| |
Jamie rolled over in bed to answer his phone, displacing Gasser, his obese orange cat who had been sleeping on his chest. As he’d anticipated, the call was from Mae. “G’day, love,” he said. “Be down in a second.”
Her arrival gave him a surge of vigor, an actual eagerness to get up. Mornings had been harder than ever lately, as if years of insomnia had finally caught up with him, but now he sprang out of bed, ready to run downstairs to greet her.
“I’m pulling in at the workshop, sugar.” Her soft, sweet voice held a puzzled note. “You sound sleepy. You’re not just waking up, are you?”
“Um, yeah, thought I’d let you be my alarm. Rather wake up to you than a clock, y’know?”
“I wish you’d told me. I’d have called sooner. There was a lane closed on 25 through Albuquerque and the trip took longer than I’d thought. I’ll bring my stuff to your place when the workshop is over today. There’s no time right now. It starts in ten minutes.”
“Bloody hell.” Jamie sat on the bed so abruptly it creaked. If she could have come up the night before, they would have woken up together, started the day with love instead of hassles. But he’d registered them for the workshop before he knew the dates of her stepdaughters’ visit, and, understandably, she’d wanted to spend as few nights apart from them as possible. He loved her for being such a devoted mum. No objections to her choice. It was himself he was annoyed with for not thinking ahead. Not setting an alarm. A sense of pressure closed in on him. “I need coffee, need food, have to brush my teeth, let the parrots out ...”
“Relax, sugar, they’ll have coffee here. You better skedaddle.”
“Yeah. Love ya. Catcha.”
Skedaddle? Was there such a thing as skedawdle? Jamie’s mind was awake, but his body had sunk back into morning torpor. He craved another minute of rest. Beside him, the cat lolled on his side, as curled up as his girth allowed, blinking lazily. Jamie patted the hemisphere of furry flank and started to lie down—just thirty seconds—then stopped. Jesus. I’m turning into Gasser.
Forcing himself to hurry, Jamie dressed, brushed his teeth, and went down to the living room to uncover and open the parrots’ cages.
“Only got a minute for you. Give me a pep talk, will you, mate?” Jamie offered his wrist to Placido, the green Eclectus. “Step up.”
The bird stepped up to be petted and kissed, and then climbed his owner’s arm to his shoulder. “I love you,” Placido said quietly into Jamie’s ear.
“Yeah, love ya, too. I’m doing this for you, right?”
When he’d signed up for the healing workshop, Jamie had wanted to expand beyond his current routine of giving Reiki to his pets. Medical intuition would enable him to take better care of them, and so would stronger healing skills. The challenge was going to be practicing on people. His healing and visionary gifts were hard to control, and the parrot soul, though sensitive, was peaceful compared to the human spirit. Mae could handle it, and the workshop had been a present for her. So as long as she benefitted, Jamie was happy, but he couldn’t help feeling a little anxious. On the bright side, maybe someone practicing on him would heal his lethargy. But he could be getting in over his head.
As he moved Bouquet, the hyacinth macaw, to her perch, she gazed at him with one of her enormous yellow-rimmed eyes and ruffled her blue feathers. He stroked her breast with the back of his fingers. “Don’t suppose you have any advice?”
She bowed her head. He hadn’t expected much. She knew three words, and none of them were wise.
Gasser came clumping down the stairs, his belly dragging. This was the animal Jamie worried about the most. The one who really needed what he would learn in the training. The parrots were young, healthy and happy. Gasser was not only fat but also struggling with the stress of no longer being an only pet. He had required extra love since the birds had moved in. Jamie put Placido on his perch and scooped up the twenty-pound feline to give him a hug. “You’re my best mate. Don’t tell the parrots.”
He knew he was procrastinating, but he held Gasser until he felt calm, confident and motivated. It was perverse, but being late gave him energy.
The workshop was meeting in a former dance studio on a side street off Cerrillos, a few blocks from Jamie’s apartment. He rode his bike at top speed, but still arrived after the opening talk had begun.
Out of breath, he took a seat beside Mae, dismayed to find there were no chairs, only folded blankets. Even after several months of yoga classes, his left hip objected to prolonged floor-sitting. Leaning back on his elbows in a half-slump, he kissed the middle of Mae’s back, resisting the urge to put his arm around her bum. He loved the firmness of her curves, strength rounded out with just enough feminine softness, the body of a goddess. A goddess who didn’t know she was one. Her face free of makeup, her hair straight and unstyled, she wore scuffed athletic shoes, a baggy old T-shirt, and shorts that revealed long, well-muscled, blindingly white legs.
