We pulled out of the parking lot onto the main drag into town, only we went the other way. Three flashes were closely followed by three ripping explosions of thunder, and rain struck the beater with a force just shy of a fire hose. I've seen less water pressure than we were pelted with in drive thru car washes. We crawled for about half a mile through the storm, then turned down a side road I'd never explored before.
"Just for a starting point, you can call me Ted," said the driver, "and him Todd." He watched me with a pained squint and a recurve smile.
"Why don't I just call you Don Rickles and Alex Carras," I said.
Rickles shrugged. The window between the front and back seats whirred shut and, along with the back, and my side, windows gradually tinted to black. I tried to determine and memorize the directions they were taking with a long serious of sudden and gradual turns and stops, but eventually lost track and gave up.
The rain had died to a drip by the time we stopped. I heard the front doors open. My door locks popped up. The front doors closed. My right side door opened. Carras was holding the outer handle. Rickles stood back about ten feet, and to the right, giving me a view of what looked like a very old, very grey factory with broken windows and strata of dust caked to its cinder block walls. I climbed out. Rickles thrust a thumb toward the factory, turned and began walking in that direction. Carras waited for me to follow. I stretched and scoped the scene. The large parking lot was surrounded by a hurricane fence which, though not very high, was crowned all around with inward sloping razor wire. I followed Rickles. Carras closed the car door and followed close behind me.
We entered the factory through a windowless iron door. It had been closed but was unlocked. As I stepped inside, I felt my shoulder blades contract inward. I tucked my chin and held my breath so that it wouldn't interfere with my hearing.
"Don't worry," said Carras, behind me. "If I was gonna kill you, you'd be dead already."
"We're not going to hurt you," Rickles said without looking back.
We went through a series of doors and narrow corridors, past old empty offices with dust-mottled windows and indistinct shadows lurking within. Then we went into a stair well lit by yellow bulbs in wire casings, and started what turned out to be a long descent. With each successive flight, the lights got dimmer. I lost count after about twenty flights. The bulbs had begun to flicker and the effect was somewhere between hypnotic and nauseating. Rickles pressed something on his wrist and suddenly was guiding a flashlight beam ahead of us.
We continued downward. The walls began to show signs of moisture until the cinder blocks were covered with moss and oozing muddy rivulets. Their was a strong scent of mildew.
"You fellas ever heard of Lysol?"
"Almost there," said Rickles.
We left the stairwell through a doorway with no door and rusting hinges onto an iron catwalk didn't feel too sturdy. Far below I could make out several flames and what looked like an intricate grid of piping. We came to a dead end. Rickles reached out to the right. He seemed to pass his arm right through the block wall. Then he flicked a switch and a light from within revealed the doorway.
Rickles gestured me on ahead of him. I looked him in the eyes. He evinced nothing. I went in.
The room was colder and more damp even than the stairwell. There was a single, stark cone of light falling from a conical metal shade. In the cone of light was a metal folding chair, by a desk. I assumed it was a desk. Only one corner was visible, protruding into the light.
"Have a seat," said Rickles.
"You'll take it from here?" said Carras. Rickles nodded, stepped in behind me, and shut the door between us and his partner.
I sat down in the well of light. Rickles waved his flashlight beam around the room, located a chair not far from mine, and sat at the desk. He turned off the flashlight and folded his hands on the corner of the desk, within my light. The tendons of his fingers shone yellowish and tense.
"You already know why you're here."
"Because I followed you in?"
"Think about it, Jack." His voice was patient.
"Was it the chicken?"
"
Think about it, Jack." He drew the words out as if to hint that he had all the time in the world.
I went over my past, jumping from tile to tile of questionable actions over a long and checkered ground.
"Are you thinking?"
"Yeah," and I really was. I was thinking about joy rides in stolen cars, petty acts of spontaneous cruelty from childhood days, infidelities, minor cases of arson, vandalism... "Is this about the robbery of the poker game? We didn't do it. We planned on doing it, but I don't think we ever really intended to follow --"
"Think back further."
"Christ, that was fifteen years ago."
"Think back much further."
Further than fifteen years. I'd used to drink an awful lot during the first four years after one of my brothers died. I'd had a lot of alcoholic blackouts. Once, I had come to my senses atop a three-storey building. Other times, whole nights were missing from memory. I'd awakened in strange places -- weeds, hallways of aparment buildings, rolled up in rugs, on a sofa in the parlor of an aquaintance -- with telltale signs of violence: torn clothes, bruised knuckles, a bloody nose.
"No. Further back than that."
I hadn't said anything. I stared into the darkness above his folded hands.
"What are you?"
"We used to work for the N.S.A. That's true. We were in a special, top-secret division -- secret even from all the other divisions -- of operatives with extra-sensory abilities."
"You're psychic?"
"You, too?" He placed his hands palms up on the table. His palms glowed in the light. "That was a joke. Yes, okay: psychic. I need you to think back as far as you can."
I remembered my first nightmare. I was about four years old. I'd dreamed that skeletons with needles were chasing my family. When they poked them with the needles, they too turned into living skeletons. I hid in a dark warehouse, in an empty crate. I listened as an army of skeletons rattled by, until all was silent. Till the only sound was my choked breating. Then a needle pricked me through the crate. I woke up screaming and ran to my mother's bed. (My dad was in the Air Force then, stationed in the Azore Islands.) Only later did I realize that the dream was a warning of the ravages of addiction in my family. I couldn't think back any further.
"That's a good starting point," said Rickles. "I can lead you back from there."
"What could I possibly have done before I was four years old?"
