by Rusk, Day
“But moving in together?” she said.
I took a deep breath. Fuck it, life was too short; sometimes you had to jump into the deep end and hope you could swim; there’s also a theory that drowning is a painless death, so I guess I was good on both fronts.
“Normally this wouldn’t happen,” I said. “Actually, in my case, it has never happened. I’ve never lived with a woman. I’ve had some serious relationships in the past, but we’ve never lived together. We’ve always had the security of being able to leave one another and go back to our own places.”
Safia was looking at me intently.
“I...I don’t know how to say this. And I don’t know if it’s wrong or just too damned early, but the circumstances between you and your parents, well they kind of change everything.”
She started to say something, but I cut her off quickly.
“If you tell your parents we’re seeing one another, what are the chances they’d ever let you out of the house again?” I asked.
“It’d be hard to get out,” she said.
“Exactly. If you tell them and they take it badly, it’s going to be next to impossible for us to see one another; to be together. If you don’t, you have to continue lying, and from what I do know about you in the time we’ve spent together, that’s not going to fly; you can’t keep lying to them. So the only solution if things go bad is for us to live together. I take it you can’t afford a place on your own right now?”
“Not right now, no,” she said.
“Then we’d have to live together. There really aren’t any other options.”
“Live together for all the wrong reasons,” she said.
“Not really,” I countered.
She was watching me closely.
“I have been in serious relationships in the past. Not many, but a couple. I’ve also dated, not a lot, but enough. I know we’re just starting out and getting to know one another, but, I don’t know, there’s something in my gut that tells me there’s something different about you. From the moment I met you, it’s been there; a feeling. I didn’t want to tell you this because it is so early in our relationship; I don’t want to worry or frighten you; have you think I’m some kind of idiot or creep. There’s just something about you that’s different; different than I’ve ever felt in any relationship before. I don’t know how to explain it but to say that if I’m not all ready in love with you, I’m falling in love with you, and, you know what, that seems like the most natural thing in the universe.”
I looked to her. I’d done it. I’d used the ‘L’ word, and probably way too soon in the relationship. She was going to be suitably spooked and break things off right away. At least that’d make things easier for her.
“I’ve never lived with another woman before,” I added, “but the thought of the two of us living together, well, that doesn’t scare me. And that’s something, in other relationships that has scared me in the past.”
She was still looking at me. The wheels in her head turning furiously, trying to decipher what I had just said. I was glad I hadn’t thrown out my Playboy collection. It had remained unseen and intact. I was out there on a limb, and I think I could feel it slowly cracking under my feet.
Just when I thought I was finally going to have that brain hemorrhage, and was ready to welcome it, she smiled. I was either safe, or she was buying some time so she could get safely away from me.
“I was thinking the same thing,” she said.
Based on the expression on my face, she knew I needed more.
“I think I’m falling in love, myself. This all feels right, somehow.”
“You are? It does?”
I was speechless. That limb I was standing on had suddenly turned into a giant, thick piece of wood, as sturdy as hell.
We kissed. I’m not one for public displays of affection, but I didn’t care, I didn’t want to lose the moment or ever see it pass, so we kissed and kissed and kissed.
Life has a way of sneaking up on you and kicking you in the ass. I’d been excited about my book. The advance, which was acknowledgement from my publisher they had confidence in me, and the ability to work full time on the project and topic I felt passionately about, brought me a great deal of happiness. No dead end job for me; I was one of the lucky ones.
Now this.
Without even going and looking for it, I’d found a woman who I could love and who could love me back - completely and entirely unexpected. Sure it was taking away time I would have normally spent working on my book, but in this case I was more than willing to trade one passion for another.
We continued to walk along the lake, a new sense of togetherness engulfing both of us. I’d been serious when I said we should move in together, but didn’t want to push it; what I had simply done was provide Safia with a safety net. She wanted to tell her parents about us, but wasn’t sure when, or when she’d get the courage to do so. And, if her parents didn’t react too badly, we’d postpone moving in together and proceed in the relationship with her living at home and me at mine. While I was confident moving in together was okay, we didn’t feel we had to rush things if it wasn’t necessary to do so.
“I consider the psychic question to be infinitely the most important thing in the world. All modern inventions and discoveries will sink into insignificance besides those psychic facts which will force themselves within a few years upon the universal human mind.”
“Spiritualism is nothing more or less than mental intoxication; intoxication of any sort when it becomes a habit is injurious to the body, but intoxicating of the mind is always fatal to the mind.”
I stared at these two quotes on my desk. The first was from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the second from Harry Houdini. They were two quotes that inspired me regarding the topic I was writing about.
The fact that Conan Doyle had embraced Spiritualism fascinated me; especially considering his literary invention, Sherlock Holmes, was so practical and logical. Everything could be proven with concrete evidence – this type of evidence didn’t exist in the spiritual world.
