Taina voda

I have early memories, from before the age of two, of feeling deep anger – a fury at having been born at all. My mother told me that as a baby I cried constantly, so much that I had to be operated on for a double hernia. I remember it faintly. Even the doctor, she said, was struck by how much I cried. But I was angry, and I had no other way to express it.

From two until four or five, I was convinced that this whole life, lived in such a frail body, was a mistake. I was so convinced that I decided to correct the error myself and end this life with a knife. One winter day I stayed outside for two hours in almost no clothes, hoping the cold would put me to sleep, that it might be enough to die. It wasn’t cold enough.

I remember sitting in the garden as the tulips opened their cups, stroking my leg and thinking how weak and useless it was. I felt so sad. In my mind I shouted, “YOU must tell me why I’m here! If you don’t, I will end this body and find you on the other side.” I still associate tulips with sadness and anger.

That night I had a dream that would haunt me for the rest of my life. When I woke, I knew it had not been a dream.

I found myself crossing through a region of tremendous noise – like chains dragging, or an old train roaring past my ear. Then I was in a quiet, empty grey space, suspended midair. I was no longer a child. I felt I knew this place, though the grey created an illusion of depth that wasn’t real. Ahead of me I saw the soft glow of a giant sphere, like a sun, rotating slowly. From its base a thread extended, holding all my lives.

My heart leapt with joy and I rushed toward it. This must be God! I will finally merge with Him! Something stopped me. He stopped me. I couldn’t see him, but I felt his presence beside me – someone I knew from before, though I couldn’t remember his name.

“This is not God,” the presence said.

If this thing wasn’t God, I thought, then he must be whatever contained the sphere – the grey itself? I rushed toward the depth. I hit a wall. It had only looked like depth, in truth it was firm and would not let me through. I understood then that I lacked the senses to truly see, that this place was borrowing images from my own mind to show me a reality I couldn’t otherwise grasp.

I turned around, and my suspicion was confirmed. The thread from the sphere drew closer, and I saw it was not a thread at all but a long line of paintings, stacked one beside the other. All my lives, lined up. Each painting was a portrait of a person bearing the main sin of that life and the manner of his or her death, the sin sitting inside the frame.

My eyes stopped on a Frenchman who had died sometime in the eighteenth century – greedy, dead in his sleep, gripped by fear for his money. Another painting showed an American man riding one of the first trains through the country, his sin was obsessive inventiveness, he was shot by a rival. I felt little for either of them. I recognized them, but I was only glad it was over.

“You promised it would be over!” I turned to the presence. Now I remembered everything. I remembered being brought before another sphere – the Judge. The Judge had found me guilty. In one earlier life I had been a soldier somewhere in what is now the Middle East. I could see my skin shining with sweat under the sun as I cut down my rivals, one after another, battle after battle. I was magnificent. I loved it, and I could still feel it even there. No more weak bodies – I remembered the strength, the valor, the drunkenness of exaltation that came with killing and victory. So drunk on it that I declared in my heart, “There is no God! No one can judge me!” For that declaration, and for the pleasure I took in killing, my soul was brought before the Judge and this life was singled out as the worst one.

I pleaded guilty. The Judge pronounced his sentence: three lives of utter pain. If I endured all three, I would be free. And I lived through them. I glanced toward the far end of the line of paintings – there they were. I pointed them out to the presence. “I did everything you asked, didn’t I? I took it all. I never questioned. I suffered through every bit of it. The last time I died was the only moment in this whole life I felt happy – the moment of death itself. Wasn’t that enough? You promised me.”

It was enough, the presence confirmed, and showed me how that portion of the thread had been wiped clean. No more sin there – but there was more still to face. He gestured to my left, and my heart dropped into my stomach. What I saw made me step back in terror: black clouds of enormous size, sweeping in different directions, and a giant serpent flying among them.

“You must overcome this,” said the presence.

“No,” I said. “It can’t be done. It isn’t possible.”

“There is a way.”

No, I thought, it’s not possible – I don’t even know where to begin. I thought of the priests and scribes from my life as a soldier, and how I had never understood a word of what they taught. I searched through all my lives for anything that might help and found nothing. I regretted, now, never having shown the slightest interest. I found strong opinions on a thousand unimportant things, but not a single memory of any real understanding of the spiritual life. At the center of the thread, the paintings began to accelerate.

“This is the coming of Christ, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes,” said the presence. “His arrival accelerated the work of the Sphere.”

I regretted never having had the chance to cross his path in any of my lives. I wondered whether, at his second coming, I might at least be permitted to see him – nothing more, of course, the rest being far above my station.

“No,” the presence said, almost annoyed. “It is too far in the future, and…” he made me understand, without needing more words, that I was not at that level to ask for such things.

I exhaled, and the weight of my question settled back on me.

“Then why did you give me this body?” I asked. “How am I meant to accomplish this in the body of a woman?”

I hadn’t been born a woman in a long time. My second life of utter pain had been as a woman, but I had never truly grown used to being one – my task there had been only to endure the pain, not to understand her. She died during a mass rape.

“It can be done in the body of a woman,” the presence said, and showed me the final painting. Of me.

There, my soul – still knowing the young child I was – saw for the first time the image of the woman I would become. I saw myself, and I didn’t like what I saw. The picture showed a woman with longer, darker hair and austere features. She lacks warmth, I thought, nothing like the frail child with dark hazelnut hair that I was now. In the painting I saw her die by execution, a crowd calling out her name.

Then, suddenly, I looked back to the Sphere. A new thread had emerged from the grey depths and was approaching its top. “Watch what happens to a soul that reaches the end of its journey without finding the way,” said the presence. The thread pierced the top of the Sphere and disappeared inside. There it bounced against the inner walls again and again, changing direction each time. Each point it struck aligned, from where I stood, into the shape of a figure. Each strike consumed the sins held in the paintings – every kind of sin, every feeling, an entire life swallowed whole. In the end, nothing was left.

I shivered with fear. No one had told me this could happen. We were supposed to be immortal.

“If you reach the end of the journey and have not found the way, this will be your fate,” said the presence.

“They ate it!” I cried, unable to believe what I had just seen.

Then the Sphere reversed its rotation.

“Quick,” the voice said, “you must go back – you won’t survive if you are seen.”

But it was too late. I had already been seen. The reversal turned the “points” toward me, and each one settled into place along the walls of the Sphere. Together they formed a single figure, and it looked at me – with hostility. I looked back.

The presence pushed me downward, and I began falling through endless circles, the same roar of dragging chains, the same sound of a passing train. But in that instant, as I fell, I looked back at it, and I saw. It was alive. It bore the image of a man. I felt its gaze lock onto mine hostile and unforgiving, but I had the strange impression that it was “just” a man.

Then I fell further, and confusion settled over my thoughts in layers. My mind slowed, thinking itself became difficult, as though I were losing my intelligence. What is this? I thought. How can our time, our lives, come from a Sphere? What is this thing – is it a place, a machine, is it alive? I couldn’t find the word for being.

“Find the Music of the Spheres!” the presence called from above as I fell. “The key is there!”

But what music? I had heard none. What was this thing? What was I supposed to do?

I woke as if in thick jelly, my arms stretched into the dark of the night as though I were still falling. Fear had replaced anger – fear and exhaustion. I felt as if I had run for hours under a blazing sun, only to reach the finish line and find it was merely the start of another race, one I would have to run without rest, without a map, alone, under threat of losing my life. I felt so disoriented and afraid that I cried myself back to sleep. That feeling of dread has stayed with me my whole life.

The next morning, I began my work.