Broken Mirrors, Fractured Minds

by Carmilla Voiez

Did you think it would be like syrup,

  oozing treacly and sweet to the tongue?

  or like semen stains and crying jags?

  No, it's Loud and Dangerous!

  Not a caress and lingering kiss

  but shattered glass and a foot on the throat.

  God Damn this and screw that.

  It's Loud and Dangerous!

  Not like babies on your chest or your toes in the sand,

  but it's dented fenders and deep regrets.

  It's Loud and Dangerous!

  Robins sing and cats curl in my lap,

  then it sounds so bothersome

  and the claws dig into my thighs.

  So shut the window, close the door

  and get off of me,

  It's Loud and Dangerous!

  “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad”

  EURIPEDES

  Wand Therapy

  by Fred McGavran

  We are not Catholic, so when I saw Joyce crossing herself in front of the TV, I asked her what was going on.

  “I’m not crossing myself,” she replied. “I’m activating my crystal wand.”

  She handed me an opaque stick about eight inches long.

  “You have to circle it clockwise to align the crystals with your chakras.”

  From high school science, I remembered that electricity is generated by rotating a magnet inside a coil of wire. I held the wand up to the light. For a second I thought I saw a flicker like the spark that ignites a forest fire or an idea being born in the mind of God.

  “It’s all about energy,” she said.

  “What if you rotate it the wrong way?” I wondered.

  “Here,” she snapped, taking the wand back. “Look at the directions.”

  She pointed at an earth tone brochure from Sincerity Wands, Ltd of Miracle, Texas. Rotating the wand clockwise in a series of three rotations would align the crystals with the user’s chakras, but it did not say whether “clockwise” was determined from the perspective of the person rotating the wand or from the perspective of the wand being rotated. Should the wand be pointed outward, or should it be pointed inward? Which end of the wand should you hold, and which should you point at the chakras? And what happened if the wand were rotated in the wrong direction? Would the chakras spark away into eternity like static electricity when you touch your nose, leaving the user enervated and alone?

  At the bottom of the last page, nearly obscured by a photograph of a rock garden, was the statement: “If you use any of the information in this brochure for yourself, the manufacturer assumes no responsibility for your actions.”

  In all my years practicing law, I had never seen a disclaimer absolving the manufacturer from liability when the product was used in accordance with its instructions. Joyce had gone back to rotating the wand over her chest, and the studio audience was going wild as the Barefoot Contessa cracked an egg. Like many irregularities in a long marriage, I decided to leave this one alone.

  That evening I dozed in my living room chair beneath a recessed light we had installed to make it easier for me to read. Joyce watched cooking shows in the TV room off to my left. Suddenly, I sensed something bright above me.

  A fire! I thought, opening my eyes.

  Like a torch in a 3D movie, a fireball bore into my face, but it did not burn. As if it were feeding on the nothingness around it, the fiery maelstrom burst into blazing streamers. I was so scared I couldn’t move. Like droplets of flame from a burning pinwheel, the streamers stretched and swirled until they filled the black void with shimmering flickers of light. It was not a house fire; it was creation, the first dazzling act of God.

  What’s she watching? I wondered, standing up.

  When I entered the TV room, Joyce was asleep on the couch holding the crystal wand. A show about cooking asparagus was on. The wand had caught the light from the TV and projected it onto the living room ceiling. Maybe Paula’s stove top had caught fire; that would explain the vision. Very gently I removed the wand from her fingers, and the ceiling went dark. I had not noticed that the wand had seven sides. Holding it up to the light, I saw something like mercury sprinkled with diamonds pulsing through the center.

  “Oh, Walter,” she said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  I had not heard that tone of voice in 20 years.

  “Is it helping your knees?” I asked.

  Joyce had arthritis so bad she had to give up golf last summer.

  “It makes me feel warm.”

  I kissed her goodnight and went upstairs to bed. For the first time in months, I felt that I didn’t need a sleeping pill.

  * * *

  My doctor once told me I was a poor historian. When I finally retired from the firm after nearly forty years, I was as sensitized to stress as a soldier with PTSD to a firecracker. The medications, however, produced symptoms worse than those they were supposed to treat. My mouth was always dry, and I suffered terrible headaches whenever I had more than one drink. Worst of all, I was drowsy all the time.

