The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (15 page)

He drove under the arch and, without hesitation, took the next left. Chestnut Street. It was strange, he thought. He could remember the name of no street in his dreams. Yet, now that he was here, he seemed to know exactly where to go. And he knew precisely what would appear when he turned right on Chestnut.

The public square was there, just as he expected. There was the
same green lawn. The same green park benches lining the diagonal walk. The same two statues. The sign said: Court Square.

But there was no tower.

He parked the car and walked into the square. On the site where he had seen the tower, there was now another building. It looked fairly new and was modern in design. Functional, all stainless steel and glass. He saw that it was the town’s municipal building. It housed the Superior Court, the Riverside Police Department, the City Clerk’s Office, the Department of Parks.

His immediate reaction was one of anger. He had wanted to find that tower there; he had expected it. It had been one of the artifacts in the museum of his memory. Now they had destroyed it, and it seemed like some kind of desecration.

An old man was sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. He wore bifocals and was neatly dressed. Peter walked up to him.

“Excuse me, sir.”

The man put down the paper and stared up at him with rheumy blue eyes. “Yes?”

“Wasn’t there a tower here a few years ago?”

“Sure was. They used to call it the Municipal Tower.”

“When did they tear it down?”

“Oh, along about 1950. Or maybe it was ’51.”

“I see.”

“They had another name for it, too. The Campanile. Designed it after some tower in Italy. Florence, Venice, somewhere like that. You could see it for miles around. But it was pretty old. The engineers figured it was unsafe, so they tore it down.”

“Wasn’t there some kind of observation balcony at the top?”

“Yep. Sure was. Great view from there, too. Used to take my grandchildren up there. Personally, I think it was a damned shame they tore it down. The tower looked pretty, standing there. I mean, it made the town. But then, what can you do? The stupid bastards are always tearing down something beautiful and putting up something
ugly. Said they had to do it in the name of progress. The real estate was too valuable.” The old man snorted. “The same old story. When a fast buck is involved, nobody respects anything.”

The man went back to his newspaper. Peter found an empty bench and sat down. He felt faint, giddy. His heart was pounding violently. He thought, All right, let’s try to put it together now. Let’s try to put it all together.

This is where I lived before I died. Riverside, Massachusetts.

But who was I?

Except that a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God
.

—C
HRIST

God generates beings, and then sends them back, over and over again, till they return to him
.

—T
HE
K
ORAN

After all, it is no more surprising to be born twice than it is to be born once. Everything in Nature is resurrection
.

—V
OLTAIRE

Death is but a sleep and a forgetting. If death is not a prelude to another life, the intermediate period is a cruel mockery
.

—G
ANDHI

Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: “It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing. And that his present birth is his first entrance into life.”

—S
CHOPENHAUER

My doctrine is: Live, so that thou mayest desire to live again—that is thy duty. For in any case, thou wilt live again
.

—N
IETZSCHE

He had no idea how long he had been sitting there.

But after a while his head stopped spinning. The buildings surrounding the square came out of the blur and into focus, etched sharply against a darkening sky. The wind had sharpened, and he felt cold. Gradually he became conscious of the noise of traffic on the streets bordering the square. The old man had left his nearby bench. The newspaper he had been reading lay forlornly on the wooden slats, the wind whipping its pages. The noise of traffic was heavy now; horns were blowing. He had the impression that it was the rush hour. A flock of pigeons settled at his feet, waiting hopefully.

And again, the questions came pounding through his brain, tormenting him.

Who was I? What was my name? How did I come to live here? What kind of man was I? And who was Marcia? Wife? Lover? What kind of woman was she? A murderess, yes, but before that? Why did she cut off my life while I was still young? Did they ever find out her crime and convict her for it? Perhaps not. Perhaps they never even found out that she murdered me. Is she dead? Perhaps. But the chances were good that she was still alive. She would be somewhere in her fifties now. It was possible that she still lived here.

And if she did, he would find her. No matter what it took, or how long it took, he would find her.

It was possible that at this very moment, as he sat in the square, his murderess might be walking along the streets, or shopping in one of the stores, or driving one of those cars he saw. Perhaps he
and Marcia had even passed each other on the sidewalk as he came out of the bank, drove down the street and into the square. Perhaps they had looked each other in the eye and gone on, without recognition. She would not know him, of course; he was sure he bore no resemblance to his previous incarnation, to X. He was a different body, with a different face and a different name. His soul was the same, but you could not see a soul. You could not describe it. A soul had no face and no fingerprints. And after all, the man she knew was dead. She had killed him herself.

He wondered whether
he
would recognize
her
. He knew the chances were against it. After all, in his dream world she was a young woman. Now she would be much older—some thirty years older. She could be ugly now. Fat. Her youth obliterated by time. He might pass her on the street and never know her. He shivered at the thought.

Funny. He was confused about his own identity now. Sometimes he thought of X as an entirely different person, and at other times he thought of X as himself. It depends on how you look at it, he thought. If you saw it in purely physical terms, X’s body had died years ago in the slime and weeds at the bottom of that lake. And my body, the body of Peter Proud, is very much alive. Yet we have the same souls. In that sense, we are one and the same. And perhaps that is the most important sense.

