The Forgetting Time(22)

She had seen firsthand how the manipulative preyed upon the gullible. She knew that there was no end to what desperate people would do. And wasn’t that what Janie was now?

Then she heard it.

There was no point going to Noah’s room yet, or trying to wake him. She knew the drill. After ten minutes, the whimper would become a shriek, the shriek would turn into words: “Mama, Mama!”

She would find him twisting in the sheets, flailing, screaming. “Let me out, let me out, let me out!”

There was nothing worse than watching your own child tumbling down through the darkness and not being able to stop it. Anything was better.

Even drugs? Even this? She looked at the image on the screen.

The whimpering was becoming sharper now, the pitch heightening. Soon he would call out for her, and she would go to his side and try, unsuccessfully, to comfort him. Sleeping, drenched in sweat, he would thrash in her arms.

The doctor and the boy were still there, frozen on her computer screen. She picked up the prescription and held it in her open hand.

Somebody tell me what to do, she thought.

She sat at her kitchen table with her laptop, the prescription in her hand, her son crying in his sleep. She stared at the image on the screen, wondering when it would begin to lose its power.





Many of the subjects in our cases are born with birthmarks or birth defects that match wounds on the body of the previous personality, usually fatal wounds. One case that includes both an announcing dream and a birth defect is that of Süleyman ?aper in Turkey. His mother dreamed during her pregnancy that a man she did not recognize told her, “I was killed with a blow from a shovel. I want to stay with you and not anyone else.” When Süleyman was born, the back of his skull was partially depressed, and he also had a birthmark there. When he became able to talk, he said that he had been a miller who died when an angry customer hit him on the head. Along with other details, he gave the first name of the miller and the village where he had lived. In fact, an angry customer had killed a miller with that name in that village by hitting him on the back of the head with a shovel.

JIM B. TUCKER, M.D., LIFE BEFORE LIFE





Eight

The packing tape yowled in protest. Anderson cut it with his teeth and closed the box, feeling as if the cardboard flaps were shutting above his head. It would be quiet in there, with his life’s work.

It had taken him months—pulling out the cases one by one to look through them again had slowed him down considerably—but the Institute was entirely packed up now, ready to be shipped.

Let the next generation of scientific seekers find his work and make of it what they will. He hoped they would. He’d gotten a letter, recently, from a colleague in Sri Lanka, where there were so many cases you could sweep them up like fish in a net.

All that evidence he had compiled. He’d been sure that the editors of the medical journals could not ignore it. As if evidence itself could be indisputable. He had misjudged human nature. He had screwed up by forgetting the human ability to reject anything it wants to—Galileo himself should have taught him that much.

From somewhere far away, or in the room, a phone began to ring.

*

“But I don’t understand. I thought she turned it down. Why does she want to talk?” His literary agent was saying something on the telephone, but it made no sense to him. “Does she want it or doesn’t she?”

“She’s having second thoughts. She’d want some changes and wants to make sure you’re on the same page with that. She’s one of the top editors in the field. She has a string of bestsellers under her belt. It’s very good news.”

The same page, he’d thought. Top in the field. Bestsellers. The lingo was funny to him. He pictured a huge white page slanting up like a mountain, with himself and the editor standing at the top of it, shaking hands. He’d never had to deal with people who were in the business of making money. With the academic press that had published his few books, money had hardly been discussed, but then again, nobody had read those, outside of the small community of like-minded researchers. This, he thought, was another world entirely. Thirty years ago the word bestsellers would have made him scoff; now it quickened his breath. How things had changed for him.

The editor got on the phone immediately after her assistant had announced his name.

“I couldn’t get this book out of my mind,” the editor said. Her voice was sharp and chipper at the same time. A force in the industry, his agent had said, citing a number of successful books he’d never heard of. He tried to imagine her: dark-haired, fervent, with a white, heart-shaped face, a dynamo Snow White wrapping the telephone cord around her fingers as she talked … what was he thinking? Nobody had telephone cords anymore. He was sweating like a schoolboy on a first date.

“I think a lot of people will be interested in it. But it does need some work.”

“It does?”

“Particularly the American cases.”

“The American cases?”

“Yes. They are all so old, in the seventies and eighties, and far less … dramatic. It’s an American audience, after all. So many of the other cases are set in exotic places, and that’s good, but we also need to focus more on the American stories. So people can connect.”

He cleared his throat, buying himself time. “But people can connect,” he said slowly, carefully repeating her words like a child learning to speak, or a sixty-eight-year-old losing his vocabulary. “This isn’t an American story. It’s a—” What was the word he was searching for? Something vast that contained all the planets and solar systems inside it. He couldn’t find the word so switched tactics: “It’s a story for everyone.” Gesturing widely and invisibly with his hands, as if to encompass everything he meant but couldn’t say.