by Barbara Hall
David feels like crying. He sees his whole life’s work circling the drain in the presence of what Joe is saying. He wants to respond but he doesn’t know how.
Finally he blurts out, “I don’t know what is happening to me.”
“Sometimes God just comes after you,” Joe says.
David locates a crumb of courage hiding in a place he forgot to look. He says, “Fuck God, he’s too late.”
But Joe only shrugs and says, “God is famous for looking like he’s too late.”
David sits for a moment, catching his breath, as if he has just run a marathon. He can feel, without seeing, the calm in Joe’s eyes and it makes him wretched with envy.
“Okay, tell me about charisms.”
“You know what they are,” Joe says. “There are too many to list. There are those that Paul identified and there are many more that have been added by the church. You can have a charism for almost anything.”
David hears Sarah’s voice saying the word and then he’s hurtled back through time, sitting in a desk in the eighth grade at Loyola while some priest is explaining charisms. He can see the list on the board. He knows the charisms were spelled out by St. Paul, though he can’t remember which book of the Bible and he can’t remember any of the charisms except the gift of speaking in tongues, which is probably when he checked out.
“Are they real?”
“You know they are. Call them talents if it makes you feel better.”
“But they’re more than talents.”
“Yes. They are gifts of the Holy Spirit for the good of the community. They pull you against reason sometimes.”
“So, compulsions.”
“Sure, why not.”
“Does everyone have them?”
“Yes, though not everyone pays attention to them or develops them. If it’s a high-voltage charism and the person isn’t spiritually prepared for one reason or another, then avoidance can ensue. And that can take many forms including addiction.”
“It is too much to ask the average person to understand the difference between a compulsion and a calling.”
“I agree.”
“So how do we help them?”
“Gee, let’s think. We could create a church and some sacraments.”
“Work with me. So if a person is hearing voices, having visions and visitations…”
Joe cuts him off. “Discernment of spirits,” he says.
“What?”
“That’s what the charism is called. The one you’re describing.”
“They see dead people?”
“They have access in one form or another to the world of spirits. The world behind your eyes. Whatever is there. I don’t have that charism so I can’t speak from experience.”
“Have you ever met anyone who did?”
“No. It’s not the world I move in. I’m a Jesuit. I barely believe in God.”
David laughs. He appreciates the levity. It pulls him back from the rabbit hole.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Dave. God is out of the box.”
“Why don’t I feel better when I come here?” David asks.
“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
“If you quote Jung to me one more time I’m going to punch you in the face.”
“I think that was Kierkegaard but welcome back.”
Chapter 15
Most of the saints talked about ecstasy. I only know this because I did some research once I started to think that these voices were not my imagination. I wanted to see how it was possible. I read about Teresa of Avilla and John of the Cross and Joan of Arc and I still couldn’t see how it was possible, but I was comforted by how familiar it all sounded. So that even if I was crazy, I was in good company.
Emanuel Swedenborg, for example, a Swedish philosopher and scientist from the eighteenth century, believed he had been granted the right to visit Heaven and Hell and report back on the conditions. He wrote a tome describing those dimensions and I read the tome and was impressed by how scientific it was, how unemotional, how specific, how conceivable. But it had to be crazy, right? He had to be crazy. Except that none of his colleagues thought of him that way. They continued to take him seriously as a scholar. None of his friends or colleagues ever reported on him seeming strange or having a breakdown while it was happening. He continued to serve in Swedish parliament and in the Royal Academy of Sciences. Later, of course, everyone except a few writers who were into the mystic declared him several sandwiches short of a picnic. But he continued to live a normal life, offending no one, and not particularly undone by his visions.
Imagine his conversations hanging out in the hallway outside Parliament.
“How’s it going, Emanuel?”
“Can’t complain. Just got back from Hell yesterday. Now, they have something to complain about.”
Maybe that can happen to me. That’s the best I can hope for. That this will settle down into something I can live with. That the voices will be more consistent. That I won’t have to spiral into despair when they go away.
My friends will say, “How’s it going, Sarah? Heard from Heaven lately? Any tips on the stock market?”
“No,” I will say, in all seriousness. “If you abuse the charisms, you lose them. And the guides don’t know everything, anyway. Only God knows everything.”
“Interesting.”
This is what Dr. Sutton is going to help me with. I don’t know how. Neither does he. But we are giving it our best shot.
There’s a subtle difference to him when he comes in. I am waiting in his office. After our last mix-up I want to be a little more obedient. And when the voices are talking, I am not as mischievous. I want to make things go smoothly. I don’t want to upset Dr. David Sutton. But I do anyway because he comes in flustered.
“Ms. Lange, perhaps we should start off by discussing the nature of agreements.”
“All right.”
“The agreement we made, based on your needs, was to meet in the common room.”
“I thought you preferred me to be here.”
