I pace the yard, tired and wired from the night’s labor, casting about for something to do. Three varieties of sedative have failed to induce slumber, and I have long since passed that delirious point of sleep deprivation and mental fatigue where anything coherent might be expected to appear on my iMac’s text window. Leave well enough alone.

No point in generating gibberish which will only need rewriting later. The poppies are popping, morning glory vines virulent, roses radiant, a dank spectrum of horny flowers living luxuriously; I wonder how they’ll fare in the dry desert when their human slave is no longer there to overwater and underfertilize them. Maybe Llewellyn can look after the garden when I’m gone.

Gone! Such an abstract idea, a world without Victor. Will it be a better world? Less contentious, surely. Probably my passing will be a great relief for protectors of paradigms past; yet even my enemies should miss me, as I would miss them. Without our opposites to contrast against, we are nothing but bland monochrome.

I certainly don’t feel like I’m dying. My skin is tingling, my head a whirl of exhilaration. I feel like dancing. The chorus of birds and rustling of leaves juxtapose a skein of subtle beats, and my arms rotate cautiously in the “figure-eight” configuration taught to me in a more innocent time to the din of booming hard house by a kid with purple hair and Adidas visor and dozens of chains of homemade plastic strung jewelry hung over a blue Rugrats T-shirt. Back in the day.

With Nature as my DJ, my feet join the party, the resonating rhythm overtaking me. Like riding a bicycle. Why did I ever give this up? I have no audience but Goddess, and Her smile shines on me along with the butterflies, birds, bees and every other being at one with itself. We all are engaged in a cosmic hoedown. I feel hugged. I can practically see the ball of energy bouncing around my body, the chi, focused essence. And I’m not even tripping.

Where, I wonder, will this force go when “Victor” gives up the ghost? It is inconceivable that it might disappear. The law of conservation of energy, which must surely apply to the spiritual as well as the mechanical variety, forbids it. I may not always obey the unjust statutes of men, but I recognize the authority of the Universe. I am not permitted to fade into oblivion.

Consignment to eternal paradise or damnation seems unlikely as well; unnatural. The two cannot exist apart. What nonmaterial joy could Heaven offer that won’t become passe over the Millennia, what spiritual torture could be featured in Hell that would not ease by acclimatization over the eons? The saved would be increasingly bored with their salvation, with yawning ages of monotony before them, which sounds horrifying; the damned could contrast their horrors to the earlier time when they were fresh and new, looking forward to steady improvement, and thereby eke out an increasing claim on hope. Hope in Hades, but none in the Kingdom of God?

Besides, who really deserves either? What possible point could there be to such an unforgiving pass/fail standard, on such a skewed and unfair examination? If God is really such a sadist, who keeps hugging me?

While literally absurd, the dualism may contain a useful metaphor. Something Christian fundamentalists have never understood about the Bible is that it’s mostly allegory, the painstaking symbolically-charged craft of antediluvian Jonathan Swifts with axes to grind and points to make. Only an idiot, the authors surely felt, would take stuff like talking snakes and all of humanity being descended from a single (genetically identical?) couple literally.

Actually, on further reflection, the snake talking I could buy. Like most acidheads, I score pretty high on the Buster-Idaho Gullibility Scale. I also engage in protracted conversations with inanimate objects and fervently believe in the efficacy of magic.

She examines me, cross-eyed, as she draws on the spliff. “You have a book to write,” she reminds me. “And I don’t think you should ditch your fortune just yet. You may need it.”

“For what? I’ll be dead in less than a year, Llewellyn. There’s no one I need to take care of. I may as well enjoy it.”

She inhales. “There might be something for you, Victor. Can I make a phone call?”

“No,” I say with a mock-Stalin accent. “You’re a hostage of the Slavic Cobras. Unless your government accedes to our demands, you will be kept here and repeatedly raped until dead.”

Llewellyn shrugs, not in the mood for silly games. “I doubt you could manage that by yourself. I seem to remember somebody saying, ‘Please, stop, I need to rest it, you’ll make it sore.’” She picks up my cell phone and I watch her ass ripple as she walks into the living room.

