Adding it all up, I certainly wasn’t persuaded that Timmy had truly shown any clairvoyance. At one moment, for example, Timmy had started free-associating about mold, asking me if I had a fear of wetness. Was I afraid of drowning? Did I dislike gooey things? When I said no, he’d eventually made his way to this connection: Mold is growth occurring where we don’t want it. Since that’s what my body was freaking out about, I needed to give myself permission to flip out and be out of control from time to time, to grow in ways I didn’t intend. Finally, he’d found an explanation that resonated with me a bit—but after an awful lot of fishing. He also recommended that I wear a ruby for my “red energy.” Seriously? Start wearing crystals?
But ultimately, all that second-guessing just wasn’t the point. The question was whether I could use his comments and suggestions to improve my health or my life as a whole. If so, it was worthwhile, and if not, it wasn’t. Nothing else mattered. And I wasn’t going to let prideful skepticism get in the way of anything that might help.
Then the question became how I might be able to make use of it. Jeez, I’ve done so much therapy already! I had talked over and over again about my childhood, my mother, my brother, my sister. Those events couldn’t be undone. How could I fix them now?
Still, it had been a while since I’d revisited all that, and I’d experienced big internal shifts in the meantime. Perhaps working through it all once more would be useful.
The idea of doing “energy work” (whatever that was, anyway) with a psychic was a stretch, though. Maybe I could work on the trauma with a therapist, I thought. Someone licensed, credible, not so embarrassing. Someone who would put me back on firm scientific ground.
CHAPTER 22
REBIRTHDAY
The morning after my session with Timmy, John and I headed off to Death Valley to celebrate my one-year “rebirthday,” the anniversary of my trip there. I wanted to take John to the desert from which I had emerged, reborn.
We were driving a 1984 Vanagon camper that we’d found after months of looking for a car. Each time I’d sat in a car for sale, I’d gotten crippled within seconds to minutes. John would then make apologies to the astonished owner as I staggered away. The more cars we tried, the more miraculous it seemed that I’d never had a problem with John’s car or with Gary’s little Impreza that I’d been driving for months. We got desperate enough that I tried a new car. I felt fine in it, but I couldn’t see dropping 20 grand for one.
One day I mentioned to John the fantasy I’d had in Death Valley of living with Frances in a Vanagon in the desert. “A Vanagon!” John cried. “Let’s buy a Vanagon!” He began spinning fantasies about road trips through the Southwest together, pointing out that it would allow us to travel without risking hotel rooms. Maybe we could even rig up a shower inside a Vanagon, he said, so that if I went into a building and “got molded,” I could rinse off right away.
I was doubtful that we’d be able to find one I could tolerate, since they were all more than 20 years old, but I was willing to look—and astonishingly, we succeeded. We bought a 1984, chocolate-brown camper van that we named Maxine, and she became my mold-free home on wheels, complete with bead-bedangled curtains that radiated good hippie juju.
On our way to Death Valley just after my session with Timmy, we camped in Maxine at the base of great red cliffs in Capitol Reef. We drove through country so fantastically beautiful, dry, and difficult that I had to laugh at the perfection of the metaphor for my life over the last few years. We stood together at a pull-off on Boulder Mountain, with Rachmaninoff’s Vespers playing on the stereo. We were overlooking what must have been many thousands of square miles of land, with snow-capped mountains shining in the background and canyons and cliffs and red rock in the foreground, so much that you could have looked forever and kept seeing new things. I had the same feeling I’d had in Death Valley, that my soul was expanding across all that space, growing out into the great nothingness over the land—but this time, I had John’s hand in mine. Tears sprang to my eyes, and when I looked at him, I saw matching tears in his.
We stopped in St. George, Utah, and John did the shopping while I waited in the van, not wanting to risk an unfamiliar building. When he returned, the van’s starter turned over slowly, then more slowly, then not at all. Maxine was dead.
“Hey!” I said. “We can jump her ourselves!” We’d brought the marine battery that I’d gotten for my first Death Valley trip to provide power, along with a solar panel. We wired the batteries together, turned the ignition, and heard Maxine rev to life.