“I prefer there to be one consistent plan.”
“Well, that’s tricky with crazy people.”
He ignores that. He is intense, on edge, but also a little intimidated by me in a way that I haven’t seen before.
I want to take that tension away from him.
“Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” I say. “Consistently.”
“Then let’s meet in this office at the appointed time.”
“All right.”
“I won’t come looking for you. If you fail to show up here then we miss our appointment.”
“Understood.”
He sits and opens his briefcase and gets out his writing pad without looking at me. He takes several breaths through his nose then looks at me.
“Are you all right?” I ask him.
“Fine. How are you feeling today?”
“I feel great.”
“I see. Is there a reason for that?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to discuss it?”
I think.
No, you don’t.
“No, apparently I don’t.”
“Are you experiencing bliss?”
“So it doesn’t matter that I don’t want to discuss it.”
He is momentarily stumped by that.
“What would you like to discuss?” he asks, inhaling patience.
“Anything else.”
“All right.”
He looks at his notes.
“Is it all right to talk about your near-death experience?”
I think. I listen.
“Yes, it is.”
“Tell me about it.”
“What about it?”
“Anything. What did you experience?”
I am able to talk about the attack now without thinking about it, without remembering it. I taught myself how to do that during the trial. But I’ve never minded talking about what ha
ppened when I died.
“He was choking me,” I say. “That’s how I died. He crushed my trachea. Later a doctor looked in my throat and said he had no idea why I was still alive. But then everyone was stumped by that.”
“Go ahead.”
“Okay, it was kind of a low-rent NDE. Not the fancy kind. No tunnels, no angels, no dead relatives. Not even a light. Suddenly I was just looking down on what was happening. Me lying on the bed and him choking me and I remember thinking, ‘That looks like it would hurt.’ Then I realized that I was out of my body. I could see everything around me. And here’s what’s strange. I felt more like myself than when I was in my body. It’s you but it’s you more intensely. It’s pure consciousness. No ego, no contradictions, just pure self. It’s hard to explain. Also, you’re out of linear time. That’s also hard to explain. And I realized I was surrounded by an intelligence. That’s the only way I can describe it. I couldn’t see it. I could only hear it but that’s because its thoughts became my thoughts, and the feeling around it was very pleasant, and the tone of it was very neutral. It asked me two questions. The first one was, ‘How much did you love and how much were you loved?’ I was surprised to find that I hadn’t loved very much and I hadn’t been loved very much. And then I was asked if there was anything I’d like to go back for. And I must have said yes because I crash landed in my body and everything suddenly hurt.”
“You don’t remember saying yes.”
“No.”
“So you don’t remember what you wanted to come back for.”
“I thought we covered that.”
“You always speak of these guides in the plural. Do they travel in twos?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s that they don’t have a word for I. It’s not like that there.”
He writes. He looks up.
“Might it be helpful to talk again about what you came back for?” he asks.
“That’s surprising.”
“Why?”
“It sounds dangerously as if you believe me.”
“It doesn’t matter if I believe your story in a literal way,” he says. “I believe something happened to you and whatever it is, we can work with it symbolically. The fact that you gloss over the reason you came back is interesting to me. I think we should take a pick ax to that.”
“What?”
“It’s what Jung said. Take a pick ax to the thing you don’t want to look at.”
This time I’m the one who squirms. I try to disguise it as moving forward in my seat out of interest.
“If you don’t know what you came back for,” he says, “you might be confused about your purpose. It’s not good to be confused about your purpose.”
“So to make up for the fact that I have no purpose I’m creating imaginary friends?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
I press my hands against my temples.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Are you hearing something?”
“No.”
He waits and I just stare at him.
He clears his throat to indicate a change of direction.
“After your near-death experience, this is when you started hearing from the guides on a regular basis?”
“I told you. I think I’ve heard them all my life. I just ignored them, pushed them down. You can do that. Most people do that.”
“But then you stopped pushing them down. You started to acknowledge them. When was that?”
For some reason, this part is hard. It feels like he’s getting too close to something, like he’s trespassing inside my secret fort, even though I want him to visit the fort. Now he’s in here and I don’t know what to do with him.
“For about a year after the attack I had all kinds of voices and visions. Memories and flashbacks and self-recrimination and bargaining and things I should have said and done. It was a cacophony in my head. It was the sound of going crazy. I knew that. It was like a thousand radio stations playing at once. One day I couldn’t take it anymore. It was just an ordinary morning in my kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. I dropped to my knees and begged, out loud, for it all to stop. And it almost did. The only thing left was this soft, neutral presence. Not a sound, not voices. Just a presence. And I demanded, out loud, to be told what that was. That’s when they started talking. From that point on, if I asked, they answered.”
I wait. He doesn’t write. He just stares with those sea green eyes.
Finally he speaks: “So most people have guides. They just can’t hear them.”
