The Forgetting Time(38)
The boat glided past the shacks with jetties, little spirit houses perched on the ends, miniature temples built for the shelter and appeasement of ghosts; past the women bathing, the children swimming in the muddy river water.
Anderson unbuttoned his shirt. He took off his shoes and socks. He needed to feel the water sloshing his toes, splashing his ankles. He stood on the boat in his open shirt and T-shirt, the late-afternoon sun roaring on his head. Every hair on his body was standing on end.
He thought of Arjuna, begging the Hindu god Krishna to show him reality: “Reality, the fire of a thousand suns simultaneously blazing forth in the sky.” He thought of Heraclitus: a man cannot step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man. He thought of the police and coroner’s reports about the mailman from Phichit who had plunged a knife into the left side of his wife’s abdomen, killing her and cutting through three of the protecting fingers of her right hand, because she had burned the rice.
The boat driver did something to the motor and the boat skittered forward, skipping over the river, dousing them with its cooling spray.
He remembered his college self, when he and Angsley had stayed up late discussing the case of Shanti Devi and the writings of Plato and anyone else who had taken a theory of reincarnation to heart, from Origen and Henry Ford to General Patton and the Buddha. He’d thought he’d given up all that. The survival of consciousness after death: it was a holy grail or a pipe dream, unfit work for a scientist of his caliber. Yet he had been searching since then in his own way, keeping track of what J. B. Rhine’s people were doing with ESP at Duke, and exploring in his own work the connections between the mind and the body. Mental stress caused physical ailments: that much was certain; but why did some people emerge from trauma resiliently while others became plagued with night sweats and phobias? It was clear to him that genetics and environmental factors did not explain everything. He did not believe that it was a question of luck. He was searching for something else.
Something else.
Connection spawned connection in his mind, branching outward like glass shattering.
Not just nature or nurture, but something else that could cause personality quirks, phobias. Why some babies were born calm and others inconsolable. Why some children had innate attractions and abilities. Why others felt they should have been a member of the opposite sex. Why Chang, the irritable Siamese twin, who liked to drink and carouse, was so different in his nature from his easygoing, teetotaler brother, Eng. Surely the genetics and environmental factors in that case were the same. And birth defects, of course—the girl’s deformed fingers provided a clear link between this life and another one, and might even explain—
Owen.
Anderson sat down. His throat was parched; the sun had scalded him on the skin of his nose and cheeks and neck and he knew he would suffer badly later. When he closed his eyes he could see formless shapes moving quickly across a too-bright expanse of orange. The shapes coalesced into a face that was not a face, and he let himself see his child again.
Sheila had accused him of an inability to love Owen during his brief, tortured life, because he could not bring himself to hold and stroke the baby as she did. True, he couldn’t look at his son, but it was because he loved him and was so powerless to help him; he was tormented by his ignorance. Why should this happen to this child, in this way?
In the hospital before Sheila had awakened he had stroked the tiny hand of his imperfect child and he had looked into that terrible, innocent face until he couldn’t look at it any longer, or ever again. He had walked right out of the NICU and down the hallway into the maternity ward, to the window behind which the other babies slept and fussed, their bodies brightly pink with health.
Why? For no clear reason, one baby comes out the way Owen had, and others come out perfectly. What sense was there in it: what science? Could it really be simple bad luck, an unfortunate turn of chromosomal roulette? Why was this child born this way, when there were no genetic indicators, no environmental factors at all?
Unless.
He opened his eyes.
Bobby Angsley was watching him, a faint smile playing at the corners of his lips.
“I’ve been tracking this phenomenon,” Angsley said quietly. “In Nigeria. In Turkey. Alaska. Lebanon. You thought I was playing. Well, I was playing. But I was looking, too. I was listening.”
“And you heard something?”
“Mostly whispers. Stories told late at night over raki or village moonshine with visiting anthropologists … some of the women are surprisingly comely, you know, in a sexy, Margaret Mead kind of way.”
“Right.” Anderson rolled his eyes and shifted his wet feet into the sunlight.
“No, listen,” Angsley said quickly, and his intensity made Anderson look up. “Did you know there’s an Igbo village in Nigeria in which they amputate the little finger of a deceased child, asking him to come back only if he’ll live a longer life with them next time ’round? And when they subsequently have a child and that child has a deformed little finger, which apparently actually happens sometimes, they rejoice. And the Tlingit—the Tlingit of Alaska—their dying or dead appear to them in dreams, telling them which female relative’s body will give birth to them. And don’t get me started on the Druze.…” He jammed his cigarette between his lips, as if to restrain himself physically from continuing, and then took it out again. “Look, I know, it sounds like folklore. But there are cases.”