by John Coyne
“Danny! Danny! Where are you?” She looked around, but the world she floated in was gray with clouds.
“I’m here. I’m here.”
She understood him, but there was no one speaking to her. Somehow, she just knew what he wanted to tell her.
“Let me see you, Danny,” she begged, still scanning the grayness for a sign of life.
“You would not know me, Jennifer. I’m not as you knew me. That was another life, another time for me.”
“Oh, Danny, I don’t understand. I don’t know what’s happening to me. Please
” She sounded like a little girl, as desolate as the day Danny had disappeared from her life, gone off to die in Vietnam.
“You will, honey. You will. And I’ll be there to help you.”
“I love you, Danny. I love you, and I’m sorry you were killed.”
“It had to happen, sweetie, and it’s all right. You know that now. You know it means nothing to die.”
“I don’t want to live, not anymore. Let me stay with you.”
“You can’t, Jennifer. It’s not your time. But we’ll be together again in another time. Go and fulfill your destiny, what your soul chose for you.”
“I thought I understood
” Jennifer was weeping again. She had a piercing headache centered between her eyes.
“You will in time.”
“I’m sorry you were killed. I didn’t want you to die. I loved you, Danny. You’re the only one I’ve really loved.” She reached out for him, although she couldn’t see him, then realized she was moving, falling, slipping away from the safe place of her death, down and down into her very own body.
She struggled, she fought it, but the battle was over; she was slipping back again, into life.
“Okay, we’ve got her,” one of the doctors shouted, eyeing the gauges of the life-support system, seeing that the flickering needle was responding. “We’ve got life here.”
“Thank God,” one of the nurses was whispering. “She was really gone.”
“I know. I know,” the doctor said, unsnapping a rubber cord from around Jennifer’s right arm, “but we got lucky this time. Clean her up and take her upstairs.” As he turned away, Jennifer fell asleep, feeling no more exhausted than if she had had a tough day at work; but she had been on the emergency-room table for over an hour.
When she woke, Tom was with her, dozing in the chair near the hospital window. She watched him while he slept. The sunlight was on his face, and he had not shaved. He had on his old blue Oxford button-down and gray cords. He had kicked off his Adirondack moccasin shoes and was wearing the pair of thick red wool socks she had bought him for Valentine’s Day. She realized she wanted to hold him, but when she tried to sit up, she was too weak to move. Her wrist was taped and she was being fed intravenously.
“Tom,” she whispered, and at the soft sound of her voice, he stirred and blinked his eyes open and quickly came to her, lifting her hand to press her soft palm against his cheek. She could feel the stubble of his dark whiskers. “Tom, I’m sorry,” she told him.
“It’s okay. Hey, you were mugged.” He was smiling at her, his gray eyes cloudy with sleep, but soft, too, and tender. “You’re going to be fine. Just fine.” He kept smiling.
“I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you.” She began to choke on her tears, and he stood quickly and pressed the buzzer for the nurse.
“I spoke to the cops. I’m having this room guarded.”
“Honey, it wasn’t your drug dealers.”
“Don’t try to talk, sweetheart. Don’t say anything,” Tom said urgently. He glanced at the doorway, then called out “Nurse! Nurse!” in a loud, panicky voice.
“It’s okay. I’m okay,” she told him. “Come and sit by me.” She wanted him close.
“You’re fine, darling. Everything is going to be fine now. I love you. I do!” He leaned closer still to kiss her eyelids.
“I want you to listen. Please,” she pleaded. “I saw Danny. I mean, I talked to Danny. And he’s all right. He’s happy.”
Tom nodded, but his eyes were clouding over again.
“I’m okay, Tom, I’m not crazy.”
“Of course you’re not.”
“I died. I left my body. I saw the doctors, everything. I wanted to stay dead. It was so wonderful, Tom. Then I saw Danny and he spoke to me, told me that it wasn’t time yet, not yet the end of my lifetime.”
Tom nodded. “Jennifer, you’ve got to sleep. Why don’t you try to sleep.”