  Joyce was away at her cosmic energy group the next few nights, so I was able to sleep through the after-dinner shows until it was time for my nightcap and the reruns. I never watched anything that I had not seen before. It was much easier on my nerves when I knew what was going to happen next.

  Joyce always watched the same cooking programs, too. Seeing again and again how to prepare the same dish must have been very soothing, although it did not translate into any noticeable improvement in her cooking. So imagine my shock when I looked up at the ceiling and saw a naked man and woman in a grove of fruit trees.

  My God, I thought. She’s into pornography.

  The man kissed the woman and disappeared among the trees. She watched him as if wanting to be sure he was gone then slipped through flowers and trees more mysterious than Henri Rousseau’s dreamscapes. Everything was so new and bright, as if every flower had just unwound from its bud, and the dew had not yet been burned away by the sun.

  She stopped before a tree with brilliant blue-green leaves and a translucent, reddish fruit. She was talking to it in some language I had never heard. Correction - she was not talking to the tree; she was speaking to a serpent wound around its trunk. As they spoke, the fruit began to glow, as if the morning sun had found a single path through the shimmering green canopy and was concentrated in that one fruit. She reached out, hesitated, laughed at something the serpent said then picked the fruit and ate it.

  I stood up and had to catch myself on the back of my chair to keep from falling. When I looked back at the ceiling, the naked man had rejoined the woman, and they were talking. Joyce must be watching some uncensored program on The History Channel about the Garden of Eden, but Joyce was asleep in the TV room. The wand glowed on the floor beside her.

  I picked it up. The man took a bite of the fruit and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he looked down and saw that he was naked. His eyes locked with the woman’s. I have never seen two human beings so surprised and so horrified. I am not superstitious, but I knew what would happen next. God would come looking for them in the cool of the day, and no man could see God and live.

  “Give me that,” Joyce snapped, taking the wand away. “Isn’t it time for you to go to bed?”

  On The Food Channel Emeril was demonstrating how to cook sausages without blackening the pan.

  “How are your knees today?” I said to avoid a confrontation.

  “I’m playing golf with Nancy tomorrow. Why?”

  Yes, it was time for me to go to bed. If she had not taken the wand away, I would have seen what no man besides Adam was ever supposed to see.

  * * *

  Since I was obviously experiencing some interaction with my medications, I decreased them to increase my tolerance for alcohol. After dinner I would sit in my chair with my glass beside me, wondering how long until the ice melted and whether I would have the energy to go to the kitchen for a refill. After a week, I just brought the bottle with me. Who needed i
ce? What I needed was a peace that receded farther from me with every stifling day.

  I dozed through Washington Week in Review. When I awoke, I stood up and went into the TV room, thinking it was time for another rerun of John Wayne’s True Grit. As usual, the TV was on The Cooking Channel.

  “It’s about time for . . .” I started to say to Joyce, but it wasn’t Joyce.

  The Duchess of Alba was lying naked on the couch, passing the wand over her raised knee. For a second our eyes met, artist and subject, and the air was fragrant with her perfume. I took the wand and held it up to my eye like an artist’s brush and sighted over her. No, her pose was not right. Setting the wand on the end table, I positioned her arms behind her head and touched her thigh to lower it onto the couch. I could not let her go.

  My God, has it really been 40 years since I had a woman on a couch? Joyce and I hadn’t done anything since I started my medications.

  “I won’t miss it,” she had said.

  Suddenly, I knew how much I did. She moaned and cried and scratched my back, until all she could say was, “Oh, my back.” It was the best sex in years.

  She wasn’t speaking Spanish. Isn’t Alba in Spain? No, it was Joyce again.

  “What are you doing, Walter?” she screamed. “Look what you’ve done to my skirt!”

  She pushed me away. I have never been so ashamed. One minute I was the greatest painter in the world making love to his most beautiful model, the next I was an old man with a sour, angry wife proud to lead a passionless existence.

  “That doctor gave you Viagra, didn’t he?” she demanded.

