Deja Who (Insighter #1)(4)
She wasn’t nicer.
Leah skipped past the McReynolds section of the chart. Westley Allan Dodd. DOB July 3, 1961, DOD January 5, 1993. Cancer. An astrological sign of contradictions, as keywords were “loyalty,” “oversensitivity,” “caring,” “self-pitying,” “dependable,” “self-absorbed.” Convicted serial killer and child molester. His execution was the first legal hanging, at his own request, since 1965.
The manner of his death was the least unique thing about him. He also claimed a stress-free, happy childhood of wealth and leisure and his first victims were his cousins, because all ordinary children with happy lives molested their cousins and then went on to rape, torture, and kill other children. “Dear Mom and Dad, happy eighteenth birthday to me. Thanks so much for a carefree childhood and instilling appropriate values in me and protecting me from all trauma, but now I’m going to be a sociopath, for funzies. Thanks again!” wrote no well-adjusted teenager ever.
Dodd’s first victims: cousins. All victims: below the age of twelve. Number of victims: over fifty. Attitude toward children in ten words or less: “I’m only nice to the ones I want sex from.”
“. . . told them, I said if I escaped I’d immediately go back to killing and raping kids—”
“They should have taken you at your word, Mr. Dodd. Further now. What is your name?”
“My name is Nathaniel Gordon.”
“You bet it is.” DOB 1834; historical records do not recount exact DOB. But they sure as hell paid attention to his death: May 8, 1862. Nat Gordon, the last pirate ever hanged, and the only slave trader ever tried, convicted, and executed for stealing one thousand slaves. “Real” piracy was punishable by death, but it was hardly ever enforced when the plunder was merely people with dark skin. The paperwork alone hardly made it worth it.
Of the one thousand slaves Gordon stole, 172 were men and 162 were women. According to John Spears, author of The Slave Trade in America, “Gordon was one of those infamous characters who preferred to carry children because they could not rise up to avenge his cruelties.” Nice.
Hilariously (to Leah, at least; she knew her job had turned her into a jerk extraordinaire and that people were right to avoid her at parties), Gordon tried to kill himself the night before his execution. The local authorities found that annoying, especially since it meant postponing Gordon’s execution from noon to 2:30 so the guy could recover enough to be murdered by the state. Leah wondered just how that went down: “He was definitely too sick at noon, but now that it’s 2:30 he hasn’t barfed in over an hour and can walk under his own power.” “Great! Let’s go kill him. Good news, Mr. Gordon, you’re well enough to execute.” Or, as Leah preferred to think of it, the classic “well, sir, we have good news and bad news” scenario.
He left behind a mother, wife, and son, but Judge Shipman (a man who almost a century earlier was a hundred times the “justice” McReynolds was) commented on Gordon’s real legacy: “Think of the cruelty and wickedness of seizing nearly a thousand fellow beings, who never did you harm, and thrusting them beneath the decks of a small ship, beneath a burning tropical sun, to die in of disease or suffocation, or be transported to distant lands, and be consigned, they and their posterity, to a fate far more cruel than death.”
“. . . family to support,” Gordon was whining from the plush couch. “How can it be a hanging crime to move property?”
So! A pirate, a serial killer, and the worst bigot the Supreme Court had ever seen. And Leah was trapped in a room with all of them. All right, “trapped” was inaccurate, since she had obtained patient consent, drugged #6116, and called all her shadows forward.
Wednesdays!
TWO
“So what was it?”
“Wrong question,” she told Chart #6116. “‘Who was it?’ would be more accurate.”
Chart #6116 rolled her eyes. “I never bought into that past lives crap. It’s just one more thing to blame your problems on. I mean—I believe it,” she added when Leah raised her eyebrows. “I’m not one of those weirdos who say there’s no such thing as past lives, that we’re just here for one lifetime and then go to heaven or hell or wherever.”
Ah, the afterlife. You don’t have to learn anything in your single solitary lifetime, and then you can live in the sky forever after! Unless you live in a lake of fire beneath the earth forever after. Well, there were stranger theories. Tabula rasa, for one. The goal of goals, an ideal so unlikely as to be mostly unattainable.
What would it be like, born with a clean slate? Nothing to make up for? Nothing to relive or regret? It was such an amazing concept Leah couldn’t grasp it. Like trying to explain the science of reproduction to a preschooler: “He does what? And then what happens?”
“It does seem to defeat the purpose of living,” Leah put forth with care, shaking off the daydream. “No point in trying to learn from your mistakes since this is your only chance to get it right . . . it calls a lot into question.”
“Exactly. I’m not a Denier. But I’m in control of this life. Whoever I was before, they had their time. Now it’s my turn.”
“That mind-set can work,” Leah said carefully, “sometimes.” It depended on who the person used to be. And what that person used to do. If in her past lives #6116 was, say, a humanitarian who mentored needy children in her spare time, then sure. Except . . . “About seventy percent of the populace can remember some or all of their past lives. But it’s fragmented, they get flashes. Or they remember it all but they don’t feel it.” One of her patients had explained it as being akin to watching a movie. You might care about the characters on the screen, but no matter how the events unfold, it doesn’t affect the viewer on a personal level. “Or, in your case—”