Regress

I have been referred by a friend to a past life regression specialist. I tell her I’m uncomfortable with seers and mystics, with visions of shuffling cards and snake eyes. She sends me directions to his apartment and I am urged by some force to attend. I walk up to the second floor. I imagine curtains and a crystal ball, beads hanging from the doorway. A man greets me with an
outstretched hand, leads me to a small room with smooth white couches, fig trees pressed against the large windows. He points to a pillow on the floor and I sit. He kneels on the rug and presses both palms to my forehead. For a moment I am tense, but succumb when he speaks from the trance and taps the details of a life I don’t remember.

You were a baby. You were ill. You were loved. You lived near the sea. You were very poor. You had a mother with long hair. You had a fisherman father. You watched the cormorants dive from his boat. You grew. You fished. You were very poor. You saw many dawns. You fell in love. You were a husband. Your father died. You were a father. You had a donkey. Your mother died. You kept pieces of her hair. You were ill. You were violent. You fished well. You did not worship. You fell in love. You had more children. You had a dog. You saw the ocean each day. You plunged into your wife and into many others. You fed the children fish. You fed the dog fish. You were ill. You were a grandfather. You played dice with cracked ivory. You were horrible to women. You were very poor. You were very ill. You made money on fish. You lost money on cards. You were scared. You were violent. You were loved. You held your grandchildren as they slipped into life and held your fish as they slipped out of life and the oil made slick your hands and hair and sweat dripped down over your eyes as you kept watch over the sun creeping down the sky at the base of that cruel celestial clock—as relentless as the hard emerald eyes of the cormorant as it plummets deep into the sea.

Although I ask repeatedly, he does not tell me how I died.

I take the lake drive home. I wonder what will be said about this life many lives ahead, when I am sitting in that future room with a future seer who knows that I, whoever I am, in one life met a man who told me details of a past I could not access. I wonder if that future self will know that when I left his apartment I looked beyond the traffic toward the lake and saw nothing spectacular about the gathered gulls floating, the white raft along the pier where men sat on buckets and swung their poles in wide, deliberate arcs.

Annie Raab

Annie Raab writes fiction, essays, and art criticism. She lives in Milwaukee, partly on a sailboat.