Doyle first applied to join the Society of Psychical Research, a committee of academics seriously studying Spiritualism in 1893, after the death of his father, and very shortly after that his wife, who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, was given only months to live. Both events placed the author into a deep depression. In the long run, his first wife, Louisa held on until 1906 before succumbing to her affliction. It seemed tragedy was never far from Conan Doyle, however, as his son Kingsley died in World War I, followed quickly after the war by the death of his brother Innes, two brother-in-laws and two nephews. Conan Doyle, who had killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, so that he could focus on more serious concerns, although in later years he did bring back the detective a few times for more adventures, had dedicated the later part of his life in support of Spiritualism.
It was not uncommon during the times in which Conan Doyle lived for individuals to grasp on to something like Spiritualism as a way of trying to make heads or tails out of the losses in their lives. Times of war, like World War I are often a boom time for Spiritualism. At these times, death is not uncommon and those who survive are looking for answers and comfort. Spiritualism thrived during the 19th Century in America especially during and after the American Civil War. The amount of death during that conflict was unprecedented. Spiritual photography also blossomed at that time, in which individuals would pose for a photo and when it was developed there would be the image of the deceased loved one over one of their shoulders as if they were looking down on them – a guardian angel. Photography was still in its infancy, although those who practiced it did know a thing or two about double exposures, and used this technique to take advantage of those in a grieving state. I believe there is even a famous photo of Mary Todd Lincoln in mourning wear with the ghostly image of her husband, Abraham Lincoln, looking down on her – comforting her by being with her even in death.
So it’s easy to see why Conan Doyle emb
raced Spiritualism; it gave him hope, namely that those loved ones who were gone, were in fact, not gone, but still out there somewhere, with the possibility of them all being reunited at some point in the future. With my parents gone, I also wished to believe the same. The thought that one day we might be reunited comforted me.
“I am willing to be convinced; my mind is open, but the proof must be such as to leave no vestige of doubt that what is claimed to be done is accomplished only through or by supernatural power.”
Houdini was willing to be open to the idea that the afterlife existed, but didn’t believe anyone on Earth had communicated with it. Houdini was a bit of a Mama’s boy and when his beloved mother died in 1913 he had set about trying to make contact with her through a series of séances. Along the way, the various tricks these psychics tried to use to fool him that they were in fact in touch with the spirit of his Mother angered him, so much so that he made it his life’s mission to expose fraudulent mediums, and even wanted a law passed to have them jailed for their actions. He was both an escape artist and an illusionist, so he knew all the tricks, and whenever he went to a new town, he’d set up a meeting with the local medium or mediums and expose them. He wrote two books on the matter, two of my most prized possessions, and some believe that the punch that eventually led to his death of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, believe it or not, on Halloween in a Michigan hospital, was not an innocent punch by a Canadian student in Ottawa, but a punch by a man who was hired by psychics and mediums to take care of Houdini for them. It was believed there was a bounty on his head.
Although Houdini didn’t anticipate dying as young as he did, he and his wife Bess had set up a secret code, known only by them, for Bess to use after his death; a séance was held every year on Halloween with the express purpose of getting in touch with the spirit of Houdini. It was believed that if anyone could escape the confines of death, it would be the escape artist himself. Bess died in 1943, never having made contact with Houdini, and while the code they used is now known, it was never told to Bess by a medium during her lifetime, in all the numerous attempts to make contact with Houdini.
This was the world I was immersed in when I was not on the phone talking to Safia. Thank God for cell phones; obviously I couldn’t phone her at home on her parent’s land line. I called her cell phone and we often burned up the minutes, talking into the wee hours every night. I assume she did so someplace in the home where her parents couldn’t hear her, as they’d no doubt wonder who she was talking to on a nightly basis.
Safia was distracting me from my book, or at least slowing me down, but at the same time I realized there might be a connection between our circumstances and what I was really writing about. Sure I was writing about a friendship that turned to anger based on two men’s staunch beliefs. It was the quote from Houdini, the one about the intoxication of the mind being fatal that really stuck in my mind.
Houdini and Conan Doyle were talking about Spiritualism; and although we don’t see it as such today, Spiritualism in its day was something of a religion. It was enough of a belief that it ruined their friendship. Both men developed a passion for something, Conan Doyle for Spiritualism and Houdini for the debunking of all psychics and mediums – the destruction of the Spiritualism movement. That passion in both of their minds was in fact the intoxication that took something good and pleasant and turned it into animosity. The intoxication of both their minds was fatal to their friendship.
This in many ways was the same for those today who blindly believed in a specific religion. A blind belief in anything can’t be good for anyone; a blind belief in religion forces you to see the world in black and white, however, the world isn’t black and white, but filled with many shades of grey, some of them good and some of them bad. Life was fluid and couldn’t be controlled, but isn’t that what many of these people try to do with their die-hard beliefs - control it? Now, I’m not just talking about the Muslim religion here, but others as well; any religion where someone takes it to heart so much so that they forget life is more than their beliefs and they shouldn’t view it through such a narrow window.
