Lindquist guided me to a lounge chair positioned directly in front of the group, then stepped back and stood next to a statue of Mayan origin and crossed his arms. I had hoped for more of an introduction, not because I needed to collect my thoughts but because I had counted on some preamble to suggest what my first words might be. I always found first words to be so crucial. I never had to write out entire arguments for the court or questions for depositions, with the exception of the introductory words. Those I needed to spell out for myself, word for word, and then, more often than not, I would find a momentum that would carry me through the proceeding.
Not now. I looked downward, hoping to find a drink or something to occupy my hands. Then, I raised my head to look more directly at the group. The youngest, Sarah, shifted uneasily. She was pretty, but inflated, like the reflection of a fashion model in a fun-house mirror.
“I just have to say, I feel silly just being here,” she said. I nodded.
“I feel silly too,” I said. “I really mean that.”
The oldest, apparently Evelyn Jackson, leaned forward and pointed at me. “Don’t feel silly,” she said to Sarah, while continuing to direct her finger toward me. “It’s easy to understand why we’re here. Each in our own way, we’re desperate, and we can be forgiven the occasional act of silliness. But here’s a question that occurs to me, Mr. Alexander. If you feel silly as well, then what are you doing here?”
“In fact,” Kravitz said, “just for my own sense of dignity, if nothing else, I’d like you to tell us something about yourself, about who you are, apart from any mystical power you may possess.” He was a small man who looked like he might have been plump at one time but had wasted away. The others seemed wary and vaguely detached. But Kravitz was focused. “I need to say something straight off,” he told me. “I’m here because Mark practically twisted my arm. ‘What can it hurt?’ he said. ‘You show up, nothing happens, and you’re in no worse position.’ But you know what, Mark, I’ve thought about that, and you’re wrong. The damage from a meeting like this goes far beyond the little bit of time involved. The damage involves the roller coaster of hope, which in my situation is completely irrational.”
He paused for a moment, and Lindquist uncrossed his arms, about to speak. Kravitz shook his head vigorously and sipped his drink. “Let me finish, Mark. Do you believe, Mr. Alexander, that one can be convinced, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually—in other words, on every plane of perception—that something’s hopeless? Take this for example. This is all nonsense. You know it. I know it. And I know it on every plane of perception. Do you fully understand me? I don’t have a shred of hope, so you can get that out of your head about why I’m here. Would you like to hear the real reason?”
“Bob,” Lindquist whispered, “please . . .”
“I’m going to ask you to remain quiet, Mark. You can do that for me, right? For a moment longer? So here’s the true reason, Mr. Alexander, two actually.” He swallowed more of his drink and swept his gaze around the room to enforce silence. “So reason number one was just to shut Mark up. Jesus, Mark, you are so annoying. Why does it not surprise me that you actually stalked this gentleman through the streets of New York? This is who you are, Mark, an annoying, pestering, brutally meddling individual . . . probably why you’re so successful and probably why your disease has gone into some kind of remission. It’s not magical or mystical or spiritual . . . it’s so much simpler. Your disease is sick of you. Jesus, the disease said to itself, all I wanted to do was to rot away someone’s body; I sure as hell didn’t sign up to hang out with this fucking asshole.”
Kravitz stood up and faced me, his shaking hand spilling a few drops from his glass onto the polished wood floor. “Here’s my second reason, Mr. Alexander, and that is to confront you, sir—to look you in the eye and say, how dare you? How dare you do this? How dare you hold yourself out as someone who can help others in the way you say you can? I have cancer. The worst kind. Do you think this is a joke? Do you think this is a game? Or some kind of experiment? Do you think just because you may not measurably hurt someone, this still gives you a license to do what you do? There’s a deep, shocking absence of morality, of feeling, of decency in who you are, at your very core. If I accomplish nothing else tonight, if I accomplish nothing else in my life, maybe at least now I can die more easily knowing I communicated this to you.”