  Like a fraternity boy when the brothers turn on the lights in the middle of his first sexual encounter, I picked up my clothes and slunk away. Yes, I should see the doctor. The medications weren’t right. I really didn’t want Joyce any more than she wanted me.

  * * *

  Doctors, however, know only medicine. They don’t really know the human mind, or the mysteries with which it deals. What doctor could tell me why the wand had seven sides? You can’t look that one up in the Merck Manual. Was it to attract the influences of the seven visible planets, or to ascend to the seventh heaven, or to open the seventh seal? Why are there seven chakras, those rainbow bands of cosmic energy that shimmer around our spines like electromagnet force around a magnet? Did the makers of the wand, like God, need seven days to complete their creation? No, I shall discard all human artifices, stop my medications, and proceed on my journey to enlightenment alone.

  * * *

  From the corner of my eye, I watched Joyce toying with the wand, indifferent to the direction she rotated it. One evening she pointed it over her shoulder at me, turning it slowly. In that instant, I felt as if bands of steel were being tightened around the crown of my head, my throat, chest, solar plexus, stomach and genitals. Like a prisoner in the iron maiden, I was strapped to my chair, unable to move until the awful lid was closed and my eyes were pierced by spikes.

  Suddenly, it was over. Drenched in sweat, I sat motionless, knowing that if the pressure had continued for another minute, I would have died. From the TV room I heard Giada talk about sharpening knives, and Joyce’s snore. Carefully, I stood up. Joyce had dropped the wand when she fell asleep. It lay on the floor beside her, pulsing with light, as if all the energy in the universe were being refracted into colors never seen in any rainbow.

  If I looked into it, I would go blind, but who could resist gazing at colors only God could imagine? It was warm when I picked it up. I shined it on my hand until it started to raise a welt.

  “Ouch!” I said then I saw the vision.

  Wavering bands of light-blue, gold, pink, purple and rose dipped and swayed around a brilliant white light, like dancers in the corps de ballet circling the prima ballerina. Slowly, as if they were too vivid for humans to endure, the auras faded. I saw Gautama sitting under the pipal tree with his disciples the moment he achieved enlightenment. His breathing stopped, his half-shut eyes turned inward, he held his palms open, thumbs resting on his index fingers, to spread the sacred nothingness over his disciples. Yes, I’d gladly lose my sight now I had witnessed the Buddha’s absorption in the emptiness beyond creation.

  “Give that to me,” Joyce exclaimed, grabbing the wand. “It’s aligned with me. You’re not supposed to touch it.”

  How could I, who had witnessed the discovery of nothingness, resist? How could I argue? Who besides the Buddha had ever seen so much? So I forgot about my nightcap and went to bed, hoping the peace that surpasses resignation would finally be mine.

  Sleep does not come easily to the damned. I lay tossing until Joyce finally came upstairs and scolded me for taking up so much of the bed. Whenever I started to doze off, I felt the band tightening around my skull, or saw the smooth, sensuous, sexless face of Gautama, eyes crossed, absorbed in the emptiness within, or Adam and Eve cowering in the Garden as God called to them. Yes, I had made a terrible mistake discontinuing my Halcion®.

  Somehow I was able to stagger into the bathroom and find two of the sacred tablets. The doctor had warned me that they might make me forgetful. What would I not give to forget everything I had seen? Velvet darkness enveloped me, and I slept until Joyce awakened me at noon to say she was going out for lunch with the girls.

  “You’re drinking too much again,” she said. “It can’t be good for you with all that medication.”

  It is the only way to get through the day until time for my draught from Lethe, I thought but dared not speak.

  What idiot thoughts we must endure as we wait for the night to consume us. What if Charon’s boat tipped over, spilling me into the River Styx? Would I, like Achilles, become invulnerable? But who wants to be invulnerable after he is dead? I only want to forget everything, and to do that, I must reach the sacred Lethe. Perhaps when I climb out of the boat, the gods of the dead will make me one of their own, and I will lie beside the river of forgetfulness forever, in a waking sleep, beyond Alzheimer’s and enlightenment.

