She thought of calling a friend to come over, to comfort her or dispense much-needed advice, but she couldn’t bear to share the diagnosis with anyone, to hear her own panic echoing back to her over the phone.
She’d always thought of herself as a successful person. She’d worked hard, building up her own business from scratch, surviving even in a tough economy; she had raised Noah on her own, creating a cozy home for the two of them. Now she was failing at the only thing that mattered.
She opened up a new window on her laptop. She stared at the blinking cursor for a moment, then sent out a flare to the gods of the Internet:
Help. She was sure she was not the first, nor the last, person to Google that.
The Beatles, Help, YouTube
The Help, Rated PG-13-Drama. Set in Mississippi during the 1960s, a southern society girl returns from college determined to become a writer, but turns her—
Help.com. I’m a member of the flat earth society and I have to do a presentation of why other people cannot believe that the earth is flat—
She rested her head on the keyboard. Lifted it again. Fingers moving across the mouse pad, talking to the ghost in this machine.
I don’t even know what to ask—
How do I ask a girl to homecoming?
My son wants another mother—
Are moms allowed to discipline another’s child?
Another life—
The Veronicas—“In Another Life”—Lyrics—YouTube
Another Lifetime, a documentary about reincarnation including free streaming video interviews …
Ha: a new age doc. She’d seen way too many of these sorts of documentaries during the last year of her mother’s life. Her mother had been a practical woman, with a wide circle of practical friends, but when she got the diagnosis (leukemia, the worst kind), all of that went out the window as far as her friends were concerned. One by one they dropped by with brown powdery packets from Chinese homeopaths, with crystals and documentaries and pamphlets about procedures in Mexico, and Janie and her mother had humored them the best they could. She’d spent hours sitting by her mother’s bedside, holding her hand while they watched these films and made fun of them, one after the next, baloney followed by malarkey. Documentaries on channeling spirits, alchemical healing, shamanic drumming. Janie giggled through a scrim of tears as her dying, tough-minded mother used the last of her fierce energy to mock the cheesy graphics, the beaches and rainbows in these films, which offered what they couldn’t possibly deliver: hope. It was the best part of the worst days of Janie’s life, laughing with her mother over those movies. Somehow, her mother’s mockery made Janie believe that she wouldn’t need any of those kooky things. She would survive from sheer will and modern medicine. There was another experimental procedure they were trying, better than the one that caused her such painful bloating. It would be enough.
And yes (clicking now on the YouTube link, eager to distract herself from both the horror of the present and the equally unbearable past, to find something to lighten her heavy yet over-bourbonated brain), yes, there it was, on this one, too: that corny shot of the ocean waves. And there was the sun and the waterfall … and the flute, of course!—and the same deep-voiced narrator.… Was it the same guy? Was that his life’s work, narrating new age documentaries?
“A majestic cycle of life and death and life beginning anew, each with its own lessons…”
Majestic cycle of life …
Oh, her mother would have chuckled at that one. “How about that, Mom?” she said aloud, reciting the words in a faux stentorian voice: “MAJESTIC CYCLE OF LIFE!”
She paused, as if giving her mother time to answer, but there was no one there, as she very well knew.
“In the United States some groundbreaking scientific explorers have been studying reincarnation.…”
“EXPLORERS, MOM!” she shouted, aware she was amusing no one, not even the dead, but unable to stop herself from trying. It was that, or start crying, and she knew nothing good would come of that. “They’re EXPLORERS!”
“The most well-known of these explorers is Dr. Jerome Anderson—”
“I’ll bet your ASS he’s a doctor! What’s he got, a PhD in Quackery?” She hiccupped, guffawed.
“… who for many decades has been studying young children who seem to recall details from previous lives. These children, often as young as two or three, talk in specific detail about missing their previous homes and families—”
Janie pressed PAUSE. The room went silent.
Clearly, she had heard it wrong. She went back a bit.
“Dr. Jerome Anderson, who for many decades has been studying young children who seem to recall details from previous lives. These children, often as young as two or three, talk in specific detail about missing their previous homes and families—”
She pressed PAUSE again, and this time everything paused: the moving images, her mind, her breath, caught half-formed in her chest.
On the screen, she could see the profile of a head that must belong to Dr. Anderson. He had curly black hair and a striking, angular face. He was talking to a little boy who looked South Asian, a boy of three, perhaps, wearing ragged trousers. Behind the boy, a wall of bricks rose up from red mud. The image seemed grainy, as if taken decades earlier. She stared at it until, like anything stared at long enough, it became something else: Man. Boy. Place. Time.
But this was … ridiculous.
On the screen, the little boy was facing the grown man. He looked extremely uncomfortable. He probably had dysentery, she thought.
She rewound again.
“Dr. Jerome Anderson, who for many decades has been studying young children who seem to recall details from previous lives…”
She knew better than this. This was the bourbon, diluting her common sense.
She paused the image.
She had seen firsthand how the manipulative preyed upon the gullible. She knew that there was no end to what desperate people would do. And wasn’t that what Janie was now?
