Believe Me

by Patricia Pearson

  “No, not yet. Thanks,” I said, distracted. “Calvin, go talk to him. Don’t just leave him crying in there.”

  My mother looked up alertly, suddenly conscious of the sounds of her grandson. “Have you and Lester had words?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way,” Calvin said, adjusting his cap in the mirror above the sink. “He came home and found a bald man where his father used to be.”

  “Ah,” said my mother, loosely clasping her gloved hands. “Well, it’s not at all surprising that you upset him. Young children can be very frightened by that kind of physical transformation. They don’t yet have a clear distinction between reality and fantasy—between what is possible and impossible. To him, you might be in the process of changing completely and, the next thing, your arms will disappear or what have you.”

  “Oh, please don’t talk to me about arms,” Calvin said, sitting down heavily at the table and holding his head between his hands.

  “Do you remember, Frannie,” my mother asked, “when your father and I were watching that Japanese film, Spirits Gone Away, and you came in with Lester and he was so terribly upset by the little girl’s parents being transformed into pigs?”

  “It was called Spirited Away, Mum,” I said, still listening to Lester’s muffled sobs, which seemed to be calming down a bit.

  “Well, that’s the sort of image that really scares a child,” she continued. “We expect them to be afraid of dinosaurs and monsters, but that’s not it at all. Calvin, you need to go and show him that you’re still the same. Let him feel your head.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Calvin, heading for the bathroom with an air of resignation. My mother gave me a wintry kiss, her cheeks still ice-cold from her walk, and reminded me to come for dinner on the weekend. When the door had closed behind her, I took off my coat and pulled a Kraft Super Deluxe pizza out of the freezer.

  “Aw, come on, Les,” I heard Calvin cajole in the bathroom, “don’t be so sad. I just wanted to look more like Caillou. He’s bald, isn’t he? And nothing else about him changes, does it? He runs around in his little cartoon world being earnest and having adventures, and the plot never develops—”

  “What about Grandpa?” Lester interrupted. “He changed.”

  “What do you mean, little man?” I could hear a flicker of discomfort in Calvin’s voice.

  “He changed, Daddy! All of him changed. Granny says he turned into an angel. And now nobody can see him any more.”

  “Oh, well …” Calvin replied lightly, hoping to dismiss this case in point. “That’s different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s different, Les.” The upset in his voice was obvious. “I’m not going to die tomorrow just because I shaved off my hair today. I’m not leaving you, I won’t suddenly disappear like that and leave you alone with your mum.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know, okay?”

  The air changed. I could feel it, and so could Lester, the way children uncannily sense when it’s time for them to compose themselves and let the grown-up be the sad one. “I didn’t say Grandpa disappeared,” Lester offered, wanting to correct the record so that Calvin would feel reassured. “He didn’t disappear, Daddy. His soul is in my heart.”

  I drew in my breath sharply and leaned back against the fridge. Wondrous child! Where the hell did he get that?

  21

  Here is a list of activities you can enjoy with your five-year-old in Canada during the winter, when a freak thunderstorm that some blame on global warming has neatly erased all the snow.

  Watch TV

  Watch TV

  Watch TV

  Make muffin

  Have a bubble bath

  Color for ten minutes

  Watch TV

  Walk to the neighborhood Starbucks whining constantly about how cold it is, order hot chocolate, suck the whipped-cream topping through a straw

  Watch TV

  22

  Calvin flew back to Cape Breton for a few days to sort things out for Bernice, and Lester responded by growing despondent about the extinction of dinosaurs. Perhaps it was just a coincidence. But we were hanging out in the house, watching TV, and a documentary called Walking with Dinosaurs came on the Discovery Channel.

  In one episode, a computer-generated asteroid came streaking down to Earth just as a young pair of T. rexes were finding their way through the cycad forests of Montana, at which point all hell broke loose.

  The tyrannosaur hatchlings were blown sideways by the force of this wild impact-generated wind, and Lester watched, transfixed, from when the trail of stardust fell ominously through the twilit sky, to when Kenneth Branagh, lately employed as a narrator who horrifies children, explained the extinction of dinosaurs.

