Reborn Again Read online

  Reborn Again

  Robert Sheckley

  One of HIS last stories.

  Robert Sheckley

  Reborn Again

  ***

  “Damn,” a voice said. “I’m still alive.”

  “Who is that?” Ritchie Castleman asked.

  “It’s me, Moses Grelich,” a voice inside him said.

  Grelich? Ritchie had heard that name somewhere before. Then he remembered. Grelich was the body he had bought to live his new life in.

  Grelich said, “I was supposed to be dead. They promised me I’d be dead.”

  “That’s right,” Ritchie said. “I remember now. You sold your body to me. And I was supposed to have bare-bones possession of it.”

  “But I am still in it. It’s still my body.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ritchie said. “Even if you are still in it, you sold it to me. It’s my body now.”

  “So OK, it’s your body. Consider me your guide.”

  “I don’t want a guide,” Ritchie said. “I bought a body, and I want to be alone in it.”

  “Who could blame you?” Grelich said. “Some schlemiel in the lab must have muffed it. I’m still here.”

  “Get out!”

  “Calm yourself, boychick. I got no place to go.”

  “Can’t you just... stand outside?”

  “Like a ghost? Sorry, Herbie, I don’t know how to do that.”

  “My name is Ritchie.”

  “I know, but you’re more of a Herbie type.”

  Ritchie let that one go. He muttered, “I need to get this mess straightened out. There’s got to be someone in charge around here.”

  “I doubt it,” Grelich said. “This looks like a rich man’s apartment to me.”

  “Where? I can’t see a thing. My God, I’m in darkness!”

  “Don’t get so excited. I seem to still be in charge of the sensory apparatus. Go ahead, take a look. I turn the vision over to you.”

  The scene suddenly opened up to Ritchie’s senses. He was lying in bed, in his bright, high-rise apartment on Central Park West. It was daylight. Sunlight was pouring in the window. Across the room he could see his mechanical exercise horse. The Chagall print still dominated one wall.

  “It’s my apartment,” Ritchie said. “I guess they put me back here after the operation. Shouldn’t there be a nurse?”

  “A nurse! The boychick wants a nurse!”

  “It’s just that I’ve been through a considerable operation.”

  “And I haven’t?”

  “It’s not the same thing. You’re supposed to be dead. You don’t need a nurse. Just a disposal service.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

  Ritchie was a little ashamed of what he had just said. But this was a new situation for him. Just yesterday he had opted for the newly developed choice of putting his mind into a new body. This had become necessary when his congenital heart defect suddenly started acting up. There had been no time to lose. He had gone to Mind Movers Technology Company, and found that they had one body he could take over immediately. Moses Grelich had decided to opt for self-obliteration, to sell his body, and to leave his money to Israel.

  Yesterday the operation had taken place.

  ***

  The doorbell rang. Ritchie slipped on a bathrobe and slippers and went to answer it, thinking maybe it was the nurse the Company should have sent in the first place.

  He opened the door. Standing there was a tall, skinny old lady, her dark hair pulled back and tied in a messy bun. She was wearing a plain cloth coat. She carried her purse in one hand, a white paper bag in the other. There was something about her... Ritchie thought she must once have been a beauty.

  “Is Moses here?” she asked timidly. “They gave me this address for him at Mind Movers.”

  Ritchie felt like one of those guys in a fable. Since Grelich had taken over the body, Ritchie could see and hear, and sometimes even speak, but he had no control over anything else. And no body sensations. When the body walked, Ritchie had the sensation that he was floating about six feet above the ground.

  “I’m here!” Grelitch said out of Ritchie’s mouth.

  “Moise!” she cried.

  “Esther? Is that really you?”

  “So who else should it be?”

  “Come in, come in,” Moses said.

  Esther carefully wiped her feet on the mat and entered the apartment.

  Moses led her into the living room. He was already familiar with Ritchie’s apartment. He waved her to a chair.

