The Book of Consequences: A Novel

By Alastair Sharp

Mektoub, they say in Arabic. It is written.
Whatever you think, whatever you say, whatever you do, it has a consequence.
And although we may not be aware of them, perhaps there is someone witnessing the whole thing. Not just witnessing but taking note to be entered into the Book of Consequences, the record of everything that has ever taken place.
To be a witness, according to some philosophies, you have to have transcended the seemingly endless go-round of life and death. Stepping off that treadmill, it is said, you can sit back and watch others still journeying on. In a state of detachment, you assume the role of recording what is significant.
Lives begin. Souls take on bodies yet again and try to fulfill their souls intentions yet again. Some make it, some do not.
It is all written.
In different parts of the world, each seemingly disconnected, individuals play out their lives.
A writer in New Zealand and his homeless muse, a widow in Adelaide, a fingerless guitarist, two American academics, a Spanish saint, a gifted child in Amsterdam, an elderly Lebanese shoemaker, an Australian jihadist, and a drifting orphan who learns to hate the French. What do they all have in common? Nothing, it seems, except for the one who watches them all and annotates what is worth recording.
And yet there is something moresomething that not even the notetaker can foresee.
Everything has consequences.
As they say, it is written.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532051678

Alastair Sharp

Alastair Sharp is an Australian living in Bordeaux France and so his writing forms a bridge between those two very different worlds. A lifelong career in writing has drawn him inexorably towards the human pursuit of meaning in life. Although his novels are not explicitly spiritual in nature, his writing constantly alludes to the innate desire we all have, no matter how latent it might be, to know more about who we are and why we find ourselves where we are and doing what we do.

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The Book of Consequences

A NOVEL

Copyright © 2018 Alastair Sharp.

Photographer Walker Jones

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-5166-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-5167-8 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 06/20/2018

CONTENTS

The Observatory1

Arnold and Jade

Heather and Grace

Colin and Giselle

The Portfolio

Johannis and Musa

Craig and Iskandar

Convergence

Author’s Notes

For Joyce.

And for Moray

Who are both probably observing,

but not necessarily agreeing on what they see.

THE OBSERVATORY

The Observatory

It is written.

In many of the world’s religions and cultures, they say: It is written.

In Arabic Mektoub explains just about everything.

This is how many people in the world learn to accept what would otherwise be inexplicable.

And it is true, everything is indeed written.

I can attest to that, because I am one of those whose job it is to write.

Nothing is missed.

From where I sit, I observe.

What I observe is written.

There are many of us in the Observatory.

We are the watchers of human kind, objective chroniclers.

Through us and by us, it is written.

Or you could say we are here because it needs to be written.

Before I found myself here, I was like you. I lived out my allotted life, my allotted lives in fact. One after another. I don’t exactly remember what I did in all those lives, but I know that I was different people in different places at different times and, like all living beings, I did things. As we all have. It went in cycles, one lifetme at a time, one after the other. I was born over and over. I enacted certain roles, so many roles. And at the end of each one, I died.

Then it all started again. And again.

Now, at last, that’s all finished.

My rôle here is singular.

I watch and I take note.

And so it is written.

This place, where we watchers, we writers sit, is the Observatory. Of course it is not a physical place. Here, evolved souls exist in a timeless, undifferentiated state of witnessing. We have no bodies any more. We left those behind, which quite frankly is a relief. Being body-less allows us to be at peace. We exist unfettered by the ties that make earthly life such a struggle.

In a very real sense now we have neither a past nor a future. That too comes as a relief. Here, unrestricted by time, floating in the endless present, our existence is almost completely pure. There is no need for food, for drink, for sleep, even for thought. Our only focus is on our portfolios, and as we also have no need to judge or be judged, it all flows along very harmoniously.

You may ask why I used the word almost. Well that is the nature of it. There is another realm even more elevated than here, and that realm is completely pure. Simply put, once we have let go of the very last traces of being-ness, we, each of us in our own time, will ascend to completion. The portfolio we currently hold will no longer be part of us, it will pass to another as the endless chronicle of lives lived continues. From time to time I am aware that some soul or another, having written and observed what was required, has quietly dissolved and risen. They are no longer required even to observe. I don’t miss them. I will no doubt join them myself, when I am ready.

