by Alex Shakar
Instead, he let his eyes fall shut again, risking paralysis for the chance of finding that old bed, of waking up in it to a sun over a skyline, and Mel’s golden hair and skin and radiant heat like the sun itself rolling atop him. Though this time, all that came to mind when he tried to picture that swell of a breast were the faint freckles he’d never quite seen before, late one night toward the end, limelighted by the pulse of a charging laptop on the nightstand as she lay waiting for him in the dark. He’d reached across the bed, his hand cupping the mass, cushiony at the surface, cottage-cheesy beneath. Then, with the pads of three fingers, beginning to lightly prod counterclockwise, as the pamphlet in the oncology waiting room recommended, in a narrowing spiral around the nipple … Her voice rippling with dread: “Are you giving me a—”
… before darting off like a jellyfish in the murk.
A soft knock at the door.
“Fred? Can I check my email?”
He sat up, leaning his back against the wall. “Sure, Mom.”
She peeked in, the reading glasses she’d been using more lately low on her nose. “I’m not waking you, am I?”
“No worries there.”
Taking a seat at the computer table, she regarded him with a quiet, searching wonder, as if he were some famous work of art she’d been hearing about all her life but had never until now seen. She gave him that look a lot, these days. Maybe it came from gazing at George’s sleeping, unrevealing face, day after day.
“Vart said the show went well,” she offered.
“He said that?”
She glanced at the ceiling. “His actual words were, ‘Everyone survived.’” “Now that I’m a convicted felon, I suppose that’s a concern.”
“I didn’t realize shoplifting was a felony these days.”
“It’s a class-A misdemeanor.”
The maximum punishment, Fred was startled to learn in his online research, was a year in prison. Which would certainly solve his housing situation. The most likely outcome, though, was something called an “adjournment in contemplation of dismissal,” which meant that if he could steer clear of criminal activity for six months, the charges would be dropped.
“And I guess I’m not convicted yet,” he went on, “if you want to get technical. But ‘alleged misdemeanorer’ doesn’t got the same ring to it, you know?”
“Oh, it sounds a lot better to me.”
She’d looked worried, though not overly so, when Vartan had brought him home from the police station the night before. Her smile was sorrowful, but there was a trust in it too, a faith in him, which, like her faith in everything else lately, seemed to him quite possibly unmerited.
“There’s probably a reason it happened you can’t see yet,” she said. “Maybe you’ll need those tweezers for something down the road.”
Briefly, he envisioned himself killing a terrorist, a very cooperative one, with a well-aimed tweezer-slam to the eyeball. He didn’t bother informing her they hadn’t even let him keep the lousy thing.
“So how’d the, um … session go?” he asked, while they were on the subject of her magical thinking.
“It went well,” she said softly, “really well.”
He waited for some indication of what this meant. Had there been any change? Had George moved or something? Cracked an eyelid?
“Oh yeah?” Fred prompted, the enthusiasm too thin, the challenge beneath too plain. He could read the pained calculation in her eyes, and was sure she could read it in his—he readying himself, out of a sense of duty to her, to stand in her path; she, out of a sense of duty to George, and to that strange new path itself, stepping swiftly around Fred.
Her smile broadened. “Oh, and on the subway ride home, Guy told us all about his trip to South Africa. He was studying with a sangoma, a Zulu shaman. They initiated him by bathing him in the blood of a goat.” With her head tilted up to keep the glasses on her nose, the reading lenses now magnified her eyes. Her face shone with a kind of creeped-out amazement. “Guy actually drank the blood, too, and did this ritual dance, and went into a trance. Then he was possessed by a Zulu ancestor.”
Fred had to admire her deftness in changing the subject. Guy—pronounced by Holly, and presumably by Guy himself, the French way—lived on the next block, with his wife, Dot. Dot was a graphic designer, Fred thought he remembered his mom telling him; as for Guy, Fred didn’t recall her mentioning an occupation other than the energy work. Fred had once run into him and Holly on the sidewalk. Guy looked to be around his age, wore a ponytail, might have been an inch or two taller than him, or maybe just had better posture. If Guy had any trace of a French accent, Fred hadn’t been able to detect it.