“Carmen? Llewellyn. Listen, I have a candidate for the DM experiment. What? Yeah, he’s terminal. I can verify at least seven lives, including the two most recent. James fucking Joyce, that’s who! Can you set up a meeting with everybody? ASAP, of course. The man is dying! Tomorrow at six? Perfect. Can you arrange to have everyone be there? What? I’m busy. Comforting him. He just got the news this morning. Yeah, I owe you one. Call this number if anyone important can’t make it. Love ya. Peace.”

“Who was that?” I ask in an offhand way when she returns.

“My sister. She’s involved in psi, too.”

“What’s DM? What does my being terminally ill have to do with it?”

“Directed metempsychosis. Listen, I really don’t want to tell you too much about this before tomorrow. I don’t want you to form any preconceptions. Can you be there?”

I grin at her cannily. “I don’t know. Do you think we can get through the Kama Sutra again by then?”

She sighs. “Baby, I’ve got appointments tomorrow. And I have to get home and meditate. That’s what I had on my schedule to do, before I decided to get high and laid instead.” She produces a yellow Post-it pad, locates a pen on the floor, and briefly scribbles. “Here. Come to this address. It’s right on the Row, just a few blocks from my office.”

I stare at the square. 1620 Illustration Ave. #18. Reality vibrates. Not precisely deja vu. More like the opposite. An odd sensation this will happen again.

She is dressing. “Once more?” I plead.

She hesitates. “Once more,” she agrees.

*  *  *  *  *  *

“The doctor said…”

She puts her index finger to my lips. “Let’s not talk about it now. I came to cheer you up. Where’s the kitty-kat?”

I indicate the kitchen. “Help yourself.”

She returns, carrying the mirror and straw, assesses my condition, and portions out a line calculated to match it. The rail disappears as if confronted by vacuum cleaner. She smiles. “Where were we? Oh, yes, cheering you up. When’s the last time you had a good backrub?”

“What kind of therapist are you?” I joke, mostly to conceal my disbelief. It must be the drugs, making me misinterpret. She isn’t actually coming on to me!

She looks me square in the eyes. “The kind you need right now.” She lightly kisses my lips. “The kind who cares.” And she retreats behind the recliner and begins to loosen my hair-trigger neck muscles.

Heaven.

“I can’t do a good job like this,” she complains, walking briskly to the couch and turning the cushions onto the floor. The K doesn’t seem to have fazed her at all. “Lay down,” she orders. “And lose the clothes.”

I obey.

She is a virtuoso, playing sensual tabla on my back, sculpting a masterpiece, dancing a storm. I melt under her fingers, grunting, moaning and squirming under her ministrations. “I love you,” I blurt involuntarily, and instantly regret it. It is sort of a stupid thing for a thirty-year old man to say in response to a simple massage, especially when I’ve been explicitly warned. But, damn it, that’s how I feel!

Llewellyn is neither tickled nor offended. “Love is the language souls speak,” she whispers in my ear, caressing my lobe with her tongue. “Turn over, and I’ll show you love.”

Our open mouths connect, our tongues electrically entwining about each other. I slurp at her, savoring and absconding with the sweet bubbly moisture, whetting my appetite for her more esoteric juices.

I assert control, guiding her gently to her back. I longingly kiss her cheek, her eyes, her brow. I gently seize her fleshy bottom lip in my teeth, stretching it to its limit before reluctantly releasing it. “I never knew you felt this way…” I mumble inanely.

“You never needed me enough before,” she answers.

I taste her neck, her shoulders, her tight firm breasts, lingering on each nipple for as long as seems to give her pleasure; then I slide down and embrace each of her painted toes with my lips, evoking some encouraging moans. I slowly make my way up her legs, lifting each to tease the sensitive spots behind each knee, which also gives me a maddening view of her ass.

I can wait no longer. I prostrate myself before the gate of the Temple and commence to worship.

I gently peel apart the petals of her flower, and sigh at the powerful scent of her, inhaling it deeply. I run my lips and tongue along the edges, teasing, spiraling in toward her stiff little button. When I sense she can take no more, I give her clit a single languorous lick. She gasps. I return to the perimeter with more assertion, boldly opening her further, and insert a probing finger before resuming my attention on her member with gusto.

My bent finger slides along the inner wall, seeking the Spot and finding it readily enough. It’s usually to one side or the other. Her body quakes with preorgasmic ecstasy. I release the pressure and continue to lightly suck and lick, alternating procedures in tune to her rhythm. Love may be the language of souls, but bodies speak it as well.

