About God

"Let me provoke you a bit," he said, as we walked along a stretch of quiet railroad track. "Just follow along with me here." And as we walked he laid out his thoughts like the track we were walking.

It was late summer, and late afternoon. It was quiet, and dry, and fulfilled. I have often thought, and I thought as I watched this old man walking next to me, that when we compare old age to winter we are mistaking the seasons. Winter is far more like stormy, turbulent youth: cold, and wet, and changeable. But these fine, warm days of September, with their weathered colors, and leaves too weary to stand, and dust trailing your footsteps as you walk down a road, these days seem so much more like this old man. Quiet, and mellow, and dry.

"So here is my thought. Time is God. No, better put, God is Time. Nothing but Time."

Ok, I was provoked.

"Well, I suppose so. If God is all things, then God is Time, too."

"No, I mean to say, God is just that. Time."

I waited for more. I wondered uncharitably, if this was merely a way to say that as an old man he was closer to God, as he had more time on his account than I.

"What do we know about God?

"Are you asking me?

"Yes, yes. What do you know about God?

"Well, not much, I suppose. I mean, we guess a lot. People think they have answers, but I don't know if you can say we know God."

"Scientifically, you mean."

"Yeah, scientifically."

"So, you might say we describe God, but we don't know God."

"I guess."

"Now, tell me what you know about Time."

"It's a duration of..." I stopped. I had started confidently, like a swimmer heading into surf, and suddenly realizing I was in over my head. "...time." I finished lamely.

"We measure it, will you agree?" I nodded. "We describe it, that is. We live through it. But do we know what it is?"

I'm sure I looked blank.

"Here is a rock." He picked one up, dusty, rounded, palm-sized. "I suppose when you reduce it to the most basic questions, I don't know nor do I care to speculate why this rock is. I mean, if it is here to do rock things, then perhaps some other creation could serve the same purpose, but we have been given a rock to do rock things. But the fact remains that it is a rock. Here it is. And should anyone wonder what is a rock, it can be demonstrated. But," he paused and looked around. "Where is time?"

"Now. Past, present."

"But what exactly is now?

"It's...it's not yesterday or tomorrow."

"You're describing again."

"So, what's the point?"

"Well, the point is, when we start to discuss it, to wonder about it, we must come to the inescapable conclusion that Time simply is. It has no form or substance, but without it, we could not exist."

"So?"

"So, isn't that the essence of what we call God?

Again, I'm sure I looked blank.

"Let's begin again. Tell me, what are the qualities of God? And let's leave dogma out of this. What concepts of God are universal?"

I pulled a long leaf of grass up, separating it from its mother plant at the base. Sucking the end of the grass, it was sweet and juicy, even this late in the season.

"Ok." Deep breath. "God is eternal. God knows everything. God can do anything."

"Alright. God is eternal. Always was and always will be. What else is Time? What we measure as time - it's two o'clock, say - is just a small way of expressing a portion of eternity. Eternity supposed Time. Without Time, what would 'always' mean?"

"Um hmm."

"All-knowing. This is harder because we are thinking of knowing in a human, sentient way. But we can say that nothing happens outside the scope of Time, and in that way, Time knows everything."

"Ok, but tell me about powerful. Time just is, it doesn't act. It has no force."

"Oh? Time heals all wounds.  It has both the grace and the horror of power. It will pass, and its passage will bring change. And change is both horrible, because we can hold on to nothing, and full of grace, because we must never endure something forever. Unless you believe in Hell, but that is for another day."

"I guess."

"Can you dispute it? Can you control time? Even for a second? Can you make it slow down, or speed up? It is the great leveler, the ultimate judge. No one, no matter how rich or powerful, no matter how strong and fit, no matter how beautiful and charming, on one has ever defeated Time. It thumbs its nose at our petty attempts. You wear a watch, you watch your time. And you haven't slowed it at all, or urged it forward even the tiniest bit faster, for all that you count it and break it down, and watch it ticking away. And what is religious ecstasy really but relief from the passage of time, or perhaps unity with it? To stand outside oneself. Just for a moment, to be relieved of the counting of minutes."