  That evening, peace enveloped me with my second drink. I was glad I had stopped my other medicines. How wrong we are to trust in big pharma when we have such resources within ourselves. I listened to a Beethoven piano concerto while leafing through a magazine with pictures of $25,000 watches and Italianate men, with legs as thin as spiders’, modeling alligator shoes. There was a nice article about what to look for when renting a yacht and another about condo hunting in Bahrain. When the voice on the radio introduced something by Bartok, I decided to see what was on TV.

  As an accommodation to me, Joyce had agreed to watch a Superman rerun featuring Lex Luther. As we watched, Clark Kent lifted a manhole cover, and smoke spewed out of the sewer like smoke from a burning coal mine, sulphurous and stifling. I could not breathe. I had to awaken Joyce, or we would both suffocate. Then something started to rustle, like June bugs around a lantern, and rivulets of black locusts swarmed out of the smoke. One of them alighted on Joyce. It had a human face and a crown of gold. Leering at me, it raised its tail like a scorpion, ready to strike. If it stung Joyce, she would die. I slashed at it with the remote, knocking it onto the coffee table.

  “God!” I cried, pounding it.

  There was a tremendous crash.

  “What are you doing?” she screamed, sitting up.

  The remote had burst open, spilling batteries onto the floor. Apollynon the angel from the bottomless pit was dead.

  “Just go to bed,” she said.

  How can I just go to bed, I thought as I slunk upstairs. I have staked the heart of the devil, and the human race is saved.

  No, the ignorant will never understand, but I could prove my righteousness to myself. I went into my den and opened my Bible to the Book of Revelation. Yes, I was right. The monster I had killed was one of the creatures loosed on the earth when the fifth angel blew his trumpet. I shuddered uncontrollably. I had stopped the divine plague, I had thwarted God’s plan to destroy the world.

  But I had not saved anything. I saw when I rea
d the newspaper the next morning. Wars, alarms and plagues still engulfed the world. I was happy when Joyce told me she was spending the day at the nail salon and the club, where no one worried that the apocalypse was near or feared the loss of time.

  Now I have eaten of the honeyed scroll, but no angels attend me. Is the prophet like a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear, when his voice is silenced by indifference? If God speaks and no one listens, have the scoffers proved He does not exist? I could no longer endure having peered into the secrets of creation, and, like God, have no one with whom to share my vision. No, the only way out was to reverse the process and undo everything the wand had done, starting with Joyce.

  That night I waited in my chair for Joyce to fall asleep. Emeril, Giada, Iron Chef and a host of imitators fried and fricasseed and splayed, and still she did not blink. No, like the swordsman in the sacred grove, she was afraid to sleep lest some rival sneak in and kill her in the night. I must have dozed for a moment, for after the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. Terrified, I awakened. The apocalypse had begun. I was too late. Still, I owed it to humanity to try to turn it back.

  Joyce snored gently in front of the TV. My slippers were softer than a cat’s paw on the carpet. I synchronized my breathing with hers, so she would not sense that another person was near. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and froze. Were the stars veering out of their orbits to watch me? No, it was only Paula, talking about how best to debone a chicken.

  The tip of the wand rested on the floor, balanced on Joyce’s half open fingers. Would she feel a sudden cold when I took it from her and awaken? No, she did not move. When I held the wand up to my eye, I saw her auras shimmer around her, fragile as the wings of butterflies. She was so perfectly at peace. She would never know I had saved the world by undoing her chakras.

  I pointed the wand at the top of her head and began to rub it back and forth in my palms, like a Boy Scout starting a fire. She shifted in her sleep, as if troubled by an angry dream. I raised the wand and looked at her through it. The beautiful crown chakra, center of peace, wisdom, and oneness with God, dissolved like a burst of light around a dying star. I had never felt such intense excitement. Next the indigo chakra in the center of her forehead, place of devotion and peace of mind; then the chakra at her throat, bluer than the Italian lakes in spring and source of speech, and then the green heart chakra, center of soul consciousness, dissolved into the nothingness from which they had arisen. I twirled the wand at her yellow solar plexus until my hands ached. It was the center of digestion and personal power, her greatest strengths. Like a stick in drying glue, it slowly stopped turning. When I held it up to see how much farther I had to go, I saw her inner eye staring at me. I dropped the wand in horror.