Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  She sees nothing contradictory in her material comfort. The division between the sacred and the profane, God and money, she thinks, is one of the “wounds” that alternative spiritualities were meant to heal.

  “Real estate,” she told me when we first met. “Perfect example.”

  One of Sondra’s clients is a former telecom exec named James Hatt. Hatt moved to New York from London in 1999, and fell in love: with an American woman, the city, its opportunities. He bought properties, he sold them, he prospered. But then he picked up a million-dollar co-op in which, he later learned, the previous resident had lost his mind. The apartment sat on the market for seven months, real money locked up in a few rooms Hatt came to think of as diseased. Finally, says Hatt, a fellow real-estate agent said, “Look, there’s this woman you should try. A lot of agents use her. Nobody talks about it.”

  “This woman” sounded like an arsonist. But what Sondra offered was a “cleansing,” a service she and other healers quietly supply for most, if not all, of the city’s major brokerages. (The fee, usually around $250, came out of the broker’s pocket.)

  Hatt had witnessed a cleansing before, and as far as he was concerned it hadn’t done a bit of good: “Nothing but dressing.” Still, what else could he try? He was desperate, so in came Sondra. And what did she do? Nothing. Walked around the place for an hour and a half. There were some prayers, a few chants, “a variety of faiths and persuasions,” but they were quiet, “unto herself,” as Hatt puts it. “Not for the audience.”

  And when she was done? “The place was warm.” Sold in two days. A few months later Hatt called Sondra again. He had a $1.5 million loft lingering unsold in SoHo. Sondra came, strolled, cleansed. The loft moved within a few days. So Hatt started seeing Sondra for personal healings, long sessions that began with Sondra’s setting up an altar to a variety of divine figures and going on to channel their energy into and around Hatt’s spirit-body. At first it felt awful; but that’s what made him believe. If she was just trying to sell him something, why would she make it so hard to take? I told him about my Emotional Cord Cutting experience, and Sondra’s surprising readiness to claim credit for the flu that followed.

  “A lot of people turn to spirituality for immediate relief from pain,” he observed. “Sondra forces you to experience pain. There is no other option: It’s inside you, an unwelcome third party in your home. You have to make it clean. With Sondra you feel like paint stripper is being applied.”

  IN THE MATERIAL WORLD Sondra is surpassingly gentle, an elfin assemblage of diminutive bones and smooth skin and big eyes. These days, she believes she’s a “fairie.” She says that a close friend, a high-powered real-estate broker herself and a conservative woman in most respects, is “of angelic descent,” with an invisible dragon living in her apartment.

  In the early eighties, when she was an English major at Rutgers, Sondra was “Goth before there was Goth,” moping to bands like the Smiths and the Violent Femmes. Later, when she was getting an M.A. in fiction at New York University, she had a sideline in modeling. When she graduated from Brooklyn Law near the top of her class in 1992, she molted into tailored suits and spiky hair. Bored into a state of depression by corporate law practice, she left Davis Polk to work as a part-time attorney while studying acting at the Stella Adler School. She still has her head shots, wet lips and thick mascara, off-the-shoulder outfits with serious cleavage.

  Now her favorite color is pink, which she says is a color of power. In cold weather she wears a puffy pink coat over a pink sweatshirt emblazoned with a Brooklyn logo, with a pink hat and pink gloves and Nikes with pink Swooshes, and blue jeans that are a little too big for her. She often stands too close to people, but nobody seems to mind. Her presence is asexual, not so much celibate as ethereal.

  One Saturday I accompanied Sondra on a house call to Rose and Bowie, who lived in a tidy little apartment with no signs of mystic inclinations. Rose Devlin was a nurse and a painter. Bowie was a cat. Rose had a face like a quiet pond, smooth and calming, marred by a ripple of agitation around her eyes. “Look at my cat,” she said, as if to explain. “This isn’t about me, it’s about Bowie.” Bowie’s right eye was green, her left eye blue, and her plump belly, recently shaved for an operation, was bright pink.