Then she heard it.
There was no point going to Noah’s room yet, or trying to wake him. She knew the drill. After ten minutes, the whimper would become a shriek, the shriek would turn into words: “Mama, Mama!”
She would find him twisting in the sheets, flailing, screaming. “Let me out, let me out, let me out!”
There was nothing worse than watching your own child tumbling down through the darkness and not being able to stop it. Anything was better.
Even drugs? Even this? She looked at the image on the screen.
The whimpering was becoming sharper now, the pitch heightening. Soon he would call out for her, and she would go to his side and try, unsuccessfully, to comfort him. Sleeping, drenched in sweat, he would thrash in her arms.
The doctor and the boy were still there, frozen on her computer screen. She picked up the prescription and held it in her open hand.
Somebody tell me what to do, she thought.
She sat at her kitchen table with her laptop, the prescription in her hand, her son crying in his sleep. She stared at the image on the screen, wondering when it would begin to lose its power.
Many of the subjects in our cases are born with birthmarks or birth defects that match wounds on the body of the previous personality, usually fatal wounds. One case that includes both an announcing dream and a birth defect is that of Süleyman Çaper in Turkey. His mother dreamed during her pregnancy that a man she did not recognize told her, “I was killed with a blow from a shovel. I want to stay with you and not anyone else.” When Süleyman was born, the back of his skull was partially depressed, and he also had a birthmark there. When he became able to talk, he said that he had been a miller who died when an angry customer hit him on the head. Along with other details, he gave the first name of the miller and the village where he had lived. In fact, an angry customer had killed a miller with that name in that village by hitting him on the back of the head with a shovel.
J
IM B. TUCKER, M.D., LIFE BEFORE LIFE
Eight
The packing tape yowled in protest. Anderson cut it with his teeth and closed the box, feeling as if the cardboard flaps were shutting above his head. It would be quiet in there, with his life’s work.
It had taken him months—pulling out the cases one by one to look through them again had slowed him down considerably—but the Institute was entirely packed up now, ready to be shipped.
Let the next generation of scientific seekers find his work and make of it what they will. He hoped they would. He’d gotten a letter, recently, from a colleague in Sri Lanka, where there were so many cases you could sweep them up like fish in a net.
All that evidence he had compiled. He’d been sure that the editors of the medical journals could not ignore it. As if evidence itself could be indisputable. He had misjudged human nature. He had screwed up by forgetting the human ability to reject anything it wants to—Galileo himself should have taught him that much.
From somewhere far away, or in the room, a phone began to ring.
* * *
“But I don’t understand. I thought she turned it down. Why does she want to talk?” His literary agent was saying something on the telephone, but it made no sense to him. “Does she want it or doesn’t she?”
“She’s having second thoughts. She’d want some changes and wants to make sure you’re on the same page with that. She’s one of the top editors in the field. She has a string of bestsellers under her belt. It’s very good news.”
The same page, he’d thought. Top in the field. Bestsellers. The lingo was funny to him. He pictured a huge white page slanting up like a mountain, with himself and the editor standing at the top of it, shaking hands. He’d never had to deal with people who were in the business of making money. With the academic press that had published his few books, money had hardly been discussed, but then again, nobody had read those, outside of the small community of like-minded researchers. This, he thought, was another world entirely. Thirty years ago the word bestsellers would have made him scoff; now it quickened his breath. How things had changed for him.
The editor got on the phone immediately after her assistant had announced his name.
“I couldn’t get this book out of my mind,” the editor said. Her voice was sharp and chipper at the same time. A force in the industry, his agent had said, citing a number of successful books he’d never heard of. He tried to imagine her: dark-haired, fervent, with a white, heart-shaped face, a dynamo Snow White wrapping the telephone cord around her fingers as she talked … what was he thinking? Nobody had telephone cords anymore. He was sweating like a schoolboy on a first date.
“I think a lot of people will be interested in it. But it does need some work.”
“It does?”
“Particularly the American cases.”
“The American cases?”
“Yes. They are all so old, in the seventies and eighties, and far less … dramatic. It’s an American audience, after all. So many of the other cases are set in exotic places, and that’s good, but we also need to focus more on the American stories. So people can connect.”
He cleared his throat, buying himself time. “But people can connect,” he said slowly, carefully repeating her words like a child learning to speak, or a sixty-eight-year-old losing his vocabulary. “This isn’t an American story. It’s a—” What was the word he was searching for? Something vast that contained all the planets and solar systems inside it. He couldn’t find the word so switched tactics: “It’s a story for everyone.” Gesturing widely and invisibly with his hands, as if to encompass everything he meant but couldn’t say.
“Right. But the only recent American case you have here … you know, in which the child remembers being his own great-uncle?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the other cases seem stronger somehow.”
“Well, of course.”
“Why of course?”
“When the subject is a member of the same family you can’t really verify the facts in the same way.”
“Right. What I mean is, we need one or two strong new cases. American cases. To anchor the book.”
“Oh. But—”
“Yes?”
