The Burn Zone

by Renee Linnell

  For ten years my parents tried to have children. After multiple miscarriages my mother carried a baby to term, a little girl my parents decided to name Renee. She was born dead. My mother told me that while lying in the hospital bed, surrounded by chaos, she had been flooded with an overwhelming sense of peace. She heard God tell her to be patient, that everything would turn out better than she could imagine. She was raised Catholic by very religious parents, and she felt that there was no way God, her God, would tease her with something for which she so desperately yearned, only to take it away.

  She was soon pregnant with twins. As the pregnancy progressed, my parents discussed names. Gary was quickly decided for my brother, but they struggled to find a name for me. My father was very attached to the name Renee.

  “But we already had a Renee,” my mother said. “We can’t name her Renee.”

  My father left the room and returned a moment later with a book of names.

  “Look at this,” he said, showing her the book. “Renee,” he told my mother, “means reborn.”

  I believe I was that first baby, that I entered this world briefly, felt the extreme psychic pain of it, and left. I went back Home to get a companion, a best friend, someone who would walk next to me through this difficult and, at times, excruciatingly painful world. Gary agreed to join me. He and I have an incredible connection. As far as personalities go, we are as close as two people could get to polar opposites, but on a soul level, we match.

  Gary was my closest friend when we were growing up. I was terribly shy and introverted, so I had a difficult time making friends of my own. I hid under the table when guests came to the house. I was socially awkward and afraid. Gary let me play with him and follow him around. He let me play with his friends. He made me feel included.

  We shared everything, including a womb for six months. We were born three months early and weighed three pounds each. Our mother was obsessed with the idea that we would get sick and die, so she kept us filled with antibiotics and made us sleep obscene amounts of time. She stressed that we were fragile. She called us miracle children.

  In many ways, our childhood was not typical. Our father was fifty-four years old when we were born, and our mother was thirty-nine. We spent most of our childhood and much of our adolescence living on a boat in the Bahamas, which made us very different from other children. We very rarely watched television, and we spent ninety percent of every day on or under the water. When we started private school in Fort Lauderdale at age five, our teachers made us work with a speech therapist, because they thought our Bahamian–Bostonian accent was a speech impediment.

  We were tiny, different, sickly, extra-sensitive, superskinny, and weird. Gary had glasses, and in fifth grade, we both got braces. When the other kids teased us, we cried. We got made fun of, beat up, and ostracized. We absolutely did not fit in. Life in private school was not easy.

  Our father had survived five invasions as the Captain of a Landing Craft Infantry vessel in World War II, and his view on life was different from most people’s: He felt that every day above ground was a gift, and he lived his life this way. He taught Gary and me to understand that we were incredibly blessed to have three meals a day and a roof over our heads in a country that was not being destroyed by war.

  While on that ship, in the war, in the middle of so much death and destruction, my father dreamed of owning his own boat. He imagined calm blue waters with no air strikes and no cannons and no dead bodies. Eventually, he made his dream come true. After the war, he went to night school on the GI Bill. He worked his way up in the world of real estate—from assistant to agent to broker to commercial developer. He made enough money to support himself and his parents, and when he finally bought the boat he dreamed of, he named her the Chance Two.

  He was old enough to be my grandfather, and everyone at school thought he was, which caused them to tease me more, but it did not matter what the other kids said about how old he looked, my father was my hero, my rock. I suppose being raised by a man that age lends a certain sense of stability that being raised by younger fathers cannot. He instilled in Gary and me a sense of immense appreciation and gratitude for daily life, and he also raised us to be hard workers and incredibly independent. By the time we were ten years old, we had passed all of his sea-survival tests: how to use the radio, how to send a flare, how to anchor, how to tie boat knots, how to know our location and how to read the tides. We could navigate water with coral heads and shallows. We were free to take the dinghy out to explore the island waters on our own, as long as we were back an hour before dark.

