The Believer, page 15
After a moment of close listening, he observed that there were other spirits in the house as well. Then he waved them on, bidding them good day and bye-bye.
Now Rob returns to his notes. “Voices. You hear voices but can’t make out what they’re saying?” Gene nods. “Yeah, that’s very common in haunted houses. Okay. Have you been psychic all your life?” The assumption startles me, Gene’s psychic abilities had not been mentioned thus far.
“Yes,” Gene confirms. “Yes, I have.” It’s something he developed twenty-five years ago, he explains. He subsequently wrote a book on parapsychology, getting both the desire to write and the content directly from a spirit guide.
“Okay, right—well you know what we’re talking about!” Rob says, delighted.
The room is densely populated with the decorative scheme of another time: chandeliers, lamps, ornately scrolled tables and glass cases displaying dolls and souvenir spoons and porcelain figurines, every surface coated with a thick stubble of dust. There are photos from Gene’s university days, his career, his parents, his wedding.
“Let me see what’s going on in the house,” Rob says, returning to the task at hand and closing his eyes. The only sound in this room with furniture for ten to sit comfortably is the purr of cars down the road outside.
“Okay. There’s a couple on the couch. One’s in that chair. They’re all listening to us talk. That’s normal. It’s very rare that a haunted house has only one spook—very rare, in my experience. There’s always a group of them.”
I follow Rob’s gaze but find only empty corners where cobwebs dangle like strands of gray hair.
Rob says that there are usually between fifteen and twenty spirits in this house, information Gene receives dispassionately. Currently, Rob continues, there is a crowd of such spirits banked up in the hallway and filing into this room to observe the proceedings. For a time, Gene watches Rob studying the doorway.
The morose-faced woman is the leader. She is stubborn but the others actually want to go to the light. “We’ll wait till they all get here,” Rob says, “and they can go together, all right?”
Gene solemnly agrees.
“Usually at this point, we invite the good spooks to come into your home,” Rob says. “Is that okay with you?”
Gene nods.
“Can you say that?”
“I invite the good spirits to come into my home,” Gene says formally.
“Thank you,” Rob says. “And all the lost spirits that are here—what would you want for them?”
“To go where they belong, to go to the light,” Gene replies.
“Okay, I’m happy with that,” Rob says, looking around. “They’re all chattering away now,” he reports.
Gene inquires about the good spirits to which Rob has referred.
“I’ve been working with them for over twenty-five years, done over five hundred and fifty jobs like this,” Rob explains. “It’s not always the same crew but somebody always turns up. All the communication is emotional. The bad spooks are just kind of frightened and lost, they don’t realize they’re dead.”
Rob says he’s had out-of-body experiences since he was a boy. It’s a state in which he can think clearly and see and hear everything that’s going on. That’s what happens to us when we die, he explains. “And if you’re not sure what’s going on—say, for instance, if you’re Christian and what you’re experiencing doesn’t match what the church told you—then you’re confused. Or if you have a science degree and what you’re experiencing is not oblivion, then you get confused,” he says.
“Yes,” Gene says, nodding slowly. “These are the spirits that should have gone up to the spirit world.” Gene explains that he’s always understood that the dead are met and escorted there by a deceased loved one; this is what he was told when he was younger.
“This one woman, she’s really grieving because she’s leaving what she knows for an uncertain future,” Rob says. “Go on, it’s okay. Yeah, bye-bye. You’re safe. This life is over. When people have been to the light they don’t want to come back ’cause it’s much nicer, a better place to be.”
“You ever heard about Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross?” Gene asks Rob.
“She was a champion,” Rob smiles.
Gene says that he knew her personally, the author of On Death and Dying (which first introduced her five-stage grief model) who later became interested in out-of-body experiences. That she arranged a free ticket for him to see her speak, at a point in his life when he was going through a rough patch. “She was telling me that when she started doing this, people thought that she was crazy and they nearly locked her up in a psychiatric hospital.”
“When she was doing that the hostility towards spirituality, particularly in medical circles and in psychology as well, was huge, so she impressed me enormously,” Rob says. While they chat about how parapsychology has long sat outside the bounds of academia, I look at how the room narrows at one end into a small vestibule which, I now realize, contains the front door. The door has been sealed shut, a long black bar bolted across its frame.
Rob suddenly interrupts himself with a lively, “What’s happening?!” before checking in with the good spooks. “Yeah . . . Oh . . . Okay, got it.” He scans the room. “We’re just about done, I think, Gene. They’ve got to change the energy in the room, that’s the last thing they do—so that this place won’t be attractive to depressed, sad people, okay?”
After a beat during which he is perfectly still, Gene nods.
“You know psychometry?” Rob asks. “How you can walk into places and they don’t feel good?”
Another nod.
“So you don’t want that, because that attracts the bad spooks. But if you walk into a place that feels light and friendly and open, that attracts the good spooks and the bad spooks are repelled by that. We’re nearly there, Gene. Okay, I’m getting a message here now.”
