Magnificent Vibration (9 page)

“In some book I bought at a bookstore a couple of days ago.” And no, I am not going to tell her I stole it. “It was written in pencil on the inside cover. That in itself is pretty eerie. I haven’t read the book yet; I only got as far as the phone number. I think it’s called
Magnificent Vibration.
It’s a book on personal growth. I was in the store and the book
just seemed to kind of jump out . . .” I stop talking. Alice is reaching for her purse slung over the back of the chair. She’s leaving.

“Wait,” I say.

But she doesn’t halt her movement, and her movement, I realize, is not to leave but to retrieve something from her purse, which she does and then drops it in front of me on the dark, fissured wooden table. Comprehension takes me a second but I do recognize the object. It’s the same book I’ve just finished telling her about.
Magnificent Vibration
is the title. “
Discover Your True Purpose,
” says the caption underneath.

“Motherfucker,” says I.

“I bought it at a bookstore a couple of days ago,” says Alice.

I look at her in complete confusion. She’s wearing a similar expression, which doesn’t help.

After a few beats she adds, “Unlike yours, mine came without a phone number.”

T
he blood-drained winter sun is an impotent, diffused ball hanging low and idle in the haze of a dawn sky. A light drizzle further filters out her anemic warmth and color. Silence hangs inside the low, settling lake mist. High above the bleakness, morning birds call and wheel as they prepare for yet another uncompromising day of gathering nourishment for themselves and their nurslings. The damp Loch Ness fog offers small counsel and limited guidance for the shadow that is slowly finding its way through the aurorean blur. The dark shape looms. Its movement is steady, like a living thing, and it leaves a gentle wake as it cleaves the fascia of the water. Concentric circles form on the still lake as fish break the surface to breathe in the oxygen-rich air-water layer, sending ripples ever outward until they resemble diminutive black sand dunes stretching to infinity. Lakeside trees drip dew back into the great starless Loch.

A half a world away, as two people sit over a table in a late-night coffeehouse and struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible, people here are waking, rising and greeting the coming assault of a new day with hope, fear, apathy, and all the colors in between.

Rubbing eyes, stretching limbs, and heaving sighs, some heavy, some joyous as the day breaks in through their bedroom windows. Life awakens, coffee boils, eggs fry, engines rev, and the repetitive path of the school/workaday week begins anew. But some will not see this day. Nor any days beyond. On the Loch the shadowy silhouette moves out of the gloom and into sight where it begins to take form.

While most of the world is either rising or retiring, stepping into or out of their daily routines, the world ticks on. Few understand that the ticking will not go on forever and the clock is
running down. There are fabled guardians: spirit creatures who intuit this and understand that their brethren are being hunted, murdered, and crowded out of existence. Poisoned, polluted, and lost as is the world herself, by the very ones who have been her self-elected caretakers, stewards, shepherds. Such a spirit lives in this lake, unmolested and hidden from all but a few. And there are other spirits, in lakes, on mountains, throughout forests and plains and in the deep, deep oceans, who know that the world is on her knees and fighting for her life. They understand that alone they are impotent to stop the onslaught. And how can they seek the allegiance of humans when humans are the cause of their downfall? From where shall their salvation arise? A savior to heal what has been almost irreparably damaged. To fix what has been broken. Their collective eyes are open, searching for the one who will come to them, in whatever unlikely form. They search, in their own way. Even as time runs out.

The mist is rising as the meager warmth of the day heats the surrounding air. The shape moves beyond the damp morning fog and no one is witness as it bumps against the gravel edge of the lake, comes to ground, ends its journey. The vessel is old and in need of repair but there is no one on board, no passenger, no oarsman, no captain, and she has drifted half the night. As her keel scrapes against the glacial shoreline stones, a painted and once loved name is her only identifying mark:
The Bonnie Bradana.

T
he three of us sigh in collective relief, yet I sense there is a rather sizable and conflicting “but” coming. The doctor stands in the waiting room . . . waiting. “Can we visit Josie?” It’s little me who pops the question. Suddenly all I want is to see my sister breathing with the light of life in her eyes again. I want to hug her till she yells “Get off me, retard!” like she used to—before she could no longer bear to be touched at all, even by me.

The doctor (did he study drama in high school? Because that’s about the level of his acting expertise) finally lets the cat out of the bag.

“We’ve managed to save her life but she has had a cardiac episode.”

Another pause, like we’re all supposed to know what the hell “cardiac episode” means, with all its thousand-and-one possibilities.

“Can you just spit it out?” I want to scream, but don’t. I just hang there and take it, letting him have his little movie-of-the-week moment. The room is starting to swim and my scalp is cold and tingling with possible imagined scenarios. Mother lets out a pathetic whimper.

“So what does that mean?” I ask, since no one else is talking.

Another theatrical pause.

I’m going to kick him in the balls, I swear to God.

“Her heart stopped, and it took us some time to resuscitate. It was fifteen minutes before we could get her vitals going again,” the bad soap opera actor masquerading as Josie’s doctor finally offers.