She glanced down at him with a smile, smoothed his hair back, removing one of Placido’s tiny fur-like feathers from the tangled mess, and returned her focus to Fiona McCloud’s introduction to the class. A silent reminder to Jamie to pay attention.
Fiona, a plump, vigorous woman with short pewter-colored hair and rosy cheeks, radiated confidence and solidity despite her ethereal occupation. “None of you are beginners, according to your registrations, so the work we’ll do today will involve only a minimal review of subtle energy anatomy. We’ll spend most of our time refining and deepening our skills. Mary Kay and I came up with a mnemonic for what we want you to achieve: the five Cs. Compassion, clarity, concentration, competence, and control. Each lesson will involve all of them.”
The central lesson of the morning was how to move one’s ego out of the way and become an open channel. Jamie was too open. As he worked with a series of partners, he kept losing his boundaries in his urgency to relieve their sufferings, seeing more of their souls and feeling more of their troubles than he could cope with.
The other workshop participants spread around the studio floor, kneeling, sitting or squatting to do their work, with the person receiving the healing lying on a blanket, but Jamie had to work standing up so he could hug people. If they were sad or wounded, it soaked into him, and he needed to hold them. Both he and the person he was healing ended up crying. His partners said they felt wonderful afterward, and he was amazed and glad he had helped them, but the process exhausted him, leaving him full of their pain. Compassion, but no control. He couldn’t clear himself of what he’d taken on.
The third time he got overwhelmed with his partner’s healing, Fiona took him aside and escorted him to a blanket in a corner. “You need to lie down.”
Too drained to argue, he obeyed, and she laid her hands on his heart and lower belly. Though her palms were hot, her touch put something like a soft, cooling gel into him, quieting the tremors, filling the aching hollows. Once he was steady, she moved her hands to his diaphragm and forehead and sent something different, like a warm bath.
When she let go, Jamie opened his eyes. Fiona squatted back on her heels, studying him. “That’s enough practice for you, for now. Rest. Learn by listening.”
She crossed the room to Mae, who knelt beside a young man with flowers tattooed on his shaved scalp. Something radiated from her as she sent healing. Jamie, his inner vision still open, picked it up as a pink rose wrapping the client in its petals. Jesus. Even her soul was beautiful.
Fiona touched Mae’s shoulder. “Pull back, do less, much less. Give the process freedom to happen.”
The rose dimmed to a single petal. The young man on the floor began to glow with little teal-blue flames, and Jamie picked up a stretched sensation like blown glass being shaped. Fascinating and powerful, but not restful.
Jamie scrunched his eyes shut. He needed to close his sixth chakra. Under his breath, he chanted the Sanskrit line with which his yoga teacher opened her classes. He didn’t know exactly what the words meant, but it was something about stilling the mind. It worked. The sensation of the other man’s soul faded away and the pool of swirling purple behind his eyes shrank down to a manageable dot.
*****
On the lunch break, Mae called her father while she walked to Jamie’s apartment, leaving her car at the workshop site. Jamie had biked ahead to start making the meal. When Marty answered, he said the girls wanted to get on the phone first. It was hard to tell their voices apart, but Brook was more often spokes-twin when the girls were sharing a phone call.
“Hey, Mama. Can you tell where we are?”
Mae listened for background sounds. A motorboat. Distant laughter. “Elephant Butte Lake?”
“Yes! Did you use your magic rocks?”
“No, I used my ears again.” Though she’d tried to discourage them, they hadn’t stopped trying to make her find them or see what they were doing. “You have a good swim?”
“Yeah. Grampa Marty can swim so good. He taught us how to do the backstroke.”
“And Niall didn’t even get in the water, did he?”
Brook whispered aside to Stream, “She knows what he did. I didn’t tell her that part.”
“I’ve been to the lake with Daddy and Niall before. I wasn’t being psychic. We swim, and he reads a book, and once in a while he gets his feet wet.”
After a pause that Mae interpreted as disappointment, Brook said, “We’ve been practicing being psychics. Listen. Stream, what am I thinking about right now?”
Stream answered, “A polka-dotted dinosaur.”
“Am not. It was plaid.”
They burst into shrieks and giggles, and Marty took over the call. “They’ve been doing that off and on all day. I think they were trying seriously at first, but now they’re just being silly.”
