“Have you?” he asked. She suddenly knew, just knew, that he was soaking her in, that he was as parched as she was.
He reached out and put his hand on the back of her neck and pulled her forward. She drew in her breath, astonished that he would put his mouth on hers. He kissed her. She lost herself in his breath and his warmth and his smell. She leaned so far forward that she felt the edge of the desk cutting into her rib cage under her breasts and her heart slamming against it.
His arm hit the cup of bourbon, and it fell to the floor. She vaguely felt the liquid splash and puddle under her foot and didn’t care. She meant to stay in his kiss until she died if necessary, but she felt something strange, a strange sensation barreling toward her, a heavy foreboding. She was able to ignore it for a while, until it crashed into her all at once.
It was a sensation of feeling and remembering at the same time, two explosions colliding and expanding. It was like déjà vu but far more intense. She felt dizzy and suddenly afraid. She opened her eyes and pulled back from him. She looked into his eyes. She felt tears on her face, wholly different from her earlier tears. “Who are you?” she whispered.
His eyes seemed to dilate and refocus. “Do you remember?”
She could not make herself see in front of her. The room spun so violently she closed her eyes and he was there, too, behind her eyes, as though from her memory. He was lying on a bed and she was looking down at him, and she felt an undertow of despair she didn’t understand.
She felt him now holding both her hands, she realized, and hard. When she opened her eyes his expression was so intense she wanted to look away. “Do you remember?” He looked as though his life depended on her answer.
She felt scared. She had another scene invading her mind that she couldn’t place. It was him, but in a strange setting, not anywhere she knew. She felt as if she was fully awake and dreaming at the same time. “Did I know you before?” She felt sure it was true, and also that it couldn’t be. She had a terror of not knowing quite where she was.
“Yes.” She saw that there were tears in his eyes.
He pulled her out from the desk and held her standing up so her whole body was clutched to his. She felt a rocking against her chest, and she didn’t know if it was her heart or his. “You are Sophia. Do you know that?” Her head was pressed into his neck, and she felt dampness on top of her head.
If he wasn’t holding her, she didn’t think she could stand up. She felt herself slipping. She didn’t know where she was or who she was, and she didn’t know what she remembered. She wondered if the bourbon was acting as some kind of hallucinogen or if she was just losing her mind.
Is this what it was like? Dana had loved to be out of control, but Lucy hated it. She pictured an ambulance coming to get her. She thought of her mother.
She pulled roughly away from him. “There is something wrong with me,” she said tearfully.
He didn’t want to let her go, but he saw the whiteness of her face and the fear. “What do you mean?”
“I have to go.”
“Sophia.” She realized he had two fistfuls of her dress, and he wasn’t letting them go.
“No, it’s Lucy,” she said. Was he crazy? He was. He was confused and thought she was someone else. He was having some kind of psychosis. He was so crazy he was making her crazy, too.
She suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of danger. She cared about him too much, and he was a dangerous person to love. He wouldn’t love her back. He’d suck her into pure confusion where he thought she was someone else. And she would want so much to believe him that she wouldn’t know who she was anymore.
“Please let go.”
“But. Wait. Sophia. You do remember.”
“No. I don’t. You’re scaring me. I don’t know. I don’t know what you are talking about.” She sobbed between the words.
She felt his hands shaking. She couldn’t look at the despair in his face. “I wish I could tell you everything. I wish you knew. Please let me try to explain.”
She pulled away so hard her dress tore down the front. She looked down and then at him. He looked surprised and horrified that he was still holding the fabric in his hands.
“Oh, God. I’m sorry.”
He tried to put the sweatshirt around her to cover her up. “I’m so sorry,” he said. He wouldn’t take his arms from her. He wouldn’t let her go. “I’m so sorry. I love you. Do you know that?” He was holding her, pressing his face desperately in her hair. “I always have.”
She wrested herself away from him. She caught the desk with her leg and sent it backward. She tripped over chairs and bags to get to the door. She couldn’t be loved like this. Not even her. Not even by him.
“You don’t,” she said without turning around. “You don’t even know who I am.”
She didn’t remember getting to the front doors of the school, but a policeman found her there. She was crying and couldn’t find a way out because all the doors were locked. That’s what the cop told her mother when she came to get her, but Lucy honestly didn’t remember any of it.
HE SAT CROUCHED in the room by himself for a long time after she left. He could still taste her on his lips and feel the warmth of her body against his, but they were a reproach now. He stared at the three wilted blooms on the desk where she’d sat. He still had a piece of her dress in his hand.
There was only regret left over. And disgust at himself. He didn’t want to move for fear of opening more cracks and letting all that in, and worse. He wished he could bathe in the touch and smell of her rather than in his failure, but the failure overwhelmed him. He’d destroyed all hope of her. He’d hurt her and upset her. How could he have done that to her?
She remembered me.
That was his worst weakness, his most toxic drug. He was so eager for her to remember, he would tell himself anything. He would do anything, believe anything, imagine anything.
She did. She knew.
