The Forgetting Time(55)

His research was useless. Worse.

He had always believed in lucidity: in looking as clearly as possible at what was, despite the desire to veer off into comforting illusion and projection, and to follow the results rationally. So he couldn’t protect himself now from the questions that followed: What did it signify, to be reborn only to relive the previous life’s anguish? What was the sense in that? What was the meaning?

He could see, suddenly and for the first time, the appeal of escape, of nihilism. And yet some part of him, even then, the scientist in him, held him together, speaking clearly and steadily under the cacophony of blame and grief: Could the suicidal urge pour like a phobia or a personality characteristic from one life to the next? Could there be grief so unresolved and potent that it continued on, flowed into the next life as powerfully as a birth defect or a birthmark, where still it could not be shaken?

He was not a praying man, not at all, never, but he said a prayer anyway, standing on the bank of the river he couldn’t bring himself to look at, that her next life would be far from here.

He had pulled himself out of his despair only with brute will. He had gone cold turkey on the long train ride back to Calcutta, the craving pecking at his nerves, hands trembling in evidence of an addiction he had only dimly realized.

When he emerged at last, shaken and sober, he had known that there were questions he couldn’t ask himself. That there were attachments he couldn’t make. It was the only way to continue. And he had continued in this way, steadily working.

Until now.

In the motel minibar, there were more tiny bottles—a whole row of them. Anderson turned the key and opened the door again and stared. It seemed only days earlier that he had stopped drinking, not decades. Oblivion had been waiting patiently for him all these years. All right then, he thought. He reached for another little vodka.

No.

He ran to the bathroom and spat and washed his mouth out, brushing his teeth twice. Not that way. Not after all this time. He threw the key to the fridge in the toilet and flushed, but it remained in the basin, glinting like treasure at the bottom of the sea.

He made his way back to the bed and stretched his body out, trying to revive the feeling of warmth the vodka had generated under his skin. He could taste the alcohol on his lips under the Crest. On the other side of the wall, the boy was still sobbing.

Damn.

He liked him. The boy. Noah.

Damn. Damn. Damn.

*

When Anderson dozed off at last, he dreamed of Owen. He dreamed that his son was whole. Owen was whole and Sheila was happy and there was no need to go to Thailand, no matter what Angsley had said on the telephone. He could stay in Connecticut with his family and his lab rats.

He awoke suddenly, to a feeling of loss so pure that at first he couldn’t speak.

He sat up in bed. The room was still dark. His mind was clear.

I can help him, he thought. I can help this child. I got it wrong, but it’s not too late to change that. So we had the wrong previous personality. Okay. That’s happened before. I have the information I need now. I’ll convince his mother. For Noah, I’ll get it right.

But he had given up. Hadn’t he?

He got up and opened the blinds, looking out the window at the dawn beginning to assert itself across the indifferent parking lot, pale light illuminating the street. Another day, whether anyone liked it or not. Yet he felt himself despite all his apprehensions hungry to begin it.

He walked over to his computer and turned it on. He could hardly wait for it to boot up. He opened the search window and typed in Tommy Asheville Road.





Twenty

Janie buckled in Noah and then herself with a feeling of grim determination.

In the event of a change in cabin pressure, the flight attendant on the video was saying, you put your oxygen mask on first, pulling the cord, and then you helped the others in your party who needed your assistance. The video showed a nice-looking dad tugging the oxygen mask over his own face, his placid daughter sitting quietly beside him, breathing bad air.

What kind of idiot came up with that rule? They didn’t understand human nature at all.

She imagined the compartment filling slowly with smoke and Noah beside her, gasping. Did they really think that she could straighten the mask on her own face and breathe in clean air while her asthmatic son struggled to take a breath? The assumption was that she and her child were two entities with separate hearts and lungs and minds. They didn’t realize that when your child was gasping for air, you felt your own breath trapped in your chest.

And meanwhile, she was lying to her own son, and this was making him howl in distress, disturbing the other passengers on the plane, disrupting their ability to hear how to fasten a seat belt, and seriously addling her already compromised good sense.

Noah wanted to go to Asheville Road, and they were going to Asheville Road, but he couldn’t know that, not yet, not this time. Brooklyn by way of Dayton, that’s what she’d said to him, grateful that he was still too young to make sense of a map. She was not about to make the same mistake twice. She’d make a new mistake instead, if need be.

“I want to see my mama!” Noah was yelling, and the other passengers looked at her as if she were lying to them, too.

The plane readied itself for takeoff and began wheeling forward, barreling down its runway. She had never been afraid of flying, but now she felt something like alarm at the plane’s initial tremors as it rose.