Jennifer smiled. He didn’t understand what she was talking about. Of course not. He hadn’t died and come back to life. She closed her eyes. Yes, she should sleep. She needed to rest and regain her strength. She had so much more to do. It was time.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TOM WATCHED JENNIFER PACK. He had made himself another drink and now stood in the doorway of her bedroom as she went back and forth from the closet to her suitcase on the bed.
“Are you going to say anything at all, Thomas? Or are you just going to stare at me all evening?” Jennifer asked. She was holding up a white cotton blouse by the shoulders and deciding whether she should pack it for Minnesota.
“You know what I think,” he answered back. The two double scotches he’d downed had put an edge on his voice. “You’ve just got out of the hospital. You need to rest, not take a goddamn trip out to the middle of nowhere!”
“I have to do this my way,” she said.
Tom nodded and sipped the scotch. “It’s going to be fucking cold out there,” he said softly, as if to make amends. “Why does she live in Minnesota, anyway?”
“It’s where she is from.”
“She knows you’re coming?”
“Yes, of course.” Jennifer decided against the blouse. “Eileen telephoned her at the farm—that’s what the center is called.” She hung up the blouse and reached to the top shelf to pull down her heavy wool sweater, while she waited for his next question. It was as if they were playing tennis, lobbing responses at each other. Then she stepped away from the closet, turned, and faced him.
“Tom, I told you. I’m being driven nuts by this, too. I don’t want to have ‘out-of-body’ experiences. I don’t want to know that I can suddenly turn into some sort of caveman who can kill people with a blow of his fist. I don’t want to think that every time I’m threatened, I’m going to turn into a freak.”
“Jenny, you don’t—”
“Yes, I do. Let’s not gloss over it, okay? Maybe those people deserved to be killed. Maybe they were scum, or whatever you called them, but then so am I. I killed them. Maybe not me, but some part of me. A past-life person.”
“Oh, for chrissake!”
“Give me a chance, Tom.” She stared up at him. “Let me go find out what’s wrong with me, okay?” Her eyes had swelled up with tears, and to keep herself from crying, she turned to the bed and continued to pack.
“I talked to a couple of shrinks,” Tom said slowly, coming into the room.
“Of course,” Jennifer replied.
“Of course, what?”
“Of course you would talk to someone. That’s you.” She glanced up to show she wasn’t upset with him. “What did they say?” she asked, softening her voice.
“I spoke to Dr. Senese, the one I saw for a while after I broke up with Helen. I told him about this woman, Phoebe Fisher.”
“And Kathy Dart.”
“Yeah, about all this goddamn channeling shit.”
“Tom, please!” She felt a wave of anger and immediately tried the exercise Phoebe had taught her, focusing her attention on the word love. Gradually she felt her body ease and the tension diminish. She glanced at Tom. He was sitting on the edge of the bed now, his drink still in his hand. She noticed that he had put on weight, that there was a new roll of fat around his middle, and that his shirt had grown tight at the neck. He was like an animal, she thought, who stored up fat for winter. Perhaps he had stopped jogging. She had not run since her Washington trip. She was afraid to
run, afraid of what might happen to her body.
“Senese says that these channelers are suffering from personality dysfunctions. According to him, a fractionalized piece of their personality gains control. You’ve read about these multiple personality cases.”
“Multiple personalities, Tom, happen within the same person. Habasha was a living person from another time period. Dance is from another galaxy. It’s not the same thing.”
“Oh, for chrissake.”
“Tom, I’m not asking you to understand any of this, either. I just want you to have some faith in me, that’s all. I want you to be at least as supportive as Eileen Gorman.”
“That loony! I talked to her at the hospital when she came to see you. She’s out of her fucking mind!”
