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Q: Is nostalgia debilitating or enriching?
A: Neither. It’s one of a thousand tender emotions.
– from a 1969 BBC interview with Vladimir Nabokov
*
For some time now, the Greater Boston Reincarnates Support Group had been meeting over Zoom instead of at its usual location. But the vicissitudes of life in 2020 AD hardly fazed the group organizer, Alcibiades, who had lived through the Plague of Athens in his past life and still woke up sometimes with Pericles’s last hacking cough ringing in his ears.
“Hey friends, glad to see you all here tonight,” he said one evening after everyone had logged in. “This week we’ll be discussing finding community as a reincarnate during quarantine. Right, so, let’s just go around and introduce ourselves as usual – name, pronouns, when and where you were from in your past life. I’ll start: I’m Alcibiades but you can call me Al, my pronouns are he/him/his, I’m from Greece in the fifth century BC, and I’m way cooler and sexier than that Hellenistic poser Alexander the Great.”
His haughty laugh sounded through everyone’s laptop microphones.
“Anyway,” he continued, brushing his tousled hair out of his eyes, “someone go next before I completely embarrass myself.”
The other regulars introduced themselves. First there was Emma Goldman, her hair in a messy bun, small round glasses perched on her nose, the shelf behind her stacked with books like A People’s History of the United States, The New Jim Crow, The Anarchist Encyclopedia, and Sisterhood is Powerful. Next there was Charles Geneviève d’Éon de Beaumont, their outfit so impeccable that everyone else in the meeting looked woefully underdressed. Then there were Mary Stuart and her girlfriend Victoria Hanover sharing a webcam, and Victoria’s boyfriend Albie Saxe-Coburg puttering around in the background of their apartment. And finally there was Alexander Pushkin (or Sasha, as he was known to his friends) trying to balance his computer on his lap while petting a slumbering cat curled up next to him.
There were also two new faces.
“Hiii,” said a young woman with an aquiline nose and a mane of curly jet-black hair. She waved cheerily at the camera. “My name’s Marie Louise, she/her. I’m new here – I was from seventeenth-century France and my uncle was Louis XIV, but now I’m just a college student from Boston with a bunch of weird traumatic memories. My therapist recommended this support group to me, so here I am! Nice to meet everyone. Oh, also, I was the queen of Spain at one point. Okay, I’m done. I talk like, way too much!”
“Um, hello,” said an androgynous young man with a long face and pouty lips. “I’m Carlos. He/him, I guess. Seventeenth-century Spain. I’m also new, also in college… and I just realized there’s someone I know here. Or knew, rather.”
An intrigued, gossipy hush fell over the meeting.
Marie Louise cocked her head to the side, her twinkly dark eyes narrowing. “Wait, are you…? No way, are you really…?” She brought a hand to her cheek, her mouth open in shock. “Oh my god, we literally used to be married. Until I died, that is.”
“Yeah, long time no see…” Carlos smiled nervously. “Um, sorry, that was really awkward. Sorry for interrupting the meeting.”
“No problem, dudes,” said Al. “Right off the bat, huh? Wow. How’s that for finding community? This doesn’t happen every week, I’ll give you that. Do you guys wanna talk or something?”
Carlos and Marie Louise shook their heads, both blushing deeply.
Al threw his head back and laughed. “All right, then. We always leave some time over for off-topic stuff at the end of the meeting, so you guys can talk then if you want. I imagine you’ll have a lot of catching up to do.”
And that was how Carlos Austria and Marie Louise Bourbon met for the second time in almost three and a half centuries.
*
It would be fair to say that Marie Louise had spent her entire life (her entire second life, that is) wondering. Wondering where all those memories of mirrored hallways, long journeys in a rickety carriage, and grand throne rooms came from. Wondering why, in her French classes, modern French sounded ever so slightly odd to her ear. Wondering how in the world she seemed instinctively to know how to ride a horse despite having grown up in the city. Wondering why she hated history so much in school without being able to pinpoint the reason; she certainly didn’t consider it dull or irrelevant, but learning about it always left her with a sinking feeling, as if she’d just been mulling over an unpleasant childhood memory.
Once her parents and uncle finally told her the whole story when she turned sixteen, Marie Louise stopped wondering about those things and began to ask other questions. Did this mean she wasn’t crazy after all – or did it automatically make her crazier than her most maladjusted peers? Was she destined to die at twenty-six again, without even the consolation of posthumously making it into the 27 Club? (Not at all, the others were quick to assure her: after all, her mom was still alive and well in her forties, despite having died at a far younger age the first time around.) But most of all, Marie Louise wanted to know, Why me?
Nobody could come up with a satisfactory answer.
And so, with the plucky resolve and capacity for emotional repression that seemed to come naturally to her in such moments, Marie Louise forced herself not to think about the subject anymore. She did well in school, made friends and rode the wave of teenage popularity, was accepted into a good college to study computer science, and began to feel reasonably confident that she’d gotten life all figured out.
