Life to Life Read online

  Sandra took my money at the cashier's stand, deadpanned it as she gave me my change, but she did say, "Have a nice day."

  I replied, "There you go," and paused at the door to put the change away.

  Sandra called after me, very quietly, "They're fruits and nuts, Ashton. All of them. Better you should find something more natural to play with."

  I turned back and said, "Thanks. I'll keep that in mind."

  She said, in that same controlled tone, "And that Annie bitch is the fruitiest of them all. I think she's really a man, in drag."

  I told her, "You're wrong about that, kid. You are dead wrong about that."

  And she told me, "Then she's a butch lesbian. And I am never wrong about that."

  I hoped she was wrong about that. God, I hoped so.

  Maybelle had been dead for more than two months but her house looked undisturbed—probably very much the same as it had been when they carried her away, except that the utilities had been disconnected. I doubted that there had been time to move the estate through probate. With her daughter as executor, that probably was not being pushed. Annie had been a very busy lady, of late. Besides, it can be very traumatic going through all the personal possessions and trying to decide what to keep and what to throw away. Not that there were a lot of those. Maybelle, like Clara, had lived simply.

  I used a pencil-flash to find my way around, and tried to keep it quiet. Did not need to attract the attention of curious neighbors and even more curious cops. Technically I was housebreaking. Of course, I did not want to take anything away. Nothing physical, that is.

  I did check out the kitchen stove, though. The bedroom where Maybelle had slept was off the kitchen and it was the stove, they say, that killed her. It was one of the old ones. And it had been red-tagged by the gas company as unsafe to operate. There was no gas now so I could not verify the problem.

  I went in and sat on the bed for a couple of minutes. It had not even been made up; was probably exactly as it had been when Maybelle died in it. I got nothing there. So I walked about the house for a few minutes, ran my fingertips along the walls and windows, lay down on the living room floor. Nothing.

  I went into the attached garage. Maybelle's car was there. A 1952 Dodge Coronet. Paint was faded, upholstery a bit tattered. Key was in the ignition. Battery was still up; there was half a tank of gas.

  Something fluttered me while I was sitting in the Dodge, but it went on past and would not return. So I returned to the house, sat on the sofa, lit a cigarette, and called her. Very quietly. "Maybelle. Maizey. Let's talk."

  Nothing.

  I tried for about five minutes then went to dispose of the cigarette in the toilet.

  When I returned to the living room, another presence was there.

  I could not see it. But I could feel it.

  So I tried again. "Maybelle. Maizey. I am Ashton Ford. I am trying to help Ann Marie. Will you talk to me?"

  A moment later an indistinct form appeared near the doorway to the kitchen. It glowed luminously but did not illuminate the darkness between us. When I say "indistinct," I mean that it was no more than a shimmering luminosity, larger in the vertical than in the horizontal but no more of a form than that.

  "That you, Maybelle?"

  "Hello, Ashton." The voice was in my head and I recognized it but she was working through my own articulation centers; I was aware of phantom movements of my tongue as she spoke. "Maizey cannot come."

  It was Selma. Believe me, it was Selma.

  "Where is Maizey, Selma?"

  "She cannot come."

  "She left before you, kid. Why can't she come?"

  "She is not..."

  I felt her struggling for a word. I tried to help, threw my whole damned vocabulary open to her, but still she struggled. I tried vocalizing again.

  "I need to talk about Ann Marie."

  "We cannot help."

  "Why can't you help?"

  "Different. It is different."

  Her appearance was improving, the shape becoming more like a person. I could see a distinct head now—hair, eyes, and mouth—though like white smoke. Gradually she brought it all out, the entire process consuming most of a minute, after which I could see her clearly but still without firm delineation—not, that is, a three-dimensional body with planes and angles but more like a photographic image projected onto smoke. But she was a young woman, that was clear, and she was probably quite pretty.

  I asked her, "Are you Selma or are you Clara?"

  "I am forever Selma. I have been Clara."

  I tried again. "Ann Marie is in big trouble."

  But she was holding firm. "We cannot help."

  I was a bit irritated by that. I snapped, "Why the hell can you not help?"

  "Different. Not allowed."

  "Different how?'

  "Not the same. Different."

  "Not the same plane?"

  "That is close."

  "Not the same state?"

  "State of being, yes, that is closer. We cannot help that girl, Ashton."

  I said, "Well shit."

  Something like a fine wave of humor moved through me and I knew it came from her. It was followed instantly by an almost chiding question. "Is it so serious, my dear?"

  I replied, "It's serious, yes. Where the hell is Maybelle? It's her kid, after all."

  I actually heard her laugh, that time. And she told me, "That girl is nobody's kid. She is... different. And her...consorts. All different."

  I had a sudden intuition, and went with it. "It's a different game."

  A brief hesitation, then: "Yes."

  “Tell me the name of the game, Selma.”

  "Forbidden."

  “Tell me something. Anything. Give me something”"

  The apparition was losing itself, losing focus or something, disintegrating.

  I repeated, "Anything, damn it!"

  Faintly: "Azusa."

  "What?"

