“When I was big.”
Anderson looked at the sun sliding through the slats onto the wooden floor, the white circles glowing on the child’s face.
“Oh. When you were big. Did you live in a different house?”
She nodded. “In Phichit.”
“I see.” He forced himself to breathe evenly. “What happened there?”
“Bad thing.”
“A bad thing happened with the rice?”
She reached over the table to the papaya bowl, grabbed a piece of papaya, and shoved it into her mouth.
“What happened, Gai?”
She smiled at them with the fruit covering her teeth, the broad orange smile of a clown. She shook her head.
They waited for a long time, but she said nothing else. Out the window, the water buffalo was no longer in sight; the sun set the bright fields on fire. Down below, the chickens chuckled at them.
“I guess that’s it, then,” Angsley said.
“Wait.”
The girl was reaching again into the bowl of papaya, and this time she took the paring knife her mother had left there. She picked it up with her imperfect hand. They were so rapt, these two grown men, watching her, they didn’t react at first—they didn’t take the knife away from the baby. They watched her pick up the doll, wrap its crude cloth fingers carefully around the knife, and with one, focused movement turn the knife toward her body, stopping just before it entered her abdomen, its point grazing the wine-colored birthmark.
It was only then that Anderson reached over, prying the knife from her tiny malformed fingers. She let him take it.
She said something else. She was looking up at him, her face urgent beneath the white powder. A ghost child, thought Anderson. A dream. And then he thought: No, she’s real. This is reality.
There was a pause.
“Well? What is it? What did she say?”
Angsley frowned slightly. “I think she said ‘The Postman.’”
* * *
It was late in the day by the time Anderson and Angsley headed back in the boat. The hired truck that had taken them to and from Phichit had let them off at the riverbank, and now they were returning silently to Bangkok. Anderson stood in the front. Next to him Angsley sat and smoked.
The boat glided past the shacks with jetties, little spirit houses perched on the ends, miniature temples built for the shelter and appeasement of ghosts; past the women bathing, the children swimming in the muddy river water.
Anderson unbuttoned his shirt. He took off his shoes and socks. He needed to feel the water sloshing his toes, splashing his ankles. He stood on the boat in his open shirt and T-shirt, the late-afternoon sun roaring on his head. Every hair on his body was standing on end.
He thought of Arjuna, begging the Hindu god Krishna to show him reality: “Reality, the fire of a thousand suns simultaneously blazing forth in the sky.” He thought of Heraclitus: a man cannot step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man. He thought of the police and coroner’s reports about the mailman from Phichit who had plunged a knife into the left side of his wife’s abdomen, killing her and cutting through three of the protecting fingers of her right hand, because she had burned the rice.
The boat driver did something to the motor and the boat skittered forward, skipping over the river, dousing them with its cooling spray.
He remembered his college self, when he and Angsley had stayed up late discussing the case of Shanti Devi and the writings of Plato and anyone else who had taken a theory of reincarnation to heart, from Origen and Henry Ford to General Patton and the Buddha. He’d thought he’d given up all that. The survival of consciousness after death: it was a holy grail or a pipe dream, unfit work for a scientist of his caliber. Yet he had been searching since then in his own way, keeping track of what J. B. Rhine’s people were doing with ESP at Duke, and exploring in his own work the connections between the mind and the body. Mental stress caused physical ailments: that much was certain; but why did some people emerge from trauma resiliently while others became plagued with night sweats and phobias? It was clear to him that genetics and environmental factors did not explain everything. He did not believe that it was a question of luck. He was searching for something else.
Something else.
Connection spawned connection in his mind, branching outward like glass shattering.
Not just nature or nurture, but something else that could cause personality quirks, phobias. Why some babies were born calm and others inconsolable. Why some children had innate attractions and abilities. Why others felt they should have been a member of the opposite sex. Why Chang, the irritable Siamese twin, who liked to drink and carouse, was so different in his nature from his easygoing, teetotaler brother, Eng. Surely the genetics and environmental factors in that case were the same. And birth defects, of course—the girl’s deformed fingers provided a clear link between this life and another one, and might even explain—
Owen.