We walked a bit more, and the sun was low on our backs, and warm with the intensity true only of late summer sun, or sitting by a fire: you're not surrounded by warmpth, but seared where you face it.

"But we believe that God created all things."

He nodded.

"Once," he mused, "I asked a physicist about Time and space, about the Universe. He tried to answer me. I told him I could more or less accept no end, just keep putting layers onto the Universe as it moves away from me. But no beginning? I can't fathom no beginning. How does something not begin?

"He told me that it wasn't so much that the Universe doesn't have a beginning. It was just that before the beginning of the Universe, before there was matter, there was no need for Time. And before there was Time, there was nothing for matter to exist in. So Time and Space are, to physicists, one continuous thing, and you can't really think of them as separate. So we can't exist without Time or God, and that's comfortable for many people. But God doesn't exist without us, either. If we are not, is God? Does it matter? So Time, or God, created the Universe, and the Universe created God. Do you see?"

"So what does this all mean? What am I supposed to do about it? Put up a shrine to my Rolex?"

"I once knew a man, he wrote me letters from time to time. He lived in New York City. Once, he wrote me about a little lady, a bag lady he called her, whom he said he saw day after day begging near his apartment building. And after a while, he began to look for her as a part of his routine, so reliable was her panhandling. One day, she was not there in her customary gutter. Nor the next, nor the day after that. After about a week, this man realized that perhaps the bag lady wasn't coming there any more, and he began to worry. He made a few inquiries, and discovered she had become terribly ill, and had been taken to the hospital. He went to visit her there, and realized that she was going to die. He knew, from his brief conversations with her, that she had dreamed of going to Hawaii, where she wouldn't be cold. So he rushed around and arranged to bring her some Hawaiian music, and brought her some pineapple from the store. And, he says, she died happily."

I was beginning to wonder when the rice paper would unroll - I was feeling perilously close to being called Grasshopper and being told to look in my empty hand for the meaning of Life.

"The irony of life is that the only way we value this God Time is in how little of Him we have left. But we can't know that before we run short, because it itself blocks our view."

I was impatient. As we had walked the later afternoon sun had slanted into evening, and slid down the spectrum from yellow to red and now blue. It is the scents that intensify as the light of day wanes; the tangy smell of grass, the gritty odor of earth; or does our sense of smell simply wake up and take over for our eyes as the light fails? Through the afternoon, the flies and buzzing creatures had set up a background to our steady, working thoughts. Now, as the evening approached, the crickets and singing insects began their rhythmic serenade.

"What should I make of all this, though? Am I supposed to do something different? Should your friend have done something different? If what you say is true, there's still nothing I can do to change things. And I can't even ask God to change things. What are you trying to tell me?"

He laughed at that, finding great good humor in my frustration, and I was a bit hurt and put out, since I hadn't intended to be funny.

"I think," he said, when his laughter had subsided, "that I was just telling you to have a nice day."

The War Room of J. Allen Pryor

J. Allen Pryor was thirty-six years, four months and two days old; kempt, pressed, filed, combed and modulated; a teacher of five year's experience and the author of a text book dealing with forty-five word paragraphs that had, as yet, to become a best-seller.

He was small of stature--measuring five feet, five inches in his stocking feet, and weighing, dripping wet, perhaps one hundred and ten pounds. Most of that weight was concentrated in his oversized and yet oddly cadaverous head. There was little flesh on the head, mostly just skin stretched across an unusually massive skull. He had tiny, almond-shaped eyes that peered weakly from behind thick spectacles, and a thin-lipped, wide mouth that, when pulled into a smile that more closely resembled a leer, revealed two rows of long, large, coffee-stained teeth. His hair was tinted, cut with a razor, and combed in a rather ludicrous wave over his bulbous brow. He wore polished loafers, a tweedy sports jacket, a striped shirt and a too-wide tie. His slacks were in perfect press, his socks matching his tie.

Thus appeared Mr. Pryor as he faced his class of twelfth-grade students in English class, his two skinny legs in perfect juxtaposition, so thin that light shone between them even with his feet pressed tightly together.