  “Nu, don’t you have a kitchen?” Esther asked. “I’ll feel more comfortable in the kitchen.”

  Ritchie could hear Esther and Moses talking. Something about how Moses’ old friends at the East Broadway cafeteria were worried about him. One of them had read an item in The New York Post about how Moses Grelich was about to undergo a whole-body transplant operation. It seemed that Moses had agreed to sell his body to someone.

  Moses was quoted as saying that since God had failed, Communism had failed, and now Capitalism had failed, he saw no sense in going on. He planned to be the first man in history to prove the old saying, “If the poor could die for the rich, what a good living they would make!”

  “So how come you’re still alive?” Esther asked.

  Ritchie summoned up all his energy and said, “He shouldn’t be!”

  “Beg pardon, what did you say?” Esther said.

  “The operation was not a success,” Ritchie said.” They had the transplant, but they didn’t get rid of Moses. This is supposed to be my body now. But he’s still here, damnit!”

  Esther’s eyes grew wide.

  Taking a deep breath, and letting out half of it, she said. “Pleased to meet you, Mister—”

  “Castleman, Ritchie Castleman. And you are?”

  “Mrs. Kazorney, Esther Kazorney.” She frowned, as if to say, “I can’t believe what’s happening.” Then, timidly, she said, “Moise, are you really still there somewhere?”

  “Of course I’m still here. Where else would I be?”

  Ritchie noticed that Grelich’s voice was more robust then his own. Grelich spoke emphatically and somewhat dramatically. His sentences were filled with highs and lows, and he made full use of diminuendo and crescendo.

  “Yes, Esther,” Grelich went on, “By the grace of the times we live in I am still here. These klutzes couldn’t even kill an unhappy Jew, even though Hitler showed them how some years ago. Esther, we are living now in an age of the goyishe apotheosis. The peasantry is now at the controls, and they are showing us what it really means to screw up, you should excuse the language.”

  Esther made a small dismissing gesture. She studied Moses’ face and said, in a low voice, “Moise?”

  “I’m still here,” Moses said.” Where else would I be?”

  “This fellow who lives inside you—is he a landsman?”

  “Atheist!” Ritchie said. “Purebred atheist.”

  “You see?” Moses said. “Atheism is the first step toward Judaism.”

  “Not bloody likely,” Ritchie said.

  “What type of atheist are you, anyhow?” Grelitch asked.

  “How many types are there?”

  “At least two. Intellectual and instinctive.”

  “I guess I’m the intellectual type.”

  “Aha!” Grelitch said.

  “What, aha?”

  “Out of your own mouth you have proven a thesis which I have long held. Jews are not instinctive atheists. Jews, even the dumbest among us, are born arguers, which is to say, intellectuals. No Jew comes to suicide without a long, reasoned argument in his mind, an argument that takes into account the question of God’s view on suicide.”

  The doorbell rang
again. Grelich opened the door. “Solomon!” he cried, seeing the tall black man on the other side. “Solomon Grundy, the Ethiopian Jew,” he explained to Ritchie.

  “Can you hear me, Moise?” Solomon said. “Esther gave me this address.”

  “Yes, yes I can hear you, Solomon. You have come to the apartment of therman who owns my body. Unfortunately, I’m still in it.”

  “How can that be?”

  “It’ll be sorted out presently. Meanwhile, what do you have to tell me? Some more of your mystic African Hasidic pseudo-scientific nonsense?”

  “I simply come as a friend,” Solomon said.

  “That’s very nice,” Grelich said. “The murderer returns to weep over the corpse he has made.”

  “I don’t quite understand your point,” Solomon said.

  “The point is, where were you when I needed a friend? Where were you before I killed myself?”

  “Killed yourself? You don’t sound very dead to me.”

  “I tried. It’s an accident that I’m alive.”

  “So might we all say. But something that is tantamount to an accident can be said never to have happened.”

  “Sophistry,” Grelich shouted.