We were proud of our ingenuity—but also rattled. We’d just been driving for hours, so why had Maxine’s battery died? What if Maxine wouldn’t start when we were camping miles up a jeep trail?
As I drove through Las Vegas and out toward Death Valley, a shifting wind battered Maxine’s sides. She was struggling to maintain 50 miles an hour against the blasts. John looked stiffly out the window. He seemed lost in misery, and I couldn’t catch his eye to smile at him. When I asked what was up, he said he wasn’t feeling very well, and the wind was bugging him. My hands were tight on the steering wheel, working to compensate for the wind’s blows. I reached out to touch his arm, but I got little response, and I needed both hands to steady us.
I couldn’t help but remember Geoff dissolving into bipolar disorder. Could this be the first step in something similar happening? Could the wonderfulness of the past eight months be an illusion beginning to crack? People do commonly get blinded in the early stages of relationships, I thought, so perhaps I’d missed incipient signs of trouble.
Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. So what if John has a moment of being distant? He’s amazingly good-natured nearly all the time. He does so much to support me, and I should return the favor and be strong for him when he needs it. Happily, I’m well enough to do so right now. We drove on in silence.
Suddenly, Maxine banged so loudly it sounded like she was being ripped in half. Then she clattered and died.
I pulled to the side of the highway and we emerged from the van into the wind. We quickly determined that this problem outclassed our meager mechanical skills, despite our earlier triumph. Time for AAA.
Hours later, the tow truck driver arrived, and we begged him to let me ride in the van on the flatbed, explaining that I had an environmental illness. “Not in this wind,” he said, face closed, continuing to load up the van.
I put on my respirator and climbed in, hoping for the best. But within a few minutes, I could barely breathe, even with the respirator on. John rolled down the window for fresh air and wiped my face off with his dampened sleeve. In, out, I thought. You can do it, Julie.
Then a sudden certainty came over me: I was going to have a seizure.
It hit me like a train, contorting my body and wrenching out a scream that surged from my chest uncontrollably, on and on and on. I wasn’t in pain; the scream felt as involuntary as the convulsing, a direct product of my disordered nervous system.
Some small part of me was coolly observing this, thinking, Geez, Julie, you sure are screaming. You should figure out how to stop, because this is thoroughly socially unacceptable. And how odd—people don’t ordinarily scream during seizures, do they? Are you really sure you’re not somehow faking this? But the screams continued ripping through me.
I distantly heard John hollering, “Pull over! Pull over!” As soon as the truck stopped, he climbed over me and carried me to the side of the road. The icy wind whipped around us as I screamed on.
John said something about pouring water on my head, a reasonable thought given the usefulness of showers. But the idea of being wet as well as cold and convulsing sounded awful to me. I shook my head and pulled at the mask, and John took it off for me. The screams muffled into sobs. John held me, saying over and over, “Ah, sweetie,” in a tone so soaked with love that I hung on to his words like a life preserver.
My body gradually calmed down. The tow truck driver babbled incoherently. I worked out that he
was saying that he’d let me ride in Maxine to the end of his zone, but after that, we had to transfer to another truck, and once we switched trucks, I couldn’t stay in the van.
I was finally able to get up and walk, with John’s help, over to Maxine. I lay down a towel, climbed in, covered myself with another, and pulled Frances into my lap. I held her tight as she nuzzled her nose along my neck, and I drew strength and calmness from her solid little body.
Meanwhile, John was in the tow truck, begging the dispatcher to let me stay in the van for the rest of the trip. It was a no-go; the dispatcher was sympathetic but said that it was against the law.
When we reached the next town—really just a couple of gas stations and casinos—John walked back to the van and asked, tentatively, if I was up for trying the tow truck that was waiting for us.
“No,” I whimpered.