"Think in terms of former lives."
Something clicked in my mind. And churned in my gut. I thought of my strange dreams of murder guilt.
"Yes. That's the connection. The tangible symptoms of intangible deeds, obscured in the bardo."
"Could you say that again, in English?"
"I'd like you to stare at my palms."
"Why? You forget to shave them?" I was getting queasy. I had a sense of impending tragedy on an apocalyptic scale. The walls were about to implode. I didn't want to see what was behind them. There was also a weight, a liquid weight of sadness, beginning to fall in layers over my shoulders.
"Stare at my palms, and REMEMBER. You are kicking in your mother's womb, clenching your little fingers, shaking off a misunderstood feeling of dread. Now you are a spark of muted awareness, a barely conscious zygote beginning to form the nubs and wiring that will become limbs and nerves. Now you are in the dark bardo between lives, clinging to your place in a teeming line of returning souls..."
As I stared at Rickles palms, the light that reflected off them began to shift and morph into images of what he was describing. The longer I stared, the more the reflection grew until it was as if I fell into its midst and began to feel myself in the scenes he was describing. After a while, I wasn't even sure if Rickles was talking anymore. I seemed to be careening through a series of personalities and life events that, though I'd never thought of them in this life, suddenly felt very real and familiar.
This went on like a long, lucid dream. Then I was completely locked into it. I was in a sparse forest, near the ocean. I could hear the lapping and hiss of the waves on the shore. The climate was mild. I looked down at my arms and found them sinewy and hirsute. I was wearing a loin and buttock covering of fur. A companion followed slightly behind me. He seemed both bent upon whatever we were about to do, and fearful. I was clearly in charge, but he had influence with me. He nodded me on at the same time as his eyes looked to mine for courage.
We came to the edge of the woods. Beyond were low sand dunes, over which we could see the beach, and beyond that, the ocean glimmering with the dawn. A primitive hut sat just beyond the dunes, at the highest point of the sloping beach. A man came out of the hut through a side doorway and ambled down the beach to the shoreline. I felt my blood stir at the sight of him. My sidekick laid a hand on my shoulder and pushed it. I slapped his hand away and glared back at him. Wrath radiated through me like steam heat.
The man on the beach turned suddenly, and just as suddenly, my accomplice and I darted behind great trees. I realized then that I was holding a primitive bow in my left hand. I held out my right hand to my accomplice and he took from a quiver an arrow and gave it to me. The beach man was squatting, his feet in the lapping waves. I took aim and let the arrow fly. It struck the man between the shoulder blades. He stood, then fell to one side. As he fell, he dropped a bundle into the waves. The bundle was moving.
By the time I realized it was a baby child, it was probably already too late. But I bolted for the ocean, frantic. I stepped over the dying man as he tried in vain to pluck the arrow from his back and groaned in anguish. I scanned the tide, wading in up to my navel until I saw the baby gently bouncing off a rock in the water. I yanked it from the ocean and looked at its pale blue face. A male infant. I howled as I shook him upside down and commanded him to live. But it was too late.
After a while, I turned to my companion on the beach. We had come there to kill the man. It was somehow an act of vengeance. We hadn't known of his baby boy. We agreed we had to bury the infant. But I knew I had permanently ruptured something.
And then, I was perceiving that rupture in two persons at once. I was experiencing the guilt as this ancient incarnation, and profound grief in my current person. Gradually, this bilocational sensation faded, leaving only a sobbing Jack on a folding chair in a cone of stark light in a cold, black void. My tears ran like the earlier rain. Sorrow constricted my heart. Rickles pulled his hands back out of the light.
I really wanted to protest. But I knew that what I had seen had happened. I had murdered that primitive man. And his infant son. In a past life.
"Why did you show me this?" I said.
"So you'd know what you've been running from, through one life to the next. It's what we do, since we fled the N.S.A."
"But what good does it do to know?"
"You asked me that last time around. And the life before that. And my answer is the same: live according to the golden rule. Try to be less selfish and more giving. Try not to judge others, but find a practice that increases your consciousness, your compassion, your peace of mind, and your love for everything."
"What practice?"
"Oh, there are so many. Pick one that resonates with you and stick with it. Above all else, you have to reach a condition of permanent non-violence. Otherwise, the worst could happen again."
"And then?"
"And then you help others? Find the ones you've harmed and help guide them to a greater self awareness and to break the chain of oblivious repetition."
I had, then, one of my rare sparks of intuition; a leap in the deductive dark.
"You did something to me, didn't you, in a past life? What?"
Rickles leaned into my light, his eyes slowly rose to meet my own. I had the sense we'd been through this many times before, and that each time it had been very trying for him to tell me.
"It was during the Crusades. You were a part of an entire Moslem village that we slowly killed with various methods of torture that we pretended were a measure to try to convert you for the good of your own souls. You were stubborn. We put you..."
I held up a hand. Rickles sighed. "We put you..."
"It's okay, don't tell me. Let this be my first gesture in the right direction."
He nodded. "We have to go now. We have a lot of people to find and debrief. Can we give you a lift back into town?"
On the ride back, once the tint was withdrawn from the windows, and the one between the front and back seats opened, I studied Rickles and Carras, or whoever they were. It slowly dawned on me that they were both somehow familiar. Carras must've sensed my gaze. He looked over his shoulder, then away, then back again. He started to speak.
"It's okay," I said. "I don't want to know what you did to me, either."
He nodded. "Try to make some progress before the next go-round."
They dropped me back at the "Six-Pack-and-Snack Shack". I've not seen them since. But I know that what Rickles showed me was true.
