Eloquent Silence

by Weise, Margaret

  At this stage in the history of Mankind we are sorely in need of a Great Master to come and lead us through the turmoil which humanity is presently flaying against. We are looking for eternal peace but it seems unlikely that we will now find it on this planet that is almost ruined.

  Time is the only thing that will tell, I suppose, who gets the halo and who gets the flick. The immortal soul has plenty of time. Time is the essence the soul deals with eternally.

  20. Nobody Knows

  Nobody knows what it’s like to be me, Reba Johansenn, clouded around and about as I am and crowned in the glory of the Lord while living in a miasma of doubt and suspicion. I am struggling with an insoluble problem not of my own making, but which was thrust upon me from external sources. They, (the originators of this fierce cause for concern), don’t know what I’ve been coping with spasmodically for as far back as I can remember, some seventy odd years, give or take a year or two. Odd being the operative word, I must admit as applied to others beside myself. Not that I’d say that to too many people. They’d think I was just having a word-play but I do not play in any way, shape or form, words or not.

  Maybe I have lost my looks and my body is shapeless now, my hair all messed up and a bit tatty, steely gray with age and hanging listlessly about my shoulders. Maybe I’ve lost the sparkle and the dancing eyes I had back in my teens when I had graduated from an exclusive girl’s boarding school and taken on the world as a measure of my capability. They have settled into black hollows sunken into my cheeks.

  Dancing all night with the cream of the crop back in those far off days was what I did best, glamorous in my evening gowns being courted by the bank johnnies of this little one horse town called Harrow. Well may you say ‘Harrow’ because harrowed is what am these days. Playing netball and basketball in those little short skirts that showed off my powerful muscular thighs and shapely hips was another activity I enjoyed when I was a graduate from the All Hallows Girls School in central Murrimba Heights.

  Those days are gone and now I have to just be who I am, Reba Johansenn, vessel for the voices which are going to save the world. Or this little corner of it, anyway. Don’t quite know when but it will happen. I have been promised that and my hopes are high as I await the coming of the beings who will take over this planet and make it into a world fit for Our Savior to return to. I am the crucible through which this change will be implemented but I am not at liberty to tell you how.

  It’s not as if I don’t try keep up an ordinary way of life, try to cope and fit in and be what the Earth beings consider to be ‘normal.’ I try so hard and I know I can’t possibly get through the day so that no one knows the evil forces that are dwelling within me. I say they are evil, but once they have taken control of humanity, they will no longer be so and harmony will rule the world. I hope. At least, that’s what they promise me.

  They do not tell me their names but they are stalking me, talking to me in my head with their didactic voices. Even as I make general conversation with the person outside my head, the person in front of me assumes they are normal and I am not. That’s their loss, their poor judgment. I know who I am and where I’m going even if they do not. The entities will eventually make their paths clear to them in the course of time.

  The acid-edged voices are not prepared to be angered further than they already are and I have no wish to reach the turning point where they will engulf me with their fierce faces and gnawing jaws. I can hear the rise and fall of their breathing as they wait for my reaction to their latest hugger-muggery. Murmuring and muttering in my head, causing me sensations of fear or superiority, depending on whether I am feeling morbid or fanciful on that particular day.

  That’s why I often lock the doors and windows and then I will be invisible, if not to myself, then to them, even though my life will still be totally incomprehensible to them and to me for that matter. Locked inside my house I can get at nobody and nobody can get at me. I work hard not to rise to the bait they put into my head, but eventually I have to stop and listen even if I don’t obey.

  At least they back off for a while after they have delivered their latest message and I have given in and listened to it. You might think it’s a battle and I would have to agree with that but it’s all in a good cause, eventually. Saving the world is as good a cause as I’ve ever heard of, don’t you agree? Not that I will be doing it alone but I will be a major part of it. Humility is not my strong point, as you may have already guessed.

  The trouble inside my head begins as the direct consequence of the hostile hookup between myself and the beings, the entities from beyond this galaxy, who come from several light years out into space beyond the sun. That’s when I start to hear other voices on the telephone going a mile a minute when I’m talking to someone who may or may not live in this stratosphere. A shiver of much magnitude fills me with such apprehension that I positively throw the phone at the cat, sweet little darling that she is, my Pussa. You should see her jump, but she knows her mummy wouldn’t really hurt her unless it was unavoidable.

  How am I to know where the voices come from since they only arrive fully formed in my head? They do not give out with their names and addresses. “Unearthly Being Number 4711, from Planet Pinochet One Million Light Years to the Left of Earth’s Sun.”

  I do not know the name of the planet beyond the sun, nor do I have a street address, so I’m left feeling disorientated and without a compass except for my moral compass which is pointing me in the direction of saving the world. Saving mankind from itself. I have the power to do this but not as yet the means. The interplanetary beings have the means and the know-how. I am simply the conduit of their plans and will be further informed when the time is ripe.

  It’s not the cat’s fault that I toss things around though, poor little mite, and that I am forced to throw things at her from time to time. I am only trying to alert the entities and show those beings I will not submit to their control over me without a fight. That I am not their puppet. The only one who backs off is the cat as the beings seem to rather enjoy the tumult in my head. It seems as if I puzzle the cat by tossing things around but that’s just an unfortunate side effect.

