The Trouble with Angels

CHERYL CHOW

Living in a cheap apartment in Tokyo as I do where the entry hall is accessible to anyone walking in off the street, I’ve had to get used to having my mail box crammed with flyers and handbills. So I wasn’t surprised—just slightly annoyed—when I checked my mail box to find it stuffed, not with personal letters, but advertisements: sushi and pizza delivery services, adult videos, dubious massage services and “telekura,” a sleazy telephone dating club for the lonely and the horny—complete with full-color photographs of larger-than-life sushi, pizza, and trussed up women in varying stages of agony. I started to wad them all up and toss them into the plastic bucket I kept in the corner for just this purpose, when suddenly I caught a glimpse of angels circling around a blue-and-white earth.

The angels were hand-drawn illustrations on a coral-pink flyer.

“Workshop by JANICE LANUGA,” read the flyer, “in Maui, Hawaii: At the Heart of the Secret; Listening to Messages from your Personal Angel. June 6–15. Cost: 600,000 yen, including plane fare from Tokyo and accommodations. Free to anyone able to teleport to Hawaii. (Verification required.)”

I stared at the flyer. Janice Lanuga. I thought I’d heard the last of her when she came to Japan two years ago in spring.

Janice is a self-proclaimed healer and intergalactic warrior from Hawaii. She travels around the world spreading messages about angels and healing UFO abductees by removing implants placed in their astral bodies by hostile aliens. Janice considers herself a living bridge between earthlings and the Rainbow Nation (not to be confused with the Rainbow Coalition), a nation consisting of sentient beings of many vibrations, such as the Nature Kingdoms, the cetaceans—that includes dolphins and whales—the universal magicians, multi-universal beings, and the Angelic Kingdom.

Yes, name a New Age fad and Janice is probably involved with it. Frankly, I’d had more than my share of her and had no desire to see her ever again. I’ve never known anyone like Janice who could come up with the most implausible explanations and rattle them off in the most matter-of-fact way. Nor could I understand why she repeatedly came back to Japan, four or five times in a span of three years.

I first heard about Janice through Sara, a demure Australian free-lance business writer living in Tokyo. When I ran into her at a seminar, “Saving Up For Retirement,” I was surprised to find the normally taciturn Sara raving to a group of rapt listeners about Janice, “a light worker.” (Not to be confused with an electrician. A light worker is a healer who works with energies.) Apparently, Sara had been cooped up in the hospital for nearly six months with pneumonia. Then along came Janice and instantly healed her. But that wasn’t all. Janice could actually talk to angels. In fact, you might say that she’s on a first-name basis with all the archangels. Sara was astounded when, at their first meeting, Janice told her that the Archangel Gabriel had something to tell her: just a few days ago, Sara had had an uncanny dream about the Archangel Gabriel!

The finale to all this was the announcement of an “Angel Workshop” by Janice near scenic Lake Biwa. And an addendum: Janice was available for private healing sessions. The weekend workshop was a bargain at thirty-five thousand yen—or roughly four hundred U.S. dollars at the current exchange rate. My financial condition being in less than celestial shape, I decided to pass, but a friend of mine went, so I asked her about it. She started to giggle like a ten-year-old.

“I’m sprouting wings,” Marla squealed. She said the workshop was strange, and Janice even stranger. They spent most of the workshop dancing in circles, and in the evening, howling at the moon. I could picture Marla’s long and bony arms flung over her head, fluttering like wind-blown butterflies. “Janice has really weird ideas, some of the weirdest I’ve heard,” she added. This, coming from Marla who assures me that since psychics are predicting that the world will end in another forty years or so, I shouldn’t worry about saving up for retirement.

So why on the Star of Sirius did I go for a private healing session with Janice?

Because, for one thing, I’m a sucker for get-well-quick schemes. Besides, I was in pain.

