Love Warps the Mind a Little

by John Dufresne

  We heard the tea kettle whistle. Dorie got up. When she stood she kind of leaned back from her hips. I noticed the Day-Glo Band-Aid on her ankle, as orange as a detour sign. I said, “Do you know Booger Marcelonis?” She looked at me like this was a trick question. I said, “Booger. Lives on Shays Road in Worcester. About, oh, thirty-fivish. Walks everywhere.”

  Dorie said no, she didn’t know any Booger.

  I said, “You look familiar.”

  She said, “I have one of those faces.”

  We were here at Dorie’s for introductions and assessment. I mean, Judi was here for all that. I was along for support and because I was curious. The actual healing sessions would begin with the next visit if everything went smoothly between Judi and Dorie. Dorie returned with a tray on which she carried a teapot, three mugs, a creamer, and three spoons. “I know I know you from somewhere,” I said. She smiled, set the tray on the glass-topped coffee table.

  Dorie asked Judi if she’d undergone an MRI ever? CAT scan? ultrasound? X ray? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, that’s not good, Dorie said, but at least I know what I’m dealing with. What she was dealing with was severe disruption of Judi’s prana, her auric fields, something like that, something about DNA not healing or replicating. I thought, I’ve seen her somewhere before. Just then Dorie looked over, scrutinized me, cocked her head like she thought she heard distant bells or screams. She seemed to deflate, as if her whole body were frowning. She turned back to Judi and explained how the medical procedures interfered with her mental, emotional, and etheric auras, made the healing more problematic. Judi didn’t question this, so who am I?

  Dorie said, “Judi, tell me how you feel about this cancer you have.”

  Judi folded her hands on her lap, looked at her hands. She shook her head. “It scares me. I think it’s killing me.” Then she looked up, smiled. She cried.

  Dorie touched her own heart with her right hand, closed her eyes, took a breath. What was this about? I wondered. She moved her hands along her body as if she were fingering notes on a flute. What was she measuring? She opened her eyes. “Judi, what do you want to happen here? What are your expectations?”

  Judi said, “What I want to happen is that I get healed of this cancer. What I expect to happen is that I won’t be. I’ll just get sicker and then I’ll die.”

  Dorie was quiet. She explained what she would be doing, trying to locate the source of the cancer, not the biological source, the symptom, she called it, but the real source, the damage from difficult relationships or other emotional trauma in this life or another. I looked out the window at the slate-blue pond. I saw a rowboat tethered to Dorie’s dock. As I watched, the wind picked up, rustled through the pines. The rowboat turned into the wind and faced me. I wanted to be in that boat. I wanted to drift away. I wanted to look down into the water, watch the sunfish school through the pickerel weed. I wanted to lie back, close my eyes, listen to the water slap at the side of the boat. Set the typewriter on the rowing thwart, get myself a little camp chair. Why not? But where would I get money to buy a boat, a house on a lake? I heard something about a thousand-petaled lotus, and I tried to pay attention.

  Dorie told Judi, “You’ve kept your legs crossed for a half hour now. You kept covering your sacral chakra while we talked. Look at yourself.”

  Judi’s hands were on her knee, and her leg was pulled up like a shield. She smiled, sat up straight.

  Dorie said, “It’s as if you were protecting this cancer.” She reached toward Judi’s stomach, held her hand six inches from Judi, and stroked the air like it was a cat. “Your aura should be glowing with vibrant colors. It’s brown here.”

  I thought this was interesting. The eyes won’t work for this kind of seeing, obviously. I didn’t believe it, but I admired the imagination at work. Brown like maple syrup? I wondered, or brown like cinnamon? I wondered if Dorie could see the tumors through the skin. So I asked her.

  She told us that every disease, every condition, has a specific vibration which she can tune in to like a radio. And each has a particular temperature, a unique texture, and each a precise brilliant tone, a red or a violet, most of them. She said also what happened was each ailment presents itself to her as a symbol. Like ulcers are pots of boiling pudding; lung cancer is a coal bin; MS is a gray sheet of rusting metal. Cancer in the reproductive organs is usually bees.

