Chapter 11. Bess' Dream, Another Massage, and All the Turkeys Too

"But what if he isn't healed, Lee?" Bess was worried about Arthur and thought Lee ought to be. She didn't like Lee sleeping with Rusty, either, and that she was not only doing it but, it seemed to Bess, not feeling guilty about it made it worse. How was it okay just to think everything was okay? "Don't you think it was cruel to promise him something that isn't going to happen?" Elvis coming through had finished Daniel in Bess' eyes. She believed or she didn't, and now she didn't.

"It wasn’t cruel," said Lee, "because it's going to happen."

Bess knew she was being put off and blocked out; denied. She was hurt. Her disbelief in the phony medium didn't lessen her worth and she refused to feel in the wrong and guilty just because she said what was true when no one wanted to hear it. "I don't know how you can believe that so completely," she said. She didn’t believe Lee did believe it! Bess didn’t shrink from antagonizing. If her tone was displeasing, offensive, she was sorry; it was only the way she talked.

Lee let it be. Disengagement mattered more to her than Bess’ opinion of her beliefs. "I don't want to talk about it," she said.

"Why not?" Bess challenged. She hated people refusing to talk about what she wanted to talk about. She hated being shut out as though her feelings and opinions had no validity at all! She was on the verge of tears and felt that if she cried she'd go crazy. She hated crying! She knew she wouldn't always lose anymore if she could only learn to keep from crying. Nights, she prayed to stop.

"For one, because I don't want to get in an argument."

"Who's arguing, Lee?"

"Well your tone of voice--"

"I hate that ‘tone of voice’ crap, I really do!" Bess said, her tears coming in spite of her, stoking her anger and frustration. “I want you to tell me why you believe that man.”

Bess was a strong woman. She was five feet four and weighed 170 pounds and since the fifth grade had blamed herself for being fat, her size a constant source of frustration, but she was pretty and vivacious and not fat, carried her weight well, just wasn't built skinny; she had fasted for two weeks recently and her weight had dropped from 170 to 168. She could arm wrestle and load a truck like a well-muscled man, had recently torn a Bergen County, N.J. (population one million, thirty thousand of them in Godwin) phone book in half. She could be made to laugh till tears rolled down her face and her friends took pity on her. Lee had told her she should run laugh clinics. There was a nightmare quality to life Bess recognized and feared; her wrists were scarred.

"I don't want to talk about it," Lee said. Bess turned and fled as her tears flowed faster.

The next morning she was with Lee and Arthur in their living room.

"I had a dream last night I'm beginning to remember," she said. "It was about my apporte. I was holding it in my hand and while I was holding it, it cracked across an edge. I remember thinking, 'I have to look at this in the morning.'"

"Did you look?" Lee said.

"No," said Bess.

She hurried from their house to hers, found her leather pouch, and returned to their living room where she opened the pouch and took out her arrowhead. It was cracked and her first rush was sorrow. She had been told her birth flower was black, her spirit guide Gray Cloud, and now her apporte had cracked. Where were sunlight and color and happiness and love? That rush passed quickly, though, with the realization her dream had revealed the truth! Tucson felt like a city of miracles.

"To strengthen your faith, Lass," Arthur said to her.



It was almost ten Tuesday night December 20 and Lee was ready for bed. "Do you want a massage, Honey?" she asked Arthur.

"Sure," he said.

"I'm going to smoke," she said. "Do you want some?"

"No thanks," he said, and thought, "I should."

He lay on his stomach, and as she worked Lee talked to him.

"Feel the current," she said. "It's even stronger tonight."

At first he concentrated on her touch, but during a 10-minute period in which she worked on his lower back, well below his sensation line, his mind wandered and his mood deteriorated. Her fingers came back above his sensation line and onto his neck. She worked his shoulders and moved her hands up into his hair. She loved him so. He pressed his head gently back into her hands and sighed, rolled onto his back with her help, used his overhead trapeze to pull up so he could lean on his right elbow, spread his legs by pushing his left away from his right, and lay back.

"We'll go hiking, Babe," she said. "There are so many places I want to go with you."

She watched her hand as she stroked the inside of his leg from above the knee almost to his crotch. She felt the warmth of his flesh under her hand and saw that his penis was beginning to stiffen. She knew how quickly she could make it hard. It had been more than a month they had been living here together, and she still hadn't had his penis in her mouth. Tonight she would, she thought. She loved this man. She didn’t want to hurt him, only heal him and love him. His skin felt so alive to her. The silence embraced them. Soon, her mouth would slide around his cock and she would tease it with her tongue and take it down her throat.

"What are you thinking, Babe?" she asked.

Arthur had been trying not to think his thoughts and didn’t want to answer. He knew the truth unsatisfactory, but thought that lying would be worse and violate them both.

"Aw Babe," he said. "No good, I wasn't thinking any good." He tried to order his thoughts, find words that wouldn't be too flat. "I'm full of hostility. Your talking about when I'm healed made it worse but even before that, when you were touching me, I was trying to let it go and be with you the way we want, but it wouldn't disappear."

She withdrew her hand from the inside of his leg. His flesh felt bloodless to her. He couldn't feel a thing. Did he ever? He felt cold and precise to her. What was she doing with him? Where was Rusty? Arthur knew he had hurt her. He had seen her gentle eyes on him as she had touched him, full of love.

He had wished during the massage that he had smoked, known, had he, that he might have had a better sense how she was touching him below his sensation line. He believed that a love that was dependent on his sometimes drugging himself was well worth saving; he thought a polluted body could be a mahatma and that pure live food could be transmuted into evil when eaten by a man or woman. But he hadn’t smoked and hadn’t felt; and as she had stroked his leg, he had had no awareness of his penis growing. He had feared she would kiss him and he would feel nothing, nothing. What had happened to them?

