Kissing the Wind

by A. E. Hotchner

  “I’m afraid I’m busy tomorrow. But maybe soon…I’ll call you.”

  I’m not sure what she read in my expression, but she smiled bravely in the face of it and began to pack up the cheeses. I swiftly moved to help, putting the Vesuvian remains in the pizza box. With our arms full of all this plus the empty wine bottles and glasses, we started toward the kitchen, but as she stepped from the living room carpet onto the kitchen floor she began to wobble. Then with a piercing “Oh, no!” she stumbled, giving up her cargo. I let go of mine and made an attempt to keep her from falling by grabbing her arm to keep her upright, but the momentum caused our feet to get tangled. I landed on a pancaked gorgonzola and Emma was sprawled in the midst of a sea of crumbled crackers.

  For a moment, we were both silent aside from a few startled, breathless pants. Then I scooped the gorgonzola covering my backside with a finger and plunged it in my mouth, and she dribbled a handful of crackers in hers. We took a look at each other and simultaneously began to laugh: no ordinary twitter but a laugh that came from the belly on up, a laugh fueled by the ridiculous nature of our fates. Tears came with the laughter and I pulled out my handkerchief, tore it in two, pitched a half to her. We wiped our eyes and blew our noses and let our laughter slowly play itself out.

  We sat facing each other among the detritus like two kids in a sandbox.

  I asked, “Do you sometimes wind up wiped out like this when you’re alone?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What if you get injured—like turn your ankle and it’s really hard to get up? Maybe impossible?”

  She pulled a cord from around her neck that had a device on the end of it. “I’d press this button that has a helping voice on the end of it that connects to the concierge desk in the lobby, as well as to a nearby nurses’ station.”

  “You mean a button like this?” I asked, pulling out an identical device from my pocket. “You’re not the only one who needs help. Like me sometimes after a killer syndrome episode. But they only work indoors. Outside you have to use your cell phone, and I suggest you add my number to your contacts. Just call out my name, tell me where you are, and I’ll be there for you.”

  I did not suggest she reciprocate. Unlike Emma, I couldn’t be helped.

  “I can’t believe it!” Emma was still releasing gasps of breathless laughter. “Both of us with the same needy buttons. You stuck with your crazies, me whirling with mine. But no! We can’t let them bury us. Do you hear?”

  Instead of answering, I got up and, putting my hands under her arms, helped her to her feet. She smiled up at me, a luminous smile that elicited a contagious response from me.

  Just then, a flow of syndrome people pranced into the room: stylishly outfitted men wearing hats and neckties, women with designer dresses and handbags. They clustered around us, looking us over intently. Their heady gazes seemed to declare that I was foolish to think I could even have one evening alone with Emma. I waved a hostile arm at them. “All right, get out, get out of here,” I commanded in a crisp voice. As usual they paid no attention. Emma began to pick up the fallen cheeses and shattered glass, but she was unsteady and started to sway, so I caught her again and this time kept her from falling.

  “Oh, thanks. Could you help me to the bedroom?”

  She took off her shoes and with my help lay down on the bed.

  “Do you need to call someone?”

  “No. I have pills for this.” She opened the night table drawer and took out a bottle. “A couple of these and a good night’s sleep will be just fine.”

  “Do you need anything else?”

  “No, thanks. You were a lovely help.”

  I passed her the glass of water from the nightstand. She took it, her cool fingers lingering for a moment on mine.

  “Do call,” she said. “When you can.”

  Feeling awkward, I kissed her hand and left.

  The syndrome people were all gone.

  chapter thirteen

  Back at my apartment, I remained dizzied from the long encounter with Emma: the easy way we had bared ourselves; our detailed confessions; my eagerness to reach out to her, but to what end?

  I made myself a tidy drink and immersed myself in watching the flow of traffic thirty-seven floors below, a torrent of red glowing taillights moving in one direction and streaming white headlights in the other. I had to admit leaving Emma like that with my failure of a promise and a few polite words was disappointing. I should have shown some warmth in my good night, something to indicate how attractive she was to me, how much I wished things could be different. Even though I knew it to be impossible.