I look at him as if he’s just grown an extra head. “That’s what you took from all that? I just told you the whole thing.”
“I’m trying to clarify.”
“I don’t know about other people. I don’t care about them most of the time.”
He is frowning. He doesn’t mean to and it’s very subtle but he is disapproving. He hates the idea of God. People who hate the idea of God can’t disguise it. But I don’t care. Pleasing Dr. Sutton is not my job and saving him is not my business.
But he is drifting and it worries me because he is the one who is supposed to throw me a line back to earth. He’s the one who is going to make the case for my staying here and playing well with others. How can he do that if he’s on the fence himself?
“I’m trying to get to the root of your problem,” he says.
“I will gladly tell you the root of my problem. The world is not enough.”
He looks confused. “The James Bond movie?”
“It’s a James Bond movie? No, I think I’m referring to something older. Alexander the Great, I seem to recall. It was on his gravestone. ‘A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough.’”
David nods and thinks. “Meaning you need more than what’s in front of you.”
“It’s not about needing it. It’s about belonging to it.”
“If you belong to the other side, why are you here?” he asks.
But it’s not a challenge. It sounds like a genuine question. It feels as if the power has shifted. The student has become the teacher.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
He looks at me and I can hear the question he wants to ask: “Don’t they tell you?”
I listen. They don’t tell me.
I listen harder. I ask. Why am I here?
You know.
I don’t know.
You know.
“I don’t know!” I shout, and though the volume alarms Dr. Sutton, he thinks I’m still talking to him.
“All right. Take a breath. You don’t have to know right now.”
“It’s like there are these two forces inside me. Inside everyone. One represents the real thing, the other is always trying to mislead us. No, that’s not it. One is connected to the Divine and the other is trying to connect to the world. Trying to force the world into a safe place. Trying to get it to deliver in a way that it really can’t.”
Dr. Sutton says, “The ego cannot live in the absolute presence of God because it has to admit that it’s not running the show and that’s the ego’s only function.”
I look at him, surprised. “The ego?”
“Freud called it ego. Jung called it self. There are a number of ways to describe what you’re talking about. I don’t want to get too clinical.”
“It’s like we have to be in the world, not of it. Or what is that other thing about the garment?”
“St. Francis. Wear the world like a loose garment.”
“That’s it.”
He stares at me, his face still, his mind tumbling. Dr. David Sutton is in the grips of something.
“Do you have a religious education?” he asks.
“Just dragged to some Protestant church till I was old enough to rebel.”
He nods. After a moment he begins to write.
“But that’s not where this is coming from, Dr. Sutton.”
He keeps writing and finally puts his pen down and cro
sses his legs, looking at me in a way that creates dread in my stomach.
“Can we talk about medication?” he asks.
“No.”
“I understand you’re opposed to being sedated in any way and that you’ve refused to discuss antidepressants. We could put you on the mildest dose.”
“Absolutely not.”
“I really believe they would help.”
“With what? I’m not depressed.”
“I’m worried about your disorganized thinking.”
“My thinking is disorganized?”
“Ms. Lange, you have a positive identification with suicide. That’s a disorganized thought.”
“In your world.”
“It’s the only world I can represent.”
I smile.
“You believe you have no soul. That’s a disorganized thought in my world.”
Dr. Sutton closes his notebook and opens his briefcase.
We are done for the day.
Chapter 16
Jen is already in the house when David arrives home. This fact irritates him. He might even say that it triggers him. Triggers a rage that boils up from some basement of which he is dangerously, or at least irresponsibly, unaware. He dislikes the use of the word “trigger” in his profession, though it is all but ubiquitous. He dislikes the idea of some nether psyche that is awakened by a sound or smell and has the power to take over. Why would there be a trigger or a fuse or a button or a hotspot in an otherwise functioning human being? As if the human psyche were riddled with trapdoors and land mines. He doesn’t like to think about what that says about human nature. He doesn’t like the idea of denying animalistic impulses. He prefers the idea of overcoming them, evolving out of them. He doesn’t want to know about some sleeping giant in the heart or gut of a reasonable human. He doesn’t like that idea in anyone and he especially doesn’t like it in himself.
He reprimands himself for blaming his response to Jen on Jen herself. All she is doing is cooking in his kitchen. His reasonable brain should tell him that’s a good thing, a generous thing, but he has to stand on the porch for a minute, breathing, so he won’t accost her on sight. When he feels he has reined in his emotions, he opens the door and walks quietly into the kitchen. She is wildly chopping vegetables and throwing them into a wok in between taking swigs of wine. He stands for a moment watching her. He is trying to see her as a stranger. He is trying not to attach meaning to her presence. A lovely, skinny, tense woman with a tight ponytail in business attire throwing vegetables around his kitchen. Not worthy of anyone’s wrath. Yet the wrath bites and licks at him. He breathes.
