The curtains were delicate, and the wind gusted. With each gust I saw a knee or a hand or the rich fabric of a sleeve. It was a woman, I could tell. I believed she was a princess. I couldn’t comprehend finer distinctions than that.
At some point the servants turned a corner, the curtain rippled, I saw fingers, and then I saw a face peering out. I knew instantly and viscerally who she was. I might have gasped or made some noise, because she looked at me. The pose of her neck, her round, dark eyes staring out at me. It wasn’t the same face, exactly, but it was the same girl. Now she was older than I was, probably twenty-five at least.
I can’t tell you how I knew it was her. In the years since then I’ve gotten to be very good at recognizing souls from one life to the next. I find it puzzling myself, so it’s hard to explain how I do it. But I am not the only one who can. It’s not so different from the way you can know a person when she is twenty years old and recognize her again when she is eighty, though every cell in her body has changed in the meantime. There is almost nothing you could program a computer to do, by observation alone, that would allow it to recognize a person at such disparate ages. But we can do it. Animals can do it.
What is it we recognize? The soul is a mysterious thing. It’s no less mysterious for me, though I’ve seen my own and others’ refracted through hundreds of bodies over time.
One thing I can tell you from my unusual perspective is how powerfully our souls reveal themselves in our faces and bodies. Just sit on a train sometime and look at the people around you. Choose a person’s face and study it carefully. All the better if they are old and a stranger to you. Ask yourself what you know about that person, and if you open yourself to the information, you will find you know an overwhelming amount. We naturally guard ourselves from the obvious truths of strangers around us, so be warned. You can get overstimulated and uneasy if you really start to look. One of the skills of living is simplifying as you go, so when you let your guard down, the complexity is troubling. There are certain rare people you find—usually they are healers or poets or people who work with animals—who live their lives in this state, and I admire them and sympathize with them, but I am not like them anymore. I’ve done a lot of simplifying in my life.
As you look at this stranger’s face you will be able to guess pretty accurately at age, background, and social class. And as you look longer, if you let yourself see, the subtleties will clamor to show themselves. Doubts, compromises, and disappointments little and big—those usually reside around the eyes, but there are no rules. The hopes usually lurk around the mouth, but so do bitterness and tenacity. A sense of humor is easy to spot around the eyebrows, and so is self-deception. Add to your observation the set of the head on the neck, the carriage of the shoulders, the posture of the back, and you know a lot more.
These are the accumulated qualities of the soul, and they are expressed in life after life. By the time a person gets really old, the soul has worn in its body so completely that she probably looks almost exactly as she would if she had reached that age in one of her other lives. She need barely have bothered with the new body at all. Which isn’t to say that souls don’t change and evolve over time, because they do.
The first time you see a familiar person in a new body is a strange and even haunting sensation, but you get used to it. You start recognizing the telltale places where the soul asserts itself: the eyes, of course; the hands, the chin, the voice. The pathos is in how much of ourselves we hold out to any passing eye that takes an interest.
It was indeed haunting to see the woman in the market on the Bosporus. I ran toward her without thinking. I grasped the curtains with my grubby hands and yanked at them as I ran alongside. “I-I—I was—you were—I want—” I couldn’t think of how to convey our connection. “Do you remember me?” In a childlike way, I didn’t differentiate my experience from hers.
I don’t know why I said that. If I could have thought a moment, I wouldn’t have wanted her to remember me.
I doubt she understood me. I can’t even remember what language I used. Anyway, it took less than a second for one of those bulky servants to put his hands on me. I was skinny and small, and he picked me up and threw me across the alley. Then he strode over and kicked me in the ribs and again in the chest.
“Stop!” she cried out. She threw the curtains aside.
His foot was already cocked, and he kicked me again in the face. “That’s the wife of the magistrate, you insolent rat,” he muttered at me.
She got out of the litter, to the surprise of her servants. People were crowding around now. “He’s just a boy!” she said. “Do not touch him again.” She spoke an elegant Greek.
“I’m sorry,” I said, also in Greek. She leaned down and put her hand on my cheek. I felt blood leaking out of my nose. I owed her so much, and she owed me nothing but disgust, but she was kind to me. I wondered, feebly, how I was going to be in a position to make anything right for her.
“I am sorry,” I said again, in the old Aramaic, the same words I used to apologize to her the first time. If it sparked a memory in her, I don’t know. I am always hoping. She looked sad.
“I’m sorry to you,” she said, and she stood up. “Take him home to his mother,” she ordered a female servant. She disappeared behind the curtains.
I had no home or mother by that point, so I fled the servant before she could kick me, too.
Every day for a year or more I waited by that same stall in the hope of seeing her again. I concocted elaborate plans of what I would do when I saw her. I scripted the things I would say if I could get close enough. I found a job hefting bags at a spice stall nearby and bought her small treasures with the money I made: an orange, a piece of honeycomb. But I never saw her again. I died of cholera before I had the chance.
From that moment, as I look back, I can trace the beginning of a few unlucky themes that would carry on for centuries. Our lives being mismatched in time. Her being someone else’s wife. Her forgetting me.
