Past Lives

By Cody Allen

Far from one another, two men embark on a quest, both physical and psychological, in an effort to understand. A visceral and beautiful journey through the eyes of ordinary people, 'Past Lives' spawns epic tragedy, as well as overwhelming love and empathy.
It asks whether we can truly forget something that weighs so heavily on the soul, and if so, can we be reborn?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Mar 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781490770611

Cody Allen

Born in 1990, Cody Allen grew up in Barrie, Ontario with a love for literature. He moved to British Columbia when he was twenty-one and began to write while living on a farm in the Similkameen Valley. Past Lives is his debut novel.

Book preview

PART ONE

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July 10, 2014

My feet sink into the quicksand seafloor, which grips them and refuses to let go. The floor itself is not as it should be, feeling as though there are hundreds of hands holding on. Their nails scratch and their fingers cling to my feet, holding me tight. They do not pull me down; they just hold me in that one spot. My upper body can move freely, so I reach down to claw away at the wet earth, but it is hopeless. The hands have me, and they will keep me here until I have served my sentence. My lungs should be on fire by this point, but breathing has lost its necessity. Sposa son Disprezzata is playing through a muffled record player off to my right, being operated by a thin man with a deathly pale face wearing a black suit; Death incarnate, garbed in his cape of crows, awaiting the feast. This song has always haunted me with such exquisite form, and now it is my fiendish lover, cooing into my ear while slitting my throat. With each note, a memory is displayed in front of me - past lovers, places I call home, sailing with my father; beautiful memories that I cherish. But when the record stops, the man in the black suit simply plays it again at a higher volume. The memories differ as the volume increases; flickering in detail, becoming faded photographs. The louder the song plays, the worse the memories become. Memories of people that I have stolen from, used, and hurt were flooding into me. Guilt, remorse, and regret swarm me now, filling my lungs. The record finishes and after a few moments the man in the black suit plays it again, but this time, she appears.

She is standing there, eyes closed, crying into her hands. She is wearing a dirty white dress and her dark brown hair covers what little part of her face her hands leave bare. She whispers, but I cannot make out what she is saying. I am trying to get closer; I need to hear her, but they will not let me go. The guilt has built up so much that it begins seeping out of my pores; I desperately try to keep it inside but I cannot contain it. It mixes with the sea and moves with the current - dancing around me; laughing at me. Just then, she removes her hands to look at me. Her eyes are filled with pain, the type of pain so vast that it has nowhere to go. She drifts at the bottom of the sea in her stained dress, waiting for someone to come along and help her understand. She stares at me with those sad, confused eyes and pushes it all through me. All of the guilt, remorse, and regret that dances wickedly around me transcends from anarchy to visceral form - a scorpion that crawls into my ear, penetrating my brain. It uses its sharp claws to lay claim, and at the center it sleeps and waits. When its sting becomes too much to bear, she calls to me.

‘Please… leave this place…’

Then she just drifts away, leaving me with my pain and my prison.

How can I leave…

I awake in a panic - drenched in sweat atop a lumpy single bed with a soaked through cotton sheet and a pillow worn thin and tattered, most likely stuffed with an old sweater. I can see my silhouette lying on the sheets, sleeping soundly. Every morning since I can remember I have woken up drenched in sweat and in a complete panic. It is the same dream - the same nightmare - every night; not simply one or the other, rather an amalgamation of the two. I dream of an event which never happened to me, but still I feel the pain. I feel the burning, the terror, the agony; I also feel the regret and the guilt, which are far worse than any physical discomfort. There is colossal, unmotivated guilt that washes over me with every shift of the current, and by the time I wake up I am reduced to something other than myself. A fragment that concentrates the pain.

Every morning I scan my memories, searching through every forgotten volume and peeking under every rotting floorboard, but I find nothing. The searching itself only solidifies the reality that I simply do not know why this is happening to me. Impotence and futility are cancers; beginning as a note, but expanding into a song that you sing to yourself as you try to fall asleep, never knowing who put the melody into your head in the first place. ‘You’ll never find out, what you’re lookin’ for. You scream and you shout, but you’ll never find what you’re lookin’ for!’

The bed begins to feel uncomfortable against my cooling skin, so I sit up to stretch my sore, damp limbs and pull myself out of bed; grabbing my clothes and backpack on the way out the door. I walk down a brightly-lit wood framed hallway with four rooms on either side, as well as a single bathroom for all to share. The decor of hand-crafted vases and terrible paintings screams hostel. I go into the bathroom and turn on the taps to use the shower and am greeted by several loud groans, followed by a few quick bursts of water that fizzle into a constant, reluctant drip - something to be expected in a place like this. When you choose to spend the night in cheap places, certain luxuries are diminished.

As far back as I can recall I have been staying somewhere different every night; that way every morning is like Christmas for loners. A new city, a new country, a new continent; anything is better than staying in one place for too long. On the wall heading to the lobby there is a wooden sign advertising a backpacker’s hostel just outside of Nelson - a small, scenic town in south-eastern British Columbia. I vaguely remember staying here one night many years ago, perhaps with an old girlfriend, but I can’t place when that was. I must have been drinking a lot at the time. Normally I make a point of avoiding places that I already have memories in. The best memories come from all around the world, in a place you have never been with people you have never met; people whom you will never get to know. So then why have I come back here?