“Is that so,” he said. He wondered if she was thinking what he was thinking, namely that if it were George sitting here with her instead of him, George would have been keen to hear about Guy’s adventures. Were it Fred now in that coma, she and George could have stood over him in that hospital room doing their mumbo jumbo together, along with this goat-blood-quaffing Frenchman, whose name she uttered with the kind of unself-conscious enthusiasm, Fred couldn’t help but feel, that a mother might exhibit for a son.
“They were hiding a wooden idol, and Guy had to find it,” she said. “The ancestor made him speak in tongues and do flips. Then he ran into a hut and found the idol. He said he went right to it!”
“That’s … one hell of a tourist attraction.”
“In the graduation ceremony, he had to wear its gallbladder in his hair.” She laughed. “He showed it to us. The sacrificed goat’s gallbladder. He still has it.”
“He should have it taxidermied. Mount it over the mantel.”
“He’s going to have it made into a necklace.”
“Even better.”
Her look joined in the humor, almost complicit in the absurdity, except Fred got the distinct feeling that there was a larger absurdity she was seeing, an absurdity he himself was a part of.
He held up The Power of Positive Thinking, hoping to get a few points for trying. “So how is this book, anyway?”
“It’s really good. I thought you’d been reading it. You’ve had it out on the table there for two weeks.”
“No. Not yet.” He’d taken that particular one down from the shelf on the day he’d applied for the helmet study, in the hope that just having it in plain view would inspire him. It hadn’t occurred to him to actually read it—he’d assumed the title said it all. That gambit not quite having worked, he picked up a sliced-open, apple-sized stone with a sparkling black interior that had been sitting on the alarm clock. “This is a nice one.”
“It’s from a vortex.”
“A vortex?”
“There are a bunch of them around Sedona, Arizona. They say the energy there is so powerful it twists the juniper trees. They say you can feel it swirling up out of the ground.”
“Sure.” He turned the stone over, hunting for a price tag. “Why wouldn’t they?”
Her smile forgave him. Even so, she looked suddenly tired.
“You probably need to sleep,” she said. “I won’t be too long.”
She turned toward the computer, waiting in silence for it to wake up. The happy glow had faded from her face, replaced by the monitor’s pallid illumination. The miracle worker was gone and she was just his mother again, a small sixty-two-year-old woman with expressive eyes and faintly trembling fingers—an as yet mild case of a medical condition called essential tremor—hovering over the keys. He clutched the vortex rock, wanting to bash his skull open with it, out of guilt, out of anger, out of guilt about the anger. Why should he begrudge her any equanimity she could lay hold of under the circumstances? Yet it baffled him how she could spend an evening with George and come home looking like she’d been to a spa, like it was he who was healing her. For a couple weeks after George had broken the news to her just over a year ago, they’d worried she might not even survive the shock. Her tremors had grown so severe she could barely bring a fork to her mouth, could only dr
ink through a straw. Her mind couldn’t track a conversation for more than a minute, and then she’d need to go lie down. At that point, the Reiki had just been one more hobby among others—journaling, dance classes, guitar lessons—her perennial, never-quite-fruitful attempt to find her purpose on Earth. But with George’s illness to motivate her, she soon went back and immersed herself in the training as never before, becoming what they called a Reiki master. And then one day, her eyes closed, her faithhealing hands held out over George, she’d had a vision, a mental image so real she’d taken it for prophecy, of George opening his eyes, right there in his hospital bed, and smiling at her.
Somehow, probably through the nurses, word of George’s continued survival had spread, and she now had patients all over the hospital asking for her help. She spent part of her time there these days making the rounds, beaming her energies to all and sundry. What did they feel, or imagine they felt, all those desperate people? Fred clenched the vortex rock tighter still. When it began to hurt, he released his grip and gazed at the indentations it had formed in his palm.
