Dr. May had told me in his email to be careful on Route 15, the busiest logging route in the state. Truck after truck piled high with timber had passed us, honking, while Byron crooned to the classic rock station on the radio, and I was thinking about how, if I died here, the person who inherited my consciousness would see this, my last vision: so many middle fingers.
“Byron,” I said. “We almost there?”
He tapped the device mounted to the dash. Where our signal status had been, a question mark now hovered. “I think so,” he said. “GPS is ghosting on us.”
Earlier that morning, I had taken the subway to the far edge of the city, walking a mile over uneven pavement to reach a car rental place that promised good deals. A teenager in a green vest brought around a lemon with the radio blasting, rattling the car’s thin frame. It wasn’t plush—or safe—but it was what fit on my nearly maxed credit card. I drove it, knuckles white, back into the city, where I was to pick up Byron after his brunch with an “important associate.” There I found him at a sunny sidewalk café with a slight, affable boy in a crisp shirt—who seemed to fit the exact profile of his roommate.
Byron climbed into the car, smelling of poached eggs, and took the driver’s seat. “You don’t get car sick, do you?” he said, and proceeded to drive, fast and jerky, out of the city. As the tall skyline receded behind us and opened to craggy rock formations against a bold blue sky, Byron told me his ideas for improving information flow at the office. We were both interns working on a film about death and the afterlife, tentatively titled What Happens? The director, Julianne Brink, had trusted us with finding good subjects for the film, people who could speak to the question of what happened after death. But Julianne, herself, was a flickering star. She would become enthusiastic about new subjects for the film, then forget, when we brought them up later, that she had ever mentioned them. She would scold us for not knowing information we had never been told.
“Brilliant people are temperamental,” Byron said. “That’s a fact. We just need to figure out a way to channel this into results.” He described a spreadsheet we would update with pending tasks. He had majored in biz comm at Bellington. I, on the other hand, was a tired waitress who had cut back on shifts to accommodate all of the work Julianne heaped on us, a humanities major with vague hopes for a career in my content area who was now living off cans of soup. Julianne had said that in the spring, she would hire one of the interns for a paid production role. Byron, though more charismatic than me, spent his shifts streaming soccer.
“A to-do list?” I said.
“Think bigger,” he said. “Algorithms.”
I pictured the curves of the mountainside graphed against the sky.
After a while, Byron said he had to whizz, and we pulled over to a rest area. While he went to the men’s room, I did a few laps around the cafeteria. All of the people standing in line for food looked miserable to me, their faces tired, their bodies limp. Even the children looked tired—not just tired, but old on the inside. Tears sprang into my eyes. I had been having a problem lately, a problem of my feelings sneaking up on me. Standing on a cold subway platform one day, for example, a busker playing “Imagine” on a ukulele had brought me to tears.
In line for coffee, I dabbed my eyes with a brown, post-recycled napkin. Byron found me there, his face wet with public sink water. He was puffy and hungover when I first picked him up, but now he looked fresh.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “Emotional?”
“Nah,” I said. “Blood sugar.”
“Poor baby. Let me buy you a smoothie.”
“I don’t want a smoothie,” I said.
“My treat,” he said.
At the register, he ordered a black coffee for himself and a “Strawberry Pizzazz” smoothie for me—a beverage so formidable, it came in its own thick plastic cup with special ridges on the side.
“Looks good,” Byron said. I sipped it, and it was sickeningly sweet, laced with a chemical sugariness that made the backs of my teeth burn. A headache stretched its way across my temples. Back at the car, I felt like my limbs had weights attached.
“I just got sleepy all of a sudden,” I said.
“Take a nap,” Byron said. “I don’t care.”
