The image of the drawing I’d been working on, the two rings with the runic bands, built up so clearly that I could reproduce it. Using a Pelikan fountain pen for the drawing helped retrieve the memory, because that brand had been available in Germany in the 1930s, though I did own a modern version. Dim images of other objects floated to the surface of my mind: a round, flat decoration called a bractate, a heavily damaged drinking horn, and a rectangular fragment of metal, each one inscribed with runes. I drew them all, and at times I could add a few German letters underneath from what had probably been the original captions. Not being able to retrieve the complete words reminded me that my memory might have garbled the details after so many years, no matter how perfect the images seemed to me. While I worked I could hear the clacking of the typewriter and the murmur of voices, speaking a language I could no longer understand.
I closed that particular book, capped the pen, and got up to pace around the living room. When I opened the fridge, looking for soda, I found a sandwich wrapped in plastic on a plate with a note “for Maya” in Tor’s handwriting. I took it to the breakfast bar with my cola and ate it gratefully. When I finished, I realized that the memories had gone dead on me. I remembered the first time my talents had manifested, and Tor had insisted I drink a sugary soda to “close things down.”
I got out my laptop and opened the radio app. I started to listen to the Raiders losing the game, but 2010 began to look like an awful season. I turned that off and surfed the Internet for images of Otto Rahn. I turned up a whole page of them—but it showed pictures of at least three different men, all classified under the same name. One even had white hair, which meant he’d lived way beyond thirty-five, the age when Audo died. Another man, who must have been in his late forties, looked like an evil elf. Only a few of the old photos thumbnailed there matched my memories.
I panicked. My mind raced around and around a loop of possibilities. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he didn’t look like the person I remembered. Maybe I was remembering someone else. Maybe my whole story came from some movie I’d forgotten seeing. I took a couple of deep breaths and calmed myself down. No one had ever said that exploring your past lives was going to be easy. When Tor came home, he’d help me.
No, I told myself, you don’t have to wait for Tor. You can try to prove or disprove it yourself like a big girl.
By then I’d digested enough of my lunch to get back to work I decided to start at the first memory, the one where the SS officer had grabbed my wrist. Why had I wanted to throw cold water in his face? The usual explanation for that impulse presented itself: a clumsy pass. Since I never caught more than a glimpse of him in the memory images, I figured that he had no real importance, just some crude dude trying to make time, like they called it in the old movies, with a girl. I made a sketchy layout drawing with charcoal, his position, mine, a drafting table nearby, and the door. Some of his sneering little speech came clear enough for me to write it down. That is, I wrote down a version of it in horribly bad German spelling. I won’t dignify it by calling it phonetic.
The memory images deserted me there. Just as Tor had warned me, they’d arrived in fragments of unrelated pictures and sounds. I did remember that Otto Rahn had written a couple of books. When I checked the Internet, I found they’d been translated into English. In the lower flat Tor had an enormous library. A little knot of fear formed in my stomach. What if Björn still existed in some strange form? I reminded myself that this time around, Kristjan had won the duel. I got up my courage and went downstairs.
The library room housed a forest of expensive oak bookshelves arranged in tidy rows. The books looked like Tor had arranged them, too, in some kind of order, but since I couldn’t read most of the titles I couldn’t figure out what that order was. Since I’d seen Audo’s books on the Internet, I at least knew what the English-language trade paperbacks looked like. I did eventually find them, placed beside the same books in German. I pulled them out, blew off the dust, and carried them back upstairs.
At first I felt triumphant. I held the keys to locked memories in those books. But I found myself oddly unwilling to open them and read. Even the short translator’s introductions repelled me. I took the books into the Burne-Jones bedroom and set them down on the floor next to the green armchair. Later, I told myself. Tomorrow, maybe. The alchemical barometer displayed an image of a black man with the sun for a head crossing swords with a white woman who wore the moon for hers. Conflict—I was conflicted, all right.
