Revelations of the Ruby Crystal

by Barbara Hand Clow

  Sarah reached for Claudia’s hand. “Claudia, I am deeply honored you shared your story with me. And I am in awe of the way you have survived and become who you are despite of what he did. Not only that, you have sought to understand and see what was at the heart of the disgusting way he treated you. Now I see why you are so functional and well-adjusted while Armando is a creep in rich man’s clothes. That is the key, isn’t it? No matter what happens to us, we must learn from what comes our way; it’s the only way to evolve. Guilt isolates us from our surroundings and our world. It is a wonder this planet hasn’t self-destructed. Thank you for choosing me to share this with. I will never reveal this to anyone, not even Simon. This is between us; we are now sisters, which means more to me than you realize. Will you be my sister?”

  Claudia turned to Sarah, grasping both Sarah’s hands with her own. “Yes. I’m so glad to have finally told someone. I just wish men would stop using women they don’t really want. He didn’t care about me; he was just trying to amuse himself. But he damaged me terribly, while he just chalked it up as some fun and stimulation. Someday I hope he will realize he is playing with very dangerous forces. Sex is dangerous when people aren’t totally conscious of what’s going on. He is so repressed he doesn’t even seem to feel guilty about anything he does; I know that because our relationship continued.”

  Sarah’s cell phone chimed. Sarah moved to turn it off, but Claudia said, “No, answer it. It could be Simon!”

  Sarah smiled gratefully at Claudia as she answered the call.

  “Sarah, it’s me, Simon! I’m at the Rome airport. Can you come for me right away, or should I take a cab and meet you at home? I am home for the holidays!”

  Sarah raised her eyes to Claudia’s. They were sitting so close together she knew Claudia had heard Simon’s words. Sarah didn’t want to leave her newly sworn sister unless she was okay and wondered what she should tell Simon, but Claudia nodded. “You can go to him. Just telling my story has healed me.”

  32

  Armando’s Analysis

  Lorenzo Gianinni, one of Rome’s most celebrated Jungian analysts, sat on a comfortable leather chair in front of a large, dark, wooden desk with various ancient artifacts spread all over its surface. He tapped a pencil while running his eyes over them one by one. They were his tools, which held historic and symbolic information, the computer hard drives of ancient civilizations. He needed them because his clients were apt to dig up almost anything in the past, especially arcane symbols. He cast a glance at a small lapis lazuli statue of Sekhmet from the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt. Her broad prominent nose and fierce lion eyes seemed to be watching ferocious religious battles between the priests of Amun and the Amenhoteps. His gaze moved over to a Sumerian wall relief that depicted a strange chimera—lion body, chicken feet, and the head of a menacing man carrying a staff. They made these so that people can remember something that happened long ago, but what?

  Putting down the pencil, Lorenzo reached for a soft limestone tablet with the twenty Maya day signs carved in raised relief; and he brushed his fingertips over the peculiar symbols. Hmmm, my fingers go to Cauac, not Ahau. Funny, since Ahau is today’s sign and Cauac means cataclysm, chaos. He was thinking and thinking, as if somehow that would get him someplace; he of all people knew it never did.

  Maybe if I free-associate it will tell me how to get Armando moving. Damn it! Ten years wasting time with this spoiled ass. He still goes around abusing young women, probably a repressed homosexual. Today he’ll show up on the last day at the end of time. Ha! Maybe time will end for him, and I won’t have to put up with him anymore! Most of Lorenzo’s patients needed only two or three years of analysis, but he thought Armando could continue for the rest of his life, or at least the rest of Lorenzo’s life. I am so sick of the pompous creep! As he thought of his life ending before Armando went away, Lorenzo’s face flashed in the crackled glass of a Victorian mirror. It was a wily and smart face, like a happy little mouse stuffed with cheese. Even though he was almost sixty, his skin was tight, his hair black and gray, his mouth sensual.

  I’ve had to listen to so many seductions and descriptions of his god-damned paintings that I’d like to gas the bastard. Lorenzo would have loved to end his work with him; Armando was the only patient he’d ever truly hated, but he was afraid to turn Armando loose. Over the past few months he’d grown more and more concerned that Armando was ready to kill somebody. I can feel it coming; I have to confront him. Maybe if I threaten to end it with him, maybe that’s what it will take to get him to see his dark side? Startled, he looked up. Had the Sumerian lion just switched its long tail? His bright brown eyes sparkled in the mirror.