Was the poison smoothie part of some plan? Already Byron had convinced Julianne to accompany me on this trip to see Dr. May, the reincarnation expert, a subject I’d discovered myself in a dusty binder on Julianne’s shelf. He was “an opportunity to diversify our interview pool,” I said, a way to break free of the other subjects, Julianne’s academic friends, who were all mordant atheists. Dr. May, on the other hand, believed in past lives, that the soul of one person could crop up in another person after death. In his case studies, he had written of people who’d experienced this: a boy on a farm next to a power plant in Illinois with a blotch on his skull where his grandfather had an inoperable brain tumor. A girl who wept all day because Pradip—a man who lived down the street, whom she claimed to be her husband—had remarried. “Reincarnation is based on physics,” Dr. May said. “The self is particles moving at different frequencies.”
About a mile out of the rest area, I nodded off. The logging trucks woke me. Byron switched lanes as one of them gained on us, honking.
“Where are we?” I said.
“Freakin’ Hicksville,” Byron said.
“Don’t say that,” I said.
“Say what?” he said.
“Hicks,” I said.
“A hick is a hick,” Byron said. “You’re the one who’s judging me.”
*
Dr. May was a demure, slim man with a closely shaved head. He wore thin, gold glasses that seemed disturbingly out of date. His home sat on a hill that sloped sharply down to the road, as if it had cleverly climbed to the highest point and was proud of itself. I reached out my hand. Byron stepped in front of me.
“Byron Haines, director,” he said.
“So pleased,” Dr. May said.
At our feet, a small, white dog barked at us.
“Cosmos, quit it,” May said sharply. He smiled. “Come on in.”
We stepped into a deep living room jammed with blue leather furniture. A stack of curling magazines sat on the coffee table, unread for a while. Dr. May walked ahead to the kitchen. He shook a bag of treats at the barking dog.
I grabbed Byron’s arm. “Director?” I said.
“Do you think he wants to tell his life story to two dumb interns?” Byron whispered. “This is for our benefit.”
“What if I wanted to do the talking?” I said.
“Talking,” Byron said. “Julianne has said—and I have to admit, I agree with her—your strengths are really more in the details. You film, and I’ll interview.”
“What are you guys doing back there?” May called. “Plotting to murder me?”
“Sorry, doctor,” Byron said. “We’re ready.”
As we entered the kitchen, I thought of all of the unfairnesses that had led up to this moment. First, I went to a state college. Second, the economy tanked the year I graduated. Third, the only job I could find was waitressing. And last, I had taken this internship with Julianne—more suited to my subject area, of course—but criminal because it didn’t pay. Meanwhile, Byron was besting me, beguiling Julianne with his wink-wink-nudge-nudge Bellington charm, always getting to her emails first, appending them with smiley faces.
I unpacked the camera. Byron positioned Dr. May in a dining chair and picked lint off his shirt. Looking at Dr. May through the viewfinder, I saw on his face an expression I had seen many times on people who were about to be filmed. The look was of gentle dread, the recognition of the fact that we are judged, inevitably in life, by other people. Dr. May was pale against the white tile backdrop. I brightened him a few shades.
“You know,” he said, “I hate interviews. Sometimes journalists show up on your doorstep, and they’re all, ‘Yes, of course, absolutely’ and then next thing you know, they put you on television and call you a whack-job.”
“This isn’t like that,” Byron said. “We’re going for the spiritual, exploratory angle.”
“Good,” Dr. May said.
Byron sat across from Dr. May. Through the hole in the back of his chair I could see his buttcrack, the doughy crevasse where his fleshes met each other. He spoke to May in a voice that was deeper than usual—less ingratiating, more authoritative.
“Start with your upbringing,” Byron said.
“I grew up in Georgia,” May said. “In the Baptist church.” At eighteen, he fled for college. He studied biology—the “seeable, the real.” Later, in graduate school, he worked for a lab that studied phobias.
“I talked to a woman who was afraid of aluminum foil, couldn’t be near it,” May said. “She fainted at the sight of anyone’s leftovers.” There was no reason, nothing immediate in her life that made this so, he said. Could these feelings be coming from an outside source?
