iery red. Eyes of flame. The demon’s last words escaped me. The glass window revealing the scene of burning flesh unnerved me, and although the power of his commanding visage and blistering voice should have been such that I should have more easily attended to whatever instructions he gave, my fear and terror masked them completely.

All I heard was, “Learn something.”

Around me chaos. Cold, hard metal gripped my face like a vise and pulled me from warmth and security into a cacophony of sound and a spinning confusion of light and blurry images. The oval device enveloping the top of my head ripped open my cheek and pinched the corner of my mouth where blood gushed from an open wound. Drenched in blood, I was hoisted upside down and a sharp slap on my bottom sent me wailing.

I was placed naked on a white, towel-covered scale, wrapped up in a warm blanket, and handed to a woman. It was my mother. My real mother. I recognized her both from fond memories and pictures of her from the ‘50s that had graced a cabinet that had attended all of my childhood and that had accompanied our family in many moves—from California to Utah and on and on until we moved to Moab. I looked into my mother’s face. She was so young! A little girl really. She looked ragged and worn from giving birth. And even though she looked ready to collapse, she managed to give me a smile. The doctor took me away to stitch my mouth and repair the damage from the forceps, a scar I would bear until the day I died. I’d heard the story of my bloody, mismanaged breech birth all my life

Over the next few weeks, months, and over the course of years, it was clear that I was living my life over again. Not exactly. Because I was still the “post-death” me. The me that lived this same life once before, except then I could control it. I could make decisions. This time I was in essence watching my life through my eyes, ears, and the other senses. I could not affect anything. I could do nothing but watch, but I felt everything exactly as it had occurred in my life. It was like I was inserted into a virtual reality immersion game, except it was all cut-scene and I never got to control my avatar.

I learned quickly that I would feel everything my old self felt, both physically and emotionally, but only as an observer. I could influence nothing. I could not speak to my kindergartener self or warn him (me?) that running with my hands in my pockets would result in falling and cutting my head open, requiring stitches.

It was not just the feeling of falling and being in pain, I seemed to have access to a deeper level of my consciousness. I understood more about the event than I ever did in life. I understood my motivations. I was given to understand the myriad of pressures and distractions that conditioned every response. I could assign clear weightings to both nature and nurture. I knew what DNA had driven me to do and how my past experiences up to that time leaned me toward one propensity or another. I too saw that life bestows freedom in ways I never understood. It manifested to my post-mortal state as a pause or a gap—a kind of space—in the tangle of causes that vectored me toward some end. This void surprised me—especially the way it engaged with other causes to create a complex manifestation of will. Sometimes this freedom appeared in things I had been convinced came from some force of irrevocable fate. Other times, some action surely freely chosen turned out to be nothing but a clever combination of my biological programing and the historical nuances of life’s experiences.

I saw my parents struggle in ways I never understood as a child. I saw their challenges and fears. I could tell better now, after a lifetime of the same, how hard their life had been and how completely sequestered from the reality of their experience I had been. There was so much I never understood. Even as an adult myself, somehow I never thought of them as anything but my parents. Now, I could not hold back my ghost self’s tears when I saw what they were going through.

The emotions of living my life over again were profound. I wept with myself often. However, sometimes, I could not help but be disgusted with how petty and unforgiving I appeared. I could have been kinder. I could have stood up for myself more. I could have done better… but then, what forces I was under! What tricks of mind and body drove me helter-skelter over the landscape of living! I could have also done so much worse.

As I neared my death. I realized there could be no greater hell than watching your life unfold with a full knowledge of how you were constructed. To view your own missteps in full light of what you could control and what you could not and see yourself bumble with the tools you were handed so spectacularly was horrific. I could have been a better husband. And my kids? Why was reading the paper more important than going outside to look at a dam my kids had built in the gutter? They were so excited, and yet there I sat, reading something that mattered not one wit. I never saw that dam, and right now it seems like I missed the most important thing going on in the world. So many times I chose simple trivia over people that I genuinely loved. Why? It made no sense. Yet over and over again I missed engaging with those I cared most about.

I stood watching myself die. I was happy it was nearly over. In the rushed and confused scene with the demon, I recalled a glorious paradise awaited me. I at last relaxed, knowing this as I died a second time. It had been Hell. It was time for Heaven.

Except, I did not die. Once again, I heard the screams. I saw the blood as I was born again into the world. Into a home this time, not a hospital. On a kitchen table, clearly in a different time and place, and as I pieced things together—again in full possession of the two lives I had just passed through, I begin to recognize my surroundings. Old memories from my childhood meshed with this place. I was in my grandmother’s house on Fifth East in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was embedded once again in a person, but this time it was my father instead of me. No child should have to watch the secret dreams of their father. My dad should have been invested with rights that precluded his child from ever being so intimately exposed to such secrets. I passed through his life in sorrow, for I saw his fears, dashed hopes, his disasters, and temptations. This was not for me! I shouted at the heavens.