In spite of getting beaten, seeing her was the best moment in my life. I was bewildering to myself, honestly, and I was looking for patterns. Even if she was only an idea, the idea was comfort. She had come back. She was alive again, in spite of what I had done to her. She was beautiful again. She prospered. I could see her again. Not that I would see her, but at least I could. In some way that’s when I first understood the regenerative power of life.
I clung to the idea that there was a point to my living over and over, and to my strange memory. I thought it would give me the chance to cure my sin and make it right. Little did I know how long and fraught a road that would be.
People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it. The path of your life can change in an instant. Not just the path of your life but the path of all your lives, the path of your soul. Whether you remember or not. It makes you want to think hard before you act.
What if I hadn’t burned down her house? How many times have I thought that thought? What if I had seen the insanity of what we were doing and put a stop to it? What if I had saved her and her family and the rest of the village as best I could? I would have gotten killed, but so what. I got killed a few years later, anyway, and didn’t accomplish anything by it.
If I had saved her instead of murdering her, we might have come back into the world together with ease and harmony, time after time. I don’t mean to suggest there are simple formulas. But certain souls cohere. It’s rare but possible. Certain souls pair up eternally, not unlike geese or lobsters. I’ve witnessed it a few times. But it takes two powerful wills to make it so, and mine accounted for one. It wasn’t enough for me to want to find her again. She needed to want to find me, too, and she had every reason to stay a long way away.
DEATH IS AN UNKNOWABLE PLACE, but I have learned something about it over time. My state of consciousness after death and before birth is not like the normal state of waking and living, but I do have perceptions and memories from thos
e times. It’s hard for me to gauge how time passes in those dark transitions. I can’t tell if it’s one month or ten. Or nine, maybe.
Being as I am the custodian of this long, strange memory and one of the few people on earth who can report back from death, I’ve felt a sense of responsibility to keep track of how it works and try to understand it better. I’m not sure who will be the beneficiary of this long study of mine, or whether it will ever be any benefit at all, but it’s what I do. Recording is not the same as doing, my old friend Ben would tell me, remembering is not the same as living, but the older I get the more it seems to me the best of what little I have to offer.
I can tell you the feeling of dying into a community of souls. It’s when you understand you are no longer alive but you feel other beings around you, and it is profoundly comforting. People you might have known to some degree or other, who know and care about you, are with you. You don’t talk to them or communicate in any explicit way, but you know you are not alone and that they will somehow keep you. You aren’t capable of asking questions in this state, but there is a condition of knowing.
I also know the feeling of dying into emptiness. We all die alone, but this is different. You apprehend nothing and nothingness. You have the sense of wandering, and it can go on for a very long time. You find yourself yearning, almost hungering, for the presence of another being.
There’s a pattern in it. Your death is the shadow of your life. If you have strong and loving attachments in your life, you will cohere to your community of souls. You will probably come back to life quickly and among your own people. Your lives will occur in clusters geographically and ethnically. When you go to a new place, you’ll often migrate among your loved ones. If your community is ethnically mixed, you’re more likely to change race, and if not you probably won’t.
If you are distant and misanthropic, selfish or cruel, you will find yourself alone in life and death. You’ll die into nothingness and come back among strangers or very occasionally among enemies. And you’ll stay alone and at odds until you don’t want it anymore. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to find any kind of community, much less a desired one. As I see it, this effort is both the penance and the rehabilitation. You will come back, but it takes a while. You will remain among strangers until you’ve made yourself some kind of family. It won’t happen until you want it to.
I don’t know about heaven and hell, and I haven’t met God yet. But I have to admire the design.
Your will is operative between lives, but not in the way you are accustomed to. In death I think you tune in to the highest frequency of your will, and it’s a sound you rarely hear in life because it is drowned out by the noise of living—by your particular place in the world and the short-term desires of your body. In death you are temporarily free from the rough grip of time. Your slate is wiped clean, you’ve got no stake anymore, so your will operates without pull or prejudice. Somewhere expressed in your highest will is a desire to pay your debts and balance yourself out. And though this balance is deeply salubrious to the soul, it doesn’t necessarily bring any comfort or pleasure to a living body.
There are limits to your will, of course—like the expression of other people’s wills. Which is why my story would be a lot shorter and more cheerful if I had simply loved Sophia from the start and found some way to make her love me. I wouldn’t have spent more than a thousand years waiting for her and searching for her and trying to hold her close enough for long enough to overcome our first encounter.
Part of my punishment was that I didn’t see her again for another two hundred years. But when I did, it set the course for the rest of my days.
HOPEWOOD, VIRGINIA, 2006
LUCY SAT IN her backyard with the thick smell of newly cut grass in her head. It was nearly seven o’clock in the evening but still so hot she was sitting with her feet in a pot filled with cold water.
Now that she was grown up and fresh off the wonders of Jefferson’s gardens on campus, she could see that this yard was nothing special. But when she was small it had been her pleasure dome. From her earliest memory she’d loved digging in the grass and making puddles with the hose. As with clay, she yearned to get her hands dirty. It was a tactile pleasure and another of her small-bore rebellions.
