Chapter 4. A Promise at a Séance

Less than a week after he had met the Hopi healer Arthur was again on his way with Dr. Gammersley to be zapped.

Lucia Gammersley was 23, five feet four inches tall, weighed about 125 pounds, had eyes as blue as Arthur's, and wore her light-colored hair to her shoulders. She had been lovers with Shell, who wasn’t over her, and she now seemed to be falling in love with Greg who, like her, was one of the four founders of Desert Light, the organization that had sponsored the recent holistic conference. The summer of 1973 Lucia had lived at Wurts Farm. Arthur, whose money had been used to buy the property in 1970, had not been there because in March he and Lee had fallen in love, and the mad and maddening commune wasn’t an alluring option with Lee in Godwin. That summer Lucia had begun her herbal studies.

She didn’t meet Arthur till a trip from Jamesville to Godwin that fall, and she soon learned to take care of him. From the day they met she hoped for his complete recovery, chances for which the allopathic medical community considered nil because there was no known way to remove the scar tissue in his spinal cord without creating new scar tissue, and it was the scar tissue that blocked the lower-body’s signals to and from his brain. Lucia would not--indeed, it seemed to Arthur, could not--believe that he would never walk, a prognosis that he had long accepted. She knew she had a calling to heal; following it she had consciously developed her common sense differently than had her mother, more as had her great grandmother, a witch from Vladivostok. In general, her knowledge and insights contradicted Arthur and, unlike him, she believed in them. Arthur, by temperament, tried to avoid gullibility and certainty; Lucia tried to avoid doubt and skepticism and believed that they blocked both awareness and receptivity. She had now known Arthur more than four years, and more often than not since meeting they had lived in the same household--sometimes at Wurts Farm, sometimes here in Tucson, and, briefly, in Godwin. She had changed his routine so that he drank more herbal teas and less coffee, and ate more fruits and vegetables and less bread, ham, and cheese.

Nine Wells would be 84 in March. Lucia's teacher Dr. William Lang, whom they were to consult today, was 125 and had been dead for decades.

Arthur was in the back of Carol's pick-up with Stoner, and Dr. Gammersley was up front with Carol. Carol and her boyfriend Stephen lived together on Tyndall Avenue three blocks further from Speedway Boulevard than Arthur and Lee. Carol was broad-shouldered and beautiful with a round face, a slight overbite, and short brown hair, was five eight and weighed 140 pounds. She and Stephen, black-haired, six feet tall, 180, had met while working in the Forest Service as fire look-outs. Stephen, whose bird drawings were hung in museums and published in text books, and who was also an accomplished clarinetist, thought spiritualists and their spooks were curiosities; Carol, though more interested in them than he, was less accepting of them than either Lucia or Lee. She thought it was fun that they were going to a private session with a spiritualist today.

Arthur reclined in his chair, the adjustable back of which was down, and shivered in the mid-afternoon sun that was partially obscured by high filmy clouds. He was shivering because he was sweating and his shirt and hair were damp. Sweating like this, and shivering because he was wet, was part of his life, though he did it less now than he had five years ago. The first ten years after he had been hurt he had sweat copiously hours at a time every day, and he still always carried a towel.

Arthur now knew many people who regularly consulted through mediums, and he did not discount his friends' or the mediums' experience; neither, though, was it his, and he knew his efforts not to disbelieve were only partially successful. He had tried for several years after he was hurt to communicate telepathically, less with whatever non-corporeal might sense his thoughts than with other humans (please bring me water, please bring me water; please come and turn me, please come and turn me). His successes, if any, had escaped his notice.

As Carol drove, Lucia thought about her first remembered encounter with spirit. She had been ten years old when her father had gone into the hospital for a routine operation, caught a hospital-bred staph infection, been treated with pills, and then had a stroke; his speech was still impaired and one side of his body still paralyzed, and Lucia attributed the stroke to the drugs he had been given. Lucia's father's father, her grandfather, had died the year after the onset of his son’s paralysis, by which he had been emotionally devastated. A few hours after he had died, Lucia had told Arthur, the old man had appeared to her as she was grieving on her back porch.

"He looked a lot like usual," she said, "except he was made out of fog. He spread his arms out to me."

"Did you go to him?"

"No. I was so surprised that I just stood where I was."

"Did he say anything?"

"I don't know, maybe, but I don't think so, not in words. However he did it, though, he told me that he was all right and that he loved me."