“I hope they get over it before they go home. Hubert never liked my being psychic.”
“Don’t worry about it, baby. They’re just doing it because they love you and they want to be like you. How’s your workshop?”
“I’ve learned a lot already. Stuff I can use in my new job.”
“Glad to hear it. You get done at noon Sunday, right? Where should we meet you?”
“How about the Railyard? Make it twelve thirty so we can go back to Jamie’s place and grab something for a picnic with the girls.” Even if he prepared it all in advance, Mae expected Jamie would be double-checking and adding things, trying to make a perfect lunch to impress two un-finicky seven-year-olds. She and Marty finished details of their plans and wrapped up the call.
When Mae approached the drab gray stucco duplex, she noticed Jamie had made further improvements on his half of the yard. The lavender in his spiral garden was in bloom, and he’d added yucca plants at the back, a birdbath, two stands that looked like perches for his parrots, and a pair of Adirondack chairs painted bright turquoise. His landlady’s side of the yard was nothing but pinkish-brown dirt and piles of pebbles excavated by ants.
Mae rang the doorbell and heard an answering ding. The macaw, communicating with the bell. Jamie called, “Come in.” The birds were sharing a perch in the living room, their bright colors a complement to the rock-red walls and blue ceiling. Placido said hello. Mae returned the greeting and joined Jamie in the kitchen.
He was layering avocado onto thick slices of whole grain bread smeared with hummus, while his enormous cat rubbed on his ankles. “Almost ready. Red chile hummus. Made it last night. Got some of your nasty sweet tea in the fridge.” He added purple onions and yellow tomatoes, gently crowned each sandwich with the second slice of bread, scooped potato salad onto the plates, sprinkled a garnish of parsley, and then turned to hug Mae, giving her a deep, lingering kiss. “Need to get that in before the onions.”
They sat at the table to eat. Mae complimented his cooking, then asked, “Did you have a hard time today? I saw Fiona making you take a time-out.”
“Yeah.” Jamie stuffed an errant piece of onion back in his mouth and talked around chewing. “Fucking healing kept making me cry, making my partners cry. Fiona talked to me about it later and said it was a sign I was a natural for this open-channel thing. Everything comes through me.”
“That’s beautiful. I always knew you were gifted.”
“Yeah, but I’m like people with lax ligaments, y’know? Spiritually. Knew this girl in college who was so flexible it was like she was falling apart. People who couldn’t stretch thought it was cool, but it wasn’t for her. She could dislocate anything.”
“What if you use your training from Gaia Greene?” Mae knew Jamie had studied briefly with a shaman, though with the intention of controlling his gift rather than using it. “Could you call in spirit helpers for healing, so it doesn’t all come through you?”
“Nah. Not enough control with spirits. Dunno who’ll show up, y’know?” Jamie took a gulp of water and got up for a second serving of potato salad. “You want more?”
Mae hadn’t finished what was on her plate. “No thanks.”
“I’m buggered. Feel like I climbed a mountain.” He ground coffee beans and ate standing at the counter. “You get tired from all that?”
“Not really. Psychic journeys wear me out, but I feel refreshed after this. I didn’t pick up anybody’s story, which was nice. I like it when I can do a healing that way.”
“That was because you got ’em without any baggage. I’d already sucked up all their misery.” Jamie filled the coffee maker and rejoined her at the table. “We need to remember to tell Mary Kay we don’t work with each other.”
“I don’t mind if you practice on me.”
“Nah. Can’t go there. If I practice healing you, next thing you know you’ll be trying to help me, and there we’ll go: Jamie-the-sick-person, under repair.”
He gave her a comically exaggerated frown, but she knew he meant business. He was in therapy for anxiety and depression and still struggled at times. Even a hint of trying to fix him didn’t go over well.
“I don’t see you that way. You know that.”
“Yeah, you do.” Reaching across the table, he brought her hand to his lips for a kiss. “You just love me anyway.”
He devoured several cookies and two mugs of coffee while Mae ate one cookie and finished her tea. She wanted to tell him to go easy on the caffeine and sugar—it only made him more anxious—but he would think she was nagging him about his weight as well as trying to fix him. When he took three times as long as she did for toothbrushing, she waited quietly. More practice at not nagging. Dental hygiene wasn’t the worst thing a person could be neurotic about.
