Skillful Death

by Ike Hamill

  I raise my eyebrows. She didn’t ask me to help interpret. It’s probably coming soon, or maybe Laurette has a different approach than most.

  “You were raised by a single mother in Virginia,” Laurette says.

  Close enough—my parents divorced when I was in grade school. Seems like easy odds for someone my age. She probably got the Virginia from my accent. I’ve picked up some of the city’s lexicon, but I know my roots are still all Virginia. Even I can hear it in some of the words.

  “You went to school up north—far north of here—but not college. You returned to Virginia for college,” Laurette says.

  I’m so stupid. I bet they’ve been researching me for weeks. I didn’t just walk in off the street, they sought me out at my office. She’s not doing a cold reading. She’s probably memorized my transcripts. If this is all they’re going to do, I think it’s time to get back to the office.

  “These are not secrets,” I say. I turn to Franza and say, “I’ll just call a cab. Thanks for the show.”

  Laurette doesn’t give me time to stand up.

  “You killed a dog when you were nineteen,” Laurette says. “I’m sorry to air your secrets, but the spirits want you to believe.”

  “I didn’t kill a dog,” I say, but I’ve put a hold on my plans to walk out. I love dogs. I wouldn’t kill a dog.

  “You did. I’m sorry, but you did. You were driving home on the highway in the middle of the night, trying to stay awake. You were listening to very loud music and you had your window open so the cold air would keep you alert. The dog jumped out from the tall grass, almost like it wanted to be hit, and you just couldn’t stop in time. You pulled over to the shoulder and found his body fifty feet down the road. He was dead. His head was nearly torn from his body. You took his collar from the bloody mess of a neck and you intended to call the phone number on the tags, but you never did. You dropped the collar off the side of a bridge the next morning.”

  Laurette sinks back into her chair, like the long speech has drained her energy.

  I try to keep my expression neutral. That was a lot of detail, and everything was dead on. Well, almost everything. I found his body only twenty-five feet down the road. When I didn’t see where it landed, I decided to walk ten paces to look for it, and I found the body after only eight. That’s way less than fifty feet. I guess spirits suck at judging distance.

  I didn’t tell anyone about that dog. It wasn’t my fault, but I still felt such guilt. Like she said, I couldn’t even call the owners to let them know that “Oscar” wasn’t coming home. I was driving an old muscle car, too. There was no damage to my steel bumper, just a little fur that I washed off the next day. Did I ever tell anyone that? No, I’m sure of it. I never told a soul.

  “The spirits want you to know that Oscar was very sick. That’s why he was running in the middle of the night. He wouldn’t have lived another week,” Laurette says.

  This is another important technique for psychics. They give you closure on things from your past. You feel this great relief and you want to come back. They’ll also hint about something they can’t quite make out at this time, and they’ll give you homework. If you go once, they want you to come back again and again.

  But, wait a second. She said “Oscar.” She glosses over that detail so fast that I almost miss it. However she’s doing this, she’s really good.

  “Tell him more secrets, Laurette,” Franza says. “He still doesn’t believe.”

  “This one is not so easy,” Laurette says. “People tell him many things, but he doesn’t have that many secrets of his own. Wait... They’re telling me one now.”

  I’m getting sucked into this. Now she has me trying to figure out what she’ll come up with next.

  “When he was a boy in the shower, he used to do something after he turned the water off. The spirits know more than just what you did, Malcolm. They know what you were thinking.”

  What did I do in the shower? Every boy does that in the shower. This can’t be news.

  She surprises me again. “You used to pretend that the last few drops of water dripping from the shower head were a magic elixir. You believed that if you caught these drops in your mouth, you could fix anything wrong with yourself.”

  That’s downright spooky. She really is converting my skepticism to belief. I absolutely used to do drink those shower droplets, but I haven’t thought about it in years and years.

  “Now he’s starting to believe,” Laurette says.

  Do I talk in my sleep? Did these people hypnotize me, extract this information, and then command me to forget? Yes, it has to be one of these things. At some point, I divulged this information and I didn’t even realize it. Maybe the boss pulled it out of me during his month-long interview process. He put me through an unbelievable battery of tests. Maybe these people somehow got into his files.

  “Can you tell me something I don’t know, but when you reveal it, I’ll know it to be true?” I ask. How could she, right?

  “That’s an interesting question,” she says. “The spirits are debating now.”

  She closes her eyes and folds her hands on her belly. She appears to be thinking, or listening, to a conversation from another room.

  “Your parents considered naming you Leonard,” she says.

  Could be true, but it’s not very interesting.

  “You have a small benign tumor on your left latissimus dorsi muscle. You were climbing a tree when you were a kid. A tree branch bruised the muscle and a small tumor formed,” she says.

  That’s a little more interesting, but they could have pulled it from some medical records from my old pediatrician or something.

  I’m waiting to see if they come up with something amusing. Otherwise, I’ll set up a controlled test for Laurette, but I don’t need more of a demonstration.