"Were you afraid at all?"

"I was just amazed; happy too."

Her inclination when she was alone again had been to run to her father and tell him she had spoken to Grand Daddy and that he was all right, but she hadn't done so. Before her father's stroke she had heard him talk about his Vladivostok grandmother’s talking to the dead, and she knew that he would not believe her. The knowledge made her sad and, later, a little angry. Ever since seeing her grandfather, though, she had known that we live in a world that teems with invisible life; she had also known that she would never again feel as alone as she had those few terrible hours after he had died.

"Stoner," Arthur shouted--Stoner, his head in the wind, leaned down to try to hear--, "think I'll jog home? Maybe this dude knows his stuff."

"What?" shouted Stoner.

Stoner was 30. He was a handsome man with dark hair and eyebrows, a black beard and moustache, and a gleam in his eye. He had a fine mind which habitually argued with itself, Stoner a partisan of the dominant side until, overwhelmed by its contradictions, he found himself converted once again--scornful, as usual, of those who believed otherwise.

Arthur did not expect to jog home and didn’t repeat his question.

Lucia’s teacher Mona—an herbalist whose students thought her gifted and flaky--required her apprentices to see Daniel, the flamboyant medium through whom Dr. Lang appeared, as a part of their apprenticeship. Lucia had first done so a year and a half ago and he had channeled Dr. Lang, who told her that she must pray that Spirit use her in its healing work; she had, both day and night. When she had learned Daniel, with whom she'd now consulted a handful of times, was coming to Tucson, she had feared Arthur would refuse to go to a séance; she had been delighted when he had (unenthusiastically) acquiesced (knew enthusiasm too much to ask).

Through college and into his twenty-eighth year Arthur had been an Atheist. He had decided on Christmas Eve the year that he was seven, 1948, that Christianity (like Santa Claus) was a fiction, and by college he was convinced that each of us is alone and life's value independent of the existence or nonexistence of either a deity or an afterlife; he knew that the invisible world around us included atoms, molecules, and cells, not ghosts or gods. He was deeply moved in college when he read St. Augustine's Confessions--but was baffled by Augustine's delusions about God and the world to come. How so wise, thought Arthur at eighteen of Augustine, yet so able to believe what he wished true to be true?

At 27, in spite of himself, he abandoned Atheism, with which he was very comfortable, and accepted agnosticism. At that time he had been smoking cannabis for several months, and he still did not understand what was meant by mind expansion, a phrase then frequently heard and read. Its meaning had clarified as he read Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung’s autobiographical collaboration (with Aniela Jaffe).

Jung and a friend, Arthur read, had visited a chapel in Ravenna and admired four large mosaic frescoes that he remembered as having been windows twenty years earlier when he had first visited. Jung wrote that he and his friend had stood before one of them for a full twenty minutes talking about it. As he was leaving Ravenna the doctor meant to buy prints but was hurried and failed to find any, so when a friend of his later planned to go to Ravenna, Jung mentioned the mosaics to him and asked that he pick up prints. The friend promised that he would, but when he tried to do so he learned the mosaics that Jung had described did not exist.

“This experience in Ravenna is among the most curious events in my life,” (p. 285, Vintage, V-268) Jung wrote. The reason he thought it so, he explained, was that he had learned that in the Fifth Century A.D. one Galla Placidia, caught in a terrible storm at sea, had pledged that if she reached land safely she would build a chapel with large mosaics like those he and his friend had seen. She had honored her pledge and the chapel had been built, and it had stood there into the Middle Ages; it was then destroyed by fire. Dr. Jung explained why he thought that it was those long-gone mosaics that he and his friend had admired, and Arthur thought his explanation was likelier than that he was lying or confabulating.

In the same book Jung wrote about warning a patient that the cessation of his depression they had achieved was inevitably temporary; he told the man, who was a friend, to call him as soon as he felt himself relapsing, as he surely would. Six months later, the man had indeed felt himself being pulled back under and, Jung would learn, even started to phone him. But his wife had long thought her husband overly dependent on Dr. Jung, and she had dissuaded him from completing his call. That night, in another country, Jung had felt a projectile enter his forehead, travel through his brain, strike the back of his skull, and lodge there. The next day, he learned his friend had shot himself in the head, and further inquiry showed that the sensation Jung had felt traced the path of the bullet, which appeared to have been fired at the time Jung had felt what he had felt.