Mr. Pryor observed his class. Sixteen upper middle-class, bright young snobs who were attending this private school for, as he saw it, one failing or another. Mr. Pryor hummed a theme from Schubert, and leered in a ghoulishly friendly way at the assembled swine as he took a seat at the front of the room, not behind his desk but exposed fearlessly in a straight wooden desk chair, sitting back straight, feet together, with a blue book on what passed for his lap. He was taking the measure of the assembled troops.

"I will call the role," he announced. "Please respond with present." His voice was soft, his coffee-breath projecting across the room. He spoke with precise elocution.

"Rebecca Cooper," he called, peering up sideways from his neat little blue class register, his left hand twisted uncomfortably around his fountain pen, and his right hand sensuously stroking the paper of the other pages in the book.

"Here."

A shot across the brow. Mr. Pryor looked up, his mouth compressed, his eyes focusing myopically on a blue-eyed, blonde girl in the front row. She was tall, busty, and had a clear, bright, self-satisfied look in her eyes, a grin on her lips. I, thought J. Allen grimly, have met the enemy.

He permitted her lapse in respect to pass, but not without first impaling her with his renowned glance of forewarning, which he felt sure looked both superior and menacing, but perhaps more closely resembled mild dyspepsia.

J. Allen stood up, after calling roll, to begin his first lesson. He moved with a rather sickening grace, his movements approaching an awkward dance, as if he stepped to a classical aria echoing in his head. He began to write some impressive phrases on the blackboard. His stance was unusual--his side to the board, his head cocked so that he should have been looking out the window that met the blackboard at right angles, and his arm curled up over his head, his hand down next to his face.

He heard a pronounced titter. He whirled. Rather well-executed, he thought. He spied who it was who was laughing. Miss Rebecca Cooper. Aha, thought J. Allen, I was correct. This is the enemy. He grinned hideously, invertedly.

"Very well, students," he said, stepping aside so that they could view what pearls he had cast on the blackboard. "I am J. Allen Pryor."

He pointed, lest they miss the fact that it was PryOr and not Er. They sat in respectful stillness, their young, undisciplined minds drinking in his teaching like dry sponges. Myriad maggots, he thought, liking his turn of phrase, knowing that his mission was not unlike pest eradication.

"This," pointing, "is our prospectus for the month. Each month a prospectus will be given you that you may copy down in your notes. This..." he paused. He looked daringly from face to face. Implied quotation marks hung in the air. "...damn," pause--for effect, "school doesn't offer proper facilities for online delivery of monthly prospectuses. I have seen to it that there shall be, soon." He added that with studied humility, like a nun's.

"Sigh," he said. The class responded with pained smiles. That never fails, thought he, to evoke restrained amusement. "We shall begin," he continued, "with perusal of Joseph Conrad's Victory. For tomorrow, you will write a forty-five word paragraph on any topic you desire. Please specify the topic sentence. I have seen the level of the writing in this class and I instruct you to forget anything you may have been told about writing heretofore and begin again. Questions, comments?" he invited, wiggling the fingers of his upheld hands before the class.

"Only forty-five words, Mr. Pryor?"

He knew the questioner without looking. He didn't really need to examine her any further--she was archetypical of her species: youthful female with rather too much silly wit that passed, in some circles, for intelligence; enough good looks, in a tawdry sort of way, to attract attention; and a fearless way of expressing her opinions, vapid though they may be. This was the girl so highly spoken of by the other teachers? he wondered. Expected to be valedictorian, editor of the school paper, captain of the--oh, horrors--cheerleaders. He needed a worthy foe; this girl was froth.

"I said forty-five, Miss Cooper," he answered, his head moving toward one shoulder and then the other as his eyes focused just beyond her left shoulder.

"But can't it be a few more or less depending on what you have to say, sir?" she insisted, prettily.

"I have nothing to say in your paragraph," he told her, triumphantly. It was good to use superior wit on students who questioned you needlessly. It embarrassed them before their peers, a clear takedown. "You will learn to write within limits, Miss Cooper," he continued, condescendingly. "You will not fill your essays with needless rhetoric."

