Walking Through Walls (38 page)

When he wasn't bringing people back from the dead or containing radiation spills, Pop continued to perform everyday healings, which often included assorted celebrities as they breezed through Miami. During one of my visits home, I took my father to the Miami Film Festival for the premiere of Brooke Shields's new film
Tilt.
After the movie, we were invited to the opening night party at a Deco mansion on one of the private islands just off of Miami Beach. The teen actress was coming down with a cold—something she didn't have time for, as she was about to open the film nationwide with numerous guest appearances. She looked unusually pale with a touch of green-gray. My father was introduced to Brooke as someone who could fix her cold. The two of them retreated to a corner of the room for about fifteen minutes, where my father performed his magic, and Brooke returned symptom free, ready to greet her public.

The projectors provided a new type of psychic technology that allowed my father to enlarge the scope of his powers. His correspondence school with the spirits was now training him to look beyond healing sick people and to treat larger phenomena, such as weather patterns, political events, and even whole societies. A new crew of spirit masters was now communicating with him from even more subtle dimensions.

One of the instruments in which they were training him was a series of complex geometric diagrams that looked a bit like Tibetan mandalas. The spirits would implant the finished design in his brain, which he would then dutifully copy onto individual index cards using a pen and a dime-store compass. Each diagram was created to emanate a highly specific force field. It could be used individually or in conjunction with other diagrams for a greater synergistic effect. On the back of the card was written an identifying code, such as “Phase II, #4 Hilarion.”

Apparently, the force of these diagrams was so powerful that my father used them only under spirit supervision. The spirits would contact my father with detailed instructions as to which specific numbered cards to place on his “sender board” at what time of day and for how long. Let's say there was a hurricane brewing in the Atlantic, or the Everglades was low on water. My father might receive a message to place a certain sequence of four or five of these cards on his “sender board” for twelve hours and then replace them with other cards as the storm weakened or rain fell on the Everglades. In his notebooks there are detailed notations of these directions from the spirits.

In some ways the sender board operated a bit like the Buddhist stupas and prayer wheels that I would see many years later during a visit to Nepal. High in the Himalayas, the monks would string brightly colored prayer flags from a tall dome-shaped stupa, which to my mind functioned like a satellite dish for sending the prayers out into the universe. Surrounding the enormous stupa was a circle of brass prayer wheels, which you would touch and spin as you walked along the path. The spinning wheel would create a dynamic energy that would send your prayer out to the attention of the necessary gods or guardian spirits. Just like the monks in Nepal, my father was constantly beaming out silent corrective energy to protect and heal the planet.

If it seems as if my father was losing his grip on reality or that the constant impingement of spirits on his mind had created an advanced psychotic state, the truth was that he had never been more down-to-earth or shown a greater presence of mind. Everything seemed very simple for him. All he had to do was follow the instructions of the spirits. With his nose to the metaphysical grindstone, he no longer had to search for meaning, struggle for answers to large questions, or wonder if his powers would leave him. He simply did as he was “told.” And the results were, more often than not, miraculous.

Looking at these mysterious geometric drawings, I realized that the best way to really understand my father was to simply accept the fact that he was three hundred years ahead of the rest of us. This thought gave me great patience in dealing with his incomprehensible ideas and behavior. It was clear that I would never fully comprehend what my father actually did or how he did it. I now understood that it must have been a great effort for him to try to explain these advanced, ethereal thoughts that the spirits had implanted in his brain to plain mortals such as me. Therefore if he was willing to make the effort to try translating these supernatural ideas, I should be patient and nonjudgmental in meeting him halfway. It was evident that Pop had traveled to an unseen dimension, gathered information, and brought it back in order for us to hopefully advance our consciousness.

I had no doubt that one day in the future, many of his fantastic discoveries would become reality for a new race of more advanced, enlightened humans. And why not? All human achievements, from skyscrapers and heart transplants to sending a man to the moon, first emanated from our thoughts. Although, in my father's case, his thoughts were actually coming from other dimensions. For reasons I will never comprehend, my father was chosen to bring this information forward.

Ever since I was a kid, my father had trained me to always remember my dreams. Next to my bed was a pad of paper, flashlight, and pen in order to record that evening's dream sessions the moment I woke up.

For my father, dreams were not just the idle musings of a sleeping mind but another reality with its own logic. Back in 1925 he kept a detailed diary of his dreams. From one of his first entries, it is clear that Pop was already aware of the power of dreams to provide access to other realities. He writes, “I must train myself to remember my creations of sleep. I must put my conscious mind in touch with my subconscious. There is something in it. People awaken their unknown and latent qualities and powers in just such a way.” Perhaps my father was anticipating some of his future spirit guides with this: “Dreamed last night of a funny person, or rather a peculiar one of a dark green hue with feelers on his head and balls at the end of them which shone and glistened with lights and colors like a spotlight.” In another, he may be having his first out-of-body experience: “Dreamed I saw all the planets as planets close-up and not as stars.” But one dream stands out as the first indication of his nascent psychic abilities: “Dreamed of fire and freight train just before I awoke. First thing I saw after I woke was the morning newspaper with a picture of fire and freight train wreck on the front page.” Being able to dream of the next day's headline in advance was quite a feat for such a young man. Clearly he had never forgotten this first experience of premonition, and it explained why he was so adamant that I preserve, treasure, and understand my dreams.

