Sleeping in Flame (15 page)

Top looked up sleepily and licked the foot. Once. "You know what I remember?

Glasses full of sunlight. Having family picnics and seeing the sun in every glass we used."

My lessons began at the end of that sentence. I blinked once, thinking about his family and their picnics. The moment I closed my eyes, there was a completely different smell in the air.

California night is damp and ripe;

Page 55

fresh-cut grass and dew, night-blooming flowers somewhere nearby. This new smell was dry and sunny, hot flowers and earth giving up their scent to two o'clock on an August afternoon. In the South of France, 1920.

When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was a boy riding a zebra bareback past a field of lavender. Black, white, lavender, all moving, all movement. He wore white shorts but no shirt or shoes. Both boy and animal had the same serious, thoughtful expression on their faces.

"Do you want some wine?"

A woman with brown flyaway hair and bold green eyes knelt by my side, a glass of wine in her hand. I realized I was sitting in the shifting shade of a (chestnut?) tree with giant yellow leaves as my moving roof.

"The boy knows you're watching, Walker, so he's riding like a good cadet. If you weren't here, he'd go like the devil flying through hell. Here, come on and drink this." She shoved the glass at me with one hand, and pushed the hair out of her face with the other. I took it and, still watching the boy and zebra canter back and forth, forgot to thank her.

"It's Venasque, isn't it? When he was a boy."

"He _is_ a boy! What do you think?" His mother's voice was a challenge.

A young girl with something cupped tightly between two small hands came from behind the tree. Smiling, she held it out to us: it was ours if we wanted. She looked very much like the boy.

"Mama, _regarde_!"

"What now, Ilonka, another lizard? Put it down. Show us."

The girl dropped to her knees, hands still cupped. She was eight.

"Ilonka" means apple tree in Hungarian. Her husband's name was . . . _would be_ . . . Raymond.

She would be shot by the Nazis when she was twenty-eight.

How did I know these things?

A gray-green lizard sat still between her slowly opening hands. Before she could do anything, it shot out and right up the tree. I watched her while her happy eyes followed it up. She kept a blue flower in her dresser drawer, pretending it had been given to her by a boy she knew. Just that morning she'd put a finger in her own shit and, electric with guilt, tasted it. She'd been especially good today as contrition for having done such a wicked thing, although no one knew about it, besides the two of us. She looked at me and smiled sneakily. She knew what I was thinking.

I was about to say something unimportant when I heard Venasque's voice.

His adult voice fingered its way through my conscious mind.

". . . mother liked the name Ilonka. It means --"

"Apple tree in Hungarian." I'd put my head down and closed my eyes, knowing what would be there when I opened them again: today, California, sixty years later. I was right. Both hands locked behind his neck, Venasque was staring at the night sky.

"Good, you saw! I wasn't sure. It was nice there, huh?"

"Was I really there?"

He grabbed for something in the air and brought his hand down to show me what it was. Sitting in there was the lizard his sister had let run up the

tree.

"Walker, there are two important things you've got to know before we get started. You know everything about everyone. We all do. You're surprised you could go back to that day in my life?

Don't be. It's an easy trick to learn.

Someplace in you is the knowledge of every day of my life. I gave you a little push this time to find it, but soon you'll be able to do it whenever you want.

But you won't use it. Know why? Because you won't want to. Even with your own life.

Hopefully, by then you'll want to figure out how to live without making stupid mistakes on your own. Do you read mystery novels? Yes? It's the same with them. A fool can read ten pages and
Page 56

then turn to the end of the book to see if the butler did it. But why ruin the whole process? The fun is trying to figure out the mystery yourself. If you get it right at the end then you really feel good and not a cheat."

"Why would I want to learn about this place in myself if I'm not going to use it?"

"For the power and the discipline! Only weak, helpless people learn karate so they can hit someone. Don't you ever watch 'Kung Fu'? One of my favorite shows. Remember I told you I was going to teach you how to fly? Well, I am, but you won't ever do it. You'll never want to, if I teach you right.