  She explained this to Judi. She would work her third eye and her heart chakra on Judi’s second chakra where there are blocks in the energy field. We need to discover the cause, the root cause, for the sickness. It’s manifesting in the body, but it has come from elsewhere. Dorie let that sink in and then added, “This healing is not just for now, Judi, you know that. This is for all the lives you will ever live.”

  I wanted to say, Hello, girlfriend, we’re all adults here, are we not? And we all know that what we are hearing is cruel and fatuous bullshit. It would be funny if it weren’t so monstrous. Repeat after me: Cancer does not germinate in outer space, and it does not travel through time. So let’s conclude the buffoonery and get back to the real world. We’re dealing with a human being here, with her life. Well, that’s what I wanted to say, but I didn’t say anything. Perhaps even groundless hope is better than no hope at all. And maybe hope would make Judi resilient enough to fight the cancer. The placebo effect. Who knows what I’d be doing in Judi’s position. Crawling to Lourdes on my knees, no doubt; sitting in the lobby of a Tijuana cancer clinic, sucking on laetrile lozenges, waiting for my turn to get secret and ancient Egyptian drugs pumped into my veins for the next eight hours.

  There isn’t much difference, is there, between Judi’s reincarnations and Dorie’s brave new world and between them and what the Catholics believe or the Muslims or any of them? The prospect of dying is so horrifying that we need to deceive ourselves or we would be paralyzed. So in the face of everything we know about nature, we simply deny our death. Everything else in the universe dies—dogs, worms, the sun, trees—but we live forever. Our brains have programmed themselves to accept the supernatural. The brain is not so reasonable after all. It wants to live forever. Every time we say a prayer, put our finger on the planchette of the Ouija board, chant our mantra, the brain rewards us with the release of soothing endorphins. Just enough to make us want more.

  Let’s face it. None of this supernaturalism can be true. But believing in it does seem to be essential. I’m right, aren’t I? So what happened to my faith program? What am I left with? Words. Questions. Dale and Theresa. Fear. Enough.

  Judi excused herself, went to the bathroom. Na’pi returned, hopped to the warm spot Judi had just vacated, sat and licked his paws and then his chest. Dorie said, “Your blue is all muddy,” meaning mine. “Your third chakra . . . ” She stared at my stomach. “The cord of auric light is tangled.”

  I said, “And . . . ”

  “There’s someone, a woman . . . ” Dorie shut her eyes. “I see blond hair, freckles. She’s hurt.”

  This was Martha she was talking about. But how could that be? Did Judi tell her?

  “She follows you. Does that make sense?”

  I said I knew a woman like that.

  “Be careful,” Dorie said.

  “I will.”

  “You have a young soul.”

  “Should I be insulted?”

  “You are skeptical.”

  “I am.”

  Judi came back. I stood to go. Dorie said, “I’ve seen cancers that go away. I don’t know why I’ve seen miracles.” She stood, walked us to the back door. She asked Judi not to drink alcohol or take any medication. Judi agreed. Judi would start in two days. At nine, back here at the house. Dorie told Judi she needed a hug. They embraced. “And you, too,” she said. We hugged. She stepped right into my awkwardness and squeezed. I said, “Thank you.”

  She said, “Edith Piaf.”

  I let go of her shoulders. I knew now where I had seen her. “The library!”

  Dorie smiled.

  I told Judi how I’
d been listening to Piaf at the library when I looked up and there was Dorie staring at me, looking puzzled. She didn’t even look away when I caught her.

  Dorie said, “I knew we’d be seeing each other, but I didn’t know why until this morning.”

  63.

  Wheel at the Base of the Self

  DORIE SAID THAT WHAT SHE HAD HOPED TO SEE WAS THE IMAGE OF A SIX-PETALED vermilion lotus, spinning and radiating light. She was talking about her meditation the night before. What she saw instead were those bees, countless bees, swarming around a pulsing, throbbing ball of orange light. This was disturbing, Dorie said, but helpful.

