Free All the Anxious Girls on Earth by Zsuzsi Gartner

like to blow my own brains out.”
    That was the trouble with the reincarnated, they were always famous people in their past lives. Like that woman on the West Coast who discovered through channelling that she was Guinevere and wrote a screenplay about her life in Camelot. Why were they never just tax collectors or lepers or chambermaids? Or silverfish?
    Daisy returned from the washroom and sat down even closer to the reincarnation guy. Her eyes gleamed as he described how Jesus, contrary to popular belief, actually had a terrific sense of humour.
Dry as bone
. He explained that many of the parables were highly sophisticated dirty jokes, well, dirty for the times, anyway, but humour doesn’t travel through the centuries all that well—and he hadn’t put that in his book as it would have turned off potential Christian book buyers of a New-Age bent. He was a businessman, after all, in this life, anyway.
    “‘If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for
her
hair is given her for a covering,’” he said, reaching out and pulling down one of Daisy’s curls until it reached well past her shoulders. “First Corinthians 11:15. I wrote that. In my
first
book.” He waited until Daisy laughed andthen he laughed as well. Jack drank some more wine. He couldn’t figure out why Daisy was suddenly in such a good mood and why she was clinging to every word this con artist uttered like some kind of mindless groupie. Those Anthony Robbins teeth alone should’ve been worth ten demerit points. Jack kept waiting for Daisy to kick him under the table to indicate they could start sniggering at the guy’s expense.
    “This morning,” Daisy said, “Teddie was so good on ‘Canada AM.’ Valerie Pringle asked him, ‘What message would Paul of Tarsus have for the Middle East today?’“
    “And I said—”
    Daisy jumped in, “And he said, ‘Lighten up!’“
    Jack clenched his thighs. Or rather, they clenched him.
    He drained his glass.
    Daisy and her client clinked their wineglasses in a jaunty Hepburn-Tracy kind of way. Their laughter ran together like a zipper, pinching the skin between Jack’s eyes.
    Toes. Stomach. Buttocks
.
    Teddie laid a hand lightly on Daisy’s bare arm. “Dud
ette
. That was one smokin’ interview. I owe you.”
    Asshole
.
    The guy smiled so widely that
The Ten Commandments
, in 70mm Dolby Digital, could have been projected onto his ultra-white teeth. That would have been appropriate. Jack was convinced most people got their ideas about reincarnation from the movies. All those people who thought they had been Moses were really thinking, Wouldn’t it be great to be Charlton Heston and have atoga-clad Anne Baxter admiring your pecs? Jack, if he was a reincarnation of anything, Jack would have been the anonymous, emaciated old guy stomping mud for the brick makers who collapses and is carried off while Charlton Heston takes his place in the bog. Behind them the pyramids grow large, the men and women scurrying hither and dither like ants. Nothing a little crumbled bay leaf wouldn’t take care of, Jack thought, or was that salt? He found himself emptying the contents of the salt mill onto the table. He’d never paid much attention to salt before. Never realized it was so white. So
salty
. Neither Daisy nor the guy were paying attention to him.
    “So, Teddie,” Jack said, his brain a raft bobbing dangerously on a red sea, “did Jesus and Mary M. ever—or, whoa! You and her… ?” He let his jaw drop in that vacant way Daisy always found funny, but now she only narrowed her eyes at him. The author formerly known as Paul laughed, though.
A bone-dry laugh
.
    On the way home in a cab, after dropping the reincarnation guy off at the Park Plaza, Daisy whispered a date in his ear. Jack wondered if it should mean anything to him: July 14, 1964. “Bastille Day?” Jack said.
“Vive le Quebec Libre?”
    Daisy leaned close, her breath a mélange of chlorophyll gum and pesto. “Its the day my brother