  "Go to Azusa."

  So okay.

  That was better than nothing at all.

  I would go to Azusa. And I would find the name of this goddam game.

  But I was talking just to cheer myself up. I knew that it would not be as simple as that. Unless I had lost all my powers of fine discernment, Selma had just given me a tutorial on life after death—or life after life, if you will.

  Jesus had spoken of many mansions. All the great mystics had talked about the many states of being and the necessity to progress through them all before any of us may return to God. Dismiss it all, if you'd rather. And have a nice day.

  I could not.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Grains of Smart

  In the literature that serves as the real history of our planet, from the oldest to the newest, there is recorded indelibly between the lines the saga of an indomitably persistent impelling force that moves the human story along. It is not enough to try to understand this force by simply naming it with a "there you go," especially if we name only the effect and not the force itself.

  Some would attempt to define the mankind theme by invoking a single word: evolution. But that names only one observable effect.

  Many wish to label it with religious terms alone, such as God's will, God's plan, God's this and God's that—and though such terms may be comforting at times, they go no further toward a meaningful understanding of the mankind situation than they would toward an understanding of celestial mechanics or nuclear physics.

  So let's talk plainly here, pal, even if a lot of people get mad at me for doing so. No matter what the angle of approach, whether via science or religion, most people really try to skirt the issue of who we really are and what the hell we are doing here.

  I said plain talk, so here goes. Each and every one of the world's great religions is based on and governed by some really insane ideas. Christianity is an insane religion. So is Judaism, and Hinduism, and Buddhism, Shinto, Islam—all of it. Of course I am talking "insane" from the viewpoint of logic and common sense.
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  Let's just take Christianity as an example of what I am getting at. God made Adam with cock and balls, Eve with vagina, womb, and ovaries—the two capable of re-creating life in their own kind by use of same equipment, same as the other animals—yet sex is sinful for anything but animals, and we are all born with the burden of Adam and Eve's original transgression. God got disgusted with his experiment along about the time of Noah and decided to wipe the slate clean—he didn't like us very much—but we got a last-minute reprieve via Noah, although there could be some question as to whether maybe Noah was no more than the first ecologist; God needed him to save the other animals from extinction.

  But Noah's descendants blew it, too, and made God sorry that he'd saved this particular animal from extinction because we were living pretty much like the others—and I don't get the logic of that, either.

  But God tried again, and this time he himself descended onto the planet but he did it in a sneaky way—he came in through a virgin's womb, thus rehabilitating the scandalous Eve (somehow) and wiping away her original sin through an act of nonsexual reproduction. But this was not an automatic, you see; first, all the folks have got to believe that Mary was really a virgin, and then they have got to believe that her baby was God incarnate (unless I misunderstand the idea of "Holy Mary, Mother of God"); but then they have also got to disbelieve long enough to put the poor guy to a torturous death and then believe. See, it wouldn't have worked without the Crucifixion. I mean, the poor guy had to suffer. And somehow through the magic of insanity, all of mankind who confess to the foul deed shall have life everlasting. It wasn't so foul, you see, unless Jesus was God. I mean, hell, all the roads of the kingdom were lined with other poor guys hanging from crosses, and we hardly ever hear about them. So we have to admit that we murdered God and that we thereby transferred all our shortcomings to him. If you don't believe that then you are not a Christian. And even if you do believe it but don't take satisfaction from it, you're still not a Christian. But if you do believe it, and if you like the idea of murdering your own God through your own damned lack of responsibility for your own deeds, then okay: you're saved; you've got it made; Jesus loves you.

  See? This is insane. But it works for a lot of people, so who's to knock it? The worst of it, from this logician's standpoint, is that it all could be entirely true.

  But I was talking about the impelling force that moves us through all this. God's will does not work it, for me. It's God's will that the stars are there, sure. That does not tell me what the stars are for, what they're made out of, what they mean to me personally. Someone who uses God's will to explain all the events of human history is just plain damned lazy and really does not want to be bothered with anything but another nice day.

  But I will turn that idea back, just the same. If that is the way it works, then I feel this way because it is God's will that I feel this way—so get off my back and go complain to God about it.

  Would that it were so simple.

  Cancel that; I would not want it so simple. Something stunningly beautiful and wondrous and magical and meaningful is going on here with us humans. We are involved in a hell of a game. It does not matter that we do not know the rules of play or the object of the game. That is the game, I believe: to learn the rules and to discover the object. But the game has subgames—and maybe those subgames have sub-subgames and so on.

  If you are content with the idea that the sixty or seventy years of planetary time that have been allotted to you here are all you are ever going to get—and that you are blotto for the rest of eternity—then that is a game, too, of sorts, and I have to respect your game. Go ahead. Do it. Have a nice day.

  Or if you prefer to think that you were born damned but that you have been saved by heavenly magic—that you will rot in the grave after your sixty or seventy years until some moment before the sun explodes when you will rise from the rot and reconstitute it as flesh and blood, then you and Jesus will rule the planet for a thousand years—okay, I respect that game, too. You just might get it, and you just might deserve it.

