The Forgetting Time(59)

She sighed, glancing at him sideways with a weary, humorous, reproachful look. It was as if she knew right then and there that he would never be done with it, that they would never have any more children, that she’d spend the rest of her days living in the wake of this obsession until there was nothing more to do but join it.

And he was still at it, wasn’t he?

Despite his compromised capacities, he was going forward. And now he was throwing protocol to the winds. The woman—the one whose name now eluded him—had insisted upon it.

*

She had answered the door of her motel room instantly after his hesitant knock. She was wearing the clothes from the day before, and her face looked ashen in the morning light. “We had a bad night,” she said flatly. He’d handed her the pages he’d printed out in the motel’s office, filled with the research he’d gathered—research that indicated a missing child named Tommy Crawford who lived on Asheville Road. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said when she realized what he was giving her. But she took the papers and looked at them while Noah slept soundly in the next bed.

“You think this is the previous personality,” she said at last.

“I do.”

She kept picking up the pages and putting them down again.

“It’s not unheard of for people to reincarnate into a different race or culture.” Anderson spoke in a low voice. He tried to keep his urgency in check. “There have been numerous cases in which children in India remembered lifetimes spent in a different caste. And some Burmese children have seemed to remember previous lives as Japanese soldiers who were killed in Burma during World War II.”

“So. If we do this—” She gave him a sober, warning look. “If we do go to Ohio—”

His heart leaped. He couldn’t help it. “Yes?”

“We go now. Today.”

“That’s not how it works,” Anderson had said reasonably. “We e-mail the family first. Or write a letter, if we can. We don’t just show up on their doorstep.” He had done this, as a matter of fact, in Asia, when the previous personality’s family had no phone or method of contact. But in Asia the families were not like American families, and more likely than not they were at least curious to see him.

“That’s exactly what we are doing,” she had said. “I’m not going to approach some other grieving mother without being sure. Not again. If Noah doesn’t recognize anything, we turn around and go home, and they are none the wiser.”

His calm began to dissipate into the air. She couldn’t be serious. “It’s better to contact the family first.”

“I’m going, with or without you. I’m going to take the next flight out.”

“It’s ill-advised.”

“Then so be it. I am not going to take Noah home only to start this all up again. So I guess it’s now or never. And if we do this…” She sat up straight on the bed. “You can’t write about it. You understand? This is about my son, not your legacy.”

He had tried to smile. He was so tired. “Fuck my legacy.”

*

His legacy—oh, he had had high hopes for himself, but he hadn’t gotten very far. There were so many things he still didn’t know. Why were some children born with memories of past lives, their bodies marked with the imprints of past traumas? Was it related (it had to be) to the fact that 70 percent of the previous personalities these children remembered had died traumatic deaths? If consciousness survived death—and he had shown that it did—then how did this connect with what Max Planck and the quantum physicists realized: that events didn’t occur unless they were observed, and therefore that consciousness was fundamental, and matter itself was derived from it? Did that therefore make this world like a dream, with each life, like each dream, flowing one after the other? And was it then possible that some of us—like these children—were awakened too abruptly from these dreams, and ached to return to them?

The blue sky through the window spread out before him, on and on. So many things he’d longed to explore further. He’d wanted to plumb the very nature of reality. He’d wanted to finish this book. But now his mind was shattered, and all he wanted was to help a single child.

He looked at the boy slumped against him, his body nestled on Anderson’s arm. He could have been any child, sweetly sleeping. He was any child.

“He likes you,” the woman said.

“And I like Tommy. Very much.”

She drew in her breath sharply. “Noah.”

“What?”

“His name is Noah.”

Of course. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know how that happened.” Jerry. Jerry. Pull it together.

She had turned pale.

“I’m sorry. I’m a little tired—”

“It’s all right,” she said. But she looked away from him and bit her lip.

Noah. Tommy. Everything came down to names, didn’t it? The evidence that one was this person and not that one. And if they got lost, the names—when they got lost—and all you had left was one long, blurry stretch of humanity, like a bank of clouds in the sky—what then?

He’d have to do better. He’d have to keep the names close. Noah, Tommy. He’d roll them up and fill the cracks in his mind with them the way people tucked scraps of paper wishes between the stones of the Wailing Wall.