  She pauses another few seconds before she comes up with her last fun fact. “Your employer is nearly two-hundred years old.”

  That’s it. Now they have my attention. My suspicions about my boss have absolutely no root in fact. I’ve formed them only recently, and I’m beyond certain that I’ve never revealed them to anyone.

  ♣ ♢ ♡ ♠

  Something on my face must have changed, or revealed my shock, because Laurette and Franza seem to know I’m hooked. There’s no use denying it.

  “Okay,” I say, “that’s pretty good. Tell me more about my employer.”

  “Ah, the spirits are very confused about this man,” Laurette says. She waves her hands briefly in front of her face and closes her eyes. She looks very relaxed, and slumps back in her chair. “His past is shrouded in deep mystery.”

  “You don’t say.” Bud, my boss, is not exactly evasive. Although, some of the things he has told me about his past seem contradictory. He will tell me a story about when he grew up in the woods of eastern Europe, an orphan who learned to hunt and fend for himself at an early age. Another day, he tells me about growing up in a small village in Tibet. How exactly did the orphan from Europe get adopted to Tibet? “That’s a story for another day,” he would say.

  Laurette is still pondering the deep mystery of my boss when Franza asks if I’d like anything to drink. I turn her down. I don’t eat or drink anything provided by the nut jobs who bring me cases. If I could, I’d bring my own air along on these investigations and breathe through a tube. Franza gets up and returns with a glass of water for herself.

  “They say he’s from a far-off land,” Laurette reveals.

  No big secret there. The boss has gone to great lengths to preserve his privacy, but you can’t have that much money without drawing a little scrutiny. Everyone knows he immigrated to the States in the seventies, but pretended for a while that he’d been born in California. Someone dug up his records years ago and found out that he entered the country on a work visa as a Chinese national. Any records before that are hard to come by. He doesn’t look Chinese. He doesn’t look Tibetan, either. Eastern Europe seems about right for his features.
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  “He had three childhoods,” Laurette says, “and he has at least two more to come.”

  Interesting. Now she’s telling the future.

  “Some consider your employer to be a very dangerous man. Most of the people who have crossed him are now dead.”

  That’s not surprising if you consider that he’s supposedly two-hundred years old. It would stand to reason that a lot of people who crossed him, or loved him, were now dead. I’ve never thought of him as dangerous though. In fact, he seems incredibly amiable. On the other hand, to have all that money, he must have been a pretty tough businessman at some point. Over the course of forty years, he’s amassed billions of dollars. At least I think it’s billions. His net worth is the topic of debate amongst people who care about such things. He has way more than most everyone else, but not so much that he appears on the covers of any magazines.

  “Anything else?” I ask.

  “Wait,” Laurette says. “The spirits are very disturbed by something.”

  “Yeah?”

  A troubled look washes over Laurette’s face and Franza leans forward. Laurette grips the arms of her chair.

  “Your employer is hunted. This isn’t happening now, but in the future. A group of men are hunting him. They are ancient, like him. Some are much older. One has lived a dozen lifetimes. Some are just beginning their long lives.”

  “Like Highlander?” I ask. Franza puts a finger to her lips so I won’t interrupt Laurette, but I can’t help myself. “You know that movie Highlander, with Sean Connery? The immortals all fight each other? There can be only one.”

  “Your employer has betrayed them. He betrayed his duty. Now they hunt him so he will return to his home country and fulfill his destiny.”

  “Wow,” I say. This has turned into quite the show. I didn’t expect all this intrigue in their story. I thought they were just trying to convince me of paranormal activity so they could get the money, but they’ve really scripted this thing out. I’d like to get some more details so I can figure out how they’ve acquired their information. I play along to steer the story back to the past.

  “Tell me about his duty,” I say.

  “He was chosen by the divinity, and given great gifts.”

  That will be good news to my boss. He’s a confirmed atheist.

  “No, not given, he was loaned great gifts. He has to return those gifts to the one who gave them.”

  “It’s not a gift if you have to give it back,” I say.

  Instead of shushing me again, Franza shrugs and nods in agreement.

  “Wait. They’re showing me more of his past now. They say you’re most interested in that.”

  I am.

  “When he was cast from his childhood home, your employer was washed down a river until he came to rest on the shores of a cold sea. The water erased his memories and he was taken in by a fisherman who sold him to a trading ship to work as a janitor. He worked for years aboard ships, increasing his rank until he could purchase his way off the ship and become a private citizen. When no respectable country would take him, your employer journeyed south and carved out an existence in the desert.”

  My boss has never told me stories about living in the desert, but I’ve heard plenty about his time aboard ships. Next time he starts to wax nostalgic, I’ll have to quiz him about this desert stuff. I’ll see if any of it is true. Based on the stuff that Laurette knew about me, her sources are pretty good. It will be interesting to see if she actually got the scoop on my boss’s past.