  Dinosaurs ended?

  He ran to his room in hysterics. Dinosaurs cannot just have ended; I understood that, as a mother. They were the mainstay of my son’s daily imaginative existence. This was a child who made me sit on the bed and provide nature show voice-overs involving clashes between stegosaurs and raptors as he acted out the primal conflict amidst the hills and valleys of the floral-patterned rayon comforter. For Branagh merely to pronounce them fini, all done, buh-bye, was incomprehensible. What did he mean to suggest? Had all the dinosaurs become angels as well?

  My brain began to hurt. Couldn’t I have had a normal son preoccupied with Hot Wheels? I tried to get around the crisis by pointing out that certain dinosaurs didn’t end, technically, so much as evolve into birds.

  “Hey, Les!” I exclaimed one morning before daycare. “Look what I’ve found in the news! According to new fossil finds in northeastern China, some dinosaurs grew feathers! They changed into birds.”

  Lester raised his eyes to me, wary. I couldn’t be sure if he was feeling suspicious of my tone, or the news. “It’s true, beauty,” I insisted, scanning the article, “paleontologists just found one of them lying splat in some rock sediment surrounded by down, fluff and feathers. Do you see what I’m saying? They didn’t go extinct, this article says, they just changed into birds.”

  I leaned over and ruffled his dark hair. “And this is interesting: the group of dinosaurs that sprouted feathers is the theropod. Like what, Lester, what’s one of the meat-eating dinosaurs?”

  “Velociraptor,” he offered alertly, “T. rex.”

  “So, there you go,” I told him happily. “They didn’t go extinct, they just changed.”

  Calvin laughed, when I explained what I’d learned when we spoke on the phone that night, caught in small daily triumphs of insight. “You’re joking,” he said. “Are they saying that T. rex evolved into a budgie? That’s like me evolving into a spoon.”

  Mmm. But I suppose that’s the thing about evolution. The process involves a time scale that humans cannot get their heads around. It’s really more about our inability to conceive of these transformations than about what is plausible. For, given enough time, lots and lots and lots and lots of time, curmudgeons like Calvin could, theoretically, eventually evolve into something resembling a teaspoon.

  Or maybe that wasn’t the thing about evolution. Lester and I leafed through a piece in the National Geographic about flying pterosaurs who were as big as F-18 fighter jets—can you imagine?—soaring through the prehistoric mists for 125 million years. Generation after generation after generation, catching fish and mating and catching fish and mating and accumulating a knowledge base of nothing at all. And the only conceivable point of this that I can conceive of is that, eventually, a spark of intelligence caught fire somewhere on the planet and moved things along. For, after intelligence evolved, so then did sociability, and love, and playfulness and artistry and consciousness and reverence.

  We won’t die so much as change. Everything connects. Life goes on. Theropods become pigeons and adapt to a brave new world of bread crumbs and parkettes, and humans lead the charge—along with elephants and dolphins and chimps—of further evolution toward a consciousness of God.

&n
bsp; “Lo,” I proclaimed to Calvin, after he got home from his frustrating visit to New Waterford, where his mother refused to entertain Dr. Pereira’s prognosis. “We have a physical body and a spiritual body, so saith the Bible. And just because one evolveth into the other, which is invisible—that maketh it no less plausible than prehistoric fish evolving into airplane-size reptiles that fly. What sayeth you?”

  “Cut it out,” said Calvin, swinging open the door of the fridge. “Did you drink all my beer while I was gone?”

  “Verily. Indeed it is so.”

  23

  In the illustrious tradition of spiritual autobiography, be it memoir by C. S. Lewis or the rapturous testimony of Julian of Norwich, the seeker invariably has a mentor, to whom he or she addresses questions of faith as the revelations unfold. “Father, what is meant by unceasing prayer?” Or “Reverend Mother, how can I banish sin when I am such a wretch?”