I returned to the living room and sat down with my laptop. I felt not exactly drained, just too tired to draw any more loaded pictures. Instead I wrote more on the history of my relationship with Tor. I made sure to lock the files with a password in case the police could somehow access my machine.
The guys returned over two hours after the game ended, not that I worried. The stadium was all the way on the south side of Oakland, and the traffic leaving the parking lot was always horrendous. Billy and JJ came upstairs with Tor, who announced that we were all going out for dinner at a local ribs place. The other two men were dressed just like Tor. Billy, a red-haired white guy, a little on the plump side, wore the same face paint as Tor, but JJ had only a couple of silver stripes on his face.
“I’m black already,” JJ told me with a grin. “It’s easier for me.”
“About the only thing that is,” Billy broke in. “If that fucking security guard hassles you one more time—” He slammed a fist into the palm of his opposite hand.
“No, leave him to me,” Tor said, and he mugged an evil grin, totally convincing with the face-paint. “He’ll be an insecurity guard when I’m done with him.”
JJ held up both hands flat for silence. “Thanks, bros,” he said, “but no need to make things worse. Yeah, the guy’s a shit. But—no need to make things worse. I don’t want to get us all bounced from the games.”
“You’re probably right,” Billy said. “It just fucking gripes me. You pay through the nose for a ticket, and then some greasy white dude . . .” He let his voice trail away.
JJ shrugged. When an uncomfortable silence lingered, I decided I needed to play hostess or maybe den mother.
“I’ll make some coffee,” I said. “We’re not going out till you guys drink some of it. You all stink of beer. I’m just glad you made it back okay.”
“Ah, the traffic was crawling,” Billy said. “Maybe five miles an hour on the freeway. Easy driving.”
“We won’t be going on the freeway this time,” Tor said. “So Maya better drive, even with the coffee.”
They all laughed, and the awkward moment finally died.
“Where’s Aaron today?” I asked.
“He can’t take the crowds,” JJ said. “Or the noise. He probably watched the game on Tor’s Bane.”
My turn for the laugh—he meant television, of course. Tor very loudly said nothing.
The ribs were great, and the company even better. Raiders fans, still wearing their face paint, crammed the restaurant. Billy ostentatiously drank only diet cola with his meal. We all laughed a lot during the dinner. For an hour or so I could forget about the police and Nazis both.
By the time we returned to our house, Billy was sober enough to drive himself and JJ home. When we went upstairs, Tor hurried into the bathroom to wash the paint off his face. I turned the lights on in the living room and sat down on the couch. My sketchbook still lay on the coffee table where I’d left it. Slightly damp around the edges, Tor joined me. He pointed at the book.
“Anything interesting?” he said.
I figured he meant ‘relating to image magic and past lives.’ “Maybe,” I said. “I heard someone talk, but I know I didn’t write it down right.”
When I showed him the sketch of the jerk in the office, Tor laughed at my attempts at spelling German. “I think this means,” he said, “Why don’t you stop going around with that schwüchtel—” He paused to think. “That faggot, I guess you’d translate it. It’s a derogatory name for a gay guy. So,
stop going around with that faggot and see what a. . . ” again the hesitation, “what a real man is like. You’re right, your spelling is lousy.”
“Well, I don’t know any German really.”
“True. Huh, he must have meant Rahn. Who may have overheard him, since he was just opening the door. In your memory, anyway. I wonder what he had to say about that?”
This memory rose as a sound, a lot of sounds. “He decked him,” I said. “Hit him really hard in the stomach, and the dude went down, and chairs went over. I think I screamed. And someone came running, a lot of people.” I could vaguely remember the meaning of my angry yelp. “I yelled something like don’t spill my bottle of ink.”
“Spoken like a true artist.”
“The guy got up, and Rahn hit him again. This time he stayed down.” I frowned, trying to remember. “And everyone made fun of the other guy when he came to. I have this vague idea that someone told him to stop listening to stupid gossip.”