Pop would tell me that before going to bed, I should plan out my dreams as if they were storyboards for a movie. If I needed to solve a problem, I was to instruct myself while falling asleep that the solution would appear to me in a dream. If I didn't like a dream's outcome, he told me to go back to sleep and act as the director to re-create the dream to my liking. This was a psychological and spiritual training exercise. If you could sharpen your mental abilities to the point where you could direct your dreams like a computer game, you would easily achieve control over the events in your waking life as well.

This training had played an important role in the creation of my paintings. Before I started any painting, I would first go to sleep for an hour or so with the intention of dreaming. I'd wake up a little groggy, my head filled with remnants of surreal dreams, and immediately start to work. I felt as if I was painting while still in a sort of trance, and as a result, the hallucinatory images that poured forth on the canvas were more documentations of my subconscious mind than anything else. I could never work after I came home from a dinner party or even from the grocery store, as my mind was filled with the ephemera of real-time reality, which I found encumbering to the creative process. I needed the resonance of my own dreams to generate paintings.

It had been years since I'd had a bad dream. This particular dream didn't panic me, it just bothered me. In the dream, I saw my seventy-seven-year-old father in a subway station at Broadway and Lafayette. As he climbed the stairs, he would pause to catch his breath. The entire dream ran just a few seconds, but it left me slightly rattled when I awoke. For some reason, I didn't bother writing this one down and went about my day. The dream stayed with me the entire day, resulting in an uneasy feeling that wouldn't go away. I hadn't dreamed about my father in years.

Why should I worry? After all, my father was immortal. How could he not be? He healed the sick and raised the dead. He convinced souls not to leave their bodies, removed demons from possessed bodies, and neutralized nuclear radiation. He had superhuman powers not seen since the time of the alchemists. But all of this was just not enough to prevent the universe from skipping a beat.

“Something has happened…” Lisa, my father's latest girlfriend, was on the phone. “I don't know how to say this. Your father is dead.”

Silence. I had never had a phone call like this before and didn't know how to understand what I was hearing. For an eternal moment, I completely disconnected from reality. During those few seconds, my mind went into “pause,” if not complete meltdown.

Somehow the cosmos had made a mistake. This wasn't supposed to happen. When my mind and body finally resumed operation, I reverted to the exceedingly polite young man that my mother had raised, and with great warmth in my voice said, “Thank you so much for calling, I really appreciate it. Good night.” This was the default response for unknown situations.

Suddenly I was shivering. I had moved from the Bowery and was now living in a nearly abandoned turn-of-the-century brownstone that had been originally owned by the Astors during the 1870s but had mutated into a heroin den. The first night I moved in, I spent hours cleaning used needles out of the burners on the stove.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. “Uh, hi, it's Lisa.”

“Yes, Lisa.”

“Well, what are you going to do?”

“About what?”

“Well, uh, your father.”

I never knew anyone who had died before. My father had taught me that no one who surrounded himself with the white light ever died. That was the purifying magic cure-all.

“Well, doesn't he just get buried?” I asked, assuming that some company just showed up and took care of this.

“Yeah, I guess so, but who—I mean, you need to come here.” She was becoming unraveled.

“Why?”

“Well, you have to take care of everything.”

“Like what?”

“Like burying him.”

“Bury him? I don't know how to do that.”

“Well, I don't know what to do either.”

“So, what do I do?”

“I don't know, but you need to take care of this.”

“But I'll have to fly down to do this.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Good-bye.”

After I hung up, I was overcome with rage. I started running around the house screaming at him,
“You weren't supposed to do this! You made a big mistake! This is really stupid! You better fix this right now!”

Breathless from screaming, I stopped and quickly tried to think if I knew of any technique to bring him back from the dead. I tried to remember everything he taught me but I had refused to learn. I knew he told me about how he would talk to the soul before it left the body, check its karmic record, and then reunite the soul with the body. I wasn't sure where to begin. I didn't know where I had put the pendulums he had given me. They were probably in a box in the basement. If it had been awhile since he died, it might be too late to get him back into his body. I didn't really know what the expiration time frame was on this particular technique. If I waited too much longer, he would have left the physical plane and would have difficulty finding his way back. Immediately after physical death, there was a period of disorientation as the spirit adjusted to being free of the body. If there was no one there to meet it, then the soul supposedly floated around for a while until it got its bearings.

I started to call Lisa for the estimated time of death but hung up. I didn't want to talk to her. God, if I could only remember what I saw him do hundreds of times.

