Free My Deja Vu Lover by Phoebe Matthews Page A

wouldn’t die right now because Macbeth wouldn’t give me a minute to think about death.
       The group leader told us to jot down on paper how we had reacted to the search directions she had given us. She repeated her instructions to help us remember and asked us to write down any past-life impressions.
       Don’t think so. I wanted to write, fuck fuck fuck, and a weird sort of fury boiled through me because she’d taken me in touching distance of the only man I could remember ever loving passionately and then she’d pulled me back. Not really. No, not really, not intentionally. That’s why I’d tried this trip, to learn more about him, so it wasn’t her fault.
       I wrote, “I remember being five years old and wearing a pink princess dress,” and quit.
       In that short time lying on the floor, my mind had entered another world. I’d felt a love that ached and burned and consumed me. And then for some awful reason I remembered Professor Berkold, well, he wouldn’t call, would he, I mean he thought I was this crazy lady trying to pick him up. With his looks, I just bet he had trails of co-eds hanging around his office doors.
       “Come on, let’s move,” Macbeth said.
       The four of us ran through rain to the car, holding our jackets up over our heads like umbrellas. We shouted to each other about getting wet, hopped around until Macbeth unlocked the doors, didn’t say much about the session really, but we all had opinions about the neighborhood. We ended up at Macbeth’s apartment.
       A paragon, that apartment, if a place can be a paragon, all efficiency. Mac lived in a shining new cubicle in a shining new building with built in appliances and sound system and dimmer switches and automatic everything. He served meals at a bar-stooled granite counter that stuck out into the living space so that any dropped food or drink could stain the carpet.
        There was a brown corduroy sectional couch with one section that opened into a bed, and a glass coffee table facing an enormous wall-hung television screen. Macbeth spent the rest of his life in his small bedroom-turned-office that looked like a computer store, every known gadget for efficient shelving, plus file cabinets. We would have all disowned him except that he also had a wall of bookcases filled with real books.
       “All the warmth of a loan office,” Cyd once said, describing Macbeth’s place.
       Oh right, it wasn’t an apartment, not a rental. It was a condo and of course he owned it. I didn’t even want to know the amount of his mortgage payments. They probably amounted to more than the total incomes of the rest of us. Ambition pays, apparently.
       We pulled apart the couch, scooting the sections around to circle the coffee table so that we could talk and look at each other. We could have all sat on the couch in a straight line the way people do on TV sit-coms, but refused to do so. Macbeth could put the thing back together himself after we left. And he would. Without complaining.
                     “Which is probably why we put up with such a neat, efficient dork,” Cyd said and ruffled his hair because she knew that annoyed him.
       Macbeth flipped his section of the couch open so it unfolded into three attached pieces that stretched into a narrow bed, then lay down, pillowing the back of his head in his hands, a beer can balanced on his flat abdomen. I knew that at night he tossed a sleeping bag on the couch rather than take up space in his bedroom office with a real bed.
        I also knew he had an inflatable double size mattress he put on the floor when Cyd stayed over. Which was probably why she wouldn’t move in with him.
       “Surely he’d buy a bed if you moved in,” I had once said and she’d raised a skeptical eyebrow at me.
       I sat yoga style on my share of the sectional. Cyd leaned back with her legs stretched in front of her. Tom sat on the floor and used the fourth section as a