Walking Through Walls

by Philip Smith

  The pendulum functioned in a binary fashion similar to a computer’s method of thinking—it could provide only a yes or no answer to a question. For example, you could not ask the pendulum, “What color shirt is Mark wearing today?” The pendulum would not respond. You needed to phrase the question as, “Is Mark wearing a red shirt today?” If the answer was no, the pendulum would swing in a counterclockwise circle. Next you would ask, “Is Mark wearing a blue shirt today?” If the answer was yes, the pendulum would then swing in a clockwise circle. My father developed a kind of shortcut in using the pendulum. If he received a negative answer, he would then mentally list all the colors he could think of, such as pink, gray, black, yellow, green, white, and so on, and wait until the pendulum began to spin in a positive clockwise direction.

  A similar line of questioning could be used to diagnose any illness in the body, including hidden tumors that a doctor had failed to detect. A typical diagnostic session to locate a tumor in the body would go something like this:

  “Is there a tumor in the body that the doctor did not diagnose?”

  Yes.

  “Is the tumor on the kidney?”

  No.

  “Is the tumor on the lung?”

  Yes.

  “Is it on the right lung?”

  No.

  “Is the tumor on the upper part of the left lung?”

  No.

  “Is the tumor on the inside of the left lung?”

  Yes.

  “Is the tumor on the upper right-hand section of the left lung?” No. “Is the tumor one centimeter in size?”

  No.

  “Is the tumor two centimeters in size?”

  No.

  “Is the tumor five centimeters in size?”

  Yes.

  “Will a psychic healing dissolve the tumor?”

  Yes.

  “Is the patient receptive to a psychic healing?”

  No.

  “Because the patient is not receptive, will the tumor return after a successful psychic healing?”

  Yes.

  “Can I alter the person’s receptivity before the healing?”

  Yes.

  “If I alter the person’s receptivity, will the healing be successful?”

  Yes.

  “Does the patient need additional medical intervention?”

  No.

  All these questions would be asked while holding the pendulum and watching it respond either yes or no. This procedure could be applied to diagnose all aspects of a person’s health. Even the best doctor would have required hours, if not days, to hopefully deliver the same diagnosis after using blood tests, X-rays, scans, and even exploratory surgery.

  In the way that we now use calculators, the Internet, and cell phones, Pop used the pendulum to verify anything and everything. There was no limit to the type or amount of information that was now available to him. Suddenly there was no guesswork left to his healing or his personal life. The pendulum made every decision for him with precision.

  My father also used the pendulum for such practical tasks as grocery shopping, or to determine the nutritional content of a tomato or which apple had the least amount of pesticide residue. His shopping via radiesthesia was truly where the supernatural met suburbia in broad daylight.

  Pop refused to put anything—and I mean anything—into his shopping cart without first checking it out with the pendulum. Whenever he asked me to go shopping with him, I tried to fabricate an excuse not to join him, as the outing always turned into a spectacle. I couldn’t bear the openmouthed stares of the Cuban stock boys or the housewives as he whipped out his pendulum and held it over every purchase, waiting for the pendulum to indicate whether or not it was a buy. This habit of his had come from a message from Arthur Ford, who expressed his concern that my father was not vigilant about maintaining his vibrations at a high enough level. In the message, Arthur said, “You must check out each food you eat. Nothing should go into the body that is not of a certain vibration. Remember, my friend, you must keep your thoughts, actions, and body as pure as you can so you can be ‘on call’ at all times.”

  My worst nightmare was the produce department. Whenever possible, I tried to slip away as soon as we headed toward the fruits and vegetables. “Uh, Pop, I think we’re running low on detergent. I’ll get some and meet you by the checkout.” As I scurried away, he would call out for me to wait for him so that he could run the pendulum over the bottles, as he didn’t want to buy a detergent that might have too many phosphates, pollutants, or allergens. When I asked him why he would always use the pendulum to check the same brand of detergent he had bought last time, he told me that you never knew when they changed the formulation.

  Acting as if he were completely alone in the store, Pop would hold the pendulum over a pile of cantaloupes and ask out loud, “Is this melon perfectly ripe, and will it provide optimum nutrition for my body?” He would then slowly scan the pendulum over the pile of melons, waiting for the pendulum to begin turning in a clockwise direction, indicating the perfect melon. Or he might ask, “Does this melon have the least amount of pesticides?” He would then wait until the pendulum gave him a positive response and nonchalantly place that melon in his basket. Sometimes I had to move twenty or thirty pieces of fruit until he found one that received a positive response from the pendulum.

  Inevitably some widow would push her cart right in front of my father in an attempt to meet the man of her dreams. These ladies always assumed that he was really rich. After all, would a poor person have the nerve to hold a little crystal bead attached to a chain over a pile of fruit and ask out loud (too loud for me), “Does this bag of oranges contain the highest percentage of vitamin C?” They were always charmed by his eccentricity, and he immediately had another acolyte in the making. Pop had let his mustache grow into a professorial-looking goatee, which for some reason led perfect strangers to call him “doctor.” Widows and divorcees really went for this look.