“Tom! How dare you!” Jennifer threw down one of the sweaters and turned on him. “Eileen has been absolutely wonderful, coming to me when I need her, listening, understanding. How can you sit there and
and
” Jennifer felt a surge of rage sweep through her body. There was a pattern to her primitive urges. They sprang from the base of her neck, shot down across her chest, and poured strength through her body; the result was an overwhelming urge to attack. It was becoming worse, she knew. Each time the rage returned, it came in stronger waves, and sometimes she realized she wanted to sink her teeth into someone. She could feel the desire to satisfy that pleasure. It was like having sex—once she spun off into an orgasm, she never wanted it to stop. She wanted only to ride the waves. She took several deep breaths and brought herself under control.
“If you hadn’t met her in Washington, then none of this nonsense would have started in the first place,” Tom shouted back.
He was drunk, Jennifer realized, drunk and angry and threatened.
“It would have happened anyway, Tom,” she answered. “It was meant to. These events aren’t coincidences or happenstance.” She looked across the bed at her lover. “Let me work this out my way,” she told him.
Tom stood staring at her in the dumb way drunks do when trying to comprehend. She went back to packing but watched him out of the corner of her eye. She was leaving first thing in the morning; Eileen was coming in from Long Island to pick her up, and they were going to drive together to Minnesota.
She could send him home in a taxi, Jennifer thought, or let him sleep there tonight. He’d be sick in the morning.
“Tom, why don’t you go into the living room and lie down on the sofa?” She encouraged him with a smile, but his eyes had glassed over, and he kept swaying against the bed. She went to him and took away his drink. “Come on into the living room, honey,” she whispered.
“You’re leaving me, I know,” he mumbled, but let himself be led away. “You’re leaving me because I didn’t do anything about Helen.”
“Darling, I’m not leaving you. I’m going to see Kathy Dart and talk to her about what is happening to me. I’ll be coming home to you soon. And I’ll be okay again.” She spoke brightly as she eased him from her bedroom. Now his full weight was against her, and she had to struggle to keep him from toppling them both over. Where was her strength when she needed it, she thought, gasping for breath as she slid him down onto the sofa. When Tom dropped onto the cushions, Jennifer sank to her knees.
At least he would sleep until early morning. And he wouldn’t hurt himself. She slipped off his shoes and pushed his legs up onto the sofa, then loosened his shirt and his belt. She peeled off his black socks and dropped them into his shoes, then went back into her room, took the extra quilt from the cedar closet, and tucked it around him.
He was already sleeping soundly. Jennifer knelt beside him and gently caressed his face. The deep sleep had swept away all the tension; he looked like a teenager, with nothing more on his mind than the pleasure of a wet dream. She leaned forward, kissed his cheek, and whispered, “I love you.”
It was after midnight when she woke and sat up in bed. She was suddenly wide awake and quite clearly she heard the front door of the apartment being unlocked, heard the two tumblers turn. She jumped from the bed and rushed to the bedroom door. Tom was up and off the sofa. He had grabbed his pistol from his briefcase, and when he spotted her, he put his finger to his lips, motioned for her to be silent.
She watched as he carefully stepped around the sofa, moving silently in his bare feet. Then she heard the dog, heard his paws on the bare hardwood floors of the front entrance.
She started to move out of the bedroom, and frantically Tom signaled, waved her back into the room, motioning that she should close the door.
“What is it?” she whispered, and then she caught a glimpse of the dog in the dim light of the living room. It had run in from the front hall, and spotting Tom, it immediately growled and bared its teeth. It was a pit bull, Jennifer saw, watching the small blunt-faced beast.
“Get away, Jenny!” Tom ordered, raising his pistol. He fired as the dog leaped at him. The bullet missed the animal and shattered the glass in her breakfront beside the bedroom door.
Jennifer screamed.
The pit bull landed on the back of the sofa and then jumped at Tom. Backing off, Tom tripped over the coffee table and shot again. This time the bullet dug into the high ceiling.
The dog was on top of him now, had seized his forearm in his teeth. Tom swung the pistol around and shoved it against the pit bull’s face and pulled the trigger. The automatic pistol jammed, and before he could get off the next shot, the dog ripped the flesh off his forearm. Now Tom screamed.
