My old journals are full of entreaties earnestly titled “THE LIST OF WHAT I WANT AND HOW I CAN GET IT,” offset by roman numerals that included such headings as Graduate College, Run Boston Marathon, Write in the South of France, under which were suggestions for doing so: Pell Grant, fix foot, cross-train, yoga, money, time, other people. My friend MuRasha told me that you cannot desire that which is not possible to manifest somewhere in the universe. MuRasha channeled Pleiadians, beings of Love and Light, from the constellation Taurus. Pleiadians do not come in darkness, she said. They come in Light, where all things are revealed. MuRasha’s tiny studio apartment in Olympia was lined with old milk jugs. Every couple of months she took the jugs to Mount Shasta, where she filled them with Saint Germain water. Ascended Master of the Seventh Ray, Saint Germain, who has come to earth embodied as a high priest of Atlantis, Plato, Saint Joseph, Hesiod, Christopher Columbus, and Francis Bacon, fed the poor, worked for peace, and wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. One day in 1930, he was met on Mount Shasta by another hiker. Together the two took astral trips through time and space, to other worlds and lost civilizations. One of these, an interplanetary, interdimen-sional portal whose citizens travel on electromagnetic subways and use amino-acid-based computer systems, is the mythological underground city of Telos. Telos lies beneath the town of Shasta. Its people are descendents of Lemurians, highly evolved beings, who were given permission to build their city after a tussle with the Atlantians over whether less evolved civilizations ought to be left to evolve at their own pace. The Pleiadians instructed MuRasha to collect and drink the water from Mount Shasta. She says she doesn’t ask why, she just does what they tell her to do. When I visit MuRasha she puts beautiful translucent stones in a glass and pours the Saint Germain water over the stones. After I drink it, she instructs me to lie down with my eyes closed. She takes the stones out of the glass and places them on my heart chakra and solar plexus. Her voice pitches several octaves higher in a kind of operatic yodel she describes as a dolphin call.
“You can see them,” she coaxes. “Pleiadians work through consciousness.” In my mind’s eye I feverishly erase the chalkboard, open my consciousness to the vibrational frequencies, the octaves of the fifth dimension, as she calls them. A few short minutes pass.
“Are they blue?” I ask.
“Yes! Yes! What shade?”
“Cobalt?”
“Yes! Yes! What are they doing?”
“Sitting in the window of my childhood bedroom?”
The first time I saw a silver cigar-shaped object float quietly and unobtrusively in the evening sky I began to scream. My sister turned around. When she saw what I saw she began to scream. My mom came running out of the house, her arms in the air, her eyes wild. We pointed up. She shielded her eyes and put her hand flat on her chest. “It’s a blimp,” she yelled. “The Goodyear Blimp.” To my sister she said, “Don’t ever scream like that unless you crack your head open,” and to me she said, “Don’t ever scream like that, unless your sister cracks her head open.” She went back inside. Full of relief and disappointment, we flopped down in the front yard and watched the blimp make its silent way over the tree line until it disappeared behind the towers of Wheaton Center. I imagined lots of people huddled cozily inside the blimp, its curved surfaces cradling them like beanbag chairs. But I did not get to steep for very long in my blimp fantasy. “That’s not the way a blimp works,” my mom told me. People don’t sit in the blimp. They sit in a tiny gondola beneath it, in seats with seat belts, just like driving in a car or flying in an airplane. This came as a disappointment. I wanted badly for there to exist a flying object whose occupants, inside of which, lolled around in Mickey Mouse sleeping bags watching The Wizard of Oz in color and eating sugary cereals. Blimps are really just big balloons, my mom said. They float because they are filled with an invisible, lighter-than-air substance called helium.
In my world things that float in the air float because they are balloons or because they are clouds or bubbles. I was four and I could not accept that a blimp was nothing more than a colossal silver balloon, whose contents I was now being told were lighter than air and invisible. I accepted other systems: inside my chest was a heart, inside my head a brain. Between the spaces of my four fingers an orange hue I knew to be blood glowed as I pressed them together in the light. But the blimp with its big open space of invisible substance meant there were objects unobstructed, unobscured in my line of sight whose contents I could and would not, under any circumstances, ever see.
Inside the falling airplanes of my dreams a sober scene belies the vertiginous horror passengers must have felt when, in full view of the Pittsburgh airport, US Air flight 427 rolled out of the sky. In my dreams no spidery fissures race up the walls, no overhead bins pop open, no chunks rip loose the plane’s belly. The g-force does not drain the blood away from my brain or pull down my rib cage. The force of the acceleration does not cause bruising or a rash of broken blood vessel called geezles. While federal crash standards require that a passenger in a typical accident not experience g-loading for longer than thirty-six milliseconds, a typical person can function under heavy g-loads within the first five seconds. After five seconds a loss of peripheral vision and color perception called a grayout occurs, followed by the complete loss of eyesight called a blackout. Unfortunately, graying and blacking out does not ensure a loss of consciousness, which passengers of Pan Am flight 103, who were not injured from the explosion or the decompression or the disintegration of the aircraft, are believed to have regained at some point during their 35,000-foot fall. A mother was found holding her baby, seatmates were found hand-in-hand, passengers were found clutching crucifixes. During a grayout or a blackout, an altered state of awareness called A-LOC (Almost Loss of Consciousness), characterized by the disconnection between cognition and the ability to act on it, overcomes you—you will still hear and think and feel—before G-LOC (loss of consciousness) occurs. When it does, you will lose bladder and bowel control. You will experience sudden muscle contractions called myoclonic convulsions or jumps, similar to those we feel just as we are dropping off to sleep. During the jumps, you will have vivid and memorable dreams.