It turned out that the feeling only applied when things were going relatively smoothly, not when a pandemic and a statewide lockdown reduced her world to the confines of her apartment right in the middle of her senior year. While her roommates were caring for sourdough starters, cutting their own bangs, and working on unfinished novels, Marie Louise sat in her room brooding over the crushing weight of the past. Here she was again, she thought, living through history completely against her will, caught in the midst of forces far beyond her control: last time it had been the labyrinth of early modern dynastic politics, and this time it was a public health crisis during the death throes of late-stage capitalism.
Great. Just great.
One bout of sobbing on the couch during a Zoom session with her therapist later, Marie Louise found herself logging into the Greater Boston Reincarnates Support Group, gazing at the faces on the screen and trying to find whatever it was she was looking for in them. And when she saw the pouty-lipped young man with exhausted blue eyes and long flowing hair and a name that sounded painfully familiar, she realized – with a jolt that frightened her but was still less unpleasant than anything she’d felt in months – that she had found it.
*
“Why am I not surprised that you suggested meeting up in a cemetery, Carlos?” said Marie Louise, adjusting her pastel pink face mask. “You always were into that kind of stuff.”
Carlos shrugged. “This is one of the only places that’s still open these days. But it is kind of fitting, isn’t it?” His eyes narrowed as he smiled behind his own mask, which was, of course, black, like all of his clothes.
They turned onto a narrow path shaded by willow trees and lined with tombstones; the oldest ones were so weathered as to be barely recognizable and bore thick layers of moss, their battered inscriptions summarizing whole family histories.
“Soooo…?” said Marie Louise. “Aren’t you gonna like, say something?”
Carlos blinked and looked at the ground, which was strewn with wildflowers. Marie Louise couldn’t see most of his face because of the mask, but somehow she could tell he was blushing. As if she’d seen him blink and look away like that a thousand times before. Which she had, of course.
“Um. Yeah. Sorry,” he murmured. “I don’t really know what to say. It’s kind of hard to just pick up where you left off with someone after a couple of centuries of radio silence, you know? Since we were both… dead, I mean.”
“Yeah, I gotcha.”
“I mean, I have a lot to say, actually, but I just don’t know where to start.”
“Well, why don’t we start with the mundane stuff, then? What’s your life like this time around?”
“It’s… um… good.”
“Good?” repeated Marie Louise, raising an eyebrow. “Like, are you saying that just to say it, or do you really mean it? Do you like your life?”
“No, I really mean it. It’s better than the last one. For one thing, having been a king really puts the stresses of college life into perspective – I’d take cramming for finals over mismanaging a blood-soaked colonial empire any day. Which is exactly what I was doing the last time I was twenty-two.”
He laughed softly: a high, familiar sound.
“For another thing, I still spend way too much time around doctors, but at least they don’t make me drink wormwood or eat snakes any more.”
Marie Louise cringed. “Yikes. Yeah, I don’t miss the wormwood, either.”
She looked at his pale face and too-thin frame. Carlos walked with a cane in this life, too, but his gait seemed steadier, his back straighter, his movements livelier. It made a small smile appear on her face, unseen behind her mask, even as her heart sank to remember what he’d been like before.
“But what about you? You must love your new life, right?” he said, his voice hopeful.
“I don’t know, actually.”
There was silence except for the rustling of the willows and the buzzing of dragonflies.
“What do you mean?” said Carlos. “I thought you’d be happier…”
“Well, I am, but ever since I found out about this whole reincarnation thing a couple years ago, I’ve felt… empty. Like my life isn’t really mine.” Marie Louise sighed. “It’s hard to explain. Besides, I’ve always had these awful flashbacks – my mom dying in an opulent canopied bed, for instance, and then the same thing happening to me. They’d come up at random times and I wouldn’t be able to shake the dread for the rest of the day. Even when I was really little.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Carlos looked at his hands, twisting his thin fingers together anxiously. “I have bad dreams most nights, so I know what you mean.”
“Really? What do you dream about?”
“Um, you know,” he murmured, making a dismissive gesture. “Watching people being burned alive and knowing it’s my fault. Priests in black robes standing over me and chanting in Latin. You dying.”
Marie Louise’s eyes widened. “You really have nightmares about me dying?”
Carlos nodded. “That was how I realized I was going to spend my whole life waiting to meet you again. And if I never did, I’d be okay with being alone forever.”
Marie Louise didn’t know how to reply. What could she say? That at weddings she was invariably overwhelmed with memories of stepping out of a carriage, far from home and more frightened than she’d ever been, curtseying before the husband she’d never seen before – only to be pulled into the warmest and gentlest of embraces, and knowing that, whatever happened, her heart had found shelter? That she couldn’t think about love without remembering the last time she saw her family waving farewell to her in the courtyard of Versailles, and the first time she held a man in her arms, stroking his hair and whispering to him as he came down from a seizure? That in high school she’d dated a succession of long-haired goth boys, and had been dumped by them all one by one when they sensed she was pretending they were someone else, for God’s sake?