When I go to the front desk to check out, I am greeted by a beautiful young woman with wide, charismatic green eyes, dark brown hair, and of a slightly tanned complexion. She smiles pleasantly as she speaks, telling me that her name is Tracey and that she is the manager. Customer service is certainly a requirement when you manage a hostel, so she is probably just going through the motions, but as I turn to leave she smiles and wishes me a good day. That smile… it is genuine. It is not the smile that you often see adorning the face of an overworked woman; it is sincere and warm. It is difficult to remember the last time a woman smiled at me like that, or even the last time I really noticed a woman.

I cannot think of anything to say, so I awkwardly turn and walk out without replying, finding the image of her smile burned into my mind. I close my eyes and her smile is carved into my eyelids. My eyes look right into hers, and hers into mine.

I get into my car, a second hand Buick, and leave the parking lot of the hostel.

Coming to this town twice was a bad idea. Nothing good can come from revisiting memories.

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The door opens in a dark room, and a man dressed as a janitor walks in and turns on the light. In stages beginning at the door, panels of beautiful golden light turn on, revealing a massive dome structure with ceilings and walls so vast they are impossible to make out. To his left he finds a two-wheel dolly cart that he moves toward a mountain of paperwork. He walks past the pile and finds stacks of millions of flattened boxes, which he then carries over to the pile. He has been assigned his task, and he will not falter.

The Janitor is a proud, but tired man of sixty four years; nearly bald, with long gray whiskers for a beard. His sharp cheekbones stretch the skin of his face, past his bright blue eyes that contradict the sullen expression he wears. His chin sags more with age, and his orbital bags puff like blisters, but his wife still maintains that he is very handsome. He smokes cigarettes constantly, does not eat as often as he should, and though he is tired, he refuses to sleep until his daily task is complete. He puts on a dusty old pair of reading glasses and begins sifting through the paper, searching for anything that is of use to him. When he finds something relevant, he places it neatly in a pile based on what it concerns, and when it took place. He searches through readings, and files them immaculately, never once stopping. When he has a sufficient amount of paper in a stack, he places them into a file, labels it, and then places it into a cardboard box, which is dated itself.

Satisfied with what he has collected, he leaves the boxes and walks toward a pallet of supplies for constructing shelves. On the way, his gaze catches a pile of what looks like DVDs. The Janitor curiously walks toward the pile and begins to look through them. They have titles: ‘Cottage Life’, ‘Sushi Date’, ‘Smoking on the Bench’, ‘Sex in the Bathroom’, ‘The Cabin’. These all seem to be movies; there are no descriptions on the back, but there are pictures to indicate plot and setting. They seem to all be shot from a first-person camera perspective, as if the viewer is the main character.

Dismissing this for the matter-at-hand, he walks to the shelving supplies to begin their construction. They are simple snap-together shelves, but when he connects the boards together, the cheap plywood mysteriously changes composition and colour, revealing elegant mahogany masterpieces. The Janitor walks back to the boxes of files and begins to stack them onto the dolly cart and move them toward the shelves. He places each box chronologically and thematically on the shelves, and when they make contact with the wood, they turn to maple wood crates, sanded and inscribed, with the files now written in calligraphy font on rich fibred wood-pulp paper.

He flicks open his pocket watch - constantly forgetting that time is no longer a factor here. He always hated that; he never felt a part of this new world when he could not even check the time. He was much happier before, when the library was fully operational and everything was on schedule. The place was bustling with analytical thought and creativity, then all of a sudden - nothing. The shelves were pulled down, and all of the paperwork was thrown into a pile and mixed up. Perhaps becoming nostalgic, he decides that it is the right time to furnish the place a bit, so he walks toward a section of the hangar containing sets of elaborate furniture. He looks over the selection, choosing a small, dark-stained table, an aged brass reading lamp, and a straight-backed wooden chair; positioning them directly in line with the center of the shelves, about three meters from the door. He has been assigned his task, but he feels that the current tenant will be pleased with this arrangement.

When his work is finished, The Janitor walks back to the pile of DVDs, choosing one entitled ‘The Room’. He inserts the DVD into the player and presses play. The movie begins, and he sees a hand pushed against the wall, close enough to be his own. He immediately receives a strong sense of empathy for the character involved. He feels as though the character is in pain, and he wants to reach out and help him but he cannot. The Janitor knows that the character is male because he is thinking in a male voice. Why can he hear his thoughts? No sound is coming from the speakers; instead it is as if the sound is happening around him. The sound amplifies, and the empathy intensifies. The film takes hold of his mind, making him watch.

The man does not know what to do, he seems to be cursed with a decision he either has made or has to make very soon. It is hard to fathom what could weigh so heavily on the conscience, and the conflict itself is so rapid that it is impossible to determine what the choices are. This man sits alone in this dark, dreary room for months, and for what?

To escape something.

To escape the decision that has already been made.

