Another Lifetime, a documentary about reincarnation including free streaming video interviews …
Ha: a new age doc. She’d seen way too many of these sorts of documentaries during the last year of her mother’s life. Her mother had been a practical woman, with a wide circle of practical friends, but when she got the diagnosis (leukemia, the worst kind), all of that went out the window as far as her friends were concerned. One by one they dropped by with brown powdery packets from Chinese homeopaths, with crystals and documentaries and pamphlets about procedures in Mexico, and Janie and her mother had humored them the best they could. She’d spent hours sitting by her mother’s bedside, holding her hand while they watched these films and made fun of them, one after the next, baloney followed by malarkey. Documentaries on channeling spirits, alchemical healing, shamanic drumming. Janie giggled through a scrim of tears as her dying, tough-minded mother used the last of her fierce energy to mock the cheesy graphics, the beaches and rainbows in these films, which offered what they couldn’t possibly deliver: hope. It was the best part of the worst days of Janie’s life, laughing with her mother over those movies. Somehow, her mother’s mockery made Janie believe that she wouldn’t need any of those kooky things. She would survive from sheer will and modern medicine. There was another experimental procedure they were trying, better than the one that caused her such painful bloating. It would be enough.
And yes (clicking now on the YouTube link, eager to distract herself from both the horror of the present and the equally unbearable past, to find something to lighten her heavy yet over-bourbonated brain), yes, there it was, on this one, too: that corny shot of the ocean waves. And there was the sun and the waterfall … and the flute, of course!—and the same deep-voiced narrator.… Was it the same guy? Was that his life’s work, narrating new age documentaries?
“A majestic cycle of life and death and life beginning anew, each with its own lessons…”
Majestic cycle of life …
Oh, her mother would have chuckled at that one. “How about that, Mom?” she said aloud, reciting the words in a faux stentorian voice: “MAJESTIC CYCLE OF LIFE!”
She paused, as if giving her mother time to answer, but there was no one there, as she very well knew.
“In the United States some groundbreaking scientific explorers have been studying reincarnation.…”
“EXPLORERS, MOM!” she shouted, aware she was amusing no one, not even the dead, but unable to stop herself from trying. It was that, or start crying, and she knew nothing good would come of that. “They’re EXPLORERS!”
“The most well-known of these explorers is Dr. Jerome Anderson—”
“I’ll bet your ASS he’s a doctor! What’s he got, a PhD in Quackery?” She hiccupped, guffawed.
“… who for many decades has been studying young children who seem to recall details from previous lives. These children, often as young as two or three, talk in specific detail about missing their previous homes and families—”
Janie pressed PAUSE. The room went silent.
Clearly, she had heard it wrong. She went back a bit.
“Dr. Jerome Anderson, who for many decades has been studying young children who seem to recall details from previous lives. These children, often as young as two or three, talk in specific detail about missing their previous homes and families—”
She pressed PAUSE again, and this time everything paused: the moving images, her mind, her breath, caught half-formed in her chest.
On the screen, she could see the profile of a head that must belong to Dr. Anderson. He had curly black hair and a striking, angular face. He was talking to a little boy who looked South Asian, a boy of three, perhaps, wearing ragged trousers. Behind the boy, a wall of bricks rose up from red mud. The image seemed grainy, as if taken decades earlier. She stared at it until, like anything stared at long enough, it became something else: Man. Boy. Place. Time.
But this was … ridiculous.
On the screen, the little boy was facing the grown man. He looked extremely uncomfortable. He probably had dysentery, she thought.
She rewound again.
“Dr. Jerome Anderson, who for many decades has been studying young children who seem to recall details from previous lives…”
She knew better than this. This was the bourbon, diluting her common sense.
She paused the image.
She had seen firsthand how the manipulative preyed upon the gullible. She knew that there was no end to what desperate people would do. And wasn’t that what Janie was now?
Then she heard it.
There was no point going to Noah’s room yet, or trying to wake him. She knew the drill. After ten minutes, the whimper would become a shriek, the shriek would turn into words: “Mama, Mama!”
She would find him twisting in the sheets, flailing, screaming. “Let me out, let me out, let me out!”