Crossing Allenby Bridge

by Michael Looft

  We did this for about five minutes. At first, my stomach felt like it was fighting indigestion, and I also experienced waves of nausea wash over me. I’d expected to be good at it the same way I was at most things–even fantasizing that Elena would be congratulating me in front of the group for picking it up with ease. Instead, I wondered if I was going to pass out. Maybe it was the turkey sandwich I’d wolfed down at lunch. I hadn’t drunk the night before, so it couldn’t be a latent hangover. In fact, before I sat down I felt healthy and energetic. I decided to cheat and crack my eyes to catch anyone keeling over. I expected to see Elena in the middle of the circle, and surprised that instead she stood in front of me, her index finger hovering two inches from my forehead. I almost shouted out, but her eyes twinkled at me with a trace of empathy and I felt her gentle touch on my forehead, just above my eyebrows. It was as though her touch forced my eyes shut again, and I felt a tingling feeling throughout my body and the nausea fell away with my next breath.

  As she spoke, I recalled a bumper sticker I’d seen once that read, “Don’t believe your thoughts.” That made me chuckle, and I again felt Elena’s finger on the same spot on my forehead. I noticed the bumper sticker drift away from my mind and I began imagining the gold ball again. Several minutes later she invited us to open our eyes, and when I did, a comforting sensation swept through my body and the room looked a little more in focus, sharper. These wore off after a minute, but left a gentle residue tingling through my fingers and toes.

  She began to ask for feedback, and I heard fantastical stories from my co-workers about images and breakthroughs that made me wonder if I’d been doing something wrong or if they were just making things up to impress her. One young woman, one of the tellers who dressed liked a hippie, held her gaze down at the floor as if she were in a trance saying that working for the bank was not her life path. I heard she resigned a few days later. Not the outcome Kitty expected, and I couldn’t help but throw a “good going” barb at Kitty about it after our next weekly management meeting. I waited for Mark to say something, and when Elena looked his way he said in a slow, low tone, “I feel lighter, like a little weight has been lifted from me. The world’s clearer, sharper.” This sent a shiver down my spine. Stealing my thoughts also annoyed me. I glanced away and ignored Elena’s eyes when they fell in my direction.

  The hour went faster than I expected, with a few people lingering around after she dismissed us. I noticed Kitty giving her a curt thank you and bolting out of the room–no doubt still bruised from the teller’s remark and writing-off the whole venture to be a waste of time. I sat amused in my chair, saying goodbye to Mark as he gave Elena an affirmative wave on his way out. He seemed energized by it, and his usual stoical nature replaced with a smile I hadn’t seen on him before. You might even say he was glowing.

  I stood up, staring at her email address on the whiteboard and glancing over as she talked to the two lefty women who I expected would approach her with those spiritual smiles. They spoke in what sounded like New-Agey jargon–blathering on about auras and shifting energies. It all sounded like mumbo jumbo to me and another example of people tricking themselves into believing they were enlightened because they played the part. Of course, part of me was a tiny bit fascinated by that side of the world, though not enough to venture too deep down the rabbit hole. I hesitated, wondering if I should write down her email address, say hello, or just skip out with a wave like Mark had done. I waited too long, for within moments the other two had left and Elena and I stood alone in the conference room. She gave me a soft smile and a knowing look.

  “What did you think, Harry?”

  “Honestly, I felt sick at first, but your poking my forehead seemed to help. What was that trick of yours?”

  “No trick–just helping you open your third eye a bit.”

  “Third eye?”

  “We all have a third eye that helps us to see what the other two can’t.”

  “Interesting.” I had been standing beside her as though I were about to leave, but now shifted my body to face her. With heels on she came up to my chin, and when she looked up at me I felt a jolt emanate from behind my eyes and spread throughout my body. “That was pretty cool… so, is this what you do? Teach meditation?”

  “Among other things. I have a yoga studio out near the beach. That’s my main source of income. I also do natural healing.”

  “I’ve always wanted to try yoga.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes, believe it or not I’m fascinated by all that stuff–spirituality and religion. Always have been. You know, with a few drinks in me my subconscious mind steers most conversations over to the subject. Not sure why, but it just happens.”

