On the eve of his twenty-first birthday, Roy had an epiphany. Suddenly, he could see all his previous lives. The experience had nothing to do with prayer, meditation, or ESP. Roy considered himself a rationalist. He wasn’t religious, and neither was he tempted by any form of New-Agey mysticism. Raised a Catholic, he’d jettisoned his faith during his teens. For him, God and all his Saints had gone the way of the Tooth-Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Father Christmas — flotsam and jetsam on the stormy voyage to adulthood.

Of all people, it was his religion teacher in junior high who’d set the wheels in motion for Roy’s apostasy. The man was a dead ringer of pop culture Jesus: white, slender, doe-eyed, long-haired, and bearded. He went by the name of Floyd, but every schoolboy called him Freud because he was always getting carried off on psychologising tangents.

Floyd’s main point was that not all stories in the Bible told the literal truth. The stories’ primary purpose was to translate complex moral and theological concepts into something even illiterate yokels could wrap their heads around. In Genesis, Floyd argued, Yahweh is shown to have created Eve out of Adam’s rib to make folks understand that man and wife are equals, cut from the same cloth as it were. Similarly, according to Floyd, the story in Exodus about Moses being denied entry to the Promised Land was meant to make the reader understand that God is always true to His promise. Moses unnecessarily decided to hit the rock at Meribah Kadesh twice with his staff to bring forth water, instead of merely speaking to it as God commanded. All man has to do is to trust and obey the Lord, and Moses had shown a lack of faith.

The unintended consequence of Floyd’s message was that Roy started to question the plausibility of all Bible texts. How was one to know whether a story told a historical fact or whether it was a moral message delivered with a literary flourish? Did Jesus truly die for our sins? Did He actually rise from the dead? Was He really the Son of God? Had He even existed, or was He just another useful fabrication?

Physics and biology classes dealt an even deadlier blow to Roy’s already shaky faith. They made him realise that when hard science and religion collided in conflicting explanations of physical reality, religion always lost. Roy became an agnostic strongly leaning towards atheism. Nothing had prepared him for accepting that reincarnation was a real thing.

Roy was a young man. His entire life was still before him. Consequently, he tried to keep death as far as possible from his thoughts. He had to admit death frightened him. In fact, it was the only thing that made him envy true believers. Only the belief in an afterlife made death a somewhat palatable prospect.

The revelation of a continuous cycle of rebirth should have brought him relief, except it did not. All of his lives had been nothing short of horrible. Roy remembered toiling as a slave during the construction of the Great Pyramid, suffering the foreman’s lash. He was a Spartan, cut to pieces by the Persians during the Battle of Thermopylae; a Roman soldier croaking of diphtheria in some god-forgotten, mosquito-infested northern swamp; a Celtic woman dying in childbirth at the age of fourteen; a young girl being raped to death by Vandal invaders; a man sacrificed to the gods in Norway and, again, another one killed by Aztec priests; an albino African girl murdered by her family because they suspected her of being a witch; a Central-European farmer who died of starvation after a series of failed harvests and raids by invading Huns; a child eaten by a tiger in Kashmir. The list went on forever, and not once did he live to see a comfortable old age. No, he was mistaken. It did happen a few times, but only to let him experience the staggering loss of everybody he cared about in the world. What was the use of all these lives when existence led to nothing but pain and misery?

In a surprising number of lives, he never reached the age of twenty-one. When he did, however, that was the precise moment when he was given the depressing overview of all his antecedent lives. It was a shattering experience that left him bereft of all will to live on. Often, he’d preferred to take his own life, rather than to wait for what cruel fate had in stock for him.

This time around, the realisation struck him in a bar where he was chilling with a couple of friends. One among them, a girl called Ophelia, noticed the change that came over him. She whispered something he couldn’t hear to his other friends. They downed their drinks at once and walked out without saying goodbye.

‘Happy birthday,’ she said to him, raising her glass of white wine.

Roy was too stunned by the onslaught of his visions to wonder how she could know. He’d never told anybody. He’d stopped celebrating his birthday since his mother jumped out of a window on his fourteenth anniversary.

‘It’s hard to take it all in, isn’t it?’ Ophelia continued.

He was about to say, ‘And what would you know about that?’ when the oddness of her remark struck him. He knew Ophelia from his evening art class. She was the most gifted student by far, but she always gave her sketches and paintings a dark twist, regardless of the assignment. Whenever the teacher dared to comment on that aspect of her art, she smacked him down with a snarky repartee. After a while, the teacher ceased critiquing her work entirely. The girl was looking at Roy as if she could read his mind.

‘Tell me about it,’ he finally sighed.

‘This is a special anniversary,’ she pointed out.

‘Why would turning twenty-one be more special than any other birthday?’ he said with a shrug. ‘I’ve been drinking alcohol for years if that’s what you mean.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she chided him. ‘That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it. You’ve just gained access to all of your previous lives, haven’t you? If that’s not remarkable enough, you should count them.’

He didn’t want to ask her how she knew — not yet anyway — so he limited himself to, ‘Why?’

‘This is your five hundredth life. Ain’t that special?’ she grinned.

‘And it’s turning out to be just as shitty as all the other ones,’ Roy answered.

‘Well, that’s supposed to be the whole point,’ Ophelia said.

Roy was baffled. Who was this girl really?

‘Why is this happening to me? Is this what happens to everybody? Living one miserable life after another? What’s the point?’ he asked.

‘Other people’s lives are none of your business,’ Ophelia said. ‘You? You got what you deserved. Just think back to what you did in your first life.’

He tried hard but to no avail. All his lives seemed to be thrown together in a blender. There was no way he could pick his earliest life from the confusing stir fry of memories in his head.

‘Let me help you jog your memory,’ Ophelia proposed. ‘You killed your own brother out of pure envy. He was a better man than you. A better farmer, a better husband, a better father. Everything he did met with success. You were just a lazy, nasty bum, who felt entitled to be as prosperous and beloved as your brother, without putting in the effort. You were a failure. One day, your brother made a sacrifice to his god, which seemed to be particularly well-received, and you brained him from behind with a rock.’

‘Wait, wait,’ Roy said, ‘are you claiming I’m Cain from the Bible?’

‘No, I said you were a Neolithic dickhead. Nobody wrote a book about you,’ she shot back.

‘And this is my punishment for a crime I can’t even remember anymore?’ Roy whined. ‘To be reborn again and again in vicious lives that only offer intolerable suffering?’

Ophelia slapped his face hard.

‘Quit being such a cry-baby!’ she snarled at him. ‘Life’s not a punishment. It’s a new opportunity. It’s a gift. Life’s what you make of it. In none of your five hundred lives, you made the slightest difference. You were your pathetic self over and over again, each and every time.’

‘I was eaten by a fucking tiger when I was three!’ he yelled. ‘I was exploited, raped, tortured and murdered more times than I care to recollect! How did you want me to make a difference in those circumstances? I never got a chance. I’m the victim here, more than my brother ever was.’

Ophelia drank what was left of her white wine and stood up. Her parting words to Roy were, ‘You think hell is other people. It fits your world view because it absolves you from taking any responsibility yourself. You’re making your own hell, Roy. After five hundred lives, you still hadn’t figured it out, so I got tired of it and came to tell you myself. Even if life is tough, you can make a difference to other people — especially if life is tough. Get your act together. Don’t make me come back after another five hundred lives.’