31. The name, part 4.

"Tell me who you were, in this life. Before it happened," she said.

This was not unusual, he thought. The idea of "faith" (which was in fact a set of illusions like any other) was so central to human thought, and it always had been. She was hunting around for things to hold on to, to help her understand. He felt belief dawning inside her, though she was carefully building arguments both ways to protect herself: arguments to defend his sanity, and arguments to refute it.

"I was happy," he said. "Or so I thought. I'd been given everything in life and yet wasn't ungrateful. I had a family who loved me and tried to protect me. I was bright, and courteous, and passionate." He paused. "But I couldn't escape the truth. It couldn't be kept from me. As much pain as I was shielded from, there were moments when the whole world's pain poured into me, threatened to obliterate me. How could I be happy when there was any suffering in the world?"

The smoke of the cigarette tickled his nostrils, and he thought about the man he had been who hurt all the time. In that life he could smell a cigarette from practically any distance, and the smell had made him gag.

"That's basically the story of Prince Siddharta," Nan said. "He grew up in a kingdom, sheltered, but the truth couldn't be hidden from him."

"It's been like that in many of my lives. Sometimes I've understood the message, sometimes I haven't."

"Message? That implies a messenger, or someone sending the message."

"A figure of speech. A message from myself, perhaps," he said with a chuckle. The humor being that he had no self; no one did really, but he didn't even have the illusion of a self. It seemed she hadn't quite got the joke.

She finished her cigarette. "But you, in this life. Tell me more. Who you were, where you lived, what your name was."

He was still smiling. "Why is that name so important to you?"

"It's part of the human thought process. Names and words may be empty, but we still need them to think."

He waited. She hadn't completed her thought, but she wasn't going any further. She changed direction instead.

"I guess I'll call you Sid," she said with a smile. "I should have been called Nancy instead of Nan."

He laughed.