  “Maybe the Universe is trying to tell you something.”

  “Maybe…” I trailed off, feeling like I’d better say something bold before the conversation lapsed into goodbyes. “Listen, Elena. I could sign up for your yoga classes and keep that up for a while before mustering up the courage to ask you to dinner. That might take weeks and we’d wind up in the same place we’re at right now.”

  “And where’s that?” She flashed non-committal teeth.

  “I’m not quite sure. So, what do you say to dinner on Friday?”

  “I’m busy this Friday. I do like your idea of signing up for a yoga class. Let’s start there.” She gave my shoulder a reassuring tap like I’d just grounded out, and with that said goodbye. I watched her pick up her bag and walk out with the same elegant gait when she first arrived. I wanted her, but I wasn’t sure how. She wasn’t my usual type–though I’d grown weary of dating high-maintenance types who ranked hair highlights too far up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Elena was about as far from them as she was from me–or at least where I thought I was.

  CHAPTER 3 | IN DREAMS

  That night I had a dream set in the Caribbean. I had gone scuba diving there the previous winter, a hobby I picked up in my thirties. The dream resembled the wall dive we had done, a hole over a thousand feet deep. I recall the Divemaster warning us about a condition called nitrogen narcosis, often referred to as getting narced. Recreational diving sets a maximum depth of 130 feet and beyond that the risk of narcosis rises dramatically. Even the Divemaster warned us to watch our gauges because the symptoms of narcosis resemble drunken giddiness and before you know it you’re welcoming your own death with a grin on your face. A bit like taking laughing gas and then plunging off a cliff, giggling all the way down. One of the crew called it the “rapture of the deep.” The immediate and simple cure for this temporary condition is to ascend back up and stay there awhile. The dream started out very similar to the actual dive.

  I reached the edge of the wall and hovered over its crest, fascinated by imaginative thoughts of what lay down there in the deep. The rocky crag of coral and rock stretched out over the horizon and sunk into blackness. I rolled into a rappelling position, descending in silence and watching tiny creatures zigzagging in and out of the crevices along the limestone rocks, some of which appeared stacked by humans. At one point, I noticed Elena’s flaming hair swirling in bubbles and her gesturing at the stones. I shook my head and waved her off, descending further. 50 feet and the colors were losing their brilliance. I let my fingers slip over crusted barnacles. 80 feet into the deep black, looking up at hazy shadows. My ears squeezed and popped, and I felt a gentle tug beckoning me to continue my slow drift, like a dark hand clutching the end of my fin and pulling me down. I wanted to go deeper, driven by the desire to brag about reaching the 130 feet limit. I also marveled at the spooky sensation of dropping into an abyss and running my fingers over the fringes of death. The thought of hovering over that razor’s edge reminded me of Mark and the title of his book.

  200 feet. That didn’t seem right. Seconds earlier it was half that. How could that be? I blinked and rubbed the gauge, shaking it free from any temporary defects. I felt a pang of terror, remembering the words of the Divemaster at how easy it is to slip down too fast. Oh, well. I was
fine. I would not die, or maybe I would. A blissful feeling enveloped me, and I let the gauge drop, along with all judgment or even recollection of the life that I had beyond a few images that warped their way into my mind. Images of my dad watching television and me holding the block of balsa wood, asking for help to carve it into a racecar. “You get started on it and I’ll be in to help you later,” I heard him say. My ex-wife, staring me down until I felt like that child again, crying in the corner of my room with no one to help me. The profile of Mark’s meditating face. Red blanket of fire smothering me, veiling me into a fathomless slumber. Then I saw Elena’s bright face come into focus and she pulled me up out of the abyss and back into the light. When we came to the surface and I took a deep breath, I noticed that her face looked more like Mark’s–eyes closed just as I’d seen him during the mindfulness session. Then it morphed into Kitty’s face with that silly fake smile of hers.

