The Blazing World (51 page)

And Maisie leaned over and kissed my head. I admire you so much, Mommy, she said. She has not called me Mommy since she was six.

I speak to Dr. F. on the phone. I can hear sorrow in his voice. It is love. I am grateful for that strange form of intimacy, for the one-way telling. He has known me better than anyone. Strange, but true.

I often return to the Riverside Drive apartment. I walk through the rooms and inspect them. I am in my father’s study and have lifted one of the pipes to my nose to inhale that special smell without being seen. I am worried he will come in. My mother interrupts me. She tells me not to touch the pipes or the pens. No, no, no, he doesn’t like them to be disturbed. His voice comes from the next room. Mother quickly straightens the pipes. I am looking up at her face and in it I see fear and hope. It is terrible to see. It is terrible to see because her expression is a mirror of my own.

She was afraid of him.

I was afraid of him.

He never hit her. He never hit me.

He didn’t have to. We were in thrall.

You did not know how angry you were.

I did not know how angry I was.

How I have raged. I think I cannot rage anymore. I think I am too feeble and then the spite comes up again, a bit weaker, a bit thinner, but there. If only I could feel that I had done my work, that it was finished, that it would not vanish entirely.

Father, you did not know how much I wanted your face to shine when you looked at me. But you were crippled. It helps me to know you were crippled.

I would like the ghost of my mother to come and rock me.

Phinny is coming. I hope he is not too late.

Rachel was here. She reminded me of the Beast with Five Fingers. Another Beast. I had forgotten. I asked her to stroke my hand. Her fingers on my fingers—I feel them now as I write. I told Maisie to take her to look at blazing mother Margaret.

Ethan has talked to me. Ethan has told my own fervid stories back to me. His memory is much better than mine.

I used to remember everything—citations, page numbers, names, papers and the year of their publication—and now it is blur.

Clemmy’s red mouth. Her radiant touch. Those silly stones. Why do I tolerate it?

I am in love with a holy fool.

I have frightened Aven. I am so sorry.

When was he here? Today? Was it today? The Barometer has sent me on my way with an opulent speech. His is an angry God, who bellows from heaven and sends down lightning bolts and brutal winds.

I remember I am a Jew.

I am multitudes.

This earth a spot, a grain, an atom.
^III

I am made of the dead.

Even my thoughts are not my own anymore.

I.
A. C. Robinson could not be traced to any likely text. An article by Lester Bone, “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Emotional Origins of Creativity” appeared in
Science and Philosophy Forum
9 (2001). Tracking Bone proved unsuccessful because his affiliation turned out to be fictional. The work was probably written by Burden, as it cites scholars and scientists in several fields.

II.
Fernando Pessoa,
The Book of Disquiet
, trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2002). The heteronym Pessoa used for this book is Bernardo Soares.

III.
John Milton,
Paradise Lost
, Book VIII, 17–18.

Sweet Autumn Pinkney

(edited transcript)

I heard a voice say “Harry.” The man’s voice was pretty loud, and I heard him talking right into my left ear even though nobody was standing anywhere close to me, because it was one thirteen in the morning and only a couple of people were out walking so late at night. I know what time it was because I looked at my cell phone right when it happened outside the Siri Pharmacy on Flatbush Avenue. Kali (she’s the little dog I adopted from S.O.S.—Save Our Strays—half poodle, half terrier, half Chihuahua) was having a pee and a sniff before I took her home. Right away I knew the voice was a sign. If you don’t pay attention to signs they pass on by, and you might miss being called to your rightful fate. No question the voice took me by surprise. I hadn’t even thought about Harry for a long time, and I hadn’t heard from Anton since the postcard, and I’d been concentrating on my spiritual becoming and development and healing gifts and helping people in my practice, Sweet Indigo Spiritual Healing, and I’d been making real progress with some backsliding, mostly in the form of guys I’d fall for who turned out to have bad karma that I would somehow miss. But then, backsliding is part of the progress to enlightenment, too. You have to recognize it and move on. In one of his lectures, the master, Peter Deunov, said, “Your consciousness can travel at the speed of slow trains, it can travel at the speed of light, and it can travel even faster.” I guess my consciousness was catching up to some airplanes by then.

The next morning while I was fixing my blooming green tea, I knew I had to answer the angelic voice by finding Harry, and I looked down at that blossom opening up in my tea and felt the expansion in my sacral plexus chakra, and the feeling of orange drifting up in the room. I remembered Harry’s red, smudgy auras. I found her name in the Brooklyn phone book, and I called her up. I had a speech ready in case she didn’t remember me. I was going to explain about the voice in the street, even though I know Harry wasn’t into the master’s teachings and astrology and chakras or anything like that, but it wasn’t Harry on the phone. The person on the phone said, “I am her daughter and my mother is very sick right now, and she isn’t seeing anyone except her family and closest friends,” and her voice made a little quaver that came right through the phone and into my body as a tremble. I asked her what her name was, and she said, “Maisie,” and I said, “Maisie, this is Sweet Autumn Pinkney. I used to know your mother on account of my relationship with Anton Tish, and I was an assistant for the artworks, and I think I can be useful to her now. You see,” and I spoke the next words slow and clear, “I have been called.” Maisie said, “But
you
called
me
,” because she didn’t understand my greater meaning, but that didn’t matter. I put on my vintage paisley purple dress with the full skirt, the best color for emergency healing, and packed up Kali in her carrying case and grabbed my bag of stones and called a car service because Red Hook is the absolute worst for subways. You just can’t get there underground, so I called up Legends, the trusty service I use in times of need.