  The plan this morning was for me to wait out back in the yard, read at the picnic table, nap in the hammock, row in the boat, whatever. But it was raining, and I didn’t offer to go for a drive. Judi said she didn’t mind if I watched. I could see, though, that Dorie minded. Call me psychic. She asked if I could sit quietly in a corner. I said I could. She asked if I could keep an open mind. I said yes. She looked at the top of my head. You could learn something today, she told me. I nodded. She sat me on the floor near the fireplace, handed me two large pillows. I smiled. Thank you, I said. Consider me your apprentice.

  Judi lay on her back on a massage table in the middle of the room. Dorie snapped a cassette on the recorder. Peruvian flute music. At least that’s what it sounded like to me. Dorie opened a decoupage box and took out a crystal attached to a gold chain. She told Judi she was going to measure her chakras. She held the crystal over Judi’s body. She began at the head and moved to the hips. Each time Dorie stopped, the pendent crystal spun in slow, tight circles. Dorie sat on a stool at the head of the table. She placed her hands on Judi’s head and remained quiet for several minutes. Dorie said she was going to energize Judi’s body through chelation, which apparently does not mean what I thought it did—removing metals from the body. Dorie held her hands about six inches over Judi’s feet, palms down, fingers extended, and began to move them as if massaging the air. She told Judi she might feel heat or a tingling or a tightening of her chest. Dorie worked her way to Judi’s head. Occasionally, Judi moaned, flinched.

  Dorie said, “I’m lighting you up, Judi. I’m pushing energy through the blocks.”

  Judi looked to be asleep. Her mouth was open, her arms and her legs jerked. This is how she sleeps normally, with all her nerves harmlessly misfiring.

  Dorie said, “Judi, let whatever happens happen.” She held one hand a foot or two over Judi’s heart, then brought it down to six inches. Now with both hands she moved to Judi’s head and began to move toward Judi’s feet. Her hands dipped in places, rose in others. At moments Dorie seemed to be kneading ethereal dough. At other times she seemed to be smoothing fabric. She said, “You may feel hot; you may see inside your body; you may feel as if you’re in another place or imagine you’re being visited by people from your childhood or from a preincarnation; you may feel my hands on you, inside you. That’s the chakra funneling the healing energy into your physical body, cleaning and balancing. You may feel nothing. Just let it flow.”

  Judi writhed. She cried briefly. Dorie worked at Judi’s abdomen like a potter throwing a ball of clay. “Can you feel the cold, Judi?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been blocked here for a long time,” Dorie said. “A century, maybe longer.” Dorie closed her eyes. “Do you see what I see?”

  Judi said she did.

  I saw Na’pi, the little prince, step down from the windowsill and then leap from the floor to the fireplace mantel. He looked at the women.

  Dorie said, “What do you see?”

  Judi said, “The river, the road, the sky, the light emerging from the smoke.”

  Dorie said she was going to seal the aura. She held her hand over Judi. Judi opened her eyes. I think she said, “Hope and control,” but I’m not sure. Dorie told Judi that now she, Judi, would be taking a journey through her body. She said the doorway was the forehead. “You are seeking knowledge,” she said. “Now, I want you to move to your belly. Nothing can stop you. Now look around you. You’re looking for the tumors, for the cancer. Do you see them?”

  “Everywhere I look.”

  “Now I want you to listen.”

  I heard the recorded flute, which I had forgotten about. You could hear the note the flutist played and the breath the flutist exhaled. Then I heard tires on the gravel road out front.

  Dorie said, “What do you hear?”

  “A humming like a machine that’s high and then low, loud and then soft.”

  “You’re hearing the note that fractures structure and the note that smashes chaos.”

  “And now the sound is color,” Judi said.

  “Violet?”

  “Yes, from mauve to black.”

  “I want you to use all your senses now. Touch, taste, smell.” Dorie waited. “And be aware of how you feel right now. The you on the inside. The you on the outside.”

  I don’t ever want to smell any of my internal fluids. The thing about being healthy is that the body kind of disappears. But now I was aware that my eyes were itchy—probably thanks to Na’pi—and my wrist-egg throbbed. My feet itched. My nose was stuffed. I had to pee. I was beginning to feel a little queasy. I heard Dorie say, “What is it that you need in order to get healed.”

  Judi said, “They won’t tell me.”