  That’s always the genesis of it, though. Small voices at first, whispering voices, snide or whining or derisive or even seductive, contradictory at times, not always telling me what to do, at others just being there whispering to each other, one another....whisper, whisper, giggle, grunt. They ignore my presence then they expand in volume and sweep me up whether I want to be swept up or not. Riding high in my head with my feet firmly planted on the ground.

  Or they’re telling me long and maudlin stories about people who are trying to take advantage of me in ways which only the beings can understand because they can see and understand things that I cannot. They tell me pointedly to keep quiet so they can illustrate all the less endearing qualities of these people they are describing who are pretending to care about me. So I surrender to keep the peace and to find out the ways my enemies are trying to overcome me.

  That’s if I am at all settled and haven’t already thrown the phone as far as I possibly can and picked it up once or twice, testing to see what’s going on at the far end. That’s where the beings are and I want to know if they have hung up yet. But they never have so on we go with the same old cycle.

  They make it awfully difficult for me to communicate with other humans as they’re very demanding of my time and attention. Even though I want a peaceful life it’s often stormy and uncertain as I have to interact with them even when I don’t want to. Especially when I don’t want to and am feeling bewildered and isolated. That’s when they really come calling, high-pitched and menacing.

  I wonder what their shape is like, what features they have, what color they are? How different are they? I have impressions of their difference from our race but they are only impressions and not actual photographic evidence. I wonder how long I will have to wait before they show themselves to me?

  Sometimes I hop
e fondly that I won’t have to interact with them, that they will simply go away and leave me be but it never works out quite that way. They come creeping back in spite of the fact that I tell them I’m not interested or available.

  That makes them angry and they screech at me or chatter aimlessly amongst themselves until I finally go to sleep, passing into the bliss of limbo. The noise of their shrill little voices sounds for all the world like a lot of monkeys in a zoo. I can almost feel their clammy hands reaching out to grab me and escort me out of here.

  Those clammy hands are coming through the phone to claim me for their own, drag me into that small space and manage somehow to get me down the telephone line and into outer space, traveling towards their planet. It will be awfully difficult for them, a hard task indeed, as I am a rather large person with big feet so I won’t fit very well into the phone and down the line. But all things are possible to the aliens.

  They come regularly from the spaceship, the voices and the invisible beings who contain them. They hook me up to the mother ship whether I want to or not. I have to exercise a great deal of self control to remain still and receptive in the hope that they will forget their plan and go on their way to whichever planet it is they’re really aiming for. Naturally, at times I fail to do this and then all hell breaks loose as I have described. Have I described it?

  If I am not on the phone but with another person, a human being, I have to look past who I’m conversing with, just look a little behind their head into a sort of middle distance. Unfortunately I can still see how their mouth curls a fraction over their teeth and realize that they’re smiling a querulous smile at me and are puzzled, as if they know I’m not really looking at them at all. Puzzlement sometimes mingled with contempt as if I were a virago of some kind who would burst into curses or mount my broomstick and leave the spot.

  I might be a little wild-haired, my eyes might rove a little but I am totally in control of the situation and will not frighten the wits out of them if at all avoidable. Making definite efforts not to frighten the horses in the street as the old saying goes. But that had something to do with sex, if I remember rightly, and that is not part of my agenda.

  They’re trying to be polite, these visitors to my door and strangers I meet in the street, but I think they would like to bolt into another biosphere or underground into a cave or a catacomb if there are any nearby. I don’t blame them. There have been times when I would like to bolt from myself, indeed. I have to struggle with myself to not submit to this urge to be elsewhere when the beings are sometimes saying polite nothings in my head.

  When I pace about fiercely others look askance at me, knowing I am clearly in a mood but not knowing what to do about it except to turn up their noses in criticism. They recognize my moods without knowing how to cope with them any better than I do. That gives me a small sense of powerfulness. Then I am truly in control when I recognize the fact that they are bewildered by me.

  When I look in the mirror I see a dumpy little roly-poly of a woman who is not me, was never me as I was tall and slender, a glib-tongued little mortal with a half-smirk who has almost black eyes set in those dark hollows I described before. No resemblance to me as I am at all. I am tall and graceful, not dumpy, with a willowy figure, serenely elegant with a dark, sweet voice that is unique to myself. I sail majestically through life, not plod flat-footed around like the creature in the mirror. Mystifying how mirrors can get the facts so wrong.

  After having been a boarder at that exclusive girls’ school where religion was drummed into us morning, noon and night, I have forever remained committed to the cause of worshiping enthusiastically. So I go to church as many Sunday mornings as I can, whenever I can be let out by the beings who see where I go and who comes in and who goes out of my house. I like to go and worship because the Holy Spirit comes to me and fills me up, full to overflowing and that is my emotional lifeline to this planet Earth where I am tied hand and foot. This despite my sometimes desire to join the entities on the Mothership and go to another world that may be preferable to this one.