She’d made a vegetable garden in fifth grade and produced her own cucumbers, but the rabbits and deer got to it after seventh grade, when she’d spent a July in Virginia Beach with Marnie’s family.
She’d planted her raspberries in ninth grade. Her mom complained about the rotten compost Lucy amassed and the fact that the canes took over the entire back of the yard. It was true that Lucy was generous to fertilize and slow to prune. But they had fresh sweet raspberries all through the late summer and fall, not to mention raspberry jam and raspberry sauce and frozen raspberries the rest of the year. “You pay four dollars for a stinky little half-pint of them in the supermarket, and compared to ours they have no taste at all,” her mother acknowledged with a certain amount of pride.
Lucy’s first act of landscape design had been their swimming pool when she was sixteen. The neighbors on both sides and in back of them had built pools, and her father had proclaimed they would build one, too. She’d made hundreds of drawings of it in her sketchbook. She didn’t want a big bright turquoise rectangle like the neighbors had. She designed a small pool in the shape and color of a pond with a natural bank of grass and flowers that went right up to the water. You wouldn’t even see any concrete unless you peered over the edge. She’d tried to figure out the kinds of materials they would need, investigated the drainage issues, priced it all to the best of her ability, and written out her order for the nursery.
But the time for the pool was never now. She’d pestered her dad year after year, presenting him with new and refined drawings until one night she saw him writing checks at the dining-room table and realized he was still paying off Dana’s hospital bills. She didn’t say anything more about it after that. And anyway, she told herself, a built pool would never have turned out as good as the one she’d imagined.
This summer Lucy had been eager to get home from school to her room and her raspberries and her nothing-special yard. She’d been feeling anxious since the end of the semester, sleeping little and badly, and waking up from terrible dreams. She’d told her mom it was the stress of exams. She had chasing dreams, burning dreams, beating dreams, and the wracking and crying dreams, which often featured the absurd Madame Esme trading off with Dana. And Daniel was a presence, seen or felt, in nearly every one. Lucy’s body ached from the strain of them.
She’d hoped that being home would soothe her and bore her, as it usually did. She thought if she just changed the rhythm of her nights and days, the dreams would stop. And here she was at home, and exams were over and Madame Esme was far away, but the dreams persisted. She couldn’t leave her brain at school. That was the problem. If she could have, she might have enjoyed a perfectly happy summer vacation.
She heard the screen door open and turned to see her mom. She had her pink suit on.
“Did you show a house?” Lucy asked.
“I had that open house on Meadow.”
Lucy could see the sweat seeping into circles under the arms of her mother’s pink linen jacket. “How’d it go?”
“I laid out food and flowers and cleaned that dump up myself. Four brokers showed up, not a buyer in sight, and those vultures had the nerve to eat my snacks.” Her tone was so dramatic Lucy wanted to laugh, but she didn’t.
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
Her mother hated being a realtor. She said she’d prefer to sell underwear at Victoria’s Secret, but her father thought that was unseemly for a graduate of Sweet Briar College. Lucy always had the feeling her mother couldn’t rebel against her native prissiness, so her daughters did it for her.
“Well.” She surveyed Lucy’s sundress. “Are you going out?”
“Kyle Farmer is having a party.”
“Kyle from chorus?”
“Yep. That one.”
“Fun. I’m glad you are going to see your old friends.”
Her mother took so much heart from simple social interactions that Lucy felt bad she didn’t have more of them, or at least make it seem like she did. She wondered if she should have stayed in Charlottesville for the summer with Marnie and spared her mother her true mood. She mostly avoided parties of old high school people. They had a depressing air of unearned nostalgia. Kind of like reunions but premature, where no one had gone out and done anything yet. But tonight she had a motive. Brandon Crist was going to be there, and he was the closest thing to a friend Daniel ever had at that school.
“Can I use your car?” she asked.
Her mother nodded, but her face showed reluctance. “You need to help pay for gas this summer, okay?”
“I know. I’ll fill it up. I put in two applications today.”
“Good girl.” Her mom always wanted to be pleased. She didn’t want to give Lucy a hard time. Dana had broken her so hard that Lucy’s shortcomings were almost like gifts.
PERGAMUM, ASIA MINOR, 773
I’m skipping ahead to one of my most consequential lives, which was my seventh, and it began in Pergamum in Asia Minor in roughly the year 754 by our modern calendar. You’ve heard of Pergamum, probably. It was a great city once, though past its prime by the time I was born there. It was one of the loveliest places I’ve ever grown up.
It grew famous as a Hellenistic city with a giant and magnificent acropolis and a massively steep theater seating ten thousand bodies. It transitioned easily into a Roman town when they gave themselves to the empire without much incident in the second century B.C. It had one of the great libraries of the ancient world, with more than two hundred thousand books. Parchment was invented there after one of the Ptolemys stopped exporting papyrus from Egypt. If you know your ancient history, you know it was the library that Mark Antony gave to Cleopatra as a wedding gift.