Miss Cooper smirked. Success, thought J. Allen. Her show of bravado before her classmates.

Rebecca Cooper was thinking, however indelicately, how Mr. Pryor would looked perched on the john. The bell rang. Books flipped closed and feet shuffled.

"Just a moment," said Mr. Pryor, in indignant surprise. "You shall leave when you have been dismissed. When you are dismissed, you will then close your books and rise. Do not forget your paragraphs for tomorrow. You may purchase a copy of Victory at the bookstore. That will be all for today."

The class filed out. Rebecca Cooper snickered on her way out the door. J. Allen poured himself a cup of coffee from the coffee maker he kept in his classroom. He was upset. He tried to plan his classes minute for minute, so that they began with a question, which, over the course of fifty well-orchestrated minutes, would be resolved by the students under his careful guidance, ending with a crescendo of insight that sent the students away in awe of all that J. Allen could impart. He was left in great distress when he was forced to summarize after the cacophonous clangor of the bell, and not before.

J. Allen deemed it necessary to visit the headmaster of the school later that day, to insist that his classroom computer be upgraded. His path led him past a notorious enclosure designed for the seniors of the school, open only to them, in which they, by merit of their advanced age and forthcoming graduation, were allowed to play whenever classes and other activities allowed free time. He overheard voices as he passed, and, discerning his own name, thought it best to be acquainted with what the students had to say about him.

"I think he's a Martian. Did you see his head?"

"Don't speak that way about a member of your peer group!"

"Here he is at the board. At least his tie and socks match. And, God, he polishes his fingernails!"

Riotous laughter. Miss Cooper, reflected J. Allen, knew how to select her barbs. J. Allen, therefore, refused to call on her in class. Providing her with opportunities to speak was not wise, he determined, thus, I shall avoid her speaking at all. Miss Cooper was something of a loudmouth, however, and often, before he could stop her, she had already spoken out.

He passed out their corrected first assignments with glee. Before handing their papers back, he stood before the class as a minister before his disobedient flock, papers held gently in one manicured hand, feet in first position, eyes cast downward.

"These are your first paragraphs. No doubt you will determine by the grades that they are less than even I had expected. I have made comments on the reverse side of the papers. You are free to respond to these comments in writing, and I will consider your comments."

J. Allen had discovered that this was good protection against immediate anger. The students felt that a dialog was opened, rather than an outright bad grade administered, and were therefore less likely to argue. J. Allen returned the papers person by person, carefully concealing the grade from the eyes of the others in the class, noting with quiet satisfaction the dismayed looks as the students discovered their grades.

"Questions, comments?" Fingers wriggling.

"Mr. Pryor, I didn't spell develope wrong."

J. Allen pointed one finger in the air and circled it around and around in an inward spiral until it halted, pointing at the smug face of Rebecca Cooper.

"Pardon me?"

"Develope can be spelled d e v e l o p e. You have it marked off three times and you gave me a D for spelling."

"Allow me to refresh my memory," J. Allen responded. He glided to her desk.

He gazed down at the paper. "Develop, Miss Cooper, is spelled d e v e l o p."

"It may be, but it's also spelled d e v e l o p e."

"I think not," he sighed, looking past her shoulder. "Questions? Comments?"

"Just a minute, Mr. Pryor," said Rebecca, huffily. "I happen to know that that's spelled right."

"Correctly."

"Whatever, so will you please alter my grade?" she assumed his tone of supercilious condescension.

"Please, Miss Cooper," he replied, his face working nervously. His cheeks, incredibly, began to twitch.

"Will you just look it up in the dictionary?" she kept on.

"You may look yourself. Please do not waste class time with this nonsense."

Rebecca went to the bookcase and pulled out a large dictionary - laptops were not permitted in Mr. Pryor's class. Mr. Pryor attempted to continue class, but the group was far too interested in the little drama unfolding before them to be distracted. In a minute Rebecca looked up with a triumphant gleam in her eye.

