Afterlife Crisis Read online

  Here I broke off, not so much because I’d run out of things to say, but because the mystery, at least insofar as the deeply troubled p. was concerned, had clicked.

  “Zeus!” I exclaimed.

  “Zeus?” said William.

  “Zeus indeed! The poor delusional inmate must be Zeus, a longtime pal of mine who went awol after having his brains scrambled — a long story, I won’t go into it now. But suffice it to say that the aforementioned Zeus, a dear and esteemed crony, is one with whom it is my fondest wish to reconvene, if reconvening means what I think it does. Perhaps all of this ‘troubled mind’ and ‘fantastical delusion’ rot is the fallout of the mental whatsits which befell Zeus at the climax of our recent imbroglio with the forces of darkness — old memories climbing out of the wreckage, as it were. It all adds up. I mean, Zeus has accompanied me on some fairly apocalyptic undertakings, and Dr. Peericks, as narrow-minded an ass as has ever pushed a syringe, would be precisely the sort of fatheaded bimbo to chalk these memories up as delusions.”

  “I see, sir,” said William.

  “It still doesn’t explain Peericks’s odd behaviour,” I added, stroking the chin. “I mean to say, it’s not as though amnesia is contagious. As baffled as poor Zeus must be, Dr. Peericks’s memory, at least so far as I could tell, seemed sound as a bell when last we held a tête-à-tête. Yet judging from this letter, every trace of yours truly has been washed from the doctor’s mind.”

  “Highly mysterious, sir,” said William.

  “On the other hand,” I added, for one likes to inspect all sides of a problem, “I did recently bean the blighter with a book called Cranial Trauma, bathing him in both irony and confusion. That might account for some general weakening of the grey cells. Or it may be the case that, if one spends one’s professional life cheek-by-jowl with assorted loonies, sooner or later a modicum of their collective goofiness rubs off, if modicums are the things I’m thinking of.”

  “It is conceivable, sir,” said William. “Perhaps, sir, if you assent to Dr. Peericks’s wishes, and present yourself at Detroit Mercy, this mystery will be solved and all made clear.”

  I laughed. One of those hollow and mirthless ones.

  “My dear, naive ass,” I said, fishing an olive from my martini, “you can’t go about Detroit deliberately seeking the society of psychiatrists, Hospice Goons, and other members of the mental health fraternity. Or rather you can, but what a hell of a life.”

  I couldn’t explain to this officious prune that, even if Peericks truly had lost all memory of my sojourn at the hospice, Detroit Mercy still housed a squadron of nurses and Hospice Goons who, on catching the merest glimpse of Rhinnick Feynman, would waste no time in snatching up a man-sized net with a view to bunging me into a cell with padded walls. At the moment of going to press I retained the distinction of being counted among the residents of Detroit Mercy Hospice, and one who’d left that dungeon’s grounds without the usual precondition of having the words “Certified Sane” stamped on my forehead.

  “No,” I said, suppressing a shudder. “I cannot go. I cannot assent, as you put it, to the doctor’s wishes. I’ll have to give it a miss. They won’t get a smell of me at the hospice.”

  “But what about Mr. Zeus, sir?” said William. “He is, if one can trust this letter, suffering profoundly. And Doctor Peericks, a man who, by all accounts, is an eminent specialist, seems convinced that only you can ease his pain.”

  This held me. Indeed, it isn’t going too far to say that this flowery-tongued boll weevil had touched a nerve. Those who have read my character sketch will attest that Rhinnick, whatever the cost to self, does not readily turn away from a pal in trouble. And here was Zeus deeply immersed in the mulligatawny, showing signs of recovered memory but unable to clear the mists. I was on the horns of one of those things you get on the horns of. A dilemma, I think you call them. I was faced with a clear choice between presenting myself at the hospice, facing the risk of a longish period of captivity which would shackle my efforts to find Isaac Newton, or giving the whole enterprise a miss and leaving Zeus languishing in this blasted doctor’s care, thus cheesing any chance that Zeus’s brain would reboot itself and render its host able to string along with my primary quest. A difficult choice calculated to baffle even the most astute philosopher.