Ever since my move to Tokyo from Los Angeles (the city of fallen angels) four years ago, I’ve been suffering from pain that radiated from the left side of my neck down to the tip of my left index finger. I’m sure it’s from the stress of living in a city that’s been likened to a desert for the soul, and, for foreign women, a sexual Siberia. The minute I set foot on Japanese soil, it’s as if I’d been rendered sexless. A porcupine with a bad case of halitosis would’ve fared better in the dating game. I admit that I’ve never been a homecoming queen (in fact, I couldn’t get dates for either the junior or the senior prom). But once I looked old enough to drink, I never again had to face a Saturday night alone. So I naively thought that ethnically half-Korean and half-Japanese, I would have an easier time in Japan than my Caucasian compatriots. But in fact, it was worse. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s racism. Or maybe it’s just my age. In Japan a woman over the age of twenty-five is a kurisumasu keiki—as desirable as a Christmas cake after the 25th of December. And I am, after all, pushing the Big Three-Oh. A few more years, and my odds for being taken hostage by terrorists would be higher than for getting married. No, my situation is probably bleaker: I’d stand a better chance of being kidnapped by space aliens than of finding a meaningful relationship with a male earthling. (It now seems, however, that alien abductions are far more common than I’d believed—so there might yet be hope for my love life.)

Be that as it may, I tried to find a healing, for the physical pain at least. I tried various remedies (except exercise, of course, that would be too sensible) but none worked. I even went to a Japanese acupuncturist, touted as a renowned healer. She’d cured someone of edema instantaneously and worked wonders on Aikido-injured knees. Alas, her treatments didn’t do a whole lot for my condition. She complained that she found it difficult working on me because of my garlic breath and kimchee-permeated body. (The truth is, I detest and abhor kimchee and I rarely, if ever, eat garlic.) And she proclaimed that I’d regain my health and be in tip-top shape if I’d make it a daily ritual to imbibe my morning urine. I confess that I wasn’t able to stomach her suggestion, but it didn’t matter anyway, since she cut me off after only three visits. She refused to treat me any further unless I could follow her dictum completely: give up reading books, quit my job as a technical writer, and make my livelihood washing dishes.

So I went to see Janice. The session was held in Sara’s apartment where Janice was staying at the time, a modern, one-bedroom apartment with a baby piano in the center, and a chirpy parakeet in the corner.

“What now, what now?” he queried in his tinny bird’s voice, flapping his yellow wings inside the bamboo cage. “Irasshaimase, my darling,” he added as if in afterthought.

“Have a seat,” Janice said, pointing at a low couch covered with a brilliant orange Indian sari. She was sitting on a stool across from it, crunching on a raw carrot.

Janice was a healthy, wiry looking woman with short-cropped brown hair peppered with gray. Although she was forty years plus, the word “middle-aged” just didn’t seem to apply to her. Her angular body and the well-muscled arms beneath the still-quite-new-blue-T-shirt with dolphins splashing across made her look as if she might be a professional swimmer. Her eyes were pale blue, as if she’d been gazing out into the sea for a long, long time. Janice, as I came to find out, is very self-possessed, and she always has an air about her that reminds me of my best friend in grade school, a spunky redhead who claimed to be from Venus. The friend told me that she was also a witch and had magical powers. I guess what the two have in common is that they both seem to absolutely believe in what they are saying.

I plunked myself down on the sofa and looked around. The apartment was well-lighted, with windows all around one side of the room. A sleek black Sony stereo set perched incongruously on a lacquered Japanese tansu.

Janice came over and sat down next to me, so close that the one red feather earring she was wearing tickled my cheek. She put her arm around me. “Close your eyes,” she said in an even tone, “just relax yourself and breathe.”

