Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (6 page)

“Find out about what, Mum?” he mumbled.

“What did you find out about Madeline Kruger? Did you find a copy of her suicide note?”

He groaned behind the paper.

“Mum, they told me the only way to get it is to contact the family. The charts are all locked up in medical records. They said the note might not be with her chart anyway. They said the police or the coroner might have it. You don’t want me to call the police or the coroner, do you?”

“Who’s going through her effects, Bobby? She’s got two daughters and a son. They’re all grown up now. Responsible adults, I hope! Somebody’s got to be taking care of what she left in the house. I want you to call them and tell them that I was with their mother during the last hours of her life, because the hospital called me and said that Madeline had addressed certain comments to me. The last words she wrote in this world, Bobby, were to me. Do you understand?”

A big sigh, and he hitched the paper up even higher, because he didn’t want me to catch him looking at the latest line on sports betting. He knows I hate it when he throws good money away on the Red Sox and the Celtics.

“Mum, I’ll try. Maybe I can stop by their old house. I used to have a cold frosty or two with Ray Kruger when he hung out at the Piece of Work and the Holly. He was living in Reno, but he’s back now. The old lady—er, I mean, his mum must have left him a little dough, because I heard he was in the back room of the Piece the other night looking for a game of nine-ball and some action. ”

“Bobby, I need that note. I have a sense that all of these things are related somehow. I don’t know why. Also,” I said, indicating my first notebook, which was already almost full, “I need another notebook, a nice fat one.”

“Yeah, you’ve been writing a lot. Is it all about the spirits?”

“Bobby, I can feel it. I’m being chosen for something.”

“Chosen for what, Mum?” he mumbled from behind the paper.

I decided it was time to let him in on at least some of my secrets.

“I am being singled out to see things that other people can’t or won’t see,” I said.

“Well, you’ve always wanted to see things, haven’t you, Mum?”

“Wanted to, yes, Bobby, but now It’s actually
happening.
I’ve seen—I think I’ve been chosen to receive revelations. The way Swedenborg was allowed to travel through heaven and hell and interview angels.”

“Oh, no, not the Sweden-bozo again,” he groaned. “Mum, if it’s not the Dalai Lama, it’s this Swedenborg guy. You can read that stuff all you want. You know I don’t mind. I’ve even schlepped to the used book stores and the libraries to find those out-of-print books for you, but when you talk that stuff to other people, they think you’re daffy.”

“I haven’t told you, Bobby, but I’m having visions.”

“Visions, Mum? Like into the future? Are you feeling like you have special powers? Second sight and whatnot? Can you tell me, are the Celts gonna spank the Knicks tomorrow night in the Garden? Can you tell me if that nurse named Carrie Von Trier who works nights on the pediatric ward back at the Kingdom has a boyfriend?”

“Bobby, I’ve traveled in the borderlands between life and death.”

“Mum, the one psychiatrist already thinks you’re crackers. If you don’t stop going on about visions, they’ll lock you up in a quiet room on the psych ward and keep you here for a month. And you won’t get to take your bag of magic tricks in with you, Mum. They’ll be afraid of you hanging yourself with a pendulum string or cutting yourself with a crystal.

“You don’t want to be locked up there with those Osama Been Looney Toons, do you?”

The next morning, two young nurses—Jennifer and Tiffany—wheeled in a utility cart stacked with towels and bathing supplies. With illness and death crawling like yellow fog along the walls in this medical megalopolis, these two pretty young things in April bloom seemed garishly vigorous. Maybe one of them would be able to put up with Bobby if he lost some weight and quit smoking that pipe? They asked me if I was comfortable, if I had everything I needed, if I’d seen my doctor and so on.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine,” I said. “I was just getting up to meet my roommate.”

They looked at each other, then back at me.

“Well, we’re going to give Nancy her bath right now,” said Jennifer. “Maybe you should wait.”

A single violent rattle sounded from behind the curtain, as if the patient had struck or shaken the bedrail.

“Oh,” I said, “then she’s awake?”

They looked at each other again.

“She’s awake, but, uh, she needs her privacy,” said Tiffany. Then she forced a big smile. “Dr. Stegman gave you ambulatory privileges. Perhaps you’d like to walk around a little? Stretch your legs?”