“Finally, we tried hypnosis and we discovered it: a memory she had long repressed. In her past life, she had worked in an aluminum factory!”
His eyes went wide.
“How do you know people aren’t just making it up?” Byron said.
“There have been fraudulent cases,” Dr. May said. “But those are rare. Most people who remember past lives, they want to be normal. It’s inconvenient to live a life that others don’t understand.”
I thought of something I had read about Dr. May, a scandal that nearly cost him his professorship. After appearing on a talk show to promote his book, Soul Journeys, the clip had gone viral, and there were calls for a “reassessment of Sloegum University’s academic integrity.” His role was almost terminated, but then an investor in Silicon Valley swooped in with a career-resurrecting amount of cash.
“Would you say there was a big turning point for you?” Byron said. “A point where you suddenly became more spiritual, invested in your beliefs?”
“I was having a crisis,” Dr. May said. “I couldn’t decide if I wanted to marry my fiancée, Layla, or a flame from high school, Charlotte. I thought, if I show up on Charlotte’s doorstep tomorrow, we could have a nice life together, a house, kids. But Layla was exciting, smart. She promised a life of travel and adventure. I saw my fate forking off into two paths, one of stability, and one of passion. I took a road trip with my buddy and we talked it over. He said, ‘Go with Charlotte. You’ll grow old together, you’ll never fight.’ I made a plan to break it off with Layla. One night we got lost, somewhere outside St. Louis. We pulled into this rest area to sleep. In the middle of the night, this truck pulled in, and what song was it blasting? ‘Layla.’”
“Clapton?” Byron said.
Dr. May nodded. “That moment changed my life. You’ll see. There’ll be moments in life when it will seem like the universe is speaking to you. Listen to what it says.”
In the viewfinder, a red warning flashed. The memory card was full.
“Hold on,” I said. “We’re out of tape.”
“Go ahead and switch it,” Byron said. “I’ll shoot a few emails.” He plucked his phone from the back pocket of his jeans. I dug into the equipment bag, and when I looked up again, he was out on the front porch. From that angle I could see his nascent bald spot, a shiny pit in the middle of his wispy blonde hair. Along with his fine clothes, it made him look regal, a man too cultivated to bother with appearances. He pulled out a cigarette and sucked on it as he typed on his phone. Cosmos peered at him through the door.
“What’s the director’s background?” Dr. May said. “He’s very articulate.”
“Mr. Haines has interviewed a lot of important people,” I said. “Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nora Ephron.”
“Impressive,” May said. “You’re his assistant?”
“His partner,” I said. “You know, I’ve read a lot about your work. What you say about the physics behind consciousness really interests me.”
“That can of worms,” May said. “I find that in these interviews, it’s best to keep it simple. Bring science into it, and you get letters from all kinds of people on their high horses about what they think particles can and can’t do.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
“When is the film coming out, by the way?”
He pulled off his ancient glasses and dusted them with his shirt. In my lowest moments as an intern, it seemed to me that the film would never get made. Byron and I would just chase lead after lead of Julianne’s forever—or until we gave up and went back to our paying jobs.
“Sometime next year,” I said.
The front door clattered, and Cosmos barked. I took out my phone and looked at my email. There were several from Byron, highlighted, in reply to messages Julianne had sent while we were on the road.
“Ready, freddy?” Byron said.
“There’s something I’d love to show you guys,” Dr. May said. “I think it would be great visuals.”
“Sure,” Byron said. “Great.”
“It’s an envisioning,” May said. “Kind of like guided hypnosis. Even for people who can’t remember past lives, it can offer great insight.”
Byron looked at me. “You want to?” Enthusiasm radiated from him like a friendly, demented sun.
“Nah,” I said. “You go ahead.”
We filed into the basement, a clean, good-smelling place that reminded me of a dance studio. In the center of the room was a white massage table piled with Indian blankets. Dr. May lit incense and turned down the lights. I brought the camera to the corner of the room and tried to get it all in frame. It was nearly too dark and I worried that the footage would be too grainy to fix later.
