Sipping its scalding bitterness, Brice Mack remembered how his mother had sat shivah after his father’s death. A neighbor had brought her an orange crate, rough and splintered, upon which she sat for the seven days and nights, her face unwashed, her hair unkempt, her clothes rent, drinking the bitterest of teas, rocking quietly backward and forward, moaning softly from the depths of her soul, putting her anguish on public display in memory of the husband she had lost, the man she had loved and whose son she had borne, lamenting in expiation for all she had not said and not done for him—the lapses and lacks and wifely duties she had failed to perform in life and would no longer have opportunity to correct in death.
The morning air was cold and damp, and spumes of steam filtered up through manhole covers in the empty streets surrounding Foley Square.
Yes, Brice Mack reflected solemnly, running his tongue over his teeth, cleansing them of the acrid taste of coffee, Momma sat shivah for Poppa, as Brice had sat shivah for Momma. But who was there to sit shivah for James Beardsley Hancock? Who was there to moan and rock from side to side and for seven days mount the rough and bruising crate of anguish for him?
There would be a Times obituary for him, one of considerable length and detail, no doubt, but possessing none of the passion and rending torment of a shivah to mark his passage from life. His would be a simple service—a brief, pallid, goyish exercise totally lacking in power and meaning. And here was a man whose splendid, exemplary, and beautiful life warranted—no, demanded!—the full outcry, the full spectacle of human grief and suffering to mourn its loss properly. There was no justice. Had he been born a Jew, he would have got the full treatment. Now, unfortunately, there was only Brice Mack, a miserable, unworthy substitute for the real thing, to cry for him.
He had been with James Beardsley Hancock at the end. Sitting at his bedside. At one ten there had been no fore-warning that at one eleven it would be the end. They had been conversing—that is, Hancock had been talking, softly and eloquently, on the very subject of death when it came stealing into the room on tiptoes to claim him.
Mack had spent most of the evening at the hospital, not exclusively to pay a sick call, but to confer with the doctors to ascertain whether Hancock would be in a condition improved enough to enable a deposition to be taken or, provided Mack could persuade the court to come up to the hospital with the jury, whether Hancock would be physically able to subject himself to what might be a grueling examination and cross-examination.
Despite the day’s stunning success with his witnesses, whose combined testimony forged an absolute link between Audrey Rose’s gruesome death and the substance of Ivy Templeton’s nightmares, Brice Mack knew that unless he could make a strong and convincing case for reincarnation, he was still a long way from home. With the Pradesh mess, Hancock’s heart attack, and Hoover’s rejection of Marion Worthman, his case for reincarnation at this point was practically nonexistent. Unless and until a full exposure of the subject could be placed before the jury by a person of consummate skill and unimpeachable scholarship and integrity, there would be little point in bringing Hoover or even the Templetons to the stand since their testimony would be heard in the absence of any real understanding of the basic issue in the case. It was essential their next witness be an expert on the level of Hancock.
At eight twenty that evening the doctors were sufficiently encouraged by Hancock’s improvement to hold out a vague hope that Hancock might be able to testify intra muros on the following day. Which was sufficiently encouraging to Brice Mack to permit him to leave the hospital and keep a nine o’clock dinner appointment with Professor Ahmanson and a man named Robert Vanable, a possible substitute expert whom Ahmanson had met in a Scientology meeting hall.
Himself a “clear,” a term applied to those who had achieved the apex of Scientological perfection and were moving up the OT Levels on which one attains abilities which are God-given and God-like, Robert Vanable instructed Mack through dessert on the true nature of life beyond death as revealed to L.R.H., the initials of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, and as expressed by him in his famous lecture to the Eighteenth American Advanced Clinical Course back in 1957.
“L.R.H. was the first to cognate what really happens when a thetan splits the scene, and to postulate it,” enthused Vanable, sipping his Irish coffee. “A thetan exteriorizes fast from a body when it kicks the bucket. There’s plenty of confusion, too, and it has a terrible time until it can locate another body and get going again. Meanwhile, it’s totally cognizant. Knows who it was and who its friends were. All it’s suffered is the loss of mass. The mind remains. The Christian misconceptions of heaven, hell, purgatory—that’s all baloney. A thetan’s proving ground is still good ol’ terra firma.”
“Forgettingness doesn’t start till the pickup of the new body, at which point the memory valve shuts off, but not before some interesting prayers and dedications are said to insure a happy is-ness in the next life.…” And more.
After leaving the restaurant, Brice Mack returned to Roosevelt Hospital to check on Hancock’s condition.
The time was twelve twenty-seven when he entered the anteroom of the intensive care unit. A nurse informed him that Dr. Pignatelli, Hancock’s personal physician, was with the patient now. At twelve forty Dr. Pignatelli emerged and, flashing the lawyer a quick smile, briefly conferred with the nurse before turning to the lawyer. He told him that Hancock’s prognosis was good, his vital signs were improved, and barring a setback, he seemed to be making excellent progress. It was still too soon to tell when he would be able to authorize the heavy program of activity Brice Mack had earlier outlined since Hancock wasn’t off the critical list as yet.
Brice Mack felt fatigue press down on him. What Pignatelli was saying was that Hancock wouldn’t be well enough to testify in the morning. Which left Mack with the tricky problem of having to vamp till the old boy was ready. That meant bringing on other witnesses—but who? Not Hoover. Not now. Not ever, if he could help it. Nor the Templetons. Maybe the doctor—Dr. Kaplan—he’d be good for a morning. And Carole Federico. He might be able to string them out for a day or so.…
“Would you care to see him?” Dr. Pignatelli’s voice cut in on the lawyer’s somber musings.
“Is it allowed?”
Pignatelli laughed. “It’ll do him good. He’s just awakened from a long nap, and he’s bored to distraction.”
It wasn’t difficult to pick out James Beardsley Hancock in the large, brightly lit, antiseptic room. Every other patient was enclosed within the inviolate privacy of screens and curtains. James Beardsley Hancock was fully exposed to view, sitting rigidly up, with the mattress raised to its highest position, like an enthroned king, imperiously surveying his domain through eagle-bright eyes.
The old man stared straight at the lawyer coming across the room toward him, and a smile spread across his face, a smile that seemed genuinely glad and fiercely self-assured, a smile that said, “Look! I’m still here. I have not left this earth life, not quite yet.”
Encompassed by gurgling bottles and TV monitors, each reporting a phase of his illness, and hampered as he was by tubes and wires that seemed to sprout from every orifice of his body including his mouth, which held a thermometer, James Beardsley Hancock could not say a word, or offer Brice Mack his hand, or even wave him into a chair. He could only express his pleasure at seeing his guest with eyes that glowed and a head that gently nodded.