Walking Through Walls

by Philip Smith

“But what about the storm? Do you think you should drive in this rain?”

  “It’ll be over within fifteen minutes.”

  Looking outside my window at the dense gray air, I couldn’t imagine this storm ending before midnight. By the time I finally pulled myself out of bed, the sky had cleared as if the storm had never happened.

  For years afterward, I completely forgot about my nerve-gas paralysis—until I came across a 2000 report titled “The Concept of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Chemical and Biological Weapons, Use in Warfare, Impact on Society and Environment,” given at the Beijing Seminar on Arms Control. It confirmed that my father was correct about the dumping of nerve gas off the coast of Florida. The report stated: “During the 1950s, the U.S. conducted an ambitious nerve-gas program, manufacturing what would eventually total 400,000 M-55 rockets, each of which was capable of delivering a 5-kg payload of sarin. Many of those rockets had manufacturing defaults, their propellant breaking down in a manner that could lead to auto ignition. For this reason, in 1967 and 1968, 51,180 nerve-gas rockets were dropped 240 km off the coast of New York State in depths of from 1,950 to 2,190 meters, and off the coast of Florida.”

  A few days after I read this document, The New York Times reported on October 9, 2002, that “the Defense Department says it used chemical warfare and live biological agents during cold-war-era military exercises on American soil…according to previously secret documents cleared for release to Congress on Wednesday…The reports, which detail tests conducted from 1962 to 1971, reveal for the first time that the chemical warfare agents were used during exercises on American soil…and that a mild biological agent was used in Florida…Some milder substances did escape into the atmosphere…in an area of Florida…” Milder substances? Apparently my father was able to psychically access military secrets and activities almost thirty-five years earlier than The New York Times.

  About a week after Pop neutralized the nerve gas in my body, I woke up in the middle of the night, hearing muffled voices. In my stupor, I thought I was at a séance and one of the spirits was trying to get through but had a bad connection. On several occasions I had actually seen this happen, where the guest entity (the dead person) could not quite align his or her vibrations with the host, and the message came out garbled, like a tape recorder playing something backward. This particular night, I wasn’t fully awake and couldn’t quite figure out where these voices were coming from. I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming or not.

  As a child with a hyperactive imagination, I frequently woke up in the middle of the night because of Technicolor nightmares with full Dolby sound. If only I had written them down, I could have sold them all as scripts for science-fiction B films and become the king of drive-in movies. At night I often heard possums walking on our roof. I thought these rapid little footsteps were aliens about to break into the house and kidnap me. Or I feared that there were unspeakable monsters gathering in my closet waiting to attack me. I would wake up terrified and cry for my father to come sleep with me, which he did. After some time, I would fall back asleep, feeling protected. Sleep was not my favorite activity as a child.

  On good nights I dreamed repeatedly of flying enormous distances with great velocity. I not only flew around Miami proper but around the earth’s upper atmosphere. Whenever I wanted to lift off, I just had to give a little jump, and I was quickly airborne. I did not have a cape like a superhero, just my own natural jet propulsion.

  Even more disturbing than these nightmares was when I occasionally woke up to find myself actually floating about five feet above my bed. I would turn my head and look down, as if I were peering over a railing, and see my bed below me. During these events, the room was always illuminated with a kind of pulsing pinkish light with gold sparkles. Sometimes my body would rotate slowly as if on a gurney. Nothing much happened; I just hovered in midair for a few minutes and then would slowly descend until I landed softly back in my bed. It would take me another ten or fifteen minutes to relax and go back to sleep. I never told anyone about these occurrences, as I simply assumed that everyone woke up in the middle of the night floating five feet above his bed.