“Breathe?” I thought. “I didn’t come here to breathe.” No, not at the equivalent of three hundred U.S. dollars that I was paying. But I did as I was told. Placing the notebook and pen that I’d brought with me on my lap (as always, I was prepared to take notes), I started breathing in and out as I listened to her voice guiding me through a visualization involving angels and dolphins. Perhaps five minutes into the meditation, my body, quite without warning, started flailing around, my pelvis gyrating as if I were having an orgasm—without the thrill. It lasted maybe twenty minutes or so. I was fully conscious and lucid, yet I had no control over my body. When the convulsions finally stopped, I immediately dived for the pen and notebook that had fallen to the floor. To hide my embarrassment about having lost control, I adopted an air of alert nonchalance that I generally reserved for job interviews.

“So what just happened?” I asked, my pen poised to take notes. I felt light-headed.

“Have you heard of a walk-in?” Janice answered, by way of reply.

“Like when you walk in somewhere without an appointment?” I said.

“No, what I’m talking about is another soul walking into a body.”

I stared at her uncomprehending.

“You see,” she said, giving the last bite of carrot an uncompromising crunch. “Sometimes some souls find that they’ve made a mess of their lives and can’t take it much longer. So, they decide to leave their bodies—you know, to die. And at that point, a different, more advanced soul walks in.”

I continued to stare at her.

“Think about it, sweetheart.” She stood up abruptly. “It’s not an entirely unreasonable thing to do, considering the options. And mind you, it’s only done by agreement. These are generally very advanced souls, and they wouldn’t just take over a body without consent. This different soul then literally ‘walks in’ to the newly vacated body. What the new soul is doing is taking on the challenges that defeated the original occupant. This way the identity of the ‘deceased’ person can be maintained.”

(As I always say, never waste a good body.)

“Your case, however,” she said with a flourish of her hand, “is not quite like that of the classic walk-in.”

I heaved a sigh of relief.

Janice sat down again, and cradling her face with her hands, proceeded to explain that I had originally had two souls controlling my body, one dark, one light. The dark one, which had heavy (and I’m talking heavy) karmic debt to pay, was finally freed—thanks to her—and departed. The light soul—the sole (no pun intended) resident of my body now—had never before been incarnated on earth, and had no karma to pay off. So I was free! I could fully come into my power, things would only get better and better. Not to mention that with only one soul controlling the body, it should be a lot easier to navigate.

I pointed out to her that what I had come to see her for—the pain in my arm and shoulder—remained unchanged. Give your body some time to adjust, Janice replied, and the pain should go away. It never did. As it turned out—I would find this out later at one of Janice’s workshops—I had implants. Which, naturally, were put there by hostile space aliens.

Janice has a fair-sized group of ardent believers, mostly expats, but also a handful of Japanese, including one psychiatrist. They claim that Janice has changed their lives completely. Janice, they say, is a genius. For one thing, she has a masters in mathematics, and before she began her mission of healing work, she was a computer programmer. She is a member of MENSA, the club open only to people with IQs of 150 or above. ( I’ve always wondered about the kinds of people that would join an organization like MENSA. Now I know.) All I can say is, Janice definitely belongs in a different stratosphere than the rest of us mortals. As does Linda, who was hosting Janice on her visit this time.

Linda lives in a world apart from the rest of us non-Japanese who struggle to get by as free-lance writers or English teachers. Her apartment is in ritzy Aoyama, where the rent goes for three thousand dollars or more for a modest-sized apartment, in a tree-shaded building with expensive Chinese brush paintings in the lobby.

I felt slightly intimidated when I walked into the lobby of Linda’s apartment and announced my arrival through the intercom. A matronly looking woman, one of the participants in today’s event, opened the door for me.

Linda’s house would be considered spacious in North America; here in Tokyo it seemed absolutely huge. My entire apartment, the seven-and-a-half mat studio the size of a closet that I pay almost eight hundred U.S. dollars for the privilege of living in, could comfortably fit into the foyer. There were four bedrooms, an American-style kitchen (a real luxury here in Japan), a dining room, and at the far end of the foyer I caught a glimpse of the living room that could have popped right out of the pages of Abitaire. A black-and-gold lacquered Chinese screen inlaid with white jade spanned the entire length of the room.

