And then I let him return the favor.
Tess woke up in a rather different setting.
Her room had vintage mahogany furniture, exposed timber beams, muslin curtains, and tall windows that bathed the room in streams of golden-yellow light. With the birdsong wafting in from the lush trees outside, she could have fooled herself into thinking she was in some sleepy boutique hotel if it wasn’t for the man who was sitting in an armchair across from her bed and watching her with an unreadable frown on his face.
“Where am I?” she asked, though she already knew the answer to that.
“You’re my guests.” Then, pointedly, with the thinnest of smiles. “All of you.”
She sat forward, ramrod straight. “Where’s Alex? And Sean?”
“Alex is fine. He’s still sleeping. I’ll make sure you’re with him when he wakes up.”
She dreaded the next question. “What about Sean?”
He paused, as if thinking of how to answer that one—or maybe he was just letting her anxiety worm its way a bit deeper. “He’s here,” he finally confirmed. “He’s fine.”
She relaxed slightly.
His eyes narrowed as he studied her. “You know why you’re here, don’t you?”
Tess wasn’t sure what to say. “I think so,” she finally replied, “though I’m not sure I believe it.”
“Oh, believe it, Tess. Trust me on this. It’s all real. I know.” His face relaxed into a hint of a smile. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. It’s all very, very real.”
Tess felt her nerves sizzle. “How do you know?”
He waved it off as he stood up and walked across to the window. “You’ll understand. With time.” With his back to her, he added, “The more relevant question you need to be asking yourself is, why are you still alive? And the answer to that is simple. You’re here because I need Alex to feel relaxed and comfortable so that Doctor Stephenson can work his magic and get me what I need from the boy.” He turned to face her, his face not betraying a hint of emotion. “That’s your only value to me here, do you understand?”
Tess stared at him and, knowing everything she did about him, she just nodded.
“Good. So I strongly suggest that you help me. Not just for your sake. For Alex’s. I’d prefer it if Stephenson can get the information out of him himself, without complications. If it proves difficult, there are other things I can do to jog Alex’s memory. Things that might not be particularly pleasant for a four-year-old boy. So I would really urge you to help Stephenson and help Alex remember.”
“And then?” she asked, again knowing what the answer—the honest answer—would be.
The slit of a smile came back. “We’ll see. Help me get what I want, and who knows how things will turn out. Cross me . . . and the heroin-addict whore-hell I’ll send you to will be worse than anything you can possibly imagine.”
He kept his stare on her as the words shuddered in. Then he walked out, leaving her to stew in his turbulent wake.
63
Stephenson confirmed what Tess had sussed out.
The things he told me about other cases, the level of authority he conveyed about a subject he probably knew better than anyone on the planet—it was all staggering and shook me to my core. Despite the state we were in, he spoke with a calm eloquence and a coherence that commanded attention, and I couldn’t imagine anyone, least of all well-educated academics, would doubt him. More troubling was the fact that every detail I gave him about what I knew about McKinnon, including his death, tallied with what he’d heard from Alex about his past life experiences, right down to the headgear I was wearing on that hellish night.
I couldn’t see how this could be anything else than what still felt impossible to me.
I fell silent for a long moment, processing everything I’d heard. After a while, I asked, “How come people don’t talk about this more? Why don’t more people know about your work?”
He let out a small scoff. “You’re saying you’re surprised?”
From the look on his face, it was evidently a long-festering frustration for him.
“I can show you all kinds of polls that show that one in four Americans believe in reincarnation,” he added, “but that’s just an easy answer to a casual question. Dig into it a bit deeper and even the ones who say they do get uncomfortable. And that’s really why my work is considered fringe science. No one wants to have to think about it. Not seriously. Our political, academic, and religious leadership—they all have a built-in resistance to it. It goes against the grain of too many sacred tenets. Medical researchers won’t consider it since they have this fundamental, nonnegotiable belief that consciousness can’t possibly exist outside the brain. And for people of faith whose upbringing can’t accommodate something that different than what they’ve been taught all their lives, this idea that there’s an afterlife, but it doesn’t involve heaven or hell, is blasphemous. But it’s not what the whole world thinks. Buddhists and Hindus have believed in reincarnation from day one. And they’re almost a quarter of the population of this planet.
“This is a new paradigm we’re talking about,” he continued. “And it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Especially—and this always surprises me—my peers. Academics who are supposed to have an appetite to explore new ground and uncover the secrets of this universe we live in. But despite all our credentials and all the care we put into our research, most of my peers wouldn’t be seen dead agreeing with me in public. The problem is, even if we have a mountain of evidence that it does happen, we don’t have any proof, and we don’t have any way of explaining how it happens. There’s no biological explanation, not even a tangible theory, for what we call ‘ensoulment’—the moment when a soul roots itself into a fetus or an embryo, or even earlier.” He shook his head with a pained, rueful smile. “But then, that’s a whole other can of worms.”
I thought back to all the IVF sessions I’d gone through with Tess, and dredged up everything that had been explained to us. “Well we know it can’t happen in the first fourteen days after conception, right?’Cause up until then, the zygote is still just a cluster of cells that can still split into two and give you two identical twins. If there was already a soul in there before that, how would that split work?”
Stephenson seemed impressed by this. “Scientifically, you’re right, of course,” he told me. “But a lot of people believe otherwise, as I’m sure you know. Still, the issue of how and when and where a soul embeds itself in that cluster of cells you’re talking about—that’s a question that’s baffled the greatest minds in history. And the simple answer is, no one knows. The Japanese believe the soul is in one’s stomach—that’s why when they commit suicide by seppuku, they stab themselves there. Descartes and most scientists since his day believe the soul lives in the brain—that’s why head injuries can cause personality changes. But where exactly, and what does that mean? We don’t really know. Da Vinci ran experiments on frogs and concluded that the soul resided at the spot where the spinal column meets the brain. Some scientists have even tried monitoring dying patients’ body weight at the exact time of death, claiming that there’s an infinitesimal but observable weight loss upon death that they explain as being the weight of the soul that’s leaving its dead host.”
“Twenty-one grams?” I offered with a slight snort, citing the meme I’d heard time and again.
“More like twenty-one nanograms, if that.” Stephenson shrugged. “The main question, though, is this. Can a soul live outside the body? Can consciousness survive outside the brain? Out-of-body experiences—for which we have a lot of evidence—would suggest that the answer is yes. Did you know that there are plenty of documented cases out there where transplant patients took on some of the personality traits and memories of their organs’ donors? How’s that possible? And what’s consciousness if not memories and personality traits? But we still have a lot of work to do before we prove it—if that’s even possible. And it’s harder since, academically, this is a taboo subject in our country. They just think it’s the stuff of horror movies and TV shows. But in many other cultures, reincarnation isn’t taboo. It’s part of the culture, part of their religion. It’s just not in ours. People here—well, people back home,” he corrected himself somberly, “they’re just not predisposed to take claims like that seriously or investigate them. If a kid starts saying weird things, the parents’ first instinct is to think that it’s coming from their imagination, that they saw it on TV or something—or they’d just think their kid is abnormal and discourage him from voicing any more ‘nonsense.’ In other cultures, the parents’ starting point would be to encourage the kid to tell them more about what he knows, and they’d be asking themselves if these are signs of a reincarnated soul. They’d look into that. And that’s another issue I’ve tried to address in my work. Does this cultural appetite for the concept of reincarnation mean these people come up with links and explanations to fit their theory, or are they really solving something that needed to be solved?”