The Reincarnation

She’s a nose dragger.

John had heard that joke before. Once, during an internship, when he was practicing his craft during the summer of his third year in college, getting some “real world” experience. His boss was an overweight man in his sixties. He was balding, but performed the ancient folly of growing his hair long on one side and swooping it over his pink and gleaming pate. That feat never worked, and it especially didn’t work on his boss. All it accomplished was making his hairless skull look like it was encaged by the strands of greasy hair he carefully combed across it in neat lines. Worse than this blight on his appearance, all the guy owned were dark brown suits. They were shiny in the elbows and the seat.

It was a hot August day when John heard the joke for the first time, a day when just walking outside meant melting like a candle thrown into a fire, sweat bursting from you, soaking your shirt before you could get from the curb to a cab. On that particular day, it was exactly two weeks before John’s boss had taken a shotgun to his wife’s head and then to his own.

Those weeks before, his boss was acting especially strange. Especially, that is, because the guy was already a candidate for the Circus of Freaks. Mainly, it was the Twinkies. The man ate nothing but Twinkies. And they weren’t even Twinkies, they were the generic imitation kind that were a few cents cheaper. The cellophane that entombed the little individually wrapped cream cakes littered the office. Some clients had even started noticing them and asking questions. And he would salt them, too, pouring a mound of the little granules on them before every bite, saying, “I’m probably the only guy you’ll ever meet whose doctor told him he needed more salt in his diet.” And his boss would always turn the conversation around to his wife. “A beach ball,” he would call her. “A beach ball with legs. Oh, they say lots of stuff about loving, honoring, and obeying, but nobody ever leads you to expect a fuckin’ beach ball with legs.” And then he would go off on his daughter as well, about how stupid she was – “Doesn’t even know how a boat floats, can’t understand buoyancy for Chrissakes.” And he would always end up taking his shoe off at some point during these tirades, banging it on any available surface, using it to punctuate his words.

At some point, John wondered how the guy could go on like he did. He didn’t. But in the meantime he had told some of the most disgusting jokes John had ever heard in his short life.

She’s a nose dragger.

Jesus, John thought, did he really tell that joke? In a room with his boss, the CEO, the Board, everyone at the office? John pushed on his eyes with his palms, trying to drive the memory out of his mind.

He got up and shambled into the kitchen to prepare some coffee. As his hands went through the motions mechanically – dumping the old grinds in the trash, rinsing out the reusable filter, pouring the beans into the grinder, grinding the beans, putting them in the filter, putting the filter in the machine, filling the decanter, pouring the water into the machine, turning the machine on – his mind reeled with the fractured memory of the night before. It wasn’t voluntary, he thought as the antique coffee maker gurgled away. It was as if he had lost control of his mind for a while – or simply lost it altogether. John had always thought that he was living on borrowed time, never knowing when it was going to unceremoniously end. “Maybe this is it,” he said to himself.

Glancing down at Hannibal, John saw that the cat had finished eating and was now strolling into the living room nonchalantly, tail twitching like a metronome. Hannibal settled down to sleep in the patch of sunlight that was seeping through the window to form an asymmetric square on the couch.

John shuffled into the bathroom and looked at his naked body in the mirror. He liked being naked. In his natural state, he felt there was no place for him to hide anything from himself. His body was pale, too white for just a hangover. And I didn’t drink that much, he thought.

He slathered shaving cream on his face and neck and scraped a razor across his jaw. The polished metal blades glided smoothly with no resistance. Wiping the rest of the shaving cream off his face with his hand and dolloping it into the sink, he stepped into the shower.

Trying to shrug his actions off as a loss, he kept returning to that one feeling; like someone had taken his mind out for a joy ride, then returned it later all banged up and out of gas, in the meantime leaving only half-forgotten memories – ones he had thought were gone for good, buried hidden in his mind – to pass for conversation. Why, he wondered, would his mind abandon him on the night that was the pinnacle of his life?

Anyway, he resolved, how bad could it be? How much damage could have been done that couldn’t be cured with fifteen minutes of his wit and charm? If he was confident enough, he could put it all behind him, he told himself as he lathered his body with grapefruit soap, together with the steam from the shower filling the room with scented mist.