They arrived a few minutes late and took a spot near the back of the room. Mary Kay, thin and sun-lined, with her fair hair pulled back in a wispy braid, stood facing the students. “I’d like three volunteers for our initial practice of seeing into the body. I need people who don’t mind waiting to do the first round on this skill, who can be the clients for the rest.”
Jamie raised his hand. A smell of mint came off him as he spoke. “I’ll do it.”
“And who don’t mind being talked about in front of everyone. I know you signed release forms about sharing with your partners, and Fiona went over confidentiality, but this will be a group exploration of how different people perceive the physical through the energy systems. To do this, we’ll need to share your medical conditions with the class.”
The young man with the floral scalp volunteered, as did a fit-looking woman of about sixty. Jamie reaffirmed his willingness. Mary Kay began her lecture. Mae squeezed Jamie’s hand and then inched away from his fidgeting in order to concentrate.
“Everything is energy,” Mary Kay said. “If you think of the koshas, the five sheaths, the physical body is the least subtle, but it’s still energy. When you see disturbance in the mental or emotional sheath, or even in the spiritual or bliss body, it could eventually manifest in the physical. Seeing it early this way is best. The client can take preventive steps. Oddly enough, with our subtle vision, the bliss-body is easier to access. The actual physical body is the most difficult to perceive. You may need to make inner adjustments, as if you were refocusing a telescope or a microscope.”
First, she had them practice seeing inside their own hands, with eyes open and then with eyes closed. Next, they practiced with their palms on their knees, eyes closed, seeing with the hand. Like all her psychic visions, the images that came to Mae were vivid, complete with muscle attachments, tendons, and vessels. She could look between her femur and tibia and see her menisci. I could study this way. I wish I’d done this while I was taking human biology. Anatomy was coming up in the fall, though.
Mary Kay ended the exploration too soon for Mae, but everyone else seemed to be finished. The instructor asked her three volunteers to lie on blankets, had the students divide into three groups, and told them to examine their practice clients, one student healer at a time. “Depending on how your reception works, you’ll have a harder or easier time with this. I see lights and sense temperatures and density, an abstract representation of the body. And then I hear voices or see words as if I’m reading a medical text. Your view of yourselves gave you a sense of how you read the body. What you pick up is unique to your receptive qualities.”
Mae’s receptive qualities were apparently scientific and realistic, though when she’d worked this way with clients in the past, she’d picked up a mix of the physical and the spiritual. Maybe the training was helping her focus better. Two of the five Cs: concentration and clarity. But of course, today’s imagery might have been uncluttered because she was looking at herself.
When Jamie had done the practice on himself, what had he seen? With his complex medical history—several rock-climbing accidents and other injuries, some self-inflicted—he’d been generous to volunteer to be studied. The students in his group would have a lot to look at.
Although Mae found no abnormalities in Josh, the floral-headed young man, she appreciated examining such a vital body as a baseline from which to make comparisons. When she’d seen diseases in the past, they had sent off strange signals, unlike the clear images from healthy tissue. If there hadn’t been other people waiting to practice on Josh, she would have spent more time studying him.
A trim young woman with yellow hair so short it stood up like a crew cut interrupted her examination of Jamie and asked, “How can you tell if what you’re seeing is in the physical body or the energy body?”
Jamie was lying on his back, his hands folded on his stomach. Wide-eyed and oddly intense, he looked up at his fellow trainee with an expression that reminded Mae of a lemur. What had the woman found in him that was so puzzling? Mae had seen Josh’s bones and joints like pictures in an anatomy book, but earlier in the day she had seen his emotions as colors and fleeting images that might have been his memories. For her, the differences were clear.
Mary Kay walked over to the student who was working with Jamie. “It varies from healer to healer. It’s trial and error. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but that’s how you learn.”
“But how can I tell?” the blonde woman persisted.
“After everyone has done their explorations,” Fiona replied, “we’ll have a discussion. You can compare what you saw with his actual medical status. Agreed, Jamie?”
He nodded, still with the lemur look. Had he found something troubling in himself?
When all three groups had finished, Mary Kay had them sit in a circle for the discussion. “Sierra, since you were confused, let’s start with you. What did you find in Jamie that you don’t understand?”
“There was this dead spot in his left hip. And another in his right shin.”
Jamie snort-laughed. “Fuck. That’s metal. I’ve got screws in my hip. Got a rod in my shin.”
Several students chuckled, perhaps at his use of the f-word or his peculiar laugh. Unsmiling, Mary Kay continued, “That’s information for you, Sierra. That’s what metal in someone’s body feels like to you.”
