepting too much blame? If they’d never met me, would they have been better off, or had our encounters served as valuable life lessons?