Half a dozen women were already seated on the sofa in the living room. A couple of them seemed to be around thirty, but the rest, I’m sure, were past their fortieth birthday—overshot it by quite a bit, I’d say. I felt better already. There were only two men, one with a receding hairline, and a Buddha-like smile; the other wore a pony tail and a nicotine-stained grimace. I was the only Asian.

Sara, the once staid business writer who had introduced me to Julia, was missing. Someone told me that Sara was busy giving her own Janice-inspired workshops, having already made her personal connection with the Space Commands, and been “activated” by Janice.

I entered the living room and sat down on the sofa next to a woman in a chocolate-colored suit. I noticed then the coffee table with crystals spread out like the Milky Way on its glass surface. The crystals sparkled as the soft sun streamed in from the French windows. Outside them was a strip of fence-enclosed garden, a lush oasis in the heart of Tokyo. Kitaro’s “Silk Road” music enveloped the room, relaxing nerves jangled by the Tokyo traffic.

I found Janice sitting on the sofa seat to my right. When I walked over to greet her, she stood up and gave me a hug that must have lasted at least five minutes. While hugging me, Janice exhaled as if pumping out air, as if she were cleansing me of everything that was wrong with me. The hug was nice, though I had a kink in my neck after the first minute.

Suddenly, I felt something tap at my ankle. I looked down. A black cat with a short, forked tail was batting me with its paw.

“Anwangonnrrr,” the cat said, looking up at me with what seemed to me a manic glint in its eyes.

I bent down to examine its tail, the kind that the Japanese call kagishippo, or “key tail,” for its shape. It’s a common flaw found in the genetic makeup of many Japanese cats. Only, this one was even weirder: the tail looked as if it had a split end; one half curved outward at a sharp angle, the other ended in a stubby knob.

“Oooh, how niiice, she liiikes you,” a voice cooed behind me.

I turned to find Linda, the hostess for today’s event, grinning as if to show off her dimples. She bent over to stroke the cat and I was reminded again of yet another reason we lived in such different worlds: Linda is a platinum blonde with the physique of a Playboy centerfold.

“That’s my angel Sakiko,” Linda gushed. “Isn’t she adorable?”

I stammered what I hoped sounded like an agreement, but I needn’t have bothered. Linda’s attention was diverted by newcomers who bustled in just then. At last everyone was here, and the workshop could proceed.

“I’ve finished healing all my lifetimes on Mars,” Janice began.

I wished I’d stayed home.

“A lot of people have been healing their lifetimes on Mars.” Janice continued. (According to Janice, many of us have spent several incarnations on Mars. During these lifetimes Mars was engaged in some type of intergalactic warfare. But now it was time for us to heal the wounds inflicted during these battles of eons ago.) She also said something about how it was now all right for people to remember the good memories of Mars. She explained that she’d been “activated”—one of Janice’s favorite words—by the Ashtar Space Commands. Ashtar, according to a book written about him by a believer, is what is known as an “etheric being,” a Christ-like figure from outer space with a higher vibratory level than earthly beings. He is the commander of intergalactic fleets and the head of an interplanetary fellowship whose mission is peace. Janice is a charter member of this fellowship, and she’s been called upon to heal numerous pockets of unrest on earth.

Then one of the participants-cum-assistants, a plump, bubbly woman with honey-blond hair, made her introduction.

“Hi, I’m Penny and I’m so happy to be here,” she said. “This is soooo wonderful. It just doesn’t feel like I’m in Japan.” (Of course not. Linda’s apartment is not Japan.) Penny went on to tell us how the dolphins made the initial contact with her. “I kept hearing this high-pitched voice that seemed to come from nowhere,” she said, shaking her blond locks and cupping her hands to her ears. At first she thought she was having problems with her ears. But it turned out to be just the dolphins contacting her telepathically.

