The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (19 page)

“My God,” said Bentley impatiently. “All this, and you’re worrying about a few classes?”

“It’s still a commitment.”

“If I were you, I’d get back to Riverside tomorrow. That’s where the commitment is. But all right. If they’ve been trying to prove reincarnation for thousands of years, I don’t suppose a few weeks more will make much difference.” He paused. “Any idea how you’re going to proceed when you go back?”

He discussed the House Dream and the Tennis Dream with Bentley and the possibilities behind them. Bentley nodded.

“It might work out.”

“On the other hand, I might draw a blank.”

“No,” said Bentley. “I think you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because I think it was meant to be. Ordained.”

Peter stared at Bentley. “What does
that
mean?”

“I’m not quite sure. I’m not a religious man, Pete, but everything that’s happened to you seems—well, as you yourself said—
planned
. As though you’ve been tapped on the shoulder by some divine finger. Chosen to deliver this particular message. As a—well, as a prophet.”

Prophet. He thought of Verna Bird. A chill crept up his back.

“Hall, suppose, just for argument, that what you say is true. There are billions of people in the world. Why one Peter Proud? Why
me?
”

“I don’t know. There’s no answer to that question. Maybe there was a big game and your number came up. I’ll answer your question with a question. Of all the people in the world almost two thousand years ago, why a simple carpenter from Nazareth?”

They said nothing for a long time. Travelers came in and out of the cocktail lounge. Muted chatter rose and fell. There was an occasional laugh. The voice over the airport public address system intruded insistently. Flights were arriving, flights were leaving, last
call for Flight So-and-So, and would Mister So-and-So please report to the information desk.

Finally, Bentley stirred and started to rise. “I guess we’d better pick up your luggage. Then I’ll get the car and …”

“Hall, wait a minute. Sit down.” Bentley sat down, staring at Peter. “There’s something we haven’t discussed.”

“Yes?”

“If all this really does come about—what becomes of me? What happens to my personal life?”

“I’m sure you can guess.”

“I can. But I’d like to hear what you think.”

Bentley smiled weakly. “I was afraid we’d get into this sooner or later.”

“Let’s get into it now.”

“All right. I suppose we can make some reasonable speculations. First, as soon as all this is announced, you’d become an instant world celebrity, a controversial figure. You’d put Bridey Murphy in the deep shade. To some, you’d become the Man of the Century, or any other century. The man who brought this world a new revelation, who solved the mystery of death. To some, you’d be kind of a new Messiah.

“Does all this sound pretty high-flown? Maybe it does. But it’s impossible to exaggerate it. In a sense, to some you’d be the founder, or at least the prophet, of a whole new religion. To others, you’d be a liar and a fraud. To yet others, some kind of Satan, bent on destroying the whole idea of Heaven after death, and other concepts the Christian church holds dear. You’d be both one hell of a hero and one hell of a villain.”

Peter felt faint. His head whirled.

“Hall, I still can’t absorb all of this. All I have is a gut reaction.”

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid of it. I don’t want any part of it. My instinct is to pass. Forget it. Not get involved at all.”

“You don’t have any choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t belong to yourself anymore,” said Bentley. “You’re in too deep, and you’ve gone too far. You’re committed. I appreciate how you feel, Pete. But look, your personal life isn’t important anymore. It’s what you know, and what you have to tell.”

They paid their bill and walked out of the lounge. As they did, Hall Bentley looked at Peter. There was a small smile around his mouth, but his eyes were serious.

“Remind me to drive carefully.
Very
carefully.”

As they drove away from the airport the traffic was bumper to bumper. It reminded Peter of the last time he had been here. Then, hundreds of kids with painted faces and wearing saffron robes had tied up the traffic. They were beating drums, clanking finger cymbals and chanting the Hare Krishna. They had come to meet their guru, the Supreme Person, Lord of all Lords, the Cause of all Causes, the Ultimate Truth of all Truths, the Perfection of all Endeavors of Perfection.

