Sacha—The Way Back

by Stan I. S. Law

She spoke French. They all did though some of them found their way here from different parts of Canada. Some even came from the States, the Caribbean, and Middle East. For all of them, a smattering of French was good for business.

  “Why?” he asked. He was so taken aback that he didn’t even attempt to probe her mind.

  “It’s my birthday,” she replied, her saucy tone accompanied by a broad smile.

  There was something very familiar in that smile. Sacha couldn’t put his finger on it but he felt that they’d met before.

  “And just why should I believe you?” He played for time.

  “Can’t you tell? I am not wearing any makeup!” She wasn’t insulted by his question; rather surprised at his lack of powers of observation.

  There was that smile again. She was definitely a lady of pleasure. Not yet spoiled, not depraved. But she was a lady of pleasure. Sacha peeked into her mind. He found innocence mixed with curiosity. Not a combination one expects from a prostitute. Sacha decided to trust his instincts.

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “Anywhere will do. But...” she scanned Sacha from head to toe, “you don’t belong here,” she said knowledgeably. “Let’s buy a bottle of wine and go to my place.”

  Had I been wrong about her? He gazed into her eyes but all he saw was an expectancy of pleasure. Not quite knowing why––he agreed. They stopped at a couple of stores where Sacha made his purchases. She waited outside. Les girls of St-Laurent did not like to advertise their presence in establishments flooded with light.

  A half-hour later, they climbed a steep stair to her small third floor Plateau apartment. She pointed Sacha towards her sofa and made for the bathroom.

  “Make yourself comfortable, while I freshen up.”

  She didn’t need any freshening up. She had all the vitality, the irresistibility of youth, which is seldom seen even outside the confines of the strip of St-Laurent. No matter. On the inside she must have been more mature than she appeared to be on the outside.

  Sacha took the opportunity to uncork the bottle, unwrap the cake he bought for her, and installed eight candles in a little circle. He looked around for matches. He couldn’t find any. Could it be that the girl didn’t smoke?

  “Where do you keep matches?” he asked.

  “You are not going to smoke on my birthday, are you?” she sounded hurt.

  “No. Where are they?”

  She told him. Before she came out of the bathroom he’d lit all the candles, poured out two glasses of wine and, as she’d entered the room, he sang in his best baritone the first line of “Happy Birthday.” The last thing he expected was to see tears in her eyes. She stood at the door to her tiny living space looking completely vulnerable.

  Sacha fought hard not to peek into her mind again. He used his ability to help people, not spy on them. Instead he walked up to her and took her in his arms. She looked as though she needed a hug. The moment he embraced her, she collapsed against his body. He picked her up, as gently as he could, and carried her to the sofa. Her head rested against his chest, the rest of her body hang limp over his arms.

  And then it hit him.

  He’d carried a girl like that once before. She too had been hanging limp, as though lifeless, as he carried her towards the lamppost. Her name was... her name was Maxine. Sacha felt a shiver passing up his spine. Hair stood up on his neck.

  Am I given another chance?

  “What happened?” She looked up at him like a baby looking for comfort.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  “Deborah. What happened?”

  Deborah. Not Maxine. Oh, I’m being stupid. That was another life.

  “You fainted...” he replied.

  “I know I fainted. What happened?”

  Sacha remembered Maxine’s dying whisper word for word: Was it good for you, luv?

  Only then did he realize that he was still holding her in his arms. He put her on the sofa and sat next to her. There was no other furniture except for a small table and two wicker chairs by the window. It all looked simple, clean and proper. Not really, “good for business,” he thought.

  And then her eyes fell on the wine bottle, the glasses but mostly on the eight candles burning brightly in the middle of her birthday cake. It all came back to her in a single flash.

  “You’re not a John, are you?” she asked scrutinizing his face.

  Sacha had spent many a night on the St-Laurent. He knew what a John was. He shook his head.

