LOST IN REINCARNATION
EVER SINCE HE’D arrived in America, a great pain had radiated from the center of Vaishnav’s body. The heat of it sprouted up his spine and through the tip of his forehead like a twisting tree. It thickened inside him, his arteries tangling into phloem.
When Vaishnav began latching the windows to keep sunlight from feeding the pain, his wife called up a massage therapist. The best in the world, she said. Vaishnav trusted her. He had to trust Akansha, the quiet woman he’d been swept off to the states with. They were good for each other, their parents had decided over tea. A boy and a girl who never caused trouble, perfect pockets of soil. These were parents who wanted children that wanted children. The music of a monsoon pouring and breathing back into the clouds.
On the terrain of his visa, Vaishnav hopped between technical jobs. His wife mended some of the neighbor’s clothes for money. Still, every month the rent swallowed their arms and legs whole, and they woke the next morning to thinned, alpine air, as if they’d been placed precariously at the tip of a mountain with nothing to take to their lungs. Like so, the seed of his pain had cracked.
Vaishnav found the massage therapist’s office to be strange and haunting, deep red walls illuminated by scarlet candlelight. Stalks of dark green leaves flooded over clay pots lining the shelves. A deep golden mattress crowned the middle of the room, where shadows bled into the light. The masseuse beckoned him towards it.
The masseuse was a very old woman, her hair white as the guts of a seashell. Her rough palms scraped his back as she examined as a doctor would, leaning forward and back with weight.
“You skipped a life,” she said finally. Vaishnav stared at her. Skipped a life? But something about her told him she was right, that he was in no place to ask questions.
“Can you fix it?” he asked. He settled on this, instead of what she meant, or how she knew.
“Haven’t you ever wondered why you felt so empty? I would imagine you would,” she said gently, rolling her palms back into his skin. “Looking back into the folds of your heart and finding no feeling, no memory . . . ”
“I have memories,” said Vaishnav, because he felt it was true. Though she was right, he thought. He remembered things, but he didn’t have memories.
The woman kneaded his back. He felt his muscles coil upwards and build into a mound where there used to be a valley. From his neck, she took two strips of flesh and stretched them downward, to his arms. Already the pain was melting, turning soft under the waves of shifting, wafting gusts of warm wind. His body became a liquid geography.
“What are you making me?” he whispered, asking only the air.
As an answer, the masseuse spun his arms and legs into a thick loaf, then sliced the dough into eight equal parts, splaying them outwards, flowering from his neck.
“An octopus has three hearts,” she said. “I need you to open wide.”
From her shelves, the woman extracted two hearts, full of sky-blue blood, organs waiting for him since the ocean’s formation. She propped a finger gently under his chin. Vaishnav opened wide. In the cavern of his chest, the drum pattering at the edges of his skin like a springtime rain grew into a thunderous roar. He felt as though he’d just seen the sun, and couldn’t, now that it had been done, tear his head away.
“There is something I want you to remember, before your mind goes,” said the woman. “About the octopus. A passionate lover, Vaishnav. Not like us.”
Vaishnav asked what she meant, his head pounding already, not quite able to form the words.
“An octopus dies once it mates,” she explained. “We humans, we start our lives with love. Not an octopus. No. Love kills it. Love is the last thing it will ever do.”
The woman slathered her hands in oil and lifted from under the mattress a box full of suckers. Patiently, she affixed them over his tentacles, which grew slippery and blue under her skin. Vaishnav felt himself already far from his human life, as if it had all been a dream, his sense of feeling dripping down like honey into the bottoms of his twirling arms. He heard his masseuse as if she were a thousand miles away.
“The last step is the ocean,” she was saying, her words folding over and burying themselves in the sands of Vaishnav’s mind. Time spilled over like moonlight into nightmares, and he found himself nestled in the shallow water, enveloped in sea foam and yellow light. Faintly, he felt rock-heavy lungs rise from his throat.
“Before you go, I’ll give you gills,” she was saying. “Don’t be frightened, the cold is just the metal of the knife.”
The masseuse rested her hand on his slippery film, caressing the neck—a gentle thing, like a newborn. She’d done all this before; she knew well what to do. The knife was sharp. She sliced quickly, two slits like eyes squinting against the morning light. They squealed like rubber as she cut. By now, she was sure the boy could not hear her. She drew back her arms. The octopus twirled gently into the tide.