  But after a moment’s quiet reflection, there was no choice. I could never abandon Zeus. Whatever slings and arrows I might face, whatever hidden dangers might lurk ’round yon corner, I had to pitch in and help my pal.

  “William,” I said, “your simple, manly words have penetrated. You have jiggled the Feynman conscience. I will go to the hospice, as you suggest, though the prospect freezes the gizzard. The doctor will be there. Matron Bikerack will be there. Mistress Oan, director of Sharing Room activities, will be there. Plus any number of Hospice Goons. The very idea makes me feel as though I had a whole platoon of spiders marching up and down my spine. Tell me, William — what was it you said the other day about the way a fellow feels when he knows he’s jolly well got to do a thing but the more he thinks about it the less he wants to do it?”

  “Sir?”

  “It was when I mooted the notion of signing up for karaoke. Currents came into it, if I recall.”

  “Ah yes, sir,” he said. “And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.”

  “That’s the bunny,” I said. “One of your own?”

  “Yes, sir,” said William. “You are, if you do not mind the observation, letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’, like the poor cat i’ the adage.”

  “Very possibly,” I said, although I hadn’t a clue of how the cat element entered the conv. But the die was cast. I would go to the hospice, face the dangling sword of Damocles, and help Zeus. It was, I could see, the humane thing to do. And we Rhinnicks are sticklers for doing the humane thing.

  I hitched up my resolve, reminding myself that in life it is not loony doctors that matter, but the courage you bring to them.

  I laid my plan before William.

  “I leave this afternoon,” I said. “I shall bid farewell to the Hôtel de la Lune, ho for the open spaces, and make my way to the hospice, leaving not a rack behind, as I’ve heard you put it.”

  “I should remind you, sir,” said William, “that you are scheduled to participate in this evening’s luau feast. You had expressed considerable interest and seemed to be looking forward to it when last we spoke. Perhaps you might delay your departure for a day and enjoy one final evening at the waterfront.”

  “Once more unto the beach, as it were?”

  “Precisely, sir.”

  “No, William. I leave at once. For if it were done when t’were done, then t’were well it were done quickly.”

  “Well put, sir,” said William. “Indeed, I wonder if you would mind if I wrote that down, for future use.”

  “Not at all, William,” I said, tolerantly. “Now remind me — which shuttlebus do I take to get to the IPT station? It’s the second route on the B-line, isn’t it?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “2B, or not 2B? That is the question.”

  “I shall look into the matter, sir.”

  It was less than an hour later that I had packed the bags, donned the travel garb, uttered a few last-minute farewells, and left the Hôtel de la Lune, kicking the sand from the Feynman shoes and steeling myself for the coming storm, scarcely prepared for what I’d find at journey’s end.

  Chapter 2

  It was an easy passage from the Hôtel de la Lune to Detroit Mercy — not a journey to be compared with some of my fruitier expeditions. I mean to say, one need scarcely jog the memory to find the episode in which I, along with assorted hangers-on, escaped from this very hospice and made the trek to Vera�
�s emporium — Vera being a psychic pipsqueak who helped me out of a spot of bother. That trip, as has been recorded elsewhere, featured hot pursuits by Hospice Goons, a bloodthirsty Napoleon, police chases, armed drones, and other vicissitudes designed to blot the sunshine from my life. But the journey of present interest, as I was saying before I interrupted myself, featured nothing so goshawful. On the contrary, this trip involved no more than a proletarian ride on public transit, an uneventful whoosh through the Instantaneous Personal Transport — a teleportation thingummy widely known as ipt — and an easy jaunt along various roads and footpaths until I hitched up at the gates of Detroit Mercy.

  Even these gates — which I’d been dreading ever since I’d first digested Peericks’s note — proved no obstacle for Feynman. While they were, as expected, manned by a pair of Hospice Goons, these Goons failed altogether to raise the hue and cry on catching scent of yours truly. All they did was peep at my letter of invitation, grunt a pair of dismissive grunts, and bung me through the gates, all with the air of two Goons who saw Rhinnick Feynman as a stranger in a strange land and one who could easily be dismissed as small potatoes.