  I woke up, still feeling the dream working through me and unsure of the edge between fantasy and reality. I still had an hour before sunrise, and once I started coming to I felt antsy and restless to get up and do something. So, I slipped on my shoes for an early morning run along the Embarcadero. Intending to clear my head, all I could think of was Elena. Like a foreign disease infecting my mind: her eyes, her hair, her face plagued my every thought. Even if I tried to think of something else, she still occupied a little room in the neural pathways of my brain that seemed connected to everything else. The feeling itself was not so foreign to me, though it had been some twenty-five years since I recalled a similar intensity. Although this feeling ran deeper, softer and not hard-edged like in my youth. Yes, it was soft, like her. Yet, I didn’t want it to take hold of me as I knew its deleterious effects from prior experience, like that one time I’d overdone it with flowers and false charm so long ago. By the end of the run I decided that I would pursue her just by showing up and learning yoga. Something told me the way to her heart was through friendship anyway.

  Sunday morning, I found myself stuck trying to twist myself into the eagle pose at the back of the room of her studio out on forty-eighth Avenue. It was far out on the avenues, about as far away from my neighborhood as one could get, and just a block from the beach. Like most people in the city, I didn’t own a car. So, the taxi ride seemed to take forever. It was worth it to hear her voice again among the two dozen students in her class. She struck a powerful pose, dressed in all black with her back to a large window looming over the Pacific Ocean. Her red hair was tied up in a ponytail, and I could see the bony features of her face that gave her a more masculine look–a sharp contrast to the feminine touch back at the office. It was like a different woman stood before me, and at first, I felt a slight repulsion to her. As soon as she started talking us through the yoga poses, and I heard the familiar mid-western accent intoned in her speech, I felt home again. At least, that’s what being around her felt like in the beginning–arriving home to a warm fire on a cold night. I spent the next hour forcing myself not to blurt out any smart-ass remarks, something I slip into when nervous in a group.

  I knew I would see her after the class, because in her email response she told me not to forget my running shoes. At least we had that in common, and I figured she took a chance that I was a runner and it might have been some test. Although, I was not prepared for chasing her down the beach and losing her in the distance, which is what happened. As a lifelong long-distance runner, I’ve never been a fast one, and it was obvious that she was part gazelle. I’m not even sure it was a date, because all we did was run for an hour and then she left for a lunch appointment, leaving me sputtering on the street outside her studio deliberating over asking her for a formal date or throwing in the towel. In fact, the first few months of our relationship consisted of her calling or texting, often at the last minute, to invite me out for a run or to walk down the beach and sometimes followed by a cup of her homebrew green tea. I remember how startled I was to get a text from her because before then I couldn’t recall ever having received or sent one. It just appeared on my flip phone with a jingle I didn’t recognize. The message wasn’t even written in proper English, reading: “r u free? – Elena.” At least she’d spelled out her name, otherwise I would have guessed it was spam or someone else’s mistake.

  I continued to pursue her that fall, the relationship moving at glacial speed. In fact, early on I mentioned something about it during one of our late afternoon walks and she whispered, “Slowness is a good thing. A lot happens in the slowness.” That last phrase stuck for me and became the theme of our relationship. She even moved slowly. Except when she ran. This rubbed off on me a bit and I began noticing my own pacing in life slow down, whether I was walking or even talking to my staff. It was like she downshifted me a few gears. That was all the upside.

  A downside was she insisted on romance taking the back seat. For Elena, friendship was the foundational connection from which healthy relationships grew, and she wouldn’t dream of loosening the reigns of her heart and letting herself get swept up in passion. I found this strange, since many of our conversations revealed how free and open she was to ideas and experiences. Some of those ideas were far outside the bounds of reality and I sometimes had to check my tongue or try not to laugh when she explained life’s conundrums through an astrological lens. I’ll never forget when I complained of the bank’s servers crashing and she remarked that it was likely a result of Mercury having gone retrograde. Yet these idiosyncrasies drew me closer to her and I recall confessing that it was like I took a space ship and crash landed on another planet–an interesting planet, but decidedly different than the one from which I had just left. So, meeting Elena was the first curveball thrown my way. I didn’t realize how much so until she invited me to her friend’s house one night for what turned out to be a séance.