Byron pointed to the massage table. “Here?”
“Yes,” May said. “Lie down. Close your eyes.”
Byron removed his loafers and climbed onto the bed. Dr. May shook out a blanket and covered Byron up to his neck, but left his toes exposed. They were vulnerable-looking, his white-socked feet, stained where the leather had rubbed.
“I’m going to do a chant,” Dr. May said. “Then we’ll get right into it.” He picked up a silver triangle dangling from the wall and tapped quick, regular chimes.
“Repeat after me,” he said. “I am made of millions. I am stardust.”
“I am made of millions,” Byron said. “I am stardust.”
Each time May hit the triangle, the room seemed to soften—darker, quieter. Byron and May chanted, their voices blurring. I looked up from behind the camera, seeing the room with my own eyes. Dr. May stood over Byron at the front of the bed. One hand rested on his neck. Behind them, smoke floated in curls to the ceiling. They had gone somewhere—somewhere together.
“Byron?” May whispered. “Do you see anything?”
“Darkness,” Byron said.
“Is it a flat darkness?” Dr. May said. “Or does it have layers, textures?”
“It’s wavy. Like a dark pool of water.”
Byron’s voice was thin and frail, issuing from an automatic place. The deep, assured voice was gone, replaced with that of a frightened child.
I shivered.
“I see a star,” Byron said quietly. “I feel its heat.”
“Go toward the star, Byron,” May said. “What happens if you get nearer?”
“The light’s getting more intense,” Byron said. “It’s hot.”
“Go from cold to warm, Byron. You’re so cold where you are. You’re so cold.”
Dr. May picked up the triangle and tapped it furiously.
“Oh, god,” Byron said.
“Are you through the light, Byron? What do you see?”
“Oh, god!”
The room seemed to heave. When I looked up, Byron was sobbing.
“Turn it off,” he cried. “Turn the goddamn camera off.”
He sat folded in half, his head low, his arms limp. Rivers of tears ran down his face, wetting his polo. Dr. May rubbed Byron’s back. The triangle dangled from his jeans, and I saw he had a special belt clip for it. I came out from behind the camera. Dr. May reached behind us and turned up the lights. Byron was limp. Tears streamed from his eyes and he did nothing to catch them.
“What happened?” I said.
“It worked,” Dr. May said. “He saw something.”
Byron took my hand. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. His voice was a whisper.
I looked at Dr. May.
“There’s often readjustment,” May said. “Confusion, fatigue. When he feels better, he’ll see. He’ll have so much clarity.”
I helped Byron put his loafers back on. Upstairs, Cosmos was huddled in his dog bed, snoring. Byron leaned against the wall in the kitchen, gray and pale, while I packed up the video equipment.
“Let me know when you have that release date,” Dr. May said.
“Perhaps the director failed to mention this,” I said. “But this was just a preliminary interview. We’ll be in touch if we want to use you in the film.”
He frowned.
Outside, the sky above the trees was blank white, like the blue sky of the morning was a sticker that had been peeled right off. Byron rested against me as we walked down the steep steps, heavy as sand. I loaded him into the passenger seat of our death-trap rental. From the porch, Dr. May waved to us, the slow wave one gives to a ship leaving a port. I queued up directions on my phone. My inbox buzzed, and there was a message from Julianne. “This man’s work seems truly fascinating,” it said. I tapped the link, and it opened to OneLifeTwoPeople.com, Dr. May’s website.
On Route 15, the logging trucks passed. The cheap rental car shuddered as I tried to keep speed. Byron’s head rattled against the window glass. I turned on the radio. A woman with a thick Southern drawl spoke.
“Hon,” she said. “What’s on your mind?”
“My husband of 17 years died of cancer last year,” said a caller. “The love of my life. But now I’ve met someone else. Is it wrong to love another too soon?”