Anderson sat down. His throat was parched; the sun had scalded him on the skin of his nose and cheeks and neck and he knew he would suffer badly later. When he closed his eyes he could see formless shapes moving quickly across a too-bright expanse of orange. The shapes coalesced into a face that was not a face, and he let himself see his child again.
Sheila had accused him of an inability to love Owen during his brief, tortured life, because he could not bring himself to hold and stroke the baby as she did. True, he couldn’t look at his son, but it was because he loved him and was so powerless to help him; he was tormented by his ignorance. Why should this happen to this child, in this way?
In the hospital before Sheila had awakened he had stroked the tiny hand of his imperfect child and he had looked into that terrible, innocent face until he couldn’t look at it any longer, or ever again. He had walked right out of the NICU and down the hallway into the maternity ward, to the window behind which the other babies slept and fussed, their bodies brightly pink with health.
Why? For no clear reason, one baby comes out the way Owen had, and others come out perfectly. What sense was there in it: what science? Could it really be simple bad luck, an unfortunate turn of chromosomal roulette? Why was this child born this way, when there were no genetic indicators, no environmental factors at all?
Unless.
He opened his eyes.
Bobby Angsley was watching him, a faint smile playing at the corners of his lips.
“I’ve been tracking this phenomenon,” Angsley said quietly. “In Nigeria. In Turkey. Alaska. Lebanon. You thought I was playing. Well, I was playing. But I was looking, too. I was listening.”
“And you heard something?”
“Mostly whispers. Stories told late at night over raki or village moonshine with visiting anthropologists … some of the women are surprisingly comely, you know, in a sexy, Margaret Mead kind of way.”
“Right.” Anderson rolled his eyes and shifted his wet feet into the sunlight.
“No, listen,” Angsley said quickly, and his intensity made Anderson look up. “Did you know there’s an Igbo village in Nigeria in which they amputate the little finger of a deceased child, asking him to come back only if he’ll live a longer life with them next time ’round? And when they subsequently have a child and that child has a deformed little finger, which apparently actually happens sometimes, they rejoice. And the Tlingit—the Tlingit of Alaska—their dying or dead appear to them in dreams, telling them which female relative’s body will give birth to them. And don’t get me started on the Druze.…” He jammed his cigarette between his lips, as if to restrain himself physically from continuing, and then took it out again. “Look, I know, it sounds like folklore. But there are cases.”
“Cases?” Anderson tried to fathom what Angsley was telling him. There were layers beneath layers. “Verifiable cases?”
“Well, I’m no Charles Darwin. I’m not a very good scientist of any kind, as it turns out. I lack … rigor.”
Anderson stared at him.
“You didn’t bring me out here just for the girl.”
Angsley looked back at him simply. “No.” His eyes were glowing with fervor.
They rounded a bend in the river, and the city appeared before them like a gift: the golden stupas of the Royal Palace, the glinting red and green temple roofs.
If they could do it … if they had verifiable cases … then they would be able to do what nobody yet had done—not William James, not John Edgar Coover at Stanford, not J. B. Rhine at Duke, who shut himself in the lab all those years with his ESP cards. They would have found evidence of the survival of consciousness after death.
“We’ll need to go back tomorrow, first thing in the morning,” Anderson said slowly. He was working it out as he spoke. “We’ll get the girl and bring her to Phichit, see what she can identify. I’ll meet you in the lobby at five thirty.”
Angsley chuckled and swore softly. “All right.”
There was a pause. Anderson could scarcely breathe. “Bobby,” Anderson murmured. “There are really other cases like this one?”
Angsley smiled. He inhaled on his cigarette and let forth a long plume of smoke.
The light on the stupas was blinding in the setting sun, but Anderson couldn’t stop looking. He could hardly wait until morning. There was so much work to be done.