Silence fell, the kind that warned against intrusion until the passage of an appropriate interval. “I’m not good at math,” Maureen Silver finally said. She was thin, with taut skin pulled back at irregular angles, creating a series of smooth patches next to wrinkled ones. “But it occurs to me, if my calculations are correct, that Mr. Alexander has uttered exactly eight words tonight. Even con artists deserve a hearing, Bob. So I say, let’s keep him on a short leash, but let him have his say.”
Kravitz continued to stand and considered whether or not to stay. He then sat down, still trembling. Lindquist moved away from the statue and sat down on an ottoman slightly behind me. No one spoke now, and I could hear the faint rumble of traffic from the main road.
“I’m going to try to put all of this in some perspective,” I said, “and then, frankly, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might just leave, if that is the general consensus. But I need to say a few things. Mark, I would really appreciate a drink. Maybe some red wine.”
Lindquist left the room and returned with a full glass, which I drank quickly. “I am sorry, Mr. Kravitz, for what you’re going through, but with all due respect, your comments are unfair. I do not hold myself out as capable of doing anything.” I faced the group as a whole. “You want answers. You want explanations. You’ll let me have my say, apparently, and I appreciate that, but the reality is this: I have nothing to say. I have no answers, and I have no explanations. I can’t even answer the simple question, What am I doing here? It is very possible, maybe even probable, that I am a farce, but I am not a fraud. If you would like, I can start there and see where this leads. But I won’t plead for your indulgence or acceptance.”
It surprised me as much as it surprised the group that I had pushed back. “Start there, then,” Kravitz said. He had stopped shaking.
“Mark asked me to come here,” I said. “Sorry, Mark, if this sounds like an excuse, and I’m sorry if this is a convenient way to deflect some of the anger away from me and onto you, but this observation does have the benefit of being true.”
Everyone was looking at me now, expectantly, and the anger had drained away from Kravitz’s expression.
“Mark thinks that I’ve helped him. And a few other people believe that I’ve helped, and still others believe that I have some power to transmit healing energy, whatever that means, and I keep coming back to the fact that I am just an associate at a New York City law firm, who, not long ago, was all but telling Mark here, who had indeed stalked me through the streets of New York, to get out of my face and stop suggesting that I was a healer.”
Lindquist soundlessly refilled my glass to the top, and I took a few sips. “I got caught up in this,” I continued, “and I’ll admit that I rode it out for a certain distance, and if this is the end of the line, so be it. If I’m a complete joke, which is more than just a little bit possible, then I’m glad to have found this out here, and I’ll leave, with an apology for having wasted your time. But I want to say one more thing, because there is a suggestion here that I might be a con artist.”
I stood up and wobbled badly and sat back down. “I have had way too much to drink.”
“Are healers allowed to get drunk?” Kravitz asked. “Isn’t there some, I don’t know, code or disciplinary rule against that?” Sarah laughed, and the other two women chuckled.
“Well,” I said, “my cosmic license is probably going to get yanked tonight, so I might as well go down in flames.” I leaned backward, grabbed the bottle of wine out of Lindquist’s hands, poured the wine to the top, and swallowed rapidly.
“Come on, Mark,” Kravitz said, �
�we can’t let the plastered healer drink alone.” Lindquist quickly refilled everyone’s glasses.
“You want to hear something funny?” I asked. “So Mark and I are at this diner somewhere on the East Side. And I tell him that I am not a healer, so you know what he does? He grabs my tea bag, holds it over his mouth, and squeezes every last drop into his throat.”
“True story,” Lindquist said.
“Then, he storms out, furious, and why? Because I told him that I was not a healer. So here’s the thing, folks. If you believe in the short time since that encounter that I reinvented my life to concoct a scheme to convince all who come before me that I can heal their ailments, whatever those may be, if you believe that, then, frankly, your belief system is nuttier than the faith of those who believe I can heal people.”
“You grabbed the tea bag out of his cup?” Kravitz asked.
“I did that,” Lindquist said.
“Help me out here, Mark, help me understand what was going through your mind . . .”
