"I was Cleopatra's ... wet nurse?"

Phil McClaymond adjusted his overalls and scratched at his graying beard. The sound of children's laughter ricocheted between the ferris wheel and the merry-go-round, bullets of fun, and behind a giant plastic sculpture of a skateboarding dog an expressionless clown sucked wearily on a cigarette. He didn't seem to want to be caught in the crossfire.

"Cleopatra IV, to be precise. The one everyone thinks about, the one who went down the Nile with both Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony—she was the seventh."

"How exciting!" said Lucy. "Listen to that, Phil." She grabbed a fistful of his left, blubbery pectus. "It's not so hard to imagine, is it? You've got moobs for days. Of course you were a wet nurse in a former life. It makes perfect sense."

"Fuck off," Phil grumbled. The clown behind the sculpture put out his cigarette with an oversized shoe. "You know this is all bullshit, don't you? I only agreed to this to be a nice husband. Like when I let you do a tarot reading in front of my whole family. It was my 50th birthday, if you can remember. They still bring it up, laughing their asses off."

"Beep," said Lucy, giving her husband's chest a final squeeze. "Don't be like that. This is just harmless fun, isn't it? And if it weren't for that tarot reading your brother would've made the whole day about him, wouldn't he? He wouldn't shut up about his yacht. That was when I dug up the deck of cards."

Phil let out a gentle sigh of resignation. He never seemed able to find a complaint she couldn't somehow reverse.

The fortune teller cleared her throat, then coughed. "Oh. Sorry," she said, wheezing. "A slight irritation. It comes and goes." Catching her balance, she said, "Your wife is right. This is harmless fun. Standard fare at a standard fair, eh?" She studied their faces for traces of laughter, squinted, then clicked her teeth. "If you're looking for the real stuff, and I am talking here about stuff with real prices as well, there's a place you can go."

"I know of a place you can go as well," Phil muttered.

"Oh? Tell us more," said Lucy.

The fortune teller pulled up an iPhone and fumbled with it a bit before landing on the homepage for some guy called Steve G. Barlow. "He's a scientist," she said quickly. "This isn't hocus pocus. This is the real deal. Like geology, archaeology, or homeopathy."

Phil wanted to submit a complaint at the mention at the last item on the woman's list, but his wife emphatically nodded her head, saying, "Yes, yes. I see. He looks clever. Is he clever?"

The fortune teller assured them that he was indeed clever and that he traveled to conventions all across the globe. She coughed once more and she cupped a hand before them with a hopeful look.

Steve G. Barlow's office was sterile, austere, and looked to be decorated by the same kind of people who decorated airports. On the wall hung rows of diplomas and columns of dreamcatchers. Phil frowned at the very sight of them.

"Ah. Mr and Ms Claymond, I presume?"

"It's McClaymond."

"Oh. Scottish descent, I take it?" Barlow widened his eyes. They were like bright blue marbles trapped in spoiled milk. He had a face like a rubber mask and the sort of haircut monks stoically donned to make themselves as unappealing to women as possible.

Fuck off, Phil wanted to say. Instead he said, "Right."

"Could be memories of summers spent as an Edinburgh druid resurfaces. You never know. There's no genetic link between past lives, of course. The transfer takes place via morphic fields, resonating like spacetime ripples from then to now, there to here."

Lucy jittered with the excitement of a golden retriever. "She said he was a wet nurse. For Cleopatra."

Barlow raised a lone brow. "Who?"

She pointed at her husband. "Phil. One look at his moo—I mean his pecs—and you know it's true." Lucy softly planted a kiss on her husband's cheek.

"No," said the scientist, "I mean who told you that?"

"Some fortune teller," said Phil.

The scientist snorted. "I'm sorry. What we do here is science. I hope you won't be disappointed when I tell you fortune telling is all bullshit."

"Oh."

"Bullshit!" cried Lucy. "It's just harmless fun. That doesn't mean it's bullshit."

Barlow shrugged. "If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck ... It's probably not a moose, is what I'm saying."

Lucy grumbled. "Those are some fine dreamcatchers you've got on the wall ..."

"Oh. Yeah. My daughter makes them. I buy them. Because, you know, who else would?"

His wife's face was starting to glow a slight red, Phil noticed. She tossed her black curls aside absentmindedly like she had a tendency to do before launching into a full frontal assault.

"So past lives, eh?" said Phil louder than necessary.

"Yes! As you're aware, neurons fire in rhythmic oscillations in frequencies from 8-25 Hz, alpha to gamma. This is a process of communal synchrony not entirely unlike the flashing of fireflies—collective dynamics is the proper term—and I am sure you have marveled at the murmuration of starlings, the colonial hivemind of ants and bees.

"The morphic field operates in a similar manner to the electrical field of charge and potential under your scalp, rising and falling like the hills and valleys of some ethereal plane. Our ancestors tended to walk in lockstep with its steady, comforting hum, but today we are deaf to its sound. Why? I suppose it's our disruption of the inherent harmony of nature; our very lives are dissonant, chaotic; we stuff pelicans full with microplastics and we poison the water we drink with chemicals that—"

Barlow gasped for breath. "I am sorry," he said. "I just watched My Octopus Teacher. It is a beautiful documentary, tinged with sorrow." Wistfully he glanced out an office window. "Those birds that soar in the skies outside, they have the wisdom of every life they've ever lived in their trembling hearts, I'm sure of it."

Phil tugged at his wife's cherry sweater, begging her with his eyes to escape this lunatic along with him. Lucy brushed him off.

"Birds can remember their past lives?"

"Oh yes. Well, I believe they can. A friend of mine has a parrot that recites verses in Latin. It must be morphic resonance. There's no better explanation."

"H-How does it work?"

"What?"

"The website said you had some sort of device. Something to connect one to the, uh ..."

"—Morphic field! Yes. Let's get started, shall we?"

It didn't look like much to Phil. A pair of earbuds, a pair of contact lenses. This guy charged $500 a session and Phil's stomach sank at the thought of every dollar he had spent on scammers that had impressed his wife and he wondered, for a moment, whether it might all add up to a yacht.

It didn't feel like anything either, wearing them.

"Let me know if you feel uncomfortable," said Barlow.

"I've felt uncomfortable all day," said Phil.

"Oh, and drink this."

With the lenses everything looked blurred, but Phil could recognize the plastic cup though he couldn't quite place the smell. He sniffed it. "Damn," he said. "What the hell is this stuff?"

Barlow blurred a smile. "Ayahuasca," he said. "It gets the process going."

"Isn't that a drug?" asked Lucy.

"If you ask me? No. If you ask the FDA or the DEA ... Well. I only request that you don't ask either of them."

Phil shrugged. "Bottom's up," he said and he drank the bitter stuff in one go.

For a few minutes, nothing happened. Then, right afterward, everything happened. All at once.