Where is God in all this, you might ask. It all depends I suppose, on your way of thinking. After we get past the thorny question of what do we mean by God, and if we assume that most concepts boil down to roughly the same thing, we are left with the basic sense that there is something at the core of it all. Call it God, if that helps. So is God behind all this?

Are we doing God’s work here? Why would God be interested in such detailed bookkeeping? Who knows? Some of us have brought strong convictions about the nature of God into this higher realm and those who hold onto those convictions are certain God is in the vicinity. They tend to believe that God cares. In those moments when I find myself in communion with some of them, I hear how they sense the worth of what they’re doing, as being on behalf of God. Others, who don’t tend to worry about God, see it as being of service to the souls themselves. It doesn’t really bother me much, one way or the other. That’s what we do.

I suppose God is what you make of him, or her.

What I have noticed is that on the earthly plane, God gets all sorts of reputations, most of it probably undeserved. There is both blame and praise. And yet strangely, the focus on God is one of the few mind states that seems to transcend with us, when so much else drops away. I count myself lucky, in that I don’t seem to have held onto much conviction of that sort at all.

I am inclined to think that once I attain the uppermost of all the different realms, maybe I will find out the truth of it all.

Or not.

Maybe it won’t matter.

In the meantime, the portfolio that I was assigned, when I arrived here in the Observatory, contains a fascinating mix of people. It is not a physical thing, this portfolio, but more like a channel of communication. It opens to reveal certain souls and I am witness to them as they go about their lives, as they do things, learn things, fail at things and try again. From inception to exception, incarnation to exit, my rôle is to record whatever is significant and trajectory-changing in the soul log. When I say it is written, this of course does not refer to anything physical either. A notation is simply a stored piece of information. When something is noted, it then exists as a record. Data collection on a cosmic scale.

In between these seminal moments, those which are annotated, observation continues as I go on watching. If I wish, I can go to back-check, in the Book of Consequences, to see where a certain soul came from or what were the determining factors for their current behaviour, but I don’t do that so often. While most of what people do comes from some form of already acquired consequential debt, some of what has previously taken place is no longer relevent in the great scheme of things.

Sometimes peoples’ actions create new and unprecedented consequences.

Whatever is recorded now is that which is likely to have a significant consequence.

People do things and what they do has consequence.

Every little thing you do does have a consequence of some kind.

Nothing is totally inconsequential.

Obviously I was in that condition before I got here and there was certainly someone who observed and made notes in the soul log ascribed to me. It is probably why I am here. No doubt in fact. It is why I am here. We watchers, we writers, and there are many of us, have made some kind of significant progress and this is our reward. Whatever we did, whether we were aware of it or not, got us off the circular treadmill. We must have done something right. Or maybe a whole string of right actions. Who knows for certain. I have no recall of that now and I don’t have any desire to remember any of it. Being here is enough, more than enough, to make me feel very content. There is no need to judge who or what I was. That much is finished.

And now, being here and watching the subjects of my portfolio, I don’t get to judge their actions. Why would I want to? I can’t really be sure what is a good action or a bad one in itself anyway. Every action has a consequence, as I have said. Whether it is important or marginally insignificant, I only record what makes a some kind of shift in their balance sheet. It is that shift that really makes the difference. That’s what we watchers are looking for. And how do we tell what is significant? We see it, we sense its relevenece and we record it. Sometimes it is subtle, barely discernible but at other times it is a great seismic alteration, where tectonic plates of a person’s life rise and shift at right angles, vast tsunamis of tragedy or good fortune inundate placid plateaus of existence. For some there are black holes that swallow the known universe. For others, they are born into mundane lives that maunder on until they stop, almost without being noticed. Sometimes a soul needs a break from high drama.

And every now and then someone suddenly wakes up to the true nature of their existence, and recognising their true identity, they are released.

The soul logs in which we make our entries become part of the great Book of Consequences. This is the ultimate record, an entire library, detailing everything that has ever taken place, absolutely everything. In the Book of Consequences, every soul that has ever existed is recorded. Only when that soul finally transcends, do the entries conclude. The book on you is closed.