When it comes to Conan Doyle and Houdini, I have to side with Houdini. Intoxication of the mind is fatal; a blind belief in anything is wrong; whether we like it or not, life changes, times change, and people change. We don’t think and act like people in the 19th or 18th Century, because we have evolved. We’ve enlightened ourselves and grown to appreciate the world around us and its new expectations of us. I can’t say any religion is right or wrong – I don’t know, but to have such a blind belief in one religion it would allow you to turn your back on family, well, that’s not right. And, yes, I know a big part of it is cultural and not religious in many cases, but let’s face it, the lines have blurred and even if you make that argument, the religious belief is always there, close by, a part of it all.
I know I said I was just going to forget it all and go with the relationship – try and stay out of my head; for the most part I have, but I’m still me, and whether I like it or not, sometimes the wheels start turning and I can’t do anything to stop them. In the case of what I was writing, a friendship died because two men were unwilling to appreciate the fact, and respect the fact, that they held different beliefs. Houdini didn’t believe in Spiritualism but Conan Doyle did; and if believing it brought Conan Doyle comfort in his old age, what was the harm in letting him believe? Houdini may have proved a lot of psychics and mediums to be frauds, but who is to say they all were; that what Conan Doyle believed in wasn’t real? Usually in life, nothing is one hundred percent one way or the other, so there was a possibility that while many mediums were frauds, there were a few out there who weren’t. Mathematically, it’s possible.
What Safia’s parents believed in threatened to destroy something real and great between the two of us. Rather than everyone getting along, chances are it would drive a wedge between all of us – a belief creating more harm than good.
As I said, life can be funny; I’d started out writing something, unaware that I was going to meet a woman and that the circumstances of our relationship were going to change my perspective, or at least open my eyes to a new way of looking at my source material and what it all meant. In many ways, not only had I found someone to love, but I had inadvertently discovered a muse.
I’d discovered a muse and she paid the price for it.
Safia was in trouble.
CHAPTER Nine
I Really hadn’t expected Safia to say anything to her parents for quite some time. I knew she didn’t like lying to them, but at the same time, telling them about me wasn’t exactly going to be easy or make her life any easier. I guess she just felt it was something she should do, and secretly hoped that despite their beliefs; in the long run they’d support her.
It was later in the evening and I was working on my book when the call came in. I immediately knew something was wrong; she sounded upset, like she’d been crying. She’d taken refuge in a donut shop; it sounded bad. I also knew that whatever pain or misery she was in at this time was because of me. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.
I, of course, dropped everything and raced to her. I didn’t know what to say to her – she was here because of me. I took a few seconds outside the donut shop to stop and look in the window. She was sitting at a corner table, nursing a drink, I assumed tea as she wasn’t much of a coffee drinker – how’s that irony for you? Tucked under the table was one small suitcase. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out how her talk with her parents had gone.
Safia looked deep in thought, no doubt reliving over and over again the events of that evening’s conversation. She was lost in her own world, and hadn’t really been looking out for me. Just looking in the window at her, I could see the hurt on her face. Tonight her entire life had been turned upside down. Deep down in my gut I hurt; just looking at her, seeing what I had caused, it was hard to take; I loved this woman, how could that possibly translate into such pain? Why should it? And,
yes, I know, I said ‘I loved this woman,’ no hedging my bets anymore by saying ‘I think I could fall in love with this woman.’ It was official and I was finally not afraid to say so, I loved Safia. It just took me causing her great pain and my reaction in seeing her that way, to truly drive it home to myself. As I took those moments outside the donut shop, I knew I never wanted to see her like this ever again. She deserved happiness – to be happy. She deserved a lot, possibly more than me, so whether I could or couldn’t, I now had to rise to the occasion and become the man who could give that to her. She deserved nothing less.
As I approached her table, Safia attempted a small smile, just for my benefit, but it couldn’t hide the hurt in her eyes. I smiled back reassuringly, but knew it lacked impact.
“Are you okay?” I asked. I didn’t know what to say or where to start. I knew she wasn’t okay, but I also didn’t know where she was emotionally. She had spoken with her parents about me and our relationship, and now, now that the hammer had dropped and her worst fears had been realized, had she been sitting here rethinking us and our relationship? Had it crossed her mind that maybe I wasn’t worth what she was putting herself through? Had I been a mistake?
“I...,” she started to say, but stopped. I sensed she just wanted to break down and cry; let it all out, probably again. Seeing how we were in a very public place, however, she was trying desperately to maintain control.
“Do you want to get out of here?” I asked.
She shook her head, ‘No.’
We sat there in silence. I was smart enough to know that I shouldn’t push her; she’d talk when she was damn good and ready, or she just wouldn’t talk. Either way, my job was just to be there.
“It was bad,” she finally managed to say. “They just wouldn’t listen. I’d never seen my father like that. He scared me. He got so angry; I didn’t know what he might be capable of.”