"Would you like to take a look?" she invited sweetly.

 He looked. His cheeks quivered more violently. He snapped the book from her hand.

"That is the British spelling. This is America."

"It's a second spelling," she corrected, hotly, flouncing back to her seat.

The class was laughing, talking. He sought for control. Rebecca kept up a steady buzz in the background. J. Allen feared he might weep. This fear made him petulantly angry. He finally kicked his desk in anger. The class fell silent, riveted on his untoward display. He stood for a moment, fixing them with his sideslipping gaze, and stormed from the room.

"I think he's going to cry," someone finally whispered.

The class, in a sort of guilty pity, bent to his will for a while. Convinced he had mastered them at last, J. Allen wallowed in his superiority. He conducted his classes like a fine concert, controlling the rise and fall of the discussion, the length of each topic, the depth of consideration, the cooperating minds of his pupils. They moved from Victory to Madame Bovary. He led them through Flaubert like a docent, pacing their progress and directing their attention to the salient points.

"What kind of man is Charles?" he asks.

"Simple," they guess.

"And," he says, his hands waving a "continue" gesture.

"Kind," they try again.

"Starts with a B," he hints, gloating in his superior knowledge. He knew the word he wanted.

"Babyish? Blythe? Bored?"

"Bo..." he continues, waggling his fingers.

"Boorish!" shouts someone, in desperation.

His finger circles in on the individual.

"Sigh," he says. "It is really very simple."

Simple, perhaps, but ultimately unbearable. And one day, taped on the senior room wall, everyone - including J. Allen himself - found a viciously accurate caricature of the little man, one that even he had to admit could be no one but himself. There were the huge forehead, the tiny shoulders, the ubiquitous coffee cup and the self-satisfied smirk, all rendered with cruel attention to detail.

During study hall, with a black magic marker, J. Allen scribbled it over in an orgy of anger and loathing. And even Rebecca Cooper, as she stood silently behind him, watching him violently blacking out her creation, realized that it wasn't she whom he loathed. He's so small, she thought, as she watched him. She hid as he turned to storm away. He just might cry, she thought.

Rebecca's French teacher was walking down the hall as J. Allen departed, his little cheeks twitching furiously, his small eyes tearing with rage.

"Was that Allen?" asked Vera Damon, a middle-aged, forward, nosy and altogether delightful woman.

"Yeah," said Rebecca, eyes down.

"What was wrong with him?"

"He saw a drawing of him someone did," said Rebecca. "There." She pointed.

Vera studied it and laughed, then became serious.

"Allen is a very lonely person," she said. When she spoke seriously, Vera's voice was like music. "He invited Don and me to his apartment for dinner, and we accepted. Do you know when we got there he had made a gourmet dinner? He must have spent hours. Everything was perfect--h'ors oeuvres, candles, wine. He lives by himself. His place is just as...tidy has he is. It's such a lonely little place. He played us Schubert CDs. And directed it," she giggled slightly. "He's a very lonely man."

"Does he have to be so precise?" Rebecca asked, with a little anger and a little shame.

"I think so," Vera said.

Rebecca puzzled, and was uncharacteristically quiet. J. Allen seemed to blossom in her silence and introspection.

Senior speeches, a yearly plague, loomed on the horizon. Everyone suffered--the seniors, who, one by one, had to write and deliver a speech, and, by way of being forced to listen to them, the entire school. J. Allen wasn't fond of public speaking, and lobbied against it, but his haughty whining was no match for a hundred-year-old tradition. He generously permitted the students two weeks of their own time to prepare.

"You may request a special order of presentation if you so desire," J. Allen announced to the class.

"May I be last?" Rebecca asked as the class filed out.

"I see no reason why not," he replied, with great benevolence. Rebecca, encouraged by his civility, extended it.

"Thank you very much, sir," she said, sincerely.

But a few days later, when the order of presentation was posted on the Senior Room bulletin board, there was Rebecca's name, in the very center of the list. An hour's worth of temper tantrum, and two of Rebecca's friends scratched her name off the list and added it to the bottom. Rebecca went home, feeling tired and oddly dis-satisfied.