Yet I found comfort that I was loved. I disappointed him and made him proud. He was grateful for me and resented me. Like my life, his was full of confusion about who he was and what he should do. One of his most painful experiences was when he’d been bypassed for a promotion. Every day he’d worked hard. It was clear he’d invested much into doing his job to the best of his ability, using every ounce of his creativity and talent. How could he not have pride at what he had accomplished for his company? How could he not get the promotion? Not for a second did he doubt it would be bestowed. No one had worked harder and he had done a tremendous job! Then someone else got it. Someone undeserving by his lights. It wrecked him and consigned him for years into the depths of despair. In some ways, he never recovered.

Yet, to us, he just said, “Well, I didn’t get the promotion, c’est la vie .”

My mother, nor us kids, ever knew what this did to him.

So many triumphs. So many despairs. I had been there for his death. I saw it again, only this time through his own eyes. Perhaps now I could be released, but I was less confident than before.

I was my mother next, then my wife, and children, followed by my brothers and sisters. My wife was the most painful life to experience in such fullness. With both my wife and mother, I was shocked at how different it was to be a woman. How differently the world was presented to my heart and mind. It was not in intelligence or in some perceptual ability. I saw my children in a new light as she interacted with them in ways I had not. It was if I saw them now more deeply and completely, as if from a new dimension. Not completely other, as I had understood these things as well. It was hard to describe, but it was if being a woman added new flavors to the palate of experience. I suspect had I started as a woman, being a man would be described similarly. Even so, I felt richer from having experienced it.

It did not stop with my family. On and on it went. One after another. I cycled through every person I’d ever met. I seemed to get placed as a ghost in order of their proximity to me in life. In an ever expanding embodiment of all those who I had ever encountered. My best friends. Cousins. My aunts and uncles, then grandparents and co-workers. My teachers, then officers I knew in the military. One by one and on and on, I lived their lives with more familiarity than they had lived themselves (just as I had with my own life). I was surprised how similar and how different all of our struggles were! How painful and how mixed life was with its joys and sorrows. How complicated! I found myself cheering people on, hoping they would give in to their best nature when that little space for freedom sauntered in. I wept when they did not follow their better self. When they slept I slept with them, when they were tired I was too. Strangely, my dreams mirrored theirs. It turns out that dreams are informative, combining freedom, fate, and the challenges of winding a path among them in surprising ways.

There was a strange thing. Occasionally, like my sense of how much of the person I attended was influenced by genes or experience, there was a sense that someone was accompanying people I met. A slight hint that there was another being in attendance. Something in their eyes seemed to reveal the presence of another ghost, like me, trapped and watching. Another inhabitant of Hell?

I had a vague hope that when I had ghosted all my lifelong encounters, this Hell would fold up and disappear and I would be released to a heaven where I would enter into a space that I might enjoy freedom and choice again, rather than this endless reel-to-reel of fixed observation. Perhaps most horrible of all, I could never affect anything. I was never able to turn away and say no, not this—and in truth there was never a day that went by that I did not try.

Is this what it’s like for God? Is He ever stuck watching all that transpires with a fixed eye? Like me, is He locked into an omniscient stare, such that all the pain and hurt of the world is paraded before Him? Is there nothing He can ever do to turn his head from the scene, or to step away and go for a walk in a solitary forest and flee from the barrage of horror and pain that never ends? I shudder as I think it. Not even a monstrous God so horrific deserves a Hell so barbaric. That is why I suspected I would be released soon. He would not make me endure all that He does.

As I mentioned, there was a sense that others were trapped in lives like me. I could sense them. Perhaps, I thought, it was my imagination, but I began to detect subtle differences, as if tiny nuances of personality of these people were leaking through and that with effort I could recognize individual differences in the entities. I tried to communicate. Nothing. One in particular I called Isabeau after the star-crossed lover in the movie LadyHawk . I pretended we were in love. More and more often “she” showed up in partners of my host, and those lives tended to be better. More vibrant. Sometimes we would go centuries without sensing each other. But when we did, did I detect rejoicing?

I was every member of the Bloods and every participant of the Crips. I was homeless on the streets of Wichita and dwelt in a mansion on Long Island inherited from old New England money. I fought on both sides of the Iraq War. I was an Inuit schoolteacher in Barrow, Alaska, and an alcoholic fundamentalist preacher in Forrest City, Arkansas. Every human was a unique instantiation of the type, and yet each so much the same—a small set of terrors and temptations. Given to abundant acts of kindness and yet, such astonishing cruelty as well.

As I moved through the world, I moved back in time. I gassed Jews in Auschwitz and led a march for freedom from Selma to Montgomery. And so as I moved back in time. I fought in every war while later praying for souls in Calcutta. It was a strange way to move through human history. I did not miss a single event, and understood every motivation for every player that ever lived from the lowest soldier marching from the kingdoms of the Kahn to Caesar.

I do not think I am capable of going mad because if it were possible, I am sure I would have fallen into that state long ago. Especially without the occasional and rare appearance of Isabeau, which seemed to stabilize me a bit. Things affected me deeply and I wept with the individuals I possessed—feeling keenly their joys and loves, as well as their agonies.