My face is alive with rapture, every lick and stroke bringing me toward an oral climax of my own, as if the urgent message of joy her nerves are transmitting to her brain are also leaping across the chasm between our skin, infusing me with a renewed desire to make her squirm. The real kick of cunnilingus, and I suppose of the other thing, too, aside from the satisfaction of giving, is this feedback loop, which can turn nearly any body part into a sexual organ.

“Whoever taught you to be such an incredible lover?” she asks, filling my chest with a teenager’s pride.

I pull away from her, a smile on my sticky face. “Well, you know I honor the Goddess, in all her incarnations,” I say innocently. “And I prefer to kneel when I pray.”

“Praise Goddess,” she murmurs as I return to my worship. Before long, she is drowning out the music with her yelps and screams. Her body stiffens, then bucks, her legs kicking out and nearly forcing me away with the violence of her reaction. After a minute of my holding for dear life, she relaxes and pants softly, a silly grin on her sweaty, gorgeous face.

“So, did that do anything for you?” I quip coyly.

“Shut up and let me taste myself,” she demands, pulling my face to hers. We enjoy a prolonged, musky kiss, breaking grudgingly by mutual consent to attend to worldly concerns before returning to our lovemaking.

Llewellyn rolls a joint, as I retrieve my survival kit from the coffee table beside the recliner. I am naked, while she is still wearing her silky minidress, so I replace my trousers to restore equality, though I have no doubt I’ll be removing them again shortly. Parched, I gulp half the bottle of water and light a clove, inhaling deeply before offering her a drag.

She swaps me for the spliff. “I have to say,” she comments, exhaling spicy smoke, “If I’d known you were so good at that, this might have happened a while ago.”

“I’m glad it didn’t,” I say sincerely. She looks hurt, so I explain. “I wouldn’t have fully appreciated it as I do, before today. You may be the last lover I ever have.”

She nods. “I sensed that you’d gotten bad news.”

I laugh. “Yeah, that and the message I left on your voicemail!”

She frowns “You left a message?”

I freeze. “Yes, of course! You said so on the phone.”

She hesitates. “I haven’t checked my mailbox. I was referring,” she says, tapping her temple in the universal gesture for psi, “to your message.”

I don’t know what to say. “You decided to tell me about your crush,” she continues, “and proceeded to contemplate suicide. I tell you, that didn’t make me feel wonderful.”

“How-”

She shrugs. “I was astral planing, and a node lit up, and I saw fear and courage and anger and love, all exploding, so I floated up to it and it was you. You were so beautiful, so wounded and needy. Then I heard my name, and 101 ways to stop paying social security. I pulled and tugged at you, but you weren’t paying attention. You were too busy staring at your navel. So I went home and rang you up as soon as I was back in my body.

It was too late to stop you from starting the party without me.”

“Want to do another rail?” I ask, starting to surface from my hole.

“How about some E, instead? I brought over a few rolls for us.”

We munch the tabs and rinse with water, gather essential supplies, and retreat to the bedroom, where you can guess what we do. Unless, I suppose, you are virgin, in which case you have my heartfelt sympathies, and it’s probably best not to titillate you any further.

* * * * * * *

How could this not be hurting my brain?

I am released from the bonds of flesh and rise to contemplate the cosmos from the vantage of a phantasm. From this angle, living and dead mingle indistinguishably in a vast network of information, every being but a node, transmitting data with material and spiritual connotations.

Distinctions, such as the notion of sentience, are an illusion, I can clearly see, a matter of perspective, a quality we assess by comparing with ourselves. There is nothing which does not possess it; it is a feature of the Whole and not of the parts, which, experiencing it, assume it to be their province alone.

The same is true of Life: every atom, every photon is charged with the Spirit. Star and crystal and tree and amoeba-every one thinks of itself as “me” and lives in a world inhabited by its own kind and lesser beings.

The Universe is the body and brain of God. Einstein was on a fool’s errand, seeking to understand the thoughts of God through physics. What he should have expected to find were the bodily functions and neurochemistry of the Deity.