When Rebecca arrived for class the next morning, J. Allen met her in the hall, coffee cup in hand and cheeks twitching in agitation.

"Did you change the list?" he demanded.

"No," she laughed.

"Don't lie to me!" he quaked. His coffee slopped on the floor, and his little eyes stared her right in the ear. "You had no right to touch that list! I cannot comply with everyone's wishes."

She looked at his sad little wave of hair over his Martian forehead, smelled his coffee-breath, and noted that his perfectly polished loafers were side by side in absolute lockstep.

"Don't," she said, "call me a liar."

Later that day, J. Allen sat at his desk in his empty classroom. Uncapping his fountain pen, he began to enter final grades for the year.

"Veni, vidi, vinci," said J. Allen, as, without hesitation, he marked a D down next to Rebecca Cooper's name.

Psycho Summer

There are hundreds of demons, somewhere behind me. They're creeping closer, and whispering, chattering. But I can't move.

I know they're there, and if I could just lift my arm, I think I might scare them away. But they're mocking me, hissing and singing and shouting.

I'm lying on the floor in the hall outside my parents' bedroom in the big old house on Parker Avenue in Buffalo. The ceiling is high, high over head; the baseboards are so tall that I can't see the Victorian wallpaper I know is above them, stretching twelve feet up to the ceiling. 

I can hear the faint sound of something, someone, walking overhead in the third floor bedroom. But no one is up there--those rooms are empty, save for a thick layer of dust, some old clothing and unused furniture. The footsteps move along the hall above me toward the stairs, stepping, sliding, halting, moving. And I can't move.

I'm trying to shout to my parents, to call them, but the tall oak door to their bedroom remains firmly closed. The chandelier above the landing floats overhead, but it's dark, and no one seems to be here in the hall but me and the demons. I can see the black lacquer push button light switch on the wall, one that I've pushed a hundred, a thousand times, watching the flame bulbs come to life.

Why do I feel a pillow under my head? Why do I know if I could just move my arm I could silence the demons? They're creeping closer and closer, all their voices blending in an unholy song of my doom. I can't move.

********************************************************************************


"You'll love it," he assured me, his excitement contagious as we glimpsed the skyline of Boston.

"Ok," I agreed. "It seems to have done a world of good for you."

Alex was a small, muscular man, his dark hair, as I had suspected from his photos, a toupee. Still, even with the misgiving bell gonging faintly in my subconscious--seriously, you want to date a man who wears a rug?--I'd agreed to go with him to meet his alternative stretching therapist. With a bad back and a history of headaches, I was typically game for anything that promised to help make me "feel better."

And Alex had certainly changed from the closed in, by-the-book Evangelical I'd met online to a more accessible, easy-going, and finally, it seemed, ready-to-engage man who was now driving me into Boston.

Several weeks earlier, Alex and I, with four years of online chatting, sparring phone calls, and a couple of failed relationships fading in my personal rear-view mirror, had agreed to meet.

He had been waiting for me when I arrived at the small, kitsch-on-the-Hudson restaurant. He was nursing a tall, spicy-looking Bloody Mary, glancing around with what I hoped was nervous anticipation when I arrived, fashionably five minutes late, and slightly sweaty from my walk to the restaurant on the unseasonably hot early summer evening.

His eyes lit up when he saw me. I know that look. I've seen it a lot. Sometimes I like it when I see it; most times I sigh inwardly and think, aw, no. What do I do to be friendly but not encouraging?

He jumped out of his chair at the trendy high table and grabbed me for a hug. "After all this time, a hug is ok, right?" he said.

"Of course," I smiled, fretting that I was damp and he might take it for nerves. He had a nice smile, too. Very Roman looking, I decided. Dark green eyes, olive complexion, a large but artfully carved nose, and a sensual mouth. And he exuded studied self-confidence. A self-assessed Alpha male, I decided. Oh, hell. The type that always spelled trouble for me.

