The Reincarnation

Early in the morning, Peggy spied a cat pacing and crying outside the Lab’s doors. She adored cats and had fourteen of them at her farmhouse. One more won’t hurt, she thought as she let the stranger in. He looked up at her admiringly, and brushed his cheek against the white leg of her pants.

“Good boy,” she cooed, picking him up. He had a tag around his neck. It was gold. She scratched his cheeks, then under his chin, trying to read the tag. She succeeded. It was heavy. There was no address or number, simply a name. It read “Hannibal.”

David woke up quickly. Trying to keep a hold on his slumber long enough to remember the dream he’d had, he simultaneously tried to be conscious enough to describe it to himself so he could analyze it. He didn’t succeed. Just as rapidly as he gained the conscious insight enough to remember the dream in a wakened state, his subconscious whisked it away.

“Damn,” he mumbled.

John fell off the counter and onto his kitchen floor in what should have been an extremely painful position, but his body didn’t protest.

It was dawn. The Lab was quiet. Peggy poured some rice coffee creamer into an emesis basin – it was shiny, brand new – and put it on the floor for Hannibal. He lapped it up hungrily.

When he was done, he licked the rice milk off his whiskers and stared up at Peggy, purring.

Enchanted by the serenity and quiet of the morning, David gave up on trying to remember his dream and returned again to sleep.

John woke up. What the fuck was that all about? he thought angrily. He noticed the coffee pot. The coffee in it steamed lazily, the vapors on its surface swirling slowly, like morning mist clinging to the shoal of a bog. It was piping hot. Pulling it out by its handle, he plucked off its lid, and swallowed the coagulated liquid in gulps. His lips flattened and turned shiny where they touched the rim of the coffee pot.

Satiated, he resolved not to end up passed out on the kitchen floor again, no matter how little control he had over the paralyses he continued experiencing. Where could he go to think? His mind raced, clicking frantically. Where he wouldn’t be seen? Where he could be in the dark? John spied the marquee of the theater next to his apartment. He had passed it hundreds of times, never giving in to his compulsion to go in. He had no reservations now. Whatever portion of his mind that held his yearning in check had vanished.

Before he went there, though, he had some business to attend to.

John mindlessly put his diamond card into a slot in the bank’s machine. He squinted at the keypad. The symbols on it eluded him. Clearing his mind, he let his hand go through the motions as it had a thousand times before. There, he thought, those four buttons, pressed in that order, tell the machine something. But there was more – there was another step after that one.

He peered at the tiny screen in the machine. It was filled with nonsensical characters. Clearing his mind again, he allowed his hand complete control. It punched various keys on the machine. The machine sputtered and blipped and then made a whirring noise somewhere in its bowels. A tiny door in the machine opened. It was filled with green paper. John grabbed it. He stuffed the money in his pocket as he began to walk away. The machine beeped and spit out his card.

He took the card with one hand, the other still trying to get the wad of bills to fit in his pocket.