As the old joke goes, I could say to them with full honesty, “I feel your pain.”

I have been tortured much as well as been the torturer, which too often it has been done in the name of some absent void or darkness dressed up as some feigned righteousness or justice. Some of Earth’s greatest evils emerged in acts such as this.

I have also fallen in love many times, both men and women, for I experience keenly the lust and desire of whosever’s body I find myself. I’ve come to realize how much we are drawn to the beauty and desire of others. It consumes us. No other force is equal in both joy, and pain. So much of our thoughts and actions are geared and directed toward the desire of the caress and the touch of another. And there is nothing so painful as its lack. We are made to love and be loved.

In addition, there is so much joy to be had in life! It is true there are lives of such misery that it truly would be better not to be born, but it is not as often as you might guess, and even some lives that appear withered and worn have had moments of joy and experiences that make their life worth having been placed here below. I always think of heaven as upward, and myself as below it, down here in Hell. Whenever I can, I gaze that direction though the eyes of my shell and try to catch the attention of whatever God might be gazing back.

Perhaps my greatest love, besides the dear wife of my real life, was when I was a wine grower in Italy during the height of classical Rome. We lived on an isolated estate in Umbria. It was a time of great peace. Alypia. A beautiful woman. She expertly managed our fields and treated our slaves well (and I know it was largely true because I have been them all) and we arranged for their freedom and citizenship upon our death. Alypia. We traveled and made sacrifices to the gods. We read and danced with delight. Our children were strong, well educated, and we made good marriages for them. I took more delight in her than she did me. I chose to adopt Felix’s perspective. For he daily felt blessed by the gods for the presence of Alypia in his life. And the most wonderful thing of all? I saw my ghost friend Isabeau shining in the light of her eyes.

Notice in the above how often I switch from “I” to “him” with a callous carelessness and nonchalance? I often became wrapped up in their lives so much I would forget that I was but an observant spirit. It was much like watching a good movie or a play that would take me away as in the days of my first life, sometimes I forgot I wasn’t the person in whom I was embedded.

Often, I would be jarred back into the dualism of which I was just a part, a member of a cast of two as when the character of my observation would do something that I willed to go in another direction. Sometimes, our lives would be so congruent and harmonious with my own desires that I have lived entire lives without remembering that they weren’t really me, and I had no say in whether they turned left or right. Ran or fought. And when this lack of being able to vary from the course my host had set became so palpable, panic would rise in my soul, the feeling of being trapped would send me into mental paroxysms of fear. The desperate need to escape would press down on my soul with an unrelenting need to take one action that was mine bubbled through me.

The feeling was similar to what I once experienced when I was young and a group of friends convinced me to crawl into a mummy sleeping bag headfirst. They wrapped a leather belt around my legs, pinning me within. I struggled and thrashed about, but I was helpless—closed in that narrow space, with my arms at my sides, unable to raise them to my head. I screamed and screamed, shouting that I couldn’t breathe. I cried and begged, all the while sure I would soon die and there was nothing I could do. Finally, I played dead and stopped responded to my companion’s taunts, and fearing they’d suffocated me, they let me out.

At about this time, I notice, or I thought I noticed, that Isabeau appeared more and more in those I fell in love with. It is hard to say. Was it just my imagination?

Time does strange things. I would pass through momentous events as if they were nothing, while fixating on some trivial thing for eons. I remember once I was a Syrian merchant. Wealthy and independent, I paid my bribes and taxes. I lived a well-provisioned house in Tyre where I owned a small fleet of trading vessels. I loved books of all kinds and had procured a large number of expensive and ancient manuscripts. When Valens, the Emperor of the East, began burning pagan books and scrolls (and often enough their owners), many of us decided that we were not safe keeping them and so burned many of the cheaper works and hid some of the more valuable ones by sending them to more secure ports. I remember burning a collection of documents written in palm leaves rolled together. On them was a transliteration of Greek written in Sanskrit by a deserter from Alexander’s army. I did not know at that time if it were authentic (anything reported to having some connection with Alexander would fetch a good price, so I had my doubts) and so threw it to the flames. I remember a strange sense of horror as I watched the leaves blacken, then ash, and then disappear as smoke in the air.

As I moved back in time among my hosts, I found myself anticipating following the history of the palm leaf scroll—an idle curiosity about its origins became one of my obsessions. I was intent on finding or following certain objects that came from the past and whose unfolding lay in my future. For obscure reasons, some of these would infatuate me.

I was surprised and delighted whenever a life gave a clue that allowed me to find a piece of the story of the scroll and see how it passed to the future where I, like Merlin, had previously lived, moving backward as I was in time. Whenever I held the scroll in my hand, sometimes as a merchant, or a collector, a librarian, or brigand, I would feel joy in the connection of that work. The feel of the leaves rarely meant anything to the person I dwelled in, however. I found delight in the texture of the dry abrasive surface, the fading ink, and fragility of the brittle surface.