Rob slips back into one-sided conversation like he’s just taking a quick call. “All right . . . So what do you want me to do with this fella? Oh. Okay. Well, you take care of him ’cause you know what you’re doing. All right. Good. No, I’m not getting involved in that one, you do it. We’ll talk about that later.”
Apparently, he explains, there’s one character here who’s a bit of a troublemaker and the good spooks have found it necessary to trap him in a bubble. “He’s next to you, Sarah,” Rob chuckles. I look over my shoulder but all I see is the collection of porcelain boxes.
“This is your lucky day,” Rob says sternly to the space above the porcelain. “You’ve been a bloody nuisance up to now but it’s all over. You can’t win in this situation, pal, so go to the light with everybody else and become a decent human being, all right?” He sighs deeply. “There’s no point hanging around me. I’ve got no time for you.” And then, to Gene, “Very stubborn, this one.”
“A man?” Gene asks.
Rob nods. “Not a very big fellow. About five foot two. Very belligerent. Both angry and frightened. Kind of a psychopath—stunning lack of empathy . . .” His gaze shifts into the air. “You’ve been a bully all your life, pal. Didn’t get you anywhere, did it? That’s the good spook next to you, just do what he tells ya.”
He turns back to Gene. “He’s getting wound up now, starting to cry, here we go. He’s in the middle of emotional turmoil at the moment, so we’ll leave him alone. Let the spooks work on him, manipulate his emotions, get him to feel things he’s never felt before, like love and kindness and peace and compassion.” He looks over at the empty couch. “There’s a row of old ladies sitting there now. Not a lot of smarts.”
“Are there any relations of mine?” Gene inquires hopefully. Rob says he doesn’t know, but can’t see a resemblance.
Rob now reports feeling the emotion rising in the room. “The good spooks flood the room with emotion, calming people down, making them feel that everything’s going to be okay. So we have to wait for that to happen. But the process has started now and once the emotions come down, they’ll be ready to go to the light.”
He does a walk-through of the house to check that the bad energy has dissipated. The walls of the dim hallway open out into a bright living space. While that area is relatively tidy, the bathroom needs a clean and the bedroom is a migraine. The sheets have been wrenched from the mattress, sit atop it in a swirl of weary fabric; the curtains entirely reject the day. The bedside lamp lies like a fallen tree over packets of medication pinned beneath it.
Of the various discarnate presences Gene has recently encountered in his home, none has belonged to his deceased wife. He does not feel her around him, has never felt that since she died a decade ago and is glad of it considering she had some mental-health issues. He has, however, felt strongly the spirit of a dog he once loved and, as he shows Rob that good boy’s photo, I think about what it means to grow old with a partner you would not miss. To live, still, among the mementos of the world you had been trained for, the rational world you had once been welcomed into like a warm home, only to find yourself locked out late in life.
To find, then, another place—more expansive, more open—a realm that was there all along like a habitable planet waiting to be discovered—only to be cast out from there, too, disempowered in your ninetieth decade before forces you could neither recognize nor control. Strangers swirling randomly around your home where you sat waiting for the faces of your family who had told you they would return for you, taking your hand as though walking you home from school.
How satisfied are you with your standard of living?
Twice, listening back to this day on my voice recorder, I hear a strange sound: a sustained whoosh at a volume much louder than my memory of the vehicles passing out front, much louder than I can reasonably account for. Perhaps I was primed for this by my discussions about EVP with Evelyn. But there it is, a sound both disorienting and displacing, which I can easily imagine to be the roar of the accumulated past through the narrow portal of the present.
How satisfied are you with your health? How satisfied are you with what you are achieving in life?
Rob makes sure Gene knows how to call on the good spooks by himself next time. It is not so different from what I do in my mind a second after I wake from the dream of treading gray water, my toe scraping something beneath the surface of the deep.
Certain now that the energy has come up, Rob folds his glasses and returns his clipboard to his briefcase. While I feel no change, I also know that nothing can be more terrifying than something.
Thinking about your own life and personal circumstances, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole?
Rob is shaking Gene’s hand in the dark garage, taking his leave and walking out towards the light, which, for one moment, is the difference between feeling fear and being defeated by it. Before the house disappears behind us, it provides that clue, that Gothic hint. It is its total banality, the fact that it could be any house at all.
25
The Death Doula
Katrina
Peter’s truck is parked in the same spot outside. The lawn is the same radiant green. The potted yellow flower still sits on the table by the front door.
Inside, trackies and socks are drying on the clothes rack in front of the back door, through which I can see Katrina’s lounge chair on the rain-splattered deck. Ricky the cavoodle weaves under a stool on which Katrina’s sister is balanced, and between pairs of legs that belong to the school principal, in a dark suit holding a cup of tea, and Katrina’s brother, leaning on the kitchen bench speaking with him and with her husband who is now a widower.