  Solomon sat silent for a long moment, and then nodded his head. “I’ll accept that. The fact is, I was not a very good friend. Or rather, I was not a good enough friend at the time you needed one.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” said Grelich, momentarily uncertain of the line Solomon was taking.

  “We are both responsible for what happened,” Solomon said. “You elected yourself a victim, I perforce became a killer. Together we obliterated a life. But we reckoned without God.”

  “How do you figure?” Grelich asked.

  “We thought we could produce the nothingness of death. But God said, “That’s not how it’s going to be.” And he left us both alive and able to suffer the consequences of the deed we attempted, but didn’t quite bring off.”

  “God wouldn’t do that,” Grelich said. “That is, if He existed.”

  “He does.”

  “What kind of a principle could He make of that?”

  “He doesn’t have to make a principle out of it. He is not restricted to His own precedent. He can do what he wants fresh every time. This time it’s for you to suffer, and you deserve it, since God never told you it was all right to suicide.”

  Ritchie loved listening to what was going on. He qvelled (a word he would soon learn) to hear the aggressive, intellectual Grelich getting it in the neck from a guy like Solomon, who came on like a religious rapper and really knew how to dish it out.

  But it occurred to Ritchie that all the talk was on Grelich, and none of it was on him.

  “Hey, fellows,” he said, “it looks like this talk could go on for a while, and I haven’t even been introduced.”

  Grelich sullenly made the introductions.

  “Why don’t we get a bite to eat?” Ritchie said, now that he found himself able to speak. “I could use something, myself.”

  “Is there a vegetarian restaurant around here?” Grelich asked.

  “Christ, I don’t know,” Ritchie said. “There’s a pretty good Cuban cafe just a couple blocks from here.”

  “I wouldn’t eat that treif junk,” Grelich said. “Not even if I weren’t a vegetarian.”

  “So recommend your own place, big mouth,” said Ritchie.

  “Gentlemen,” said Solomon, “we will take a taxi, which I will pay for, and we will go to Ratstein’s on the Lower East Side.”

  ***

  The taxi dropped them on the corner of 2nd Avenue and Fourth Street. A corner place, Ratstein’s was open. Inside it was big—it must have had over a hundred tables, all empty except for two men at a front table, arguing over coffee and blintzes.

  “We’ll sit in the back, at the Philosopher’s Table,” Solomon said, and led them to an oval table with chairs for eight.

  “Schlepstein from NYU often shows up here,” Solomon said. “And sometimes Hans Werthke from Columbia.”

  Ritchie had never heard of these men. And he didn’t much like vegetarian food. He settled for a plate of egg cookies and a celery tonic. Grelich ordered strawberry blintzes, Esther took rice pudding, and Solomon ordered the rice and vegetables dish.

  Their waiter was a short, plump, middle-aged man with a fringe of pale thinning hair and a vaguely European look. He moved slowly on what appeared to be painful feet.

  “I’ll need this table by 7 pm,” he said. “It’s reserved.”

  It’s only 3 o’clock now,” Grelich said. “God forbid that your famous philosophers should have to sit anywhere else. We’ll be out of here long before they start their discussions.”

  “Our customers are used to seeing them here,” the waiter said. “I am Jakob Leiber and I am here to serve you.”

  ***

  The talk was general for a while, with one after another relating incidents of their day. From their conversation, Ritchie got an impression of an older New York, filled with old law tenements, push carts, micvahs, and study rooms for young scholars. He wondered if they weren’t talking about a New York of a hundred years ago, not today.

  In the taxi down Second Avenue he had noticed the Hispanic food stores, perfumeries, lunch counters and laundries. What once might have been a Jewish neighborhood had become a Hispanic barrio or whatever they called their slum neighborhoods.

  He commented on this to Esther. She told him, “Everything’s changed. I’ve heard Ratstein’s only stays open because of the support of some wealthy Jewish mafia types who live in New Jersey and need a place for lunch on their trips into the city.”