“The day I need his permission to walk—” I said.

I had to admit that a stroll sounded enjoyable. So I put on my robe and my Merlin crystal and shuffled out for some exploring.

As I was preparing to go, I heard the two nurses behind the curtain washing and chatting.

“Stay on this floor, Mrs. Druse,” one of the girls called.

“Yes,” said the other, “or we’ll come and hunt you down.”

They seemed to be having a merry old time, so I left them to their work and ventured out into the wide world of Boston General.

Dr. Metzger’s little session yesterday troubled me, I suppose, because I had to consider that he might be right. To my knowledge I’d never had a seizure of any kind, nor had my neurologist at Kingdom Hospital, Dr. Massingale, ever proposed that as a diagnosis to me. Of course I knew that seizures come in many different forms, not just the familiar grand mal, where the epileptic falls down frothing at the mouth. I guessed that the doctors here were wondering if I might be having petit mals, small seizures, difficult to detect on clinical examination.

I had no doubt that if I had confided in Metzger and shared the details of my near-death experience, he would have defined me as an epileptic in the grip of seizures. My head hurt and the sore parts of me were ready to believe in anything that might explain what had happened to me that December night at Kingdom Hospital. All my life I had waited for an angel, a vision, a journey out of myself, a visitation so bracing that I would gasp with delight at a world full of wonders and see with my new eyes naked what my faith had told me for decades: that the spiritual realm, though invisible, is inseparable from the material world, and that life circulates like blood through them both. No here. No hereafter. Only a great unity! And Sally Druse right there in the thick of it!

What if these seizures could explain all the extraordinary things that I had ever experienced? Not only Madeline’s infested corpse, but the transcendence and prayerful joy that was mine in the deep reveries of meditation? What then? What if the vast inscape of my entire spiritual life derived from a lesion?

Patients and staff streamed by me in the busy hallways of Boston General. Sick and well. Busy and indolent. I looked into the eyes of everyone who walked by me, wondering what aberrations of brain chemistry and organic syndromes made them who they were. Did that awful sturgeon Stegman have a pomposity lesion somewhere in there? And if so, would he agree to go under the knife to have it removed and have his personality repaired? Did neurosurgeons propose cutting into Barbra Streisand’s or Rush Limbaugh’s head because of the crazy shit they say?

When I returned from my jaunt, the room was quiet, and I resolved then and there to meet my mysterious roommate, who apparently was so ill that she could neither hear nor respond to my voice, and who needed two nurses to bathe her.

I sat on the edge of my bed and faced the curtain between us. The morning sunrise slanted in through the windows and made the flowers Bobby had brought me even lovelier in the new light.

“Mrs. Conlan? My name is Sally Druse. I’m your new roommate and I’d like to come over and see you, if it’s a convenient time.”

Nobody answered, even though, after half a minute or so, I heard a soft groan, followed by gurgling, then metal rattling again, as if Mrs. Conlan had grabbed the bedrail and shaken it hard.

I’m the neighborly sort, so I got out of my bed and went to the foot of hers, where I could see an opening in the draperies. The linen curtain made a pale scrim and diffused the harsh light of the sun into a nimbus that lit the interior with an otherworldly light.

On the bed a gaunt, ghastly human figure lay supine, with pillows wedged here and there on either side of her, without which I had the impression she would shrivel into a sideways fetal position and perish. She appeared youthful—thirty or so—but with a lifetime’s worth of suffering etched into the lineaments of her grimacing face. Her neck was extended and arched, almost as if she were trying to see something above the head of her bed. She appeared wide awake, but her eyeballs had rolled back into her hollow, dark sockets, where gravity alone controlled their listless movements. Likewise her mouth had fallen open and seemed permanently ajar, her chin shuddering with each breath. Her hands were curled up in front of her like the talons of a dead bird, with splints fastened at each wrist, to keep the lingers from curling into themselves. As I watched, she began working her mouth as if she were chewing without ever swallowing. She was appallingly thin, a human leftover from nature’s repast, her miserable figure lit by a morning radiance that was too harsh for my ancient eyes and my tender heart.