Jennifer went for the beast. She dove at the animal, grabbed his white slavering muzzle with her own bare hands and wrenched open his jaw with one smooth strong motion, as if she had been killing animals in the wild all of her life.
Then with her arms outstretched, she let the heavy beast twist and turn under her strong grip, let him struggle to get loose. She saw the anguish in the dog’s yellow eyes as he gasped for breath, and then with a sudden jerk, she ripped open the beast’s mouth and broke his jaw. The fresh blood from the soft white insides of his mouth sprayed her face and splattered the pale yellow rug of her living room. She dropped the prey.
Tom crawled away from the pit bull. Crawled away in pain. His arm was bleeding and his flesh hung loose from the muscle.
“Jenny!” he gasped, seeing what she had done to the dog.
He was frightened, she saw. Frightened now of her. But Tom wasn’t her enemy. He did not want to harm her.
Jennifer smiled at her lover, and slowly, carefully, as any animal would, she wiped her lips clean with the tip of her tongue.
Book Three
If we open to these sources of inspiration and creativity, we open a window to a universe that is going to be becoming better. Someone once asked me about which mode! of the universe I favored. I said, “To hell with the model, let’s just channel the universe. Let’s become one with it. That way we don’t have to play little games.”
—Channel Alan Vaugkan
He [my guru] asked me to pray, but I could not pray. He replied that it did not matter, he and some others would pray and I had simply to go to the meeting
and wit and speech would come to me from some other source than the mind. [I did as I was told.]
The speech came as though it was dictated, and ever since, all speech, writing, thought and outward activity have so come to me from the same source.
—Sri Aurobindo
CHAPTER TWENTY
JENNIFER SLEPT AS THE car swept across New Jersey. When she woke, stretched out in a sleeping bag in the back of Eileen’s station wagon, she saw they were on an interstate, passing through bleak farmland. The trees were bare, and icy snow covered the low, rolling hills. The sun, reflecting off the snow, blinded her for a moment, and she thought at once of how she had killed the pit bull, and to keep her mind off the frightening memory, she asked, “Where are we, Eileen?”
“Well, good morning, sleepyhead. According to the last signpost, we’re just beyond Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, heading w
est on 80. Do you want coffee?”
“Oh, no, just keep driving.” Jennifer did not want to stop. She liked feeling that she was escaping from New York, driving away from danger.
“I have some with me. Here.” Without taking her eyes off the road, Eileen handed back a thermos. “There are sandwiches packed, too, and sodas. Would you like to drive?”
Jennifer shook her head. “Not unless you want me to,” she said. “I’m exhausted.” When Eileen had picked her up that morning at the apartment, she was still trembling from the dog’s attack. She was afraid that Tom wouldn’t let her go, but he had wanted her to go then, thinking that she would be safer in Minnesota, far away from the drug dealers. But it wasn’t drug dealers, Jennifer knew, who had sent the pit bull into her apartment.
“Well, you’re okay now,” Eileen told her, smiling into the rearview mirror.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever be all right again.”
“Yes, you will. Kathy’s going to help you.”
Jennifer smiled, then reached over and tenderly squeezed Eileen’s shoulder. She closed her eyes again but immediately conjured up the nightmare vision of the dog attacking. She saw the animal’s slobbering mouth, its bare white teeth. Jennifer opened her eyes and blinked again at the brilliant winter sun.
“Tom thinks the dog was sent after him,” she said. “By drug dealers he’s prosecuting.”
“You don’t believe that.” It was a statement, not a question. Eileen’s eyes found Jennifer in the mirror.
“The dog was after me, Eileen,” she said. “I just have this feeling that whoever attacked me outside of my apartment is still after me.” Her own words frightened her. “I guess I’m trying to warn you, Eileen, even if it’s too late. I mean, here we are all alone on the interstate in the middle of nowhere.”
“We’ll be careful,” Eileen said reassuringly.
“I’m just sorry that you have to be involved.”
“I want to be involved. Kathy Dart practically told me to hand-deliver you to Minnesota.”