I was part of an entourage of young men and we were following a woman whom I could see only occasionally far ahead of us in profile, her face beautiful and determined in a way I associate with movie stars or marble statues. We were in a line like ducks or grade school students and she was leading us through a wide palace room, alternating red and white tiles stretching to a wall as distant as the horizon.
And at the far end of that room was another line of people, parallel to us, moving in the opposite direction. Iin that line were men and women, spinning and dancing and clapping sticks and chanting, all wearing grass skirts that swished in the air. The sound of their clapping and chanting reached us faintly, and with with a slight lag that dissociated the sounds from the movements.
“Next will come the cocktails with the miniature umbrellas in them” I whispered to the man ahead of me. All I could see of him were the two lines of dark hair that ran on either side of his neck from the bottom of his hair line down below his collar.
Almost at the same time as I spoke it, I could hear my joke repeated, as if over a loudspeaker system. I was at first appalled by the crassness of it and the disrespect, and then appalled to realize that it was me who had said it. I am that person.
I was immediately spun out of the line and became a perfectly round egg, which a neatly manicured giant handwas dropping gently down a clear plastic chute like a gumball in a clear plastic spiral dispenser. I rolled down, gathering speed and then, as I half expected, I was in a complete void.
I may have been moving at infinite speed, I may have been suspended, perfectly still.
My last thought before entering this void, which lingered for “what seemed like an eternity,” was that my contrition had been genuine, my remorse full-hearted and quite complete, and that this must count for something.
Now I was reborn. I was a young man stepping out into an aircraft hangar or factory floor with the assurance of a pilot or an engineer.
I knew all at once that all the wishes I had ever wasted on some alternative circumstances of life or character had been granted.
If I had wished for a family rich in accomplishments and affection, that was my family. To have discovered my vocation and passion early enough to devote myself to it: granted. Complete love of a woman that she might reside in my heart and I in hers: that was my fiance.
I also knew that all these were all just consolation prizes, a slight lessening of the sentence of having been born again.