Eternally exhausting the realm of infinite possibilities. Every piece in it’s place. Hologrammatic images cast in a fractal pattern. Like the hippie said, one person in a mirror funhouse.

What I think of as “me” is nothing more than one of these circuits, I realize. If “I” malfunction, the data will be rerouted along another path, one which will emerge naturally as a consequence of my passing, which will then be “me.”

This is nothing to fear.

“I” am hardly unfamiliar with this egoless state; the transformation is common behind the screen of several different drugs, even during sex and writing. Yet always it fades, and the grasping demon of desire reasserts its dominance in the physical realm, bringing a paradox: who experienced ego dissolution?

And of course that is the villain, lust: for food, for sex, for social intangibles, for our own bodies; Siddhartha called it out of the lineup over three thousand years ago, suggesting its complete obliteration and creating another of the paradoxes of which he was so fond, for how can anything be accomplished without the accompanying ambition to make it so, even when the goal is abolishing yearning itself?

If a tree falls in the forest, the other trees will hear.

And then I am beyond thought, beyond perception; I am a soap bubble carried on the waveform of the Universal Mind. “Time” is a silly memory, a game I once played to organize events. There is only Here, Now.

Somewhere a phone rings.

At first I think it a twisting of the music, a response to the new status of stasis; but the video-game sound effect I chose to signal incoming calls gets louder, until I think my head will split; I fumble the phone free of my jacket pocket with numb hands, and, in a process that seems to take forever, I press the Enter key and bring the phone apprehensively to my cheek.

“Hu-Hello.” My voice sounds alien, unfamiliar.

“Victor, it’s Llewellyn. Just got your message. What’s up?”

Up. A preposition. Refers to the gravity-induced delusion that an object may be higher than another. “I’m-I’m a little…stuck.”

Fortunately, she’s hip enough to know what I mean by this lingo.

“Killing the pain. Bad news at the doctor’s, huh?” she says, sympathetic but not surprised. “I’m coming right over.”

“No…” I protest weakly. “I won’t be able to answer the door.”

She laughs, a creepy sound when amplified by K-echo. “You forgot to lock it. I’ll let myself in.”

I don’t ask her how she knows this. “Come ahead, then.”

“Okay. See you soon.” She clicks off, to my immense relief.

Telephones and Ketamine definitely do not mix.

Be nice to see Llewellyn, though. Or, rather, six of her, with my K skip-vision in full force. I jack the volume on the remote control and return to Never-Never land, the timeless, spaceless void, with a downward flick of my eyelids.

I walk immediately into the kitchen, unceremoniously dumping my belongings on the counter. I locate a clean plate, set a pot of water to boil, and shed my jacket as I proceed to my bedroom to retrieve my stash.

I’m not about to tell where I hide my stuff; after all, you might come and rip me off, especially after I’ve bragged about the quality and variety of my collection. Worse, you could be an undercover narc. Suffice it to say, it is well concealed.

Less Japanese Red left than I thought; better save that for when the weaker stuff is gone, to overcome my tolerance. More Hydrochloride, on the other hand, than I recollected, at least a half V. I start with the Blue Anasket, primarily because it is the most plentiful, though “weak” isn’t really an accurate description. Blue Label is indicated for veterinary anesthesia for use on goats and larger mammals. In spite of recent gains, I am still somewhat smaller than a goat, so a vial should render me unintelligible for the next few hours. I crack the aluminum seal, unplug the rubber cork, and empty the tiny bottle onto the plate, adding just a few drops of vanilla extract for taste, and set it gingerly on the pot.

I activate my lighting system, consisting of strobes and “smart” lasers, which oscillate to the beat of the music, as well as liquid wax wall holograms, and a large-screen TV with a panoply of psychedelic DVD’s in the player. I select a two-hour program of computer-animated weirdness prepared by a friend to the hard-trance tracks of Astral Projection’s Another World. As an afterthought, I flip on the Jacuzzi, though by the time it sufficiently heats, I’ll probably be too fucked up to crawl into it.

Damn shame to be doing all this by myself. Ah, well, that’s what you get for being a player. Some days, no one else wants to play.

Razor blade. Mirror. Straw. Vick’s inhaler. A plastic bottle of water. A pack of clove cigarettes. Remove all sharp-edged furniture.

Check.