The next topic on the agenda was angels. Janice outlined in brief her relationship with the angels, and told us to listen to their messages. And now, we were ready for the highlight of the event: everyone was to “channel” their personal angels. One by one each person stood up with her eyes closed and made a waving motion in front of her body, as if brushing off a cobweb. With eyes still closed, the person said, “I am . . .” and then would give the name of their personal angel. It was generally a fairly long but lyrical sounding name, none of which I remember, but which all sounded something like “Shaniharaelirahami.” The “angel” also explained its purpose for coming to earth. She’d say something like: “I’ve come to bring peace and love.” Or, “I’ve come to give the galaxy to the earth,” “We’ve come to serve humanity.” Each person took at least three minutes, generally longer. The man with the Buddha smile went through the motions but couldn’t speak. He said he felt an angelic presence, but he couldn’t hear the words yet. Penny said that sometimes they tell you syllable by syllable, as it happened with her. Like this: “Mmmmmmmmm, eeeeeeee, rrrrrrrrrr, llllllllll, iiiiiiiiiiiiii, nnnnnnnnnnn, Mmm-eeee-rrrr-llll-iiii-nnnn, M-e-r-l-i-n.”

I could tell this was going to take a lot longer than I’d counted on. I thought of the 200-page computer manual I had to rewrite by the end of the week. Whatever possessed me to come here? If I missed the deadline, could I plead temporary insanity? It didn’t seem as if anyone else shared my sentiment, however. In fact, one woman was so moved, she wept. As for me, I feigned a headache and declined.

When we’d finished giving our angelic introductions, that was it. No more scheduled activities. Apparently, it was more of a get-together than a real workshop. People broke off into little groups and chatted with each other. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. I felt a little left out, but immediately Janice and one or two other women came over to “heal” me. They heaped a pile of crystals on my lap and gave me a large, translucent crystal to hold in my palm. Janice kept breathing. When the “healing” was finished, I fully expected her to claim that she’d removed an implant from me, as she had in the past. As Janice says, many people have these implants. They are placed there by extraterrestrials to prevent a person—generally, someone quite powerful—from fully expressing his or her power. Once, during one of Janice’s earlier visits, I’d sat in for about an hour on her workshop. I had a cold that dragged on like a bad relationship, and Sara had suggested that Janice could cure it instantly. When I arrived there I found everyone sitting around in a circle playing drums, triangles, and bells.

After an interval, Janice stood up to begin a short discourse. “As many of you are aware, intelligent beings from other parts of the universe have been visiting the earth,” she explained. “And throughout the history of humankind these extraterrestrials have been abducting chosen members of the human race. In recent years especially, the pace has been accelerating.” She said that in Japan Mount Fuji serves as the gateway for UFOs. Which is why so many Japanese—though unaware of the fact—are UFO abductees. (When I mentioned this to a friend, she jumped up and exclaimed, “That’s it! That explains everything!”)

Throughout the speech, I sat on the floor rubbing my shoulder, yawning, and half-listening to her words when suddenly, Janice announced to the group that I—and several other people present—had been abducted many times by extraterrestrials. During one of the kidnappings, the aliens had placed implants in me. Not that I was able to see them. They’re invisible, of course. So far, Janice has removed at least two from me. No, make that three. She removed one from my heart once while we were talking on the phone.

What could have induced these aliens to come all the way from another galaxy to abduct me, a mere child at the time, whose main interests in life at the time were Barbie dolls and Marvel comics? I must be pretty darn important, much more so than I ever realized. The only hitch is, I’d never had the slightest inkling that such a thing could have happened to me. I’ve never even entertained such a possibility, nor do I have the remotest trace of such a memory. I’ve never suffered from amnesia, blackouts, memory lapses, migraine headaches, multiple personalities. Nor do I have any large blocks of time that’re unaccounted for (although that’s apparently no problem—these aliens work in a different time system).

I felt no different when I left the workshop, except that my wallet was now lighter by ten thousand yen. My goal of saving up for my retirement seemed further away than ever. And I still didn’t know when, if ever, I’d have sex again.

