The Reincarnationist

Chapter 9

One minute, Josh was cradling the professor, waiting for the ambulance. The next, the scent of jasmine and sandalwood blew past him, and he braced himself for the first stirrings of exhalation that preceded an episode. At the same time that Josh desperately wanted to stop the lurch, he also ached for it. An addict, this was his drug. It was that exhilarating. It was that horrific.

Josh had always thought that occasional sense of recognition people experience when they meet someone for the first time and feel an instant connection was nothing to pay attention to. You laugh and say, I’d swear I already know you. Or when you go on vacation to a town you’ve never been to but feel like you have been there before. It’s disturbing, but you shake it off. Or it’s amusing, and you mention it to a friend or spouse.

It’s just déjà vu, you say, not thinking twice.

Maybe when it used to happen.

But not now.

Malachai and Dr. Talmage had educated him beyond that. That fleeting sense was a gift, a moment of unforgetting, signifying that there was a connection between you and the person you’d just met or the place you’d just visited. Nothing is an accident, nothing is a coincidence, according to theories of rebirth that go back through history, through the centuries, circling through cultures, changing and developing, but only attracting so much controversy in the West after the fourth century A.D. In the East, being skeptical about reincarnation would have been as unusual as questioning the wetness of water.

While he waited for what seemed much too long, trying to will the professor to live, Josh was certain he’d tasted death in that place before. He didn’t know what had happened here in the past, only that he now felt he was on some unimaginable journey of repetition that was out of his power to stop.

Sitting on the ground, feeling the professor’s pulse slow, he trained his eyes out the opening, up toward the sky. This way, as soon as the paramedics arrived, he’d see them.

The air undulated around him, and shivers of anticipation shot up and down his arms and legs. Even while he sat perfectly still in one dimension, he was being sucked down into a vortex where the atmosphere was heavier and thicker, where he floated like a ghost rather than walking like a man, and where he felt pleasure more purely and pain more acutely.

It began like every episode. The scene developed slowly, the way photographs appear, as if by magic, on pristine sheets of paper, swimming up out of a swirl of liquid. He was the stranger outside looking in as the scene opened before him. He saw the players and the stage. And then, in a matter of seconds, he became the person he was observing. Saw now through another’s eyes, spoke in the other’s voice. Was not himself. Had lost himself. Did not know there was another self.