After Dachau (6 page)

“You fuckhead,” she said flatly. “Go home and die.”

Bewildered, I looked over my shoulder to see who she was talking to, but I was alone. She was talking to me.

I said, “I’m Jason Tull.”

“I didn’t think you were Chester Morris.”

Blinking stupidly, I asked her who Chester Morris was.

She sighed and went back to her book.

I stood there for a minute then asked what I’d done wrong.

“You were born,” she said without looking up. “That’s where it began.”

I couldn’t imagine what she meant by that, but I felt I had to make a stab at it. “You mean … it’s something about my family. About being born a Tull.”

“Forget it,” she said, tossing her book aside. “Sit down and we’ll start over.”

Several sets of muscles wanted to accept the invitation, but I held them in check. “I think I’d rather start over on a more even footing than this, Mallory. Give me a call when you’re ready to talk.” I turned to go, and she said, “Wait a minute.”

I turned back and waited.

She sat for a moment staring into the middle distance. Then, as if offering a demonstration, she raised a hand and deliberately raked the side of her face with her nails, leaving four livid tracks.

“Get that?” she asked.

I admitted I didn’t.

“This isn’t me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You stood there admiring this face, but you weren’t admiring
me
. You were acting just like all the rest of them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ve been a woman,” she said. “I know how it goes. A man tells a woman, ‘You’re very beautiful,’ and she’s supposed to feel like he’s saying something about
her
, as though that beauty runs clear through her. But if you tell me
I’m
beautiful, you’re just talking about some bones and skin and hair that don’t even belong to me. It’s like you take it for granted that
I’ll
feel complimented if you stand there admiring some
other
woman’s face.”

“I understand. If someone says Mallory’s beautiful, this has nothing to do with you. You don’t own that face.”

“That’s right.”

“But you
do
own it, you know. It’s yours now, for the rest of your life. You might as well get used to accepting the compliment, to saying, ‘Yes, you’re right, I
am
beautiful.’ ”

She gave her head a little shake. “You can’t know that. Maybe next week I’ll be gone just the way Mallory’s gone.”

“No,” I said on my way to a chair, “that’s no more likely to happen to you than it is to me.”

“But it
did
happen.”

I sat down and crossed my legs, making myself at home. “It did happen—once—virtually a miracle, something that happens once every billion man-years.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“If there are a billion people on the earth, we experience a billion man-years of human life every year. And that’s about how often this happens—and why it’s hardly likely to happen twice to the same person.”

“All right, I can see that.” She paused, momentarily lost in thought, and I had a glimpse of the calm intensity that would come to her naturally when the present turmoil and confusion subsided. “But tell me this,” she said at last. “Where did Mallory go? I’ve got to know that, because I feel like a murderer. Where is Mallory?”

I lifted a finger and pointed it straight at her. “There is Mallory.”

“I’M GOING TO
explain
the theory,” I went on, “because theory is all we have. What’s happened to you has happened before, hundreds of times at least. I, personally, have met half a dozen people it’s happened to, and this is how we explain it until we have a better way. Every human is animated by a soul, which departs the body at death and subsequently migrates to another body, which it animates at conception or sometime soon after. In this new incarnation, the soul has no recollection of its previous incarnation—or of any of its previous incarnations. At least not ordinarily. But once in a very great while someone will spontaneously begin to recollect details of a previous incarnation—name, family, place of residence, and so on. Most often, memories of the person’s past incarnation exist side by side with those of the present incarnation.

But sometimes, even more rarely, memories of the past incarnation overwhelm those of the present incarnation—supplant them, blot them out. And of course that’s what’s happened in your case. You haven’t
murdered
Mallory, you’ve just lost all memory of
being
Mallory.”

Looking stunned, she shook her head. “You mean I was born into this body. Despite everything my memory tells me, you’re saying I have as much business being here as Mallory did.”

“That’s right. The break is in your memories, not in the person you experience as yourself.”

“That’s bullshit,” she said. “Excuse me, but it is. The person I experience as myself is exactly what’s broken.”

She had a point, which I had to acknowledge. “Try it this way,” I said. “Many people experience amnesia for one reason or another, usually as a result of a head injury. I assume you know that.”

“I guess so. Go ahead.”

“And what usually happens in these cases is that they remember nothing of their past at all. It’s a blank, right?”

“Right.”

“Let’s say this happens to someone called Tom Williams. He gets hit in the head by a falling roof beam, and when he wakes up in the hospital, his mind is a total blank. He doesn’t know his name, doesn’t recognize his wife or his children, and so on.”

“Okay.”

“So what do you think? Has he ceased to be Tom Williams? I don’t know about you, but I’d have to say not. He’s still Tom Williams, even if he can’t remember
being
Tom Williams.”

“Okay, I can see that.”

“But now let’s look at a much rarer case. In this one-in-a-billion case, the amnesiac wakes up in the hospital, but her mind isn’t a blank. Instead, she has a complete set of memories of being someone else. That’s what happened to you, isn’t it?”

She nodded.

“Who were you in that previous life, Mallory? What was your name?”

“Gloria MacArthur.”