I was musing about all this when there was a slight commotion at the far end of the coffee table. Apparently, the cat had spilled a silver tray filled with cards.

“This is a sign,” Linda announced. “Everyone, pick a card. There’s a message for each of you.” As I found out, these were called angel cards, and each one had a word or phrase written on its back.

“C’mon,” Linda encouraged. “Take a card, any card.” In her enthusiasm to have me choose, she nearly hit my nostrils with the tray. I was strongly drawn to one card, and though it kept slipping out of my fingers, I persisted in chasing it and managed finally to grab it. I turned it over for the message. It said: “Trust.”

Whale songs were now spewing out of the stereo. I slipped over to the other side of the room, and sat on the floor on the pale gray carpet where half a dozen people were congregated. I was curious to find out who they were, what they did for a living. After talking to everyone, I discovered that many were wives of expats whose perks alone were fatter than my monthly income. Others claimed to be rewriters, proofreaders, copywriters. Except for the man with the Buddha smile, who readily confessed to teaching at an English conversation school, the rest would sooner have admitted to being raped by extraterrestrials than to teaching English.

Penny, the assistant, was now sitting alone on the long sofa, the Chinese screen acting as a dramatic backdrop. She called for our attention, and then gave an impromptu talk about her work with dolphins. Janice had taken her on her first dolphin swim about a year ago.

“Dolphins are wonderful healers,” she asserted. They are able to appraise humans instantly, and can often cure them of whatever is ailing them, not just physical problems, but psychological ones too. She cited one example where a mother and her children came together to swim with the dolphins. The family was not, in fact, related by blood, as both generations had been adopted; consequently, both mother and children had unresolved fears of abandonment.

“Yes,” said Janice, who came to join us. “These dolphins worked magic with them,” she added, with a flourish of her hand, then related the rest of the story. The dolphins swam toward the family as soon as they entered the pool, then looped around them in circles, around and around, healing them, dissolving their abandonment fears, strengthening their ties as a family.

But of course. What else would dolphins be interested in other than to heal humans of their all too numerous problems? And unlike humans, a dolphin would be doing this all for free too, without charging twenty or thirty or even forty thousand yen per session like its human counterparts. Yes, the next time my friends have a marital crisis, I’ll just send them out for a swim with the dolphins. It’s cheaper than marriage counseling.

For those who’d rather not get wet, there are nonaquatic healing sessions too—as I’ve already discovered—unassisted by dolphins, whales, sea lions, or sharks. “How some of that works,” Penny spoke up on behalf of Janice, “is by changing a person’s cellular structure at the level of the DNA. This makes it much easier for your body to go up to the higher dimensions.”

“Waawoogangunraaarrrrngggrrrr!!” Linda’s black cat suddenly let out an ear-rending shriek and streaked past the sofa and over the coffee table, knocking a few angel-shaped crystals onto the floor.

I think I knew just how the cat felt. The tide had turned; it was high time I left. I didn’t know why I’d even stayed as long as I had. I gathered up my belongings to make my getaway—though not before inquiring as to where in Japan one could swim with dolphins (in case there’s ever scientific evidence that dolphins can heal arm-and-shoulder pains instantly).

At that point, several other women decided to leave too, and followed me to the foyer. Linda caught up with us and asked us somewhat breathlessly to not forget our donations. I wadded up a few bills and put them into the envelope that Linda had prepared. Suddenly, I found Janice standing next to me. Smiling benevolently, Janice informed us that she won’t be seeing us for a while—she’d been called by the Space Commands to assist in intense healing work in another part of the planet.

“I won’t be back in Japan for a long, long time,” she said, a little wistfully, and asked for a group hug. All the women present shuffled around to get into a circle. I complied with the same show of enthusiasm I display toward group shots. I ended up having to stand there with my arms stretched out as far as I could.

For a long time afterward my arms were sore.

[1995]