They quickly discovered that a man named Fuad, who had a house on that road before dying ten years prior to Nazih’s birth, seemed to fit Nazih’s statements. Fuad’s widow asked Nazih, “Who built the foundation of this gate at the entrance of the house?” and Nazih correctly answered, “A man from the Faraj family.” The group then went into the house, where Nazih correctly described how Fuad had kept his weapons in a cupboard. The widow asked him if she had had an accident at their previous home, and Nazih gave accurate details of her accident. She also asked if he remembered what had made their young daughter seriously ill, and Nazih correctly responded that she had accidentally taken some of her father’s pills. He also accurately described a couple of other incidents from the previous personality’s life. The widow and her five children were all very impressed with the knowledge that Nazih demonstrated, and they were all convinced that he was the rebirth of Fuad.
Soon after that meeting, Nazih visited Fuad’s brother, Sheikh Adeeb. When Nazih saw him, he ran up saying, “Here comes my brother Adeeb.” Sheikh Adeeb asked Nazih for proof that he was his brother, and Nazih said, “I gave you a Checki 16.” A Checki 16 is a type of pistol from Czechoslovakia that is not common in Lebanon, and Fuad had indeed given his brother one. Sheik Adeeb then asked Nazih where his original house was, and Nazih led him down the road until he said correctly, “This is the house of my father and this [the next house] is my first house.” They went in the latter house, where Fuad’s first wife still lived, and when Sheikh Adeeb later asked who she was, Nazih correctly gave her name.
JIM B. TUCKER, M.D., LIFE BEFORE LIFE
Twenty-Eight
Paul Clifford woke up slowly and took stock of himself. Another day and he was intact—more or less. Maybe his nose was broken; it was sore as hell and he could feel dried blood itching like crazy on his upper lip. Probably not, though. He’d always been lucky that way. He’d get into some kinda deeply fucked-up mess and black out and then he’d wake up and find himself still alive on this shithole of a planet. A disappointing development, as his old AA sponsor had said to him once, when he called him in the middle of a particularly epic binge. Today he was lying facedown on concrete, not dirt or carpet. That meant he was in his mother’s basement.
There was an ache near his balls and he realized it was a Ping-Pong paddle. He must have tripped against the table and fallen the night before and lay where he fell. His lip, too, felt funny, swollen; he moved his tongue around his mouth. It tasted like blood and dirt and bad breath and throw-up. There was a bit of vomit stuck to his hair, though he couldn’t see how he’d had anything to vomit. He hadn’t eaten anything solid in days.
He lifted his head. It was killing him, of course. He set it down gently on the cool concrete. It felt nice, like a pillow. Maybe he’d stay there a while. He couldn’t remember what happened and who he’d fought with, but he had a feeling that it was well after noon and he’d royally screwed up again. No way Mr. Kim would take him back at the gas station now. That meant Jimmy would probably kick him out. He was behind on rent, though paying rent for somebody’s couch never had sat right with him, anyway. He was getting ripped off, anyway, right? So who cares?
The job at the gas station wasn’t too bad, though; the people coming and going kept his mind busy. When he was working his mom got on his case less about getting his GED or going back to AA. He’d tried to tell his mom he wasn’t going back there, but she didn’t understand and he couldn’t explain it. She kept asking him, “Why?”
“Questions like that, that’s why,” he’d say.
At AA it was the same old business. They wanted you to tell them a “story.” Your “story.” They wanted to get it out of you, your bad childhood, or whatever, and they never listened when he said he didn’t have a story to tell. His dad was an asshole, and when Paul was fifteen he had divorced his mom and married the co-worker he was fucking, but lots of dads did shit like that. What difference did it make why he turned out this way? He was here now, wasn’t he? But it wasn’t enough for them. They wanted your blood, is what they wanted. This one counselor last time would not shut up about it. She kept looking at him and looking at him like she knew he was lying. His brain started to get that whirling feeling like it was a roulette wheel going around that might stop at any moment on the wrong number. And he had to leave that room right away. He left by the back door and walked straight to the grocery store and bought a beer. Just one beer. Happy now, bitch? he thought as he gulped it down. He went home to his mom’s basement with that taste on his lips and in his mind like the smell of a girl he couldn’t forget and then in the middle of the night he’d raided the house of all her brandy and NyQuil and elderberry wine and whatnot and for the next day or so he didn’t think about anything and then she kicked him out.
He could hear his mom and brother moving around upstairs, doing whatever the hell they did all day. From down in the basement, he could smell the hot dogs she was cooking. He was hungover but he was also starving, so he was nauseated and hungry at the same time, something you might not have thought possible except he felt that way all the time. He would kill for a hot dog right now or even a peanut butter sandwich, but he didn’t want to risk going up there because his mom would take one look at him and know what’s what. She wasn’t an idiot, even if she still let him sleep in the basement sometimes.
He lay there until he heard his mom and Aaron finish eating their lunch and the screen door slam when they went out. Maybe Aaron had a wrestling meet at school.
