New fiction by Eve Marx
It started with a client, a no-nonsense lady, who requests Reiki services, oh, maybe twice a year. She was unspecific about what we were working on; in the past I’ve channeled energy to assist with various, potentially combustible, domestic situations she’s experienced. We were only a few minutes into the session and both of us had our eyes closed and I was half in trance, when suddenly the client’s father, who is dead, joined us.
“Your father’s here,” I said, rather casually, like it was no big deal for spirits to show up in the middle of a Reiki session. “I didn’t intend for this to be a mediumship kind of session but he just appeared.”
The client sat up on the Reiki bed. She was a little shocked and definitely suspicious.
“What’s he doing,” she said. “What’s he after?”
“Well, he’s stroking your back,” I said to the client, my eyes still closed.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” she said. “This is unreal. Yesterday, when I was at my college reunion, some guy I barely know approached me. He stroked my back! Normally I’d be, like, get the fuck away from me, muthafucker, but it felt nice, so I didn’t.”
“Well, there you go,” I said. I thought the session was over even though we’d only been working a few minutes. I was exhausted. The energy of her father’s presence drained my battery. She put her shoes on and left my house; over the next several days she sent a flurry of fascinating texts that she was conversing with her dead dad; she yelled at him; she argued; she said she wouldn’t bargain with him. I asked if she’d discussed this otherworldly visitation with her mom with whom she’s been fighting. She said no, she hadn’t and when I said why not, that generated a fresh volley of messaging.
Meanwhile, since the portal was open, I thought, why not seize the day? I took in hand my lodestone, a weirdly shedding rock that happens to be a naturally occurring magnet. I mesmerized myself into my Reiki zone, closing my eyes and scribbling the Cho Ku Rey symbol in the air and chanting Hon Sho Ze Sho Nan nine times and focusing. Always focusing. Somewhat recklessly, I invited any spirits in my life — and I’m either blessed or cursed to have dozens — to shine their light. I invited any spirits who might be hanging around to show me a sign. It was a big ask, but I figured what the heck. It’s not every day the veil thins and the portal opens.
The first spirit to show up, naturally, was my mother. I bit my lip and feigned graciousness but I know from hard experience when my mother’s spirit shows up, it’s rarely helpful. My mother swore when she was alive she would haunt me after her death and she’s kept her promise. Mostly when she shows up, it’s to provoke or annoy me. So, I wasn’t surprised to feel her presence. It was, after all, around the anniversary of her death, a time of year when she likes to be remembered. This time she didn’t play any of her usual games like hiding my husband’s keys or causing him to flip his car, things that have happened in the past. This time her presence seemed more benign, and, well, more like just a presence.
My father, dead sixty years, manifested himself two days after I invoked him with the lodestone. I knew he was around because I had a sudden compulsion to buy a watch. When I was a child I coveted my father’s Bulova and after he died, for a few years, I wore it. I don’t know where his watch is now. It might be in a box inside another box pushed way back in a closet. With a strong sensation of my father’s spirit breathing down my neck, I went online and found a watch that looked like something he might wear and ordered it. My husband idly mentioned he felt the presence of my father, who of course he’d never met, with him in the shed behind our house where my husband plays sax. My father was a musician and composer in love with jazz and swing. I think he likes this swing band music I’m playing now, my husband said. He’s one of two horns in a seven piece swing band.
I knew I’d gone overboard when I did the lodestone thing because all of a sudden the house became very crowded with the spirits of the dead. To be frank, it was overwhelming. Our (dead) friend Tony who was a rock and roll star in Montreal once upon a time showed up briefly, as did a (dead) dog, a (dead) horse and a (dead) cop I’d once dated. I mentioned to my husband that I felt his (dead) mother’s foreboding presence. My adult son, who does not believe in ghosts or spirits, called me from the city not far away where he lives and reported a crow pestered and cawed and screeched and followed him when he was out walking a friend’s dog. “Oh, that was my mother,” I said. “She must have something to say.” I had to admit not all of these spirits hanging around were sending friendly vibes. In fact, they were leaving rings on the coffee table, lazing around on couches, interfering with my sleep. Whenever my former mother-in -law’s spirit was in the room, all the oxygen felt sucked out. Around day three of this supernatural experience, I became exasperated and shouted into an empty room, “Ok, enough already!” and snap! Just like that, all the spirits packed up and split. Evaporated. Disappeared. Only the (dead) dog remained and that’s probably because we keep a painting of him on the mantel an artist friend did that is such an uncanny likeness, right down to his blind eye, that his spirit is always present.