  And while you might expect me to chafe at going unrecognized while treading on my home turf, as the expression is, on this occasion I didn’t, what with one thing and another. I had heard the one about gift horses and mouths, and so I left the guards behind me without trying to prod their memories and kickstart the merry reunions.

  On entering the hospice I passed through the usual gauntlet of receptionists and administrative beazels, many of whom were known to me, but none of whom registered any trace of familiarity with the Feynman face. There wasn’t a hint of “ahoy there, Rhinnick,” nor anything along the lines of “rejoice with me, for I have found the lamb which was lost” — just a larger-than-average dose of “right this way sir, thank you for coming sir, the doctor will be right with you.” It wasn’t long before I found myself decanted into a chair in Peericks’s office, where I was left alone to wait for the doctor and pass the time in reflective mood.

  And I’ll tell you why my m. was r. Having made my way past the phalanx of forgetful hospice workers, if phalanx is the word I want, I suddenly found myself with time to chew on the rumminess of my newfound anonymity. I mean to say, Peericks’s letter had hinted that the doctor himself had come down with a spot of Rhinnick-centred amnesia, but recent evidence forced one to the conclusion that the affliction had now spread. As for the cause of this development — who could say? Was this some elaborate ruse designed to lure me back to the hospice with a false sense of security? Or might it be a recent revision by the Author, blotting out those earlier chapters of my life in which Detroit Mercy had been the Feynman abode? I think you’ll agree that this called for a deeper and more thorough investigation.

  It was while I sat musing on these matters that Dr. Peericks sauntered in and took his customary perch behind the desk.

  “Mr. Feynman,” he said, smiling.

  “Dr. Peericks,” I said cautiously, cocking an eyebrow and searching the chump for any sign that the well-dressed, debonair, and distinguished-looking visitor sitting before him had rung a bell or two, or tugged at the mental folders bearing the legend “Feynman, R.”

  “I can’t thank you enough for coming,” he said.

  “Think nothing of it.”

  “We’re so grateful that you’ve come,” he said, beaming in my direction and seeming a good deal more bonhomous than I remembered. “We were becoming desperate. I hoped you’d be willing to help us, but hadn’t imagined that you’d be able to make the trip so quickly. You must have left the moment my letter reached you. I—”

  “The pleasure is mine,” I said, falsifying the facts in order to push the thing along.

  “I trust your trip was comfortable,” he said, sticking to the cordialities with the stubbornness of a dog who has set his teeth on a favourite slipper. “Words can’t express our genuine gratitude.” And he carried on in this thanksgiving vein, polluting the atmosphere with copious “thank yous,” “pleased to meet yous,” and “we’re ever so gratefuls,” for the space of several ticks, allowing me ample scope to deploy the well-honed Feynman senses in search of any trace of reminiscence on the part of the louse before me. And the longer I subjected this psychiatric ass to my penetrating scrutiny, the more it became clear that, as his letter had foreshadowed, here sat a man to whom the undersigned was less familiar than summer snow.

  It was at this point, having had enough of the preliminary pourparlers, that I decided to broach the issue in that direct way of mine.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” I said.

  “Recognize you?” he said, taken aback. “Well, no. Should I? I — I don’t think we’ve ever met—”

  “Roommate of Brown?” I said. “Poster child for ego fabularis?”

  “I’m sorry?” said the fathead.

  “Devotee of the Author? Deliverer of ironical bumps on the head? Does none of this spark your memory?”