Until at last, I was attached to the man who’d written the moving account. It is filled with so much of the human condition—of both war and love, and much of the terror and joy that I’ve experienced. I repeat the words of the poem (or story) to myself often. I leave it here for your enjoyment (or dismissal). The title and subheadings are my own addition, as the palm leaves contained only the author’s words. The portrayed events are largely true, for I lived his life and observed these events transpiring in their fullness before he wrote this as an old man during the afternoon of a muggy day on the banks of the Narmada River. It is long, but I have nothing but time in these bodies to memorize that which I grow to love.

Leaving the Storm Crows

 

I. The Forgetting

I look at you lying

on the stony ground

 

amid tufts of patchy grass

that playfully worship

 

the god of wind

like children dancing to

 

Apollo, or in honor to the king.

Your hand rests beside you,

 

curled as if forming a cup

waiting for some offering

 

of wine, or perhaps a coin.

A Persian spear has pierced

 

your soft eye, opening a slit

wide and deep. The point

 

of the blade must have been

dulled when it finally reached

 

the back of your helm,

emptying forever your skull

 

of thoughts—

thoughts of home

thoughts of glory

thoughts of love

 

thoughts of fame.

 

I did not know you well. A

little, only. I remember once when

 

we were both wine-addled,

raging in the heat of lust, and

 

roaring through the streets,

singing loud and manly that

 

our names would live forever.

 

Aye. That was the dream—that

like Achilles,

 

our names would live forever.

 

We said it again as we rowed together

against cold Aegean winds. Side by side

 

feeling the hard beat of the

leather drum deep in our bones,

 

well-placed and throbbing in our

wintry bones, our cold frozen bones.

 

Our names would live forever.

 

But here is the last truth—

I cannot remember

 

your name. You are there, on

the ground, tossed hard by fate

 

and your enemy’s spear. I know

your wounded face, but that name

 

by which your mother called you to dine,

and by which your father commanded

 

you to mind well the sword and spear

and its dance, has fled me as if you were

 

a stranger. I think hard, concentrating. I

shake my head, trying to clear it, staring

 

at your broken and still form,

it seems important to remember,

 

How were you called? It will not

come. Your name was to last forever,

 

but here on this field of death, your

memory has not lasted even an hour

 

after your departure to that cold

place, across that dark river.

 

That river crossed but once. Your

name did not last forever—not even an hour.

 

I see ravens landing nearby. They

hop about, turning their heads sideways

 

to fix their black eye on a fallen soldier

twisted nearby. A bold, big-breasted

 

storm crow hops upon the armored chest

of that fallen comrade, and with a clever

 

twist removes a bit of lip from an empty

face that no longer needs to smile.

 

I look down, trying once more to recall

that appellation that will restore your

 

memory to my mind and to the Gods’

as well. But alas, forgotten one, it will

 

not come. The general signals. We must

move on. Rumors of another force

 

approaching mean we will not pause

to burn you and do you one last honor.

 

Your body will go to these harbingers

of death. These feathered eaters of death.

 

These markers and signifiers of death. I

pick up your short sword, its tang wrapped in

 

hardened olive wood and stiff ox hide.

It is in better shape than mine, which I

 

stab into the ground next to your body,

and sheath your blade as my own.

 

Our names were to be remembered forever.

 

Commemorated for deeds worthy of songs.

Epic poems were to be spoken of our Areté

 

at games and sacrifices. But the wind stirs me

to wander on, to collect with other survivors to

 

the place we are gathering to march into

another fight, and on and on in an endless

 

cycle of battles played out in a theater

enacted for the amusement of the gods.

 

As I walk away, I try once more to remember

your name. But it is gone and I will try no more.

 

Your bones will dry here.

Unmarked. Unmourned. Forsaken.

II. The Battle for Tissaphernes’ Head

 

I once watched a gull and a raven

battle over Tissaphernes’ head.

 

It was loosened by the deep strike of

a cavalryman’s spear to his uncovered

 

throat and kicked fully free by the errant

hoof of a staggering warhorse. I watched his helm

 

bounce among the stones of the strand. His

head lodged between two barnacle-graced

 

stones. One eye was open, the other closed

and his curly locks falling fetchingly around his

 

face, in a handsome and stylish way. He would

have turned heads in Athens were it

 

still attached. The gull arrived first. Its white

and gray body balanced atop his head seemed

 

in a strange way to honor him with its calls,

as if hailing, “Come! Come! Come! Behold, here

 

wedged between two rocks, is Tissaphernes’ head.

Come! Come! Come! Honor him.” The raven

 

arrived a few minutes later. She landed on a

nearby bit of drift wood appearing at first uncaring,

 

preening indifferently. Then with deft quickness

she leapt in a bound to his perch and plucked from

 

Tissaphernes his open eye. Oh, how that gull

screeched at this audacity. And so it began.

 

Why these two fought so over this bit of property

only Athena knows, for there were many fallen

 

comrades among the rocks of low tide, and their

flesh was there for the taking. But on and on

 

they fought. Feints, thrusts, attacks, retreats, bold

ventures, stealthy maneuvers, and both false and

 

true strikes. Many feathers were lost, both black

and gray, leaving patches of white and red.