“It’s pretty simple,” Lindquist said. “I figured if this guy was a healer . . . I don’t know, maybe when he drank his tea, his lips secreted a certain amount of healing saliva, which in turn dissolved into the liquid in the cup, following which it made its way into the tea bag. Anyway, don’t ask me. Ask Will. He’s the healer.”
“Traditionally, we in the healing community have found tea bags to act effectively as conduits,” I said.
“Well, that seems pretty straightforward,” Kravitz said. “That was my thinking as well,” Lindquist said.
Kravitz laughed; then, everyone else did too. “Let’s break out the tea bags,” he said. “Better yet, as long as you’re here, place your hands upon me, and let the healing energy flow.”
“Oh, I’ll do better than that,” I said. “You see, I don’t even have to touch you. In fact, if I understand this correctly, I can heal you remotely. We don’t even have to be in the same room.”
“That is so cool,” Sarah said. “Maybe you can heal by texting.”
“Only if we’re on the same plan,” I said.
“What if you make a typo?” Sarah asked.
“I could always dictate with Siri,” I said.
“You’ll run into problems with autocorrect,” Sarah said.
“You’d have to make the text really simple,” Maureen Silver said, “to rule out misinterpretation. How about, ‘You are cured.’”
“Jews are blurred.”
“Pools are absurd.”
“Fools are nerds.”
Everyone drank and came up with more interpretations, and at some point, Kravitz fell off his chair and rolled onto his side, his face awash with tears. Lindquist raced out again and brought back bottles of hard liquor and red wine and poured freely.
Still on the floor, Kravitz sat up and raised his right hand to silence us. “So a healer walks into a bar,” he said, and spittle flew through his teeth. The women laughed loudly. Kravitz tried to continue but was gasping for air. “I can’t breathe,” he said.
“Wait, you have to finish the joke,” Lindquist said. “A healer walks into a bar . . .”
“A healer walks into a bar with a frog on his head,” Kravitz said, regaining some composure.
“A white frog?” Lindquist asked.
“I did not see that question coming,” Kravitz said. “Usually, when I tell this joke, no one cares about the color of the frog.”
“It’s important,” Lindquist said. “Think, Bob, think, was it a white frog?”
“I wasn’t there, Mark, I really couldn’t say.”
“Well, someone was there. Surely, there must be a way to get this information.”
“Actually,” Kravitz said, “come to think of it, yes, it was a white frog, a big-ass white frog.”
“I knew it,” Lindquist said. “There are no coincidences.”
“So can I finish this joke?” Kravitz asked. “A healer walks into a bar with a big, bright, gleaming, white frog sitting on his head. And we’re talking one massive, amphibious beast. And the bartender goes, ‘Whoa, what the fuck is that?’ And the frog says, ‘I don’t know. It all started when I developed this huge wart on my butt.’“
We were spluttering now, the women trying to maintain some modicum of dignity but failing. Lindquist was not able to pour quickly enough, so I leaned over and swallowed Kravitz’s glass.
“Did you see that?” Kravitz said. “He actually drank my whisky. You’re a disgrace to healers everywhere.”
Lindquist refilled Kravitz’s glass with straight rye. “No harm, no foul,” he said.
“First of all, I did not drink your whisky. I was inspecting it for defects,” I said. “Let me show you what I mean,” and I grabbed his glass again and swallowed its contents. “This one is defect-free as well,” I said, at which point Kravitz reached over, grabbed my glass and swallowed the wine.
“That’s remarkable,” he said, “no defects there either.”
“See? There really are no coincidences,” I said. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch at Bear Mountain, and my lack of planning caught up to me abruptly. I spun off my chair and landed on my side with a thud, joining Kravitz on the floor. Then, I blacked out, but probably only for a moment, as I felt myself revived with a bouncy tune that Lindquist must have been piping through his stereo system. I wasn’t dizzy, but I couldn’t open my eyes, at least not at first, and the music became louder, though not painfully so. I recognized the chord changes from one of those doowop variations that almost every song from the fifties followed.