I sat across from him, with the odd, insecure self-assurance of an attractive woman who had grown into beauty late. White pants and a salmon top, long shining dark brown hair, and my bright blue eyes. I'd still look in the mirror with surprise, and wondered who was looking back at me. It wasn't ego, but fascination, that kept me staring at my own image sometimes. Disbelief.

An awkward young girl with books under her arm was being walked home by the man down the street after she'd babysat his children.  His wife had been curt to her when she paid her, and grilled the girl about what the children had eaten for dinner, and when they'd gone to bed, and why the dishes weren't put away.

She objected when her husband said he'd walk the girl home rather than drive her, but it was only a few blocks, and it was a warm summer night. So she gave him an unreadable look, and shut the door hard when they left.

"Sorry," he'd muttered, as they headed down the street.

"It's ok," mumbled the girl. "The kids were fine."

"Have you ever been alone with a man?" he asked, suddenly. He stopped under a streetlight, the light splashing on the ground in the negative pattern of the leaves it shone through. The girl halted, uncertain and with a strange lurch in her stomach, a giddy, frightened, roller coaster of yes and no carrying her from moment to moment. He reached up and put a tentative finger under her chin, running it down to her collar bone.

"My dad," she finally said.

"Of course," he said, taking both her hand and pity on her. He walked her home the rest of the way, chatting about things she never remembered. The summer night air was sweet, a breeze of soft air, a dog barking in the distance, cicadas singing in swells of warm-night music.

Reaching her door, he looked at her for a long moment, and said good night. She ran upstairs to her room and went straight to the mirror, looking for the freckled, chubby little girl she knew so well, studying her image, and realizing with a shock, profound, delightful, and horrifying, that she had, without knowing when or how, become a beautiful girl.

She never babysat for that family again.

Mr. I'm-An-Alpha-Male offered me a drink, and I said I thought his Bloody Mary looked good. It came with both a straw and a stalk of celery to play with, letting me practice the art of lowered eyelids, sudden eye contact, a smile, and a slow seduction.

"So, tell me about this stretching," I said, twirling the celery in my over-sized glass. Alex had told me that he'd been seeing a guy in Boston who'd created a method of resisted stretching that had phenomenal physical results, and also "opened you up" where you had been shut down, or closed off.

He was certainly the model of shut down and closed off, from what I remembered of our online interactions four years earlier. "Looking for the company of one," he'd written in his dating profile, "to share activities, interests, and more." Later, after dozens of hours-long phone calls, instant messages, and open flirtation, he'd spun that into a backward dance of "I said I just wanted company. I'm not ready to date."

When he'd suggested we actually meet, after off-and-on bouts of toe-in-the-water interaction, curiosity got the better of me, and coincidence put us both in the same general vicinity on the same weekend. Could a drink and a conversation actually hurt? So here we were.

And there, of course, it was. That slow, liquid pull at whatever it is inside us that draws us toward this person over that one. The touching of glances, the hands almost brushing, the momentary halt in inane chatter that says, "yeah, he's feeling it, too."

"Here, it's easier if I show you," he said, reaching for my hand. "Put your elbow up on the table. Okay, now, I'm going to pull your arm toward me, and you resist, but let me pull it." He took my hand in one of his, and braced my elbow on the granite table top with the other. "So by you resisting," he explained, "you actually get more stretch. It seems counter-intuitive, but it works." We repeated the action a few times. "How does that feel?"

"Good," I said. "Different."

Two drinks later, we were kissing on the street outside the restaurant.

"Is there somewhere we can go?" he breathed into my mouth.

"There's a park on the river," I said. "Where's your car?"

A warm summer evening, the Hudson River flowing past, the late sun casting a golden haze on everything not already hazy with first contact lust. We talked, and flirted, and touched, and kissed. My hand pressed flat on his chest, I could feel strong muscles under the cotton of his preppy, blue and white checked shirt. My other hand rested on the back of his neck, just below the hairline.