“That’s one way to kill a rumor about your manhood, all right. Do you remember when this was?”
“It’s weird, but as soon as I try to think of a date, I feel like I don’t know anything, like I’m just making all this up or something.”
“That’s the way the process works. You’re bringing up emotional memories, and then something makes you doubt yourself. Wham! The bottom drops out, and you can’t trust anything.”
“That’s exactly how I feel. And I tried to do some research on the Internet—”
“Don’t! That’s dangerous.”
“Well, this sure was. I found pictures. Some looked like my memories, but others were all wrong. There were at least three different guys in the thumbnails, and a couple were way too old. Everything I’d dredged up, it all seemed fake.”
“Yeah, that’s standard, when you first start remembering, and a good sign. Skepticism is a valuable corrective. A lot of people think they remember past lives. But they believe they were an old movie star or Cleopatra or an aristocrat, because they jump on the first stray thought or image that comes to mind.”
“So you think I’m right after all?”
“Sure, probably.” Tor shrugged, but his smile reassured me. “Don’t try to remember too much at once. When I was a teenager, I got my first clear memories. Of being Lars, those were. And I got fascinated with the circs, the Nazi invasion, the Nazis themselves, and I read everything I could get my hands on. I ended up so confused I didn’t know what I was remembering and what I was just inventing, trying to fill in the gaps of the memories. My dad had to help me straighten it all out again.”
“Is that why you know so much about Rahn?”
“Yeah. But let him go for now. I don’t want to confuse you worse.”
“I don’t want you to, either. This is all so weird.”
“You’ll get used to it. What else did you draw?”
I gestured at the sketchbook. “If you turn back, like maybe three pages back, you’ll see some artifacts. I remembered drawing them.”
Tor obliged, then frowned at the first drawing, the broken drinking horn. “Shit, I’ve just seen a picture of this, an old photo.” He looked up. “In the papers from my grandfather.”
“I’m not surprised. Did he say anything about it?”
“No, it’s just a faded old black and white photo. Nothing on the back.” Tor turned another page, nodded, turned to the last one, nodded again. “I’ve got photos of all of these.” He shut the sketchbook and tossed it onto the coffee table. “Well, now we know.”
“Yeah. I guess Rahn must have known your great-grandfather. Your family, they seem to be totally involved in this story.”
“Which must be one of the karmic things that brought us together in this life. So don’t knock it.” He thought something through before he spoke again. “What I wonder is how your father got involved. Your father in this life, I mean. The guy who was half a wight.”
“Half a what?”
“A wight’s just the name for any non-human intelligent being. Come to think of it, these sound more like wraiths, because of the way your father could drain élan from living beings. He must have had genes from the snow wraiths, the ones who live in Niflheim. And he passed them on to you.”
Snow wraiths. Frost Giants. The room turned colder, I felt, just from repeating those names in my mind.
“Jötunheim, the place where the giants live,” I said. “Is it all ice and snow?”
“No, only in the north where it fades into Niflheim.” Tor frowned in concentration. “Not sure where I read that, one of the Eddas, probably.” He shrugged the problem away. “But the giants have farms and steadings in the valleys and along the rivers.”
“So they have like real lives? They need houses and food?”
“Yeah, the giants do, but in Niflheim, the wraiths must harvest chi, élan, directly from the air. Like you can learn to do.”
That statement destroyed my last few doubts. If developing my talents could let me feed myself, I could face any fear. Well, I hoped I could. At least I could try. Tor was smiling as if he knew he’d just changed everything.
“You really think I could?” I said.
“Why not? I had to learn how. I did it when Dad was so ill. I helped him live a little longer by feeding him chi.”
“But you’d been studying the runes for years by then.”
“Yeah. I didn’t say it would be easy for you to learn, did I?”
“Okay. Where do I start?”