“How do you turn this thing on, anyway?”
Holly stopped typing and looked. He gave the rock a shake.
“It’s on already,” she said.
“What does it feel like, this energy stuff?”
She considered. “It’s different at different times. And different people feel it in different ways.”
“So how do you know it’s the same thing you’re all talking about? How do you know it’s real at all?”
His voice had risen. He regretted this, as well as the accusation in his tone. But she didn’t seem to mind.
“Yeah. Sometimes we all sit around and ask ourselves if we’re crazy.” She thought, then added quietly, “But it is real. The more you do it, the more you know it.” Once more, she fixed on him that searching, appraising gaze. “You should come next week. We could give you an attunement, and you could see for yourself.”
An attunement. The term sounded comfortingly technical, as if they might simply replace a couple misfiring spark plugs and set him running good as new. He thought of Mira’s question, so value-neutral, nonjudgmental—why hadn’t he tried it?
“George’s energy was so strong tonight,” his mother said, a near whisper. “All of us felt it.”
“You did?”
She nodded. “Above his crown chakra, especially. And his throat chakra, too. I felt like he was getting ready.”
Part of Fred wanted to fall into her arms and cry. Part of him wanted to scream and shake her until she snapped out of it.
“Getting ready?” he asked.
“To come back to his body.” She smiled, her weary face luminous. “And speak.”
Five
… Just relax. Nothing to do now. Nothing to worry about. Nothing even to think about. For these next few minutes, just be free, as free and relaxed as you know you can be. As I count down from five to one, you may notice a feeling of deepening relaxation with each number, and with every word I say. And at the count of
four
without trying to change it, just focus on the gentle motion of your breath, flowing in and out. With four, you may notice your breath becoming slow and relaxed, and the rest of you also becoming slow and relaxed. Just imagine your breath seeping into every cell of your body as you breathe in, and seeping out as you breathe out: your whole body relaxing with every breath. So that when
three
comes, when three is here, and it is here, you may have already become aware of how heavy your arms and legs have gotten. A heavy, drowsy, comfortable feeling in your arms and legs, so that the more you focus on your arms, your legs, the more relaxed they are, and it’s getting to the point where you can’t even lift them, they’re so heavy now. Go ahead and see for yourself how heavy they are. It’s funny, isn’t it, how easy it is to relax? And you can just let go now, even deeper, at the count of
two
and notice this warm, drowsy heaviness spreading through you. Outward from your heart in rippling, relaxing waves. Rippling through the muscles of your back and abdomen, through your internal organs. Down through your hips and legs and feet and out through your toes. Out through your shoulders and arms and hands and fingertips. And up, in a great, warm wave, through your neck. Maybe you’re already thinking about how it will feel when it washes up into your head. Go ahead and let it, feel it ripple over your face, relaxing every little muscle—around your mouth, around your eyes, all the muscles of your scalp. Now let it seep deep into your brain….
one
So deeply relaxed. Your mind too heavy for words. Let the words disappear. Only pictures, now. I want you to picture the city, late at night. No cars, no people, no noise. Just you, out on a quiet street. It could be any street you want, Broadway, or any one of the avenues, whatever you like. It’s just you there, you and a chair, a comfortable recliner, in the middle of the sidewalk. You’re comfortable and reclined, and looking up, you can see the buildings like tall cliffs reaching into the night sky, the long, dark canyon of them stretching in both directions.
There, look. A little white balloon, rising past the windows and up into the blackness.
And there, a sheet of newsprint rising up, caught in a breeze.
And one of those outdated, pink “While You Were Out” memos slips floating out an open window.
