The Reincarnation

David let the music take him. He didn’t sleep, but went into a fugue state, as he remembered doing in the past. Meditating was what anyone else would have called it. He thought rationally about his dream of the birthday party. What did his mother give him that day? It would have been a joke to anybody else. Only his mother had the religion “take to her,” as she liked to say, as much as it did. More like brainwashed her, he thought.

He pictured the sale. His mother all gussied up for her day at church – which turned out to be every day in the last few years of her life – asking the preacher what a twenty-year-old boy – her son, she had probably said, blushing and putting her fingers to her throat bashfully – needed on his birthday. What the preacher said next David could only guess. He hadn’t seen the guy since he was twelve. How did she let him get away with not going to church with her?

He pictured the certificate. He knew that The Medical Church of America was written in calligraphy in a semi-circle across the top in that pompous Old English style that was barely legible and served only to impress people who didn’t know any better. Then it said something religious, something about Judgement Day. David knew he had taken it out of its frame and signed it to humor his mother, but he had never really thought about it again. Until the dream. Until now. Nice Mom, David thought. She was dead for twenty-six years, he was dead to the world for twenty-five, and she was still haunting him. In fact, she was so arrogant, she took time out of his first REM cycle in a quarter century to remind him of some cheap religious prank she pulled. Well, that was Mom.

On the other hand, there was Beethoven.

Hannibal was hungry, but avoided the kitchen even though there was some food left in his bowl. Instead, he rested his chin on his paws and sat quietly alert, as if waiting for something.

The symphony ended and David sat up. It was much easier than before. He was regaining his composure. His body responded when he asked it to and didn’t punish him with pain.

The symphony had flooded David’s mind as well as his ears. His memory was going back further than it had before. He remembered some of his childhood, mostly in broad brushstrokes, most of them stained by the color of his mother and her religion. How his mother thought they combined God and medicine at the Medical Church of America, David couldn’t say. She had just accepted it as two parts of some new holy trinity, he guessed. As to the third part of that trinity, again David could only guess. Maybe it would come to him in time.

His teenage years came back more fully. He was a good student, at least as far as his selective memory was allowing. In college, he had gone the liberal arts route at first, trying not to limit himself to a calling that hadn’t made itself known to him yet. He remembered his frustration at this.

The world swirled around him in those years. The more he learned, the less he understood. He couldn’t figure out simple things, like how gasoline ended up cheaper than water. How the images on television of starving children were sponsored by commercials for diet dog food and one-calorie soda. How open heart surgery came to be seen as routine while changing your diet was seen as radical. How information was valued before knowledge, and knowledge before wisdom. How the only people who might be able to help humanity out of the mess it was in were the very people destroyed first by it. How when society was faced with the specter of not just death, but the end of birth itself – extinction – it still marched on undeterred. He remembered all the observations he wasn’t able to account for, all the questions he wasn’t able to answer. Then he remembered Beethoven.

He had discovered Beethoven’s music in his third year of college and had immediately been stunned. He had always known about Beethoven and had even heard some of his music before, but he had never really listened to it. After reading about the man himself, he became even more intrigued. He learned that the composer slowly went deaf during the course of his career, and David was fascinated by this. The more he thought about it, the more he understood why his music was so magical. All the other great composers were plagued by their ability to hear, constantly limiting themselves to what the orchestra was capable of. Beethoven, on the other hand, in a world of sound that existed only in his mind, was able to compose symphonies that weren’t limited by the human capacity to express them. He alone was able to make music that had as its audience the mind itself, unfettered by the skills of the musicians.

David remembered reading about a singer in the late 1960′s named Jim Morrison. Coaxing the crowd while he performed, Morrison admonished them to throw off their chains of suppression and to riot. He called himself the Lizard King. Beethoven was the original Lizard King, David thought. The man who transcended the pitiful capacity of his audience to participate in his art. Beethoven alone went directly into their brain and caressed it. David questioned how people could think this was a handicap to the man’s craft.

David thought about his own handicaps. Looking at his frail frame, he wondered how life could course through it, whether it wasn’t just the machines keeping him alive. He thought about how much time he had lost, about all the people whom he would never see, and if he did, how he would be a ghost from the past to them, a startling harbinger of their own mortality, a Rip Van Winkle that didn’t age. How everything he had ever known was probably gone. How lonely he felt. How maybe he would have been better off with the cancer. How then he would have viewed himself as mortal, not as a product of the machinations of his age. How he had come to rely so much on technology that he had literally placed his life in its hands. How he could find a way out of the technological maze and escape from its mechanical clutches.

But he did it, he told himself, suddenly confident in his decision. And when he got to eat, the strength would come. Thinking about this, he salivated. Food, yes food, if nothing else, he had come out of the freezer to eat. His stomach grumbled at the thought of it. Just a few more days, he consoled himself.

As John lay on his kitchen floor, he was a bit like Beethoven the Lizard King himself. His ears weren’t deaf, but his mind was becoming so. Lying there helplessly, his memory was being erased line by line. He already wasn’t able to recall much of anything that happened to him from his childhood up to his third year of college. And his skin had taken on the cold and smooth pallor of a reptile’s belly.

Hannibal passed the kitchen on his way to the bathroom and his litter box. When he finished scratching to cover up what smelled like perfume compared to what was in the kitchen, he parted the skirt that surrounded the sink and, pulling in his tail to make sure he was completely covered, hunched down on his paws and waited.

The door to the apartment stood in its frame less than five feet away.