  And to further drive home that point, that night the Bonnet syndrome reasserted itself. I closed my eyes against the burning sting of my predicament and found myself in a vast decorated space dominated by a mammoth Morpheus statue and filled with hundreds of identical beds with uniform sheets, pillows, and blankets, all in orderly arrangement.

  I was in one of the beds, which had a high metal filigreed barrier on each side that could be raised or lowered. I was lying on my back, head on a pillow, covered by a white blanket. Mine was the only bed that was occupied. The aisles between the beds were filled with roving syndromers, nightclothes draped over their arms, inspecting the beds. As they passed mine, I reached up and called out, “Give me a hand,” but they didn’t even look my way.

  The giant Morpheus suddenly exuded a bright blue canopy as a band of regal white horses came in, ridden in formation by white-clad horsemen who with jeweled batons induced the circling sleep-clad syndromers to enter the beds, one after the other. In no time all the beds were filled and colored lights with beautiful patterns began to play over our heads. As the colored lights started to fade and complete darkness replaced them, the horsemen activated torches and rode among the beds, inspecting the occupants.

  One of the horsemen, who wore a red sash, rode to my bed and lowered the right-side metal guardrail in the light of his torch. He activated a device that automatically raised me up. Then he drew a jeweled sword from his scabbard and was moving toward me, wielding it, as I let out a silent bellow and jumped out of the bed and into the chaise on my balcony.

  My mind clear, I still kept seeing Emma’s horrified reaction to one of my outbursts, or worse, her sympathetic one, imagined Emma offering to chain herself to me as Violet had done, and as much as it grieved me, I knew I had made the right choice in declining to see her again.

  Part Two

  chapter fourteen

  Feeling stir-crazy, I had risked an outing to the Music Box Theatre and was settling into my seat (right-side orchestra to favor my good eye) after the intermission when the silenced phone in my pocket began buzzing incessantly. There were several missed calls and a message from Charlie: “I’m at Sardi’s second-floor bar. Important you come immediately.”

  Sardi’s, the legendary theater restaurant, was just down the street from the Music Box. I found Charlie sitting at the bar with a robust man he introduced with “John Williamson, meet Chet Tremaine.

  “Sorry to pull you away,” Charlie added while I ordered a drink. “It’s not a very good show, anyway, and I knew you would want to hear what Mr. Williamson—”

  “John,” Williamson said.

  “What John has to say…He came from San Francisco to close a deal of mine this afternoon, and he leaves on the red-eye tonight. While we were having dinner he mentioned he’d only been in New York once before for his cousin’s wedding, and that this cousin had an incurable disease that he miraculously cured by going to Nepal.”

  “It was called Bonnet syndrome,” Williamson said, and I nearly upended the drink I was being handed. “Wasn’t a doctor here in New York could do anything for him, but Bruce was a bit of a kook and he believed all kinds of spiritual stuff, so he knew about the gods and spirits and temples and healers and monks in Kathmandu. He and his family had be
en going through hell for many years, but after his visit to Kathmandu, he was completely cured. Never had another one of those crazy hallucinations.”

  “How about that, Chet?” Charlie said. “John is leaving tonight but I thought you ought to hear about this.”

  Part of me wanted to start laughing, under the assumption that Charlie would immediately join in in appreciation of his terrific joke: Cured? Nepal? Was the spiritual healer in Midtown all booked up? But there was no trace of humor in my friend’s face. And after a moment I felt like I saw another face superimposed over his: smiling, hopeful. Call. When you can. It wasn’t a hallucination. Just a feeling.

  “You’re damned right,” I said. “Can you put me in touch with your cousin?”

  “ ’Fraid not,” Williamson said. “He got struck by lightning on a New Jersey golf course last year. But I could put you in touch with Sophie, his widow. She knows the whole shebang. Let’s exchange cards.”