He rarely moves; occasionally making exceptions to smoke cigarettes, and to eat food and drink water when his body can take no more. He does not accept the pain as anything but necessary for his fate, and he encourages it at every opportunity.

This is a cursed man that will never know another moment of peace until the day he dies. And even then, who knows? If there is life after death, it is a terrifying thought for those damned, wicked souls that are hopelessly clinging to their last moments of life. He shudders at the thought, and inhales the nicotine deep into his lungs, exhaling it through his nostrils like an angry bull in winter.

He looks down at his arms, which are covered in both scarred and freshly scabbed lacerations that resemble numbered ticks. One through five; four vertical lines, with a diagonal line through the middle. His arms are covered in sets of five. Every time he tries to think about what happened he becomes paralyzed with guilt and shuts down, adding a tick to his arm. He has tried a few hundred times already, all attempts proving unsuccessful.

What is so bad that someone would rather cut their own arm than see?

When a tragedy first occurs, that is when you are free from the pain. You know how and why it happened, but the pain is something that comes after. Sometimes, something happens that is so terrible that you flood your system with so much pain that it is forced to feel and you begin to forget what really happened. Details become blurry and tuned to your preference, excuses become reality, and you are suddenly the victim.

By the time one goes from culprit to victim, the story has been pressed and manipulated into something other than the truth.

This must be the final stage of the transformation, when the villain forsakes everything and chooses to live a life apart from this one. He has been sitting in this room for so long that he has trouble recognizing anything else.

His arms are red and swollen, pulsing with pain and possible infection. The pain is good, that means that the transformation has already begun.

Can we be reborn?

Can we truly wipe the slate clean of something that we cannot hide from any longer?

After a few minutes of deep thought, he looks up to see a wall that he does not recognize. Surely, this is the wall that he has been staring at for the last six months, but everything about it is foreign to him. He walks out of the dark room, down the hallway, and out into the street into a display of utter majesty; a rising sun that he has not seen in so long that it floods into him, refreshing his soul.

He cannot remember why he was in that house, or why his arm is covered in painful wounds, all he knows is that he needs to get out of this town as soon as possible. He gets into a gray Buick LeSabre with a dented hood and starts the engine, driving aimlessly along with a new sun.

After the movie is finished, The Janitor sits in the wooden chair for a while, contemplating what he just saw. Not just saw. What he felt. This is not a movie, this is a memory; this is documentation of a man on the verge of death, combating whatever he fears with ignorance and denial.

Who is this man - and what is so horrible that he refuses to face it? When the man walked out of the house, The Janitor could feel that he changed. His soul became empty; his thoughts were focused, but mundane.

He became something else entirely.

He was reborn.

July 21, 2010

It is only forty feet down, but the vertical cliff is settled above a bed of jagged sandstone and hardened granite; a fall from this height would spell almost certain death.

I am scaling a series of jutting rock and eroded cracks that embroider a massive boulder, allowing access to a view unlike any other around here. The finger and toe grips are worn from overuse, but it is a fairly safe climb. It is about sixty feet from base to summit, followed by a five minute hike along a mossy creek to a natural spring that is glacially fed from a section of the Rocky Mountains. Approaching the source, the stream widens, being met with little resistance by several large stones, smoothed and polished by the constant graze of the brook. The creek is fed by an initial waterfall about eighty feet high, but the water pressure in the subsidiary fall is low enough that one can scale up the side without much risk.

Up above the waterfall sits an oasis - a beautiful spring, sprouting with lush, green flora of all variety, supple and rich from the moist environment. There are two large boulders that up to twenty people can lie on comfortably, as well as a small cave that is hidden away in the wall. It is called the ‘Cave of Perpetual Rain’, because water is glacially fed down to a stream that follows a corrosion tunnel that empties above the cave entrance, appearing as rain.

Sitting in the cave, with my eyes closed and my mind light, all is well with the world. Regardless of external turmoil, there is peace and serenity in absolute silence. I discovered this place one day while climbing about three years ago; I was scaling up to find good vantage points when I heard the sound of the waterfall, and when I climbed above it, I discovered this paradise. Since that day, I have camped out here for weeks at a time, using this place as a sort of safe haven.

A place to get away from it all; sitting peacefully in my cave, out of the rain. This particular day was unlike any other to begin with - I woke up in the same sweaty sheets, got in the same rusty car, and drove to the same meaningless grocery store job that I had been working at for the past three years. I drove all the way to work as usual, stopping in the parking lot. I sat in my car for a few minutes, paralyzed, suddenly scared to death of walking in those doors. The monotony is so horrible; I knew a place like that would be the death of me. So I shouted, ‘I’m not going to be the one who dies in a piece of shit like this,’ triumphantly, and to myself. I began driving far, far away; to a place where the lights and the elevator music and the relentless speaker announcements are reduced to an idea of what used to be, being further forgotten with each rolling kilometer.

Today is the day that I change my life. I am not satisfied with what the people of the world have shown me; they show mere aspects of the truth, while I crave the full view! So I will discard my old life, like a layer of dead skin, shaking it off of my leg. I will carve my own path through a new world, one that is exciting and undiscovered, and I will be free to go where I please. That is when I decided to go home, pack a multi-night camp bag, and rush out