  “But life on the water had cast a spell on him after all those years. The sand beneath his feet never felt so solid as the rocking of deck planks. He sold everything he owned to purchase a small boat and start his own trade in the desert gulf. Success comes to him in all things, so soon his business demands a larger boat, and a larger boat. Then he is captain of his own ship, and he sails across the warm sea, exchanging desert spices and cargo for fruits and meats of the north.”

  When was this, a thousand years ago? I guess this kind of trade still goes on, but this story seems like something you’d read from ancient Greece.

  “He traded fair, but he was a ruthless man. The entrenched families who controlled the shipping lanes resented his success, and demanded taxes so high that he could no longer profit. When he wouldn’t comply, they drowned his crew and burned his ship down to its hull.”

  “How can you trade fair and still be ruthless?”

  “He would honor his side of a bargain, but if you crossed him…” Laurette says, and then she makes a slicing motion across her throat with her thumb.

  “Sounds like his competition was pretty ruthless too. They got away with drowning his crew?”

  “Your employer then traveled east. He left the blue sea and tried to establish himself trading in the desert. Then, he managed to find himself another small boat to cross the gulf.”

  “Where is this? Can you give me names?”

  “Geography is too imprecise. The spirits only know what these places were called in ancient times.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Your employer’s luck was no better. Everywhere he went, he faced fierce competition from established traders. He traveled farther east and south until eventually he rounded the desert peninsula. At last, he found opportunity. One shipping route was deemed so dangerous that nobody would undertake it. Your employer constructed a boat of his own design. With his new ship, trade that previously took a month would take him a week. His business flourished.”

  Franza turns to an end table and lights a stick of incense. I watch the green smoke begin to curl upward.

  “Can you put that out?” I ask. “I have asthma and allergies.” I don’t have either. I just don’t like incense.

  “Sorry,” Franza mouths. She plucks the incense from the holder and dunks it in her water.

  Laurette barrels ahead with her story. I’m starting to think I should just ask for a transcript of this whole mess. It would save me time and I wouldn’t need to try to remember everything. These two must have scripted the story. Can’t they just give me a copy?

  “He traded for years, building his reputation and fortune once again. But now that he’d proven that he could navigate the treacherous route, other shippers wanted to capitalize on his innovation. They tried to bribe his crew. When that didn’t work, they tried to get their men hired as spies on his vessel. Their builders could copy the shape of his hull, but they needed someone who’d been belowdecks to report on the structure. Could you get me a glass of water, dear?” Laurette asks Franza.

  Laurette’s eyes have been closed this whole time, so she didn’t witness the incense snuffing. Franza pulls the stick from the water and walks her glass over to Laurette. She presses it into Laurette’s hands without touching her and Laurette takes a delicate sip. She smiles and places the water down on a coaster. Her eyes are still closed.

  “Your employer was betrayed by the men he trusted most. He left everything behind and took back to the land.”

  “He retired?” I ask.

  “No,” she says, “he simply walked away. He traveled for years, living on what he could scavenge. He was chased and pitied. Eventually he found himself in the mountains, amongst monks of the oldest traditions. He was an old, tired man, at the end of a long and fruitless life.”

  “Sounds like he had fruit, he just walked away from it,” I say.

  “A life without offspring is pointless. So say the spirits,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “With the monks, your employer observes and understands, as he always does. His ability to learn and innovate brings his practice of their ancient arts to new levels.”

  “What arts?”

  “Ah, in this order of monks, they once knew how to reincarnate without traveling to a new body. Their predecessors mastered the art of complete rejuvenation, and then they used that skill to ascend past biological form. The monks who remained to teach the next generation of disciples could only mimic the forms.”r />
  “What are these forms you’re talking about? I don’t understand. Is this prayer?”

  “Physical forms. Like yoga,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “Your employer improved on their forms and taught his body to reverse its age. He worked closely with one of the monks. Together, they replenished their bodies and became children once again.”

  “Literally, or figuratively? Are you saying that he was an old man and then he was a kid?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he conquered mortality, and somehow that didn’t make him the most famous person in the world? Why didn’t he teach this to everyone? Why do we still have death?”

  “Your employer chose to renounce the practice, and when he did, he expunged his memories.”

  “But what about the other monk? Is he still around?”

  “The monk practiced for years, aging very slowly as he gradually lost the perfection of his form. He eventually decided to attempt to ascend while he still possessed the knowledge. He failed.”

  “So two guys figure out how to be immortal. One walks away and the other gets bad at it, goes for broke, and then dies?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a terrible story,” I say.

  “But the story is not over,” she says.

  I roll my eyes.

  “As a child once more, free from memory and experience, your employer begins a new life. He learns a new skill, and, this time, he starts a family. Alas, his past catches him, and his only daughter is killed.”

  “This guy cannot catch a break.”

  “Despondent, he roams again. Wait,” she says. She waves her hands around in the air as if she’s tugging at invisible strings. “The spirits, they’ve gone silent.”

  “Huh,” I say.

  “So have you heard enough?” Franza asks.

  “Enough for what?”

  “For the prize. You’ve witnessed my aunt channeling information from spirits that nobody could possibly know.”