 

Tissaphernes’ ears were the spoils of

the raven. The lips and one cheek were won by

 

the gull. Long after their bellies were full they

fought on. Neither willing to yield to satiety, or

 

reason. At last I had to leave them to their

conflict for it was time to form ranks and

 

take the road to our next conflict, where we ourselves

would fight on, for land, for glory, and for the Empire.

 

As I made my way up the guarding cliffs, I could

not help but check my bare arms and naked legs

 

for missing feathers, and other things lost for

reasons ungiven as we marched into the

 

growing darkness of night, to join the same dance

as this vain skirmish for Tissaphernes’ Head.

III. Departure

 

On the bright morning of my desertion,

I saw a Greek bearing three babies

 

upon the shaft of his iron-tipped spear. He held

them over his shoulder light and easy

 

as if carrying them to market like so

many sedge ducks. I watched from the roof

 

of a merchant’s house, on a balcony rich

in verdant vines. I had sacked twelve cities

 

and had taken my share of spoils, but those

dark-haired Persian nurslings skewered

 

as if for roasting, turned my stomach sour

and emptied my heart of manhood. Of rage.

 

Of battle lust. The city is now awash in flames

and screams. Cries of passion and anguish.

 

As one of the conquerors, I walk from

the broken gates unmolested to the tents

 

from which we had lain siege for four months

and six days until the walls were at last breached.

 

The camp followers ask for news,

I answer them no word, and slouch to my

 

bivouac and take the woman I won at

dice from a minor king of a minor island

 

and bid her walk before me. Three woman

demanded to know where we are going and cry out

 

“He is running!” And so I am. But there is

no one to fear, all are gone mad as the city is razed,

 

bloodied and raped and we walk out. I now forgo

empire. Foreswearing citizenship. And in doing so

 

leave behind my farm and olive trees and

the wife that bore me two daughters and who

 

I have not seen in seven years. She thinks me

dead, I have no doubt, if she remembers me at all.

 

And so I am dead. I will go east. To a land

of mysteries. A land where I spoil nothing

 

more. Where war and death will not find me.

Where babies bawl and are fed mother’s milk.

IV. Travelers (I and my wife standing next to each other)

 

We join a caravan You join a caravan

Me as mercenary You as mercenary

You as my wife Me as your prisoner

 

The camels stink The camels remind me of home

The air is dry The air is dry

The flies relentless The flies relentless

 

We head east We head away from home

To a new land To a foreign land

Away from war Away from war

 

A red sun shimmering A sunset red aglow

I speak of the farm You speak of pasture

Along a river Along a river

 

Where such sunsets Where such sunsets

Will grace the day Will grace the day

And we will sing

 

Well-fed goats Goats

Will give us milk and meat Milk? And meat?

And make our children strong Children? Strong?

 

Once I had a wife Once I was a wife

She was well-favored To a blacksmith in the city

She bore me two daughters I bore him two daughters

 

I left her to fight He was killed by Greeks

For what? For what?

Now all is gone Now all is gone

 

No daughters No daughters

No homeland No city

Only this sword Only ravens

 

He made me laugh

He is cruel and kind

He is Greek! Never!

 

It is night and in the firelight In the firelight

I hear the bark of jackals The noise of the wilderness

They draw near Quiets me

 

A thousand stars A thousand stars

Ignite a sky Whisper changes

Portending life Portending life

V. Storm Crows Uncalled

 

You lean against the table and hold your expanding belly.

Our son and daughter watch the black goats nearby,

 

they wave and our daughter yells something

I cannot make out. You ask if I want some cheese

 

speaking our new tongue, the language of this

land—using vowels that emerge windy and round

 

from the verdant wet air that hangs heavy after

the summer monsoons. I assent, and you cut off

 

a piece white and thick. You pour the juice of

a melon into cup fashioned from the pale clay found

 

downriver a bit. I drink and hand it back to you.

You finish it. We have many neighbors

 

skin black and hair long and straight unlike

the tight curls of an Ethiopian I met in Corinth

 

many years ago. They welcomed us here and

asked no questions. They taught us how to

 

care for goats. How to plant grain. These are

they who will gather tonight to sing and dance

 

because the rains have come and gone and we

are still here. Floods have been abated and we

 

must honor the gods that make it so. Soldiers

pass here from time to time, long speared and

 

fierce. Warriors of kings whose palaces dot

this strange land, but they bother us not at

 

all but go to and fro on business of which I

have no interest. I tell my wife and children

 

to hide and I bow my head like the others

and lean hard upon my hoe and let them pass.

 

I like to imagine sometimes they stop to harass

and I pull from under my bed my iron-tipped spear,

 

and my hoplite short sword, and my curved

shield and let the soldier hidden in my breast

 

burst out, to find again the scent of blood that brings

the storm crows from the clouds. But I look at my

 

fair Persian wife, and those she has born me, and I

smile. And remember the words of the mendicant

 

who stayed with us a night and taught me that life is

suffering, and that in letting go of the past I can

 

move to better cycles of birth and rebirth. But I say this:

If this moment alone is all there is as my father taught.