After they left he couldn’t find the energy to get up for a long time and he lay on the floor of that basement where he’d spent so many hours as a little kid playing air hockey and Ping-Pong and video games. He thought about how hungry he was and how far into the shit he’d sunk.
Then his mind started to get that nervous feeling again, like he was going to blow up, and he felt around on the floor to see if there was anything there and came across a vodka bottle he must’ve bought the night before. There was a lick of it left but it wasn’t enough.
He forced himself up the stairs to find some food. Maybe there was a bottle of Amaretto or something tucked away that he hadn’t come across yet, though he seriously doubted it, after that last time.
Someone was outside; he could hear the crunching on the gravel. Maybe it was a guy delivering pizza who got the wrong address. He could eat a whole pizza right now, even if it had mushrooms on it. He’d find the cash somewhere. There had to be some change in the couch cushions or something. He flung open the door.
There was a boy standing there.
A little kid, yellow haired. He was standing in the driveway, staring at the house. The boy had a lizard on his shoulder. It was a pretty weird sight. He knew all the kids on the block and this boy wasn’t one of them.
“Hey,” Paul said.
The boy looked really nervous. Maybe some of the other kids had dared him to come by. All the moms on the block told the little kids not to talk to him; he could tell by the way they looked scared sometimes when he said, “Hi.” It hurt his head to think of it. He wanted the boy to leave.
“Can I help you with something?”
He just stood there. He didn’t say anything. He was a weird boy. Maybe there was something wrong with him. Like he was a mongoloid or something. What did they call them now? Down’s syndrome. He had a friend who had a sister with it and she stared at him sometimes, too, and didn’t mean anything by it. This boy had regular eyes though, really big blue ones that were looking at him like he stole his lollipop or something.
Paul smiled. Tried to be nice. It was just a little boy. He wasn’t a complete asshole, despite what everyone thought. “You need something?”
“You don’t know me?” the boy said. He looked disappointed.
Somehow Paul had already said the wrong thing. He felt a wave of exhaustion come over him. It was too hard, sometimes, trying to be nice to people.
“I don’t know any little kids.”
“My brother’
s name is Charlie.”
“Okay.” Something occurred to him. “Are you lost? You want to come inside and call your mom or something?”
“No! No!” The boy started shrieking. “Leave me alone!”
“Okay, then. Okay. I got to, um, get going, then. Good luck getting home.” If the boy was going to be a freak about it he wasn’t going to get involved. He probably should call the police about the boy. Maybe one of the neighbors would, though. He started to shut the door.
“Wait—”
He turned around. “What?”
The boy’s mouth was all twisted up. “Why’d you do that to me?”
“Do what?”
His eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head. “Why’d you hurt me?”
Paul started to sweat. His sweat smelled like alcohol and made him thirsty for it. “I never met you before. How could I hurt you?”
“You hurt me bad, Pauly.”
How the hell did the kid know that name? Nobody had called him Pauly in years. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I was going to Oscar’s and you stopped me. You were being nice and then you hurt me.”
He started to shake. Maybe it was the dt’s. How was that possible, though? “I don’t know what you mean. I never met you before. I never hurt you.”
“Yeah, you did. With the gun.”
He stood there. He couldn’t believe it. “What’d you say?”
“Why’d you do it? I never did anything bad to you.”
He was going nuts. That’s what it was. It was like that scary shit he’d read in high school before he dropped out, the heart tick-ticking through the floorboards ’til you lost your fucking mind. The boy wasn’t even here. Yet he saw him there, scuffling at the dirt, hands balled into fists, looking scared and furious all at the same time. Little yellow-haired kid. Nothing like that boy that was dead. Was somebody tricking him? But who could know?
“You never even let me try it,” the boy said. “You said you would.”
“How do you know about that? Nobody knows about that,” he said. More likely he was still drunk. Maybe that was it. He didn’t feel drunk at all, though.
The boy stood there with his fists, his whole body trembling. “Why’d you do it, though, Pauly? I don’t know why.”
He felt that feeling again in his mind, it was whirling and whirling like a goddamn roulette wheel, only this time there was no stopping it, this time it landed where it had been heading all along.
Twenty-Nine
Janie drove on, wrapped in a world divided, a world of Noah and Not-Noah. The streetlights turning on one by one, the slight jolt of cracked asphalt beneath her wheels, the split-level houses with their basketball nets, their green lawns shading to gray in the falling dark, the night air itself, cooling rapidly, humming with evening: all of this was Not-Noah, and, therefore, useless.
The world was three feet tall, pale skinned, fair haired, its veins pulsing with life.
That’s all her eyes would see. All they would recognize. She could see, but not register, the shapes in this Noahless world.
Her brain, though; her brain—
Her fault. That’s what she couldn’t stop herself from thinking. So many mistakes, so many places she could have gotten off this path, so many simple things she could have done. She could have not called Anderson. She could have decided that this trip was indeed a bad idea. She could have stayed with Noah in the kitchen while he was watching a video. She could have checked on him. She should have checked. Why hadn’t she? He was only four.
Her fault.