When Peter opened the door I was painfully aware that his wife died thirty-six hours ago, yet I still defaulted to a reflexive “Hi, how are ya?” And my ensuing chagrin did nothing to keep me from rolling it out again when I said hello to the family gathered in the kitchen. Then again, they welcomed me the same way before we moved on to speak about the traffic. Who has the words for this?
Annie. But she’s home with pneumonia and I am here looking at Katrina’s fruit bowl and her fridge with its photos of her sons as their laundry goes round in the machine.
Peter asks if I’d like to spend some time with Katrina. And I say yes, of course, yes. So we walk down the hallway to the closed door of the front room. He ducks in first, explaining that the undertaker advised keeping her face covered between visits. Alone in the hallway, I rest my eyes on Katrina’s red walker parked near a table by the front door, which displays a gold-framed wedding photo next to a black-and-white photo of three little children. Pete and his sisters, I think. An antique clock, stopped, and the ornate key with which to wind it. A plastic folder containing Katrina’s advance care directive—Take Control on its cover in bold red. The tableau is a memento mori more powerful than any Flemish still-life festooned with skulls and smoke.
Reappearing, Peter ushers me into the room. And then I am alone with Katrina, who is lying on a cooling plate on a hospital bed in candlelight, a single flower wilting on the white sheet pulled up to her chin. Annie—who made these arrangements so that Katrina could stay at home for the next week—will say tomorrow that the flower “works beautifully” in Buddhist terms as impermanence in action. But that thought does not occur to me now, so shocked am I standing there because it is nothing like I thought it would be.
I am ashamed to tell you that I remember walking into a darkened room, dimly lit by two flickering candles, Katrina supine in a sort of sepulchre. However, when I later looked at the photo Annie requested, and which Peter allowed me to take for her, the room is perfectly bright—a hospital bed in a home office, blinds open on green garden in early afternoon. Katrina appears nothing like a figure on a tomb—more like she just nodded off while reading. I am also ashamed to tell you, because it does not feel generous of me, contrasting so starkly with Peter’s gently domestic manner, that my first impulse the moment he shut the door behind him was to immediately wrench it open and flee.
I was not aware of myself as scared, I only was scared: an ice-cold tingling shooting from the top of my head down the sides of my body. I had expected an open casket, with a degree of artifice closing the gap between the person as you thought of them and the body they had become. Instead there was just Katrina, looking both like herself and not like herself, her head angled precisely towards the spot where I stood.
And then I felt that I heard it. You can always, in any situation, make a decision to get a bit closer with wherever you are, with whatever is there. So I talked to Katrina, shaking in a light I felt to be dark, feeling extremely small. Still, though, I did not look away.
Part 2
Above
Chord noun. Also cord.
[ORIGIN from accord]
Agreement, reconciliation; an agreement, a peace treaty.
MUSIC. A group of notes sounded usually together, combined according to some system.
ANATOMY. In spinal cord, vocal cord.
A straight line joining the extremities of an arc.
AERONAUTICS. The width of an airfoil from leading to trailing edge.
The string of a harp or other instrument. Chiefly poet. or fig. strike a chord evoke some reaction in a person. touch the right chord appeal skilfully to emotion, evoke sympathy.
ENGINEERING. Either of the two principal members of the truss of a bridge.
Chord verb.
Form a chord (with); harmonize.
From the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th edition
26
Halfway Home Lynn Sometimes the lie is linearity. The necessity of beginning somewhere: privileging that one initial detail so that it sticks in the mind like corn in the teeth. This first fact, this slim and stubborn fiber, undermining—simply by virtue of primacy—all others.
So I will start this way. One month and twelve days after they married, by her count, Ray broke Lynn’s cheekbone. She iced it, the red skin turning hard under the cold towel. Patted foundation onto and around the high, broken plane beneath her green eye. Brushed her hair, changed her dress and sat beside him, smiling, at her birthday dinner with her parents.
“That was my first mistake,” she tells me, there in the homeless shelter. “Well, my first mistake was stopping at the red light where I met him. I wish for all the life of me that I had run the red light.”
All the life of her means, in purely quantitative terms, seventy years. Thirty-four and a half years old when she went to prison for murder. Thirty-four and a half years inside.
“Exactly half of my life out, half of my life in,” she says, a certain wonder in her voice.
27
Theories of Flight
Fred & Rhonda
At 6:19 PM on Saturday, October 21, 1978, one year to the day before I was born, a twenty-year-old training pilot took off from Victoria’s Moorabbin Airport in a rented blue-and-white single-engine Cessna 182 that still has not been found.
Frederick Valentich is remembered for disappearing, but he had a wonderful presence. He was a gentleman, according to his fiancée, Rhonda Rushton. Handsome in his Air Training Corps uniform, old-fashioned—would open doors for her, bring her flowers—and punctilious. He marked their anniversary every month, though they were together less than a year. If he was running five minutes late to pick her up he would stop at a pay phone on the thirty-minute drive from his place in Avondale Heights to hers in Preston and ring the four-digit phone number of her parents’ house. She was sixteen when they met, he was still nineteen.