“We could stay in Maxine here,” John said, his voice gentle.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and forced myself to focus. Most likely, no tow truck would let me ride in Maxine in the morning either. Somehow, then, I had to get to Las Vegas outside the van. And a taxi was as likely to be as bad as a tow truck, maybe more so. Jesus, I thought. The world is not designed for people like me. There is no safe way to deal with this.
John stroked my hand as we talked about our options. Staying in this gas station parking lot sounded awful. Plus, I told John about a hypothesis I’d come up with: Maybe I’d reacted so violently because the mask itself had gotten saturated with contaminants from previous use and had actually made things worse. If so, I might be okay if I didn’t wear the mask.
So I decided to try it: I climbed in the next tow truck, mask-free. Almost immediately I could tell that it would be okay. Thank god, thank god, thank god, I thought, almost in tears. I could see the relief etched in John’s face too.
As we drove, John told me that when I was convulsing, he’d assumed I was dying and in horrendous pain. The thought that went through his mind was, “Well, we sure had an unbelievable eight months together. Too bad it couldn’t be longer.” Tears sprang to my eyes and I squeezed his hand.
At one o’clock in the morning, the tow truck pulled up to the garage. Even at that hour, traffic whizzed past and street lamps blared. Still, we gratefully climbed into the van and popped the top up. We stripped off our clothes, put it all in giant Ziploc bags to try to keep the contamination from spreading around the van, gave ourselves sponge baths, and poured water over our heads before collapsing into bed. We just had to hope our efforts were enough to keep Maxine contamination-free.
Just before eight a.m., the garage owner arrived. He seemed unsurprised to see marooned Vanagon owners sleeping in his parking lot, and as he opened his shop, he called out cheerily, “Be with you in a moment!” His mechanics found a huge metal plate at the transition between the transmission and the engine that had ripped in half. Seven hundred dollars and a day later, we were heading to Death Valley once more.
We listened to the recording of my session with Timmy as we drove. Hearing Timmy’s advice, I rethought my response the day before in Las Vegas, when John had been distant and I had been frightened. Timmy had advised me to be soft, to allow my emotions to swing, to not always keep myself together—all the opposite of how I’d responded.
“Yesterday, when you were so distant,” I asked John, “what if I’d told you I was feeling scared and needed to connect, instead of trying to be strong for you? How would you have responded to that?”
“Oh yeah, absolutely!” he said. “That would have been easy for me to be open to.”
I felt a band loosen from around my chest, the same feeling I’d had when I’d been feeling anxious as I drove into Santa Fe after Death Valley and the thought had fallen into my mind, I died out there in the desert. I wasn’t responsible to make things work out. I could just be where I was, feel what I felt, inhabit my poor, beaten-up body free of burden and duty. I could live that way by myself, and I could do so with John too.
Huh, I thought. Well, that’s something that’s come out of that session with Timmy. I still don’t know if he had any special insight, but hey, he managed to spur something in me!
John was driving when we got to the jeep trail snaking up the rocky moonscape of Trail Canyon. At one point, I warned him the next bit was a little tricky, and he should speed up and stay to the right. But instead, he stopped and inched forward—and then got stuck.
“Can I drive?” I asked, fighting back my irritation. John got out and gave the van the slight push it needed to get unstuck, and then I gunned it up the hill, dodging the potholes.
When John got back in the car, he said, “All right then!” He also reported that a fellow camping down the road had walked up to see if we needed help, and after I got up the hill, he’d asked, “Got a four-wheel-drive van there?” John had laughed and said, “Nope! Just a very determined woman.”
My breath caught as we pulled up to my campsite from a year earlier. It had come to feel mythical to me. It looked unchanged, and I wondered if anyone had camped there since me. I felt an odd nervousness, like I was bringing my boyfriend home to meet the family.
I looked out at the familiar view and thought back to the woman a year before, sitting in this spot, facing a cavernous darkness, with no idea of the transformation that lay ahead. I’d focused my hope on the fantasy of living alone in the desert with my dog in a Vanagon, and now here I was, in my Vanagon with my dog. I couldn’t have imagined then, though, that I’d also be here with my beloved, and that I’d have a safe home and my health (well, mostly, albeit with some frightening reactions). I felt my gratitude spilling beyond my body, reaching toward the Amargosa Mountains on the other side of the valley.
