by Daniel Quinn
For a decade after leaving school he’d been “something in the military” and wore his beautifully tailored suits as if they were uniforms. Everlastingly slim and fit, he always looked like he could rise from the dinner table and run a mile without getting winded or mussing the careful set of his fine blond hair. Now no longer in the military, he was “something in the government,” and I wasn’t in the least surprised to learn that recruitment was the object of our conversation.
When we were settled with our brandies in the library after dinner, he said, “I think this venture with the Reincarnation Institute sounds like fun, and I’m sure you’ll learn a lot.”
The family didn’t care for the name of the organization, and it was quite their usual practice to reshape reality to suit themselves. Thus We Live Again had almost immediately become the more dignified Reincarnation Institute.
“But,” Uncle Harry went on, “you mustn’t get them too accustomed to leaning on you. In a year or two you’re going to want to move on to something else.”
“Yes, that’s only good sense,” I agreed blandly.
“I want you to be aware that anytime you want it, there’s a place for you in my outfit.”
“Doing what?”
“Doing what I do.”
“And what’s that, if I may ask?”
He shrugged. “I assumed you’d know by now that I’m in Intelligence. Or guess it.”
I suppose I had guessed it, I told him, though I’m not sure I could have put the name Intelligence to it. “I know what you do is … mysterious, perhaps sinister.”
“Neither one, most of the time. The government—every government everywhere and in every age—depends on men like me. On large numbers of men like me, in fact. When a leader stands in front of an audience or answers a question from the press, he almost never speaks from his own knowledge about the issues and problems of the world. For the most part, he’s merely voicing our knowledge of those issues and problems. This is no exaggeration, I assure you.”
“I believe you, though in my innocence it never occurred to me until now that this might be the case. But why me? I’m no good at languages. I have no very useful specialties.”
He shook his head impatiently. “Linguists and specialists we buy in packets of ten. It’s the talented generalists who are difficult to find, people with classical educations, people who are intelligent, well-bred, well-connected, and, above all, known.”
“Known? My father is known. I hardly consider myself to be known.”
“You’re known to me, and that’s all that matters. I can vouch for you absolutely, which is something I can never do for anyone who just walks in off the street looking for a job. He may have degrees spilling out of his pockets from the world’s leading universities and letters of introduction from dozens of national heroes, but to me he’s an unknown, and I wouldn’t even trust him to empty the wastebaskets.”
“I see. To be honest, I was expecting something like this but thought you’d just be doing it as a favor to Dad.”
“Not at all. In fact, it’s the other way around. I’m the one who asked for the favor, and your father granted it.”
I told him I was flattered (and I was) and that I’d certainly keep the offer in mind.
“What you propose to be doing for the Institute,” he went on, “could actually turn out to be excellent training for Intelligence work, I think.” He paused to ponder that for a moment. “I suppose you could say that, in a sense, what you propose to be doing is Intelligence work.”
I didn’t particularly care to know what he meant by that, so I thanked him and adjourned the meeting sine die.
IT’S HARD TO THINK what my family, including Uncle Harry, would have made of Reggie and Marcia Fenshaw. They were so unlike anyone I’d met at home or at school that they might as well have belonged to another species. My father, I fear, would have thought them hardly different from criminals, their values were so foreign to his. They used atrociously the meager funds they had, caring nothing about money, and neglected themselves the way uncaring parents neglect their children, wearing shabby clothes, going unwashed for days, living on candy and snacks, and letting their teeth visibly rot. At the same time, if you had the slightest interest in their obsession, they would before long begin to seem to you as charming and graceful as a pair of dotty old royals pottering in their garden.
The one thing they did superlatively well was manage the data they collected from around the world. They lived for nothing else (and I’ve never met a happier couple in all my life).
The central feature of their system was a vast index of file cards generated by the reports they’d received over the years. If you wanted to study cases like Mary Anne Dorson’s, they’d ask, “Like in what way? What feature are you looking at? Her age? The period she lived in? Her social status? The way she began to remember her last incarnation? The way her family reacted? The fact that she knew what family she belonged to in her last incarnation? The fact that this family lived nearby? The involvement of the doctor? The way her predictions were tested? The fact that the Prescotts accepted her as the reincarnation of Natalie? The fact that the rest of her life story was perfectly ordinary?” By using the card index, they could (for example) track down all the cases in which the reincarnate was able to name his or her former family. Virtually every story they had was like Mary Anne’s in some way.
Every three or four months they rewarded their correspondents and financial supporters with a newsletter carrying the best reports received in the interval. It was, however, seldom more than four pages long, and its “best reports” were seldom worth reporting at all. In truth, it’s hard to imagine anything more frustrating than the pursuit of credible evidence of reincarnation, and anyone who takes it up is putting his or her sanity at risk. The problem isn’t so much that evidence isn’t there but that it’s invariably tainted beyond redemption by the time you get to it.
