The Devil's Elixir

63

Stephenson confirmed what Tess had sussed out.

The things he told me about other cases, the level of authority he conveyed about a subject he probably knew better than anyone on the planet—it was all staggering and shook me to my core. Despite the state we were in, he spoke with a calm eloquence and a coherence that commanded attention, and I couldn’t imagine anyone, least of all well-educated academics, would doubt him. More troubling was the fact that every detail I gave him about what I knew about McKinnon, including his death, tallied with what he’d heard from Alex about his past life experiences, right down to the headgear I was wearing on that hellish night.

I couldn’t see how this could be anything else than what still felt impossible to me.

I fell silent for a long moment, processing everything I’d heard. After a while, I asked, “How come people don’t talk about this more? Why don’t more people know about your work?”

He let out a small scoff. “You’re saying you’re surprised?”

From the look on his face, it was evidently a long-festering frustration for him.

“I can show you all kinds of polls that show that one in four Americans believe in reincarnation,” he added, “but that’s just an easy answer to a casual question. Dig into it a bit deeper and even the ones who say they do get uncomfortable. And that’s really why my work is considered fringe science. No one wants to have to think about it. Not seriously. Our political, academic, and religious leadership—they all have a built-in resistance to it. It goes against the grain of too many sacred tenets. Medical researchers won’t consider it since they have this fundamental, nonnegotiable belief that consciousness can’t possibly exist outside the brain. And for people of faith whose upbringing can’t accommodate something that different than what they’ve been taught all their lives, this idea that there’s an afterlife, but it doesn’t involve heaven or hell, is blasphemous. But it’s not what the whole world thinks. Buddhists and Hindus have believed in reincarnation from day one. And they’re almost a quarter of the population of this planet.

“This is a new paradigm we’re talking about,” he continued. “And it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Especially—and this always surprises me—my peers. Academics who are supposed to have an appetite to explore new ground and uncover the secrets of this universe we live in. But despite all our credentials and all the care we put into our research, most of my peers wouldn’t be seen dead agreeing with me in public. The problem is, even if we have a mountain of evidence that it does happen, we don’t have any proof, and we don’t have any way of explaining how it happens. There’s no biological explanation, not even a tangible theory, for what we call ‘ensoulment’—the moment when a soul roots itself into a fetus or an embryo, or even earlier.” He shook his head with a pained, rueful smile. “But then, that’s a whole other can of worms.”

I thought back to all the IVF sessions I’d gone through with Tess, and dredged up everything that had been explained to us. “Well we know it can’t happen in the first fourteen days after conception, right?’Cause up until then, the zygote is still just a cluster of cells that can still split into two and give you two identical twins. If there was already a soul in there before that, how would that split work?”

Stephenson seemed impressed by this. “Scientifically, you’re right, of course,” he told me. “But a lot of people believe otherwise, as I’m sure you know. Still, the issue of how and when and where a soul embeds itself in that cluster of cells you’re talking about—that’s a question that’s baffled the greatest minds in history. And the simple answer is, no one knows. The Japanese believe the soul is in one’s stomach—that’s why when they commit suicide by seppuku, they stab themselves there. Descartes and most scientists since his day believe the soul lives in the brain—that’s why head injuries can cause personality changes. But where exactly, and what does that mean? We don’t really know. Da Vinci ran experiments on frogs and concluded that the soul resided at the spot where the spinal column meets the brain. Some scientists have even tried monitoring dying patients’ body weight at the exact time of death, claiming that there’s an infinitesimal but observable weight loss upon death that they explain as being the weight of the soul that’s leaving its dead host.”

“Twenty-one grams?” I offered with a slight snort, citing the meme I’d heard time and again.

“More like twenty-one nanograms, if that.” Stephenson shrugged. “The main question, though, is this. Can a soul live outside the body? Can consciousness survive outside the brain? Out-of-body experiences—for which we have a lot of evidence—would suggest that the answer is yes. Did you know that there are plenty of documented cases out there where transplant patients took on some of the personality traits and memories of their organs’ donors? How’s that possible? And what’s consciousness if not memories and personality traits? But we still have a lot of work to do before we prove it—if that’s even possible. And it’s harder since, academically, this is a taboo subject in our country. They just think it’s the stuff of horror movies and TV shows. But in many other cultures, reincarnation isn’t taboo. It’s part of the culture, part of their religion. It’s just not in ours. People here—well, people back home,” he corrected himself somberly, “they’re just not predisposed to take claims like that seriously or investigate them. If a kid starts saying weird things, the parents’ first instinct is to think that it’s coming from their imagination, that they saw it on TV or something—or they’d just think their kid is abnormal and discourage him from voicing any more ‘nonsense.’ In other cultures, the parents’ starting point would be to encourage the kid to tell them more about what he knows, and they’d be asking themselves if these are signs of a reincarnated soul. They’d look into that. And that’s another issue I’ve tried to address in my work. Does this cultural appetite for the concept of reincarnation mean these people come up with links and explanations to fit their theory, or are they really solving something that needed to be solved?”

“I’m amazed you stayed with it all this time,” I told him. “Given all the flak you’ve had to deal with.”

He let out a long sigh, and his expression turned doleful. “It’s just a shame, really. That we can be so prejudiced and closed-minded about what I think is the biggest question facing us. But that’s the way it’s always been, especially about anything having to do with the nonphysical world. That’s why we don’t know much about it. But then again, we didn’t know much about the subatomic world not too long ago either. And just imagine, for a second . . . if we could prove it. If we had proof that reincarnation was real, beyond a doubt. It would change everything. A lot of people would fight it, of course. Bitterly. Angrily. But after it all sinks in, it would make us better. All the great revolutions in human thought did that. They made us more humble and more humane by giving us a better understanding of what we are, of our place in the universe. Copernicus took us out of this delusion that we were the center of the universe. Darwin showed us that we’re only one small part of a big evolutionary system. Freud showed that there’s more to us than an ego and showed us that we have unconscious impulses influencing us, and that pushed us to try and understand ourselves better. This would be another huge step in that tradition. Death is the biggest mystery we face. And if reincarnation were ever proven to be real, it could open the door to a whole new exploration of . . . everything.”

I scoffed. “Not gonna happen though, is it? No matter what proof you might come up with, people will always find a way to shoot it down and say you’re wrong.”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying.” He looked around the walls. “Assuming we ever make it out of here.”

I left that hanging and came back to the most pressing question on my mind. “How’d Michelle take it? When you told her?”

“It troubled her. It always does, when it’s not part of one’s culture. But it didn’t take her long to accept it. She was very open-minded.”

That didn’t surprise me at all. “And you think Alex’s case stacks up?”

Stephenson didn’t hesitate. “I do. And it’s a really interesting case for me. It’s a more or less immediate rebirth—a soul finding a new home shortly after losing its old host. He was born, what, just under a year after McKinnon was killed? It doesn’t happen that often. There’s usually a gap—weeks, months, years even—which opens up a whole other question.”

“About where the soul goes during that gap?”

He nodded. “Exactly. We call it the interlife. And that’s another whole can of worms.” He was now standing by the door, staring at it. Then he turned to me. “Do you think we’re ever going to get out of here alive?”

“I don’t know.” I was being charitable.

He seemed to read it, and his face sank. He sucked in a deep breath to calm himself and ran his hands through his hair, pulling back tightly against his scalp. “What is this drug this psychopath is after? Why is he so determined to get his hands on it?”

I heard some shuffling outside the door, then a key rattled in the lock and the door creaked open.

“Maybe we’re about to find out.”