 

It is enough.

 

Guess whose light shined through the eyes of my Persian wife?

Often I was afflicted with an idle curiosity I had no way to satisfy. I’d lived the life of numerous musicians and now understood much about the fine art of music. A musical ability never graced my original life, but now I could play thousands of instruments. But could I really? I would never be allowed to actually play. Someone else’s hands always do the work. I can feel the pressure on the strings of a guitar, or holes lining a flute, or even my hands dancing on the keys of a piano. I lived entire lives as a master player, and yet they are not my hands.

If I were released would these talents remain? I’d like to think so. For example, I find myself anticipating the next note, knowing exactly how my hands would fly into the next position. I have practiced this within my host thousands of times and so know how to play, what I imagine, is with the same expertise as she in whom I dwelt. While I am lost in the music, it feels as if I am leaping to my next sequence of notes. But it is not, at least not in any way I can control, for if I try to move differently or improvise, nothing happens of course.

There were some people I inhabited who had little freedom. I remember a homeless man. A veteran ruined from saran gas in the Gulf War. He had grown nearly mindless from years of inebriation. He dressed in rags. Even so, each day, dirty and homeless he did one thing that was truly free: He chose a flower from a woman who sold them from a small booth tucked into an alley, which he wore in his hat as he begged for coins to purchase sustenance and drink. His one act of freedom was to choose a flower. Freedom, it appears, can be lost and gained.

Enough. There is no end to these stories. I must move more quickly. To give you details about my life as a Neanderthal or small bipedal apes would become tedious. As I left humans and other semi-rational creatures behind, freedom shrank. I spent a lifetime as a small ape. Then reptiles, whose minds were calm and languid. I would descend lineages and then climb back up them, so from a certain bird-hipped lizard, I would ascend the taxonomic lineage to become every bird (I even saw myself many times from the perspective of a robin or a house sparrow). Down I descended until a fish I became, and on down the chain until I was then a worm-like segmented creature, then small bacteria. My lives were short in such creatures, and the change from one to another involved little differentiation. Were I ever to go mad, it would have been here. My shadow persona blipping in and out of billions upon billions of incarnations of these nearly identical creatures. I was exposed to a staccato of consciousness flashes as I moved among these fellow travelers. But I learned a way of being that helped me through these tedious years that made existence possible. I will explain in a moment.

Were I to tell you of the nearly endless blades of grass or the forests of trees and shrubs I became, you would likely shriek in horror. Yet it was a time of calmness and it seemed to me that the eons rolled past rather pleasantly. I rested from the jostling existential noise of being a rational creature.

Isabeau, far down the chain of life where consciousness largely disappeared, became an ambient kind of glow. Not that I could see, but feel. Isabeau followed me here below.

Then I saw it coming. I had moved down the great chain of life so far, until one day I realized that I was moving through a population of single-celled organisms very rapidly. The population was getting smaller with each generation. Signaling that in all the Earth there were only around a thousand of these primitive cells, then the population reduced to a few hundred. Suddenly there were only sixteen, and since my life span was only a few hours I realized it must be the end for me! The point where life began, where the population narrowed to just two, then one. I was about to be released. I had been placed in everyone and everything that had ever lived. Untold billions of humans. Trillions and trillions of plants and animals. So many. So, so many. It was coming to an end. If I had had eyes, they would have filled with the tears of a thousand oceans! I would be free! At last, it was over. How many eons had passed since I started this Hell? I could not fathom it.

Then there were eight cells. On all the earth there were only eight cells.

Four.

Two. (Here. At the end. When there were only two. I sensed Isabeau beaming in the aspect of the other primitive cell.)

One.

I had only a few hours to think about what I had been through before this cell died. Then I would be free. Suddenly I was overcome by the realization that Isabeau was with me. I was able to apprehend her in a way I never had before. We were in the same being. For an instant we were aware of each other intimately, however, we had been non-rational for so long as single-celled organisms that words did not come easily during the short existence of the cell we were in.

If I could have found voice, I would have pled to know which of all women I had been though the nearly infinite eons, was she. But my voice had been silent too long. Still, we basked in each other’s presence. I was excited. I had imagined the moment I would depart Hell. I thought when this happened I would engage in a meditation on the enormity and complexity of the lives I had lived. But, here at the end, I was with Isabeau, and a wild cry of joy erupted as I contemplated meeting her in a few minutes. I could feel her excitement too. I was too distracted to contemplate on this Hell—there would be plenty of time to do so in the eternities of paradise that lay ahead. I was now in a cell driven completely by my chemical makeup. A strange, carboxyl group had joined my chemical machinery that allowed a copy of what I was, allowing this form to create a new copy of itself that would detach and be born new in the world I had known a few minutes ago. I began to divide. It was over. This was it. I was leaving.