  He wiggled his wallet out of his butt pocket. I don’t carry cards, so I wrote my vitals on the back of a Sardi’s bar menu.

  “I better get my ass out to the airport,” Williamson said, consulting his wristwatch. “I’ll call Sophie to tell her about you. I hope this does you some good.”

  I thanked him profusely as Charlie paid the bar bill. We descended to the first-floor cloakroom, from where I gratefully carried his suitcase outside and we put him in a yellow cab. Some of the shows were letting out and the sidewalk was getting crowded. Charlie and I threw our arms around each other and gave a couple of whoops.

  There are a few good things that drizzle down on you from above beyond your remotest expectations, and I thought this was as good a one as I would receive this time around.

  * * *

  —

  Sophie Gleason was immediately forthcoming and invited me to her place in the Bronx. She wanted to hear about my encounters with the syndrome, as if authenticating my status. I told her about the trapeze plus the wild ride on the MRI.

  “Jehoshaphat, even worse than Bruce. Well, you certainly need to escape your horrible Bonnet curse and I am only too glad to help you best I can.”

  She was a voluble woman with a ripe Bronx accent somewhat softened by a few years at Rutgers.

  “Do you mind if I ask you some personal questions?”

  “Not at all. Ask away.”

  “Good. Are you religious?” she asked.

  “Well, I don’t belong to any organized religion but I believe in God and the soul, so I guess you’d say that’s my religion.”

  “All right…Bruce and I are Catholics, I mean were Catholics, and when his syndromes were bad—that’s what we took to calling the hallucinations, his syndromes—he’d go to church and pray to the statues of Mary and Jesus to rescue him. But the syndromes didn’t improve and he began to seriously talk about suicide. At this point, to distract him, a friend of his got him into his Nepali study group. Since no one knows what causes the syndrome hallucinations and Catholic prayers weren’t being answered, we figured a civilization as old as Nepal’s might have some impact for Bruce, maybe locating the basis of his hallucinations, something all our doctors had not been able to find. Oh yes, the brain is the source, they suggest, but where in the brain, they cannot say, although probing operations have been performed unsuccessfully. You follow me so far?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Sophie continued. “Every aspect of life in Nepal is governed by hundreds of gods who have actual forms and are prayed to and regularly courted with offerings of flowers and food and other such daily gifts called puja that demonstrate the love the people have for the gods who dwell all over Kathmandu and spread their spirits in temples, trees, rivers, houses, schools, hospitals, restaurants. The two main religions are Hinduism and Buddhism, but there’s a fair bit of intermixing. The Shiva linga and Buddhist chaitya even stand together in some places, and Hindus and Buddhists worship similar powers, although the names are different. With such a large number of creeds Bruce and I couldn’t keep them straight—at the big festivals, of which there are a great many, everyone worships the most consulted deities: Ganesh, who with his distinctive elephant’s head brings good luck, and Shiva, who responds to daily problems, often medical. Do you think you could make all this your mindset before going to Nepal? If you can’t then it is a waste of time because you won’t be able to connect. That’s the thing about Bruce—he believed all this.”

  For even a chance to rid myself of the syndrome that had invaded and altered every aspect of my life? “I think I can, although it sounds like a lot of acceptance on my part.”

  “I’ve got all of Bruce’s books for you, and all his notes—he kept a journal the entire time he was there.”

  “That’s really kind of you. I’ll be very careful with them. Does this Nepali group still exist?”

  “No, ’fraid not. But I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have once you get started.”

