The Reincarnationist

Chapter 20

Rome, Italy-Wednesday, 11:08 a.m.

Josh leaned against the giant bronze doors on the monumental porch facing inward to the rectangular colonnaded temple, staring at the familiar way the sun filtered down from the hemispherical dome. He’d been feeling Julius’s grief so deeply he could barely breathe. He was surprised that his physical reactions had crossed the divide.

The light shifted and sunbeams streamed through the unglazed oculus, creating patterns of illumination on the floors and walls of porphyry stone, granite and yellow marble. The opening also let in birds that were swooping down and then, not sure of where they were or how to escape, flying around wildly until they found a breeze and rode it out.

On the wall, Josh noticed a large plaque. The top paragraph was in Italian, but the one beneath it was in English. He read the brief history of the church.

The Pantheon of Agrippa was erected by the Roman Emperor Hadrian between 118 and 128 A.D., replacing a smaller temple built by the statesman Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa in 27 B.C.

In the early seventh century it was consecrated as a church, Santa Maria ad Martyres.

Had he-or the man he saw in his mind-defended this very temple sixteen hundred years ago? Was he remembering for him…remembering for the dead?

From where he stood, Josh could see Gabriella in front of the side altar, lighting a votive candle with a long stick. The flame sputtered and then held steady. The glass glowed red.

Bowing her head, she knelt and clasped her hands in front of her.

Josh fingered his camera, yearning to take her picture but sensing it would be a rude intrusion to photograph this woman he barely knew, in prayer. It even felt wrong to be watching such an intimate moment, but he was mesmerized by the scene. By the serenity that hovered just above the chaos. By the beauty of her body arched over, deep in prayer. By the halo effect of sunlight glinting around her head, echoing the Virgin’s halo in the painting that hung behind her in the alcove.

“You don’t like churches?” Gabriella asked when she found him there a few minutes later.

Josh couldn’t tell her that he’d just stood at the door to a church in Rome on a Sunday afternoon in the twenty-first century and watched what had happened in that same building nearly two millennia before, or how the horror of that past had stopped him from going inside.

In the past six months, other than Dr. Beryl Talmage and Malachai Samuels at the Phoenix Foundation, Professor Rudolfo had been the only one he’d told any of the tale to. Curious rather than judgmental, the professor seemed to accept what Josh had said without skepticism. Would Gabriella be as objective? Or would she look at him the way his ex-wife had, the way some of the doctors and therapists had, the way Josh still looked at himself in the mirror-as a freak.

Malachai had laughed when Josh told him that was how he’d felt.

“To me you are a marvel, a gift. A chance,” he’d said, “for us to take our understanding of reincarnation to another level.”

As they left the church, it occurred to Josh that he didn’t know where Malachai was, and asked her.

“He was at the American embassy most of yesterday, trying to get them to intercede on your behalf. We talked last night on the phone and he told me he wasn’t having any luck. There was some kind of summit meeting and everyone with authority was away. That’s when he asked me to help. He thought I’d have a better shot with the police since I speak fluently.”

“And since you’re so damn attractive.”

She was totally caught off guard by his compliment. So was he.

“That was fairly sexist. I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. “No, it was nice.”

The tension between them lifted for a minute. They were just two people standing on a street in Rome, walking in the sunshine. A guy giving a woman a compliment that she was gracious enough to take in the spirit that it was intended.

They’d just gotten into her car and she’d turned on the ignition when her cell phone rang. While she talked, rapidly in Italian, Josh turned around and looked back at the church, watching a group of tourists go in. Lifting his camera to his eye, he studied the building from different angles and took several shots. Gabriella’s back was to him; she was facing out her window. He shifted in his seat so he could see the side of her face, watch her lips move and the way the sun brought out the honey in her hair. But what he was searching for wasn’t there.

After the accident he’d seen an aura around certain people’s heads when he photographed them, but the strange lights never showed up in the photographs themselves. The first time he’d thought it was a camera defect and had changed the camera body and then the lenses. When it appeared a second time, he told the doctors about it. Just like the memory lurches, the lights might have been proof of neurological problems. But they never found any.

When Josh went to work at the foundation, he continued seeing the lights hovering over several of the children he worked with. Impossible to discern with his naked eye, it was only something he picked up through the camera lens: white translucent streaks radiating around the upper portion of their bodies. As if a cartoonist were indicating speed. Was it speed? Time moving at the speed of light?

He had only seen it once before that.

When Josh was twenty, his father had been diagnosed with cancer. Whatever Ben sensed about Josh’s reaction, he didn’t say much at first. That was his style. He delivered the news to his son in his straightforward, black-and-white way and left him to absorb it.

A few days later, they were working in the darkroom together, both of them lit by the single red light.