  “That reminds me of this movie I saw,” Ritchie said. “There was this Jewish mobster and his daughter, and this other mobster, a young guy, falls in love with the first mobster’s daughter and goes back in time to kill the man who became her husband but didn’t treat her right. I forgot how they got the time machine, but it seemed pretty logical at the time.”

  “Did he get the girl?” Esther asked.

  “Sort of. But there was a complication.”

  “There’s always a complication in invented stories,” Grelich said. “But life isn’t like that. Life is terribly simple.”

  “I don’t agree,” Ritchie said, recognizing Grelich’s propensity for climbing out on an unstable premise and inviting someone to knock him off. “I was writing a story about a similar situation—it’s an old theme, you know—and all I found were complications. Christ, even my complications had complications.”

  That got a mild laugh from Esther, and a chuckle from Solomon. Even Grelich gave a sour grunt of approval.

  “Boychick,” said Grelich, “I didn’t know you were a writer.”

  “Well, scarcely a writer,” Ritchie said. “But I have published a few things in a magazine. An online magazine, no pay, but they get some good names.”

  “You’re a writer?” Jakob the waiter asked. He had been listening to the conversation while serving the dishes.

  “Well, I do write,” Ritchie said. His recent experiences with real professional writers, who posted messages and comments on his Message Board from time to time, had convinced him that his best policy was to make no public claims for himself, at least not until he had a few professional sales.

  “A writer,” Jakob mused, drying his hands on his apron. “I’m in the publishing business myself.”

  “You’re a publisher?” Grelich asked.

  “No, I’m a translator. From the Rumanian. I have a Rumanian science-fiction writer I translate for.”

  “You translate into English?” Grelich asked.

  “Of course, English, what else? Urdu?”

  Ritchie said, “What is this writer’s name?”

  He couldn’t make it out even after several repetitions, so he decided to learn it later, and write it down, see if the name turned out to be of any importance.

  “Has he published?” Ritchie asked.

  “In Engli
sh, no. In Rumanian, plenty. It’s only a matter of time before I sell him here.”

  “You’re his agent, too?” Ritchie asked.

  “I have that honor.”

  Ritchie wanted to ask Leiber how good his agent contacts were, and whether he was taking on any new clients. But he couldn’t find a way of slipping it into the conversation. He decided he’d come back to Ratstein’s on his own some other time, go into the matter again, without Solomon and Esther, and, with a little luck, without Grelich. For a beginning writer it was always worthwhile checking out an agent, no matter what else he did.

  “Anyhow,” Grelich said, “we’re here to discuss this situation I’ve got, with this goy lodged in my head.”

  ***

  No one had any ideas about it. They considered Ritchie’s suggestion that they all return to his apartment. But Solomon was tired and had an appointment in the early evening; Grelich had had enough argument for the day, and Esther was looking forward to her late afternoon television.

  They all agreed to meet tomorrow evening, first at the East Broadway cafeteria, then, after Ritchie said he’d pick up the tab, at Ratstein’s.

  Exhaustion ended the night for both Ritchie and Grelich. Ritchie had a long, dreamless sleep in his own bed.

  ***

  In the morning, after Ritchie made coffee, they agreed that it was time to go downtown to the MMT sales office and find out what had gone wrong.

  Grelich was feeling a little funny about this. His desire to kill himself had abated remarkably. In fact, his suicidal urge had vanished. Replacing it was an unexpected zest for life, the strongest he had ever known.

  It was difficult to account for this. Maybe the medical procedure, even though it had not killed him, had driven philosophical despair out of his head. These problems, which had recently driven him to suicide, seemed academic to him now, even puerile. Why kill yourself because you can’t decide whether God exists or not?

  Ritchie for his part wanted to own his own headspace uncluttered with Grelich. But he liked Grelich’s friends. Esther looked like she had been a classy lady. Solomon was interesting. Ritchie hadn’t known there were any black Jews. He wanted to find out how this had come about.