  “I knew it! I knew it!”

  Deborah had recovered completely. The very young can do that. She shot up from the sofa, clapped her hands and did a little exotic dance that looked like a cross between an Irish jig and a whirl he’d once seen the dervishes perform in India.

  “I knew it... I knew it!” she sang again. “I knew I would have a real birthday, and I will!” The next moment she stopped. She looked at Sacha again and asked, this time shyly. “May I ask what your name is?”

  He told her.

  “You are very kind, Sacha. I think I am falling in love with you,” she actually blushed. “You don’t mind do you?” There was that innocence again.

  Deborah had been walking the streets since a little after her fourteenth birthday. She’d been sent out by her foster mother. She didn’t mind. It was better than watching her foster father drinking around the clock. Going to school was no fun either. The other kids gave her a rough time just for living in a foster home. There were seven of them, the children that is. The children were her foster parents’ only income. A small stipend, per child, from the government. That, and whatever Deborah brought in from the street.

  At first she’d brought all her money home, and had given it to her foster mother. This went on for a little over a year. Then the foster father tried to beat the money out of her to buy himself more booze. That was when she’d left. She didn’t pack her things. She didn’t have any. She just left. She’s been “on the street” ever since.

  Most of this Sacha learned from her as they sipped the light Chablis and munched on the birthday cake. Some of the story he got by scanning her mind. Like the part about the beatings by the foster father. She hadn’t told him that. Was she that proud, he wondered?

  “Why did you make me tell you all that?” she asked finally. “I’ve never spoken about my past to anybody.” She sounded surprised.

  “What happened to your parents?”

  “They both died in an auto accident the day after we came over from England.”

  So that was her accent! It was already Canadian but there were those quaint British overtones.

  “And you were left with nothing?”

  “The baggage was lost in transport. My fosters tried to recover it but failed. I was lucky they took me in.”

  Those were her actual words. After her twelve months with the depraved, spurious pseudo-parents, she considered herself lucky. Her love of life must have been incredible. Still was.

  For a while they sat in silence. Later Sacha had learned that she now considered herself an expert. In her profession that is. Would she stay in it, he asked?

  “I try not to look too far ahead. If I have enough to eat and keep this flat, I’m content. I don’t invite Johns here. I share a pad with my girlfriend for that.”

  No wonder she considered herself an expert. She’d been a prostitute in her previous life. Not that she knew that, of course. Evidently she couldn’t break out of the cycle. Sacha knew that Maxine had died in his arms. There, he’d been too late. He would not make the same mistake again. He would not let her contract an incurable disease and die, as Maxine had died. On the street. Or worse. When you don’t break out of your cycle, it’s always worse the next time. The extra difficulties are supposed to help you. Often they do. They act as a stimulus.

  Sacha was amazed at her inner light, still glowing with the innocence of a child. He’d seen such light in no one with the possible exception of John Norman, towards the end. Not the last time he saw
him, but the time before. But that was different. Light has brightness that you might almost measure in lumens, but it also has colour and tone. There is a joyful light. There is no sad light but there is light less joyful. After that, the light continues to dim so much that its qualities become indiscernible.

  Light and love are almost synonymous. There are degrees of both, at least in the way we perceive them. Love is one, but there are degrees how deeply it can manifest itself. The same goes for light. People have long discovered that white light incorporates all other colours. There are also pure colours and some that are left with a desire for purification. Sacha was delighted by what Deborah had to offer. She radiated more joy than people with fat bank accounts. That’s assuming people with fat bank accounts were joyful. Sacha hadn’t met any. They seemed to manage on their own.

  “Would you like to make love?” she asked very quietly. When Sacha didn’t answer she added: “I’m eighteen now. You don’t have to worry.”

  For some reason Sacha thought he detected a plea in her voice. The idea never crossed his mind. Judging by her aura her body was obviously not harboring any disease. The next instant he was ashamed that he thought of her in those terms. In terms of an object that is to be examined before purchase.