No. She couldn’t possibly tell him any of that. Not yet, anyway.
They walked on, going deeper into the cemetery. Nobody else was there, it seemed – nobody but the occupants of the hundreds of graves surrounding them on all sides. Had any of the people buried here been reincarnated? And were they, too, resigned to spend their new lives wondering and waiting?
“Look,” said Carlos, pointing to a row of tiny gravestones.
Marie Louise crouched down to get a better look. She read the short inscriptions: they all bore antiquated names like Constance, Ephraim, Makepeace, the dates underneath encompassing just months or even days. Someone’s children. She stood up.
“By the way,” Carlos said, his eyes downcast and shadowed, “I’m really sorry.”
“For what?”
“For not being able to give you children. For everyone blaming it on you.” His soft, high voice was strained and regretful. “When I was born the second time, my parents were told that I’m intersex. I guess it makes sense, looking back: the first time around, there had been rumors that I was actually a girl. I know now it’s not something I could ever change – not by prayers, not by drinking all the godforsaken aphrodisiacs the doctors shoved down my throat – but God, I was such a coward. I should’ve protected you, even if it meant admitting there was something wrong with me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Marie Louise said with unexpected forcefulness. She touched his arm lightly, social distancing be damned. “Not then, not now.”
Carlos looked at her for what seemed like a long time, his blue eyes searching her sloe-black ones. “Thanks,” he said quietly. “That means a lot.”
Marie Louise tried to laugh to lighten the mood, but it came out sounding more like a scoff, or a suppressed sob. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, clearing her throat. “This place gives me the creeps.”
She turned around and began making her way back down the path, shaking her head a bit too quickly to clear it. A monarch butterfly fluttered past her, its wings like a little flame, almost glowing in the shadowy cemetery.
“Marie Louise?”
She turned around. Carlos hadn’t moved.
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad I met you again,” he said.
Marie Louise hesitated for a moment, looking at Carlos standing in the middle of the path, surrounded by tombstones. In the afternoon sunlight that filtered through the weeping willows, his reddish-blond hair seemed to shine just like the butterfly’s wings.
“Me too,” she replied.
*
They ended up moving in together within a week, of course. Marie Louise insisted adamantly that doing so didn’t constitute giving in to Fate or History or any of that fatalistic nonsense, thank you very much. Carlos just smiled and kissed her hair, just like he always used to do in moments snatched between High Mass and formal audiences and all those other things they’d never have to do again.
“Do you think they’ll ever make a period drama about us?” Marie Louise asked once as she caught a glimpse of Carlos’s history homework, his textbook open to a chapter on the Baroque period.
“Oh god, I hope not.”
“Really? I kinda wish they would. I feel like it’d be cathartic, almost – even if they got a ton of stuff wrong. Maybe then I’d finally get over it all.”
“I can’t even watch the Monty Python skit about the Spanish Inquisition without being consumed by guilt, so I think you’ll have to go to the movie theater by yourself if that ever happens.”
At that moment, Marie Louise’s phone buzzed. It was her uncle.
“Hello?” she said, stepping out into the hallway.
“Loulou! Allow me to congratulate you on your excellent match. Again.”
“Geez, uncle Louis, how do you know about that already?”
“News travels a lot faster now than it did in the seventeenth century, if you haven’t noticed.”
Marie Louise was thankful he couldn’t see her blush at being once again the subject of family gossip. Luckily, this time the stakes were considerably lower, as nobody would be judging her on how well she promoted French interests abroad or how quickly she produced an heir to the Spanish throne.
“I always knew it would happen one of these days, you know,” continued Louis. “No need to thank me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t be silly, Loulou. If I hadn’t signed the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678…”
“Hang on,” said Marie Louise, interrupting him. “That was last time – which, by the way, my therapist says we still need to talk about, since I still have like, a ton of unresolved trauma about my arranged marriage. But I’m pretty sure you had nothing to do with it this time around.”
“Maybe not directly, but you know that if it weren’t for me back then, you would never have met this boy the second time, either. You know what I say – I couldn’t have done more for my own daughter. Or my niece, in fact.”
Marie Louise rolled her eyes. “Well, you know what I say – yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery, and today I have finals to study for.”
“All right, all right,” said Louis. “I have to get back to my meeting with Facebook, anyway. I’ve kept the poor bastards waiting for an hour, but just between us? They deserve it. Well, take care. Get good grades, make smart choices, don’t besmirch the family name – you know, the usual. Tell your boyfriend I said hello.”
“Okay. Have a good meeting, uncle Louis. Love you.”
She hung up just as Carlos appeared beside her.
“Was that who I think it was?” he asked.
Marie Louise nodded.
“The Most Christian King says hi.”