Arthur's skepticism flip-flopped and, no longer Horatio, he was Hamlet. He knew now that just as he didn’t know that Jesus had walked on water, neither did he know he hadn’t. All he actually could know was that he didn’t know. Scoffing was easy; but wasn’t it, he asked himself, usually the expression of a belief quite as unproven as the one being dismissed? His answer was yes.

He had also that year tried fractions of hits of LSD and mescaline. Each of his trips was like a bumpy airplane ride to a person afraid of flying. His legs had shaken for hours. He’d spiked fevers. But several weeks or months after each experience he had felt as though walls of which he’d been unaware had crumbled. The experiences themselves had not been fun, but their longer-term effect he thought beneficent. The first time he had used a psychedelic--mescaline--was a few months before he read Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

For a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s the doors of perception had seemed to open in America. The fantasy that the members of the Weather Underground, one of the so-called violent revolutionary groups of his place and time, could, aided by psychedelics, be or become philosopher kings and queens intrigued Arthur, much as he assumed it fantasy. He was far from thinking LSD and other hallucinogens a panacea, but he did think them an extraordinary tool, the outlawing of which interfered with his and others responsibility to explore the mystery of human being.

Too, he saw the Weather Underground’s bombs, which he thought planted for maximum symbolic value and minimum bloodshed, as statements of outrage delivered with astonishing restraint and grace. That bombs elicited the worst in the power structure, he knew, and that they alienated the politically insulated (and others), he knew, but he also knew that to him they felt good and, too, that the domestic bombs were as balloons popping relative to what had happened and was happening on Springfield Avenue in Newark and in Vietnam. The occasional deaths that bloodied his allies' hands were a price he thought (with the characteristic cold-bloodedness of a hot-blooded non-combatant partisan) must be paid, given the human cost of acquiescence to racism and the Southeast Asian war.

He knew, though managed largely to ignore, that his positive emotional response to the violence of his allies, and his excusing of it as a lesser evil, was suspect and convenient. He even knew he might be wrong and was probably fortunate to be an armchair revolutionary, not a bomber or a killer. But, too, he felt that he was deadly serious and must be.

Arthur had sensed that the movement of which he felt part would collapse with the fall of Saigon, and it seemed now that it had. The war ended, the American-left no longer had a single overriding shared goal. He’d read the Bhagavad Gita and felt comfortable with nonattachment to the fruits of action; he’d cultivated desirelessness. For himself he chose, knowing he might be choosing badly. The ideas of his subculture had led it into a cul de sac, and he was a warrior and fool, wending his way. To a séance! We tend both individually and culturally to make what happens fit our own theory and dogma, not revise theory and dogma to deny nothing of what is. He strove mightily to do the latter, not the former.

The appointment with Daniel was for three o'clock at the Rev. Sperry’s home. It was nearing three, and the seekers were lost; Lucia, afraid that Arthur might never meet Dr. Lang after all, threw up a prayer for succor. Carol turned the truck around and started back in the direction they had come, and when a small green car a block in front of them pulled over to the curb and Bess’ boyfriend Phil, yet another former Godwinite, got out, she recognized him and pulled over. Phil said that he was just killing time until he could go to an appointment and that he was mostly unfamiliar with this neighborhood, but when Carol asked him for directions he was able to help.

Carol parked in front of the house for which they were looking and the Rev. Sperry, a woman in her fifties, came outside to greet them. Daniel was with her. He was about 50, over six feet tall and fleshy but not fat, had white sideburns and elaborately combed hair, and wore white loose-hanging robes. He and Lucia hugged.

"And you must be Arthur," he said.

He took one of Arthur's hands in both of his, which were large and soft, and as introductions were completed the group moved toward the garage attached to the house. They went through the garage and into a windowless ten-by-twelve-foot storage room in which there were several folding chairs and a half dozen long straight trumpets. Stoner picked up one of the trumpets to examine it. Arthur read a lot, and read everything as though it were fiction; Stoner never read fiction, but he had several shelves of how-to books and loved to take things apart, put them back together, and find how they worked. The hearing-trumpets, which were said to amplify the voice of spirit and also help it to hear, were about three feet long with no moving parts; as far as Stoner could tell, they were no different from cheer-leaders' megaphones.