The wind became sharper. What he had to do now was check in at a hotel somewhere. He remembered there had been one near the bank.

He rose and started to walk out of the square. Then something caught his attention-a large rock, or boulder, the top of which had been flattened out. On the flat area a bronze plate had been riveted. He read the inscription:

He read the inscription on the boulder a second time. George Washington drank here. He wondered whether Washington was alive now in some other incarnation. It was entirely possible. The Father of Our Country might still live, in some other body, some other house of flesh, somewhere in the world. In his reading, he had learned that many men had claimed they had been George Washington in some previous incarnation. Or Napoleon, or John the Baptist, or Caesar. Most of them, he presumed, were in insane asylums. But the idea was no longer ridiculous to him.

He himself was the living proof of that.

The hotel was called the Riverside.

Vaguely, Peter recalled it from one of his dream fragments, although in the hallucination it looked much newer than it did now. It was an old building, perhaps fifty years old now, and it seemed out of place amidst the new shops along Main Street. It was perhaps ten stories high and built of the time-darkened granite that apparently was indigenous to the region. Under its roofs and cornices were fancy flutings and small gargoyles of what appeared to be dirty marble.

When he entered the lobby, he knew he had been there before. It was all vaguely familiar: the green carpets, the palms, the dark mahogany reception desk, the heavy leather furniture, the doors to the restaurant and the rest rooms, their upper halves made of Tiffany
glass. He even seemed to recall the oaken grandfather clock standing at the entrance to the dining room.

Clearly, the place was doing very little business. There was nobody in the lobby. Probably on its last legs, he thought. They’d tear it down any day and build another new and sterile high-rise office building in its place, or maybe another bank.

The eerie feeling persisted that he, in the form of X, had frequented this place. Back in the forties, it must have been quite fashionable. It was possible that X had taken Marcia here for a drink and dinner many times. Certainly he could afford it. In the dreams he seemed prosperous enough.

There was no one at the reception desk. He punched the bell on the counter. A clerk came out, a man of about sixty, white-haired, with a seamed face.

“Yes, sir?”

“I’d like a room.”

“For how long, sir?”

“Oh, about two days.”

“I think we can accommodate you. We’ve got a big room high up and at the front, for eighteen dollars. And a smaller room at the rear, for fifteen.”

“The room at the front will be fine.”

He signed the registration card. Peter stared at the elderly clerk. Then he asked, “How long have you been with this hotel?”

The man was startled by the sudden question. He stared at Peter.

“Why do you ask, sir?”

“Just curious.”

“Why, let me see. Came here in 1940. Been here thirty-five years.”

“I see,” Peter looked around. “Must have been quite a place back then.”

“Yes, sir. It was.”

He had been here long enough then. Long enough to have met X. He must have known what X looked like. Known him by
name—and Marcia. Suddenly he had a desperate desire to say to the man,
I am someone you used to know. A long time ago. Someone who probably came into this hotel. With a woman named Marcia. But I don’t know my name. Can you tell me who I am?

Crazy. The man would think he was crazy, and with good reason. Yet he almost blurted it out.

The clerk, still looking at him curiously, rang for a bellboy.

He lay on the bed, drained of all energy, his nervous system still in shock.

He remembered the clairvoyant, Verna Bird, lying on her chaise longue in her long flowing red housecoat, frozen in her trance. And Elva Carlsen, her secretary, sitting rigidly with folded hands, acting as conduit to the beyond. “We have a soul here.”
Yes, I see the soul
. “And we have a body which houses the soul.”
I see the body
. “Do you see others before this?”
I see others. The bodies are different, and they live at different times. They live and die, according to God’s will. And the old soul passes from one to the other
. And himself, listening, fascinated, as he peered at Verna Bird through that ridiculous altar.

Ever since his visit to the house on Laurel Canyon, he had been confused about Verna Bird. Was she just an aging female charlatan conducting a little mumbo jumbo for fat fees? Or did she have genuine insight, the kind that transcended logic itself? She had told him he had lived a number of lives before, back through the centuries. Chalaf, the Hittite slave, the Japanese outcast, and so on. But this was pretty safe ground. Who could call her a liar? Who could possibly prove her wrong or right? It was significant that she had stopped short of any reincarnation that might possibly be documented as true or false. She had claimed she knew nothing about X.

Yet, curiously, all his previous lives had come to an end by drowning, in one way or another. So, too, had his last life. But he
had told Verna Bird nothing of the dream. It was strange. And frightening.

Then he recalled what she had said in her Spiritual Healing reading, about his becoming some kind of prophet. He had instantly dismissed it as pure nonsense. But now, in view of what had just happened?

He shivered a little. It’s crazy, he thought. Death was not the end of everything, it was just the beginning. In effect, nobody died. Death was a long sleep from which you always awakened. A man didn’t live just one life; he lived many lives.