  My father would nonchalantly tuck the small end of the pendulum through one of the buttonholes in his shirt so that it was always available. The pendulum was not exactly the French Legion of Honor, that small red thread that gentlemen of a certain status discreetly tucked into the buttonhole of their bespoke suit, but it gave my father that je ne sais quoi of extreme eccentricity.

  As we walked down the aisles, testing everything from Saran Wrap to yogurt for toxicity and protein content, I could hear the curious whispers behind us. Occasionally I winced at the metallic crash of shopping carts as two disbelieving housewives collided with each other while watching my father dowse the zucchini. Before we reached the checkout counter, he would guess the total cost of the items in the basket and ask the pendulum to confirm. If it indicated a no, he would throw out another sum or two until he got a positive response. When we checked out, if the total differed from his number, he would tell the cashier that she had made a mistake. She would give him a nasty look, then cancel the order, check him out again, and inevitably find that his number was the correct amount.

  In addition to food shopping, Pop rapidly found other applications, which included spying on me.

  Adolescence requires a certain amount of rebellion, secrecy, and privacy. My father’s psychic abilities preempted any of this. If I was trying to masturbate in the shower or sneak a cigarette, he knew. Since I wasn’t supposed to be smoking, I went through an elaborate ritual before I would light the cigarette. First I would try to scramble and block my thoughts about smoking from being scanned by my father or his spirit friends by running algebraic equations or a list of phone numbers through my mind. I figured that would throw them off my mental trail. Only after I had cleansed my mind of the thought of smoking did I then look around to see if anybody was watching before I lit up. Even though I couldn’t see anybody watching me, I always ended up getting caught. As soon as I walked back into the house, I was met with “Philip, you were smoking again, weren’t you?”

  I averted my eyes and responded cal
mly, “No. No, I wasn’t.” But there was no point in lying; it never worked and only made things worse.

  “Philip, you are destroying your body. Your body is your temple. You don’t own your body; it is a gift from God. Remember that the body never forgets an insult. You will pay the price for this later on. I don’t want you smoking. You’re killing yourself.”

  “But Mom smokes.” I knew this was the wrong answer.

  “Yes, and she’s killing herself.”

  “No she’s not. She’s still alive.” Being a smart aleck was not going to get him off my back.

  “You know that I know when you’re doing drugs or smoking cigarettes, so why do you make me lecture you like this? It would be easier if you would just take care of yourself.”

  “Yeah,” I thought, “easier for him, but not for me.”

  Like most kids, I thought that smoking made me cool and adult. That’s all I wanted, to be like the other kids and not the son of a psychic decorator who could read people’s minds and cure cancer. What I really wanted was a father who mowed the lawn, drank beer, and fell asleep in front of the TV. But that’s not the father I had. Instead I had Clark Kent, who at a moment’s notice turned into Superman.

  As my father became more proficient with the pendulum, he used it to check out my health, activities, and whereabouts at all times. No matter what I did, I was under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. There was no privacy. It didn’t matter whether I was asleep, in class, or kissing my girlfriend—my father could, through the use of the pendulum, instantly flip the “on” switch to his private camera, tune in to me, and monitor my every move. At times I could feel it when he was mentally in the room with me. Sometimes it was like a breeze whooshing by me as he left the room. Other times when he was listening in, I could feel a little click in my brain, like when an operator checks the line or interrupts a call.

  I remember one such incident that occurred around dusk as I was hiding some pharmaceuticals in a hole in the backyard for future use. They had not been directly prescribed for me. After carefully wrapping them in a plastic bag that I sealed with masking tape, I placed the bag into a plastic storage container that my mother used for leftovers. Behind a tree on the far side of the property, I dug a twelve-inch-deep hole and buried them. I placed a few heavy pieces of coral rock over the box so that I could find it easily when I dug it up. Artfully, I camouflaged the area with a natural-looking spread of leaves and twigs. While I was digging, I thought I kept seeing a gray shadowy figure moving around the periphery of my vision. I sensed it was watching me. But when I turned around, no one was there.

  The next day I was in the mood for a few capsules and went over to my storage facility. I was pleased to see that none of the leaves or twigs had been disturbed by raccoons or other animals. The fresh dirt from the day before was easy to remove. After a few minutes of digging with my hands, I could feel the rocks at the bottom of the hole. I knew I was close. I cleaned out the remaining loose dirt, lifted out the rocks, and looked into the hole. There was no Tupperware filled with pharmaceuticals anywhere in sight. Even though the rocks were there, the plastic container was clearly missing. I started to dig down a bit deeper but couldn’t go any farther because I had reached a bed of coral rock. Carefully, I sifted through the dirt to see if I had somehow missed the box. Nothing; no box, no pills. Finally I gave up and walked away. I didn’t even bother to refill the hole.