  CHAPTER 4 | AND NIGHTMARES

  Elena later dismissed my calling it a séance as hyperbole. Just a gathering of friends, she said. Nevertheless, I was there and there was some creepy shit that went down. It was the Saturday before Halloween and the warm weather earlier in the month had started to turn cold, though still mild compared to other parts of the country. Elena invited me to a costume party and since it was the first time meeting her inner circle of friends, I went all out to make an impression. I agonized over costumes. I considered wearing one of my three-piece suits and going as a banker. Showing up as my real self would have been cliché and perhaps too scary.

  I settled on Alex from Kubrick’s movie, A Clockwork Orange, a costume I already had from a previous Halloween. Based on the reactions from a few of the other guests later at the party, I might have been better off going as myself. For one thing, most people saw my all white outfit, black boots, and black bowler hat and guessed wrong–missing the single eyelash and eyeballs on the sleeve. This was especially true of the younger ones who’d never seen the movie and one woman who even asked if I was Huck Finn. Elena was amused when I showed up at her house to pick her up. Early on, she had confessed that the wicked streak hiding my goodness was one of the things she appreciated about me. We shared the same dry and sometimes warped humor, and when no one was around we had a good time laughing at bawdy jokes. She told me these were hallmarks of old souls. Elena dressed as a belly dancer, and something told me she’d already had the costume for other occasions. When I asked her about it, she mentioned that she danced on occasion, but rebuffed my attempts to get her to perform before we left the house. Maybe later, she said with a wink.

  The party was up in Marin County, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. So, we took Elena’s little Honda up there. The bridge gets fogged over most of the year, but we were in luck that evening, crossing with blue skies and a bright setting sun to the West over the Pacific Ocean. I didn’t get out of the city much, always feeling like I was going on a long journey anytime I did leave it. I caught Elena’s profile while looking over the bridge at the sky glowing red. She wasn’t much younger than me, but years of healthy living spread across
her cheeks and I couldn’t help noticing how beautiful she looked in that light. Though her features were plain, and I suspect too much so in her youth to turn many heads, I presumed she was aging like a fine wine, made confident with time and temperature. Seeing her there, face both bold and placid looking out over the road in front of us, it was the first time it hit me how lucky I was to have met her. I even blurted something out to her, and her mouth wrinkled into a smile and she cast her green eyes on me. It was then that I knew I was falling for her. Sappy, but true. I also knew she saw something in me that I didn’t see myself. Otherwise, I had no clue why she put up with my own plainness and mediocrity.

  We wound our way around Mt. Tamalpais to a hillside house overlooking huge swathes of the Bay Area. Elena sensed I took time to warm up to parties, so she introduced me to the hostess, a buxom grey-haired woman dressed as the Fairy Godmother–complete with a starry wand–and then let me slink off to the deck with my glass of wine to watch the boats in the Bay switching over to their night lights. We were early, only half a dozen people having arrived so far. The house appeared bigger on the outside, and looking back in through the glass doors I realized it was no more than a large studio. The décor resembled Elena’s, but with more art from the Far East than India. I noticed a small frame of parch paper with a quote in calligraphy hanging outside next to the door: “Respect Buddha and the gods, but don’t count on their help.” – Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings. I had no idea who this Musashi guy was, but he tickled me with that line.

  After some time out there, I made my way back into the house. The dark interior was lit with candles and lamps covered in soft clothed to dim the lights. I expected more people to show up, but no one did. Elena began introducing me to everyone. Each of their flamboyant costumes matched their personalities. One was dressed as Tinker Bell. She was as thin as a rail and laughed a lot, showing big teeth and gums when she did. She was with a large guy in a Bamm-Bamm outfit, complete with a massive wooden club. With his thick beard and crazed expression, I think he’d give real cavemen a run for their money–perhaps even frighten them. Elena seemed to know them quite well, and we were stuck talking on a field of pillows that served as a couch. I reclined into a comfortable position and observed the conversation. They were chatting about a guy who took an old shipping container and turned it into his house. Seemed like the kind of place Bamm-Bamm might live, but I said nothing except for asking how they’d get cell phone reception inside that box. They didn’t have an answer for that.