Tor laughed and threw his arms around me. He looked so triumphant that I finally believed what he’d said about becoming his equal.
Until that evening I hadn’t put any thought into our actual wedding. Too many other things, like my senior project among the weird magics, had occupied my mind. Tor, however, had been thinking about it. The next morning at breakfast, he repeated what Liv had already told me, that early summer would be a good time.
“We need to get you a lawyer before we draw up the official marriage contract,” Tor told me.
“I need a lawyer? That’s scary.”
“If you don’t have your own representation, and something happens to me, the court might have trouble adjudicating your inheritance. Not that I think Liv would dispute it, but there are cousins lurking around.”
“I don’t get why we need a contract.”
“I’m setting it up to protect you, not cut you out of the family goods.”
“I didn’t think you were going to shaft me. I just never thought money would be an issue when I got married. Not even when I was playing with Barbies and fantasizing about marrying a prince.”
Tor grinned at me, then turned solemn. “You’re the first girlfriend I’ve ever had who didn’t think about the money. I think they put up with me as long as they did because of it.”
“That really sucks!”
He smiled again. “There are so many reasons why I’m marrying you.”
We kissed a few times, but how cozy can you get when you’re sitting on tall stools at a breakfast bar?
“Before we get married,” I said. “I’ve got to graduate. Which means I’ve got to get serious about my senior project.”
“Do you want studio space downstairs?”
“I can get some at school to start with. The panels I have in mind are going to be huge.”
Fancy art schools have big buildings where senior students can have real studio space. At my school, we had an ancient gymnasium that had been “repurposed,” as the Admin people called it. The basketball hoops were gone. Scruffy, paint-stained linoleum protected the wood floor, and the cheapest possible office partitions divided the space up into 12 by 12 foot cubes, one per student. Each cube did include a section of the real walls, at least, where we could hang things up properly. The partitions wobbled too much if you taped anything heavier than a photo or drawing on them. For a water source and clean-up space we had the old locker room, which still smelled of sweat on damp days.
I got a decent cube near the door
where I breathed fewer fumes from the turps, printing inks, and chemical mediums than the other students did. The prof in charge that day issued me an easel. I put up a placard with my name on it to ensure that no one else took the space, but I left my supplies in my locker. I needed to get home, because Tor and I were driving in to see Roman in the hospital.
And a good thing we did, too. We’d only been in Roman’s hospital room for about five minutes when Lieutenant Hu and his uniformed back-up joined us. Hu greeted Tor with perfect politeness, which Tor returned, but oddly enough, neither Hu or the other officer so much as looked my way. Brittany glanced at them, then strode out of the room without saying a word. Neither cop remarked on her leaving. I helped Roman sit up against a stack of pillows. He was staring narrow-eyed at the two cops.
“We just want to ask you a few more questions,” Hu said to Roman. “Nothing serious.”
Tor dropped his illusory pose of nice guy and stepped forward. “We’d better have a lawyer present. I have my family lawyers on retainer.” He took out his smartphone. “Just take me a minute to call.”
Hu gave him a look like a general on the North China frontier might have given an uppity barbarian. His voice, though, stayed mild. “It’s hardly necessary.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s not.” Tor smiled in the bland way that meant he was furious. “From your point of view.”
Hu opened his mouth to reply just as Doctor Mellars charged in with Brittany right behind him.
“I told you,” Mellars snapped at Hu, “that my patient can’t be disturbed this way. If you’d simply set up a time for an interview, I can have the nurses manage his medication.” He turned to me and Roman. “He should be lying down on his side.”
Roman winked at me. I helped him lie down again and arranged the bolster along his back. Mellars was just getting warmed up.
“Look,” the doctor said, “do you see that IV unit? Do you know what it’s delivering? Morphine, that’s what. The bullet damaged major ganglia. Without sedation he’d be in serious pain. Questioning a witness under the influence of morphine—would anything you learned stand up in court?”