* * *
“Recalculating.”
How many times had the GPS said that? Where was he?
He’d taken a wrong turn somewhere.
Anderson pulled over to the side of the muddy road and got out of the car. Trucks zoomed by him on the highway, which stank of asphalt, exhaust, a false sense of importance: America. He looked around for road signs; last he’d noticed, he’d been somewhere outside of Philadelphia. How far had he gone astray?
He tried to shake the sights and sounds of Thailand out of his head. He felt his friend’s presence near him, as if he had just left his side.
His best friend, gone now; it was all gone: the Institute, that fine edifice he and Angsley and Angsley’s money had built. And what excitement they’d had in building it, when the field was theirs to discover and the cases flowed one after the other, sending them off: to Thailand, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, India, each case compelling and new. They’d had a good ride of it, too, until Angsley died suddenly, six months after Sheila, walking up a hillside on his property in Virginia, his heart seizing and stopping, just like that.
At the wake (Catholic, traditional—Anderson should have known right then that the widow would slowly drain the money from the foundation like the blood in her husband’s veins) there was a look of surprise stamped on Angsley’s face even the funeral director hadn’t been able to erase. Oh, my friend, he had thought, looking at that familiar body plumped with formaldehyde, rouge on its cheeks, headed for the family mausoleum—not the burial you’d imagined, your old bones bare on a cliff, gleaming in the sun.
Oh, my friend. You beat me to it. Now you know, and I don’t.
Angsley was dead. The Institute was closed, its files shipped off. There was only one thing left to do, only one more case to investigate. All he had to do was finish it.
Sixteen
Ashview, Virginia, made Janie nervous. It was a suburb of D.C., full of the kind of Stepford McMansions she had always scorned: homes lacking any sense of history, taking up every inch of the space allotted with vast unwieldy garages. And yet … she had to admit there might be something enticing, for a child, in these new, oversize houses, the large bright green front yards, the oak trees that lined the streets too neatly, their green branches arching over the road.
They had driven down the main street a few times. They stopped by three different schools (one of which, apparently, was Tommy Moran’s). Each was appealing in its own way, with its large ball field and playground.
“Do you recognize anything?” Anderson kept asking, but Noah said nothing. He seemed stunned, distracted, watching the buildings from the backseat, murmuring to himself every now and then in a singsong voice: “Ash-view, Ash-view.”
“We’ve been through here already,” Janie said to Anderson.
He had picked them up at the station and proceeded directly downtown.
“One more time. We’ll take a different route.”
He wheeled the car around and they headed back through the town’s thoroughfare. Janie had it memorized by now. Starbucks, pizza place, church, church, bank, gas station, hardware store, town hall, fire department: sliding by again and again like a town in a dream.
She glanced at Anderson. He drove stiffly, his jaw set with a stubborn resolve. He had twenty-four years on her and sixty-four on Noah, and there was no sign of fatigue in him. “I’m not sure he recognizes anything.”
“That’s not unusual. Some children are more attached to the actual house than the town. People remember different things.”
* * *
At last he reached a gate. Anderson conferred with a guard who checked a list and then waved them through. They proceeded slowly down a street flanked by even larger, newer homes. A golf course gleamed in the hills beyond them. Anderson pulled up to a huge brick home that reminded Janie of a plain woman burdened with too many accessories. The only sign of human life was a plastic dump truck by the stone path to the front door, its wheels in the air like an upended beetle.
They sat silently in the car. Janie watched her son in the rearview mirror. His expression was unreadable to her.
“Well,” Anderson said at last. “Here we are.”
“They’re rich,” Janie said suddenly. “Tommy was rich.” She felt it like a blow.
“It seems so.” Anderson managed a tense smile.
Well, no wonder Noah wanted to come back here, she thought. Who wouldn’t? So what if the house was poorly designed—who could be happy with a small two bedroom on the garden level when you’d had this?
