It remined me of what I’d read in the Tibetan “Book of the Dead, the Bardo Thodol existence after death occurs. The soul moves along encountering different-colored lights; each color represents a different kind of womb, a different type of rebirth. It is the job of the departed soul to avoid all bad wombs and come at last to the clear white light. I decided not to tell Nicholas this; he was screwed-up enough already.
“Phil,” he said to me, “as I move along through these different-colored patches of light, I feel – it’s very strange. I feel as if I’m dying. Maybe the oral surgery did something fatal to me. But I’m not scared. It seems . . . you know: natural.” It was anything but that. “You are on strange trips, Nick,” I said. He nodded. “But something is happening. Something good. I think I’m past the worst part. The radio voice mocking me and insulting me in that gross way, and the whirling jagged buzz saws that were nearly blinding me -that was the worst part. I feel better with this candle.” He pointed to the small narrow candle flame beside his bed. “It’s strange … I wasn’t even sure what the word „votive“ meant; I don’t remember ever using it before. It just came to me, as the proper word. This was the kind of holy candle I wanted, and I knew how to ask for it.”
“When are you going back to work?” I said. “Monday. Officially I’m on leave, on my own time. Not on sick leave any longer. It was awful to be nearly blind, and so goddamn dizzy. I was afraid it would last forever. But when I saw the girl standing there, and the golden fish sign – you know, Phil, the Greek Orphic religion, around 600 B.C., they used to show the initiate a golden sign and they’d tell him, „You are a son of earth and of starry heaven. Remember your birth.““ It’s interesting: „Of starry heaven.““
“And the person would remember?”
“He was supposed to. I don’t know if it really worked. He was supposed to lose his amnesia and then start to recall his sacred origins. That was the purpose of the whole mystery ceremonies, as I understand it. Anamnesis, it was called: abolishment of amnesia, the block that keeps us from remembering. We all have that block. There’s a Christian anamnesis, too: memory of Christ, of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion; in Christian anamnesis those events are remembered in the same way, as a real memory. It’s the sacred inner miracle of Christian worship; it’s what the bread and wine cause, „Do this in remembrance of me,“ and you do it, and you remember Jesus all at once. As if you had known him but had forgotten. The bread and wine, partaking of them, bring it back.”
“Well,” I said, “the girl told you the fish, the golden necklace sign, was an ancient Christian sign, so if you experience what you said – anamnesis, whatever – you’ll remember Christ.”
“Guess so.”
“I have a feeling,” I said, “a theory, actually, that you have seen that dark-haired girl with the fish necklace before. She was delivering medication from the pharmacy; don’t you sometimes have them deliver? Couldn’t she have come by before? Or you could have seen her at the pharmacy. Delivery people hang around a pharmacy when they aren’t delivering; sometimes they even double as clerks. That would explain the shock of recognition, with you still half stoned from the Sodium Pentothal; deja vu, I mean, occurring during great pain and under the lingering haze of the – “
“The pharmacy he called,” Nicholas broke in, “is near his office, which is in Anaheim. I’ve never been there before; I never got anything from that pharmacy in my life. My pharmacy is in Fullerton, by my doctor’s office.”
Silence.
“Guess that shoots that,” I said. “But you did fixate on what she wore because of the pain and stress and the residual haze of the Pentothal. It acted as a hypnotically fixating object, like a moving watch. Or like this candle flame.” I pointed at the votive candle. “And the mention of „early Christians“ suggested to you to get a votive candle. You’ve been highly suggestive, almost in a hypnotic trance, since your surgery. It always happens.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well it seems logical.”
Nicholas said, “I had the uncanny feeling, God help me – I had the incredible experience, Phil, for a few minutes after I saw her necklace, that I was back in early Rome, in the first century A.D. So help me. She said that, and all at once it was real, completely real. The present world -Placentia, Orange County, the USA – it was all gone. But then it returned.”
“Hypnotic suggestion,” I said. After a pause, Nicholas said, “If I’m dying -”
“You’re not dying,” I said.
“If I die,” Nicholas continued, “who or what is going to run my body for the next forty years? It’s my mind that’s dying, Phil, not my body. I’m leaving. Something has got to take my place. Something will; I’m sure of it.”
Into the bedroom walked Nicholas’s sheeplike cat, Pinky. The big tomcat hopped up onto the bed and kneaded with his paws, purring; he gazed affectionately at Nicholas.
“That’s a strange-looking cat you have there,” I said.
“You notice the change in him? He’s beginning to change. I don’t know why; I don’t know in what direction.”
Bending down I petted the cat. He seemed less wild than usual, more sheeplike, less catlike. The carnivore qualities seemed to be leaving him.
“Charley,” I said, referring to Nicholas’s dream.
“No, Charley is gone,” Nicholas said, and then at once caught himself. “Charley never existed,” he amended.
“Not for a while, anyhow,”! said.
“Charley was very different from Pinky,” Nicholas said. “But they both served as my guide. In different ways. Charley knew the forest. He was more like a totem cat, the kind an Indian would have.” Half to himself, Nicholas murmured “I really don’t understand what’s happening to Pinky. He won’t eat meat any longer. When we feed him meat he. starts trembling. As if there’s something wrong about eating meat; as if he’s been hit.”
“Wasn’t he gone for a while?”
“He recently came back,” Nicholas said vaguely. He did not elaborate. “Phil,” he said presently, “this cat began to change the same day I first saw the buzz saws and you had to lead me home. After you left I was lying on the couch with a towel over my eyes, and Pinky got up as if he understood there was something wrong with me. He began searching for it. He wanted to locate it and heal it, make me okay. He kept walking over me and on me and around me, searching and searching. I could sense it about him, his concern, his love. He never found it. Finally he lay down on my stomach, and he stayed there until I got up. Even with my eyes shut I could sense him there still trying to locate the problem. But with that small a brain . . . cats have really small brains.”
Pinky had lain down on the bed near Nicholas’s shoulder, purring, gazing at him intently.
“If they could talk,” Nicholas murmured.
I said, “It looks as if he’s trying to communicate with you.”
To the cat, Nicholas said, “What is it? What do you want to say?”
The cat continued to gaze up into his face with the same intentness; I had never seen such an expression on an animal’s face before, not even a dog’s.
“He was never like this before,” Nicholas said. “Before the change. The buzz saws, I mean; that day.”
“That strange day,” I said. The day, I thought, when everything began to become different for Nicholas, leaving him weak and passive, as he was now: ready to accept whatever came. “They say,” I said, “that in the final days, in the Parousia, there will be a change in the animals. They’ll all become tame.”
“Who says that?”
“The Jehovah’s Witnesses say it. I was shown a book they peddle; there was a picture, and it showed all the various wild animals lying around together, no longer wild. It reminds me of your cat here.”
““No longer wild,““ Nicholas murmured. “You seem to be the same way yourself,” I said. “As if all your fangs had been pulled . . . Well, I guess there’s a reason for that.” I laughed.
“Earlier today,” Nicholas said, “I fell into a half-sleep and I dreamed I was back in the past, on the Greek island of Lemnos. There was a gold and black vase on a three-legged table, and a lovely couch … It was the year 842 B.C. What happened in the year 842? That was during the Mycenaean period, when Crete was such a great power.”