The pot is nearly bubbling over, so I turn the heat down a tad. The K has already begun to curdle. I rake it gently, mixing the solidifying portions into the liquid. Won’t be long now at all.

I go to the bathroom and use my electric nose hair trimmer, not for vanity but to clear a path, and run a few drops from the tap through each nostril to lubricate a vigorous noseblowing. I wrinkle my face at the greenish-brown slime on the tissue, dotted with black flecks of winnowed hair. Why must bodies produce so much…gross…gunk?

I watch the last whitish bubbles pop and flatten on the surface of the plate, then extinguish the burner and remove the plate with terrycloth oven mittens.

Not really needing anything like a full vial of K, not fresh out of the bag with no tolerance, I scrape about a third of the pale, plastic-like film from the plate to the mirror. The translucent crust readily converts to opaque white powder. I shuffle the pile into a neat rail.

I aim and shoot.

Bullseye. I throw my head back in pleasure/pain.

Half the line remains, but I am so overwhelmed by the power of what I’ve already had, that I decide to leave even that for later. How easily is grandiose ambition subsumed! How humbling, to be knocked upside by a fingernail length, not even a proper $20 bag. Why, back in the day…but there is no arguing with my spinning head and queasy gut.

I stumble to the recliner.

The world dissolves.

Quincy Jones may not have the answers; but Western allopathy is not the final word on healthcare, and is hardly the most venerable tradition. A Taoist or Ayurvedic healer might have a different opinion.

Acupuncture. Spirit healing. Orgone boxes. Peyote ceremonies. Cleansing herbs. Colon hydrotherapy. Full-coven spells. Antioxidants. Alien intervention. Cloning. Cryogenics. Computer storage of my brain matrix.

Hope! Opiate of the soul! Just an idea, really. The willingness to believe in a pleasant future, in spite of all the evidence. Faith. Not my strong suit. Such a temporary feeling.

I am alone. This seems inappropriate.

I must call Llewellyn Reece. I scroll to that number and press “send.”

No answer. Chime, and greeting. Protracted beep. “It’s Victor. I need to talk to you. Please call me. It’s important.” An empty feeling, talking to a voicemail, when what you really need is a human. I start the engine. May as well head home. Home is where the drugs are.

I think we’ll get things started by dropping, deep, deep into a K-hole. Half a vial should do the trick. I think I still have that much Japanese Red Label; if not, I have three of Anasket and a Green Label Ketacet. Maybe even a plastic seal with a quarter V or so of Hydrochloride, the creme de la creme.

I flip on the radio. “Come on baby, don’t fear the Reaper-”

Exasperated, I hit the search button as I light a cigarette.

“And when I die, and when I’m gone, there’ll be one child born in this world  to carry on, to carry on-”

Search.

“Knock, knock knockin’ on Heaven’s door…”

Search.

“Goodbye life, goodbye sweet caress, I think I’m going to die, bye-bye my life goodbye.”

Enough of this shit. And they play nothing but love songs after you’ve had your heart broken. Radio stations have an uncanny knack for playing what I don’t want to hear. I pop in a Ziggy Marley tape as I torch a spliff. That should lift my spirits. Irie, mon.

“All things have come to an end, now I be mindful of prayer…I’m goin away/To a place where there is no night or day-” Surrendering, I switch off the stereo and drive in silence.

Guns are for psychos; hanging and wrist slashing for halfhearted gestures. I’ve always been terrified of heights and there’s no way on Goddess’s green Earth I’m spending my last seconds watching a sidewalk or ocean rushing up on me. I’ve gotten plenty of that in cold-sweat nightmares.

Drowning is out of the question. Self-asphyxiation seems unlikely to succeed. Carbon monoxide has potential, but it’s such a cliche, bringing to mind salesmen and brokers ending it all over some stupid money-related disaster. That’s not a message I care to send. This is not about defeat, but taking control of my destiny, having a say in the one matter which really concerns me.

It’ll be drugs, of course; but how to choose? Resolution to take up smack notwithstanding, dying with a needlewound seems inelegant, as well as hypocritical in light of my lifelong opposition to intravenous injection of recreational drugs within the counterculture. Don’t poke holes in the spacesuit, I warned, wagging my finger, snorting my Ketamine. It would hardly do to leave such a poor example. I’d better smoke my heroin.