Anderson turned toward Noah in the backseat and his face and voice softened. “Does anything seem familiar to you, Noah?”
Noah looked back at him. He seemed a bit glazed over. “I don’t know.”
Anderson nodded. “Why don’t we go in and find out?”
Noah seemed to rouse himself. He unlatched his car seat himself and scrambled from the car and up the stone path.
A man in a polo shirt and crisp khaki slacks opened the door. He had a ruddy, exasperated face and limp red hair, and looked at them all with the dismay of a diabetic facing a troop of cookie-bearing Girl Scouts. Janie tried not to stare at him or at Noah, who was inspecting the man’s boat shoes. She restrained herself from saying, “Sweetie, is this your daddy from another life?” and then almost started giggling from sheer nerves.
The man glowered at them. “I guess you all ought to come in,” he said at last, stepping back and holding the door partially open so that they had to angle their bodies to enter. The foyer was the size of her living room in Brooklyn. “Just so you know, I’m not on board with any of this,” he continued. “So if you’re expecting any compensation, let me tell—”
“We don’t want negotiations,” Anderson said firmly. Janie realized that he must be nervous, too. He was gripping his briefcase tightly in his hand.
The man squinted. “Excuse me?”
“I meant—compensation.”
“Right.” He waved them into an expansive great room. Janie tried to relax and simply breathe; there was the scent of something sweet baking in the air, and also something citrusy and antiseptic underneath that caught in her chest. From somewhere deep in the home a vacuum cleaner hummed.
The room was decorated in a tasteful, neutral way with luxurious beige furniture and framed prints of flowers on the walls. Through the sliding glass doors in the back of the room she could glimpse a large pool covered with a heavy gray tarp. It looked like a scab in the middle of the backyard.
“You’re here!” A tiny blond woman smiled at them warmly from a balcony overlooking the room. She was balancing a hugely plump baby of
about a year on her hip as if he were made of air. She was pretty, with a round face and fine, delicate features.
The woman joined the three of them standing awkwardly in front of the fireplace. She smiled graciously at Janie and Anderson, as if they had come for tea, and gave each of them in turn her soft hand. Her hair was held neatly at the nape of her neck with a cloisonné hair clip that, Janie noted, perfectly matched her silken, canary-yellow blouse.
“Thanks for coming all this way,” she said. “I’m Melissa.”
Melissa turned to Noah and extended her hand to him as well. He shook it solemnly. The whole room watched them without breathing, the skeptical husband from the doorway, the two anxious adults. Noah scuffed his feet shyly against the carpeting, and Janie noticed unhappily that his left sneaker was sprouting a little hole near the toe. Yet another thing she hadn’t been able to stay on top of.
Melissa smiled sweetly at Noah. “Do you like oatmeal raisin cookies?” Her voice was light and high, like a preschool teacher. Noah nodded, looking up at her with wide eyes.
“I thought you would.” She adjusted her grasp on the baby, jiggling him in her arms. “They’ll be ready soon. I made mint lemonade, too, if you’d like some.”
She was so appealing, with her bright blond hair and wide smile … like Noah. Any stranger would assume she was the boy’s mother. She was the mom you’d pick from a catalog: I want that one. Anyone would want to go back to this big house and sweet-faced, cookie-making mom. Janie crossed her arms. The skin on the backs of her upper arms was slightly nubby, a medical condition that never quite went away. Noah had the same problem. She wanted to reach out and feel the familiar roughness on his upper arms. He’s mine, she thought. There’s the proof.
“Sit down, won’t you?” Melissa implored, and they all sank as one into the curving couch. Melissa put the baby on the floor, and they watched him pull himself around the furniture on his pudgy, wobbly feet. Noah pressed himself against Janie, subdued, his head bent down, eyes unreadable beneath half-closed lids. She tried to soak in the warmth of his body against hers.
Anderson opened his briefcase and took out a piece of paper. “I have a list of statements that Noah made, if you wouldn’t mind going over them to see what corresponds—”
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