  “It is your birthday, Deborah. We shall do whatever you want to,” he heard himself say.

  For the first time in his life Sacha found himself over his depth. He bandied arguments with professors at Oxford and Sorbonne, he compared visions of reality with men who had dedicated their lives to the subject, yet here and now he was lost. He had no choice but to let her take the helm.

  “I’ve never made love before...” she whispered.

  For crying out loud! She was speaking the truth. In her heart she was a true, unspoiled, uncontaminated virgin. She was a child in need of love. Make love to her meant love me. You can love every part of me. Including my body.

  Sacha found making love to her, the actual physical contact, the nearest thing to leaving his body. An OBE, an out of body experience, they called it. Only… he was one hundred percent aware of his body. His emotions, his senses rose and took both, Deborah and himself to a different plane. A plane he’d never experienced before. He rejoiced in his new discovery. He came here as a teacher and he ended up learning. So this was sex... This was what so many searched for under the red lights of St-Laurent. They searched, paid, and left wanting, their hunger unquenched.

  Yet, he had found it.

  He held her body as gently as father would hold his daughter, as passionately as a lover would embrace his dearest mistress. His consciousness was making random leaps from one facet of her personality to another. At one particular instant he became so engrossed in her being that he in turn swept her emotions to the Home Planet. It all happened outside the normal frame of time. They soared together, they hovered on the fringes of the Far Country, and they came back united as though a single mind bound with a single emotion. It lasted only for a briefest moment but it was intensely real.

  “What was that... that...” she asked, awe in her eyes shining with pleasure.

  “That was the real you,” he answered.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like that. She’d needed warmth. Even if it was artificial, fractional, insincere. Like so many confused souls pacing rue St-Laurent in the early hours of yet another forgettable day, she wanted to lose herself. She found herself at the momentary threshold of Nirvana, in a fragmentary instant torn out of the fabric of time, in which to cease being, in which to forget the reality she refused to accept. She offered her own self in exchange. She was prepared to try her best to give Sacha pleasure. All for a little warmth. She tried giving love the only way she knew how. Instead she’d met her own self.

  “You are the perceiver and the perceived. You are your attention,” he told her later. “Wherever your attention is, you are there. If you think yourself in hell, then that’s where you are. When you think yourself in heaven, then all you must do is imagine it and believe.”

  Deborah’s perceptions were as innocent as those of a newborn baby. All things were possible for her. The religious, the pious, the saintly, would call her a sinner. A Jezebel. A harlot. She was none of these. She would have no idea what they were talking about.

  Nor would Sacha.

  Chapter 17

  Once More LA

  There is one way to break the habit, and that is to remove its cause.

  Sacha did not return to his B&B for three days. He stayed with Deborah. During the day they went for walks, ate at local cafes, visited a few art galleries. They talked and talked until Sacha felt that he knew her the way he knew himself. He purposely did not venture into her subconscious because it was important to him that Deborah uncovers the darkest corners of her mind herself. Sometimes he prodded, but only with a word or two. After the three days Deborah sounded as though her past was no longer a mysterious chasm to be afraid of, but a fragment of her existence which no longer had anything to do with her. In a way, she was starting anew. Only neither of them had any idea where that new way would take her.

  At night Sacha walked the streets alone, while Deborah remained at her apartment. He suggested this course of action and she agreed without a word. She seemed to have developed instant trust in Sacha’s word. Whatever he said was law. Contrary to other teenagers her age, she didn’t need to reassert her ego by negating whatever the adults said. She went through two, almost three years of making all her own decisions. To have someone to make them for her was like a sort of holiday.

  But it didn’t last. It couldn’t have.