  Rose had hired Sondra to heal both Bowie and herself; Bowie had been listless since she came home from her surgery, and Rose had also been having troubles, but she couldn’t describe them. “This should be a good time,” she said. “I mean, everything is working, like what the universe wants to happen is actually happening.” Her painting, she felt, was developing. Her work situation—she had spent years caring for children with cancer—was painful but meaningful. Her small studio was just the right size for her, and a shiny building across the street caught the sun, softened it, and sent light cascading onto her art. Her life, she said, was just fine. When she sat on the couch, bathed in the amber of the setting sun, she looked like Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

  “So I thought maybe the problem has something to do with Bowie,” she said.

  Sondra gathered Bowie on her lap and began kneading her shoulders, cooing to her. At first Bowie slapped Sondra’s thigh with her tail and squawked. Then she settled down, gripping either side of Sondra’s knee with a paw. Rose was already pleased. “She hasn’t been friendly since she got back from the vet,” she said, marveling.

  “I called in Saint Germain,” Sondra explained. “He’s an ascended master who works with animals.”

  “Ah,” murmured Rose.

  “I mean,” said Sondra, “Saint Francis.”

  Until recently Rose was neither religious nor spiritual. Then, she saw a PBS special about people who talk to their animals, and believe that their animals talk back to them. It inspired her to enroll in a week-long course on the subject, after which she let her new spirituality lie fallow until a friend treated her to a session with another healer. He also recommended Sondra.

  Bowie uncurled from Sondra’s lap, ambled over to the litter box, squatted. “There are a lot of angels around her,” Sondra whispered. Then, to Rose: “Bowie is telling me that we really have to do some work on you, Rose.” Rose nodded, as if the healing of Bowie had been just ritual prelude—as of course it was. Sondra turned off the lights, leaving nothing but a rectangle of afternoon gold stretching across the wall. Sondra directed Rose to lie down on the couch, told her to take off her watch. “Time isn’t really cool in the spiritual realm,” she explained.

  Sondra knelt at Rose’s head. I sat in a folding chair a few feet away, but I might as well have been watching through a one-way mirror. Over the next hour the light faded to blue. Bowie watched, too, perched on the ridge of the couch, green eye/blue eye fixed on Sondra. I was thinking about her knees. They must have been hurting.

  Her hands framed a triangle over Rose’s closed eyes. Rose’s face had collapsed into the couch. Sondra’s, meanwhile, had undergone an even more curious transformation. Her chin had disappeared. Lines normally invisible stretched like deltas from her eyes, and her smooth forehead was as furrowed as rough seas. She shuttled on her knees down the length of Rose’s body and then back again to her head. She raised her triangle hands, the veins popped in her neck, and when she had her arms fully extended above her head, she blew—Foof !

  And that was it. She stood, knees cracking, shook herself out, and took a seat on the floor beside me. She bit her lower lip.

  “So, you can take your time coming back.”

  Rose wiggled her toes. We sat in silence.

  Rose opened her eyes. She was crying.

  “He’s with you,” Sondra said. Derek? Sai Baba? Jesus?

  “I saw him,” Rose whispered, finally moving to rub her nose.

  “I know.”

  “It’s so hard. To say good-bye. I flew back. To Australia. And—and—I didn’t get there in time.”

 
Rose pulled herself up. Sondra moved to a seat beside her, wrapped an arm around Rose’s shoulders.

  “My brother,” Rose said. She shuddered with tears.

  Rose’s brother had been sick, she explained as she shook in Sondra’s arms. She’d flown home to be with him; he’d died before she could get there.

  “When I saw him, I didn’t want to come out of it,” Rose said. “I didn’t want to come back. Here.”

  She looked up at Sondra. “Did . . . did James”—Rose’s friend, Sondra’s client—“did he tell you about my brother?”

  Sondra shook her head. She didn’t lie. “I didn’t know,” she said, leaving it at that—either a testimony to her power to enter others’ lives or an acknowledgment that this wasn’t about magic so much as ritual, the gestures and symbols and theatrics that free us from the flow of ordinary time, that allow us to return to moments not yet resolved.