  Going to church feels wonderful and I come away refreshed, feeling that I am validated. And clear-headed for a time. A new version of me emerges, quite unlike the one many people know. They look at me with their blank, bewildered expressions and say, ‘Hi Reba,’ and ‘How are you, Reba,’ and all the time I know they are feeling I am a danger to them in some way. I do have a good left hook, I’ll admit.

  Unfortunately when I have a sense of peace after church it seldom lasts long until they start slogging it out again. They wear away at me until I feel I am an old woman awash in free-floating fears and I wish for a solitude that I cannot find here on this planet. There are days when I feel I am a walking, talking battleground as I try to sort out their spellbinding conversations, looking to left and right for relief and validation.

  At other times the silence is eloquent as I wait for the pattern to begin again, the old repetition of murmuring and echoing that I had hoped would go away once and for all. Once I have gone into shutdown mode I feel a little safer as I huddle in the darkness waiting for Jesus to appear outside the window.

  Can’t go to church at the moment, though, as much as I would like to. Too busy at home with my assignment, feeling utterly drained. I hope this is not a foretaste of how I will be tested for the balance of my days. The thought simply wears me out. Exhausting and confusing. But I’m having an absorbing and dramatic life, so I shouldn’t complain.

  Oh, more times than I can possibly tell you, the Holy Spirit has filled me with His divine light and has given me a mission to fulfill because I have a special talent to do it. I possess the special ability it takes to carry out this project I’ve been given as He passes me a degree of revelation at the time. A mystic, I consider myself to be, in the divine sense. Mystic mystery woman who has tasted of the divine fruit. That’s me. That is I, Reba the Realist. When the beings finally take over this planet I will hopefully be Reba the Ruler of some important area on the face of the Earth.

  But I must be humble about it, though I’m not really in the least humble if anyone could see inside me. Nothing has ever been said to me to alter my self-esteem which is a Godsend.

  Although sometimes when I am at peace I feel that I am suffering from diminished capabilities and this concerns me. I don’t want to have diminished anything. Self-esteem is central to my soul and I know that in the fullness of time when I have achieved my plan I will be rid of this insufferable need to cloister myself.

  But please don’t ask me to explain my mission to you as nobody else is supposed to know it’s even been put on the table for examination. Mind you, it’s not an easy mission but I’ve been blessed with all the special qualities it takes. I have special knowledge, special talent, special ways that have been shown to me so I can persevere and complete this work for the sake of humanity as a whole. Secret, secret stuff, don’t you know.

  I’ll just stay within my home until the obligation is complete. I have to be obstinate about that when people come and try to get me out of the place. Then, when this is accomplished, they, (the owners of the voices I am referring to, that is), may allow me to go out again, maybe, one day. Hopefully. I long to go out for more than cigarettes and a few groceries. Sometimes I get out and by the time I have driven around for a while, all the entities have been blown out of the car. Then it’s just the cat and me, driving along at a million miles an hour, fast as a space ship even, the wind in our hair and whipping the eyes out of our heads.

  They’re fairly strict, these beings, and may not often approve of my leaving the house. I see my course clearly, though, and I must obey or be mastered. I have a natural inclination towards dignity and problem solving, so I will suffer the condescending tone of people who think I am nutty.

  ‘Fruitcake lady,’ the neighborhood children call me, gawking over the fence at me if I go outdoors, throwing the odd stone or two at the roller door of my garage or the cat if it goes outside.

  If I
speak to other people, at times they, (my voices), reproachfully accuse me of being disloyal to them as they want me for myself, want to possess me fully. Only they can see my course clearly and make me pursue it, which I must do. It’s no use trying to evade them as they are everywhere, ubiquitous, and I must have such utter faith in them that I don’t question their motives.

  But when the Holy Spirit enters into me, eventually the evil forces come as well, sure as I’m born, which is a really strange phenomenon as it can be a discordant time for me. They invade my house and chase the Holy Spirit out and they won’t let me outside except to get cigarettes for myself and food for my beloved cat, which I’ve told you I can only do at the present time. The cat, Whoppie, is my companion for whom I have to fight the evil forces because if they can’t get at the woman then they get at the animal.

  These beings can take my last atom of strength out of me as they pervade my inner sanctum of my soul. But they have chosen me to be their instrument so who am I to wonder why?

  My little cat’s been through hell, poor little mite, so I protect her as best I can by keeping her with me all the time. When we go out I let her sit on my lap as I drive. She likes to feel the wind through the window. She’s really the only thing that keeps me going. All I live for.

  I have family and friends but they can’t understand what I’m on about, only one or two of them, even though they pretend to see the problem and say I need help—medication, counseling. Some tell me I’m not Christian because I won’t respond to them and that fact continues to worry and aggravate them. I think that’s their problem, not mine.

  I am on permanently bad terms with some of them. They think I’m a little on the loony side, obviously, in agreement with the neighbors. I simply can’t remember when anyone cared enough to put their cheek next to mine in greeting or farewell. Maybe they’re afraid of me, that the beings will rub off on them or jump from my eardrum into theirs. Weirdos.