  As for Sacha, there had been two more near escapes from the Vice Squad and one incident with a pimp. The latter was a particularly brutal man. Sacha had been forced once again to use his skills of becoming invisible, thanks to which, rather than retreating, he continued to examine the man’s mind. There is a strange light hovering around a human form when he or she is about to vacate the body. Sacha had seen it before. The pimp displayed this particular, if dull, vaguely violet luminosity. Sacha had gently insinuated his thought patterns into the man’s subconscious and showed him a different perception of what he was doing. He made him aware of possible consequences of… pimping. He did so on the man’s own terms, from the man’s own point of view. An ignorant witness might have thought that Sacha went too far. The man attempted to cross the street before he managed to recover from the shock of a higher perception invading his consciousness. Still in a daze, he was hit by a speeding car. Sacha, there and then, raised him gently to the Home Planet. It would have taken the ex-pimp hundreds of years to be able to perceive the glorious reality on his own. He wouldn’t know how to keep it. But at least the poor man would not start in the abysmal depth, which are known to ensnare some that venture into this reality unprepared.

  Towards the end of that week, sipping cup after cup of coffee in her little flat, Deborah grew discontented. Sacha had been expecting as much. He’d sensed the wind of change. It had to happen, sooner or later. As for himself, no matter how little sleep he needed, he couldn’t continue in his present mode for much longer either. They’ve reached their first crossroads.

  “I feel like a kept woman,” she said.

  Sacha looked at her in disbelief. Each time he thought he’d fathomed her psyche she came up with new surprises. But he refused to argue. He knew how she felt.

  “Can’t you think of it as a holiday?”

  “I did. Until now. I’ve never had a holiday that long,” she replied with a straight face.

  “But aren’t I staying in your place... for free? Isn’t that enough?” he asked. It was worth a try.

  “It would be if you didn’t do it just for me.”

  There was no doubt in her voice. No room for maneuvering. This eighteen-year-old refused to be a kept woman. She was too honest. She had to pay her own way. Sacha thought that they didn’t make them like her any more. Not even in the East End of London.

  He needed time. “Can you give me till to
morrow?”

  “Of course.” But her facial expression said, “and not a minute longer.”

  The next moment her eyes misted. Sacha, though implicitly embarrassed, succumbed to his own weakness. After all, he was very young himself. In spite of his own avowed principles, he peeked into her mind. Almost immediately he regretted having done so. He found pain where so recently there was only pleasure. Her heart cried out in silent emotive plea: God please don’t make me give him up. Please God... please...

  And after that he sensed mostly sorrow. Sorrow and a little fear.

  The next day he took Deborah to the passport office. She resisted under the pretext that she had no intention of going anywhere.

  “I can’t afford it, Sacha. And you know how I feel about taking alms.”

  “I need a secretary,” he lied.

  “I am not a secretary,” she replied.

  “A companion?”

  “They are a dime a dozen.” Then she muttered under her breath, “I’ll introduce you to some of my friends...”

  Sacha pretended he didn’t hear that.

  “I’ll marry you,” he said.

  “I’m not the marrying...” She leaned against the wall. “What did you say?”

  “I said I’ll marry you. If you will have me, of course. I have a little money put aside and we could afford to live together for a while. Then I would make some more money and...” Deborah knew nothing about Sacha other than that he was a man who did her kindness. Who didn’t insist on quid pro quo.

  “You would marry me? Don’t you know what I am?”

  “I know who you are. And well, you don’t know much about me either.”

  “No Sacha. I most certainly will not marry you. I love you too much to lose you.” Her mind was made up. “You were the first man, the first human being, who treated me as a person. I am not going to lose you. Can’t we be friends?”

  Deborah had stories to tell about marriages that would make Sacha’s mop turn gray. She regarded marriages as legalized institutions for mutual abuse. Sacha learned later that her own parents were none too skillful at creating marital bliss. Perhaps that was why she believed herself to have been lucky to have been given a bed to sleep on at the foster home. Even if just for a while. The ridiculous thing was that she’d never given any indication that she thought life dealt her a raw deal.