  I needed someone to whom I could pass along questions from Lester, such as, “When I’m an angel, will I still have my eyeballs?” But I had my own yearning for answers now, too, and I felt it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have a mentor. But Andrew at Sunday school just wasn’t cutting it for me. I couldn’t respect a spiritual guide who clearly needed to go on Paxil. Though he was a wonderful ambulatory book of quotations, Avery was too skeptical. My best friend, Marina, who lived in New York, told me that she did believe in God, but she also felt certain that we were merely God’s Sea Monkeys, and that he’d lost interest in us and forgotten where he’d put our packet of food. “How else do you explain that angels were popping up everywhere two thousand years ago, talking to shepherds and Mary and Abraham, and yet nobody’s heard from them since?” she wanted to know. A mentor wasn’t supposed to be asking me the questions.

  My mother was irredeemably secular, my father typically vague, and no one else of their age and wisdom seemed suitable. How had I stumbled so easily upon Father McPhee in New Waterford, I marveled now.

  For the time being, the only person I could really talk to about spiritual matters in Toronto was my cousin Kate, whom I joined for Ashtanga yoga every Thursday at noon.

  Kate was a lawyer. A fiercely feminist lawyer who brought off brilliant resolutions for women in divorce cases, whom Kate deemed poorly treated by oafs and control freaks. She was also a devoted Quaker, which appealed to her practical activist side, although it had taken her years of questing about to settle on a suitable framework for her beliefs. In one memorable instance, dating back to the mid-1990s, Kate embroiled me in a weekend workshop with a shaman from suburban Toronto named Larry. At the time that she instigated this scheme, we were in her New York apartment on Washington Square, while I studied at Columbia and she took her master’s in law at NYU. She was reading my Tarot cards, and puzzling out what it meant that I had received the Phoenician, upside down.

  “Look, Kate,” I pointed out, “you can figure out what the card means, but then you do have to concede that what you are doing is probably just imaginary.”

  She refused to concede any such thing, and an argument ensued in which Kate accused me of being “spiritually frigid,” and this led, in turn, to my lying flat on my back, blindfolded, in a rec room in Mississauga the following summer.

  “Start at the beginning,” Kate had said, explaining to me why we had to go visit Larry. “With the first practices, the first principles. Begin with the universal beginning of religious quest, the shaman’s journey.”

  “The what?” I asked.

  “Shamanism, Frannie,” she repeated, drawing out the syllables. “You know, Wade Davis? Carlos Castaneda? Tribal spirit work?”

  “Give me another clue,” I suggested.

  “Shamanism is a spiritual practice which for thousands of years has been central to tribal communities. The word ‘shaman’ actually comes from Siberia,” she added, pedantically, “but the role of an elder who can bring his people into contact with the spirit world is common from the Amazon to China.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” I said. “So who’s your shaman? That psychic you told me about who wrote Hello from Heaven?”

  “No, actually, in a way it would be the anthropologist Michael Harner. He studied in Peru, where shamans are able to guide people into trance states by using hallucinogens and a specific drumbeat. There’s something about the brainwave frequency that the drumming tunes people into. It allows them to perceive a different reality. He’s measured it in a lab. And it turns out that it’s the same frequency in totally different parts of the world, like in the Amazon and in certain African tribes and the Inuit. Harner calls shamanism the basic precedent of all religions.”

  “So, if I drop acid and then listen to a drum solo I’ll come face to face with God? I could have told you that.”

  “No,” she said, raising her brow at me, “it has to be guided. Journeying isn’t child’s play.”

  24

  Larry lived in a split-level on Sunny Day Crescent, and when we arrived a bit early for our day-long workshop that summer, we found him outside mowing his lawn.

  “Hi, Larry!” Kate sing-songed out the window of her Honda.

  He paused, squinting in the sunlight, and then gave her a lopsided grin. Larry was one of those men with very slim legs and tiny bums squeezed into jeans, whose look I tend to associate with Led Zeppelin concerts. Maybe it was also the mullet. He ambled toward us, wiping his hands on his shirt.

  “Hey, man,” Larry said, “good to see you, Kate.”