  “Is there someone there who…”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I’ll make up a list of persons, places, hotels, all that. But the fellow you want to start with is Dr. Shankar Gopal. He’s not an MD, the ‘doctor’ is something else. He’s a wonderful man who helped us every step of the way, an outstanding scientific palmist. Kathmandu is famous for its fortune-tellers, but Gopal, who used to read the king’s palm every morning for His Highness to use as that day’s guidance, is very scientific. Graduated Oxford, has a fabulous place on Durbar Square in Kathmandu. Outside the entrance is a famous fifteenth-century stone sculpture of Shiva with his beautiful wife, Parvati, sitting on his knee. Gopal will take care of everything for you, beginning with someone meeting you at the airport to take you to the Hotel Yak and Yeti.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from laughing at the name. “Are there yaks wandering around the lobby?”

  Sophie laughed too, though she shook her head. “It’s five star and as impeccable as you could ask for. Well, what do you say? Does all my describing scare you off? There’s even more stuff you ought to read up on before you go. I haven’t even mentioned the jhankri you’ll have to find with Gopal’s help.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Who. A faith healer who intercedes between the person in need and the spirit world. In other words, he was the one who went into a trance and bridged Bruce into the invisible world of spirits. You’ll have to accept him and his trances if you are going to make a go of finding your cure in Nepal.”

  “To answer your question, you certainly don’t scare me off. Just the opposite. But does this call for a rather lengthy stay in Nepal? I run a business…”

  “Oh, no, not long at all. Dr. Gopal will have everything prearranged for you. Either you connect or you don’t. I’d say with Bruce it took maybe only a week or so to get under way.”

  “Did Bruce have some kind of psychic signal?”

  “I don’t quite remember, but when it happened and Bruce knew he was free of the Bonnet, that occurred on the day of the festival for Ganesh, a very important festival celebrated by Hindus and Buddhists. So we also got to celebrate Bruce’s getting out from under the syndrome.”

  * * *

  —

  After going through all the items Sophie gave me, I realized that what it came down to was this simple proposition: to go through this ordeal on the other side of the globe, I would have to truly believe that a Hindu god could prevail over the Bonnet curse; that a jhankri medicine man in a trance could conjure up forces that would protect me; that monks and priests would imbue me with an emotional acceptance of the entire process.

  As preposterous as it sounded, there was the indisputable fact that this very process had had “positive results” for Bruce, who, like me, had been suffering from the daily hideous assaults on his life.

  Sitting on the terrace of my Connecticut cottage surrounded by the menacing syndrome structure blocking my view, I had a
sharp yearning to discuss this dilemma with my father. He had meant so much in my life, but alas, he was no longer here. It was a sudden tragic accident, a second of time that decimated both Charlie and me.

  Our fathers were as close friends as we are. All four of us would go to Yankees games together, to concerts; we’d fish out on the sound in Charlie’s father’s boat, a Chris-Craft. Once in a while our mothers would come along but only for the sea air, not to hook live bait on a fishing pole.

  As we got older, Charlie and I fished less and less, but our fathers maintained their outings as often as their schedules would permit. Charlie’s father was a distinguished surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery, my dad an architect with a prestigious firm in which he was a partner. No two families could have been any closer, but that dreadful accident changed all our lives.

  It was a lovely sunny day when our fathers decided to run the Chris-Craft across the sound to Long Island, something they had done often in the past: eat lunch and fish over there. They were halfway across when a large ferry coming in the opposite direction rammed into them and split their boat in two, killing them both.

  All these years later I still haven’t been able to reconcile the loss of my closest, most indispensable friend. Nor has Charlie been able to handle the loss of his father. Neither of us has brothers or sisters. Charlie’s mom moved to California after Charlie got married, and my mom married an Australian rancher she met in New York and now lives in Melbourne. All this has made Charlie and me like family, like two surviving brothers.

  Charlie was of course interested in what came of the meeting with John Williamson at Sardi’s bar. He was fascinated with my account of my talk with Sophie, and he looked at all the material she had given me. “It’s a tough call,” he said while we were having lunch at Rive Bistro. “I know the hell you are going through better than anyone, but going all the way to Nepal, where you have to deal with a palmist and a faith healer—that’s one hell of a load, isn’t it? Does any of that feel like something you can honestly open yourself up to?”