  But if you are not quite sure about your game—if you have not yet found the name of it, or your place in it—then you need to come along with me while I investigate the impelling force that gave birth and life to Ann Marie Mathison. Because, believe me, this one is a hell of a game!

  Say, for the purpose of discussion, that you are God. So there you are, Lord God of the entire universe because you built it—and you built it smart. You built it smart because you have all the smarts there are, and you don't fool around with dumb shit.

  It is so smart that you only had to do it once. You took everything that is now present or potential in all of creation, and you engineered all of that into a tiny capsule—tiny in a relative sense, of course, but it was probably no larger than eight of earth's suns and that is tiny, that is almost infinitesimal, in relation to the present universe.

  That's no big deal, you may say as you place an apple seed in my hand. Can I see the roots and branches, the trunk and bark and leaves and blossoms, all the sweet delicious fruit itself that an apple tree produces in a lifetime—can I see all that in the apple seed?

  But, see, the apple seed itself was present in that original capsule; I could not have seen it in there any more than I can see the tree within the apple seed, but it was there. So were all the stars and all the planets, all the gases and the rocks, the bacteria and the viruses and all the living things; all of space and time forevermore were locked up within that capsule eight suns large—and all the people, too. We were all there as the potential and the promise of that primeval universe.

  So you are God and you have fashioned this fantastically smart capsule. With a finger snap, then, you fertilized that cosmic egg and set it off. My parochial and primitive intelligence sees the event as a big bang—but that is also partly because of my limited point of view; a cosmic big bang to me was a gentle sigh to you, and in that sigh was carried all the smarts that you had built into this production.

  Smart, yeah, a really smart production. All you had to do was sigh and set it off, then you'd never have to fuck with it again if you didn't want to. The sumbitch is self-propelling and self-regenerating, self-maintaining and self-perpetuating. You built all that shit into the original design. It's going to go on expanding and becoming forever; you built it good, to last, and you have a right to be proud of it.

  But now part of the potential of that cosmic egg (and maybe even the reason for it), buried somewhere down there beneath the leptons and quarks, was this idea called life and you'd provided all the support systems for that, too. Some stars would have planets, and some planets would stabilize into orbitary patterns that encourage the development of biospheres, and some of those biospheres would encourage the development of (or the release of) smartness—nothing like yours, of course, but primitive smartness anyway maybe good enough to begin a little curiosity and self-conscious examination of this whole process. You are God, of course, and you built it that way so you must have been expecting some such development. I don't know why, but you built it and it is there so it must be what you wanted.

  So now here we are some ten to twenty billions of years down the pike, and some of the smartness potential you built into the cosmic egg has taken firm hold aboard the third planet of a rather ordinary star near the edge of a rather ordinary galaxy far from the center of creation. You are God, remember, and you expected this to happen, but it still may give you a little quiver of pride to note that the thing is working the way it was designed to work.

  So maybe you're taking a special interest.

  These little grains of smartness have gone around and named every damned thing on the planet; they've even named themselves man and they have developed cultures and civilizations, sciences and technologies; shit they are swarming that biosphere and taking it over completely.

  Well...you built it. Wasn't that what you wanted? Your will be done, you know. You couldn't possibly be unhappy with them, could you,
for fulfilling your design?

  So sure, you like these smart grains called man. You even intend a personal relationship with them, if they ever get smart enough for that—and of course they will because you will.

  So here come three of these grains right now. They've come to court to pay their respects.

  The first one falls prostrate about fifty paces out and grovels on his belly the rest of the way like a reptile without legs. Not too becoming, really, of a self-conscious grain of smart but of course you understand that he is just trying to show respect. You can't see his face because he wouldn't dare present it to you; he just grovels in the dust and cries out in a loud voice that you are the One God, the True God, the Only God—I mean, okay, it's boring and it's obvious— but you have to allow it, don't you?

  So you ask the guy what he wants. He replies that he just wants to adore you. You ask, you mean all the time? He said, yes, Holiness, allow me to grovel in your shadow and sing your praises; I wish to adore you eternally.

  You may think that is not so smart. And it may get a bit embarrassing to have this guy following you around all over the place singing your praises and adoring you in public, but what the hell? That's what he wants, right?

  The second grain of smart comes up and hugs you. He claims a personal relationship with your son, tells you that a place has been prepared for him and he's come to claim it. You ask, where is that? He replies that he's not sure but he knows it must be up here somewhere because he gave up sex and booze for it. You ask, don't you want to sing and adore me? He says, no, he just wants to go hang out with the kid. Well you're not sure which kid he's talking about; but what the hell? That's what he wants, right?

  The third grain saunters up with his eyes darting everywhere. He's taking notes with a pad and pencil and he's so busy he doesn't even see you until he's right on top of you. You say hi and he says hi. You say, what do you want? He says, shit I want everything—what've you got? You say, okay, that's what I've got; you can't have it all to yourself but I'll share it with you. He says okay, where is it? You tell him that it is exactly where he's at, no matter where he's at it's always there. Use it and have a nice day. He says, there you go, thanks, and goes back where he was because that's where he is. Well...that is what he wants, right?