  I loved the quiet and the serenity of life on a boat. I spent hours on the fly bridge next to my father, sitting side by side in silence, as we travelled from one island to the next, crossing deep and seemingly endless ocean for days at a time. We didn’t need to fill the quiet with useless chatter. We listened for hours to the sound of the wind and the waves crashing against the hull and the steady droning of the engine. The salt water caked our skin. The wind whipped and tangled our hair. The sun tanned our faces. Eventually, we would crawl down the ladder, to Gary and my mother in the cabins below, and smile at each other, knowing we had spent the day in a type of church. We never said that to each other. My father was as irreligious as a person could get. He disliked going to church and only went once in a while to appease my mother. His God was nature. His God was silence. And without ever talking about it, he passed that belief, that feeling, that knowing on to me.

  When I was six years old, my father pulled our little dinghy up near a huge Navy ship anchored off of Nassau. The sailors seemed to be a thousand feet above us, all standing alongside the railing, looking down at us. The ship must have been similar to the type my dad piloted in the war. We waved to the sailors, and they waved back. Then one of them tossed his white hat down into our little boat. It hit the T-top and bounced into the water.

  He probably intended it for my brother, but without thinking, I leapt overboard and dove after it. The water was deep, dark blue and was pierced by magnificent rays of sunlight that illuminated the sinking hat. I kept my eyes open, ignoring the sting of the salt water, and swam as fast as I could—down, down, down—as the hat kept sinking out of my reach. There was no way I was going to give up. My eyes stayed locked on my target. And I got it. I clutched it in my tiny hand and swam as fast as I could toward the surface. I came up gasping for breath, with my prize in my hand, which I held out of the water for everyone to see. My father, smiling, lifted me into the boat, and only then did I hear it—the sound of cheering. All those men and women so far above us were cheering—for me!

  It wasn’t until years later that I realized what I had done. Gary and I were recounting childhood adventures, and he brought up that story, mixed with other stories about my “stupidity.”

  “Do you realize how deep that water was?” he asked. “It was hundreds, if not thousands of feet deep. We were in the shipping channel. You’re lucky you didn’t get eaten by a shark or sideswiped by a swordfish.”

  But thinking of water depth or sharks or swordfish had never even crossed my mind. I was impulsive and not afraid to go after what I wanted, and my father encouraged me. He was proud of me for leaping into the water. He didn’t scold me; he smiled.

  I was three years old when he taught me to snow-ski, five when he taught me to snorkel, and eight when he taught me to water-ski. I wrestled with him and roughhoused with him and wanted to learn to do everything he did so I could always be by his side.

  I was thirteen years old when I found out he had cancer. My mother and I were on a flight from Colorado to Florida when she suddenly exploded in a drunken rage, screaming, “I can’t handle this. Your father is dying.”

  Everyone stared at us. I started to cry. In a high-pitched, breathless voice, I asked her what she meant, and she told me he had leukemia; that he was going to die, and he was going to die soon.

  He didn’t die soon. He held on for two years. And he hid most of his pain and strugg
le from Gary and me. We went on about our young lives knowing our father was sick and not as strong as he used to be, but believing he would live forever. His illness was never discussed after my mother’s initial outburst. We all pretended it wasn’t happening.

  When I was fifteen, on the night before Thanksgiving, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I suddenly jumped out of bed, overwhelmed with the urge to go hug him and tell him how much I loved him. We were on our boat in the Florida Keys. He was in his pajamas, in his bathroom, going through his bottles of medicine. He had lost most of his hair from chemo, leaving a fuzzy, bald head that I loved to rub, and he had lost some of his strength, but he still seemed like normal Dad to me.

  I stepped up on the toilet in order to sit on the counter so I could be closer to eye level with him. I wrapped my skinny brown arms around him, looked into his sparkling blue eyes and told him how much I loved him and what a great father he was. I told him how grateful I was that he was my dad and that he was the best dad in the whole world. Then I pulled him in close and hugged him with all my might, not wanting to let go.