In a daze he left the school long after everyone had gone. There were a few security guards left over, cleaning up the mess. Nobody bothered with him. His failures were private and invisible.
But not to her.
He’d pushed her. He’d scared her. He’d besieged her. He’d vowed he wouldn’t, and he did. He’d kept himself together so scrupulously for so long, but when he came apart he did it with the force of centuries. He hated himself and every intention and desire he’d ever had. He hated everything he’d ever planned or wanted.
I love her. I need her. I gave away everything I had for her. I just wanted her to know me.
He walked until he was away from the sights and sounds. He found a clearing past the soccer field and lay down in the damp grass. He couldn’t go any farther. There was no place to go, no one to see, nothing to want or hope for. He had built up his vision so patiently for so many years and wrecked it in a matter of moments.
She is my doing and my undoing.
She always had been. And what a price she had paid for it, too.
He couldn’t stay there. He still saw the red of the police lights beating against the heavy June sky. He got up, and his back was wet with the ground. He walked down the hill away from the school. He was done with it, never to return, leaving it in the state of ruin in which he seemed to leave everything. He should have left the world alone.
He realized he’d forgotten to take his diploma. He pictured it sitting on the long picked-over table in the gym, alone amid the crepe streamers and sinking balloons. They were for the people who cared, who’d treasure it as though it was their first and last. He knew better. What did one more matter to him? So there it would sit, with his name written in careful calligraphy.
Why did he keep going when everyone else got to start over? Why was he still here and she would always go? Sometimes he felt like the only one on earth. He was different. He always was. His attempts at living in the regular world seemed stupid and false.
I’ve lost her again.
It would seem that so
meone who had been around as long as he had, who’d seen as much as he had, would have a longer view and some amount of patience. But he was too pent up, too full of need. She was right there, and he couldn’t control himself. He tricked himself into thinking that she would look into his eyes and remember, that love would conquer all. The bourbon was tricky, too.
Nobody remembers but me. He kept that thought locked in its place, but this night he let it out. The loneliness of it was unbearable sometimes.
HE WALKED THROUGH fields and along a two-lane road. He walked along the river, and it felt good to be close to something older than he was. This river had a long memory but, unlike him, wisely kept it to itself. He thought of the Appomattox campaign, the Battle of High Bridge. How much blood had soaked into this river? And yet the river flowed. It cleansed itself and forgot. How could you cleanse yourself if you couldn’t forget?
I don’t want to want this anymore. I don’t want to do this to her anymore. I want to be done.
He had no one to keep him here. He had no real family. In the life before this one, he’d lucked into one of the truly great families, and he’d recklessly given them up to follow Sophia. It was no wonder he got what he got in this life—an addict who left before he turned three and a foster family every bit as bad as he deserved. For the last two years he’d been on his own, living narrowly on hope. He’d given up blessings he hadn’t been worthy of for the chance to be with her, and now he’d lost that, too.
What would it be like if you didn’t come back? That was one of the few corners of experience he hadn’t looked into. Would dying be different? Would you get to meet God finally?
He sat at the edge of the river, minding the cold, muddy soak of it, and wondering why you couldn’t free yourself from those small inclinations. No matter how long you lived. Like the death-bound convict glancing at the clock. You could never quite fit the small rotations to the big ones, could you?
He pulled mud-covered rocks from the riverbank, small enough to fit in his pockets. Bigger ones he threw blindly into the riverbed, listening for the hollow crack of stone hitting stone or the merciful slap of soft water. He pushed rocks and mud into the pockets of his good pants, just daring his dumb autonomic brain to resist him. He stuffed a jagged few rocks into his breast pocket, a little abashed at his own stagecraft in a moment like this. There was no moment so momentous that it strangled all the little notions.
Except when you kissed her.
Decisions like this were more dignified in the future or the past, or when they occurred in the lives of other people. The petty workings of your birdlike mind brought you down, and forgetting was your only salvation. It was his curse to remember lifetimes of those moments.
Appropriately burdened, he trudged to the road and followed it onto the bridge. The dark air moved cooler and faster over the water. Headlights of a car appeared and grew on the other side of the river but passed without crossing. He got to the highest point, climbed onto the guardrail and sat on it, facing the river, dangling his legs over the water, feeling strangely young. He observed the rocks cutting into his skin as though they hurt someone else.
He climbed up to standing, balancing the guardrail under his stiff-soled shoes. He waved his arms to keep from slipping. Why did it seem important to jump and not to fall, when it came to the same thing? The heavy moisture in the air made his face feel wet. Another car passed.
Of all the millions of possible things he could take with him, he had a piece of Lucy’s soft purple dress balled up in his hand and the sour taste of bourbon in the back of his throat. In his mind he held the look of fear on her face as she tried to get away from him and he wouldn’t let go, ruining centuries of carefully nurtured hope, knowing he was ruining it, and still not being able to stop himself from ruining it.
That was enough to make him hold his balance and jump.
