Soul Survivor (13 page)

But James insisted, “The little man is named James, too.”

Andrea was confused. “Do you remember the little man’s last name?”

“No, I can’t remember it.”

Bruce and Andrea were sitting on the bed. It was one of those fragile moments when James offered up some small, select details,
like dropping pearls. But both parents knew that it was only a brief glimpse into his dreams and that it could end with the
least little pressure on him. James spoke when he wanted to speak, and he went silent and dark when he didn’t want to talk
about it. Bruce compared it to the coin-operated telescopes on top of the Empire State Building. You put in your quarter and
you got to see a great distance, and then, suddenly, when you were well and truly into it, on the cusp of perfect clarity,
the scope shut down. The coin had run out.

But Bruce and Andrea kept at it with James, albeit with the knowledge that they were seeing through a very capricious lens.

“Can you remember anyone else in the dream?” asked Andrea. “Any friends?”

James concentrated for a moment; then his face lit up and he said, “Jack!”

Well, it was a name, but it was no big deal. There were a million guys named Jack. He could have said Frank or Tom or Joe.
Jack could even be a nickname for James.

“Do you remember Jack’s last name?” asked Andrea.

And then James said, very clearly, “Larsen. It was Jack Larsen.”

“Get the pen and paper,” said Bruce, holding down his excitement.

Andrea went down to the office and fetched the legal pad and a pen, and Bruce started scribbling away, trying to remember
it all in sequence. Andrea saw that James was sleepy, but asked one more question anyway.

“Was Jack James’s friend?”

And James replied, “He was a pilot, too.”

It was too much to take in. They couldn’t push James much further. He was yawning and ready for sleep. So they kissed him
on his forehead and went into the family room, where they sat quietly, trying to digest this latest development.

J
ACK LARSEN” PLUNGED the Leiningers into the heart of the matter: belief and skepticism.

Andrea decided to believe. Under the circumstances, it felt like the sensible thing to do. She could not live indefinitely
in a state of nervous fear. (Even in combat, soldiers under fire attend to the banal, everyday details of existence.) In the
end, belief seemed the only practical solution.

For her, the name Jack Larsen was proof enough of the never-to-be-spoken-of “past life” memory. She did not need a perfect
circle. She was a mother with meals to prepare, a home to keep clean, and a child to amuse. Life had to go on. Those everyday,
humdrum imperatives trumped the midnight mysteries.

As far as Andrea was concerned, the war was won and the troops could come home.

Of course, she had help in arriving at her new belief. Her mother continued to talk about a New Age paranormal key to the
problem. She kept alive the possibility of a past life.

On the other side of the cleft was Bruce, hardened now into a firm nonbeliever. It was his mission, as he perceived it, to
prove to his wife (and the entire Scoggin clan) that his son’s nightmares were the coincidental rants of a child, not the
recovered memory of… Well, he would have to find out about “Jack Larsen” to make his point.

This was not just the whim of a contrarian. At stake for Bruce was the integrity of his Christian faith, as well as the whole
history of rational thought that he had studied in college and graduate school. He had dismissed the possibility of a past
life as no more than New Age mumbo jumbo. His background was conventionally schooled and systematically oriented. He had studied
mathematics and history and Descartes, and he believed in the scientific method and a rational universe.

And he had another incentive: victory on the home front. He could not surrender his role as custodian of the family’s good
sense and judgment. He held himself out to be the voice of reason on West St. Mary Boulevard.

“You cannot argue with the Scoggin women,” he would declare. “You have to prove them wrong.”

As Andrea went about the mundane business of maintaining the home, Bruce spent hours in his home office, brooding about the
nightmare problem. That first night, after James revealed the name of Jack Larsen, he went into the office and sat in front
of the computer screen, trying to figure out how to connect the name to the nightmares. It was late, after ten at night—he
saw the time glowing on the computer screen—and he had a big day at work ahead of him. He needed his rest, but he felt he
had to deal with this nagging problem of these nightmares. But how? Where was he going to begin? Was Jack Larsen the little
man in the burning plane? Was Jack Larsen another name for James? After all, Jack was a nickname. It could be John.

He turned the puzzle over and around, looking at it this way and that, searching for the key that would unlock the secret.

The modern version of brooding in the Leininger house took the form of Internet toe tapping. In would go the keywords and
key phrases, and Google would spit out—in the case of Jack Larsen—blind alleys. Bruce found himself stymied. He had no idea
where to begin. It was as if he were suddenly speechless on the Internet. And so he went to bed.

The weather turned sultry again on Saturday, and the quest for Jack Larsen was put on a back burner as the Leiningers celebrated
Bruce’s birthday. He had his coffee and read the newspaper and went out to do some work in the yard. Then he got his usual
bundle of hugs and kisses and gifts. As always, he was delighted with Andrea’s choices—his old jogging outfits were threadbare
and he welcomed clothes that were new and crisp. But his favorite was the jogging stroller. Now he could go on his runs with
James.

He took the stroller for a test drive, with James lolling in the seat, his hand out catching the wind, while Bruce ran behind
and pushed. Then it was back home for what he called “the Scoggin interrogation”:

“How was it?”