One of the corners of the room had a small stage on which was a straight-backed chair in which Daniel would sit to go into trance; black curtains would be drawn in front of him before the séance began and the windowless room would be dark. Psychic investigators routinely warn that darkened rooms and hearing trumpets are marks of the charlatan, but Arthur, by an act of will, accepted that in this case they might not be. He knew that it was unlikely but possible that his whole attitude might be about to change. Wouldn't this at least be interesting? "Probably not," he thought.

Daniel asked that Arthur's chair be placed directly in front of the curtains. He said Lucia should sit to Arthur's right, Carol to his left, and Stoner stand behind him with his hands on Arthur's shoulders. The women were each to hold one of his hands.

"You will be conductors," Daniel said to them.

He asked Carol to latch the door through which they had entered and reminded everyone not to break his trance because to do so could injure him. Lucia felt giddy. Carol and Stoner, who had not been sure they would be allowed to participate, tried not to seem intrusive. Arthur tried to balance comfortably while holding hands. He habitually leaned on his right elbow and never balanced easily while holding hands.

"Now as Lucia has probably told you," Daniel said, "I will just sit back here and go to sleep. Hilda will speak to you and tell you what to do. Then I expect that Dr. Lang will visit and examine Arthur. I hope he can help.

"What is your problem, Arthur?"

Arthur paused before he answered. This was small talk, and he felt stupid making it.

"Paralysis, I guess," he said, chronically metaphysical, knowing the human problem is living in the two nows that we inhabit simultaneously: the never-changing now which is all a human ever knows and from which he or she cannot escape, and the ever-changing now that follows the past and precedes the future. "From a car accident in 1963; August twenty-five." He had no idea how much or little information to offer. "My neck was broken. There's a scar-tissue block at C-6,-7." He stopped.

"All right," said Daniel. "Will you join me in the Lord's Prayer?"

They said the Lord's Prayer. Stoner and Lucia knew the words; Carol and Arthur each remembered phrases and followed the others' lead as best they could.

"Now I'm going to sleep," said Daniel, and a moment later a new voice, like Daniel's but changed, came from behind the curtain.

"Welcome children," it said.

"Hilda?" said Lucia, with a happily conspiratorial giggle.

"Hello, Lucia," said Hilda. "Whom have you brought?"

Lucia introduced her three friends and Hilda asked the men if either was married. When they said they weren't she said that she was glad. She was one of Daniel's guardians and helped him professionally by acting as his mistress of ceremonies. She told jokes and sang songs.

"I will visit you again," she told Arthur before she left. "When you smell roses but there are no roses nearby, you will know it is me.

"Now I know that you are anxious to meet Dr. Lang."

A new voice came from behind the curtain. Like Hilda's it was unlike yet of a piece with Daniel's. After all, their vocal chords and voice box were his, Arthur reasoned.

"Hello Lucia," the new voice said.

"Oh, hello Dr. Lang," she said. "I'm so happy to hear your voice."

"I see you have brought Arthur."

"Yes. I do hope you can help him."

"I think I can, child, but first I must examine him--though of course I have seen him before."

He had promised Lucia to visit Arthur when she had first met him and each time she had visited thereafter.

Arthur's head was bowed and his eyes were closed; his sweating had stopped. He felt nothing as Dr. Lang examined him.

Carol felt a light touch on her shoulder as one of the megaphones brushed against her. It was floating in the dark room, its end tipped toward Arthur's back as it might have been were it held by a spirit using it to amplify vibrations. "Do not mind the trumpets," Dr. Lang said. Another trumpet floated by Lucia.

Arthur was as open to the spirit doctor as he could make himself, his sense of the absurd jettisoned to the best of his ability. Lucia squeezed his hand encouragingly.

"Try to move your fingers," Dr. Lang said to him.

Arthur had not told the spirit doctor that he had had his wrist tendons surgically attached to his fingers; they still did not move separately but did move as a group.

"Separately?" he asked.

"Yes," Dr. Lang said. "Your right index finger."

It might move, Arthur knew; it might again be innervated. He tried and seemed able to move it a wee bit before his other fingers moved. Lucia felt the movement, exultantly.

"Can you move it?" asked the spirit doctor.

"It moves," said Arthur, "but I can't tell where the movement comes from."

"It's moving!" said Lucia.

"Keep trying to move it independently," said the spirit doctor.

Arthur tried to move it up and then down, up and then down. It had been long since he had tried this exercise.

