Chapter 19. Sunday, Sunday, Monday, Sunday

Sunday January 15, after smoking some excellent marijuana, Arthur Randall felt adequately prepared for the Super Bowl, the season's climactic American football game. He was to watch the game, this year between Denver and Dallas, with Stoner, Bess’ beau Phil, Stephen, and Carol on a black-and-white TV set that Stoner had found. It had no sound, but a second set that did, which Alice had thrown out because it had no picture, sat on top of it tuned to the same station. Stoner and Stephen couldn’t have cared less about the game, Phil was a Dallas fan, and Carol had grown up in Denver and wanted the Broncos to win. Arthur kept up with football only sporadically once his Giants were out of the race but still watched an occasional big game, and the Super Bowl was the biggest game of all; the live-television coverage that had begun two hours before kick-off would this year attract more than 100 million viewers.

As each Dallas starting player's name was announced, he trotted out between two lines of scantily clad cheering women and joined the players who had preceded him in a growing huddle just beyond the cheerleaders; the two lines of women effectively represented the shaft of a penis, the growing huddle of men its swollen head, and, the last starter announced, the rest of the players poured from underneath the stands, ran between the cheering women, and were ejaculated onto the field.

Arthur was examining his right small finger.

"Is it any better?" asked Carol.

"It doesn't seem to be," Arthur answered.

He had noticed yesterday morning that his pinky was red and blotchy at the nail, and through the day and night it had swelled; faint red lines now extended above the first joint reaching almost to the second. The finger looked as though he had slammed it in a door but as far as he knew he hadn't. It did hurt a little, and its having any sensation at all was unusual, but portentous? Arthur had learned over the years that he sometimes felt pain where, given his spinal-cord damage, he thought he shouldn't. He gingerly bent the finger's tip with his left hand; ten years ago both its joints had been fused and a pin inserted, but the finger-length pin had come out a few years ago and they had still been fused, hadn't they? He thought so, but they weren't now. He readjusted his weight in his chair, pushing up as best he could off his left wrist and right forearm. The wrist cracked ominously. Beyond rationality, his body felt full of incipient pain. Was he afraid? Yes. He snorted derisively as he imagined the swelling the onset of his healing, the soreness moving to his arm and then his neck; snorted, the game underway, at yet another Denver turnover. The game was dull, or looked about to be, dullness an established Super Bowl tradition. He had another hit of pot and the game for a time improved.


January 22 more than half the time Dr. Lang had said Arthur's healing would take had elapsed. Shell was in Portland now and had recently seen Daniel, who had asked solicitously after Arthur. Shell and Lucia had talked last night. "We're friends again, I think," Lucia had told Lee and Arthur this morning. Pages of The Healing, the tentative title of what Arthur was writing, were piling up. The still mostly unwritten book began December 2, the day Dr. Lang had operated, and would end March 2, the day he had said Arthur would be better and out of his chair. Arthur was writing the book's middle from day to day but had read none of it; he feared if he read it he would be demoralized and stop writing but knew that by not reading he risked writing more and more irrelevantly.

When Lee returned from the Rev. Samuels’ church Arthur turned from his typewriter to greet her with a kiss. She was refreshed, as usual after church.

"You may want to know for your book," she said, "that today I released my expectations of your healing. It was like I felt I needed to believe it would happen to make it happen and now I've realized that isn't true. What will be will be whether I'm sure it will or not."

"Yes it will," he said, smiling appreciatively. “And now it'll be a nice surprise if I'm up and around." She scrunched up her face and stuck out her tongue at him.

"I hope Daniel comes back soon, though," she said.

Arthur felt a momentary prickle of annoyance but was pleased it immediately yielded to good-natured amusement. "Hilda promised he'd be here in February," he said. He too looked forward to seeing the medium again; he had a few questions.

That night Lee massaged Arthur, as of late she had again been doing every other day. He had earlier poured down two pots of coffee, a full six cups, twice as much as was his wont; he was drinking coffee daily now. He had also smoked some excellent Colombian, was smoking more days than not.

While Lee got the olive oil from the kitchen for the massage, he rolled unaided almost all the way onto his stomach, farther than he ever had before.

"You really did drink coffee today," she said, laughing.