Take Mary Anne Dorson’s case (which, incidentally, is one of the very “best” on record). In the efforts he made, Dr. Jansen wasn’t trying to prove the reality of reincarnation, he was just conscientiously practicing family medicine. He felt sure that the “healing” of Mary Anne could only be effected by bringing the Dorsons and the Prescotts together (and of course he was right). But the moment he succeeded in doing this, all the evidence he’d collected became worthless, and all hope of collecting further evidence disappeared forever.
If he’d been trying to build a case for reincarnation, he would have proceeded very differently. He would have immediately isolated the girl, moving her as far away as practically possible from anyone who might have knowledge of the Prescotts. Living in seclusion, she’d be wrung dry to make a record of every supposed memory of her life as Natalie, down to the smallest detail. Meanwhile, a team of scientists would descend on Vettsburg to begin work on many different fronts. Every neighbor and every child at Mary Anne’s school would be examined as a possible source of her information about the Prescotts. The Prescotts themselves would be interviewed no less exhaustively to make a record of their memories of Natalie and every circumstance of their lives during the time when she was alive. When all this was done, the two records would be compiled and compared by an independent panel of scientists, and a new round of examinations would begin in order to resolve as far as possible the discrepancies and conflicts revealed. Not until all this was done would anyone dream of introducing Mary Anne to the Prescotts in the flesh—and even then it wouldn’t be designed as a festivity for the girl (who by this time would probably be a young woman) but as a further and final opportunity to gather evidence.
Assembled in this way, the case would be compelling (which it otherwise certainly is not). With coincidence, blind luck, collusion, and deception decisively ruled out, skeptics would be hard pressed to suggest any other “ordinary” explanation for the wonder. If Mary Anne truly had no normal access to ten thousand items of thrice-verified information about the Prescotts during a twenty-year period
before her own life began, how explain this marvel except as an instance of reincarnation?
The case as it stands convinces only those who are already convinced or who want to be convinced. When I arrived on the scene, there wasn’t a single case in the files of We Live Again that did more than that. Not one even came close to doing more than that.
The Fenshaws understood this as well as anyone (and better than most of their supporters). “Someday we’ll have it, though,” they said.
They called it the Golden Case. The Golden Case wouldn’t convert the scoffers, but it would certainly give them something to deal with, something they couldn’t just wave away as superstitious nonsense.
I LEARNED SOMETHING about obsession during my time with the Fenshaws. I learned it isn’t madness or even foolishness, though madness and foolishness have given it a bad name. How could anyone who wasn’t obsessed compose a symphony or write a thousand-page novel? How could anyone who wasn’t obsessed cross an uncharted ocean in a seventy-foot sailboat? No one sneers at people like these, but they will sneer at someone whose obsession drives them to fill a house with starving cats or to build a half-size model of the Brandenburg Gate out of matchsticks. I almost feel that someone who lives without an obsession has a poor sort of life.
I wasn’t obsessed with anything when I joined the Fenshaws in Tunis, their home. The possibility of reincarnation fascinated me, but I was neither a believer nor a nonbeliever. I was there to satisfy my curiosity one way or the other, and if I’d somehow managed to do that immediately, I probably would’ve gone on to other things without a backward look.
One can’t plausibly begin to do fieldwork without being familiar with the classic cases, and the Fenshaws had been feeding me these for a year before I arrived. In a way, these were more frustrating than the rest, because each would have been profoundly persuasive if someone had taken the trouble to demonstrate with reasonable certainty that they weren’t just instances of people seeing what they wanted to see. After the event, however, no test can be run that will reveal whether what you have is gold or pyrite.
My first investigation took me to Johannesburg at the other end of the continent, where (we’d been told) there lived a young man who one morning woke up speaking a strange language that was finally determined to be ancient Persian. The young man, Rudolph Kintmacher by name, mystified all with uncanny tales of the court of Darius I, the greatest of the Achaemenid kings, which (as far as anyone could tell) were absolutely true. With this, I learned the first rule of reincarnation research, which is: If you don’t investigate the silly stories, then you might as well just pack up and go home. I investigated and found it was just as silly as it sounded.
The facts (which Rudolph freely provided) bore little resemblance to what we’d heard. To begin with, he hadn’t “woken up one morning” speaking Persian. He’d discovered the delight of glossolalia—speaking in tongues—long ago, while in his early teens, and had entertained friends with the trick for years before he began to take himself seriously and wonder just what language he was speaking. It was of course no language at all, but he managed to find an expert who swore it sounded just the way he’d always imagined the ancient Persians might sound. Reading up on them, Rudolph said he began to experience a powerful sense of déjà vu, especially when it came to the reign of the first Darius—and the rest followed as night the day.
Over the next three years I investigated four dozen cases as worthless as this one (and was on the verge of quitting) when at last I caught a glimpse of the gold.
Nine-year-old Eddie Tucker of Council Bluffs, Iowa, one morning asked his mother about the time he got sick in the boardinghouse in O’Neill. She told him he must have dreamed it, because he’d never been sick in any boardinghouse anywhere. He insisted it wasn’t a dream, it was something he remembered from a long time ago. It didn’t matter how long ago it was, she said, because they’d never lived anywhere but in Council Bluffs and had never even visited a place called O’Neill. In fact, she’d never even heard of it.