  That evening I went over to the guesthouse to visit with my father. We talked about my day at school and how he had just treated someone with schizophrenia. He then opened his desk drawer and pulled out my precious pills. He turned to me and said casually, “No medication is ever free of a side effect. Unfortunately, once you start with one pill, it sets up a reaction, and then you need another and another until you are taking so many pills, and all the chemicals are at war with your body, and you get sicker than you were at the beginning. I would prefer that you stay away from all prescription medication, especially if it wasn’t prescribed to you.” For emphasis, he picked up his pendulum to indicate that I had been under psychic observation. I felt a small jolt of electricity pass through my body and suddenly had trouble breathing, as if someone had just punched me in the chest. I didn’t say a word. There was a deep silence after he had spoken. I didn’t know how to respond. He had made his point loud and clear. I changed the subject and began talking cheerily about what happened in Latin class that day. Like everything else associated with my father’s growing powers, I got used to it, the way that someone who has a chronic disease gets used to it; you wish it would go away, but it never will. It’s just there, a fact of life.

  Even though the pendulum had now become an indispensable diagnostic tool for my father the way a doctor uses X-rays, he would occasionally still perform healings the old-fashioned way in an emergency. With his gift, Pop felt it was his responsibility to help anyone he could at any time, especially if there wasn’t a doctor around.

  One late night in mid-May, we were driving home from an afternoon of visiting friends, and traffic was at a near standstill. As we crept along, I could see the revolving lights of the police cars flashing up ahead. There must have been about six cops on the scene attending to a three-car pileup. Two of the cars were intertwined, and the third had flipped over. Several bodies were lying on the ground. They appeared unconscious and were covered with blood. The rest of the passengers were pinned inside the cars. The ambulances had yet to arrive. As we passed the accident, my father quickly pulled his car off onto the shoulder of the road.

  “Where are you going?” I asked. He didn’t answer as he got out of the car. The police were too busy directing traffic and working their walkie-talkies to notice my father heading toward the accident scene. I watched as he stood there, looking at the bodies for a minute or two. Just staring. He stepped over one of them to bend down and take a closer look at the other, a man dressed in a red T-shirt and shorts. With his eyes closed and arms outstretched, Pop started moving his palms in a circular motion over the person’s head and then slowly up and down the length of his body. I noticed the person’s left arm twitch like a fish that had just been caught. My father then placed his right hand about eight inches above the person’s chest. While he did this, the person’s head moved slightly from side to side.

  I sat in the car thinking, “Great. We’ll never get home now.” I was hungry and wanted to call my girlfriend. Out of the blue, two cops came over, grabbed my father from behind, and pulled him away from the body. One of them screamed, “What the hell d’ya think you’re doin’?! Cain’t you see this here’s an accident scene?!” He shook my father and yelled, “What are you, Dracula?” Then he said to the other cop, “Get this guy out of here. Book him.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “For what?” asked the other cop.

  “I don’t know. Interfering with a crime investigation, somethin’ like that. I don’t care, just get this jerk outta here.”

  The arresting cop quickly pulled my father’s hands behind his back and said, “What do you think you were doin’ over there? Huh? Huh?”

  I didn’t know whether to get out of the car and try to help or just sit there and keep listening. As usual, my father decided to tell the truth. “This man is about to die. I can save his life. Please let me get back to him.”

  At first the cop’s eyes opened wide and nearly popped out of his head. Then a look of disbelief ran across his face before he broke out laughing. He called out to the first cop, “Hey, Sam, we got the Wizard of Oz over here! Claims he can save that dead guy over there.” He started singing the theme song from The Twilight Zone in my father’s face: “Doo doo doo doooooo, doo doo doo doooooo. Sam, you know, I think jail’s the wrong place for this guy. Let’s send him over to Jackson Memorial and get him in a straitjacket.” They both laughed.

  Overhearing this, I thought, “Uh-oh, now we’re in for some serious humiliation from the cops. This time he’s definitely playing with fire.” I decided to get out
of the car to see if I could help my father. It was one thing when my father argued with a doctor—there were few consequences other than bad feelings. But to argue with the cops, especially redneck Miami cops, was not a good idea. I thought my presence might let the cops reconsider their prejudice against my father—although with my shoulder-length curly hair and bell-bottoms, these cops would probably want to make it a double and throw me in jail as well. I noticed that the guy my father had been waving his hands over was slowly opening and closing his mouth as if trying to say something. By the time I reached the cops, they had my father handcuffed and were writing up a report. I said to the officer, “Excuse me, this is my father. My mom is probably worried, and we need to get home for dinner. Can we go now?” The guy ignored me. My father gave me a look that said, “Don’t say anything. I’ll handle this.”

  The cop walked a little closer to me, crossed his arms over his chest, and looked at me hard before he said, “Let me tell you somethin’, son. Your daddy here is in a whole lot of trouble. He was messin’ where he shouldn’t a-been messin’. This here is police business. Now, I don’t know exaaaactly what he was doin’ over there with those people who are badly hurt, probably dead, but it’s just no business of his. And we’re going to make sure this don’t happen again.”

  “But he was trying to help the guy. What are you going to do to him?”

  “I didn’t see your dad try to help nobody. Looked to me like he was trying to pick the guy’s pocket or take his watch. We don’t like that kind of stuff. I don’t think no judge gonna like hearing what your daddy just did—foolin’ with the dead folk. I don’t think he’s gonna like it one bit.”