He opened his mouth. The objections rose within him: My office is closed. I haven’t had a new case in six months.… There are not as many strong American cases, anyway. I’m not sure I can even write a cogent sentence, much less a chapter.…
“All right,” he said. “That’s fine. An American case.”
“A strong one. So we’re on the same page?”
He stifled a laugh. He was exhilarated, reckless. He was slipping down the mountain now, tumbling, head over heels. “Yes.”
Purnima Ekanayake, a girl in Sri Lanka, was born with a group of light-colored birthmarks over the left side of her chest and her lower ribs. She began talking about a previous life when she was between two and a half and three years old, but her parents did not initially pay much attention to her statements. When she was four years old, she saw a television program about the Kelaniya temple, a well-known temple that was 145 miles away, and said that she recognized it. Later, her father, a school principal, and her mother, a teacher, took a group of students to the Kelaniya temple. Purnima went with the group on the visit. While there, she said that she had lived on the other side of the river that flowed beside the temple grounds.
By the time she was six, Purnima had made some twenty statements about the previous life, describing a male incense maker who was killed in a traffic accident. She had mentioned the names of two incense brands, Ambiga and Geta Pichcha. Her parents had never heard of these, and … [none of] the shops in their town … sold those brands of incense.
A new teacher began working in Purnima’s town. He spent his weekends in Kelaniya where his wife lived. Purnima’s father told him what Purnima had said, and the teacher decided to check in Kelaniya to see if anyone had died there who matched her statements. The teacher said that Purnima’s father gave him the following items to check:
—She had lived on the other side of the river from the Kelaniya temple.
—She had made Ambiga and Geta Pichcha incense sticks.
—She was selling incense sticks on a bicycle.
—She was killed in an accident with a big vehicle.
He then went with his brother-in-law, who did not believe in reincarnation, to see if a person matching those statements could be located. They went to the Kelaniya temple and took a ferry across the river. There, they asked about incense makers and found that three small family incense businesses were in the area. The owner of one of them called his brands Ambiga and Geta Pichcha. His brother-in-law and associate, Jinadasa Perera, had been killed by a bus when he was taking incense sticks to the market on his bicycle two years before Purnima was born.
Purnima’s family visited the owner’s home soon after. There, Purnima made various comments about family members and their business that were correct, and the family accepted her as being Jinadasa reborn.
JIM B. TUCKER, M.D., LIFE BEFORE LIFE
Nine
Janie closed the book in her hand and frowned into the depths of the diner. She was waiting for a man she didn’t know, whose work was either mind shattering or total baloney, and who now held Noah’s future in the palm of his hand. And she couldn’t even get through his book.
She’d tried. The book was a serious-looking thing—she’d had to order it online, since the academic publisher that had put it out twenty years ago was now out of business, and it had cost her fifty-five dollars for the paperback. She’d picked it up again and again over the past two weeks, as she’d planned this meeting; yet whenever she focused intently on one of Anderson’s cases, her brain began to fog up with confusion.
The book was filled with case studies, children in Thailand and Lebanon and India and Myanmar and Sri Lanka who had made statements about other mothers and other homes. These children behaved in a way that was at odds w
ith their family or village cultures and sometimes had intense attachments to strangers, who lived hours away from them, whom they seemed to remember from previous lifetimes. They often had phobias. The cases were compelling and strangely familiar.… Yet how could they be true?
She found herself going over the same cases without finding any clarity of belief or disbelief. In the end she couldn’t read them at all but absorbed, like a clammy mist, the impression of something deeply unsettling. Children who seemed to remember lives spent selling jasmine or growing rice in a village somewhere in Asia until they were hit by a motorcycle, or burned by a kerosene lamp—lives that had nothing (or everything) to do with Noah.
Janie ran her fingers through her son’s soft hair, grateful for once for the television affixed to the wall above their heads. (When had restaurants joined airports in assuming their customers needed to be endlessly glued to the tube?) She pulled out the computer printout she’d tucked in the binder and looked again at the doctor’s qualifications:
Jerome Anderson
M.D.: Harvard Medical School
B.A.: Yale University, English Literature
Psychiatry Residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY
Professor of Psychiatry, University of Connecticut School of Medicine
Robert B. Angsley Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at The Institute for the Study of Previous Personalities, University of Connecticut School of Medicine
The meaning of these words was clear enough, and she clung to it: an educated man. She was simply getting another expert’s opinion. That’s all it was. And it didn’t really matter what his methods were, as long as he got results. Maybe this doctor had some sort of especially soothing approach with children, the way some people could placate horses. It was an experimental procedure. You read about things like that all the time. It didn’t matter what Noah had, or what Anderson thought he had, so long as he was cured.
She flipped through the binder she’d put together for him. It was the same type of binder she used when courting new clients, except instead of town houses and apartments, each section was marked by a colored tab signifying a year in Noah’s life. The binder had all of Noah’s information, the odd things he’d said and done: everything, except the crucial thing. She hadn’t mentioned Dr. Remson or his possible diagnosis, worried that Anderson might balk at working with a child who might be mentally ill.
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