“Fine.”

“Did James have fun?”

“Yes.”

“What did he do? What did he say? What did
you
do? How far did you go? What do you think? Was it hot?”

She wanted to know every detail of the test drive; he felt pretty confident that he covered himself by saying it was “fine.”

That was a principal difference between them: her open, out-loud demand for instant public accountability and his quiet, slow,
withheld commitment. Andrea wasn’t just curious; she had to burrow into the meat and marrow of every little event. He wanted
to savor it, think about it, find the exact spot for it among his hierarchy of experiences and opinions.

It was the characteristic that made her settle for a quick answer to the nightmares and that made Bruce keep searching more
deeply for proof.

In the evening, they enjoyed a birthday dinner. They went to the Blue Dog Café, a Cajun restaurant that Andrea and James were
eager to test. Andrea packed a diaper bag full of crayons and toys to keep James occupied, but the Blue Dog was well prepared
for family crowds and had white butcher paper covering the tables, with a glass full of crayons as well. James had the guilty
thrill of drawing on a tablecloth, and Bruce and Andrea had a taste of the Tabasco-driven sauces that caused the busboys to
rush around the dining room to fill people’s water glasses.

When they came home and lit the candles on the eight-layered chocolate doberge birthday cake, Bruce let James blow them out.
They sang happy birthday, drank champagne (milk for James), then lit the candles again so that James could blow them out again…
and again. He was, for that sweet moment, an untroubled two-year-old who couldn’t get enough of candles or cake. And Bruce
and Andrea had their own respite of champagne and chocolate.

Later, Bruce wound up in his office again, staring at the blank screen. In the year 2000, it was practically impossible to
get on the Web during the rush hour—between seven and eleven p.m. But it was one o’clock in the morning.

If I couldn’t get connected now, I was throwing this piece-of-shit computer out the window. I turned it on and crossed my
fingers. I heard the familiar touch-tone dialing into the access network. I waited… and waited and waited with bated breath
and crossed fingers. My signal moved up to the middle of the three dial-up icons.… There was a pickup on the dial and the
familiar squawk of the computer searching for a signal. I couldn’t breathe. I watched the screen, hoping that once again I
wouldn’t get the signal that all lines were busy and to try back later—hoping that when Andrea woke up in the morning she
wouldn’t find the smoking remains of the computer in the leaf pile in the backyard. But I got the connection signal and I
could finally exhale. I had been admitted to the Emerald City….

Bruce typed in the name Larsen, with all its possible spellings and variations, including the first name Jack. But it was
a wild shot in the dark. Google was still in its larval stage, and the use of such a powerful search engine was inevitably
chaotic. You couldn’t expect to get any fast answers.

The sites came up Jack and the sites came up Larsen, and there were all the variations, from LaMere to Lwoski. From Jack to
Jake to John to Johann. Like so many stars in the sky. No one, he thought, could make sense of hundreds of names with so many
hundreds of combinations. How to refine the search—that was the critical question.

On Sunday morning, after feeding James with the clandestine bottle, he was back in his home office again, trying to find Jack
Larsen.

Now he’d thought of a starting point. Jack Larsen was a Navy pilot. Bruce assumed that if he had existed, he was dead. But
there was the possibility that Jack Larsen was the name of the little man in James’s dreams. Jack Larsen, Navy pilot—the search
links scattered Bruce everywhere. There were live Jack Larsens who were still Navy pilots; there were retired Jack Larsens—there
were hundreds and hundreds of possibilities wrapped around the name Jack Larsen and all its phonetic variations.

He was screening page after page of links, looking for a needle in a haystack. Even if, by some miracle, he found the right
person, how would he know it?

Bruce changed the search to war dead. That brought up a whole new unbroken code. They were, for the most part, listed by state,
and they were incomplete and unorganized.

He went out into the sunroom and had a martini. This was not something that he would crack with one blazing insight. This
was a layered, textured puzzle that he would have to outthink, then work to the end.

T
HERE WERE THE incessant demands of work. The oil field services firm that paid Bruce’s salary had more urgent claims on his
time. They were in the burning business of going out of business. OSCA was always intended to be sold for an infusion of cash
for the parent company. That meant a kind of corporate beautification in which the books had to be balanced, the workers handsomely
(but not overly) compensated, the benefits package both alluring and cost effective. Bruce’s job was to help spruce up the
bottom-line bride for a capital-heavy groom.

It was a grueling job just obtaining all the payroll codes—sixty pages of requirements and routings—to match each of the workers’
slots. All day he pored over the infinite and tiny details of government codes and management requirements—a watchmaker in
heavy industry.

At night and on weekends, he remained bent over his computer, trying to pluck out the secrets of his son’s mystery.

Bruce’s search had to be carried out as a part-time, staggered midnight-and-weekend sideline. In a way, that was good. It
took his mind away from his obsessive pursuit of the nightmares and enabled him to come to the puzzle fresh, pick it up again
each time he left his OSCA duties, and see the thing in a clean, clear light. And he also found that he was having useful
thoughts that came out of nowhere—just going blank and letting his mind wander brought other possibilities. Why not look here
or there, or concentrate on the military links?