I was enclosed in something. Like the mummy bag I described earlier, inducing the familiar panic. I started to struggle. Wiggling frantically to escape from this prison. My host, too, was panicked and terrified. Together, we thrashed about in alarm. I did not understand. I had been every animal on Earth and the closest that had come to this experience was as a baby lizard trying to escape from a leathery ovum, or the baby bird’s desire to escape its hard-shelled egg by pecking its way out. Then it hit me. A realization. An inescapable logic poured over me. I had been every form of life that ever lived on Earth . I had not been this. I was not on Earth. Despair flowed over me, overwhelming me. I wanted oblivion more than anything imaginable. Was I somewhere in the galaxy I knew? Or a far distant one? At least on Earth I had some scope of the task before me. What awaited me now I could not guess. I was lost in time and space.

My new host burst from its cocoon. I was lying on a long thoroughfare that ran for a few hundred meters forward and backward. This new context was hard to resolve until it fell into place that I was on a giant branch of some sort. Colored, and even textured, like concrete. A great creature stood before me. It had a long, flexible neck that resembled a geoduck ending in a round orifice. A ring of numerous pale red eyes, on short stocks, surrounded its neck and it turned this way and that, until I, or my host, began a low whistle at which they all focused on me. The other end connected to an odd, leathery egg-shaped body sprouting massive wings from its sides. It had six legs terminating in hydra-like tentacles, rather than claws.

With a swift motion of its swaying neck, it struck like a snake and swallowed me whole into its monstrous orifice. I slid quickly into its gullet. I was pushed down into a chamber where, like a tadpole, I squiggled around to face the opening, then wriggled up the esophageal passage a short distance. I opened my own mouth wide and glued my lips to the edges of the great creature’s throat, sealing me to it in such a way that anything that went down this throat would enter first into mine.

Since my arrival, I was flooded with an intensity of emotions. Something akin to fear and anxiety mixed with confusion. In all my rebirths on Earth, I was able to understand all the forms of communication and language. Would that be true here, too?

It was. A strange contentment enveloped me. A kind of peace and sense of safety. I felt all this because I knew this was my mother. She would care for me. Occasionally a sticky mass of food would come down her mouth and I would devour it with delight. These were tastes I had never experienced. After the food passed through me, I would expel it. What I didn’t use was passed out and was welcomed by my mother for her nourishment.

One day, after around thirty meals, my mother released a strange chemical. Immediately knowledge, color, and smells began to seep into my pores. It gave me access to her life, like a cheap copy of my experience in Hell. It assembled the memories of all my mother’s ancestors. I was an ordinal moment in a long sequence of past lives. My body absorbed these chemicals, ordered them, and put them together into long chains of crystal-clear recollections.

I was a future ruler. Part of a distinguished tribe that had conquered many patches of the tree islands in which we made our homes. The trees were complex, fungus-like organisms that formed broad webs made of thick webbing, like the one upon which I sat as I emerged from my cocoon. I knew the songs, combinations of sounds and smells, and stories of my people. I felt rejoicing and pride at my age and glory at the life that lay before me. I would rule with honor and holiness!

Then I felt my mouth detaching from my mother’s throat and she began to squeeze me out with force. During the time inside my mother, I had changed and developed into something other than the tadpole that entered. Suddenly, with great force, she shot me into the world. I rocketed upward a few feet and then began to fall. The branch I sat upon was high, and as I fell, I knew exactly what to do. I burst from a thin glassy membrane and stretched my newly formed wings vaulting into the sky for the first time. I was surrounded by my subjects, by relations, and by my tribe, all winging our way skyward, all singing with joyous abandon, whistling and calling me by name as they accompanied me into the warm orange light of a red dwarf star which nearly filled the sky with its glory! My air sacks expanded, swelling my ovoid form to the limits of its elastic and flexible body. Then, with violence, I forced the air though my mouth and let my scream sound clear and potent into the world. In joy! In power! In the ecstasy of existence!

I have by now explored hundreds of worlds. Isabeau has been with me still from time to time. She almost seems to be resolving in greater clarity. When she is in a partner of my host, our recognition triggers delight. I have long conversations with her and I imagine she responds. There is no way to know if they are real, but I seem to sense moods and dispositions. After billions of eons, perhaps we will improve enough to genuinely talk?

Right now, I am descending into a Jupiter-like gas giant. I am a bubble creature, and my buoyancy-bladder has been ruptured by a blast from a <impossible to translate into human languages> generator that fired a plasma bolt that grazed my gleaming membrane. My crushing descent will be slow, giving me time to reflect on my life. My seventeen mate-partners, one of which was Isabeau, will not mourn long; for it will be easy for them to find another to replace me, given the excellence our cadre has displayed in battle in the blue clouds of the upper atmosphere.

I have one more story to tell.

It is not of any of the alien worlds I have traversed—and truly they are no longer any more alien than Earth was, as they have been made known to me at depths that not even the inhabitants understand.

The story I want to tell you is about how I have learned to endure this Hell. “Endure.” That is not the right word. I do not endure it. I relish it. And it is no longer Hell. It is life. Or a stage in life. Its duration does not matter to me.