  Many years later my father and I attended a lecture on astral travel. I learned that these experiences are known as out-of-body experiences. Among my father’s friends, they were reverently referred to as OOBEs (pronounced “oh-bees”) and were considered quite an accomplishment. Not everyone was able to have an OOBE. For some reason, I assumed they were pronounced oooh-bees, as in, “Oh boy, did I have a big oooh-bee last night” or “I’m exhausted because I was out all last night on my oooh-bee.” Like participants at an AA meeting, his friends were always eager to share a report of an OOBE, especially if they could claim to have traveled to a distant planet or visited dead relatives who were now living and working on the other side. My father often spoke about leaving his body at night to travel to different dimensions where he would learn new healing methods. He was always met in his journey by knowledgeable spirit guides who took him to laboratories as well as other places of advanced healing. My father truly went to night school, only it wasn’t on this planet.

  That night in bed, I listened intently to the hushed voices, trying to make out what was being said. It sounded like code spoken in staccato tones, intense with emotion. As I became fully awake, I realized that the sounds were coming from my parents’ room. They were having a discussion in the middle of the night. Something was wrong.

  The truth is that something had been very wrong for the past year. Weeks went by when my mother moved into the living room and slept on the couch. She smoked and watched TV, and retreated to her own world, just as my father retreated to his. This was her form of protest, a sit-in against her crumbling marriage. Looking back, she badly needed someone to talk to about her pain and her loss of the joyful marriage that was once her dream come true. She was alone with her grief. No one was there to help her through this catastrophic crisis. Her SOS went unnoticed by the only two available witnesses: my father and me.

  Glittering nights in Havana casinos, glamorous clients, and a stable, happy home—all the touchstones of her life—had vanished. There was nothing there to replace it. Bleak House had arrived. I was too young to know what questions to ask, to know how to listen, or to know how to even raise the topic, except anonymously with Sophie Busch. My father was overwhelmed by his new abilities and failed to notice that in the process, my mother and I had been displaced. It appeared that at this point Pop was so busy with his new life that he didn’t care what happened to any of us. Mom’s courage and her determination not to appear weak or needy created a facade of stubbornness. In this standoff, she was not going to be the first person to raise the white flag. Unlike my father, she did not have a flying saucer parked outside waiting to whisk her away to a new life.

  My parents were overwhelmed by their circumstances—one lost in thought, the other lost in space—and at times their mutual disinterest in each other could make me invisible. As a result, I had an unusual amount of independence. At any time of day or night I would jump on my bike and explore hidden areas of Miami, including vacant lots filled with poisonous plants, coral rock mansions, and abandoned shacks. Sometimes I would collect fallen mangoes and avocados that served as my lunch. If it was getting dark and approaching dinnertime, I would ride through the poorer neighborhoods and collect discarded soda bottles for the two-cent deposit. Eventually I filled my basket with enough bottles to buy a small box of Quickin’ Chicken for dinner. During these long, thoughtful rides I always hoped that by the time I returned home, my parents would have finally sorted it all out.

  One morning, to my great surprise, my father offered to drive me to school. I hadn’t seen much of him for weeks because of his new schedule of working and running off to séances, yoga classes, and metaphysical lectures. For most of the trip, we rode in silence. Neither of us had really spoken to the other in a while, and we barely knew what to say. Finally I said, “You and Mom have to get a divorce. I can’t take i
t anymore.” He nodded his head. The following day he moved into the guesthouse next door, and my mother filed papers. Determined to make a clean start, she turned everything over to my father: the house, her jewelry, her car, her money. Everything except me.

  At the time, divorce was really not that common. There was still the stigma of a “broken home” that hovered over my few friends at school whose parents had divorced. I thought it was cool and modern to have divorced parents and wore it like a badge of honor. However, society, along with banks and other financial institutions, did not look kindly on a forty-four-year-old woman with no income, no savings, no job—no nothing except a child to support. This was a time when banks did not issue credit cards to women directly in their name but rather as “Mrs. Robert S. Montgomery” or “Mrs. Lew Smith.” Single women simply did not have credit cards.