The satisfaction is knowing you can."

"What was the second thing I should know before we start?"

"That's something else. The second is, we know the past is a few million years old. But the future

. . . there's no guarantee it will be even half as long. Right? Well, that's what I wanted to tell you --

it _won't_ be half as long.

"Connie. Connie! Come here. I gotta lizard for you."

The pig sprang up and waddled over. Venasque put his open hand in front of her. She gave it one fast _shloop_ with her wet mouth and the sixty-year-old lizard was gone. She nuzzled his hand to make sure nothing else delicious was there before returning to her pillow. Venasque shook his head in wonderment, as if she had done something special.

"There are a few years left, but that's not important. I think it'll be best when everything is over."

"What do you mean?"

"Us, _life_, man's whole long story will finally have "The End' written across it. What nobody understands is what comes _after_ that. Only some of those who are around when it does happen will be able to find that out. I hope

I'm one of them, but I may never come back at that time."

"Come back? You mean reincarnation?"

"They've been talking and writing about reincarnation forever, but no one seems to get the hint, you know? Man is so dumb, down deep. You think people have talked about it for thousands of years because they're making a mistake? No. Reincarnation means coming back and working on life until you get things right, Walker. But even people who do believe in it never think that maybe life on earth won't go on forever. They think you live and die and come back maybe ten or fifty or a hundred years from now. That's wrong. You do live and die and come back, but not always in the future. Know why? Because after a certain date, there _isn't_ a future. There's an end to our time here. Pretty soon some idiots will make a big mistake that'll lead to other big mistakes, and then the world will die. And I mean everything will die -- man, animals, bugs. Sad, but that's the way it is. Getting back to what I was saying, there's only this certain amount of time available to us humans to live in.

You can come back in 1390 or 1790 or 1990, but not so long after that because if you did, you'd be born on a charcoal briquette! So we live and work out our troubles now, or in our past.

Sometimes we Ping-Pong back and forth, depending on what we need and where it is in our history. It even happens to animals.

That sea monster you saw? Where do you think it came from?"

"Philip Strayhorn said --"

The old man waved away the rest of my sentence. "Phil Strayhorn's read too many books. He should swim more. I'll give you the technical name of that thing if you want, but all you gotta do is look at those old sea maps explorers used. There's a dragon like yours drawn on each one. That part is No

Man's Land! Don't sail here! You think guys like Columbus and Magellan were fooling around?

You think they were crazy? Hell no! They said don't sail there because they'd seen sea monsters there. But monsters come back too, Walker.

Page 57

From what I can understand, they usually die and come right back to the same time, but sometimes they pop up nearby. Like out at Santa Monica." He smiled.

"Why would a sea serpent be reincarnated?" Did I believe any of this? I did.

"For the same reason man is reincarnated -- to work things out. It doesn't matter where we are in time because the problems are always the same.

I can imagine the same is true for sea monsters.

"I'm going to show you something now which I shouldn't do yet, but you need it to believe what I've been telling you. Don't get scared, though. Even if it gets bad, try not to get scared."

Before I could say anything (like "No!" or "Help!"), I realized I was putting my hands out in protest, not against Venasque, but some man I'd never seen before. We were in a cold gray room somewhere, and my back was flush against a window. I saw bright daylight coming in from behind me.

The man coming at me was a midget, no taller than my beltline. He was dressed in a natty blue suit that was a little masterpiece of tailoring and had obviously cost a lot. More than his height, the most dismaying (and interesting) thing about him was his face. It had the seraphic, suffering beauty of Christ in a Renaissance painting: long golden hair, wispy beard, and eyes infused with all the scars and joys of life.

"You are _my_ son!" he said, pushing me backward through the window.

I didn't have a chance to scream because the next thing I knew, something heavy was standing on my chest, licking my face. The pig.

