With a gasp as though she has just come up for air and saved herself from drowning, Kate comes out of her hypnotic reverie. The clock illuminates the time as 10:32 p.m., two hours from when she’d drifted off. She cannot believe in that time she has experienced a whole past life as a man — in the fifth century.
‘That’s crazy,’ she says aloud. Her ginger tom lifts his head from his curled-up spot in front of the heater with an indignant yellowy-green gaze, swishing and swirling his tail and thudding it on the mat.
◊.◊.◊
At the pharmacy where she works, Kate is unable to focus on her tasks. She stacks jars of Blackmores vitamins where the Betadine Sore Throat Gargle should go and doesn’t notice the line of customers waiting at the counter.
‘Good weekend?’ her co-worker asks her at morning tea break. Ashlee grins at her while dunking her teabag in a cup of hot water.
Kate looks up at lover-of-anything-Gothic Ashlee, with her dyed-black hair and nose ring. On her first day at the pharmacy she turned up wearing heavy-black eyeliner, dark lipstick, black fingernail polish and dressed in clothes like a Victorian mourner. She had whitened her face by mixing sunblock with talcum powder. The pharmacist had a quiet word with her.
‘What do you mean?’ Kate asks.
‘Well, you must have met someone. You’ve been miles away all morning. Was he well hung?’
Kate has become used to the way Ashlee talks. The twenty-something shop assistant has had her share of dramas; a mother who slit her wrists when Ashlee was a teenager, before she was expelled from school for smoking pot. She also lived on the streets for a couple of weeks when her father threw her out of his house.
Kate’s flatmate had gone away for a long weekend, which meant she had time to herself to do her hypnotic regression thing, but nothing other than that. ‘No well-endowed gentleman caller. Just me and my cat,’ she replies. She doesn’t want to chat with Ashlee, let alone tell her what she’s been doing. The co-worker raises an eyebrow at her, a smile forming on her lips. Kate rinses her cup and leaves the tearoom.
◊.◊.◊
The Roman man consumes her mind. She touches her nose, wondering if she has somehow genetically inherited Fabius’s Roman nose. She knows she has a big nose. A little girl with large innocent eyes once said to her, ‘You’ve got a big nose.’
She’d read about cellular memory, about how personality traits can be stored in individual cells or in other organs, not just in the brain; that people who have had heart transplants have developed the traits and abilities that once belonged to the donor. Then she wonders if physical features from a past life can pass down as cellular memory to a soul’s present life.
In bed with her eyes closed but still awake, Kate mulls this over.
She sees faces. Many faces in gray-scale appear and disappear in seamless fashion; silent fleeting images, some overlapping. It is like watching hundreds of actors in an old movie with the sound muted, played out in five minutes or so. She has been seeing faces for over ten years, but she has never before seen a vivid, colourful image like the vision she saw of Fabius.
She wills her Roman man to return to her. But alas, he never does.
◊.◊.◊
However, something even more remarkable happens. While on the threshold of consciousness, in the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep, she receives a message. It is crystal clear, as if the person attached to the voice is in the room. The voice is that of an older man, deep and masculine, with an accent difficult to discern — a mixture of Russian and Italian.
‘There is an energy force that dwells deep within your psyche. It is your higher intelligence. It holds information about every one of your past lives. It is a memory bank of records; blueprints, registering all of your lifetimes’ life experiences.
‘Conscious memory is not retained, but psychic memory is. The psychically charged memory systematically collects genetic records of past events and transfers records into the genetic memory of the cells of the individual’s present physical form. They are linked electromagnetically to the atomic make-up of his or her body.’
Cellular memory.
Kate hears, ‘Amen,’ as if the voice had read her mind.
‘The memory bank of blueprints is specifically to function as a drawing account, but which lies dormant unless you take advantage of it. You possess in this memory bank, experiences from earlier lifetimes to utilise and guide you in your present lifetime, but if you do not take advantage of it, if you do not seek out these levels of consciousness, then the precious legacy available to you will remain dormant.’