  Unfortunately, Mom had not really thought this thing through. The vivacious spontaneity that once made her the life of the party had backfired and resulted in disastrous decision making. Her great strength of uncompromising character now made her life difficult. Suddenly we had no money. There was no child support and no alimony. I don’t know how my father imagined we were supposed to eat, but he rarely focused on such matters even during good times. Mom quickly found a job as a bookkeeper at the Bahama Steak House, where drugstore blondes sat at the bar on the off chance that they might be saved, at least for the evening, by some desperate stranger. Along with her miserly paycheck, Mom brought home the low-class perfume of cheap meat, overused cooking oil, and stale liquor on her clothes. Even the powerful aroma of night-blooming jasmine could not erase the bad smell of the Bahama Steak House.

  My rare attempts at helpful advice were insensitive and painful. One night during dinner, I told my mother that she should go out and meet somebody. She dropped her head and cried silently. I don’t know if the tears were for the lost love of my father or the difficult reality of her situation. I wish I could have understood better what she was going through. My mother did everything she could to hold herself and our house together. It was a tremendous burden, and I was not of much help. She had given everything to a marriage that left her with nothing.

  In a futile effort to create the illusion of stability, I would occasionally cook a surprise meal. As the young chef of the house, I whipped up a brilliant medley of canned Green Giant vegetables mixed with freshly cooked soybeans, soy sauce, and seaweed. It was nothing short of depressing. Mom was stunned and paralyzed by her state of penniless freedom and suffered quietly. Meanwhile, Pop continued to live next door, bringing home new girlfriends and cohorts for a little late-night chanting.

  I would commute between the two houses, pretending that my parents were still one unit just separated by a few yards of grass. After school or after dinner, I would usually walk next door to visit with my father. For some reason, I volunteered to do his laundry and would sneak pillowcases stuffed with his dirty clothes around the back of the house and into the laundry room. If my mother had ever found out, I would have been labeled a traitor and sent to the isolation ward.

  Trained by my father that the spirits were always watching and ready to help, I waited for the smiling Hindu deity to magically appear and transport us on a magic carpet ride away from all of this sadness. With the wave of a wand, presto change-o, we would all be one happy family again. All the pain and grief would suddenly vanish. But no spaceship landed to take us to a distant planet where money grew on trees and all the little children skipped with happiness, surrounded by rainbows of divine light.

  seven

  Psychic Shopping

  I had no idea whose car I was in. Someone was driving me home from a party that had occurred two or three days earlier in the Grove. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t have my car or how I had gotten to the party or how I had ended up in this guy’s apartment or what happened over the past few days. As he drove, he kept calling me Michael. I didn’t bother to correct him. He was rattling on about the police and how his ex-girlfriend became a stripper so that she could earn some money to go to Jamaica and then she married a guy she met at the gas station and moved to Arizona but that didn’t work out so he thought maybe they should get together again but he thinks she had a baby with the other guy but wasn’t sure so he tried to call her but someone else answered and hung up on him so now he’s thinking of driving out to Arizona but wasn’t sure of her address or if he could find her so maybe he would drive to L.A. and try to get a job but before he goes he would have to sell his furniture but that would take too much time and maybe he should just leave it but then he thought that maybe his current girlfriend would rent the apartment from him but if he left to go to Arizona maybe she would meet someone else and besides he met this guy that he really likes and now they’re into free love but he really digs this girl but this guy is like someone different and it’s different with a guy but when his girlfriend lost her dog then he—

  “Make a left here and then go straight up Miller Road.” The guy didn’t notice when I interrupted him to give him directions to my house. “Okay, now make a right here, then to the end of the road, follow the curve, and it’s that house on the right.”

  “Hey, I think I’ve been here before. I remember this place, although it looked different at night.”

  “No, um, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, yeah, this cool cat lives here, or maybe the next house up, I can’t really remember. Older guy; I think his name is Lew. I was having bad flashbacks from acid, and it was weird, he kinda put me in a sorta trance and waved his hands over me. I mean, it was like really weird. I can’t tell you what I felt, but I never felt that way before. Like this crazy electricity in my cells. This guy has powers. I mean, look at me; I’m totally back to normal.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for the ride.”