  “I would like to offer you a gift,” Sondra said. She went to her pink backpack, rummaged, and pulled out her knife. It was a really big knife, in a small room, and Rose winced, the no-nonsense nurse in her replacing the brokenhearted sister. Sondra explained the Emotional Cord Cutting. “Oh,” said Rose. Then: “That makes sense.” There is, after all, a narrative logic to the ritual; to succeed it must be alien and obvious at the same time. Rose stood. Sondra lit a stick of incense, gripped it next to the knife, and took her position before Rose. “Now,” she said, “envision your brother standing in front of you.” Rose nodded. “You know he has to go, right, Rose? You have to let him.” Rose agreed. Sondra breathed out—Foof!—and began slashing. Rose gasped. Sondra dropped to a knee and tapped the blade to the cement floor. Then she told Rose to open her eyes. “Look at the incense.” She was to watch it burn. Everything she had to give up would go into the flame. Everything she wanted to keep would remain, purified by fire. The incense flared as it burned to its end. After the lights went on, while the money was changing hands, both women agreed that the quick, bright sizzle was Rose’s brother, saying thank you.

  I BEGAN VISITING SONDRA at her apartment, just off of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, to learn the biographical data that led her to don a dozen different spiritual symbols, including a giant cross she hid beneath her shirt when she visited her parents. There had been some hard-partying years, a youthful, heart-shuddering night of too many drugs, followed by years of vitamins, healthy living—a rhythm of achievement and boredom. There’d been bad lovers, broken hearts, an appreciation for show tunes. Nothing out of the ordinary. To explain her unusual beliefs by the facts of her life would make no more worldly sense than dismissing them as demonic, or declaring myself of angelic descent, as Sondra suggested I might be.

  That wasn’t a New Age version of a come-on; it was a recognition of my role in our relationship as the listener, the role Sondra so often plays for others. Not as a therapist, one who reveals root causes, but as a reenchanter, someone who makes you feel as if your story matters.

  We watched a fair amount of TV together. We sat side by side on the pink comforter of her four-poster bed, hung in a gauze of pink and roses, in a pink-walled room in which there were two main variations of color—a life-size poster of Sai Baba, and her dull black TV and VCR. Together we watched an old acting reel of hers from her days at the Stella Adler School. “I feel like Norma Desmond,” Sondra said, the aging actress antiheroine of the 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard.

  The first scene we watched was taken from Living in Oblivion, a 1995 low-budget comedy about the making of a low-budget art film. Sondra chose a scene in which she plays an actress forced to pretend devotion to a jerk she can’t stand in real life. Sondra’s job is to be a good actress playing a bad actress overwhelmed by the contradictions. She nails it, doe-eyed and contemptuous at the same time, a combination I’d never witnessed in Sondra Shaye, metaphysician. In the next scene she plays a sobered-up junkie, trying to convince her ex-lover, still strung out, that he’s romanticizing their relationship. “In rehab,” says this sensible, firm Sondra, “they call it selective recall. It means you remember all the highs and forget all the lows.” This is followed by two scenes from a modern adaptation of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove. If the first two clips showed the early stages of a woman’s life—dating-life angst, first disillusionment—these scenes reveal Sondra as an adult: witty, sexy, kind of sad.

  The next several scenes show the onset of middle age. A woman who can’t have a baby, arguing with her husband about adoption. A scene from the 1998 film A Price Above Rubies, with Sondra in the Renée Zellweger role as the middle-class, bitter Jewish matron she might have become (she says) had she herself remained a lawyer. “There is no escaping God,” a rabbi advises her character. “Then let him do what he wants,” Sondra spits back. “I don’t care anymore.”

  “Do you want to see more?” Sondra asked. I wasn’t sure I did. I felt as if we were watching Sondra’s life unfold in a parallel universe, one lacking the magic she believes surrounds her in this one.

  “Let’s look,” she said, and pulled another tape off her shelf, unlabeled. “I don’t know what this one is,” she said, popping it in. Sondra always keeps her apartment at hothouse temperatures, but with the clouds outside clearing and the sun pouring white light and heat in through two big windows, it was unbearable even for her. While the tape rewound, she pulled the shade. We sat in darkness, then blue light as Sondra appeared on the television.