When you transcend, you become a watcher of others. A chronicler. Who assigns us our given portfolio is a total mystery. We simply find ourselves here, and when we do, we become aware of our new state of being and in that awareness we find ourselves connected to certain souls, still circulating on the treadmill. There is no training, no orientation, we simply become the conduits of observation and through us what is written is written.

So I observe, without putting any judgement on it. Even if I choose to make judgements, it would not make the slightest difference anyway, because what I record, as far as I can tell, does not effect the doer of the action. I simply watch detachedly and as I watch, people do things. I take notes.

One of my subjects is a writer of novels. I have access to everything about him. He’s sixty years old and lives in a small iron-roofed cottage in a remote town that was once the site of a thriving tin mine in New Zealand. Blackball hides in perpetually misted hills, inland from the west coast of the South Island. He bought the house for ten dollars, when his then wife left with the perpetually bare-chested Swedish carpenter who had rebuilt his writing studio. That was back in Wellington and he was writing mindless advertising copy. His wife took possession of most of what he thought he then valued and when he saw the advertisement for the ten dollar cottages in Blackball, he recognised it was an invitation to sever all ties. The government of New Zealand back then, in the early nineteen eighties, decided to save Blackball from extinction, the tin mines long exhausted, by enticing young couples, or whoever was naive or desperate enough to think they could live there, with the cheapest housing they would ever be able to own. He left the rat-race of the nation’s capital and all traces of his previous existence. He packed whatever took his fancy, of what little his wife had left him, into his decrepit Renault and went south. He became a serious writer and is now something of a minor celebrity in the two-street town, and has been churning out his little novels to a small but attentive female readership for twenty years. He barely makes a living out of it, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. He creates, or thinks he creates, characters and scenarios from his imagination. He believes that he dreams them up but in fact they all come out of the territory he has inhabited, in one lifetime or another, almost of them. I have done some back-checking and there they are. And some are very obviously from the current incarnation. He has travelled a lot, the natural Kiwi wanderlust, watching people on buses, in bars, on boat-decks, subtly recording all of it in his psyche. His ex-wife, in one form or another, reappears in every one of his novels, usually causing major disturbance to other characters. In the back-check I see that they were coupled several times, though in most instances she wore the pants. Like her, some of his book characters are from other lives and need to come back. It is a very subtle form of reincarnation and it helps him move beyond some of his past baggage. The wife obviously got what she needed from him in this last life and he hasn’t heard from her since, at least in the physical form. He probably never will. I am not following her trajectory, but you can be sure someone is.

There is something else about some of his characters which is rather strange. They are real, that is to say they are currently incarnated. They are alive and their lives run parallel to his narrative. I have no idea how or why this happens, but there it is.

His current book is called The Nod The main character is an older woman who has just lost her husband. The basic premise is that, since her husband has passed on, she decides that every time she is presented with an opportunity, she will say Yes.. This writer is clearly going through a very positive, uplifting phase in his writing. I recorded that when I picked up the trend. Certainly his new domestic circumstances are helping.

The book starts like this:

The tendrils of her soul, brittle as winter fingernails, she laid the adult-long burden of marriage to rest. As easily as brushing the crumbs of old fruitcake onto the lawn for the birds, she discarded the vestiges of what her husband turned out to be. They dropped away from her, old secret hopes dropped, shy expectations dropped, needing to be loved dropped. Until there were none left.

Your smallest wish the smiling boy had said, his sensual lips muffled in her then lush hair, Anything, you tell me, and I will do it. To this day, she can recreate on her skin, the warm murmur of his voice and feel still the inner urgings that it awoke in her. But then he was gone. When he went away, so suddenly, without any warning at all, he left nothing but those sensations. He had granted nothing. And so she had gone meekly, hand in hand, with whatever came along. A life of unlonging, because longing had been too much, too painful, too close.

Only now, husband buried, cold and inert, much as he had been for years before he died, does she dare to touch again, tremulous as the first buds of jonquils at the end of winter, those long suppressed but deep inclinations. It is an autumnal spring, anachronistic as unwrinkled skin. In the days following the rituals for those who outlive the dead, she sensed how her blood flowed again, quickened in veins that these days showed opaquely through her skin.

