The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (12 page)

“You’re at this lake?”

“Yes.”

“What is your name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try to think. What is your name?”

A pause. Then: “I don’t know.”

Bentley’s voice was insistent. “Try. Try to think. Try to think.”

“I don’t know. I don’t.” X sounded querulous. “I don’t know my name.”

“All right. You are at the lake.”

“Yes.”

“What is the name of the lake?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try to think.”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. Are you there alone? Or with someone?”

“With someone.”

“Who?”

“Marcia.”

“Marcia who?”

I don’t know.”

“What is her last name?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. Tell me what you
do
know.”

“It’s night. I come out of the cabin. I’m naked. The wind is cold. I shiver a little. But then, I hardly feel it …”

“Go on …”

“The moon is out. It’s almost full. I feel good. Very good. I walk down to the dock. I do a little war dance …”

From this point on, the voice of X related the entire incident, down to the last detail—just as he, Peter Proud, had dreamed it again and again. Right up to the hideous end. There was a pause of several minutes.

He felt entirely different, separate from X. They were two different people. After the moment of birth a stranger had come into the picture. A familiar stranger, but a stranger, nevertheless.

Then Bentley’s voice broke in:

“Is there anything more? Can you go even further back?”

There was a pause. Then:

“I see an automobile.”

“Yes?”

“I’m driving this automobile. The top is down. There’s a girl beside me. She’s singing.”

“Where are you driving this car?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is the girl’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is your name?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. Go further back. What else do you see?”

X then related, in succession, the Baby Dream, the Tennis Dream, the Prison Dream, the Tower Dream and all the others, right up to the Tree Dream. In none of them did he come up with any names, any new facts. The Tree Dream would be the last possibility.

Bentley’s voice took on even greater urgency. “Now tell me what you see.”

“I see a tree.”

“Yes? Where is this tree?”

“It’s in a kind of park. Just outside a town.”

“What is the name of the park?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is the name of the town?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try.” Bentley’s voice persisted. “Try to think.”

“I don’t know the name of the town. I don’t know.”

“You were there. You
must
know.”

“No.” The voice became querulous again. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“All right. What do you see?”

“I am there. And with a girl.”

“The girl is Marcia?”

“No. Some other girl.”

“What is her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“How old are you now?”

“I’m young.”

“How young?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m carving my initials—and hers—in the bark of the tree.”

“What are the initials?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see them.”

“Try to see them.”

“I can’t, I can’t see them!”

After a few minutes of silence, Bentley turned off the tape recorder.

“Well, that’s that. Nothing we can use. Nothing new. Not a name anywhere, not a clue.”

“Why couldn’t I remember anything else?”

“I don’t know.” The parapsychologist took out the spool of tape and slammed shut the cover over the machine. Clearly he was disappointed. “We can only theorize. Obviously, you developed a deep resistance, even under hypnosis, to opening yourself up. For some reason, you didn’t want to open the door. Or in another sense you didn’t want to open a Pandora’s box. Afraid, perhaps, to explore this weird mystery, to reveal yourself to yourself. Afraid, perhaps, that it would be too much to handle, that you might go insane …”

Peter was still stunned by what he had heard on the tape. All the names he had remembered, right up to the day of his birth. And after that, nothing.
I’ll just tell you so much and no more
, X had said.
If I don’t want to remember, there’s nothing you can do about it
.

“Look,” said Bentley reluctantly, “we could try again. Maybe we can get you down into a deeper stage….”

It was easy to see that Bentley didn’t have much hope in this possibility.

“You don’t really think it would work, do you?”

“If you pin me down to it, no.” Then, hopefully, “But there is another method we might try.”

“Yes?”

“Electroshock.”

“Shock treatments?”

Bentley nodded. “There’s a theory that applied electroshock before hypnosis may produce some interesting results, change some memory patterns temporarily, so that the patient evidences less resistance. Of course we’d experiment with a very mild current …”

“Experiment? You mean, this hasn’t been tried on anyone before?”

Bentley hesitated. “Well, yes. It has.”

“On whom?”

“On schizophrenics.”

Peter stared at the parapsychologist. “I don’t think I’m a schizo, Hall.”

“I didn’t say you were,” Bentley said hastily, “It’s just something we might possibly consider.”

“No. I don’t want to be anybody’s guinea pig. And I don’t intend to have my brains scrambled to prove
anything
.”

“Okay,” said Bentley. “I don’t blame you. I guess I was reaching a little. Let’s forget all that and try to get this monkey off your back another way. We’ll try suggestion hypnosis. Suppose you come in tomorrow morning, same time.”

“You think there’s a chance …?”

“I don’t know. In hypnotherapy, it’s foolish to make any predictions. We’ve had some success with certain traumas involving certain sleep disturbances, amnesia, and the like. All we can do is try.”

After his patient had gone, Hall Bentley went to a cupboard and poured himself a drink. He felt very tired and very depressed.

Christ, he thought, what a letdown. For a while his hopes had soared, especially when he had found out that his patient was able to go, first, into a trance state and, second, into regression. For a while he had believed that here, on this day, Peter Proud would turn out to be the living proof of reincarnation. That here history would be made, that they would shake the world. The prospect was a thousand times more exciting than walking on the moon.

But his patient had come up zero.

He had pursued this wraith hopefully for years. But it always came down to the same roadblock. Theories, conjecture, even a certain logic. But no hard-nosed proof. At this moment he was convinced that there never would be any. And anybody who really thought so was only deluding himself.

If you believe it’s so, fine. But just try proving it, doctor.