  We all shook hands and Larry politely refrained from completing his mowing, leaving the lawn shorn in zigzag strips, and led us through his garage, into a kitchen festooned with bongs. Nowadays, Larry noted, as he studiously measured out two spoonfuls of coffee, shamans such as himself were obliged to skip hallucinogens. But otherwise, the method remained the same. The shaman—who used to be all naked and painted, but Larry preferred to wear an oversized monk’s robe—calls in the spirits through whistles, rattles and drumming, with participants arranged in a sacred circle to reinforce the energy field. Then each person “journeys” in “non-ordinary reality” until the shaman calls them back.

  Kate and I sipped coffee from big white mugs at Larry’s kitchen table while he went upstairs to grab his monk’s robe and the other workshop participants trickled in. In strolled a couple of friends from Larry’s day job at Sam the Record Man, followed by a spry woman of seventy or so who wore yoga attire, then a ponytailed fellow who looked about fifty and brought his own coffee cup, which dangled from his neck on a string. Finally, Larry’s girlfriend, Tina, who was just about as thin as he was and wore similarly skintight jeans. After Larry reappeared, rubbing his hands together and saying “Hey, man” and “Thanks for coming,” we all filed downstairs into the wood-paneled, shag-rugged rec room and milled about uncertainly until we sorted ourselves out in a cross-legged circle.

  Larry assumed command of the room. Gazing into the center of the circle as if drawing strength from his rug, he solemnly instructed us to journey into the spirit world and attempt to locate our Power Animal. If we wished, we could ask the Animal a question. Native Americans, he explained, used to ask the spirits very specific questions, such as how to locate the bison herd, or where did So-and-So go in the canoe. I looked over at Kate, wondering if she also found that intriguing, that our ancestors just sought information—not the Meaning of Life, which they understood perfectly, but answers to the irksome daily questions that we solve by flipping on the Weather Channel or ringing people up on the phone. Kate had her eyes closed, however. I guessed she was preparing for the trip.

  Larry knee-swished in his monk’s robe over to his drum, and gestured to his girlfriend to pick up her rattle so that they could play the special beat that would enable us to journey into the spirit world. I began to feel nervous. I figured I would ask whatever happened to my granny. She had died in her sleep after a fine long life, but then what? On the other hand, perhaps “then what?” was too broad a query for shamanic journeying? But I couldn’t think of
anything else I wanted to know. As I lay down and waited, I got to wondering if the Power Animals in Non-Ordinary Reality were better at finding canoes or at providing rudiments of meaning to our lives. Maybe they felt relieved that nobody was bugging them any more about where they put their skinning knives or whether it would rain.

  The drum began to beat: loud, insistent and almost dizzying—the sonic equivalent of a disco strobe. Larry said we had to imagine diving into a tree stump or a pond or something that would lead to “the lower world.” After a stretch of time banging my head into solid earth, I finally succeeded in worming down through a cave, and then suddenly found myself in a meadow. The first power animal—or figment of my imagination—to come along was a wolf. He was snarling and yellow-eyed, crouched at the edge of the meadow. I began to chase after him, and he loped into dense undergrowth. Hacking and swatting my way through the bushes in frenzied pursuit, I ran across a chipmunk, which gave me pause. Oh, hello, Thing I Have Imagined in Larry’s Basement. Should I ask you about life after death?

  I said to the chipmunk, “Where is my granny?” and it led me a merry chase, up and down trees, skittering along branches, faster and faster until my pulse raced. Then the chipmunk revealed a triptych of images: boiling, swirling clouds with Granny’s distorted face in them; a cottage in a poplar grove that evoked a Russian fairy tale; her gravesite in the sweet green light of summer. Which meant what?

  Larry called us back by slowing his drum beat. Sitting up, we stretched our legs, rolled our necks, reclaimed notebooks, glasses, a ballcap.

  “So, okay,” Larry said. “This would be the time where shamans returned from their journey, and grabbed their charcoal stick or a cup of ochre or whatever they had available, and painted what they’d seen on a sacred rock site. Right? That’s the spirit of this, but my house is a rental so I can’t really have people marking up the walls down here. I hope that’s understandable. So we’re just going to go around the circle and see what you all have to report.”