She got up, undressed, turned out the light, and got into bed next to him. He wanted to hold her and comfort her and want her and tell her that he loved her. Her body trembled and he knew that she was crying. She only hoped he wouldn’t try to hold her in his arms to comfort her or try to stop her tears by talking to her.

"I'm sorry I made you feel so bad last night," Arthur said Wednesday morning.

"You wouldn't have said what you did if you'd known what I was thinking," Lee said. "I was going to have your cock in my mouth in about a minute."

"I know," he said, "or thought you might, but it didn't change what I'd been thinking. I didn't want to hurt you. You cried, didn't you?"

"Yes," she said.


For the past several weeks Lee had been going twice a week to a Christian spiritualist church. She had asked Arthur, who hadn't been to a church service in twenty years, to go with her tonight.

"I like the meditations," she had said. "I don't have the discipline to meditate on my own. That's why I like our Sunday night lady's meetings and going to church Wednesdays. They make me do it."

"God," Arthur had said to her. "One of the reasons I dislike group meetings is the meditations! How bad is that? I mean, not only don't I meditate on my own despite my theoretically approving it, I dislike going to the full-moon feasts at the ashram partly because I know we'll meditate for a few minutes."

Arthur, Lee, and Alice were about to be picked up by Lloyd, Sandra, and Peg, who, as usual, were late. Lee dashed into the house and returned with Arthur’s serape, with which she covered his legs.

"Too nekkid?" he said.

"It just doesn't seem right having legs that bare in church," she said.

The van arrived as Lee finished tucking his serape around his legs. Lloyd lifted one side of the chair, Peg and Sandra the other. Arthur aboard, Lee climbed in behind him. Lloyd's truck was a gypsy's wagon full of pretty things; like many of Arthur's friends' vehicles it often served as home as well as means of transportation. Wind chimes and bells tinkled as they rode.

After they’d unloaded Arthur at the church and he’d driven to the door, he released his clutch handles so that he could, he hoped, be quietly slipped inside. The Rev. Samuels was already speaking. Lee tipped the chair and pushed Arthur in, but the wheels squealed loudly enough to cause the Reverend to pause. "Better," thought Arthur, nodding and smiling to a woman in the third row he hadn't seen in three years.

The service tonight, perhaps every Wednesday night, was in three parts: the sermon, messages from spirit, and healing. The sermon done, the Rev. Samuels stood before the lectern facing the congregation in his white-trimmed red Christmas robes; he spread his arms and brought his palms and fingertips together in concentration.

"There are many many spirits here tonight," he said. "I'll try to deliver as many messages as I can." Arthur, like anyone in a wheelchair, drew attention from healers, and he was not surprised when he was addressed. He wondered whether his message would confirm Dr Lang's prognosis.

"You have an intense healing aura around you," the Rev. Samuels said. "You are a healer."

Arthur looked questioningly at him.

"Yes," the minister said, "you are. Not with your hands necessarily, but I feel that with just a word or two you help people. Also, just by seeing you people are reminded that their own troubles are not so bad and so, by reminding them to be grateful for all they have and making them happy in the comparison, you spread healing in the world, which is a very beautiful thing.

"You know, this is not the first time you have been in this condition. You have had many many lives on earth, and you have been in this condition many times. You do not fear it. That it is not new to you is one of the reasons you accept it with equanimity. I feel also that you and I have known each other in past lives and have worked together several times. I do not know what our connection was, but I feel we are not strangers. You are surrounded by love; people love you very much. You are very fortunate and they are fortunate too. I feel that at Christmas time you will be surrounded by people who love you. I hear laughter. You are all light-hearted and happy."

If that which had reincarnated as him were in fact life-after-life injuring its spinal cord, Arthur thought, oy bloody vay. He imagined pursuing the matter with the Rev. Samuels later. At the news Christmas was to be full of light-hearted love, he thought about last night with Lee.

After another half-dozen messages were delivered and a hymn was sung, three chairs were placed facing the congregation, a healer at each one, and congregants came forward to be healed. A woman about fifty accompanied by a young man who, like Arthur, had received a message from spirit tonight approached Arthur, introduced herself, and asked if he would let them work on him. He said he would be grateful and she took her place behind him; she had the young man, whom Arthur took to be her student, stand in front of him. She seemed at ease; the young man did not and his hands shook throughout the healing. Arthur, his eyes closed, sat somewhat stiffly, resisting his desire to lean forward with his forearms on his knees. After several minutes she switched positions with her assistant, kneeled, and put her hands a few inches above where she thought Arthur's feet were. They were hidden under the serape with which Lee had covered them, and Arthur thought they were well to the left of her hands. She finished and nodded to her associate; Arthur thanked them.

"Did you feel anything?" she asked him.

"Yes," he said, but he thought his answer only a sensible half-truth. He'd felt something in his fashion.

During his sermon the Rev. Samuels had spoken of a pair of healing services he had recently attended. "The healer came before the group and he said, 'Anyone with a stomach problem, come forward.' The next week, he said, 'I will work on those of you with ear, nose, and throat problems.' Now that, to me, is not what healing is about. When I talk about healing, I mean the whole body and the spirit too. I want to heal everyone of everything, not just those with a particular ailment like a doctor handing out pills, and not just one group of people or the people of a single nation. I want to heal all the Greeks and all the Turkeys too."

"Maybe I am in the right place," thought Arthur.

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