The boy gave up, but only temporarily. A few hours later he came back to say he remembered that the boardinghouse had a little fish pond in the backyard, and a boy named Perry from across the street had made him a toy boat driven by a rubber band and propeller. He drew her a picture to show her what he was talking about. Her rejoinder was, “I thought you were sick at this place.”
“That was later,” Eddie said.
Perry had also given him a coin he’d made himself that looked just like regular money. Eddie said he could get rich if he made his own money, but Perry explained that the counterfeit cost more to make than real money, which was a little over Eddie’s head at the time.
“I don’t know where you’re getting all this stuff,” Eddie’s mother said. “This never happened.”
“How would you know?” Eddie riposted. “You weren’t there.”
“Where was I?”
“I mean Perry and I were playing together. You weren’t out there playing with us.”
“Was I in the house?”
But he didn’t remember anything about that.
A few days later Eddie told his mother he’d hidden some things behind a loose brick in the foundation of the house in O’Neill, some coins, maybe. He didn’t remember exactly what he’d put there, but he was sure he could find the brick.
“Do you think the things are still there?” his mother asked.
“I’ll bet they are,” he said.
“Why didn’t you get them when we left?”
But he didn’t know the answer to that.
In spite of herself, Eddie’s mother had become intrigued. They got out an atlas and turned to the index for Iowa. There was an O’Brien but no O’Neill.
“Could it have been O’Brien?” she asked.
“No, I’m sure it was O’Neill.”
“Well, there isn’t any O’Neill.”
“Try Nebraska,” Eddie said—and there it was.
Checking the map, they found it was about two hundred miles northwest of Omaha, just across the river from Council Bluffs.
On the weekend, mother and boy prevailed on Dad to drive them up there. O’Neill isn’t a metropolis, but it still took Eddie a while to spot the house. He wanted to head straight for the loose brick but was restrained by his parents, who knew they had to introduce themselves to the residents before starting to dismantle the foundation. The owner of the house, Thorvald Boyle, politely invited them in and listened to their story before explaining that the house still offered lodging but no longer board in this day and age. He’d acquired the house just ten years ago, when there were plenty of loose bricks in the foundation, but it had all been repointed since then. There’d also been a fish pond in the backyard, but when he bought the place it was no longer in use, having cracked one winter back in the sixties or seventies. Considering it an eyesore and not worth fixing, he’d had it ripped out.
There was no boy named Perry living across the street, but there was an old man of that name living there, in a house that had been in the Schuylkill family for something like four generations.
The Tuckers found Perry Schuylkill to be a pleasant and well-preserved eighty-six-year-old with a full head of white hair and a farmer’s ruddy complexion (though he wasn’t a farmer). He listened to their tale with bright-eyed interest and evident puzzlement, glancing back and forth between mother and son. When they were done, he said, “Well, this is a hell of a thing. I don’t know what to think.”
He stared at the boy for a long time, then began his own tale.
“There was a family that boarded across the street back in 1920 or so. I guess I was twelve or thirteen, so that would put it back in 1919 or 1920. I don’t remember their name—I mean their family name. It might have been Dickens or Pickens or something like that. I can’t think what business Mr. Pickens was in, but I know they didn’t have a lot of money. There was a boy and a girl, though I only remember the girl, who was my age or a year or two younger. My goodn
ess, I do remember that girl, Rita May, because she was the first love of my life, and I had the biggest crush on her you’d ever want to see. I spent a whole summer trying to impress her, and I guess maybe I did.” Here Perry Schuylkill gave Eddie another long look.
“It was for her I made that nifty little boat. I remember I got the wood from a drawer-bottom of a cast-off bureau of some kind. And that coin. I remember making that for her too. She took hold of it and said, ‘It feels funny, sort of slick, like it’s got oil on it.’ ”
“I remember that,” Eddie said. “And you said, ‘That’s just from the process,’ or something like that.”
Mr. Schuylkill nodded, and Eddie’s mother burst into tears, for no reason she could ever cogently explain.
At the end of the summer, Mr. Schuylkill went on, Rita May fell ill. He thought it might have been rheumatic fever but couldn’t be sure. “I didn’t care what it was,” he said. “I just wanted it to go away. But it didn’t, and my precious love passed away in a little room under the fourth-floor eaves of that house right over there. I can show it to you if you like. I’m sure Mr. Boyle wouldn’t mind.”
But Eddie’s mother wanted no part of that.
After their visit to O’Neill, Eddie dredged up a few more details of his life as Rita May Pickens, but he later admitted that even he wasn’t sure whether he’d dredged them up or made them up.
It took two years for rumors of the case to reach our ears—a usual sort of interval—but Perry Schuylkill was still alive and alert, as were all the others. It all checked out. All the principals and witnesses seemed guileless, earnest types who had nothing to gain from deceiving me or anyone else.