She had stood naked and white in front of the full-length mirror of their conjugal bedroom, on the day after the funeral, and studied her body. In her mind she replaced it with the body she had lived in when first she allowed the smiling boy to run his wonderfully soft, creative fingers over its shyly unclad contours. She could almost see his long thighs against her whiteness.

The writer’s name is Arnold Waites and he wrote that opening passage one late afternoon, as the grey mists swirled around his house. The young woman who had invited herself to inhabit his little tin house and warm his newly purchased double bed, had rubbed her naked body against him until he was on fire and they had fucked furiously on the rug in front of his coal heater. Then she smoked a joint and he felt inspired to pen the opening for his next book, The Nod.

This is what I watch. None of this was particularly monumental, but I did record it. Beginnings are always significant. It’s his fifteenth book in twenty years and will appeal to female readers of a certain age. All of his books do. Pleasing women has been one of his life challenges. The book will be a great success and he will be invited to go to Paris for a writers’ convention. As the token Kiwi at an international event he even gets to take a companion. The girl goes too.

What is interesting here, is that the woman he has begun to write about, her name is Heather Atkins, exists. I know that, because I am watching her too. This happens, now and then, in a sort of parallel existence, where a life is lived out in more than one way at the same time. In some of the most celebrated so-called fiction writing of all time, this has taken place. However it is rare for the subject to discover that the writing exists while they are still alive, or for the writer to stumble upon the subject of their own creation. It would probably be too confusing.

This may prompt you to wonder if you are being watched as you read this. Of course you are. I assure you, I am not your watcher, so there is nothing to worry about. I won’t be saying anything about you. Even if you wanted to know. I wouldn’t be allowed to. The guidelines are very clear on that. We watchers are never allowed to let on to our subjects. We do not, as a rule, communicate. On occasions we will but it is rare. If you need to know about that, you will.

For some reason, I am telling you about what I do. Am I breaking the rules? Maybe, but there seems to be a reason you are meant to know about the watchers. It must be in the Book of Consequences somewhere but I haven’t seen it. Maybe you will work it out for yourself by the time you read to the end. And it is possible that, somewhere in the world, there is a writer, writing your story, thinking it has sprung fresh from their own imagination. Keep your eye on your local bookstore, while it lasts !

So I’ll tell you what I watch and you can make of it what you will. If it is significant to you, or to where you are heading, or it inspires you to do something, then your watcher, whoever that is, will make notes.

So don’t worry.

Nothing is missed.

Everything is written.

ARNOLD AND JADE

Arnold and Jade

The girl who lives with the writer, Arnold Waites, calls herself Jade.

That’s not her real name.

On a dark misty August night, she wandered into the warmth of the Blackball Hilton, the only two-storey building in Blackball, looking for a freebee. It’s a country-style B and B, that’s bed and breakfast, not Black and Ball. These days it has to call itself Formerly the Blackball Hilton because a certain vast American hotel chain of the same name took umbrage at the competition. They thought this decrepit tin public house, with its meek little verandah out the front, might sully the reputation of the mighty international hospitality giant.

Jade was broke, more than a little stoned and desperate for somewhere to crash out of the cold.

Arnold had been holed up in a corner of the backbar. That corner is his hideout when he hits a hurdle in his storyline. He can spend days there, often between novels, when it takes a while for the next storyline to begin to gestate. The locals get quite used to seeing him there and they generally don’t take much notice.

To Jade, his hunched over solitude presented an easy target.

Ostensibly she is now his housekeeper, although unremunerated.

Given the size of his house, you could say they shacked up together.

I’ve been watching them with a certain fascination because I always enjoy the play when two of my subjects find their paths cross. When I say fascination, it is a very detached form of fascination. We can enjoy our rôle without any harmful repercussions.