I was a reverent and devout Catholic child, named for a young missionary and messenger of the Immaculate Conception. When my mom was nineteen she watched The Song of Bernadette. In it a young peasant girl named Bernadette is taking off her shoes to cross a canal when she feels a gust of wind. A bright light catches her eye in the cliff face running along the canal. Something white in the shape of a lady motions for her to come closer. Bernadette is fearful. She begins to say the rosary. Over several visits the apparition, dressed in white and holding her own rosary, tells Bernadette to return for fifteen days. News spreads and crowds gather. Though they do not hear what she hears, they see Bernadette’s lips move. And though they do not see what she sees, they watch her dig in the muddy ground below the grotto. As the water pools before her, she scoops it into her hand to drink. She is crazy, they whisper.
Later, Bernadette tells the priest, “She indicated that I drink from the spring and wash in it.”
“Why did she ask you to do that?” wonders the priest.
“I am drawn there by an irresistible force,” Bernadette tells him. “When I see her I feel I am no longer in this world. When she disappears I am amazed to find myself still here.”
I believed in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. I prayed to Saint Anthony for my lost crayon barettes, a missing two-dollar bill, the mouthpiece from my alto sax. Each time my faith in the procession of the saints was matched by my faith in the power of prayer, both of which were reaffirmed when the lost object was discovered under my pillow, in the desk of Andy Besh, or inside the neck of my alto sax by a confused music store employee. I was too young to ask for clarity or strength or foresight, but old enough to feel the weight of my conscience. I confessed to thinking a classmate ugly or my sister stupid, and for those I was asked to say three Hail Ma
rys and a Glory Be. But the weight was no more than a jab. I feared the real urge to clear my conscience came less from a penitent heart than from a belief in the conditional: If I confess, then I can receive the Body of Christ. For a child, the silent contemplation of Catholic mass—the forty-five minutes of sitting, standing, and kneeling—is finally broken when at last we file out of the pew and down the long line to receive the Eucharist. The break is enhanced by the belief that something real and holy happens as the host dissolves on the tongue. Despite learning all the secrets of wafer-making from my altar-boy friends and despite a detailed account from my neighbor, who said she was given loaves of white bread and taught to press the slices into tiny half-dollars after she and her friend were caught in the sacristy eating the wafers, I felt the Holy Spirit move through me. Many years later I discovered that the perceived physiological effects—the rush of energy, the pounding in my chest, the flush on my cheeks—I had long ascribed to the profound sacrifices made for me by Jesus were really just the effects of oxygen coursing through my body after forty-five minutes of stillness and silence.
When, decades later, I arrived at a writing workshop in the South of France and a self-proclaimed recovering alcoholic Buddhist poet told me to Go to the dark place, I had well embraced the notion that thoughts dictate reality. I believed in the laws of attraction. And while I understood that they did not exactly promise fulfillment, I had only partially begun to accept that if you put attention and thought into something you wanted, you got it. But if you put attention and thought into something you didn’t want, you got that too.
The moments that elapsed between the engine explosion and the subsequent emergency landing on one instead of two engines were, physically, some of the most uneventful of my life. As a young person I loved being flung and spun and tossed into the air. I rode roller coasters that twisted and dropped so fast they left strings of saliva across my face. I jumped out second-story windows and balconies, off rooftops and into piles of snow, out of trees and into raked leaves, and when I was sure I could not get any higher, I jumped from the apex of the longest swing in the playground, savoring that airborne second before landing with a thud and a roll. Once during a school assembly I volunteered to sit on the shoulders of a blindfolded man riding a unicycle. I trusted the laws of motion: action-at-a-distance and the tendency of objects to resist change, that all would end with the intact simplicity of a falling apple. Airplanes followed that course. I not only believed in them, I wanted to be a part of a cast that kept the belief alive.
I was six when I was given a flight manual. That year my first-grade class stood outside to watch the flicker that was the Space Shuttle Columbia launching out of Cape Canaveral. When I was ten I wrote to Sally Ride. By then I had cemented my career choice. By then I had also become suspicious after reading that Amelia Earhart had fallen victim to the Bermuda Triangle. Uncle Tom took me up in his Cessna, attached a pair of headphones around my ears, talked me through the preflight check, telling me where to push and pull: that pedal to turn the plane, this steering wheel to lift the nose up and down. The plane wants to fly itself. During climb out you want your flaps at zero degrees. This dial right here. You want the nose of the plane to touch the place where the horizon and the sky meet. Keep an eye on the wingtips. When we’re in the air, your job is to keep the nose of the plane one fist below the horizon at all times. Calm your hands. Calm your hands. If you pull your steering wheel up too high and the nose of the plane lifts too far too fast, you’ll stall. You feel it? This is what happens when you stall.