  Dorie told Judi to come on back, to return through the brow chakra and to relax and to imagine herself back in the womb, where it’s all warm, soft, quiet. “Just float there,” Dorie said. “Your body is whole and pure and miraculous, and nothing can touch you.”

  And that’s what I did. Without evoking an image of my actual mother, which would have ruined everything, I ensconced myself in her womb. I was upside down because that’s how I liked it, the blood rushing to my enormous head. I opened my little fist, closed it. I touched the umbilical cord, my first love. I thought, Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live our lives backward? Like suddenly you open your eyes in a hospital room and you’re aware of tubes in your nose and wires in your arm, but you don’t know where you are or where you came from. Like Frankenstein’s monster. You’re frightened and you cry a little. In a few days, you’re feeling better. The people tell you that for eighty-four you’re doing as well as could be expected. What does this mean? In a week you’re brought home. You are disoriented, but you settle into idleness. You read, fish, and go to restaurants with your wife for about twenty years. You suffer the usual childhood illnesses—arteriosclerosis, cancer of the prostate, Alzheimer’s—but they get better, as they always do. You decide there’s more to life than loafing around. So you sell the Florida condo, move north to be near your brother, get a job. As the years go by, you like the job more and more but you make less and less money It’s okay. You need less. You’re happy. The world seems less complicated. You decide there’s more to life than work. You’re not maximizing your potential. You’re using only a tenth of your brain power, a quarter of your abilities. So you retire and go to school. College is great. You make all kinds of friends and everyone has so much energy. For a while there it’s sex, sex, sex. You do all your thinking with your dick. But as you get younger, you understand that even though intercourse is amazing, especially with Margaret Nugent, there must be more to life than indulgence. There is. Running as fast as you can. Toys. Sugar. Cartoons. You get tired easier these days. You begin to take naps. Soon you’re sleeping whenever you can. Your mom has to wake you up to eat. You’re not interested. The food’s bland. You can’t see that well. What you can smell is unappealing. You can no longer discriminate sounds. It’s all just noise. You end up sweetly dreaming your life away. And then you’re unborn and you spend nine months or so floating in a warm ocean, all your needs taken care of. And then you die.

  When I snapped out of it, Judi was talking. She told Dorie that she could see a light at the bottom of the river and she was walking toward the light. And now her knees were wet and now her feet have been swept up, have lost the
ir purchase on the rocks. She could hear him yelling, coming for her. And then she allowed herself to rest, to ride the current, and she was carried away. Judi cried. Dorie cried. What had I missed exactly?

  Dorie asked Judi to sit up. The session, apparently, was over. I was sure we’d been there for hours, but it had been fifty-one minutes. Dorie and Judi sat on the couch. I stood, hesitated. I went to the chair and sat. Dorie said it would take her a few minutes. Judi stared at the ceiling. I was exhausted. Dorie told me she was clairsentient and so could feel the pain that Judi felt. But she would recover in a few minutes. When she did, she told us what Judi evidently knew, that it was worse than we thought. Dorie was sure that there was involvement with the lungs and the head.

  Dorie took Judi’s hand. “Of course there is reason to hope. We know where to work now. We have discovered the source.” She looked at Judi.

  I said, “The river?”

  Dorie nodded. “Judi can tell you what went on if she needs to.”

  I said, “Why she was trying to kill herself?”

  Dorie said, “Yes.”

  Judi rested her head on Dorie’s shoulder. She smiled at me. I tried to picture Judi with her head on Dr. Pawlak’s shoulder. Any doctor’s shoulder.

  64.

  A Coincidence of Opposites

  DORIE’S HUNCH ABOUT THE SPREAD OF THE CANCER WAS CONFIRMED BY THE radiologist’s report on Judi’s most recent X rays. A constellation of specks on the left lung, a blemish on the right hemisphere of the brain. Bad news that for some reason offered Judi hope. Her trust in Dorie had been validated. I suppose that was it. I was more alarmed by the news than she was, and I phoned Dr. Pawlak to try to, I don’t know, get some kind of insight into how we might convince Judi to undergo radiation therapy if nothing else. And I guess I wanted to know if it was already too late even for that. I left three messages, one on a machine, two with the receptionist who wore the heavy perfume. Dr. Pawlak did not get back to me.