The next morning, Bentley put Peter under hypnosis again. When he had gone under, the parapsychologist began:

“You have been having these dreams. The same dreams. But they are really hallucinations. They are harmful. They are nightmares
that hurt your sleep. They exhaust your energy. Now, you must get rid of them. You have had enough of them. You will forget all about them. They never existed….”

Miraculously, the dreams vanished.

Night after night passed dreamlessly. Peter awoke feeling rested, completely refreshed. The man he thought of as X had apparently died for the last time. He no longer walked the streets of the mysterious city, or played tennis, or drove the big Packard, or counted money in his prison.

In time, he began to dream again. But these dreams were different, the kind everybody had. Dreams identified with childhood memories or authority figures. Dreams in which the cast of characters was familiar: his father, his mother, his friends, Nora. And in locales he recognized in present memory.

In time, the hallucinations themselves became one big dream, a series of nightmares he had had at one time. Now and then he would refer to the notebook he had kept. He could read about them now in a curious, detached way. Their content seemed the wildest fantasy.

He became his old self again. He worked well teaching, doing his research. He completed four chapters of his book. His appetite was good. He played even more tennis than before, and his game and reflexes were much sharper. It seemed to him that he had twice as much energy as he had ever had before. He felt marvelous. And at peace.

His relationship with Nora improved. He knew it had been badly shaken recently—that, in fact, she had been on the verge of leaving him. He knew he hadn’t been easy to live with. She had gone along with him, but it had been an ordeal for her, too. And their sex life had suffered. Now everything was normal again.

Occasionally they would talk of marriage, but in a deliberately vague way. Perhaps, they said. Someday. But they both knew it
wasn’t really there, not for the long run. They appreciated each other, both physically and intellectually. They more than just liked each other, but someday, they knew, it would end, with deep regrets and a great sense of loss on the part of both. But in the meantime they enjoyed each other from day to day.

Then one night, out of nowhere, without warning, his pleasant, peaceful existence was shattered.

It was about two months after his last session with Hall Bentley, during the spring midterm break. He was sprawled on the couch in front of the television set, indifferently watching the end of one program and the start of another. The program just coming on was one of those documentaries the networks occasionally produced, the kind they put together to convince the FCC that they were indeed operating in the public interest and vitally interested in raising the cultural level of the American people. This one, according to the opening title, was on “The Changing Face of America.”

He had played three hard sets of tennis that afternoon and was on his second martini. He felt pleasantly tired and drowsy. He had to struggle to keep his eyes open as he stared at the screen. Nora was in the kitchen broiling steaks. She was complaining to him about her job. He only half-listened as she went on irritably:

“That bastard I work for—Dr. Lohrman—he’s been impossible lately. Having some trouble with his wife or something. I think she left him. Anyway, he’s taking it out on all his teaching assistants, particularly me. It seems I can’t do anything right. And do you know what I found out about him?”

“What?”

“He’s dishonest. Intellectually dishonest. I happen to know that he found an article in some obscure German publication, paraphrased it a little, and he’s going to use it in his own work. Publish it without credit….”

On the television screen, a narrator came on. He stood on a huge floor map of the United States. This was a program, he said gravely,
about contemporary America. The America you and I live in today. The America most of us love. We are going to show you how its face has changed, where America has gone, where it is now. How it has changed in population, in regional economics, and in other ways during the past fifty years.

Peter drained the last of his martini. He was getting sleepier. Nora’s voice continued from the kitchen. Vaguely he heard her saying that she had had it up to here with being a T.A., especially for a demanding idiot like Lohrman. He was impossible. Here she was, a PhD candidate, treated like a child, paid a pittance, and still paying tuition. On top of all this, she had gone before the doctoral committee to present her dissertation subject and the chairman, a pompous son of a bitch, had rejected it. He had told her that she needed a more problem-oriented subject. And what the hell did
that
mean?

Her voice drifted off. It became a babble from a distance. He stared fixedly at the television screen. Pictures were flashing on the screen now, quick cuts of various towns and villages. Grainy pictures taken long ago, the kind they would call Americana now. The narrator was talking about the Northeast now—specifically New England. Many years ago, he said, it was a vital industrial area. Here, in these towns and villages, were silk, paper, tool and die, textile, and small arms industries. It was an area full of skilled craftsmen, many of them immigrants from the old country, as well as native Yankees. But times had changed. Many of the industries had closed and moved south, where labor was cheaper.

The pictures went on and on, a montage of shots, one after the other—towns and cities, circa 1920, from Maine to Connecticut. They showed principal streets, factories, residential sections, monuments, public squares and so forth, none of them identified by name.

Suddenly he sat bolt upright. There, on the television screen, he saw it. His town.

He was sure of it. There was one quick picture of the main street he knew so well. The stone railroad bridge over the street, its
underside curved in the shape of an arch. Then a shot of the square he remembered. And the tower, an exact replica of the one he had seen so many times in the Tower Dream.

They were only glimpses. The name of the town hadn’t been given. But it had been there, right on the screen.
His
town.

He sat rigid, staring at the screen. The narrator was talking about the South now. Pictures of other cities, other towns, flipped by quickly. He sat there in a cold sweat. Then he yelled:

“Nora!”

She came running from the kitchen, looking alarmed. “What is it?”

He told her what he had seen. He babbled it out, the words coming out in a rush. She stared at him.

“Pete, you’re crazy.”

“I
told
you. I saw it!”

“You couldn’t have.”

“I swear I saw it.”

“All right,” she said. “You think you saw it. Maybe you did—in your imagination.”

“No.”

“Darling,” she said patiently, “there isn’t any such town. Not the one you dreamed about, anyway. You were just lying on the couch, you had had a couple of martinis, and you were half asleep. You know—daydreaming. You saw all these pictures flashing by, and you just identified with a couple of them. Had a kind of hallucination …”