“Isn’t that cool? Completely accurate, too,” she says. “You could give this to a new cabbie and they could use it to get around the city.” She looks closely at it again. “Griffon was only ten when he did this.”
“Griffon drew this?” I’m speechless. It’s like something that should be hanging in a museum, not as a piece of kid art in a family room.
“He drew it from memory,” she says. “We took a helicopter tour of Manhattan one time, and he came up with this a few weeks later.”
“That’s amazing,” I say, but even as the word comes out, I know it’s not totally correct. “Amazing” is what you say when someone does a backflip or sings “The Star-Spangled Banner” all the way to the high note in the second-to-last verse without their voice cracking. This is something else entirely.
“That,” she says, “is part of being Akhet.”
We stand in silence, looking at the photos, until she reaches up to pull a silver frame off a high shelf. “And this is one of my favorite people.” She hands it to me—a picture of Janine with her arm around a tall white guy with glasses.
“Who is he?”
Janine brushes some dust off the glass. “Only the man who’s going to save us from ourselves,” she says, placing it carefully back on the shelf.
“Save us?” For a split second, I’m hoping she doesn’t mean that in a Hail-Mary, Praise-Jesus kind of way.
She glances up at his photo with an adoration that scares me a little. “Yes. Save us. If we don’t do something soon, it won’t matter who is Akhet and who isn’t, because there won’t be a planet to come back to.”
I look at the face of the man in the photo and feel a flicker of recognition. “Didn’t he make a ton of money in computers?”
She nods. “Software. But that’s not the reason that he’s so important.”
I wait, but she doesn’t continue. “It’s not? I heard he owns his own island somewhere.”
“The important part isn’t how he earned his money, it’s what he does with it. World health care, AIDS, poverty, climate change. All of these things are being helped by the money from his foundations.” Janine turns to me, her face more serious than I’ve seen it all evening. “Most of us take the knowledge and abilities we possess to research issues that affect the world. Others use them to make money to support those issues. You can’t choose how you are born, just who you become. It’s part of our journey as Akhet.”
All of a sudden I understand what she’s saying. “So, wait. Is he one too?” I look back over the photos in the case. “Are all of these people Akhet?”
She looks back over the gallery and smiles. “Most of them are Sekhem. And the ones who aren’t Akhet probably will be in another lifetime or two.” Janine reaches up to straighten out one of the photos, and as she turns, I can see an intricate tattoo on the back of her neck—a cross with a loop on the end filled with curling ivy and flowers. As unusual as it is, it also looks familiar. Before I can get another look at it, she moves and her hair covers it back up.
I turn back to all of the photos lining the bookcase. “So you’ve actually met all of these people?”
Janine nods. “Some are colleagues. Many have become friends over the years.”
“But I thought you were only a professor,” I say, realizing how bad it sounds the minute it leaves my mouth.
Janine laughs. “I get around,” she says. Her smile fades, and she looks serious for a moment. “There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with being Akhet. I don’t know how much you’ve talked about it with Griffon…”
“Not much,” I say. Talking to Janine has made all of the ideas about Akhet and Sekhem seem more real—as long as I don’t think about it too hard. Sometimes rational thought can be a liability.
She frowns. “I forget what it’s like the first time,” she says. “Forgive me if I assume too much.”
We sit on the couch, and I pick up the coffee. Cream and sugar, just the way I like it. Janine smiles at me but doesn’t say anything as I take a sip and try to absorb everything she’s been saying. I can hear Griffon banging pots around as he does the dishes. I try to pick up the thread of our conversation. “So Akhet like Veronique don’t join the Sekhem?”
“Not usually. But then again, not everyone does—some Akhet choose a different route. It usually takes new Akhet a lifetime or two to get hooked up with the Sekhem to see if they can serve. But rogues are different. Rogue Akhet usually do what they can to sabotage the good things others are trying to accomplish. Some of them end up the worst of the worst.”
“Like who? Serial killers?”
She pauses a minute before continuing, and I can feel her measuring how much information she’s going to give me. “Sometimes. Sometimes worse. If they’re not stopped, some are capable of widespread destruction.” Janine leans forward and sips her coffee. “Pol Pot. Stalin. Bin Laden.”
“Like Hitler?” I ask, unbelieving.
“Well, he is your most obvious candidate,” she answers.
“All rogue Akhet?” I ask, unbelieving.
“All very old rogue Iawi Akhet,” she says. “Every time rogues like these come back, they get stronger and smarter. It may take decades for an essence like Hitler’s to come back again, but they always do.”
“So the essence that made Hitler who he was back in the thirties might be alive today?”
“Exactly. It might be in the body of an adorable two-year-old girl at this very moment, just waiting to get older. And stronger.”
I shiver at the thought. There is one question that has been looming all week, but asking it feels like it would be tearing at the fabric of humanity’s most basic beliefs. I take a deep breath.
“Who decides?” I finally manage, not sure if my meaning is clear at all.
Janine tilts her head to the side. “Decides?” she repeats. “About what?”
“About when you’ll come back. Who you’ll be. How many times.” I look around the room. “All of it.”
“You’re asking if there’s a God? Someone who directs our actions? Judges us on what we do in each life, like some sort of final exam?”
I nod, knowing that the next few moments could reveal the mysteries of life that hang over everyone’s basic existence.
Janine sips her coffee slowly. “I don’t know.”
I stare at her. After everything she’s told me, it’s not the answer I’m expecting. The answer I feel like I deserve. “You don’t know? You guys have lived all of these lives before, come back as other people, but you don’t know how it works?”
“That’s the hardest thing to ultimately understand,” she says. “That our knowledge is limited by our experiences. We don’t have any sort of direct line to God or Allah or Buddha or whatever deity you care to worship. What happens in the time between lives is the greatest unknown, even to the oldest Iawi Akhet. All I do know is what I’ve experienced over my lifetimes, and that it’s up to me to put that experience to work in this one. It might take a year or it might take a hundred to come back, but so far, I always have.”
A feeling of despair settles into my chest. Janine doesn’t have any more answers than I do right now. For all of her lifetimes of experience, she hasn’t found out any more than I have in sixteen years. It feels a little like a rip-off. Or maybe a cop-out. I sit forward on the edge of the couch. “So where does the … essence … go if it’s not going right into another body? I always figured that for reincarnation to work, you had to go from one body right to the next, like lighting one candle with another.”