Kate lies still, anticipative, waiting to see if she hears anything more. Minutes pass. A steady rain that has begun to fall lulls her to the edge of sleep when the heavily accented voice comes through again. His speech is unhurried. ‘As regards your perception of the driver’s hair, it was but a glimpse of your inner senses that was brought on by the psychedelic drug you inadvertently consumed. It is a sense similar to empathy, though far more dynamic. But the true nature of inner vibrational senses cannot be experienced in their full intensity stimulated by drugs, simply because your nervous system will not be able to handle it. However, with perseverant practice of deep meditation and hypnosis, you will perceive your inner senses to a certain degree. Should you achieve this you shall be granted wondrous cosmogonal prosperity. Thus, at a fundamental level you will learn to use your inner senses to become aware of the true feelings of others. It is an extremely valuable asset which leads to compassion and a greater understanding of the emotional aspect of any living thing, whereby you will be able to comprehend its consciousness and energy. You have touched on this already, by perceiving the vibrating, molecular structure of a strand of hair.
‘Your inner senses should be used only to help others, but if you are not ready or willing to do so, then your own psyche will see to it that you do not use them consciously at all.’
Lastly, the voice says, ‘Meditate regularly. Turn your focus of attention inward. There is no need to seek the aid of psychedelic drugs; indeed, it is something one should avoid. It is no secret that hallucinogenic substances can alter your brain’s neurological workings with unfortunate and detrimental consequences.’
◊.◊.◊
In her bed, Kate has turned to stone. Her eyes stare vacantly into blackness.
‘Who was that?’ she says aloud.
The jumble of music and muted human sounds and bursts of laughter trickling up from a garden bar on the corner of her street keep her awake for hours, until her body surrenders to exhaustion.
◊.◊.◊
Kate’s workday drags. Again, she cannot focus on her tasks; she is consumed by what she thinks was the voice of a ‘teacher’. The evening can’t come soon enough. Once home, she eats a dinner of Israeli salad straight from the pottle, bought on the way home from the Kosher Deli, has a shower, and prepares for her new meditation routine, starting at 7:00 p.m., but just as she gets comfortable and places the headphones over her ears, she hears a key turn in the door. Her flatmate is back.
‘Bugger.’
Melody throws her keys in the bowl on the table; a loud clatter reverberates against the porcelain. She breezes past Kate who’s horizontal on the couch with her legs under a throw and disappears into the bedroom. ‘What a weekend!’ she yells from her room.
Kate’s flatmate is flamboyant, arty, and loves all things kitschy. Her eclectic collection of figurines of animal heads with human bodies and other off-the-wall oddities are utterly freakish. Kate is grateful she keeps all that stuff in her bedroom. In the corner of her bedroom, Melody has a life-size headless mannequin dressed in a white lacy top, a jacket two sizes too big with a garish purple and yellow pattern, and baggy, high-waist, yellow-checkered pants.
The flatmate with multi-coloured hair and flashy clothes launches into the events of her weekend, about how she had to drive her grandmother and her grandmother’s Yorkshire Terrier to the vet because the dog had eaten a whole bottle of magnesium tablets that had given it a chronic case of diarrhoea.
‘Grandma was in tears. Whether it was because she thought Pepper would die or because the dog had shat all over her valuable Chesterfield suite, I wasn’t really sure. It’s completely stuffed anyway. The stench was gross. I had to ask the neighbour to help me drag it out of the house.’
Kate folds up her blanket and drapes it over the sofa arm. She gives up on tapping into her memory bank. ‘Oh, that’s too bad. I was just off to bed.’
Melody looks at her, surprised. ‘But it’s so early.’
‘I’m into a really good book. Goodnight.’
Her thoughts distract her from her Barbara Kingsolver novel, which continue into the night and hamper much-needed sleep. She listens instead to the soft repetitions of Melody’s snoring coming through the bedroom wall, which eventually send her off to sleep.
◊.◊.◊
Tonight, her flatmate is staying overnight at her boyfriend’s place, so Kate has the flat to herself. She is so excited about ‘going within’ that she skips dinner. If she gets hungry later on, she reasons, there is leftover Vietnamese chicken salad in the fridge Melody said she could have because “it needs to get eaten”.
The teacher’s message has inspired her, knowing there are levels of consciousness the mind can tap into, and Kate is determined to venture into these mysterious dimensions without the help of mind-altering drugs that’ll no doubt end up frying her brain.
She gets comfy, pulls on the headphones and plays the audio, then closes her eyes and slips easily into a trance. Her breathing becomes regular and steady.
Vivid, colourful images appear in her vision. Clear in her mind, Kate finds herself embedded in an ancient life in America. She is a fifteen-year-old native American girl, who speaks the language of the Crow Indian.