The bright light when I was born shone briefly before I accelerated through my early years, past my teen troubles, and raced through to finally hit my true time, where I landed with a bit of a thud.
I checked my watch. I’d been gone for no time at all.
Grandma’s funeral was still scheduled for tomorrow.
Chapter 11
Later that evening, I sat in Grandma’s living room staring at some news broadcaster talking about the latest riots in New York City, the most recent battle in the Middle East, an earthquake in China, and a drought hitting Ethiopia the Red Cross was calling the worst disaster in Africa in twenty years.
It was all so depressing. It felt like I was surrounded by bad news, choked by it, and overriding it all was the body of Ariela Abelman, still lying at the funeral home waiting to be buried.
I thought about going to see her, but I knew that if I did I would end up feeling worse. Tomorrow was soon enough. She had planned a typical Jewish closed-casket ceremony. The funeral home had taken her from the hospital, and were preparing the service. If they needed anything, they had my phone number. I’d been clicking my phone to life to check for messages every few minutes, in case I somehow missed the chime of a call. Nothing.
Grandma would have been pleased with how smooth everything was going. Nothing left to chance.
It was so like her to be so precise and organized about her own funeral. As much as she sometimes drove me crazy with her attention to detail, it was a trait that had served her very well over her lifetime.
Somehow, I figured she’d learned those skills as a result of her time in the Nazi concentration camps. I walked to the dining room table and flipped again through all the material she had left me.
I kept being drawn back to the family tree. So much death in our family at the hands of Hitler and his crazies. The victims would have had a terrible death, the Zyklon B gas crawling over them, drowning them. They would try so hard to hold their breaths, but eventually they had to breathe in the poison. They knew they would die, but their bodies demanded something be pulled into their lungs.
I know I spent a lot of time feeling terrible about the six million Jews killed in the gas chambers, not to mention the blacks, the gays, and the many other groups Hitler decided weren’t fit to live.
While browsing through Grandma’s material, though, I also wondered at the book that talked about Shelljah. I couldn’t read a damned word of the Hebrew text, but maybe one day I would learn.
Clearly I needed to find out about Shelljah one way or the other.
I barely believed I had gone to a past life. As much as I wanted to trust that one day science would explain things, it felt more mystical as the twilight rolled over Minneapolis. The darkening of Grandma’s apartment seemed to wash away logic and science, making room for magic and miracles.
“Hogwash,” I said.
I closed the book and a thought hit me: If I had one past life, maybe I had one prior to that one, and one before that, and…
And ideas flooded my mind.
This was time travel in a way that nobody had ever thought of.
“Ariela Abelman, you were hiding such big secrets.”
Then I added, “Or did you even know about past lives? Maybe you never made the mistake I did and zoomed into the wrong direction?”
Across the table from me, I imagined her sitting there, a smug look on her face, challenging me to figure things out for myself.
Well, I doubted I’d ever know unless she left me some more concrete notes in the material I’d now managed to scatter all over the table.
I’d finished the last two beers Grandma had left in the fridge for me. It had been a long day, but I wasn’t tired at all.
Less than twenty-four hours before I would lose the ability to travel in time. Grandma’s burial was going to stop the magic.
I went back to the more comfortable chair in the living room and closed my eyes. It wasn’t long before I found the spot in my mind, and I was again in control of my reality.
With a few questions in my mind—if I was the one going crazy, and whether my plan had any chance of succeeding—I slammed onto the reverse pedal.
Immediately, the world started to rush past me in backward order. I again saw the flashes of light and darkness, the highs and the lows glancing by me.
I pressed harder and harder, and my life was a blur.
Soon, the darkness came and then the different light, the light from my prior life when I was James Peller. Without slowing, I remembered my new life and felt shame at the man I once was.
I tried to ignore Peller and slammed through his life, bits of pain and anger rushing through me like bullets. I never wanted to spend time re-living that life again. I’d already seen more of him than I wanted.
James Peller was born in 1920. When I rammed through that date, all went dark again, this time for a longer period, but then the light came back. I didn’t slow, but immediately knew my name was Louis Larrange, a French fur trader who spent much of his life exploring the northern part of Hudson Bay. The frozen wastelands were lonely but we had made a good living by trapping beavers and otters.
He was only thirty-two when he died, so my flashing through his life was quick.
Then came Peter Buttlesworth, a lawyer in London, England.
Michael Robinson, Benjamin Tosh, Mark Graves. The names and lives flew by faster and faster, as I grew closer to my destination. All my lives were men. All were Jewish. I don’t know why.
The journey lasted for what felt like hours. I grew tired of the names flying through me, each surrounded by a coat of memories I knew in detail, because I had lived every one of their lives.
The truth of past lives only made sense if each of us was actually endowed with a soul.
I didn’t like that thought, but I didn’t have any other explanation. The concept of a soul sounded like religious crap.
Finally, my personal time machine slowed and then halted. I had no way to explain why I stopped where I did, except that however the apparatus worked, it knew which body I needed to travel to in order to meet my demand.
The ground was baked clay. The sun beat down on me like a furnace, and I gasped at the heat. It was unexpected and gruesome.
My body was used to it, though. It moved on its own, looking for a lost sheep.
I was twenty-three and my body was old. In this time, nobody lived a long life. The sun and the work and the lack of food and water and the illnesses with no cure brought everyone an early death.
The valley around me was full of rolling hills to the east and stark landscapes to the west. The sheep was probably going to die.
I was Adlai, son of Asher.
I was a fisherman. My father was a sheep herder, and it was for his lost sheep I was searching. My father was soon to die at the ripe old age of forty-one. We didn’t care much if we actually found the sheep, but I had to do a cursory look. The lost animal was vital to my father, as the few sheep he owned were his only way to make money for food.
My clothing consisted of loose wraps and a cap for my head with rope holding it on, not that there was much wind to tear it away.
The area I stood in was both beautiful and terrifying. I was alone in the middle of nowhere, looking for a sheep I knew I would never find.
Part of me wanted desperately to get back to the river Jordan to fish. Right now, my livelihood was more important than my father’s.
The me that was riding this body soaked in every aspect of this ancient land.
I knew exactly where I was, since my ancient self knew.