  After parking and passing through the iron bolted gate off the Via del Portico d’Ottavia in the medieval Jewish ghetto, Armando ascended an ancient stone spiral staircase up to Lorenzo’s office in a tower that was more than nine hundred years old. Once he got to a certain level, his awareness melted into another time and place. He was startled by something dark and hairy on the damp stonewall to his right. Ugh! What a hideous spider! Looks dangerous too. He took off a Ferragamo loafer, stood slightly back, and Whap! He squished it all over the wall. As it writhed and convulsed he thought, There! Take it! You shitty thing! Armando could hear its high-pitched death scream, a siren inaudible to most ears.

  “Hello, Armando. How are you today?” Lorenzo said as Armando sat down, his head resting on the tufted dark green leather analyst’s couch that could spin long tales going back to the mid-1980s. Lorenzo was invisible while he sat with clipboard and pen in a comfortable easy chair. He turned off the light on the table next to him and waited.

  “The same, always the same,” Armando said in a distinctly bored voice. “When am I going to change? We’ve been doing this for ten years! If only I could have Claudia just once more, I would change because she’s the only woman I ever loved. And it would be even better because I know she is now Sarah’s friend, the only woman I ever wanted to marry. Ironically, they are close these days. I have seen Sarah go into Claudia’s apartment. I’ve waited around outside on the verandah for hours wondering what they talk about; Claudia should have a guard. I’m sure Sarah will go over there tonight, since it is the end of the Mayan Calendar. If only I could fuck Claudia just once more, maybe fuck both of them,” he muttered as the heaviness came, the time to free associate.

  “Armando, I want to make some changes today with your permission. We have been working together for ten years and making very little progress. You must be as tired of it as I am?”

  “Of course I’m tired of it. I am sick of paying you, boring you, and never changing myself.” That’s what Armando verbalized, but it wasn’t what he was thinking. You worm, Lorenzo. I know you love me laying around here telling you about all my adventures. I’m sure I make you horny all the time.

  “Armando, I would like you to begin as usual by telling me the first thing that comes into your mind and then I’d like to regress you. We’ve never done that before, and I think it is time. I can lead you on a journey into the past, maybe to another place and time, possibly into another lifetime. We don’t care what these experiences are, but they are usually valuable because regression accesses the deep subconscious where we find deeply repressed memories. I have been thinking of terminating our relationship because we aren’t getting anywhere. This technique might help you; certainly it won’t hurt you.”

  Armando gave his permission because his brain was thickening; something was flooding it, something was coming. He said, “I see a baseball bat.”

  “A baseball bat,” Lorenzo noted. “Yes?”

  “I’m swinging it hard over and over again, stretching out my shoulder muscles. I played baseball because I loved hitting the balls. Wham! Wham! Just like smashing that huge black spider in your filthy tower.” His voice slurred; Lorenzo struggled to hear him. “I wonder if hitting a woman’s skull with a bat could crack it open, thwack!”

  Lorenzo shuddered.

  “Armand
o, I want you to breathe deeply in sync with me for a few moments. Just allow yourself to relax . . . I am going to start at the number 100 and count slowly backward. Follow my voice coming through a tunnel . . . Here we go . . . 100. . . 99. . . 98. . . 97 . . . back. . . back. . . back. . . back in time to the place where you can see yourself with the baseball bat.”

  Armando’s eyes closed. He felt like he was going to sleep, but suddenly he became hyper-alert. Rock was all around him, damp rock, creepy. He listened to Lorenzo’s voice coming through a thick fog. “See your feet; what are you wearing? See your legs and torso; what do they look like? Look at your hands. Tell me what your hands look like.”

  Armando’s eyelids fluttered as visions danced in his cornea. “This is very strange,” he said in a sludgy voice. “This is very strange, I can’t explain it.”

  “Just try!” Lorenzo encouraged in a soft voice. He’s gone somewhere.

