Jed and Alison

When I wrote about Jed and Alison yesterday, I omitted some details of how we met. Have you ever made acquaintances in a domino effect? One person introduces you to another, who introduces you to another, etc? That's what happened to me on a sunny day in 1998.

I had a friend called Amira in New York City. I didn't often see her, because she lived in Manhattan and I lived in upstate New York, near Poughkeepsie. It was a two-hour journey into the city with train and subway. One day we were joined by her 16-year-old daughter Betty. She was fascinated by my British accent, and was even more interested when I said I'd lived in Germany. Betty told her mother that she was meeting a schoolfriend at McDonald's and wanted me to meet her. Amira said it was fine, and she'd come to pick us up afterwards.

At McDonald's I was introduced to Ulrike, a girl with German parents who was born in New York. She spoke remarkably good German for someone who'd never been to Germany. First we spoke about me, where I'd lived and what I was doing in America. Then Betty nudged Ulrike and said, "You can tell him your secret". Ulrike was reluctant to tell me at first, then she poured it all out.

She said that she was born in Frankfurt in 1954. Wow! I was shocked. Ulrike wanted to stop, but Betty told her to continue. Ulrike said that she killed herself in 1980, but less than a year later she was reincarnated in New York. She'd remembered her past life ever since she was a child. When she told her parents they thought it was a childish fantasy. As she grew older she learnt to keep it secret, because people called her crazy. She hadn't told anyone at school except Betty, her best friend. I was confused. I'd never heard a story like this before. Ulrike didn't seem mad. Maybe it was all a joke.

One of the most bizarre things she said was that she wanted to go to Germany one day to meet her son. She still remembered her old house, so she could track him down. I advised against it. She'd be locked up if she approached an older man and claimed to be his mother. Ulrike seemed to be reasonable. She said that she could convince him by confronting him with old memories from his childhood.

That's when I met Alison. A white-haired girl was sitting at the next table. She'd overheard the conversation and asked if she could sit with us. Alison took it all seriously, asking her questions about her past life. Ulrike seemed happy that someone was taking her seriously, not accusing her of being mad. After a long talk and several Coca-Cola refills Alison said that we should meet her Dad. Betty said that she had to wait for her mother, so Ulrike and I left with Alison.

I saw a part of New York I'd never seen before. We were near Central Park, and we were surrounded by large houses, but we walked through the streets and came to an area with small houses. Alison lived in a small, single family house in the middle of Manhattan. It's an area the tourists never see.

It was an old but well-kept house. It was dark, even in the summer, because the windows were small. The house smelt of incense. And then I met Jed. He was a tall thin man with straggly unkempt hair. He welcomed us, made us a cup of tea, and he let Ulrike tell her story. Like Alison, he never doubted for a moment that it was true. He said that it's normal for suicides to be reborn quickly, because they have tasks waiting to be fulfilled. He said it's unusual for someone to remember his previous life in such detail, but it's not unheard of. He wanted to know about Ulrike's other past lives, but she didn't know anything except for her life in Germany.

Jed said he wanted to hypnotise Ulrike to delve deeper into her past. That scared her, and we didn't stay much longer. As far as I know, she never returned to Jed's house. I stayed in touch with Jed. We met as often as possible over the next year, considering the distance I had to travel. He always welcomed me like an old friend. I also met Alison at McDonald's a few times. I found out that she was only 16, but she looked older. I noticed that she was always alone, never with friends. She seemed to be an outsider, hardly surprising with such an eccentric father. I never asked why she didn't have a mother living with her.

Sometimes Jed joined us at McDonald's. Heads always turned when he walked in. He had a commanding presence. He was told off sometimes because he put his feet on the chair. He just didn't care what people thought about him.

Jed was a wonderful person. At first glance he looked like a vagabond, but he was always clean and tidy, in his own way. At first I thought he was arrogant, but I was wrong. He said that almost everyone in Manhattan is a fool. See my last post. But he didn't claim to know everything. He said that the Fools (with a capital F) think they know everything, but the Magicians realise that they know nothing and spend their whole life searching for the truth. He called me a Magician, not a word I would have used to describe myself, but I knew what he meant.

Recently I've been thinking about them a lot. AI gives me the power to reconstruct their images from memory. Jed was easy to draw, once I figured out the right prompts. Alison is more difficult. AI wants to make young women look beautiful, but Alison isn't beautiful in the conventional sense. Her hair is thin, without body, and falls straight. Even if I prompt her features correctly, I keep getting pictures I don't want. The picture at the top of this post captures her looks perfectly, as I remember her, but it's difficult to duplicate the image. AI isn't perfect. Not yet.

Here's the domino effect:  Amira – Betty – Ulrike – Alison – Jed

So I met Jed as the result of a series of coincidences. Jed would call it fate.