I know that is a bad idea. It is so rare for me to feel fear that I hardly even recognize the paranoia that it brought with it. I look at the Good Samaritan. An older black woman, skin stretched across her gaunt face, her concerned eyes exaggerated by her eyeglasses.
“I’m okay, really,” I say, growing more confident as the lie forms. “I have a medical condition and this happens every once in a while. It’s passing. I’ll be all right...thank you for your concern.”
She smiles in a matronly manner, waving as she walks away. “You be careful, young man.”
Laughter tickles up within me. This body is in its forties, yet to her I am a young man. If only she knew the many countless years that separate us. I bite my lip to stop from tittering aloud.
She returns to her own car, where an elderly man waits behind the steering wheel. They exchange a few words and pull back into traffic. I look around and recognize where I am. A large cemetery is only a block away. Putting the car into drive, I go there.
Tombstones and miniature mausoleums fill the ground between trees and brush. I find a secluded spot and switch the engine off. When I open the car door, the cool evening air sweeps across my body, chilling me. I walk briskly about for a moment, relishing the isolation. If I stop to actually listen, I can hear the rumble of cars on a nearby road, but for a city, this is being alone.
I slump onto a marble bench in front of one of the larger mausoleums. Moss grows on the base of the bench legs. The long shadow cast by the mausoleum covers me.
Now I allow myself to recall the office by forcing my mind to replay the memory. Never have I met such evil, so repulsive and so filled with hatred. And I have experienced the worst that history and humanity has offered. Even Attila the Hun, as he terrified the crumbling Roman Empire, still possessed some redeeming qualities, though I cannot remember just what they were. This person contains only darkness. Yet this is not just a person, a human, but another of my own kind. How truly extraordinary.
Replaying the memory in my mind, I realize with a sinking feeling that Bill Handlin, the man I have called friend, is dead. His body still walks, his memories still exist, but his mind, his essence, is another’s. He is now occupied—possessed—by the enemy.
But where did this other one come from? I do not know. That is because I do not know my own origin. I have always existed, or I assume that I always have. Had I at one time emerged from the womb of a woman and cried at the chill and abandonment that the newborn feels? In modern times, adopted children often seek out their natural parents in order to find their roots. Knowing their origin gives them a foundation to build a life upon. That urge has never come to me. While this may seem curious, I do not like to think about where I have come from. Whenever I follow that path, I so often experience the same emptiness as when I think of what there was before there was God. God has to have a beginning, because everything has a beginning. But if there was a beginning, what was there before the beginning? How can the human mind conceive of total emptiness, no matter and no time? How can one absorb and comprehend absolute nothingness with no beginning?
Does my ignorance about my origins gnaw at me? It does not, and that is because I deny any curiosity and avoid the very thought of it. Are we all not entitled to a bit of denial? The price of searching always seemed too high.
But the equation is changed. There is no longer just one, but two. And if there is two, might there not be three, or even more? Am I one of many? I have always been the many, the sole many.
The question of origins may be interesting, but I have more pressing problems. My very existence is at risk. Was the enemy able to absorb any of my memories during our contact? Certainly I absorbed none of his. That was because of my instinctive drawing back in repulsion. Carefully scrutinizing my memory, I realize that he had pushed eagerly forward and only my resistance had kept him on the outer edge. Perhaps he had absorbed some of my memories, and maybe he knows where I live or where my fragmentals are currently located.
While capable of fragmenting some ten or eleven times, I have just one fragmental away from myself right now. It is with a small boy in Shaker Heights. I need to retrieve it, then flee. The life I have known as James Barash, M.D. is over. I need a new life and that means a new body. There are two possibilities: a man who languishes in the criminal insane asylum outside Canton, or Joanna Prall. Both of them are void. She is the healthier specimen by far.
It suddenly occurs to me that maybe the enemy is not exactly like me. It took over Bill, but maybe it cannot fragment. Maybe it is a single entity, bound to a single body. An interesting thought to be pursued when I have the leisure to mull it over. Now I must run. Every instinct urges me to escape.
Night has wrapped the city in its shroud by the time that I pull up to the curb in front of a large, red-brick mansion in Shaker Heights. I have always thought that context and contrast are absolutely essential. Before me is the wealthy home that houses the Horgan family. James Horgan works for Society Bank as an executive Vice President and as befitting such a position, his family lives in this private neighborhood.
These gently rolling hills had been homes to animals and the Native Americans for millennia. I almost called them Indians, but why continue Columbus’s mistake? Then the Shakers came, fervent in their belief in God, communal ownership, and strict celibacy. They called themselves the United Society of Believers, but everyone else called them Shakers. When I first came to America in 1775, I met some of the Shakers back in eastern New York in the small town of Watervliet. A woman, Ann Lee, led the church. She was called Mother Ann by the faithful. At their meetings, they trembled and chanted songs that contained no words. Intrigued, I cast a fragmental into one of them and was overwhelmed by the intense emotions coursing through the crowd. This type of communal fervor is the closest that I have found normal humans coming to the wholeness that resides within myself. They felt a oneness with each other and with God. I have found such energy in others: the dervishes of North Africa, the flagellants of fourteenth-century Germany, the ancient Dionysian rites of northern Greece, the rites of modern Haiti.
The Shakers took in orphans and converts and new colonies were sent out. One group of Shakers came to Ohio. They repressed their sexual energies by channeling those forces into other avenues. As a prayer to God, and with skilled hands, they made beautiful furniture. Their orderly communities were filled with love and hard work. While not sharing their theology, since I have no God-knowledge, I respected them. They constantly strived for the good of the whole and not the individual. That I can always appreciate, regardless of the place or time.
When I left America in 1788 to return to France, I left a thriving community. Unfortunately, it could not last. A religious community cannot survive when celibacy restrains procreation. Each generation needed to be replenished by the fickle seeds of orphans and converts. They gradually died out, though a few still exist here and there.
Speculators bought the land, and two brothers turned the communal soil of Shaker Heights into a planned community of curving streets, lakes, and designated locations for houses, apartments, schools, and commerce. The brothers never married and left no children, but they left a legacy—an exclusive neighborhood of fifty-year-old homes with great full-grown elms and oaks lining quiet streets.
These thoughts of context and contrast dominate me as I stand in front of the house. The only lights on the empty street come from the windows of the other mansions. While I often lapse into retrospective, at this moment the exercise is pure escapism. I do not want to do what I feel driven to do.
As I stride up the curving walk toward the front door, I see the flickering of a large-screen television through a window. Tim Horgan sits on a cushion, entranced by the cartoons on the screen. The boy looks so calm, not betraying the rage and schizophrenia that had dominated most of his six years. Visual and auditory hallucinations haunt him when I am not