  “Well, the backs of my hands are like snake skin, wormy, reptilian, scratchy snakeskin. I have claws with six fingers,” he said in an awed voice.

  Now Lorenzo was seeing what Armando was seeing. I’m surprised Armando is so suggestible; I should’ve done this sooner.

  Armando’s voice filled with wonder. “I am dying! I’ve come to the time when I am dying and my skin is horrible, dry, and cracked. I am dying because I’ve dried up and I’m ugly. Who am I? There are noises around me, other things around me that are like me. We are writhing together in a pit, writhing together because I squashed that spider. Oooh!”

  “Armando, tell me about the creatures around you if you can. I would love to know all about them,” Lorenzo said in a reassuring, curious, and seductive voice.

  “They, we, WE are the fallen ones, the ones in the deep cave under the earth! Here we are in our prison; I am in the prison. Oh my God!” he said in a voice filled with amazement. “This is the part of me that exists simultaneously with Armando, like my double. I am a reptile, a snake, a being of great power. I am awesome, I am Armando Angelico Pierleoni.”

  Lorenzo looked around the room, detecting a potent, acrid stench in the room that seemed to be rising through the floorboards. It’s sulfur! Nervously, he grabbed for a hematite crystal on the table and moved his awareness deep into the Earth, breathing in and out three times to balance his body. I can always bring him out of it if I need to. What in God’s name is this? What is he contacting?

  Armando’s voice switched into its more familiar nasty, manipulative tone as he sneered at Lorenzo. “You’re not so smart, doctor. You conjured me, Armando the Lizard, prince of the world. I can do anything to you if I want to; just wait.”

  “Now, Armando, let us not forget our agreements. You will not be doing anything here, only telling me what you see and feel. How does it feel to be a lizard? A reptile? Where is that part in your body?” At this point, Lorenzo was channeling questions because he was clearly seeing a vision of a huge cave filled with writhing monstrous reptiles, an underworld horror show. He remembered hearing an odd report twenty years earlier about Russian scientists doing deep drilling for oil five miles down. Out of curiosity they lowered a sensitive microphone down the hole and heard the sounds of voices screaming in agony. The scientists thought they were demons. What if these are the souls of the reptiles that died in the cataclysm sixty-three million years ago?

  When Lorenzo asked him where the lizard was located in his body, Armando felt blood rushing loudly in his ears. “It, it’s my blood, it is in my blood, my family blood. It is in all of us but we Pierleonis are born with more. My mother is so proud of our blue blood, but of course they are good aristocrats; I am an evil aristocrat.”

  “What is an evil aristocrat, Armando?”

  Armando felt metallic power surging in his veins, the reptile in the deep cave. He barely heard what Lorenzo asked, but it registered somewhere in his brain. He replied vaguely, “I, I am there when I am here. When I have sex, my lizard grows. I was seven when I first felt him inside my body when I was playing baseball, and I was so proud of myself since I’d had my First Communion a few weeks before. When I whapped the ball, the lizard came into my body! He was licking me inside; it felt good. When I was twelve and saw a chambermaid’s pubic hair when she leaned over the bed to pull the covers, again the lizard came into me! I swelled and got hard and pulled her into the stair closet and fucked her, my first fuck. She almost stopped breathing because the lizard was holding her mouth shut so she couldn’t scream. My lizard does these things, the things that women don’t like. I like to clutch their throats while I fuck them.”

  “Armando,” Lorenzo said in a firm and commanding voice. “I want you to come back into the room with me when I count again. I want to talk to you about what we’ve discovered today.”

  In a few minutes, Armando was sitting across from Lorenzo in the dimly lit alcove again, feeling very odd.

  Slouching over, Lorenzo was taking notes on a pad and considering things. If he can integrate this and start to see it for what it is, he may be able to become aware of the pain he causes others. If he can’t, I will warn the authorities about him. He said, “Armando, now that you are fully here, what did you get in touch with today?”

  “It can’t be me, a lizard?” Armando said in an annoyed tone. “How could it be me? You think so because you regressed me into a lizard!” Even as he said that, he knew the lizard was a part of him, a part he knew very well. But talking about this with Lorenzo was too revealing. I need help; I really need help. “Even if that lizard is a part of me, then what will happen if I try to understand what it wants? What will happen to me? Will I turn into a snake or a reptile? Am I a reptile?”