Oral overdose of opiates is an option, but eating death brings with it the danger of barfing it back up. Also, I want to minimize the lag time between ingestion and unconsciousness. I don’t fancy my thoughts will be too pleasant about then. That’s probably a shitty attitude, but what, really, can be on your mind at such a time? I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die…

Death by nitrous oxide is an appealing possibility. I can’t see that it would be much different from phishing out on a balloon, except that when you went for some air, you’d just get more laughing gas and never wake up. A small room could be flooded with an enormous amount, or I could use a gas mask hooked up to the tank. It would work even if I was on acid and K. A pretty nice way to go.

Didn’t I read somewhere that NO2 was discovered by adding nitric acid to iron filings? It’s given off as waste from the reaction. Mixing enough of the two should do the trick.

Thing is, how do I get nitric acid, without some clerk calling the FBI and bringing the Bomb Squad down on my head? Pretty sure, it is also a component of nitroglycerin. I can’t exactly explain to the SWAT team, “No, look, fellas, it’s all a misunderstanding. What I’m actually trying to do is manufacture enough nitrous oxide to off myself.”

For that matter, making a bomb and detonating it to some political or social purpose is also worth considering. While it brings the same hazards of getting caught, it has the redeeming virtue of making my death meaningful and significant. A bona fide suicide bomber would be hard to stop, particularly if I targeted an unoccupied building at night from the outside. Don’t want to kill anyone, of course; I’m still a pacifist. But the terror that would strike the hearts of DEA workers when they arrived the next morning to the spectacle of their beloved headquarters, reduced to rubble in the wee hours by a drug-crazed madman with a vanload of high density plastic explosive.

Let them have a nightmare or two.

The studio bigwigs are also concerned about the deficit in law enforcement, which partially explains the proliferation of the even more extensive and putridly stale genres of “Copaganda,” in which I also made a cameo appearance as a “scumbag,” and “Trialhypnosis,” where I had starred as the controversial defendant.

It always comes down to the Verdict: a uniformed authority figure pronouncing a fate over which you are helpless. The message is powerlessness, and the show might as well fade to black after that, the rest is all padding to fill the hour. It’s over for the hapless extra, he’ll never be seen again when the Verdict is delivered, whether it’s a cop chanting, “You have the right to remain silent,” a judge reading, “Guilty on all counts,” or an allopath gloatingly declaring, “Your type of malignancy has a survival rate of about five percent at a year.” Same late prime-time slot; different night.

There’s even a subtle aesthetic to it, a balance. Cosmic justice, wholly distinct from cultural justice, which is at least theoretically based on fairness. The Universe fosters no such delusions. All the stars demand is that both sides of an equation be equal. My winning streak was bound to turn.

Defeat/Triumph
Pleasure/Pain
Life/Death
and so on.

I get up and leave without a word or gesture. To what point continuing to stare at his smug mug, enduring the glaring light and sickly alcohol miasma of his Death Chamber? Shall I appeal to reason, come up with a logical argument to convince the doctor of his error? Will I pry some neglected nugget of hope from his overcluttered mind, my one chance in a million he forgot to mention? I have nothing further to discuss with medicine.

Courtesy is for the living. Time to start losing those habits.

On the bright side, I can finally give the IRS a big fat bird.

No need to give up smoking or cocaine. In fact, I believe the time is ripe for a good old-fashioned heroin habit. I always wanted one of those.

I can trade in my exercise equipment, which mostly goes unused anyway, for some skydiving gear and maybe a dragracing motorbike.

My diet from this point on may as well consist of pure cholesterol. I can live exclusively on pastries without a twinge of guilt.

I can fuck strangers without a condom.

I can tell off all the people I was afraid I might need someday, my agent and publisher and lawyer and probation officer and everyone else that no longer matters.

Fuck ‘em.

I never again have to pretend I’m seriously considering matrimony so as not to lose a good, steady lay.

I will drive the Porsche into the ground and never spend another minute in a mechanic’s shop.

I will tell Llewellyn Reece I have a crush on her.

Can I write a novel in three months?

Absolutely. Thousand words a day. Cake.

Two in six months?

I don’t see why not.

Will I be able to write when I can no longer walk?

Marcel Proust wrote seven million words in the sickbed, by hand, no less.

