from Chapter Five

She reached up and put her hands on my shoulders. “Are you glad to be back? Does it matter? I mean--” She shook her head quickly. It was almost a shudder. I could see the glisten of tears in her eyes. “--is this where you prefer to be?”

“Yes,” I said, knowing it was the only thing I could say. I could not admit to her I was also sorry to have left the other life. But perhaps, in telling her about it, I could bring her into it with me. I took her by the arm, leading her back into the living room.

“Did he hypnotize you? Is that how he did it?”

“No, he helped me through his breathing techniques. Somehow, he seemed able to enter that same state with me. All through it, I could feel him alongside me. After a time, when I became aware of the room again and the sound of his voice, I also remembered images of another life. And a strange name that I couldn’t pronounce. I asked him what had happened.”

“We found your parallel self,” Thongden said. “The financier.”

“With a strange name?”

“I suppose you could call it strange. The name was Bazenrüd. Hungarian, actually.”

“And this Bazenrüd, is me?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then--?”

“If you try to think of this other personality along a time track, as someone you might have been in the past, then you’d have no trouble understanding what a reincarnational personality is? Am I correct?”

“I suppose so. Somebody I once was, but not me. Although talents acquired in an earlier life can sometimes show echoes in my present one?”

“That’s the commonly accepted notion. Except that in reality, all these so-called past lives, and you’ll have to include future lives as well, are all going on at once.”

I nodded. “A little hard to grasp, but--” And then a sudden irruption of memory trapped my attention. “--Bazenrüd, I remember that name now. There was an article I picked up in a magazine at the dentist’s, maybe ten, twelve years ago. Way back. But as I recall it, this fellow was sort of a shady arms dealer? Very wealthy? Very secretive? Very powerful? Lived a kind of mysterious underground life?” I grew excited, my voice rising a little higher with each burst of returning memory.

“Mostly correct. Except for the arms dealer. What he was, or is, is a financier. Never dealt in arms at all. But by getting to know him, you might be able to do a better job dealing with your own finances.”

“How do I do that? And where do your plans come into it? I’m not forgetting that part of it.”

“So many questions,” Thongden said. “But you don’t really have to do anything.”

“About becoming Bazenrüd?”

“No, I meant about my problem. It will happen by itself.”

“There’s someone out to get rid of you, you tell me, and you send me back there, and then you say I don’t have to do anything? How do I even find this would-be assassin?”

“It will happen,” Thongden said. “It’s not a thing like knowledge. It has more to do with the way events are constructed. There’s the aspect of grace, and there’s the dark side. A kind of split series of space-time events. You and I are obviously here for the purpose of uniting a specific group of space-time events. It is why we have crossed at this point, and why you have drawn this particular timeline. You are here to help me. Through your own financial problem.” He paused, studied me for a moment as though to see how well all this was going down, then proceeded: “Every possible outcome can occur. The one you experienced thirteen years from now does not disappear, because you have created the timeline that connects it to this present. But it’s no more real than the one you can help us create now. All planes of being are possible. Without affecting the plane you find yourself on in this moment, you can still help bring about that other possibility.”

Now he had really lost me. “What other possibility?” I said. Thongden made me sit in the big chair facing his desk. He brought his face close to mine as though through some force of his own being he could help me digest what he was saying. “In the multi-layered universe, as it really exists,” he explained carefully, “there are clumps of events that belong together, that are related in a kind of non-causal grouping, their connection having to do with value and meaning rather than material events. And that is why, if you pursue your own financial goals, you will bring everything else along with you.”

“You’re sure of that?” I said.

“Of course not. I’m not omniscient.”

“Then why?”

“Because if you don’t do it,” he said, “you’ll wind up a pauper in your final years. That’s guaranteed.”

“And you’ll be dead?”

“Death cannot be in my experience. But I can certainly be dissolved.”

“That’s what they’re working on?”

“According to Nelson Rimpoche.”

“So our only choice, then, is Bazenrüd?”

“Which, even though it’s not guaranteed, is a better choice than doing nothing. Wouldn’t you agree?” he finished, fixing me with his familiar craggy smile.

He started me on it with his customary technique of nadi-sudi. I felt it going on for a long time. Until . . . there I was sitting in a familiar chair, looking out a window. And exactly as we always presume a personal history in dreams, I knew exactly who I was, how I had gotten where I was, what I was doing at that moment. But I was not Alvin Schwartz. I wasn’t Bazenrüd either. My name was Edward Horgan and I had never heard of Bazenrüd.