And it’s not just the breeze, is it? Because here come other things drifting out the windows. Here come chairs, and desks, and copiers, and bulletin boards, all as weightless as that first helium balloon. Here come phones and keyboards and monitors, twirling slowly by the wires that join them all together. Here come pens and pencils, and the windowpanes too, the millions of them, rising into a long, sparkling cloud, like a second Milky Way. Here come the filing cabinets floating out, and drawers from the cabinets, and papers from the drawers. There goes a city bus, its wheels still slowly turning as it passes through the cloud of papers. The whole city is rising, dancing free in the sky, and the freer it is, the more peaceful you can feel. Out come the bricks, now, joining the dance, streams of them pouring steadily upward. And the shelves from the stores. And the items from the shelves—jackets and sneakers, vitamins and magazines—falling away from you, falling slowly up.
Maybe you’re wondering: where are they going, all those pieces of the city?
Just think of it as a break, for now, a vacation. Just let all those things take their well-deserved rest, let them float and twinkle and rise. Just picture their freedom, from here in your chair, watching your city up in the air …
The red bulb.
The control room window, black shade drawn.
The black perforations in the white ceiling tiles, a night sky in reverse. The glossy galaxy, masking-taped to the tiles, creased from former folds. Must have come in a magazine.
No expansion. Maybe it wouldn’t happen today. He should probably be relieved if it didn’t, Fred told himself, but he knew he’d be disappointed. The spontaneous outbreaks of oneness had for the most part ended with the birthday girl, a day after the last session. For a day or two after that, he thought he sensed an episode coming on again a few times, but none did, and when they didn’t, he began to miss them. He wandered around the hospital, through the coma ward and its sleepers minded by nurses and machines, through the various other wards, getting out wherever the elevator doors happened to open, through Radiology, Endoscopy, Rehabilitative Services, trying to join with them, merge all those disparate pieces of suffering with his own, fit them all together like a puzzle to see what the whole picture meant or was any good for. And he sat by George, of course, trying to expand and contain him, but here the effort felt fruitless in a different way: expansion wasn’t the right tool. George was already a part of him. But a no-longerknowable part. Fred felt like the neurology patient he saw surrounded by doctors and residents the other day, a guy who could only sense one half of his body, the other hanging limp.
Fred wandered through Neurology more th
an once, the possibility of running into Mira in the back of his mind. He wanted to meet her on level ground, as it were, not as a test subject looking helplessly up at her from this or that recliner. He wanted to challenge her about this “faith without ignorance.” From her conviction, it had seemed like something personal, something she herself had come to possess. He wanted to know how, how she’d managed it, with all that scientific reason so evidently crammed into her brain.
And he wouldn’t have minded chewing her out about his arrest.
And seeing if he could make her smile again, too, just to reassure himself that the moment of impossible connection he’d felt with her after the last smile had been nothing more than a neuronal misfire.
But he hadn’t run into her, nor had he really expected to; he was pretty sure both she and the other guy, the older man behind the glass, were academics, with no reason to be in the hospital other than to post the occasional flyer and stock their experiments with desperate fish like him. For all his and Mira’s imagined conversating, in any event, when she’d sat him down in the chair ten minutes ago, they’d barely managed hellos. “How are you?” she’d asked, in a clipped sort of way, unbuttoning his shirt.
“OK,” he’d said, not knowing whether the question was clinical or friendly or just the usual formality. “How are you?”
She hadn’t answered for a moment, maybe considering how such a question from a test subject such as he should be dealt with. It was a hot day for a long-sleeved blouse. He could smell the not unpleasant scent of her sweat, jasmined with deodorant.
“OK,” she’d finally hazarded, swirling gel over his heart.
She’d pasted him with electrodes, pressed on the helmet. He’d idly watched the sway of her skirt as she left, then looked over to find the man behind the window giving him a stern look over his reading glasses. Ten minutes. Maybe twelve. Still no expansion. Maybe a lightheadedness, nothing more. He wondered if his desire for it was getting in the way, if it would only come when not watched for.