  “What do you think, Armando?” Lorenzo asked as he felt his skin crawl. Better switch to mental right away. “Maybe we all have a lizard inside? After all, we are descended from reptiles according to some evolutionary theories. Or maybe this is the serpent in the Bible that tempted Eve to bite the apple?”

  As his mind grasped what Lorenzo was saying, Armando felt a rush of relief. Thinking about ideas always got him out of his snake body. “Lorenzo, have you heard of conspiracy theories that say the global elite are closet reptiles? People say during their secret rituals, they turn into reptiles to sacrifice and eat babies or have ritual sex. Since I come from an old elite family, maybe I was born that way? What do you think about that?”

  “I think that is possible, even likely,” Lorenzo said with a touch of amusement in his voice. “I don’t mean possible that you eat babies, since I think you would have told me? But maybe the lizard is in your blood.” In a commanding voice, he said, “Armando! You have been coming to see me for ten years, and I have been very patient. I have asked few things of you. I suggest you get to know this lizard because I think it is the part of you that hurts innocent women. Frankly, Armando, I’ve been appalled by what you do, horrified; your cruelty is shocking. You must claim this part of yourself and change!”

  “Everybody is appalled by me, especially women. But I’ve never cared, never cared a bit,” he said as his voice slowed down becoming barely audible. Lorenzo leaned closer to him. “Doctor, I enjoy their pain; it makes me feel powerful. I am afraid I will kill one of them soon. I don’t want to kill anybody,” he said so softly Lorenzo could barely make out the words.

  Armando felt a tiny sliver of hope come. “Do you think I can get to know that part of me? Can I learn to control it and not be ruled by it when I want sex? Lorenzo, now I will make the first honest statement of my life. I hate myself for what I do.” He hunched over, hugging his lean torso and sobbing quietly. As the tears began to flow, his throat closed, and he felt as if hot liquid were flowing into his heart. He whispered, “I think I’m having a heart attack, Doctor. If I am, I deserve it.”

  “Breathe, Armando, breathe with me. I am your doctor. You are not having a heart attack; your heart is opening. You are forty-one, the time of mid-life crisis when many men have minor heart spasms during their heart opening. But, Armando, I am here with you and I know
you will be fine if you let the energy flow. When we finish, I will order a complete array of tests just to be sure about your health. Do not worry. You are getting in touch with your feelings now, and I am very impressed with you. You can be a good man, Armando, and then you will be a good lover.”

  Simon sat at the kitchen table telling Sarah about his discoveries in Jerusalem and his experience in the Tomb of Mary, all the while marveling at the beauty of her face. She studied his eyes, looking for the sapphire blue flashes that revealed so much about what he was thinking. Instead of shyly turning away as he used to, he held her gaze and she shivered. “I see so much more in your eyes, Simon. Actually, I see profound spiritual beauty in your eyes.”

  “I am a different person, Sarah, a different person altogether. Something happened to me in the Tomb of Mary that awakened me. But it’s hard to handle. When I went to the airport, everything was shining with extended light, and I was afraid the Israeli authorities would hassle me. They were about to give me a hard time because they could sense something about me, but when I told them I was going home to see my wife for Christmas, after running my passport again they let me through.”

  “Can you tell me anything more about feeling different?” Sarah asked. “I can feel it, but how would you describe it?”

  He stroked her forearms while their foreheads touched. He found he could express himself if he looked down at the table. “I feel myself, you know, my solid body here in the room with you, as very small, much smaller than I have ever been, like a seed. Yet I am much bigger because I extend way out all around myself in a field that is shaped like an egg. When I was a young boy, my father taught me how to detect it, my extended cocoon, but I drew it back inside as soon as I went to school when I forgot about it. It is wavy and shimmery and has a greater intelligence than my mind has; it centers my heart. When I was walking through the airport, I could feel what everybody around me was thinking and feeling, and I was picking up accurate information. I can’t wait to walk around the Vatican! ‘Between the Sheets in Roma’ is going to detect what is going on at the Holy See! Holy See indeed! But enough of me! You just saw Claudia this evening. How is she?”