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When Lee and Stephen met Arthur, Lucia, Stoner, and Carol at Lee and Arthur's house after the reading, the tale spilled out. Carol had been struck by the cruelty of the prediction. Arthur had noticed it too, though he didn't feel cruelly used. Lee and Lucia believed. Why not believe if they could? Stoner didn't know about any of it: dealing with spirits he suspected smacked of Satanism; believing in them seemed stupid and gullible; searching them out when you didn't believe in them seemed perverse.
That night Lucia had a dream in which a woman asked, "Do you recognize me?" She did, as one of her guardians and teachers whom she had seen three other times. "So," the woman said, "you finally got them together."
"Yes," said Lucia. "I thought I never would. Is what Dr. Lang told Arthur true?"
"Yes," the woman told her.
"In three months?"
"Yes, even that is true. Three months."
In Tucson thousands of people sensed the dawning of a new age. Arthur did not, but he was sensitive as a turtle’s shell. He assumed, in his fashion, eighteen trillion rebirths in the blink of an eyelash, any one of which might find him innervated and able to walk and feel.
In the truck on the way home from seeing Daniel he had thought of The Monkey's Paw, the story by W. W. Jacobs in which a couple comes into possession of a magical monkey's paw that gives them three wishes. At their son's prompting their first wish is for the money they owe on their home, and the next day the money arrives; their son has died, mangled at work by machinery, and the money is compensation from his employer. After the funeral and over her husband's objections to using the paw a second time, the grieving mother wishes her son alive again, and that night they are waked by a scraping at the front door that the wife hastens to answer. The terrified husband knows it is their son’s broken and putrefying body scratching at the door, and as his wife is opening it he manages to get to the paw and make the third wish: that their son be back in his grave dead. The paw exudes evil and the story is scary. Arthur imagined the paw rubbed, his cord healed--his joints arthritic, his scoliosis unchanged, his twisted ankles locked, his bones still brittle, his hemorrhoids vengeful from years of constant sitting and unnumbered digital evacuations, and his urethra rubbed raw and scarred after years of catheterization. Then again, nothing ventured nothing gained.
Sandra, who had visited Nine Wells with Arthur, came by the morning after Arthur's reading. She was a student at the university and when Arthur had met her last year had been living with another student from Godwin, Fawn Belcher, and with Arthur’s soon-to-be lover Jan. Sandra and Fawn had been best friends since grade school and now, though parts of separate households, they closed bars together often, finishing abandoned drinks so as not to offend the gods of alcohol and thrift. Fawn was blonde and strikingly pretty; Sandra was attractive and less overtly outrageous and temperamental than her friend. Fawn was not interested in alternative medicine; Sandra, to whom it was all new, was. Fawn’s on-again off-again boyfriend Willie sang and played guitar in a punk band with Jan’s new love interest, Stitch, with whom he’d been best-friends since elementary school. Stitch had recently become interested in Maharaj Ji, the teen-aged Indian master whose devotees included several of Shell’s closest friends, and Willie was relieved and amused that the interest had adversely affected neither Stitch’s abilities as a punk lyricist nor his love of liquor.
When Sandra arrived Arthur was alone and sitting in the sun at his open kitchen door.
"I heard the good news," she said.
Arthur was momentarily confused, then realized she was speaking of his healing.
"Yes," he said. "I'm quite looking forward to it."
"Have you been massaged today?"
"No."
"Do you want me to? I can work on your legs out in the sun."
Comfortably warm in the sun Arthur watched as she poured a small pool of olive oil into her left hand, put down the bottle, poured the pool into her right hand, and cupped it in both. She began on his left foot, then kneaded his calf; after working on top of and under his knee where she had seen Nine Wells concentrate she progressed to his thigh, the left still small compared to the right but the right markedly less swollen than it had been three weeks earlier. He could not feel the warmth of her touch but could, maybe, the pressure of her hands.
She moved his lap apron aside so that his penis was partly exposed. He noticed it was not growing though the back of her right hand sometimes brushed it. He watched seriously, intimately, and without attachment. He could almost feel where he saw she was touching. She finished his left leg and worked on his right, though she skipped his swollen thigh. Arthur modestly readjusted his apron. He loved her hope; he loved her face and gestures.