We are all leaning forward like dogs trying to will the cookie off the kitchen counter.

“What does that mean?” This time it’s mother reading from my script, same intention.

I can stand it no longer and say with some force “For Chrissake sake will you just tell us what’s wrong with my sister?!!”

“HORATIO!” mother yells in embarrassment, though my father says nothing. The doctor looks extremely put out. I’ve veered away from his script.

“I agree with the boy,” says my father in one of the few times he will ever stand with me. “What are we talking about here?”

The doctor, sensing he has lost his audience, lets us have it with both barrels. “She is alive, but there is significant brain damage. How much we won’t know until she comes out of the coma, if she comes out of the coma. Her brain has suffered severe oxygen deprivation during the time her heart was still, and we have good reason to believe there is gross cell destruction as a result. She is on a respirator at the moment, which I suspect we will be able to remove eventually. But she will, in all probability, need twenty-four-hour-care for the remainder of her life.”

He stands there, the despot. Is he waiting for applause?

“When may we see her?” asks my poor, lost mother. She sounds exhausted.

He turns and exits, tossing back his reply like a sore loser. “I’ll send a nurse in.”

We all wait meekly for some unfamiliar nurse to come in and tell us what to do next. I could really use some more M&M’s.

My mother and I bring my sweet, broken girl home one autumn evening after the doctors, nurses, consultants, a PR dude (wanting to know if our stay was satisfactory—“Yes, we had a fabulous time, thanks for asking”) and the jerk demanding payment in full of the hospital bill before we bail, have all had their way with us. The only light in my Josie’s eyes is a dull fire that seems to recognize nothing and see no one. I’ve spent the three weeks of her hospital stay by her side talking to her, trying to get a reaction to all the stupid shit I’ve been saying, bad jokes, worse impressions, and even, so help me, a thorough explanation of the grand mysteries of the Mormon church, with which I assure her I am no longer affiliated. She does not respond. She allows me to brush her hair, hug her, kiss her slack face, with no objections or questions about my cleanliness, where I have been, or who I might have touched beforehand.

We move her back into her old bedroom and begin the feeding, cleaning, turning her over, talking to her incessantly. And that is all we do and all we are told we can do by the powers-that-be who seem to know so much yet still offer so little.

“There are no easy answers,” is their generic response. “Do the best you can.” Another good one. Love that. “There are facilities that house people like your daughter.” That’s one I particularly despise, although mother perks up at the suggestion. So insistent am I at not having Josie sleep anywhere but in her own bed here at home that I voluntarily include myself in the cleanup detail, which to a young teenager is highly gag-inducing as well as extremely disgusting and unpleasant. But I do it. And it actually gets easier. The stink, the washing, the medicated cream on her bedsores, the caretaking of the soiled laundry actually begins to feel like love to me. Now that I am free of the Mormons’ persistent and invasive grasp I have more time to spend with my tragic and beautiful sister. “Beautiful” is no longer a word that an outsider might apply to
my girl—she drools, her skin is sallow, and she lives in a perpetual bad hair day. There is dried food clinging to her nightdress and matted in her tresses, but she is my Josie and as my mother slowly backs off and leaves her more and more to my care, she becomes the real reason I run home after school every night, forsaking friends and even possible potential (though in reality, imaginary) girlfriends.

The big moment arrives when I catch her eye one evening. She points at me with a shaky finger and smiles a big goofy grin.

She has “seen” me, I am sure of it. I call out to our mother.

“Mom, Josie just recognized me!”

No response from the matriarch. So I point to myself, and like a parent teaching a baby new words I say slowly—“Tio. TIO.”

“Sho,” says Josie.

“Motherfucker,” says I. “Yes, Tio, Tio. I’m Tio.” Honestly it’s like she just memorized the whole frigging
Encyclopedia Britannica
and recited it verbatim back to me in Swahili.

Now let the healing begin!!!

One of the doctors had candidly admitted there was so little they actually knew about the human brain that it was possible some healing might occur. Rewiring, rerouting of electrical impulses, that sort of thing. I asked if we were talking about my sister or my laptop? Mother swatted me. But here it is, and she would soon be back to her normal self, laughing, going out on dates, and living the life she was meant to live. She would, however, not. She smiles when I enter her room, but “Sho” is about as far as we will ever get. I am happy for that at least. So I now become “Sho.”

One day I hear voices in the living room and head out to investigate. There isn’t a lot of conversation in this house these days, apart from the occasional screaming match between the parents, but I don’t really count
that as actual dialog exchange, so the chatty tone drifting in from the living room perplexes me. It is an uncommon sound in this house, the easy, relaxed notes of a one-on-one conversation. It’s weird how something so commonplace can be missing for so long that its sudden intrusion makes it seem almost exotic, alien. My parents are standing talking to an older man who reeks of organized religion and clutches a small book. “Oh no, not the Mormons again,” I think to myself.

My father breaks the casual color of this anomalous exchange and switches to parent mode.

“Boy, this is Reverend Whiting from the church. You know him, I’m sure?”