  The man looked at me befogged. And I don’t mind telling you that, now that the issue was laid bare, and the question of this sudden fad of blotting out all knowledge of Rhinnick Feynman was being mooted out in the open, I found myself nonplussed. I mean to say, one doesn’t insist on universal acclaim, but one does hope to evoke at least a pinch of the Auld Lang Syne spirit when meeting up with one’s former brain attendant. I mean, dash it. Here sat a medical man who had tootled around in the Feynman corpus collosum, seeking here a memory, there a delusion, all with a view to rendering some quackish diagnosis: a man, in short, who ought to have known my face as well as any. But here we were, vis-à-vis, as the Napoleons say, and this highly paid MD registered no more glimmers of recognition than a particularly forgetful goldfish who’s been neglecting his brain exercises.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Feynman,” said the bewildered pest, “I don’t understand what you—”

  “Perhaps this will prime the grey cells,” I said, reaching into an inner pocket with all the skill of a conjuror and fishing out what I hoped might serve as an aide-memoire.

  “Grrnmph,” said the aide-memoire, perhaps better known as Fenny — a loyal hamster in whose presence Peericks had wallowed on many occasions.

  Fenny’s advent didn’t go so frightfully well. Peericks made the face you might expect of a man confronted with unexpected hamsters, and a noise one generally makes upon accidentally swallowing a rather-too-elderly oyster. I took the hint and returned Fenny to store.

  “Mr. Feynman,” said Peericks, once composure regained its throne, “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but—”

  “Never mind,” I said, waving him off. “I must have been thinking of something else.”

  Here I let the matter drop. I mean, eager as I was to solve the riddle of my sudden loss of celebrity status, I reminded myself that I wasn’t so dashed eager for the fallout that might ensue should I be recognized as one who was awol from the grounds. Besides, I felt it was time to switch gears and get to the purpose of my visit, viz, the business of helping Zeus.

  “Now about this patient you mentioned,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Peericks, who, if I read him correctly, now eyed me with a spot of wariness. I had the impression he was mentally thumbing through his loony doctor’s handbook in search of a fitting diagnosis. “Perhaps I should tell you a bit about her case,” he added.

  “Her case?” I said, surprised.

  “Yes, my patient. She—”

  “You don’t mean ‘she,’” I said.

  “Excuse me?” queried the fathead.

  “You said ‘she.’”

  “I did say ‘she.’”

  “I should explain,” I said tolerantly, remembering I was dealing with a goof who seemed to have lost a few of his marbles. “You employed the feminine pronoun in reference to this patient. An understandable gaffe, conventional grammar not being eve
ryone’s cup of tea. Probably not even taught in loony doctor school. But rest assured that ‘he’ is the mot juste when chirping about a chump who identifies as male.”

  “The patient is female,” said the ass. “Her name is Oan.”

  I stared at the man wide-eyed, as the expression is. I don’t mind telling you this revelation had landed on me like a crisp left hook to the mazard.

  “What’s the matter?” said the doctor.

  “Did you say Oan?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Yes,” said the physician, “the patient’s name is ‘Oan.’ It’s spelled ‘Joan,’ but the J is silent and invisible.”

  “But you can’t mean Oan.”

  “I do mean Oan.”

  “A droopy bird with a spiritual air and a marked disposition to fiddle with crystals, Vision Boards, healing oils, and similar garbage?”

  “So you do know her!” said Peericks, leaning forward and making a face that had INTRIGUED written across it in large, capital letters.

  It now occurred to me that the cagey thing to do would be to hold my cards close to the Feynman chest. I mean to say, we had already weathered a few exchanges which surely had this medical fathead wondering whether my brain was up to factory specs, and I didn’t wish to add fuel to the fire. So rather than dishing up the full, sordid history of my entanglements with the crystal-toting weirdo under discussion, I simply said, “Oh, we’ve met,” and hoped this would fit the bill.

  Aiming to stave off any further cross-examination by the physician, I turned the tables by seeking particulars from him.

  “I understood her to be your employee,” I said.

  “She was. Oan served as our Sharing Room director for more than thirty years. She’s a great help to me and an asset to the hospice. Beloved, really. And she’s wonderful with the patients. She’s a great comfort to them.”

  I could have corrected the blighter there, pointing out that Oan was about as comforting as a kidney stone or a porcupine-quill blanket. And far from being beloved, she was pretty generally thought of as a blot on the hospice landscape and a fly in her patients’ ointment. But I kept these observations to myself. Better to let the babbling gasbag buzz along with his story.