"I 'm so happy for you," she said.
Arthur smiled. He was happy too, though not because of his allegedly imminent recovery.
"We'll know soon enough," he said.
"I can't wait till Wednesday," Sandra said.
Wednesday night she was to meet Daniel, Hilda, and Dr. Lang, as would Alice, who now joined them. Alice had moved in next door to Arthur and Lee when Rebecca and the Count moved out ten days ago. She was accompanied by their (now her) chicken, Thongoor. In bad weather and sometimes in good, the pure-bred Rhode Island Red lived indoors. The rest of the time she foraged in the fenced space between the houses, though she was also free to go where she would through a hole in the fence; twice she had moseyed up Arthur’s ramp and into his and Lee's kitchen. When, as a special treat, Chicken was taken to a friend's house three blocks away to hunt the fat white grubs that lived there in the compost pile, she walked on a leash behind Alice. They were on their way there now.
Arthur and Sandra were silent for several minutes after Alice and Thongoor left.
"I'm looking for work," Arthur said.
"Really?" Sandra said. "Doing what?"
"I want newspaper work," Arthur said. "I haven't worked in fifteen years! I don't know that either of the newspapers is going to be hot for my services."
She was now massaging his right foot, working on the calcium deposit that had formed at the point on his foot that corresponded to his sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae, where the scar tissue interrupted the flow of signals between his body and his brain.
"But I've got two social workers supposedly talking to them, one from Vocational Rehab and the other from CETA. The one from CETA specializes in creating jobs where there aren't any and the Vocational Rehab guy is supposed to help us handicappeds find work."
"Do you need money?" Sandra asked.
"We could use a little more, I suppose, but no, not really. We don't spend much."
"Then why are you looking?" Sandra asked.
"I'm not sure or, well, I guess I am. I'd hoped to start a novel when I got here, or at least some sort of more or less fictional prose--my poems are kinda slight--, but I haven't written a line. I've been too much at loose ends this past year, smoking too much, just sort of killing time. It doesn't feel right. I thought a job might either be satisfying in itself or, better, be what I need to make me write."
For years Arthur had accepted the pot habit he'd had since 1968 as useful, in part because when he smoked he wrote. The summer just past he had kept a journal, but he had not edited or even read it. He had smoked and typed, as usual--but whereas for years perseverance had satisfied him, he had felt this summer that he was not so much writing as mimicking writing. He had welcomed his increasingly intense dissatisfaction, nurtured it in the hope that it would force him to work differently and harder. So far it hadn't, and he had recently begun talking about it not only to his friends but also to strangers in bars. Was his talk cheap? Yes, unless he made it otherwise by starting to write more seriously. Seeking a job was yet another way to force his focus onto what he wanted his real work to be.
Arthur guessed that to be the man he wished he had to try to write, and he feared he wasn't really trying. He had begun again and again and again, and every time had quit without finishing. His confidence was eroding. Why wouldn't it? Each false start seemed to make it likelier that he would never finish. He accused himself of laziness, justly; his writing spoke for itself and what it said condemned it and, incidentally, him.
"I know what you mean," she said. She worked on each toe separately and lovingly in the sun. "I feel like I'm waiting all the time, but I don't know for what. Work sucks, though."
"I might not like it much if I started working," Arthur agreed, "but maybe I would, and if it sucked bad enough maybe it'd whip me into line."
"Do you want to work in an office?" Sandra asked. She didn't, though thought it wouldn’t be worse than waiting on tables as she did now.
"I think that part'd be fun," said Arthur. "Get me into the real--I'm sure," he added, facetiously, "--world."
She worked on his swollen thigh carefully. She had moved his apron aside again and again he noticed that his penis wasn't stiffening. He was healing, though, whether he would walk in three months or not. He was accepting himself; trying as best he could; full of doubts; unable to touch Lee in spite of himself; unable to work but able to try to change. Unlike Lucia Gammersley he heard no call, but unlike her he was deaf to such, so he worked as though he did.
_____
To go to the next part of THE HEALING click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say, including whether you have had similar or contradictory experiences. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.
Edited by Coach, 09 March 2006 - 07:49 PM.
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