With my eyes still closed, I hauled myself back onto my chair, and then, I could see Kravitz, and he was considerably plumper, and I had the uncharitable thought that he looked more interesting as an emaciated cancer victim. Then, I blacked out again, and I know that a fair amount of time must have passed, but the music played on, and then, I opened my eyes, and Kravitz pointed at me and sang, “Here’s a man in evening clothes . . .”
Then, the screen really went blank, and the music got louder, and I recognized Sam Cooke singing “Twistin’ the Night Away.” But when the lights came back on, it was a roly-poly Kravitz singing and pivoting across the stage like Chubby Checker, with an old-fashioned, oversized microphone clutched in his right hand. The three women were behind him singing backup, and Kravitz was good, really good, and the music was contagious, infectious, and we all started dancing, everyone, even Sondra and Josh, although I didn’t see Erica there, but she was recovering, so that was understandable. And I knew the song well and knew that it was relatively short, but the song kept playing without being repetitive. Good Lord, we were having fun, and I asked my parents to join, and my mother was willing, but my father demurred, but that was fine, because he loved watching Sally dance. And Sally was good. She joined Kravitz in synchronous gyrations, and we formed a circle around them and began clapping to the beat. I felt the music in my gut. It just felt so damn good, so alive. No one then, and no one now, could listen to this song and not be elevated beyond despondency and illness.
30
Awakening
I felt the warmth of sunlight pressing against my eyes, and when I opened them, I noticed that the glass doors and windows of the room had no curtains or shades. Light flooded in, as if there were multiple sources of illumination trained on each exposure. A few opened bottles rested on the table, but otherwise, the room was tidy. I looked at my watch and confirmed my guess that nearly half the day had lapsed. It was 1:00 p.m., and the room was empty, and unless I was very mistaken, so was the house. No other explanation could account for the penetrating silence.
I felt fine, but I wondered whether my assessment would change once I tried to stand up. Thankfully, I found myself sturdy and balanced on my feet as I pushed up from the lounge chair, where I must have crashed at some point the previous night. I listened for anything. The hum of some appliance or generator. Birds or other animals. Nothing. Not even traffic in the distance. Where had all the sound gone?
“Mark,” I called out, and my voice vanished like a muddled thud. As I walked out of the room, I saw a note taped to the door, folded over, with my name on the outside. “Will, you crashed pretty hard, but you seemed comfortable, so I left you where you were. The house will be empty for most of the day, so make yourself at home, if you wish, but it would be nice if you could be gone by 4:00 p.m., when my housekeeper comes.”
I wandered into the kitchen, where I found a well-stocked refrigerator. I hunted around for some pans and decided to make an omelet, with onions, ham, and cheese. Lindquist also had paper bags of fresh bagels and coffee beans on the counter. I became absorbed in the task of making myself a hefty breakfast and was grateful for the noise of the eggs sizzling and the coffee grinding. I sat down and ate. It was quiet again.
Last night was something of a fiasco, but I was not troubled. I remembered laughing and getting drunk with people I had never met before. How bad could that be? If I chose this moment to reassess my life, sitting alone in dead silence in a large house, slightly hungover, with my motorcycle standing outside waiting to be mounted, I could confront the ancient Chinese proverb with confidence. “May you live in interesting times.” At least, I thought it was a proverb, although somewhere lodged in my consciousness was a memory that the proverb might have been a curse.
I cleaned up and felt considerably better, then walked out to my motorcycle. I had left the top case open, which created an image of an animated robot with its mouth agape, laughing at me. I slammed the case shut, started the bike, and rode down the driveway, away from this peculiar night and south toward the city. On the ride back, I wondered whether I was the only one who had blacked out and whether the others watched me collapse, continuing to talk among themselves, perhaps making derisive comments about me while I snored loudly. At some point, they left, maybe carefully stepping over me as they exited. I hadn’t healed anyone that night, of that I was quite sure, but I hoped that the frivolity of the evening would endure.
The Reluctant Healer Page 18