Her fingers and hands felt delicious to Arthur tonight; her touch was delicate and cool, and the marijuana had sensitized his body so that he was able to feel her hands down his back almost to his waist. When she returned them, though, nearly to the top of his spinal column, it hurt, and as she worked outward toward his right shoulder what she did was more painful than pleasurable. He was not sure that the best long-term benefits came from the most short-term pleasure and said nothing; maybe it was good that it hurt a little.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

He told her where and when he had begun to feel pain. He was dismayed that he sounded mildly accusatory; he had not meant to accuse her, only truthfully to answer.

She touched his neck with one hand, lightly. The other he couldn't feel, but he knew it was on him, probably at the base of his spine or on his perineum. He imagined the electrical impulses traveling from his brain to his lower body using her body to bypass his spinal-cord scar-tissue; the pain he'd confessed dissipated almost immediately. Her hand on his neck was still. He was still. The night was calm. The lovers were calm. Cricket and Twilight breathed quietly at the foot of the bed.

"Your spinal column is filling with white light," she said. "Imagine the light. The light is passing through me, into you, and down your spine."

She paused between each sentence.

"Now the white light is flowing through every nerve in your body.

"Your body is suffused with light.

"Your body is the light."

In the pauses she listened for God.

"Now the light is filling the room.

"It is filling the house.

"The white light from your body is flowing into the rivers of the Earth and the rivers are flowing into and filling the oceans. The whole Earth, the entire Universe is the white light of God."

He sighed. She sighed and leaned down and hugged him.


Monday night January 23 Lee had gone to Lucia's to join her, Peg, Lulu, Alice, Carol, Jan, and Sandra for a women's session at which they were to talk from personal experience about natural birth control, miscarriage, and abortion. Arthur was reading a book about Olga Worral that Lee had just finished, and, first-hand, finding it less objectionable than he had when she'd talked about it.

He was tired. Getting into bed without help was difficult and risky and he'd rarely done it, but he managed; Lee would be pleased and would help straighten him and put his chair on the battery charger when she returned. He lay diagonally across the bed on his back quieting himself, thinking, dozing. If he were not healed, it would not necessarily mean spirit healing was a sham or even that Daniel was. What the body doesn't use, the spirit does, Olga Worral taught. Ghosts, past-life memories, wine that turned to blood, crackers that became flesh, telepathy, telekinesis, all might be real; Arthur thought some were. He thought it better to be wrong than never guess, and tried assiduously to keep his guessing to a minimum; he thought it best to realize that whether we are wrong or right is a guess as well as a fact; he thought that humans this side of spirit--and that side, too--were fallible. He had the answers, including a prepared rationale or two for no answer and incorrect answers. Living life in the dark invalidated nothing, certainly not the possibility of light and truth beyond all appearance and partiality. He was asleep when Lee returned and came in and kissed him.

"Are you too tired for a massage, Honey?"

"No," Arthur said. "We ought to do it."

"Good," she said. "Lucia's going to help."

He didn't want their hands on him, wanted much less, though, to refuse.


In the first chapter of more than one book about spiritual healing (and/or communication with the dead, etc.) the author asserts that he or she is by nature a skeptic; by the end of chapter two his or her conversion is well underway and by mid-book examples of how unbelievers foolishly rationalize the obvious abound. By Sunday January 28 Lee's mole seemed to be shrinking and was less painful than it had been when she'd seen Dr. Lang; Peg's cyst had not shrunk and was to be operated on soon; Arthur's sensation was not returning and neither his fingers nor his toes were responsive to his will. His little finger was still puffy but better, and this morning he had discovered a large lump in his left groin. Another day, another symptom. All that remained of the swelling in his right thigh was a cyst that varied in shape and size and some extra leg spasticity from his having suspended his leg-stretching exercises. Sometimes his chest felt tight and the tightness sometimes seemed to spread to his left arm. He was sitting at the typewriter and had felt fine until he smoked; he still felt fine but now also ached everywhere, and an uncomfortable pressure in his left temple was increasing. He closed his eyes and touched his nose, first with his right thumb, then with his left, his usual test for stroke. The Healing could end with his death, he thought. Death was a good and proper end to any tale and would be a healing in the sense that the spirit body, cut loose from its Arthur Randalling, would be restored to consciousness of its disembodied essence. Death, he thought, is the spiritualist's ultimate cure, a proper panacea; it would certainly end his need for his chair. He thought of Ulysses, Aeneas, and Orpheus, mortals who had been to the land of the dead and come back alive; he didn’t expect to do the same--nor did he expect to die soon or walk ever. He imagined gifts he might receive other than ambulation. Dream teachers, to teach him as he slept, and memory of the teachings? He'd like that.
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