“People are gonna gossip,” the host said. “Don’t listen. Don’t waste a single day because you’re supposed to be mourning. Trust me, your husband is watching you from above and he wants you to be happy. You have his blessing. Here’s a song for you.” “Something to Talk About” by Bonnie Raitt filled the car.
Byron broke into a loud sob.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re awake.”
He tried to speak and a small squeal escaped. He shook his head.
“How about some coffee?” I said. “A beer?”
I was seeing signs for Tannsboro, the hamlet where Sloegum University was located, the college where May held his position. I turned off the highway and onto Main Street, a predictable array of bagel shops, used bookstores, and college bars. It was after Christmas, and the town was lifeless without the students. A bar with a wooden sign, The Half-Empty, offered a cheap happy hour, and I parked on the street outside of it. Inside, the place was deserted, save for a couple of townie barflies who sat at the bar, alike with flannel and thinning hair. A wide flat screen television behind the counter showed a basketball game. The tables were decorated with faux-flame candles.
I propped Byron at the bar. He was starting to look better. His eyes were open, and there was some color in his cheeks. “What can I get you?” the bartender said.
“Two Buds,” I said.
She put the bottles in front of us. Byron drank a long pull.
“Byron,” I said. “Can you tell me why you’re so upset? You saw something?”
“It was awful,” he said.
“Tell me,” I said.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Why?”
He scrunched his face. “I’m scared. You’ll think I’m crazy.”
During our time together as interns, he’d treated me like a less-gifted younger sibling he made pains to appreciate nonetheless—even though I was older than him. Beneath his put-on swagger, did he actually care about what I thought?
“I won’t think you’re crazy,” I said. I reached out my arm and touched his shoulder—pat one, pat two.
“Okay,” he said. He sipped his beer. “Dr. May said to go through the tunnel of light, and I did. On the other side, I saw my past life. I was a torturer! I was whipping peasants. They had welts all over their backs. I burned their bread, stole their land, hoarded the grain. Everything I did, I did for money and power.”
His description sounded like television—like a low-budget period piece with actors who, when you looked closely, were wearing Levis under their chain mail tunics.
“Byron,” I said. “What happened back there, it wasn’t real. I saw the whole thing. Dr. May, he makes money by implanting memories in people’s minds, making them think things. There’s no such thing as reincarnation, or past lives.”
“No,” Byron said. “It was real.”
“It wasn’t,” I said.
“You don’t believe it because you can’t,” Byron said.
The bartender approached us. “Happy hour is ending, but the good news is, there’s music.” She pointed across the room. A trio of grizzled men in matching leather outfits tested their guitars.
“We’ll have another round,” I said. I pulled out my last cash, a few one-dollar bills leftover from when I paid for gas. Byron still owed me for the rental car.
“I don’t believe it because it’s fake,” I said.
“You’re closed-minded,” Byron said. “You can’t see anything outside of your negative point of view. Julianne thinks…” His face twisted. “Julianne thinks you’re grouchy.”
“Grouchy?” “Jesus,” Byron said. “I’m terrible.”
I stood up. “I’ll be right back.”
In the dark, foul-smelling restroom, I looked at my face in the mirror. My complexion was splotchy, my hair uneven and needing a trim. Gray, permanent circles had formed under my eyes—my youth wasted by lack of rest. Was this it? I thought. Was this what Dr. May described, a moment of the universe “speaking to me”?
When I came out again, the band was playing. The frontman slithered like Jim Morrison. His leather pants drooped. “Riders on the storm,” he sang. “Into this house we’re born.”
At the bar, our fresh round of beers waited. The bartender leaned over the bar, laughing at something Byron was saying. Byron was starting to look like his old self again—clueless, charming. The bartender winked at me.
“He’s a hoot,” she said.
Behind her the barflies sat, eyes trained on the game.
Carianne King received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. At the University of Virginia, she won the 2009 Wagenheim Award for Best Short Story Written by an Undergraduate. Her writing has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Storychord, and American Chordata. http://carianneking.com