Sure, but god, what a dull seven million words! He wrote about ghosts. An exercise in stasis. Seventy pages on one instance of tea-and- biscuits and the associations conjured. How can you create dynamic fiction, if you’re not really alive?

Will I waste away to a corpse, still madly scrawling my impressions from a life cashiered, clutching my memories to the end?

I know in that moment that there will be no sickbed. I ain’t goin’ down like that.

-Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, “All I Need,” Spirit of Music, c. 1999, Bob Marley Music

“Well, I’ll be frank,” the doctor intones gravely, tightening the knot of his tie. “The prognosis is…not good.” Could be paranoia, but it’s as if he’s biting his tongue to keep from popping a grin, or even a chuckle. That too- serious look. The bastard, I do believe he’s enjoying this!

Delivering the news, after all-that’s the signature scene on every one of the dramaporn clones that have been hastily plotted by failed playwrights since television began. The shows where dumpy looking, balding guys with glasses get to be unconscionable philanderers and still earn the love of grandmotherly near-widows who bake brownies all day for you after heroically snatch ninety-four year old Sylvester from the jaws of death by performing some unconventional radical surgery that you invent on the spot, mostly to impress the new nurse.

You know that sort of show. In fact, I believe that the ubiquity of this tired setting has less to do with it’s popularity among viewers (it’s a fact that most Americans will watch any crap put in front of them) or even
unwillingness to invent new and original premises (which in addition to being expensive and risky, requires exactly the type of minds that avoid commercial television) than with the patriotic zeal of network executives, who, in their unobtrusive way, are trying desperately to address the nation’s shortage of physicians.

I can just about see a teenage version of this geek, pocket protectors and calculators, Advanced Placement Biology text at the ready the minute he stops jacking off to ER. Standing in front of a mirror in blue thriftshop surgical scrubs and a white Miami Vice coat, practicing his lines. “There appears to be an abnormality,” and “I’m going to be frank, the prognosis is not good,” and “Nurse, please, I can’t. I’m a married man, and my mistress works on this wing.”

If I were writing the script, the next line would be, “However, there is an experimental therapy that just became available for your condition, and the early indications are promising…”

Instead, the Writer, who I sometimes think is boring and unnecessarily cruel, decided to insert a lecture into the monologue. “If you’d come to me earlier, when we first called you, it’s possible that we’d have had some options. Surgery might have been feasible. But it’s been over three months, and your x-rays are extremely discouraging. Chemo and radiation are contraindicated by the extent of the growths.”

He pauses, savoring his moment. “I’m afraid that the best I can recommend is a course of painkillers, and I will, of course, associate the research centers with your case. Breakthroughs happen every day, and one might be relevant to you.”

He hesitates again, and it’s obvious he’s waiting for the Question. It’s my big line, one of the last I will get to utter, since I am a guest on this show, just one among the legion of goners that portray the heartbreaking tragedy the Star must confront each day in his daily struggle to be true to his Oath.

There’s no escaping it; I need the information, if only for tax purposes, and he’ll never tell me without being explicitly asked. Would you? I surrender, nearly choking on the words. “How long, doc?”

“Well-it’s just that,” I stumble, trying to distill my impressions into inadequate verbal code. “Okay, it’s like this-if you’d ever asked me who I felt to be the greatest English-language novelist during the first half of the last century, I’d have told you, without hesitation, Joyce. He represents the quantum leap in form and structure in fiction, every bit as much as Einstein forever changed the way physicists think about their work. Yet I’ve always profoundly disagreed with him about his theory of literary art.”

Llewellyn is wearing her therapist’s mask. “You know, I read Portrait of the Artist probably ten years ago, as an undergrad. I can’t really say I remember his ideas on the subject clearly, if I ever did really understand. Perhaps you could describe the conflict.”

I inhale. Lecture time. “For one thing, I’ve always objected to his veneration of Aristotle and Aquinas. Heavyweight minds, certainly; but wrongheaded. In a philosophy-paper kind of way, they could just about equally share the blame for Western civilization’s ongoing rape-and-pillage approach to other cultures. And some of their thinking was quite absurd. Aristotle ‘proved’ the impossibility of the atom, showing quite clearly that there could never, logically, be a point beyond which matter could not be divided and retain it’s basic character. He also provided an excellent case for slavery and the subjugation of women. Aquinas ‘deduced’ the existence of a Christian god from the widespread success of Christianity; for how could it have taken over the ‘whole world’ otherwise?” I shake my head. “Nitwits.”