For the first time ever, my father had goofed in a major way. For some reason, he wasn't watching for just that one split second when the universe snuck up on him, opened wide, and swallowed him whole. In the blink of an eye, it was all over, and he was gone. Who would protect me? Who would stop the evil spirits from attacking me? Who would talk to Arthur for me? Who would make all the bad stuff magically go away? There was no one else who could do these things. It's not like my father was a lawyer, and if he died I could call another attorney to represent me. He was irreplaceable. Suddenly my safety net had been ripped out from under me. For the first time in my life, I was now completely human and vulnerable. My gifted slide through life was over. I could feel the hard whoosh of life's vagaries coming at me fast. I would now be exposed to disease, harm, toil, and trouble like every other human on the planet. My precious InvisaShield was gone. But most of all, I missed the man whose existence made me more special than I was. It was his exploration of other dimensions that allowed me to live in a world defined by magic and miracles.

All night I paced around my apartment hoping for a sign, something that I could do. If I had died, my father would have known exactly what to do. But no, I had to smoke pot and run around with bad kids when I could have prevented this from happening if I had only paid attention. I was so stupid. In fact, I was the stupidest person on the whole planet, in the whole universe, and in all dimensions. Ever.

As Lisa requested, I took the first flight the next morning to Miami. When I stepped off the plane, the sun hurt my eyes, and the humidity made me nauseous. My native weather had suddenly become hostile and unbearable. Even though my world had completely collapsed, I looked around and saw cars moving, people talking, yelling, smoking, eating. Didn't they know what had just happened? The world had just ended, and all these people acted as if this was just like any other day.

As my taxi approached his house, I saw that a crowd had gathered in front. Some of the people were talking, some were crying, while others just stared into space, their faces filled with pain. I sensed that they were waiting for my father to appear, just like I was, to disprove the unbelievable news they had heard.

When I got out of the cab, they rushed up to me and begged for me to heal them and their loved ones. Crying with pain, they said, “Please, please, my daughter is in the hospital and needs your help! Your father said you had the power.”

“My sister has breast cancer. You can save her!”

“My father has had a heart attack. We need your help!”

In that brief instant, I now saw what my father went through twenty-four hours a day. It was overwhelming—a responsibility I could never have handled. Being a doctor, where you see sick people day in and day out and helplessly watch them die, is bad enough, but having to be a nonstop miracle worker would have been impossible.

This was now the moment to become my father, to make him happy, to continue his work. Somewhere inside of me, I knew that even though I was a bit rusty with my healing techniques, I probably knew enough to help these people. Whatever I did, no matter how clumsy, it would be better than doing nothing. Even though I didn't listen or really pay attention whenever he tried to teach me, I had watched thousands of healings. I knew the drill backward and forward, but I had never done it on a real person. This is what Pop had always wanted. He knew he had a once-in-a-trillion-lifetimes gift, and he wanted me, who carried his DNA, to continue his work. It was as if my father's sudden death was preordained to create this succession. I could feel invisible hands pushing me to start healing immediately, while I, Philip, wanted no part of this. I knew that once I performed just one healing, it would open the floodgates. Just as they had for my father, they would line up around the block, call at all hours of the day and night from around the world to be freed from the pain, ravages, and threat of disease. What I really wanted more than anything was for these people to go away. How could they bother me now? I had nothing to offer them. Certainly there was someone else they could call to remove the tumor or stop the bleeding. That's what the yellow pages are for. Look up “Twenty-four-hour Tumor Removal” or just call “1-800-TUMOR.”

The truth was that there
wasn't
anyone else to call. Besides, these people had already seen every possible doctor, who had told them, “I'm sorry, but there is nothing else we can do.” That's why they were now willing to trust the lives of their loved ones to someone like me. My father was dead, and I was in no mood to assume the position of chief of psychic surgery at the Lew Smith Supernatural Hospital.

Without much, if any, thought, I made the definitive decision: I knew nothing about healing, and I didn't want to know anything about healing. As far as I was concerned, my father's powers died with him. There would be no passing the torch and no inheriting the mantle. As I made my way through the crowd, I muttered vaguely, “No, sorry, call someone else; sorry, come back tomorrow.”

Once inside the house, I started to worry about practicalities. Was there a will, burial instructions, or some psychic message waiting for me? For my father there had always been a sign or an indication as to what the next step was. When he was alive, the universe was more than happy to reveal its inner workings, to answer his questions to point him in the right direction. The universe was his ally. Now that door had been slammed shut and the plug pulled on the ever-present blinking neon sign that said Welcome, Open All Night.

I realized that there was another matter I had to deal with: no one had told me where the body was. Was he still at the hospital, the morgue, or the police station? All this happened without me, and now I was supposed to fix it.

I walked into his healing room, hoping that I would find detailed instructions not only for the burial but for the rest of my life. The room looked as if he had just stepped out for a moment to go to the post office. An air of suspended animation pervaded it. I wanted to find the “on” switch so that I could make time move forward or backward—anything but this awful pause that I experienced. It felt as if he had been kidnapped. There was no note, but perhaps there was a secret cassette tape that once I played it would self-destruct. Nope. Nothing. No father, no instructions, no tape. I was definitely on my own.