NORTH AFRICA, 541
I was once a perfectly normal person, but it didn’t last long. That was in my first life. The world was new to me then, and I was new to myself. It began in roughly the year 520 A.D., but I am not sure of the exact point in time. I didn’t keep track of things in the same way then. It was long ago, and I didn’t know I’d be remembering them.
I consider it my first life because I don’t remember anything coming before it. I guess it’s possible that I lived lives before that. Who knows, maybe I’ve been around since before the time of Christ but something happened to me in this particular life that led to the formation of my strange memory. Doubtful but possible, I guess.
And the truth is, some of the very early lives are murky. There were one or two when I think I must have died young from ordinary childhood diseases, and I’m not sure how they fit into the larger order of events. I keep a few bits and pieces from them, the expansive hotness of fever, a familiar hand or voice, but my soul was hardly situated before I moved along.
It’s painful for me to think about that first life and to try to recount it to you. I would have done better to die early of measles or pox.
Since I first began to understand my memory, I’ve considered my actions differently. I know that suffering doesn’t end with death. That’s true for all of us, whether we remember or not. I didn’t know it then. Maybe it helps explain how I did the things I did, but it doesn’t mitigate them.
I WAS FIRST born to the north of the city that was then called Antioch. The first indelible notch in my long record was the earthquake of 526. I had no perspective on it then, but in the years since, I’ve read every account I could find to compare to my own. My family survived, but it left many thousands dead. Our parents had gone to the market that day, and I was alone with my older brother, fishing in the Orontes, when it happened. I remember falling on my knees as the earth rolled under us in waves. For reasons I can’t explain I got up again and walked unsteadily into the river. I can still remember standing in water up to my neck, feeling the syncopated roll of one surface under the other, and then suddenly ducking under, my eyes open wide and my arms out at either side for balance. I lifted my feet from the ground and stretched out until I was parallel with the river. I rolled until I was face up and saw the sky through the water. I saw the way the light lost its certainty under there, and I felt I understood something about it. I have known a true mystic well enough to be sure I am not one, but for a moment the ticking of time was silenced and I saw through the fabric of this world to eternity. I didn’t process it then, but I’ve dreamed it a thousand times since.
My brother shouted curses at me to come back and then followed me when I didn’t. I think he meant to pummel me and drag me back to shore, but the sensations were so peculiar he stood a few yards from me, his face suspended over the river in a look of abstraction. I came back up to the surface, and we waited for the shore to go back to normal. And even when it did, I remember walking home, keeping a wondering eye on the ground as it passed under my feet.
WE WERE PROUD subjects of Byzantium then. Belonging to a great empire made little difference in our small domestic life, but the idea transformed us. It made our hills a little grander and our food a little tastier and our children a little prettier because we fought for them. The able-bodied men in my family fought, albeit distantly, under the famous general Belisarius. He, more than anyone, gave the glory and shape to our lives, which were otherwise not glorious. My uncle, whom we revered, was killed on a campaign to put down a Berber uprising in North Africa. We had only enough information about his death to demonize North Africa and every soul contained therein. I later discovered my uncle was most likely stabbed to death by a comrade for stealing his chicken, but again, that was later.
I sailed with my brother and a hundred other soldiers of the empire across the Mediterranean Sea to North Africa. We were inflamed by vengeance. Like many new souls, I was never better suited to being a soldier than I was in that life. I obeyed orders with absolute literalness. I didn’t question my superiors, not even in the privacy of my mind. I was fully committed, ready to kill, re
ady to die for my cause.
If you had asked me why this or that Berber tribe, who shared none of our culture, religion, or language, had to die or remain part of Byzantium for a few years longer, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. We weren’t the first to conquer them and wouldn’t be the last, but I was a young man of faith. I didn’t need to know exactly the cause of my fervency. The fervency itself was the cause. And just as blindly as I believed in the rightness of my side, I believed in the black heart of my enemy. This is characteristic of a very young soul and evidence, though not proof, that it really was my first life. I hope so. It would be an atrocity to have stayed that stupid.
In every life since that one, I’ve known from early on that I was different. I’ve known my interior life was something to hide. I have always kept apart, always shared little of myself except in the rarest cases. But that’s not how I was when I started.
I was swelled up with eagerness for my first soldierly assignment, but we spent weeks, it seemed, making a camp civilized for our commander. We went to great and arbitrary lengths to make an African desert as comfortable to him as his hilltop home in Thrace. These are not the kinds of reflections I made at the time. I don’t know if I reflected on anything at all. Little did I know then how long I’d have to reflect and how long I’d be saddled with my regrets.
Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms. This was yet another war when we mostly sat around gambling, bragging, getting drunk, and watching the meanest drunks pick fights—usually my brother in this case. It was almost identical to every other war I have fought in up to and including the Great War. The memorable parts, as in when you kill or get killed, take a very short amount of time.
At last our assignment came. We were making a raid on an encampment a day’s march west of Leptis Magna. As the mission grew closer it became clear it wasn’t an army encampment so much as it was a village. A village, we were told, where the army was being quartered.