“Furthermore, I’ve never really understood what Joyce meant by his contention that Art should be ‘static, not kinetic’. As I’ve been made to understand this vacuity, the duty of the writer is to abstract his judgments from his work. To be a landscape painter with words. To reflect through the mosaic life itself. Not settle personal scores.”

“Well, when I read this, I was enraged! It immediately sounded all wrong, narrow. Were Huxley, Orwell, mere propagandists? The whole point of literature, I’d always felt, was to move you. If I had a novel political or religious view, I owed it to both myself and the reader to make the idea available. Not through rhetoric but technique. If I were clever enough, you’d never know you’d been changed, but there’s no finer and more delicate art than counter-propaganda. It’s why I write. Yet to James Joyce, I am a desecration.”

Llewellyn nods sympathetically. “This must be confusing for you.”

I find to my surprise she’s mistaken. “No, actually, things are clearer now. I’ve always felt a bit of terror in opposing the notions of a much greater writer. What did I fancy I knew that he didn’t? Now I just know Joyce-or, rather, I in the incarnation of James Joyce-was wrong. Victim of Jesuit propaganda. There can be no such thing as static literature, because selection of subject matter represents a kinetic decision in the production of art! By choosing what you write about, at the minimum, you are manipulating your audience! He was as guilty as anyone. How could you read Portrait and not be moved against the Catholic Church?”

“That’s a fairly common phenomenon,” Llewellyn says, nodding. “People who discover that they’d been famous figures find frequent points of similarity-underlying personality traits and life-struggle themes-but as often harbor a strong distaste for the previous incarnation’s major premises.” She smiles. “It’s a symptom of growth. I happen to know the reincarnation of Karl Marx, as it happens, and she feels the same way. Now she’s working on a spiritually-based social philosophy called ‘Tribal Collectivism’. A hippie chick. Used to go out with Crazy Bear, in fact, and he’s the earliest recorded reference we have. Sonofabitch is in the Bible. Numbers. Look it up.”

“Crazy Bear? In the Bible? Who was he, Moses?”

Llewellyn laughs. “No, and it’s a good thing he didn’t hear you say that. No, on the contrary, our friend was a little-known insurrectionist named Korah. Led an uprising against Moses and Aaron in the desert, said they were incompetent, any moron could have moved the Hebrews past the Sinai peninsula in a few weeks. According to the Bible, he and all his supporters, their families and livestock, were swallowed alive by the earth, which opened at God’s word to obliterate them. Of course, that’s not how C.B. tells it.”

I’m curious. “What’s his side?”

She shrugs. “It was a straight political execution. God had nothing to do with it. Moses had studied Atlantean magic as a prince in Egypt, which is the same place he got the idea for monotheism. The peasants honored as many gods as the market would bear, but the Pharaohs and their offspring worshipped the Sun, just like their ancestors from the Island. Moses had an Atlantean power rod, a crystal-tipped copper tube device for channeling TK. He used it to bury them alive. That’s also, of course, how he split the Red Sea.”

“How about you?” I ask, realizing she’s never peeped a word about her own transmigration. “Who have you been?”

“No one important, I’m afraid. Midwife and witch. Shaman. In every life I’ve recovered, I’ve been some kind of healer.”

“That seems very important.”

“It doesn’t get you into the history books, that’s for sure. Except occasionally as a statistic. I’m fairly sure I was burned at least once, during the Inquisition. It’s a recurring nightmare.”

Something’s been nagging at me. “You said ‘we.’ ‘He’s the earliest recorded reference we have.’ Who’s ‘we’?”

She hesitates. “A group. We compare notes on reincarnation.” She doesn’t elaborate and I decide not to pursue it. Why force her to lie to me?

“Thank you,” I swear I hear her say, though her lips don’t move. Then, most definitely aloud, “Why don’t we get you back into a trance, see what else we can come up with? You seem especially tuned in today.” She raises the volume on the music a notch. I close my eyes and ride the wave of time away from the shore.

* * * * * *