The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

He’d be squaring up a putt on the seventh green or working in his woodshop or talking to his daughter (now a college student herself) about her senior thesis, and he would wonder where Annmarie is now. What she’s doing. What she remembers about that night.

Harris’s smile widens to a locker-room smirk. It may be a shitty job, but it’s clear there are a few parts of it he enjoys. ‘I can see that’s a question you don’t want to answer, so why don’t we move along. You’re thinking of all the things you’ll change during your next ride on the cosmic carousel. This time you won’t slam the door on your kid brother’s finger, or try to shoplift a watch at the Paramus Mall—’

‘It was the Mall of New Jersey. I’m sure it’s in your file somewhere.’

Harris gives Bill’s folder a get-away-fly flap and continues. ‘Next time you’ll decline to fuck your semicomatose date as she lies on the sofa in the basement of your fraternity house, and – big one! – you’ll actually make that appointment for the colonoscopy instead of putting it off, having now decided – correct me if I’m wrong – that the indignity of having a camera shoved up your ass is marginally better than dying of colon cancer.’

Bill says, ‘Several times I’ve come close to telling Lynn about that frat house thing. I’ve never had the courage.’

‘But given the chance, you’d fix it.’

‘Of course – given the chance, wouldn’t you unlock those factory doors?’

‘Indeed I would, but there are no second chances. Sorry to disappoint you.’

He doesn’t look sorry. Harris looks tired. Harris looks bored. Harris also looks meanly triumphant. He points to the door on Bill’s left.

‘Use that one – as you have on every other occasion – and you begin all over again, as a seven-pound baby boy sliding from your mother’s womb into the doctor’s hands. You’ll be wrapped in bunting and taken home to a farm in central Nebraska. When your father sells the farm in nineteen sixty-four, you’ll move to New Jersey. There you will cut off the tip of your brother’s little finger while playing flashlight tag. You’ll go to the same high school, take the same courses, and make the same grades. You’ll go to Boston College, and you’ll commit the same act of semirape in the same fraternity house basement. You’ll watch as the same two fraternity brothers then have sex with Annmarie Winkler, and although you’ll think you should call a halt to what’s going on, you’ll never quite muster up the moral fortitude to do so. Three years later you’ll meet Lynn DeSalvo, and two years after that you’ll be married. You’ll follow the same career path, you’ll have the same friends, you’ll have the same deep disquiet about some of your firm’s business practices … and you’ll keep the same silence. The same doctor will urge you to get a colonoscopy when you turn fifty, and you will promise – as you always do – that you’ll take care of that little matter. You won’t, and as a result you will die of the same cancer.’

Harris’s smile as he drops the folder back on his cluttered desk is now so wide it almost touches the lobes of his ears.

‘Then you’ll come here, and we’ll have the same discussion. My advice would be to use the other door and have done with it, but of course that is your decision.’

Bill has listened to this sermonette with increasing dismay. ‘I’ll remember nothing? Nothing?’

‘Not quite nothing,’ Harris says. ‘You may have noticed some photos in the hall.’

‘The company picnic.’

‘Yes. Every client who visits me sees pictures from the year of his or her birth, and recognizes a few familiar faces amid all the strange ones. When you live your life again, Mr Anders – presuming you decide to – you will have a sense of déjà vu when you first see those people, a sense that you have lived it all before. Which, of course, you have. You will have a fleeting sense, almost a surety, that there is more … shall we say depth to your life, and to existence in general, than you previously believed. But then it will pass.’

‘If it’s all the same, with no possibility of improvement, why are we even here?’

Harris makes a fist and knocks on the end of the pneumatic tube hanging over the laundry basket, making it swing. ‘CLIENT WANTS TO KNOW WHY WE’RE HERE! WANTS TO KNOW WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT!’

He waits. Nothing happens. He folds his hands on his desk.

‘When Job wanted to know that, Mr Anders, God asked if Job was there when he – God – made the universe. I guess you don’t even rate that much of a reply. So let’s consider the matter closed. What do you want to do? Pick a door.’

Bill is thinking about the cancer. The pain of the cancer. To go through all that again … except he wouldn’t remember he’d gone through it already. There’s that. Assuming Isaac Harris is telling the truth.

‘No memories at all? No changes at all? Are you sure? How can you be?’

‘Because it’s always the same conversation, Mr Anderson. Each time, and with all of you.’