I had the address written down, but I couldn’t find the exact building, and I saw some kids standing around, and I asked them if they knew where Harry Burden lived, and one boy with a tattoo on his neck and a black baseball cap said, “Oh, you mean the rich witch.” After we talked a little more it was pretty clear we were talking about the same person, and I asked him why he called her that, and he said he didn’t know except there were lots of rumors about “creepy shit” in her studio and crazy noises and yelling about Satan and God that sometimes came from the building. They petted Kali a little bit and then showed me the door, and I rang the bell. I explained to Maisie and to Bruno, who was Harry’s boyfriend, that I had come to see Harry, and he had to go in to Harry and ask her if it was okay to see me, and she said yes, and so I went up the stairs and into a great big room with windows all over the place and light coming in all over and a super beautiful view, and Harry was lying in a hospital bed with the railings, you know, the kind that lift up on both sides, and an IV drip in her arm. I could see her elbow sticking out from under the floppy sleeve of her T-shirt, and sure enough she was just bones, and then I knew she wasn’t going to get well at all. It made me hushed inside.

I saw the aura sludge around her and the dull colors—whites, grays, some ochre—and the toxins from the losses and the traumas built up over the years. My mission was not healing but cleaning the chakras so the luminous body would not be earthbound. I had to spin Harry’s luminous anatomy free. But she needed to give me permission. You can’t just run in and start cleaning and spinning without permission. Kali started barking, so I put her in the hall in her case. I knew she would whine a little but then probably go to sleep.

I approached Harry with my soft walk. It’s a toe-heel walk like a dancer. I do it to show respect and not make noise, and I stood beside her. She was propped up in the bed. Her hair was short and stringy, not curly the way I remembered it, and her cheekbones stuck out over her hollow cheeks. The skin under her eyes was dark gray, but her green eyes were clear and hard. She looked straight at me and said in a husky voice full of the disease, “It’s the little mystic, isn’t it? The clematis?” And I smiled and put my hand on her arm. Then she squinted at me. I knew she was feeling the warm flow from my fingers. She closed her eyes. And I said, “Harry, can I pray for you?” Before she could answer, Maisie was standing right behind me and asking me what I was doing, and she said they weren’t a praying kind of family. Harry hated praying and on and on. Maisie had a blue aura but a little smoky because she was sad, clinging to her mom, so understandable. But I said in a firm tone that I wanted to know from Harry because she was the person I had been called to see.

Harry said, “Clematis, I’m a Jew.”

I said it didn’t matter and that every religion had its own ways, but God was the same everywhere. I told her that Peter Deunov’s Christianity was renewed by the principles of karma and reincarnation. He liked phrenology, too, head-bump reading that was popular all over the world when the master was young. And then, while I was staring into Harry’s sunken face, I saw pain in it, and her mouth stretched out, and I felt pains in my solar plexus, such hard strikes I had to put my hand down there to steady me. And after the pains, I had the revelation. The calling, the higher planes. Sweet Autumn, I said to myself. (I talk to myself like that when something is really important.) Sweet Autumn, I said, that was the message the voice was trying to deliver to you on Atlantic Avenue! A master is someone who has taken at least five initiations and completed the human stage of evolution and gone beyond it. Didn’t the master say, “A new earth will soon see day.” Didn’t he say that fire would come to “rejuvenate, purify, and reconstruct everything”? And some of the masters are artists—Michelangelo is one, an artist like Harry. He’s moved on to a higher planetary system called Sirius. The Siri Pharmacy! The voice! It was an angelic master, maybe it was Michelangelo, speaking to me from Sirius. I was pretty excited, and I told Harry. I could see Maisie’s face getting all screwed up and angry. And Bruno was looking funny at me, but Harry was listening with her eyes closed and then she said in a whisper, “I remember Deunov now. Clem, he helped save the Bulgarian Jews.”

And I said yes, yes, and I was really happy because Harry knew the story, and that was another sign. Forty-eight thousand people were saved because Master Deunov sent his messenger, Loulchev, to look for the king of Bulgaria, who was hiding out somewhere, to get him to save the people who were going to be deported. The king’s name was Boris the Third or the Fourth or something. Well, Loulchev looked and looked, but he couldn’t find the king, so he had to go back to the master and say he had searched every nook and cranny but no luck. So the master meditated, and the name of the town was sent to him, and lo and behold, the king was in that town, and the king respected the master, and the Bulgarians were behind both of them, and the king made a law that saved the Jews from being killed.

“I remember,” Harry said to me, “Tsar, not king.”