Certainly, I slip into old patterns of thought. I am human after all, as when I discovered that upon reaching the first form of life that lived on Earth—at which time I convinced myself that after that event I would be released from Hell. No, I did not escape, I was to be reborn in a near endless cycle of alien births. Yet it did not take me long to recover into that calm I had come to appreciate as I traversed the incarnations of plants and bacteria prior to my transfer to other star systems.

Back on Earth, my host was born into a royal family in high cold mountains that rose above the plain like granite gods. The air was clear and fresh and it was a time of prosperity and peace. As a prince I was taught to fight and to enjoy the pleasures and rights of power. I married a woman chosen by my father and had children as expected. My wife cared little for me. My children were cared for largely by others.

A disquiet settled on my host, and we wondered together at the meaning of life. How is it to be lived? We became discontent. His wealth brought him no joy. We saw the ascetics, traveling from town to town in poverty, begging for their food, searching for wisdom and meaning. He decided to follow them. We left all behind. The trappings of wealth, of sex, of all the advantages that life had so far offered. We starved ourselves, fasting, walking dangerous roads. He walked naked through the harsh and lowly winters. But we found nothing in austerity, any more than what we found in wealth and prosperity.

We ended the life of an ascetic, but wandered still. Looking for what would explain the endless cycles of birth and death, which, as you can imagine, had special relevance for me. I suspect you know who he was. As did I. I had felt his influence in millions of his followers for thousands of years, in countless people whom I had been. So you can imagine I anticipated what was coming, but to experience it first hand, to perceive as I did, his enlightenment, changed everything.

We were walking along a river. The day was hot and sweltering. A large tree giving abundant shade was mothering a sandy bank and we stopped to rest. We were preoccupied with our questions. What was life? Why was it so full of suffering (a universal on every planet I’ve visited)? Why are we so discontent, no matter what our circumstance?

As we rested in the shade of that tree, our minds were adumbrated with light. It was attachment to our goals, to our dissatisfaction with our present. We wanted to be elsewhere, always looking ahead to a time and place that would we believed would end our dissatisfaction—always convinced if we could escape this moment or embrace that event, it would all be made right. But it never was. We had to let go of that myth. We had to embrace the present. If we are truly eternal beings, if life is endless, then the present was the only reality, and we must find contentment by being there. Suffering would not end. How could it if we were endlessly trying to end it—thinking that we would be able to escape it?

I thought of how miserable I’d been in my incarnations in different hosts. Always thinking about the time it would end. That somehow I would escape this Hell and then, finally, be happy. I had lived millions of millions of lives, wanting to rush through them, to get to the end. To get out of Hell. To be free. Then in despair, I realized there were eons ahead.

The only way to escape the misery of this repeating cycle was to embrace it. To be content with the present I’d been given. To stay put in this duration and live. I did not know why such a profound realization did not release me. I could not imagine learning something more profound. I’m still trapped, but it at least provided a way to cope.

After that, I tried to live in the present. To forget that I would move on. That there was an end I was trying to reach. I tried to be in the present. The more I practiced, the better I became. I remember once when I was a great sequoia, those long-lived trees that grace the great forests where I used to live. I let that calm and still way of being wash over me. I did not look forward to being something else. I did not try to escape the boredom and frustration of wanting to move on. I was still and let that stillness fix my mind on the present.

I occasionally slip up. Especially as I anticipate a meeting with Isabeau. As when I was rushing toward the beginning of life’s creatures on Earth and the thought that I was nearing the end became my focus. I let the crushing despair take me when I did not escape the repetitive cycles I endured in host after host, but as I screamed the joy of existence in that first alien creature I inhabited, my desire to enter the present returned to me. And so it has.

Do you see what a gift I’ve been given? I will be billions of creatures. Each with something to teach. Each with an almost magical way of being and a presence in a given duration. In Isabeau, I appear to have been given a companion who was ever near and ever far away.

God is merciful? Perhaps. Even so, I have seen such wonders with such varied eyes I feel myself the most blessed of creatures. It is true that I suffer, but thinking about its end is no longer my focus.

Now, I try to discern what is to be learned from it. Both suffering and joy have things to teach, and I try to imbibe lessons of these beings. Oh that I could write the nearly infinite number books it would take to describe the things I’ve experienced! Of the people, both wise and ragged, which I have come to know! I would place them in an endless library that all might enjoy the depth of experience of these beings. This , I think, is what it must be like to be a god .

Hell? Existence can be such, and is, from time to time. I am not oblivious to the suffering around me, but then I remember: I will never stop existing. There will always be futures to anticipate and dread. But I will no longer focus on escape. Rather, I will find my place in the present. Now, when I awake from whatever dreams the night has held, in whatever creature I inhabit, I turn my thoughts skyward in gratitude that I have this chance, despite its terrors, to experience so very much of existence’s presence and grace.

Do you see the gift I’ve been given?

To hold on to the moment. To the now of wherever I am.

Do you see it? The gift?