For us, paths crossing happens quite a lot. What brings it about is a never-ending mystery but I do entertain a theory that we, the observers, might be part of that. It makes sense from the point of view of which folk appear in my portfolio. Why do I have the subjects I do? Why do their paths cross?This is my theory: It is all, most probably, because of what I was, maybe who I was with and perhaps what I am supposed to learn here. Why else? Well, there is always pure coincidence, but I doubt it. I think the sum of the parts will make a whole at some point. We, who are the watchers, are not here just to mark time. There has to be more to our rôle than that. How we got here is clear, it has to do with merit. Some way or another each of us got to the point where we could step out of the cycle. Why we ascended to here and not to the higher realms, well that is something else. We talk about it amongst ourselves and there are theories about that too. Our social life is a little ethereal as we do not have bodies any more.

When she first appeared in the portfolio, Anne Kingsleigh, as she then was, led the life of a regular kid, growing up in a hilltop suburb of Auckland, older daughter of two lawyers. Surrounded by unostentatious comfort, untroubled by affliction, her childhood was uneventful. She appeared to be humming along, unperturbed by much, achieving little and behaving herself. She went to a diligent Anglican school, a moderately gifted student middling along until she turned 18. She was ostensibly heading for law school, in the family tradition. Then, just before final exams in her last year, she took off with a fully tattooed Maori guy on a massive Harley.

Why she did that was a total mystery, to her and to her parents, who had done what all well-meaning parents strive to do in nurturing and protecting their young. It was one of those moments where the soul’s intent or some major past impression prompts the person to act, so often irrationally. One moment she was a schoolgirl in a uniform filling her applications for the university in Auckland and the next she was heading north, taking nothing with her but her impulse, and telling no-one. The half-hearted attempts by the Auckland Police to find her left her parents guilt-ridden and troubled. Their second daughter was carefully watched for years to come.

There is no need to describe what went on up north, but, if I was to make a judgement on it, which I don’t, I would say none of it did her much good. She took the name Jade and drifted from here to there, round the North Island, scrounging food, doing odd jobs, shoplifting, living in communes. The Maori guy was a passing phase, not much more than a ride out of town, the sudden loss of virginity and an entree into another life. There was very little for me to take note of, except maybe her parents’ deep grief and mystification, of which she was oblivious. This is not to excuse her but as I chronicled her journey, I was very aware that she was suffering through a whole raft of past consequences. Looking objectively I would say she had to go through it, before anything else could take its place. The North Island nearly killed her and at a certain point she decided to head south. She hung around the ferry terminal in Wellington with no money to buy a ticket, until she scored the ride to Picton by way of a very long blow job in the cab of a refrigerated lorry.

Quickly ditching the insatiable driver, she fled Picton and stumbled off around the ports of the South Island. For a while it was more of the same.

I sometimes catch myself wondering how people like that keep going. They stagger from one disasterous situation to another. They don’t seem to be able to see that there is a pattern to it, or that there are other options. Although I see where it all comes from, looking into their backlogs, I often ask myself, as I watch, what’s the point? Why do they keep doing that? Why don’t they just let it go and skip to the next life? Of course some will do that. Then again why don’t they wake up, recognise what they have got themselves into and do something different? But maybe that’s close to being judgemental. My rôle is to keep track, no matter how it plays. And anyway premature skipping to the next life, just to escape, is not a very auspicious action and the consequences are not pleasant.

Jade, went on working through more consequences as she headed south, and in the process created more than a few new ones along the way. When you create new consequences by your actions, the consequences wait for the right time to come back. They will always come back.

She ended up in Greymouth, the only town of any size on the west coast. She had become adept at finding the hangouts of characters who were not useful to the evolution of her soul’s intent. After a couple of days of dossing down in a group house of people who did not seem to be interested in personal hygeine, she had a fight with another girl and was less than politely asked to leave. One of the local cops caught her trying to nick food from a convenience store and when he frisked her, found a small pouch of an illegal substance. His frisking hands were going where a police officer’s hands should not go and she managed to break away and disappear. She hitched out of town.

Most people avoid single scruffy-looking girls hitch-hiking alone, but she got a lift in a Dry Cleaner’s van heading up to Blackball. The woman who drove her was a born-again Baptist, addicted to doing good works and she tried to make a convert as the van wound up the hills