The Reincarnationist

Chapter 32

It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some strange new disguise.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rome, Italy-Thursday, 7:20 a.m.

Josh woke up to the ringing of the telephone but didn’t answer it. The ancient vista of Rome and the conversation with Lucas were more real to him than the bed he was sleeping in. So was his headache. No, it was Julius who’d had a headache, in the dream. Josh couldn’t also have one in reality.

Turning over, he tried to get back to where he’d been. There were urgent decisions Julius and Lucas still needed to make, dangers that had to be thwarted. Josh tried to conjure the landscape that had been so clear in his mind only minutes before. The orange-pink sky. The statue of Augustus. The tall cypress trees. And the problem that needed to be solved: how to save Sabina.

Was there any way to get back, or had he lost his mental grasp of the membrane that held him tethered to the dreamscape? He rubbed his eyes-the movement hurt his hands. He opened them and looked down. The scratches he’d gotten in the tunnel had scabbed over the day before. Now many of them, too many of them, were freshly opened.

Fresh blood oozed from the angry lines.

In a rush he remembered the recent past, the scene hours before, being hunted and then his hunter being hunted.

Brushing his hair off his forehead, he was careful not to touch the two-inch gash there. But there was no gash. That was part of the memory lurch. Josh was going mad. How could there have ever been any doubt? This was not some crisscrossing of who he was now and who he had been in a past life. This was his imagination spinning out of control, caused by the trauma incurred during the terrorist attack being exacerbated now by new violence. Of course it was, and the sooner he could get out of Rome and away from the endless flashbacks, the better.

No. Stay. Solve this. Save her.

He felt as if he was being wrenched through a hole in a wall that was far too small for him. Why was he chained to another time and place and to people who were long since dead? Josh didn’t have an adequate way to describe the agony of being forced back to the present when every ounce of your soul says you need to stay in the past. When you are so certain that the people you love won’t survive without you. If Julius didn’t come for her, Sabina would think she had been abandoned. She would think she was unloved.

There is no “she.” You’re a lonely man whose imagination is spinning out of control.

Josh’s body ached as if it had been battered. Josh’s body. Julius’s thoughts. His skin was so dry it felt like sandpaper. His eyes were burning, his hair was dirty, the muscles in his legs felt as if he’d run a marathon. The smell of fire was inside his nostrils.

Insanity was frightening. Josh didn’t want to analyze and dissect what was happening to him anymore. He just wanted it to cease. He wanted to return to a time before the accident, with recollections that started when he was four years old and got his first camera and he and his father went out into Central Park in the snow so that he could take his first roll of pictures.

The only way to break this spell was to get out of bed and into a shower. But not even the cold water pelting his body did anything to shake the sense that he was only half awake, that part of him had been left behind in that netherworld with Sabina.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. This was nuts. There was no woman named Sabina. There was no past. There was only his brain, corrupted by some invisible trauma that had not yet presented itself clearly enough to be diagnosed.

Certainly, Josh had read hundreds of Malachai’s and Beryl’s reports of children who remembered their past lives with such accuracy that the foundation had been able to find historical proof of some of what they’d lived through. However, all the cynics said that if there was evidence, it was logical to think it had been planted rather than remembered.

Sometimes, yes. But over and over? With thousands of children? To what end?

Those kids had been tortured by their past lives. You could see that in their eyes, hear it in their breaking voices. There was no monetary gain for them or their parents. None of them or their families had ever gone public. Other than the Phoenix Foundation helping the child put the disturbing scenes to rest, not one of the three thousand children Beryl and Malachai had helped had ever tried to cash in on their experiences.

So why couldn’t Josh accept that what happened to them was what was happening to him? Why wasn’t it possible that something had gone terribly wrong long ago in Rome, and now, all these centuries later, he was remembering what he was not meant to remember through some accident of metaphysics?

What if this woman whose mummified body had been discovered by the professor and Gabriella was named Sabina? What if there had been a Roman priest named Julius whose fault it was that Sabina had suffocated to death in that small, narrow space? Wasn’t that the kind of horrific event that might have karmic repercussions that would reach through time to demand retribution?

But even if he believed it all, what the hell was he supposed to do?

He turned up the water. Made it hotter.

How do you avenge a death that took place in the year 391 A.D.?

You find the body her soul now inhabits and make it up to her.

Wasn’t that the thought that had been plaguing him since he woke up from the accident in the hospital?

Somewhere a woman was waiting for him and he wouldn’t be himself again until he found her.

He’d been so confused and obsessed with the idea of this woman it had shredded his already-damaged marriage.

Somewhere a woman who once shared Sabina’s spirit was waiting for him to help her and get it right this time.

Lust does not explain itself. There’s no logic to the powerful hunger that can interrupt any single moment and render you almost helpless. Standing in the shower, water dripping off him, trying to make some sense of his messed-up life, the last thing he expected to feel was overwhelming naked need for the woman’s skin-for Sabina’s skin.

Leaning against the cold tiles, he shut his eyes. He tried, but failed to stop himself. His body didn’t care what his mind dictated. He wanted to find her. Wanted to smell her and taste her and bury himself high up inside of her. He wanted to know her again and disappear with her into that place where passion dissipated every bit of fear and existential panic. It didn’t matter if their joining ultimately doomed them. Being together was worth dying for. All that mattered was that they were connected, that their bodies crashed together again and obliterated all the pain of living in an unfair world. That for a few minutes they could find some ecstasy to succor them through the bleakness and the blackness.

In the shower stall, back up against the wall, the imaginary lovemaking inflamed him. He was burning up, igniting, flaring and soaring: he was with her for what always felt like the first time.

He allowed himself to say the word-her name-moaned it out loud as his blood surged through his veins and her curls fell on his face and his chest, and the jasmine in her hair scented the steamy air, and he clutched her thighs as they wrapped around him and pressed himself deeper and deeper and deeper into her, and for a time he believed it was her muscles that moved him forward, forward, forward.

Out loud, in the cry of release, came her name again.

Sabina.

The sound of the final note of a sad song played on the strings of a harp. A long, solemn note, lasting, lasting, lasting and then gone.