The plane shuddered and yawed and banked momentarily before steadying itself. The cabin lights came on, the woman across the aisle stopped crying, and I resumed my praying, silently. Anyone could hear that the engine was no longer powering the airplane, but the illusion of normalcy alarmed me.
In kindergarten, Eddie told me that in his backyard beneath the big blue slide lived the Devil. Uncle Tom told me that the Spanish moss which hung limp on the cypress trees during the day came alive when the sun set. A certain white house on the main thoroughfare gave me “the heavies.” As I grew up, books filled with dead bodies floating in quarries were read in front of curtain-less picture windows after dark. Scenes were snuck from The Exorcist and Halloween: foot-long needles sliding through eyeballs, flesh melting in loose, serrated chunks. When the Ted Bundy made-for-TV movie aired the year I turned twelve, my siblings and I taped it. The Deliberate Stranger, a two-part series, follows Ted Bundy from Washington to Utah to Colorado to Florida as he lures women into his tan VW. We loved The Deliberate Stranger. We argued over his victims as if we were arguing over the backyard shenanigans of friends and neighbors. “They did not find Carrie-Anne’s skull at Lake Sammamish,” insisted my nine-year-old sister. “That was Dawn’s, you idiot.” We clutched one another each time Ted flashed a fake badge or emerged from a wooded state park, when hair and dental records were collected and scrutinized by baffled patholo-gists.
Why are we still ascending? I asked the pilot. They have to disengage autopilot, he answered.
“They did a real number on you,” says the grandma, aiming her camera.
I point to the poker chip in her forehead. “Looks painful,” I joke. “Bad gambling accident?”
“Shrapnel,” she says, pointing her camera at two teenage girls who walk past us calmly and importantly. They hold their heads as though they’re balancing books so as not to disturb the oozing cuts across their necks.
“I am actually dying from this,” says the taller girl. She points to her friend. “You’re already dead.”
“I’m not actually dead,” says her friend.
There’s an evident hierarchy. The survivors, who consequently look in much worse shape than the deceased, are getting all the press, while the dead, played mostly by younger children who will not be required to do anything but lie in the grass, vie for attention—and fake blood.
The boy grabs his neck and rolls his eyes into his head. The girls keep walking. “Grandma?” he asks. “Don’t you want more fake blood?”
“No, I don’t want more fake blood.”
The friend brightens. “You know you can eat it,” he says, stretching his tongue across his cheek to where the blood has splattered.
“Don’t eat it,” says Grandma.
I am told the fake blood is a mixture of corn syrup, flour, and red food coloring and most of the children participating are scouts or members of school drama clubs and church groups.
“We do this all the time,” says the boy.
“Every few years,” says Grandma. “FAA requirement.”
If the other dreams were about approaching a crash, the strangest dream, which did not fit into any of the other categories, was about reaching it. In it I watched the ground through a window on the floor of the airplane as it ricocheted violently from one side to the other. We knew we were in trouble, but were kept calm by a woman who talked us through the final moments. She spoke in the soothing way a yoga teacher might talk you through a difficult posture.
“The closer we get to impact,” she said, “the slower time will move.”
As she spoke my limbs grew heavy, my movements full of effort.
“We will see the crash happen before our eyes,” she said, “but we will not feel anything or remember anything at the moment of impact.
“We are all going to die,” she added, “Except for Steve.”
I felt disappointed that I had not been “chosen” and annoyed by what seemed to be a presumption of the outcome. Yes, I could see the ground moving toward us through the window on the floor of the airplane, but who was she to tell me death was imminent? The farther we fell and the slower we approached the end, the less I believed her.
The scene changed. We were being ushered into a large conference room, with big picture windows along the walls. When we were told that we had died in the plane crash and this was the beginning of our afterlife, some people began to cry. “Where are we going?” “What are we doing?
” “It’s not true!” they yelled.
I looked around and noticed that we were all dressed in the same green shirt. We were ushered up to a long conference table on which were stacks of brochures and bowls full of tiny gold charm medals. The medals, intended to hang from gold chains, were the size of silver dollars. On them were inscriptions and illustrations appropriate for the occasion: a seagull flying over water, hands folded in prayer. We were told to choose one we felt represented who we were in life. The inscription on mine read, “I was a nice person.”
The dead and dying have already been chosen, says the woman at the registration table. She looks apologetic and, in a cheerful voice, suggests I play a survivor. After I sign a release form stating my understanding of the terms and conditions (damage of personal effects and stains to clothing are not the responsibility of the county), I walk to a long cafeteria table on the other side of the hangar. “Dead, dying, or surviving?” asks a woman with a clipboard. I hand her my release form and she instructs me to take a seat.
“We’re gonna make you look really gross.” She grins, nodding to a man who is opening a jar of Vaseline. “Should we cut off her arm?”
The Best American Essays 2011 Page 11