  “Hey, man, do you live here?”

  “No, I’m just visiting.”

  It was getting to the point that my father was always around. I couldn’t escape him. Either someone knew him, or through his psychic powers he knew where I was and what I was doing. It didn’t matter if I was asleep, in the shower, or passed out at some party, he knew it.

  Recently Pop had exponentially expanded his psychic capabilities with the discovery of a new tool called the pendulum, which was the magic key that opened a world of unlimited knowledge for him—past, present, and future. The pendulum, a small opalescent glass ball about the size of a pea attached to a short length of chain, allowed my father access to any type of information he required. Mainly he used the pendulum for medical diagnosis, but he could also determine for the police where the murder weapon was, which insurance agent he should use, if he should move to Kissimmee, what the distance between Luxembourg and Luxor is, the temperature on Mars, where his glasses were, where the missing person was, all in a matter of minutes. He put the FBI, CIA, and KGB to shame with his ability to almost instantly gather hidden data about anyone or anything in the world.

  My father liked to say that he had a complete hospital in the pendulum. With the pendulum, he didn’t need a stethoscope, a pathology lab, or an X-ray machine; he could diagnose quicker and more accurately than all the MDs and their fancy machines combined. He would astonish patients and doctors by describing to them in accurate detail the exact nature of their illness. Certain doctors who were open to my father’s methodologies would often call him in secret and ask him to help them diagnose a problematic case that they could not solve. Their patient might be ill, but all their tests were coming up normal. My father could usually find the source of and the solution to their disease. Now, with the use of the pendulum, he was able to take a much more empirical approach to his healing work by diagnosing exactly the problem and directing his healing with pinpoint accuracy.

  Up until this point, Pop would just open his hands and let the energy pour out without any control. He didn’t have to diagnose, he just had to show up. While he was achieving remarkable results, this wasn’t enough for him. He was after empirical results. He
wanted to deliver healing energy in exact doses rather than just blasting a patient with cosmic rays.

  The art of the pendulum is based on the arcane science of radiesthesia, which posits that everything in our material world is a collection of atoms vibrating at specific rates. Just like in physics, flowers vibrate at a different rate than rocks, plastic spoons, or lungs. According to the laws of radiesthesia, each of these vibrations can be measured—and in the case of an ailing body, manipulated and returned to optimal functioning.

  Radiesthesia was reportedly known and used by the high priests and magicians of ancient Egypt. The modern father of radiesthesia was Abbé Mermet, a Swiss priest who in the 1920s began to use it for the purposes of medical diagnosis. Radiesthesia is a close relation to the art of dowsing—using forked tree branches to pick up the magnetic pull of an underground body of water. However, instead of tree branches, radiesthetists use pendulums—flexible metal wands made from wire, or even their fingers—to read the vibrations emanating from any object, person, or natural body.

  Through radiesthesia my father was able to measure a physical malfunction both before and after a healing. In this way he could document the change that occurred from his healing. Using the pendulum, he could look into the body without an X-ray machine or into stellar space without a telescope. I never asked him if he could have picked stocks or horses and made a bundle. Most likely his answer would have been no, this was a God-given power to be used only for the highest good.

  In an attempt to make his healing more scientific, Pop created a detailed chart that would allow him to diagnose every facet of his patients, from their psychological profile to the mineral content of their body, or if they had shingles or worms. In a matter of minutes, he could do a complete workup on a person whether they were sitting next to him, having dinner in Paris, or sleeping in Buenos Aires. This enabled Pop to document his diagnoses and healings in a way that would give him credibility and acceptance. His hope was that he would not be dismissed as a nut and as a result could work with doctors to teach them new methods of healing the body. He was tired of being harassed by the authorities and constantly having to prove himself over and over again. All he wanted was to be able to share his gift and alleviate people’s suffering.