A week or so later when things had calmed down, my husband and I were enjoying our morning coffee in our kitchen, discussing the day’s work schedule. Over demitasse cups of French press coffee — I admit I am a coffee fetishist — we spoke for a few minutes about energy and spirits and the risks versus the rewards of stirring them up.
Do you remember when I had that collision, he said, as if I could ever forget. It was an icy night, at least twenty years ago. We were going through a rough patch in our marriage. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my husband was having an affair with a much younger and less encumbered woman. As affairs go, it wasn’t much. A hotel room here and there, some expensive dinners in dimly lit, intimate restaurants that I didn’t know about while I was sharing a Happy Meal with our kid at a McDonald’s on the highway. I think that was the thing that burned me up the most, much more than the sex, that while I was squabbling with our ten year old over the last french fry, my husband was slurping oysters on the half shell and drinking screwdrivers in Darien. Which also happens to be where his first wife lives, but I wasn’t thinking about her then. That came later.
“You hit an icy patch,” I said. “You lost control of the wheel. The car flipped over. I can’t remember now if it went into a ditch. I remember a police officer calling to say you’d been in an accident and the car was totaled but you weren’t badly hurt.”
You came to pick me up at the emergency room where they took me to get stitches, he said. You were so worried. Do you remember what I said in the car when you were driving us home from the hospital?
“Of course,” I said. “You said just as the car was flipping over, you saw my mother in the passenger seat.” My mother had been dead for a decade, but her ghost loved haunting him.
Yes, she was right there in the passenger seat, he repeated. You weren’t at all surprised when I said that. You had no trouble accepting she was right there. Do you remember what you said next?
I did.
“I asked if she saved your life or caused the accident,”I said. “You said you didn’t know and I didn’t ask more questions and then two weeks later I discovered your affair.”
Your mother never trusted me, my husband said.
As I was rinsing the coffee pot, I mentioned to my husband that while I was caught up recently in a Reiki transcendental state, I had the insight that he and I were just a couple of old bald eagles.
They mate for life, right, he said.
“Yes, unless one of the mates dies and then, if they can, they find another mate.”
I thought about how a month earlier, a bald eagle, its breakfast seagull still gripped in its talons, fell out of the sky just outside our house. Just clean fell out of the sky, dead as a doornail. It was early and I was still in my pajamas but I went outside to look. The bird was dead but its eyes were wide open. It looked startled. It all must have happened so fast, the bird’s feathers were barely ruffled. Before the police arrived and police did arrive because a fully grown dead bald eagle in the roadway is an actual event, I stood over the eagle and took my time looking at it. It was huge. Even in death, it was majestic, its aura palpable, its energy electric. One of the police officers who seemed to know a thing or two about sexing birds mentioned it was female.
The females are bigger and stronger than the males, he said.
Not too long later, I learned the eagle got shipped off to be examined by a wildlife forensic expert to determine the cause of death, or at least rule out foul play, like someone shooting it with a BB gun or that it was electrocuted on a power line. The only information that came back weeks later from the examiner was that the eagle wasn’t shot, nor was it electrocuted.
Do birds have heart attacks, my husband said, but just to me.
I like to tell people I’m living on borrowed time since every single blood relation from the generation above me and the generation before that has died, very suddenly, from cardiac arrest. They tend to die young, younger than I am now, which is why I say I’m on borrowed time. I often joke that I have a bit of an edge on my forebears, since unlike them I get a little exercise and don’t think sour cream is the perfect condiment.
“I think I might have witnessed my own death,” I remarked to my husband just before we retreated to our separate desks. He’s a journalist, I’m a journalist, we both work from home. “I am that dead bald eagle.” I said I was sorry to leave him a widower, but I know he’ll be ok. He’s so much better equipped than me to handle the rigors of being widowed. I think it’s entirely possible he might find another eagle. And if that eagle turns out to be his first wife, well, that also would not surprise me. He could finally retire from his exhausting and demanding job and move to Connecticut and swim in her pool and play saxophone and maybe write a novel.
The thought of dropping dead just like that female eagle is oddly comforting to me. Once I had that revelation my entire outlook brightened. I thought only lovely things about that female eagle lying in the roadway. Even dead, she looked really good and I thought that was nice. The oddest thing to me at the time was how no one except me came out of their house to get a look at her or see what was happening. You would think someone else might have come out, a fully grown bald eagle falling out of the sky, dead to the world, not something that happens every day.