She had thought that coming here might help him, when in fact she should have run hard and fast in the opposite direction. Remembering was not the answer. Forgetting was the answer. No other lives, no other worlds. Just this one, right here, this inexplicable, cracked-asphalt-filled life, with Noah in it. That’s all she was asking for. That’s all she wanted. She had made a mistake, though, and maybe lost him—for good?
No. Of course not. She’d see him any minute.
But it was getting darker now. Her child was wandering in it somewhere, lost and alone. Soon the darkness would swallow his red jacket, his bright blond hair. How would she find him then?
She rolled open the window and the night air filled the car with all its Noahless freshness and density: “NO-AH!”
Her eyes swept the landscape, finding nothing.
* * *
Anderson stumbled down the road away from the Crawford house, the flashlight in his hand sending its futile trickle against the broad, smirking face of the early evening. Dusk was falling, and Noah was out in it somewhere, and the necessity of making it all right pulsed through him, pumping his body full of the harsh, spiking energy bequeathed by the hormones secreted by the adrenal medulla: adrenaline, increasing his heart rate, pulse rate, and blood pressure, raising the blood levels of his glucose and lipids, and sending his brain ricocheting from the wall of the present back, ten, twenty, thirty years.
Preeta Kapoor.
The same river, twice.
Who was he to play with lives, past and present, as if he were a god? When people are not meant to remember. That’s why most of us don’t. People are meant to forget. Lethe: the river of forgetfulness. Only some lost souls had forgotten to drink from its healing waters—forgotten to forget.
And here he was, walking these suburban streets that were more alien to him than any of the Indian villages ever were, loosing a lost child’s name into the evening sky, tearing it out of his chest. His last child.
Noah, blond and buoyant, bouncing on the tips of his toes.
Walking and calling, a mouth, a pair of eyes; that’s all he was good for anymore. Lethe rising up around him until soon he’d forget everything, even the names of the lost.
Thirty
He had to get out of there.
Paul ran into the house. He could still hear the boy calling and crying outside.
He blew out the back door, straight through the yard, through the gap in the fence and out, running flat and hard across the field to the woods. When he passed the old well he gave it a wide berth, as if the bones inside might jump out and bat him around the face, that’s how crazy the movie was that was playing in his head, only it wasn’t a movie and it wasn’t in his head. He tore through the woods, his gait unsteady, feet slipping wildly on the pine needles but propelling him forward, onward, as if he could outrun June 14 once and for all when he knew he would never get away, it would always be there, that boy still standing there back in the yard saying,
“Why’d you hurt me, Pauly?”
“Why’d you hurt me, Pauly?”
“Why’d you do it?”
And his own heart charging back I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.
Thirty-One
He was sitting on the edge of her bed. His smooth, glowing skin. His radioactive smile.
Hi, Mama.
Denise opened her eyes.
It was dusk. She was alone in the room. Tommy wasn’t there. She had heard his voice in a dream.
The word still buzzing in her ears. Mama.
The room was dark. Voices not far away, pinpoints of light rolling through the fields.
Tommy!
She sat up quickly, dizzily. Her mouth was coated with a bitter medicine taste and her eyes hurt when she blinked. She opened her hand and saw the pills in it. Through the window she could see the flashing of police lights in the fields and the woods beyond. She hiked the window open for some fresh air. People on the front step were talking. Fragments of conversations pierced her ears.
“—we’ve got a dozen men in the woods now, Lieutenant—”
“Four years old, answers to Noah—”
She lay back down. All of it flooding back to her, swamping her mind: those people in her house, their words worming into her ears, talking about the hereafter.
* * *
That same old song. She’d heard it before, albeit with a different
set of answers. She’d been born hearing it.
Seeing now the tent—that big tent in Oklahoma she hadn’t thought of in thirty-odd years. Sitting with her granddaddy whom everyone thought had gone ’round the bend. Her mother said they were all a pack of snake charmers, but she didn’t care, she was interested in seeing snake charmers and she’d wanted to go wherever her granddaddy went. The tent was big and high like a circus. It was filled to the edges with more people than she’d ever seen at one time in her whole life, rows and rows of them. The minister stood in front and talked so loud the whole tent could hear him. He was a tall, thin man with very dark brown skin and he seemed angry to Denise, but the people didn’t seem to mind much. Some of them sat still and listened to the minister and some of them laughed and sighed and called out.
She was sitting on the lap of her granddaddy, who loved her more than anyone. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she knew. He had his big hand on her head and every now and then he tugged on one of her braids, as if to say hello.
She remembered that there were some hymns that were pretty and then the minister started talking. He talked in that voice people used when they quoted Scripture.
And the Israelites were weary from their journey, their hope waning in the desert.
And they spoke against God, they said: Can God set a table in the wilderness?
And God rained down on them manna to eat and gave them the grain of heaven.…
She remembered that she giggled, she thought it was funny, the idea of setting up a table in the middle of the woods. She leaned back against her granddaddy’s chest with his hand on her head and his smell of soap and grass and manure and she dozed off right there in that din. Then the minister’s deep voice started yelling out, “Who wants to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Who is here to testify? Who is here to be healed by His power? Make your presence known.”
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