He knew they were part of the whole growing occult scene. Most of them had already tried all the psychedelic drugs. They knew all about mind expansion, and they were interested in anything that promised a fourth dimension. It wasn’t much of a step to go from acid travel to soul travel. And it wasn’t only the kids who were part of this renaissance of mysticism. It was the older people, too. Everybody wanted answers. People everywhere, he reflected, were suffering from the same frustrations. We could fly men to the moon, but it took years to get our men out of Vietnam. We knew how to blow all mankind to hell, but we couldn’t get rid of the rats in the slums. We could climb the highest mountain, but we couldn’t keep muggers away from a few square miles of city parks and streets.

This didn’t make sense to the cultists. To them, what made sense were ideas or movements based on faith or emotion. Brother, we’ve
all been locked in the jail of technology. We’ve had our minds computerized. And what has it done for us? Nothing. It’s turned out to be a desert. Now, we’re looking for answers way out there, because there’s nowhere else to look.

At the time, the Krishna kids had amused him by the way they had honored their prophet. The Great Guru, the Supreme Person, the Ultimate Truth of all Truths.

Then he shivered a little. My God, that could be me.

When Bentley dropped him at the Summit Plaza, he still felt a little lightheaded.

When he walked into the lobby Edna was at the switchboard. He found the familiar sight reassuring. He’d been doing too much heavy thinking, been involved for too long in the unreal, the bizarre. He needed to divorce himself from all this for a while. He had a hunger now for the ordinary, the inconsequential.

“Well! Welcome back!”

“Thank you, Edna. Glad to be home.”

“We’ve missed you around here. Did you have a nice trip?”

“Very nice.”

“Lots of phone calls for you,”

She reached into his message box and gave him a sheaf of pink slips. He saw that her astrology book was open in front of her.

“What’s my horoscope for today, love?”

“Let’s see. You’re a Libra, right?”

“Right.”

“I love Libras,” she said. “Libras are usually very interesting people. Very sensitive. You should know some of the
other
signs we get around here.” She ruffled the pages of the book and found the reference she wanted. She took a moment to read, and then: “Oh, my. You’re going to find this interesting.”

“I can’t wait,” he said.

“Mars and Neptune are approaching your fifth solar house. Neptune is in the third house, and squaring Mars. This is a good time to study your various financial interests and enlarge your sphere of
action. Analyze current insurance policies, contracts, and other legal documents to be sure they are to your satisfaction. Follow up any opportunity there may be to do public speaking …”

“Nothing very earth-shaking about that.”

“Oh,” she said, “I haven’t finished. Here’s the interesting part. Your life is about to change radically. Soon you will meet a new lover. The experience will be deep and profound. Look for a whole new future.”

“Well, Edna,” he said, “that’s more like it.”

He grinned at her and walked toward the elevator. His horoscope for today wasn’t bad, except it was screwed up in one detail: He was looking for an
old
lover.

The apartment had a faint musty smell. He opened the curtains and threw the windows wide open. Down below, he could see three or four girls lolling in beach chairs and mats on the pool patio. Now, he thought, they’re tanned and languid young naiads baking themselves in the California sun. But who were they once? Handmaidens to Cleopatra? Camp followers to the armies of Napoleon? Ladies-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth? Queens or slave girls?

He swore softly at himself. It was getting so that he couldn’t look at people without speculating on their past lives. He’d have to cut it out.

He dialed Nora’s number, but there was no answer. He felt very tired. The plane trip, the talk with Bentley at the airport, everything.

He stretched out on the couch without unpacking. He dozed awhile, then fell asleep. He had two dreams, the House Dream and the Tennis Dream. When he awoke it was getting dark. He went to the telephone and dialed Nora’s number again. This time she was in.

“Nora, Pete.”

“Oh. You’re back.” She sounded cool, distant. “I hope you had a nice trip.”

“Listen, I found it. The town …”

“Congratulations.”

“It’s a place called Riverside. In Massachusetts.”

“How nice.”

He was silent for a moment. “You
still
don’t believe me.”

“Why, of course I do, darling.”

“Nora, let’s have dinner tonight.”

“I’m sorry. I have a date.”

“Tomorrow night, then?”