  I returned to my bed and dreamed of chaos and panic. The next morning, he was gone, taken away by an ambulance in the middle of the night. My mother had gone with him. Our boat captain, Dave, and his wife Jeanne (people my father had hired once he got too sick to captain and maintain the boat on his own), told me my father had suffered a mild heart attack and was at the hospital. I had slept through it all, mercifully, but my brother had watched as they pulled my father off the boat on a stretcher. He told me later that our father looked as if he wasn’t there anymore, glassy-eyed and panting. I know now that he wasn’t; he had left in his sleep, with only a small part of him keeping his body alive in order to appease my panicked mother.

  Throughout Thanksgiving Day, Dave and Jeanne (who were like family) pretended that my father was fine, just in the hospital, that we would see him the next day. We had an awkward dinner in a restaurant. Jeanne’s eyes were red and puffy; she kept getting up to go to the bathroom. They knew my father had died but were under orders from my mother to keep it from us.

  The next day, Dave and Jeanne drove Gary and me to our home in Boca Raton to “see our father.” From the backseat I watched the trees and bushes and cars through the window with a nervous heart. I appeased myself with thoughts of hugging my father and kissing his forehead when I got to him. I imagined all of us at home together, making him chicken soup and covering him with blankets, piling in bed and watching movies. Dave and Jeanne barely spoke. Gary and I stayed quiet. It was a long and tense two hours.

  When we got to the front door of our house, my father’s assistant, Sally, came to greet us, her eyes bright red. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” she said. “Your father is dead.”

  My mother was inside the house, crying. She couldn’t bear to tell us herself.

  I’m not really sure how I made it through that period of time. Upon hearing the news, I wanted to go straight back to our boat and continue playing with my friends. I had no capacity to hold the information, to grasp the reality that my father was gone, so I just wanted to return to life as usual. I vaguely remember the funeral. I remember kids at school whispering and staring. A few came up to me and offered awkward condolences. Some said things meant to be kind, but that actually made me cry. I really just wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened.

  Two weeks after he passed, we took the boat to the Gulf Stream to scatter his ashes, per his request. I was standing on the bow of the boat, staring down into the water. Our closest family and friends were grouped along the bow with me. My mother was fiddling with the urn and preparing to read the poem “Sea Fever” by John Masefield, another of my father’s requests. A slight breeze was blowing; the boat was rocking gently up and down, side to side, the sun was intense. My mother began reading. My thoughts were elsewhere. I was hot and didn’t want to be there. I closed my eyes and remembered hugging my father in his bathroom, realizing some part of me had known I was saying, “goodbye.”

  Suddenly, I heard my brother exclaim, “Look!”

  I opened my eyes.

  As far as I could see were dolphins—hundreds of them, maybe a thousand. There were waves and waves of them, surrounding our boat. They stayed there, seemingly motionless, as my mother finished reading the poem, and we threw roses into the water with my father’s ashes. Then the dolphins moved. Those closest to the surface grabbed the roses in their mouths, stayed for a moment longer, and then, instantly and all at once, the pod dove deep and disappeared.

  The next day at school, my English teacher, Mr. J., called me over to his desk as class was ending, looked into my eyes, and asked me how I was doing. I had always felt close to him. He seemed to care about each and every one of us, as if he was a father to every student. My eyes welled up with tears, and I told him about the dolphins. He paused, smiled, and gently said, “You know, in Greek mythology, it is said that the dolphin carries the soul to the next world.”

  The days and weeks rolled on. At some point, the reality of my father never coming back truly hit me. I cried a lot, alone in the dark at night. My mother started drinking herself to oblivion and spending most of her time in her bedroom. My brother just denied anything had happened.