  The camera looks at her from across a desk, as if it’s a job interview. “Oh my God,” Sondra whispered beside me. “It’s The Rapture.” Sondra is playing the Mimi Rogers role from the 1991 movie, the story of a swinger who’s born again as a fundamentalist Christian awaiting the Second Coming. It’s a strange movie, beloved by fundamentalists who take the thundering horsemen of the apocalypse witnessed by the heroine as accurate depictions of what’s soon to come, and by film geeks who admire what they see as the movie’s ambiguity. Does it really end with the end? Or is our heroine utterly delusional?

  “There’s a fire inside me,” Sondra’s character tells her unseen interrogator, staring into his, the viewer’s, eyes.

  “I did this with no rehearsal,” Sondra whispered.

  “And now it’s getting hotter and hotter,” Rapture-Sondra says. “It hurts.” There’s nothing sexy about it, as played by Sondra; it hurts.

  We watched one more clip that morning. The Today show, a decade ago, a segment on nutrition. There’s Sondra. Long hair and tailored suit, the gorgeous Brooklyn Heights apartment she used to live in before she quit lawyering. There’s a rainbow of pills on the table in front of her, and as the camera watches, she pops them, one by one. They’re vitamins. Back then, divorced from the spiritual realm, Sondra believed she needed to take at least a couple dozen daily just to survive. She didn’t really need them, though, not physically, anyway, a point subsequently made by a snarky doctor interviewed by the program, who dismisses fads and alternative health and the whole kit and caboodle of the New Age as nothing more than a lifestyle.

  This brought Sondra back to reality, grounded her as surely as would a pint of Guinness with Derek in a pub in Dublin, or a day with the family in Jersey.

  “Ah, shut up!” she yelled at her television. “What do you know about my fucking lifestyle?”

  JIM FARAH, A CORCORAN real-estate agent, sat with perfect calm as Sondra squirted holy water—tap, blessed by her, dispensed from a pink plastic spritzer—on the carpet, ceiling, and walls of a Kips Bay apartment he’d been trying to sell. It was a one-bedroom in a doorman building, with an open terrace overlooking St. Vartan’s dazzling, gold-domed Armenian cathedral and the East River, and it was priced very reasonably—$680,000—but it wasn’t moving. Farah, a sober, dignified man with neat gray hair, a black jacket, and a gray sweater, an Episcopalian, a former retail executive with no supernatural experiences, called Sondra on the recommendation of a colleague. Now she was standing in the living
room, her eyes fluttering and her shoulders twitching as she called in a full congregation of minor and major gods.

  “Jim,” I whispered. “Does this—is any of this kind of, I don’t know, hard to swallow?”

  Farah shook his head and offered the best defense of New Ageism I’ve encountered. “Absolutely not,” he said. “To some extent it’s a language of its own.” The terms, he said, may be peculiar, but the ideas at hand—that spaces reflect their inhab-itants (“bad sex energy,” Sondra had diagnosed this property), that faith goes by many names, that all rituals, “true” or “false,” cohere around metaphors of our own creation—are perfectly ordinary.

  Sondra slumped, hanging like a puppet on strings, straightened, and left the apartment. She needed to get some distance so she could draw a magic circle around the newly cleansed space. Neither seller nor buyer would consciously budge an inch on the basis of this invisible shield, and Farah, like most brokers, wouldn’t even mention the procedure. I looked at him, hands folded in his lap, waiting for Sondra to return. It’s then that I understood: He had purchased this spell, the details of which do not concern him, for his own peace of mind.

  So I tried to follow his lead, and since Sondra was willing to comp me again—a savings of thousands of dollars—I signed up for her special Rising Star workshop, a healing “modality” Sondra shares with Derek O’Neill. It was a collective effort involving half a dozen students gathered for twelve hours of instruction, meditation, visualization, and holy dancing—the highlight, for me, gently absurd and genuinely lovely, was a spirited session of Ring Around the Rosy set to George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord.” We met in a midtown luxury apartment decorated in shades of buttercup yellow, the home of one of Sondra’s regulars, a real-estate agent named Louise, who sells apartments to ball players and rock stars—cleansed, when necessary, by Sondra. Along with several rookies like me, there was also Anthony, an actor who’d won a modest but real role in a recent Sylvester Stallone movie, and Mary, a breathtakingly beautiful psychotherapist who had been on what she called the “guru trip” for years before she found Sondra.