“I’ve a favor to ask,” Ben said, and while they continued to develop that afternoon’s shoot, he told Josh he wanted him to chronicle his illness photographically.

At the time, Josh didn’t question the request. It seemed so natural. The father, a photographer, asking the son, a photographer, to capture this last event of his life. Only years later did he realize what a great gift his father had given him. A way for them to share as much time as they could together. A way for Ben to pass on every last bit of teaching about their shared craft. For them to be joined even in their unjoining.

Josh chronicled everything in those last few weeks. The slow fading. The light that disappeared in his father’s eyes, lumen by lumen until there was nothing left but pain and dulled emotion. He looked through the lens and searched for the potent man he had known and loved for all of his life, but he couldn’t find him in the shell made of bones and sickly flesh.

Toward the end, Josh moved back home and slept on a cot in his father’s sickroom. One midnight, Josh had fallen asleep when the nurse woke him to tell him that from the sound of his father’s breathing, she thought this was the end.

Josh asked her to leave them alone.

He sat in the dark by Ben Ryder’s side, holding his father’s hand. It hurt just listening to his raspy breathing. And then Ben woke up. Just lay still on the bed, looking up at his son and whispered, “More shots.”

“Morphine?” Josh asked. Although Ben was on a drip, he assumed his father had forgotten he was no longer getting injections and needed additional painkillers.

“No.” He gave Josh a weak smile. “Photographs. Of this.”

A son dreams of the secret of life being revealed by a father on his deathbed. Josh was asked to pick up his camera and go to work. But it was what they did, and so Josh stood over his father and kept photographing him, not knowing if he was getting anything because his eyes were so blurred with tears.

And that was when he noticed the opalescent nimbus, like a ring of light around Ben’s head and shoulders.

It was his hand shaking, it was a reflection from the bathroom light, it was something in the lens or the camera itself, it was his tears. It was nothing. It was not worth questioning.

Over the ensuing days and weeks of grief, Josh forgot about the light, and when he eventually developed the photographs, it wasn’t there and he never thought about it again.

Until twenty years later when he went to work at the Phoenix Foundation and started seeing the mother-of-pearl arc of light that appeared almost like wings behind his subjects’ heads and around their shoulders.

Over lunch one day, he mentioned it to Beryl and Malachai.

“That, too?” Malachai had said wistfully.

“What do you mean?” Josh asked.

“Not many people can see it. I can’t.”

Beryl didn’t suffer her nephew’s plaintive longing when it crept into his conversation. She shook her head as if he were a little boy she was displeased with, and addressed the issue without any emotion.

“We think it’s a marker identifying some people as old souls.”

“Have you ever seen it?” Josh asked.

“Yes.”

“Through a camera?”

“No. You only see it through the camera lens?”

Josh said yes and asked her why, but she couldn’t think of a reason. He asked why she hadn’t written about the phenomenon in any of her papers.

“The hallmark of scientific research is reproducibility. I can put out an auger dish and grow a banana fish in it and present that as my research, but my career as a scientist would be over unless the next person who tried to do it, following my methods, could duplicate my results.”

“Then I’ll find a way to prove it so that if someone else follows my methods and takes a picture of the same subject it will be there for him, too.”

“I don’t think it can be done,” Beryl said.

“I need to try. I need one absolute shred of proof. At least this has to do with something I know about-cameras, light, exposure.”

Long after that lunch, Josh still wondered if the light he’d first seen years before had been his father’s intact soul lifting up and leaving his tired, diseased body, starting the journey to find a new, healthy one and begin anew.

Ben Ryder hadn’t been religious, and neither had Sarah, Josh’s mother. Under their influence, he wasn’t, either. Ben had left instructions that he wasn’t to be buried but cremated and that he wanted his ashes thrown away. Like garbage. That was his wish, and Josh honored it. He knew Ben wasn’t in those ashes. He was in his son’s remembrances of him.

He was in his photographs.

“You just do the best you can and make the most of the life you have. Heaven,” he’d once told Josh during that last year, “is just a comfortable concept to make people feel better about death.”

So Josh had watched his father’s energy and vitality leave and each day recorded what was left of him, but it wasn’t until his work for the foundation that he wondered where his father’s spirit had gone. Until then he’d never wondered if it had indeed existed as an entity that could pick up and move. Never wondered if it was in limbo waiting to be reconstituted in someone else. Certainly never wondered if he’d be the person to capture it with his camera and try to prove that it was real.

But since going to that lunch with Beryl, he did.

“I’m going back to the hospital,” Gabriella said after she hung up. “The professor is worse. He might be…” She swallowed, fought for control but didn’t finish the sentence.

“You said he survived the surgery.”

“He did. Now he has an infection. You saved him for the surgeons, and they saved him for this to kill him.”

“Let me go with you,” he said.

She didn’t put up an argument, and so they set off for the hospital together.