“No,” she said. “I can’t make it then, either.”

“I see. You’re pretty busy.”

“Very busy.”

“We’ll make it some other time, then. I’ll phone you.”

“You do that, Pete. Some other time.”

He hung up and thought, that’s that. Curiously, he felt no sense of loss. He grinned.

Soon I’m going to meet a new lover. I’ve got it straight from Edna
.

The next day he saw the head of his department and got permission to stay for only the first four weeks in the quarter and have his teaching assistant handle the rest of the course. He gave as his excuse some urgent research he had to do on some of the tribes in the East. The department head was unhappy about the request but finally agreed, reluctantly, provided he was back in time for the exam period.

The time dragged. He taught his classes, got through his conferences, worked on his book. It was hard for him to maintain any level of interest. Los Angeles was where his body was, but the rest of him, the most important part of him, was three thousand miles away. At times he was on the verge of quitting ahead of time and taking the next plane for Riverside, even if it meant placing his whole career in jeopardy. But he resisted the urge.

Meanwhile, the hallucinations continued. The Lake Dream was, as always, the most frequent and the most intense. But five of
the dreams were missing, seemingly banished to some permanent limbo. The City Dream, the Tower Dream, the Tree Dream, the Cotton Mather Dream, and, curiously enough, the Prison Dream.

He talked to Hall Bentley about it. And the parapsychologist said, “I’m not sure what’s happening. It seems to be some kind of expiation process—release through some kind of reenactment or contact, no matter how vague. You’ve seen the streets of the city. You’ve been at the site of the tower. You saw the Puritan effigy. Once you come in real contact with the subject of your dream, the hallucination itself disappears.”

“But how do you account for the Prison Dream? That’s gone too.”

“Go over it again for me.”

“I’m in a prison, and I’m counting money.”

“Maybe you saw it and didn’t recognize it.”

“No. I never even saw any prison in Riverside.”

“Funny about that. It’s the only hallucination that isn’t realistic. I mean, you don’t normally count money in a jail cell.”

Something else puzzled him. He had seen the lake. But the Lake Dream still continued.

Suddenly he remembered Ed Donan’s dissertation subject.
The Relations
. The Iroquois divinity of-dreams, their therapeutic strategy of catharsis. You have a dream; you live it again, act it out. The Seneca dreams he buys a dog in Quebec, the next day he travels to Quebec to buy a dog. The Huron dreams he is tortured by an enemy, the next day he gets his friends to torture him. If you fail to do this, the sickness comes.

Ondinnonk
.

He flew to Bradley Field, rented a car, and then drove to Riverside. It was early evening when he checked in at the same hotel as before.

He felt the key to X’s identity lay in the House Dream. His best chance of finding out who he had been was in finding that house. If he could locate the house, he could find out the name of the person who had lived there.
If
.

He remembered it clearly, every detail of it. He knew he would recognize it immediately if he saw it. It was a two-family house, the upper part brown shingles, the lower white stucco, with a big three-arched front porch. It was the third house from the corner.

He would start looking for it the next day, He decided to go to bed right after dinner so that he could get an early start in the morning, There were hundreds of streets in Riverside, and it might be weeks—even months—before he found it. But he had to find it—it was his only chance.

The next morning, he bought a detailed street map of the city at a bookshop. Then, with a red pencil, he systematically marked off specific sections. His idea was to cover a section a day by driving up one street and down another till he had covered the entire area.

Suddenly he had a chilling thought. Suppose they had torn it down long ago? They’d torn down half the town already. Maybe there wasn’t any house left. Maybe they had put some goddamn gas station or apartment house in its place….

He did have a few things going for him. In the Window Dream, he had been able to see the big sign on the roof of the Puritan Bank
before the blizzard obscured it. There had been no river in between. This indicated that the house had been located somewhere in Riverside proper, not across the river in West Riverside. From the distance and the perspective in which he had viewed the sign, he was quite sure the house wasn’t located in the central or business part of the city but in one of the many residential areas. And, finally, he was under the impression, from the House Dream, that the location was on a side street, not a main avenue with traffic lights and stores.