I spotted the source of the rattling: Her hands were tethered to the steel bedrails, and every so often, her arms jerked spastically and yanked the railings against the bed frame.

“My poor Mrs. Conlan.” I spoke aloud, but words were of no use.

A tap on the door. It was an orderly pushing a wheelchair, and right behind him, son Bobby.

“C’mon, Mum,” said Bobby. “We’re going upstairs to take some pictures ofthat crackpot brain of yours.”

More brain scans! How exciting. I didn’t have the heart to tell Dr. Metzger that I wasn’t going to let the likes of Dr. Stegman poke around inside my brain, no matter what showed up on my scans. (There’s a little legal theory I know a lot about called informed consent.) But I saw no harm in indulging our mutual curiosity about what big doings were happening between the walls of my skull.

Bobby and the orderly wheeled me to a separate wing that must have been devoted exclusively to the domain of the brain. All the signs on the wall began with
neuro
—neuropharmacology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology.

Finally, at the end of a windowless corridor, we came to a large door with a huge handle on it that looked like a closed bank vault. The technician, a nice young man named Michael Baxley (from Portland, Maine!), came out and informed me about the extremely powerful magnetic fields to which I would soon be exposed and questioned me closely about any metal components I may have acquired in life’s journey—prostheses, pacemakers, orthopedic screws, shrapnel.

“Did you know that the Dalai Lama is intensely interested in brain imaging?” I asked him. “He’s in cahoots with several Western neuroscientists who are imaging the brains of Buddhist monks to measure what occurs in the brain during meditation and mindfulness.”

“You don’t say,” said Michael Baxley. “Nobody’s ever told me that before.”

“Mum, lay off with the Dalai Lama, would you?” said Bobby.

My interest in the Dalai Lama embarrassed Bobby, I guessed. But why? I don’t get embarrassed when he’s interested in beer and the Red Sox, or when he plays that damn old ABBA album all day long.

By the time I got into the scanning chamber I was beaming with anticipation. I assumed my health insurance would cover most of it, but it occurred to me that I might be able to charge these neuroresearchers for a look inside the brain of Eleanor Druse. I’d show them a scan image for the record books if I could work myself into one of my meditations or deep prayer states before they took their pictures.

Once in the scanning room, I felt as if the technicians were preparing to launch me into space via an alien abduction tube. I had to lie very still while the MRI was working, they said. I would be able to hear them and speak to them, and they would be able to tell me when I had to hold still and when I could take a break and wriggle around to get the blood flowing and keep my old limbs from falling asleep.

They slid me deep inside a huge cylindrical scanner. I had the sensation that my little cranium had been nestled in some vast cosmological turbine.

On the inside panel of the beige doughnut, at eye level, I saw a tiny metal tag embossed with letters and numbers, a code or serial number, a long meaningless alphanumeric sequence.

“Okay, Mrs. Druse,” said Michael, “we’re going to start the machine now. We aren’t taking scans yet, just warming her up, okay?”

“Fire away!” I said.

I began my meditation in earnest, trying to slip as quickly as possible into the strong but gentle stream of being that flows just below consciousness.

“Mrs. Druse, the machine is all ready, and now comes the very important part about holding absolutely still. Can you do that for us?”

“I won’t budge a jiggedy jot!”

I stared straight ahead at the letters and numbers, which became ciphers glowing with a celestial light. I didn’t so much as blink and yet they changed right before my eyes into occult symbols or cryptograms, iridescent and changeable, as if the data from the device was flashing by on a digital readout for me to see.

I closed my eyes and felt myself disappear inside the material universe. I have practiced yoga and meditation for most of my adult life, and I have struggled along the steep path that leads to mystical self-transcendence. Finally it happened, right there in the scanner: my first truly extraordinary state of consciousness. The boundary between me and the rest of the universe dissolved. I was no longer myself seeing matter, I was matter seeing myself. The polyurethane shell surrounding me was still beige and textured, but it was also perfect, profound, and meant to be. Like me, it was part of eternity. I didn’t have to do or say, be or think. I was. I was Brahman, the single absolute being animating and sustaining the entire universe, and every time I breathed, I exhaled a new universe.