“So that’s the difference between you and Tom Williams. When he woke up, he was nobody, and when you woke up, you were Gloria MacArthur. But by any measure anyone can make, he was still Tom Williams and you’re still Mallory Hastings.”

“I can see all that, but …”

“Yes?”

“I just can’t buy into this soul business.”

“Neither can I.”

Her eyes widened at that. “I don’t get it. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that what I’ve given you is a theory, a way of explaining something that happens—and it’s the best I have at the moment. Give me a better one that doesn’t involve this ‘soul business,’ and I’ll embrace it like a shot, believe me. But most people just throw out the baby with the bath water.”

“Meaning what?”

“Many people are unable to distinguish the theory from the phenomenon it tries to explain. They figure that if the theory is nonsense, then the phenomenon must be nonsense too. If I tell people that Mallory Hastings is the reincarnation
of Gloria MacArthur, they’ll just say I’m crazy.”

“You mean, according to them, I’m faking all this.”

“Or imagining it. Maybe you just wanted a new life for yourself—were fed up with being second banana at the library.” That won a hesitant sort of smile, as if smiling were something she’d forgotten along with all the rest.

“So what
do we do now?” Gloria/Mallory asked.

“What do you
want
to do?”

“It’s funny,” she said after thinking for a moment. “I needed to be rescued.”

“You evidently felt you couldn’t get out of here under your own power.”

“That’s right.”

“And this is what you want to do? Get out of here?”

“You bet.”

“And go where?”

The question seemed to perplex her. Finally she said, “I don’t understand what you’re doing here. I know why
I
wanted you to be here, but I don’t know why
you
wanted to be here. What is it you want?”

“I work for a nonprofit organization that studies events like this, events that seem to demonstrate the reality of reincarnation. In your case, I’m here to try to verify the memories of your former life. Working together, we’ll try to find the person who acquired those memories during her life as Gloria MacArthur.”

She emitted a little sigh of exasperation. “Why can’t you talk like ordinary people? ‘The person who acquired those memories’? What’s that mean?”

“I’m sorry. You’re right, I’m being a little cryptic. Where did you grow up as Gloria MacArthur?”

Darting me a suspicious look, she asked why I wanted to know that.

“Gloria MacArthur is—or was—a real person who lived sometime in the past. Together, the two of us are going to track her down and find out how closely your memories match the reality of her life.”

“No, we’re not,” she said simply but definitely.

“We’re not?”

“No.”

“I see,” I said, getting up out of my chair. “Well, let’s get you discharged, then we can go from there. Did you by any chance find out where Mallory Hastings lives?”

By this time
, the hospital’s personnel no longer bothered to be amazed at the things Mallory didn’t know about herself. We asked for a map and driving instructions, and they provided them. When we got into the car I’d driven up from Manhattan, Mallory sank into the passenger seat, pulled her coat collar up around her face, and let me drive, looking neither right nor left as we traveled to a prim little gated community north of the city, where she owned a prim little condominium. Using the keys from her purse, I let us in and turned on the lights in the gathering twilight. Mallory followed me into the living room, glanced around, and shuddered like a prisoner being led into the cell where she’d be spending the rest of her life.

It was in fact an appalling place, decorated in a style of meaningless perfection, as if everything had been ordered
from a catalog of unobjectionable furnishings, neither too dowdy nor too elegant—a vase of a certain size here, a picture of a certain type there, all as indicated in the accompanying diagram.

“I can’t stand it,” Mallory said.

“You don’t have to. You can throw it all out and start over.”

Predictably, she shook her head.

“You should check your telephone messages,” I told her.

“How do I do that?”

I showed her, and we learned that Mallory Hastings had a wide circle of nice-sounding friends, who left nice messages wishing her a speedy recovery. We also learned she had an ex-boyfriend, Phil, who couldn’t understand why his calls were being ignored but who eventually got tired of asking. There seemed to be no point in worrying about any of them.

“You should probably let your mother know that you’re home, however,” I said.

“She’s
not
my mother.”

So we hadn’t made any progress on that score.

“I don’t want to stay here,” she said. She still hadn’t taken off her coat, hadn’t sat down.

“Don’t be childish,” I told her, not meanly, just letting her know I didn’t plan to pamper her forever.

She looked around once more and said, “Help me get rid of at least some of this crap.”

We stripped the place of everything that would move, then went on a shopping spree to replace it.

No question about it—Gloria’s tastes were not Mallory’s. She wanted nothing that was handsome, nothing that hinted of refinement. No one was to mistake her for a genteel
young lady with conventional good taste. She bought quickly, almost randomly, explaining that she’d find things she liked better later, and when we got it home, she wouldn’t rest till it was all in place.

The effect was different (and in its way no less appalling), but she declared she could live with it for the time being.

It was nine o’clock, and I was hungry, as I supposed she was. I told her we could probably find a restaurant that was still serving, but she said she was tired, and that was that. As a concession, she offered me whatever I could find to eat in the fridge and the use of her sofa. I told her I was booked into a hotel downtown. It was far from grand, but, to be honest, I was looking forward to it. I needed a rest from the reincarnated Gloria MacArthur.