I looked up and saw its craggy, comical face and sweet eyes against the California night sky. I pushed her off and looked for Venasque. He was standing by one of the flower beds, watering his plants.

"What'd you see back there?"

Weakly, I pushed myself off the ground and into a sitting position.

"What the hell was that all about?"

He put the watering can down and stabbed a stiff finger at me. "Don't _ever_ ask me questions in that voice, Walker! You either work with me and believe in what I'm doing, or you get out! You gotta lot to learn and not so much time to do it in."

"Well what the hell _was_ that? You send me back to someplace where a midget pushes me out a window? What is that? Where was I? Come on, Venasque, I don't understand this stuff!"

"It was your last life, Walker. How you died back there. You fell out a window? Did you hit the ground? Did you feel yourself die?"

"Should I?"

"Yes; the most important thing you could've done would have been to stay there and feel yourself die! Who was it that pushed you?"

"I told you -- a midget who called me his son."

"Don't you want to know if it was your father? Don't you want to know why it happened? That's the whole purpose of studying. All these magical things that have been happening to you lately all come from that last life."

My heart was beating like a hammer on an anvil. BAM BAM BAM. "Do you know why I died there?"

He pursed his lips. "I don't know. I got a feeling, but there's all kinds of funny stuff coming out of you. Like someone's turning the channels on you fast and I can't see any one picture yet."

"How will I get back there to find out about it?"

"After we go to the mountains I'm going to have you go through a couple of rebirthings. You know what they are?"

"You hypnotize me and I go back through past lives?"

"Something like that. First you gotta learn some other things. We gotta
Page 58

fix the TV set to stay on one channel before we can watch the Super Bowl, eh?"

That night Maris and I made love -- slowly and deeply. After it was over, she said it'd felt like two clouds touching and then moving together as one great whiteness. Later, we figured out that was probably the night she became pregnant. Neither of us was surprised.

Afterward, we lay on our backs, holding hands. She hadn't asked anything about what had happened with Venasque because she knew I'd tell her as soon as I'd sorted the meeting out in my mind.

"Walker, we're good for each other, aren't we?"

"Of course! Why are you asking?"

She squeezed my hand hard, then let it go. "Because I'm letting myself fall more and more for you, and part of me gets scared doing that.

"Did I ever tell you about the fat man I saw in Vienna? We were supposed to meet one day, but I had some time to kill before, so I went into an AIDA

for coffee. The biggest fat man I ever saw walked in right behind me and sat down nearby. He was so huge that it looked like he was sitting on a pin and not a chair. You know what he ordered? I counted. Three pieces of cake, two scoops of ice cream, and when he was finished, two coffees with _Schlag_. He ate the whole . . . blop in about five minutes. His hand and mouth never stopped moving: like a big steam shovel. At the end, when he went to pay, he reached for his wallet and took out the only bill in there -- a hundred-schilling note. His check was for ninety-eight. I heard the waitress tell him. He gave the hundred and told her to keep the change.

"The first thing I thought was, how sad. This big fat man, who obviously didn't have much else in the world _but_ cake to look forward to, used up the very last money he had to buy some. Then I thought some more about it and realized how wrong and condescending to think that way."

"How so?" I took her hand again.

"Because he probably knew sooner or later those cakes he loved so much would kill him with a heart attack or something as bad. But so what? That's what he loved best, so damn it all, he's going to appreciate it to the last cent or breath he had. Isn't that wonderful?" She turned to me while the soft light from the bedroom window fell over her shoulder and the top of her breast.

"I can't tell you how envious I was of him. Know why? Because never in my life has there been anything I'd been that crazy about. Nothing. _Except you_. You're the first. So I have every reason to be scared of that, don't I?

"Obsession is nice, but it can also kill you."

"You think I'm going to kill you?" I smiled at her, but she did not smile back.

"I don't know. No, of course not. I'm hoping I know you well enough to believe you're always telling the truth. That's a lot, Walker! I love you. I