Mae wondered if she would have seen it the way she’d seen Josh’s normal joints or if the metal would have come across differently to her.
Sierra said, “His hip is a little hot near the dead spot. Not real heat, though. It’s like if you could feel red.”
Jamie looked at Mae, “Pronounce it, love. Can’t remember what it’s called.”
She answered, “Femoral acetabular impingement.”
“Painful?” Mary Kay asked.
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “Used to it, though.”
“More information.” Mary Kay nodded toward Sierra. “You’re getting to know how a client’s physical pain feels to you. That’s important. Clients may not tell you everything. I suspect Jamie wouldn’t think to mention it. He says he’s used to it.”
Sierra ran a hand over her inch of hair. “Okay. So that stuff is starting to make sense. What’s the kind of half-dead, half-fiery thing in your right arm? Like along your funny bone?”
“Nerve damage.”
“Wow.” She peered at him with the kind of fascination Mae’s children directed toward bugs. “You’ve been hurt a lot.”
Jamie wriggled his shoulders and made a dismissive noise.
Sierra turned to Mary Kay. “So, here’s the thing I don’t think is physical. He’s got little lights. All over the place. Like, he’s sparkly. Could I have been getting his soul, not his body?”
Mary Kay asked Jamie, “Does that mean anything physical to you? Being full of sparkles?”
“Could be my fat cells lighting up. Had a really big lunch.”
Typical Jamie. Calling attention to the very thing he didn’t want people to notice. Several of his classmates showed their amusement again.
Suddenly excited, Sierra leaned eagerly toward the middle of the circle. “Could a healer detect viruses or bacteria? Would they be little lights?”
Was she happy to think Jamie might be sick? Or just happy to have an idea?
Mary Kay shook her head. “More likely they’d be background, or variations in the background. We’re all so full of our friendly bacteria, you might sense some quality of sickness if there were harmful bacteria, but I doubt you’d see lights. You might be reading metabolic energy, though.”
“Metabolic?” Jamie put a hand to his belly. “It is my fat cells.”
Laughter again.
Mae tried to figure out the images. If only she’d taken physiology. But that wouldn’t be until spring semester. She wished she knew more than the short version she’d learned for her personal training certification, but based on what she did know, she doubted fat cells would be little lights. Fat wasn’t that metabolically active; it was storage.
Sierra frowned. “So, let’s say I felt like the sparkles were wrong, something that shouldn’t be there. I need to tell him what I think they are, right? And then start the cure?”
“No.” Mary Kay looked around, making eye contact with every student in the room. “You advise a client that something needs attention, but we have a limited scope of practice. None of you should ever claim to diagnose or treat disease.”
These were the ethical guidelines Derek had wanted Mae to follow, and she was more than willing to do so.
“What if it’s my nervous system?” Jamie asked. “I’m a little anxious.”
“About this?” Mary Kay asked. “You shouldn’t have volunteered if—”
“Nah. I mean, all the time. Think it’s my nerves lighting up. That’s something that could have felt wrong with me. I don’t mean wrong wrong, y’know, just ... a problem. She could treat that, couldn’t she?”
Fiona, who had been observing, spoke up. “But she doesn’t know that’s what she’s seeing. And neither do you. What if it’s an infection you don’t feel sick with yet? Sierra, you would give Reiki, not try to treat or cure, and then tell him you saw something you didn’t understand and to see a doctor. You can’t go wrong with that. Reiki energy goes where it’s needed. With the more targeted energy healings like emitting chi, where you send specific kinds of force, healers need to know what to send. I wouldn’t want to direct an accelerating energy into something that needed to slow down, but I would want to send it to a process that needed support. If the sparkles are his immune system fighting bacteria, you’d want to support that, but if it’s his fat cells growing,” Fiona chuckled, “or his nerve cells rattling, you’d want to slow that down. When you’re not sure, let the Reiki decide. Does that make sense?”
The group murmured assent, except for Sierra, who pressed her lips together and folded her arms, shaking her head.
Jamie closed his eyes. His long lashes fluttered a few times. “Think my nerves could stand to slow down.”
Almost everyone volunteered to heal him. Mae wasn’t surprised. There were few temptations harder to resist than the urge to take care of Jamie. Sierra, however, didn’t offer. Just as well. Mae didn’t want her sending energy to him. Sierra might be a competent seer, but something was missing from her as a healer.