"What have you done to me?" Arthur asked Dr. Lang, though he was unsure anything at all had been done.

"I have operated on your spirit body," the doctor said. "Now the effects will gradually be felt by your physical body. Try to move your middle finger separately now."

Arthur tried.

"It doesn't seem to move," he said.

"Try your left hand," said Dr. Lang. "Try the index finger."

Carol was holding his left hand. She seemed to feel current passing from the crown of her head, on which a weight seemed to press, through her body and hand and into Arthur. A miracle might already have occurred. Arthur and Lucia had, she thought, implied Arthur was moving his right index finger. She waited in the dark to feel him move one of the fingers she was holding.

"Keep trying," Dr. Lang told him.

Arthur tried. He had tried for years (not frantically, as one might when first discovering paralysis, but because it was there to be done or not, and he still occasionally did it).

"It will come," said Dr. Lang. "You will get better. In three months, you will be out of that chair, young man."

Lucia audibly sucked in her breath. Daniel had never given her reason to doubt him, nor had Dr. Lang. Her prayer was answered? Arthur would walk?

Carol involuntarily exclaimed.

Arthur opened his eyes, surprised. He had not expected to be offered such a put-up-or-shut-up promise. Was Daniel perhaps manic-depressive? Arthur didn't see how an unfulfilled promise of a miraculous cure could help Daniel's business and was surprised that the medium or Dr. Lang himself, if it was he, hadn't hedged what he had said. On the other hand, if Daniel and the doctor could pull it off, Daniel could go big time.

Will he hire me as his publicist, Arthur wondered silently, or would that taint my testimony with self-interest?

"What must I do?" he asked aloud.

"Nothing," said Dr. Lang.

"My specialty," he said with a laugh.

"The work is done," said Dr. Lang. "Just keep on trying to move your fingers and toes."

Arthur could not have believed his walking inevitable, but he had not been asked or told to. "You will be out of that chair," the voice had said. Into another one, Arthur wondered? Dead? He examined the pronouncement for Delphic ambiguity.

"What should we do Dr. Lang?" asked Lucia.

"Massage Arthur's spine," the spirit doctor said.

"Is there any special diet he should follow? Any herbs he should use?"

"No," said Dr. Lang. "Just massage his spine."

Arthur imagined what Lucia might have liked to hear he should consume, suppressed a shudder, and quickly changed the subject.

"Dr. Lang," he said, "for the past week I've had pain frequently over my heart or in it, accompanied by more or less anxiety. Can you tell me what's causing it?"

“Edema," said the doctor. "Do you know what edema is? Swelling? Fluid?"

"Yes."

"It is edema in your lung. It is not dangerous. It is going away."

"Thank you," said Arthur.

"What should he do for it?" Stoner asked.

"Potassium," said Dr. Lang.

Arthur wondered if his body would believe the doctor. My mind doesn’t, he reflected, and in the days and weeks that followed ate an occasional extra orange and took deep and perverse pleasure in the absence of more than the slightest further twinge of pain and the complete absence of anxiety.

"God bless you, my children," said Dr. Lang.

They replied together with blessings.

"God bless you, Arthur," said Dr. Lang.

"God bless you, Dr. Lang," said Arthur.

When Dr. Gammersley heard Arthur the Skeptic bless her teacher the spook she was euphoric. To hear him say it!

And then they heard a new voice.

"Hello my child," it said. "Hello my daughter."

"Who are you?" Lucia asked.

"I am Matthew, child, your master teacher."

"Ohhhhh," she said. She had not met her master teacher before.

Outside it was a sunny Tucson day. Children were coming home from school.

"You are doing well, my daughter," Matthew said. "Continue to study. This man shall walk again."

"I know," she said; "I know he will."

"I must leave now," Matthew said, "but I am always with you. Remember, I am working through your hands."

In the street in the sunlight outside Lucia took Arthur's ten dollars and pressed it into the hand of Daniel's host, who took the modest fee as though it were not required. Thoughts of the difficulties of making ends meet in God's service flitted through Arthur's head. He thought of the believers who'd lost their faith and of the psychics who'd lost their gift but still needed to make ends meet. He neither believed nor disbelieved the promise he'd heard made, though as an oddsmaker he knew he'd bet the ranch against at almost any odds Why doubt or believe when he could wait and see and know? Today was December two. In three months it would be March two.

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