Then I heard John say “Julie!” Portent dripped from his voice. As soon as I jumped out of the car, I heard a hissing sound. John pointed underneath the engine. Drops of green fluid sizzled against the radiator.
“This has to be from bumping up that bad spot,” John said, with an accusatory tone I’d never heard from him before. “I saw the exhaust pipe scrape on the ground. The car is almost thirty years old. It’s just too delicate for that.”
I froze. He could be right.
The engine was so hot that we had to wait before we could figure anything out, so we sat quietly next to each other in Maxine, thigh to thigh on her bench seat, retreating into her tiny protected space. We didn’t say it, but we both knew we might be in really big trouble. Would a tow truck even come up here? If it didn’t, what could we do?
Defensive thoughts swirled in my brain. Gary’s low-slung Subaru had no problem with that. And coming here in Maxine was part of my original image in getting her. If she’s too delicate to bring to places like this, I’m not sure I want her. I thought I could almost hear the reversed mirror image of these thoughts swirling in John’s brain, a cacophony of blame.
I looked out the window at that enormous view, breathing it in, absorbing the hugeness of this place, its stillness, its ancientness. These mountains didn’t care a whit about whether I’d screwed up, or whether we’d get Maxine out of there, or whether we’d have a big fight. I felt the part of me that didn’t care much about any of those things either, the part of me that was as ancient and enormous and calm as this valley. If we were going to have a fight, well, okay. Worse things had happened.
I leaned against him, feeling his solidity. John wrapped his arm around me. “I’m really glad to be here with you,” he said. “If we can never come here again in Maxine, at least we’re here now.”
I put my head against his shoulder, the divisive thoughts swirling past me and away. I’m safe, I thought. Even if I really screwed up, I’m still safe.
We decided to enjoy ourselves and deal with Maxine later.
We quickly fell into the rhythms of the place. John rode his bike way up the canyon, and on the way up, Frances stopped to sniff and then caught up with him. On the way down, she ran full-out, delighted to at last have her speed tested. We pre
pared gourmet dinners on Maxine’s two-burner stove and ate them by candlelight. We spent hours making love in her pop-top, feeling the van rocking beneath us. Unlike a year earlier, I spent no time as a zombie in bed.
A couple of days before we left, John called our mechanic in Boulder to ask for advice. “John,” he said, “you’re a smart man, and Julie’s a smart woman. You’ve just got to get inventive. Got any duct tape? Got any electrical tape?”
We managed to trace the leak to a crack close to the end of a hose. When we reported our findings to our mechanic, he said that the hose was old and poised to break. At worst, my bouncing up the road sped it up slightly. We found that there was enough slack in the hose for us to trim the end and reattach it. Maxine was ready to roll.
I called Timmy when we got back to Boulder. The convulsions had scared the hell out of me—I had to find some way to calm down my reactivity. Plus, I’d found the reading helpful. It seemed dumb not to give his “energy work” a try, no matter how ridiculous I felt.
A few days later, I returned to Timmy’s dark hobbit house, walked through the kitchen, and returned to the room with the table covered in tchotchkes. He asked me to lie down on a single bed. I eyed it nervously: Beds were dangerous objects for me. But I cooperated, and he put pillows under my legs and asked if I was comfortable. I was—so far, the bed didn’t seem intent on killing me.
He started with fairly conventional relaxation exercises, having me progressively tense and relax different parts of my body, breathing deeply. Okay, I thought. So far, I can handle this.
Then he asked me to think back to when I was seven and my mother had made my siblings leave. Was there a specific moment that I remembered?
I described the day my brother came out of my mother’s bedroom and told me she’d said he had to leave. I recalled the porch swing, my unsuccessful attempt to eavesdrop on their conversation, my brother’s body next to me on the swing, the feeling of not knowing what to say, my confusion about what it meant that he had to leave, the impossible effort to hold on to my mother and my brother both.
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