  I struggled with so many unanswered questions. They started with why: Why did God take away my father? He was such a wonderful man, my hero, my one true love. How could S/He let that happen? What comes after we die? Where do we go? Is this life, this obsession with wealth, popularity, and buying stuff, all there is?

  I was only fifteen, but so much of my family had already passed away: My father’s father died when I was an infant. My mother’s father died when I was two years old. My mother’s mother, a diabetic, had a leg amputated when I was eight and died of dementia. My father’s brother died of lymphoma, and his sister-in-law died of lung cancer. My mother’s brother committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. My cousin died of a tooth infection. That is a lot of death to deal with by age fifteen. I felt like there simply had to be more to life than what I was being taught in church and school.

  And then the book Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss appeared in my life, introducing me to the idea that we incarnate over and over again and that we appear in each life to learn certain lessons. The part I loved the most is that we constantly reunite with souls we love.

  All the heaviness surrounding my heart lifted. I had a decision to make: I could believe that we live, we die, and it’s over. Or I could believe that we incarnate over and over again, we learn these fabulous and complicated life lessons, and we always and constantly reunite with the people we love. One belief system made me sad and angry and despondent and mean; the other filled me with hope and joy and love and faith. Neither, at this stage in my young life, could be proven, but one offered me despair while the other offered me hope. One offered me death while the other offered me life.

  I decided, on that day, at fifteen years old, to believe in reincarnation, to believe in learning life lessons, and to believe in souls reuniting. And with that decision, I planted one foot firmly onto a spiritual path that led me on an adventure I never could have imagined.

  Chapter 3 University of Mysticism

  After I submitted my application, I heard nothing from Lakshmi or her University of Mysticism. Two agonizing weeks rolled by. I checked my mailbox daily. No response. I checked my e-mail daily. No response. I called my friends who had applied.

  “Have you heard from Lakshmi?” I asked.

  “No,” they all replied.

  And so we waited.

  I had almost given up when it appeared: a beautiful large crisp envelope, cream colored, with sophisticated font on a perfectly centered white address label with a shining University of Mysticism logo and a gorgeous stamp. I held it in my hands for a moment, studying its beauty. And then I ran inside and opened it. I had been accepted as Lakshmi’s student. The first class would be in two weeks. I simply could not wait. The secret door
to Lakshmi’s University of Mysticism had opened for me.

  The program started slowly and magically. Lakshmi assigned wonderful books for us to read, fantastic movies for us to watch, and taught us about different spiritual paths and the Truth underlying all religions. The movies she assigned were mostly mainstream movies, but she showed us how many of the major blockbusters were dharma films. (Dharma is a term that is difficult to define, but it essentially means “upholding the cosmic order” or “aligned with one’s Truth.”) Most of the books she assigned were spiritual in nature; many of them on Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism, or mysticism. She taught how the basic thread, the true uncorrupted teachings, of all religions is the same and that one can find mysticism lying beside every major religion: that the difference between mysticism and organized religion is that mystics seek spiritual experiences for themselves, seek to know for themselves what is real and what is not real. She described our path as tantric Buddhist mysticism. What made it tantric, she said, was the fact that we used everything as our spiritual path; we did not run or hide from anything in the world.

  Close to a hundred of us met with her one weekend every month, in California, in ballrooms in the nicest hotels. She must have accepted everybody. I had known all of my friends had been accepted, but I was surprised to see what looked like all of the others, as well. We ranged from teenagers to eighty-year-olds and were a melting pot of ethnicities.

  Rather than call our program “University of Mysticism,” as she had on the posters and flyers, she called it CDT, standing for “Career Development Training.” This put a corporate spin on the events, making them seem more mainstream and less “woowoo.” We were told to dress business casual and to bring a tuition of $150 in crisp, brand-new bills. It was an expression of proper etiquette, she told us, to pay for spiritual teaching with brand-new bills, which, we were told, were energetically cleaner—held a “higher vibration”—than bills that had been touched by countless people. She called them “tomato cutters.”