"But that is a hairpiece," I told myself, a piece of me, My Critic, standing back and watching the entire exchange. That part said, "Ok, enough. Time to go home now. This is a good place to say goodnight." And the other piece of me dipped one more time, another time, a third, into the temptation of attraction and first kisses.
*********************************************************************************
The cat is on the bed, twirling, spitting, and hissing. The spitting and hissing aren't so bad, but it is the mad twirling that was making my heart pound. Spinning and twisting and contorting, she is a ball of madness inches away from my hand. And I cannot move.

"She's possessed," I realize. "It's not my cat, it's a demon. It's a creature." If I can shoo her off the bed, or move away, I will be safe. But I can not move.

And then I realize she is under the blankets, not on top of them as I'd first thought. She is in here, with me. And if she touches me, I am doomed. The demon will jump from the cat into me, and I cannot stop it. And still she spins, and rolls, her hissing now a snarling, a roaring, a screech. I want to cover my ears, to hide my head under the pillow, but I cannot move.
*********************************************************************************
When it proved harder to find a way to make a second rendezvous, My Critic got louder and more vehement. "This isn't good," she said. "This isn't how it's supposed to go. He should have wanted to see you right away."

Still, he wanted me to come to Boston to visit the studio and meet his mentor, Rob. I had the book Rob had written, A Lifetime of Flexibility. It seemed to be bits and pieces of many things: a bit of standard stretching, some Reflexology, more than a small helping of traditional Chinese medicine, and a smattering of the personality-typing Enneagram, all stewed up together with a huge seasoning of ego. It seems Rob can, according to Rob, heal all wounds, cure the lame, the halt, the blind, and make your life happy, prosperous, and satisfying to boot. Whatever is amiss, there is a stretch for it.

But it's more than that. He also can tell you everything about yourself merely by looking at you.

"I'm a Large Intestine," Alex told me, proudly, as if that Explained Life, the Universe, and Everything. "We can be domineering, but we're born leaders. I'm just hoping you're a Lung."

"Why?"

"That's my balancing type. You can only be truly happy with your balancing type," he explained.

"You don't really buy this, do you?" I asked, incredulous. I admit it, I've never been happy to be stuck in a box that tells you why you're the way you are. Astrology, social styles, Myers-Briggs: to me they're articles in Cosmopolitan magazine, aimed at weak minds disappointed in love. If you can just figure yourself and everybody else out, put them in the right container, you'll find your soul mate and live happily ever after. Right.

"I showed him your picture," Alex told me. I was wandering the house, as I usually did when on the phone, picking things up, dusting, organizing the happy clutter that was my house--projects halfway completed, books everywhere, mementos and oddities that had a story. "He says you're either a Lung or a Small Intestine."

"What happens if I'm a Small Intestine? Do I have to go away?" I was teasing, but I realized, dimly, and with dismay, that Alex wasn't.

"You'll get sick a lot," he said, with real concern in his voice. "Large Intestines have that effect on Small Intestines."

"It sounds a little icky," I said, still trying to have some fun with the subject. I'd read Rob's theories about personality types, and frankly had a hard time following the mumbo-jumbo. Astrology made a lot more sense, and at least the Myers-Briggs ratings let you answer some questions before it drops you into a personality category. In the Rob Theory, he and he alone could look at you and tell you what meridian (that's the Traditional Chinese Medicine part) dominated your personality. "I don't want to be an intestine. Anyway, nobody ever types me very well. I'm right in the middle of the Myers-Briggs, they don't know what I am. They tried to do my colors once, and I don't fit their patterns." Yes, ok, I was a little proud of that fact.

When I'd first started talking to Alex, he was deeply interested in the Sanguine-Choleric-Melancholic-Phelgmatic system of typing people. I figured this was a by-product of his recent divorce. I could remember trying to find answers, too, to questions that simply had no answers, unable to face the random cruelty of life. Why me? I'd wanted to know. Now I knew the answer was simple: Why not you? It was your turn for the Cosmic Tumblers to hit, for good or for ill.

"I wish it were that simple," I said. "I think relationships are more like timing and a lot of hard work."

"Don't you feel a change in me?" he said, and I leapt at the flirtation in his voice, happy to be onto a subject that was much more attractive to me.

"Yes," I answered. "You're definitely less defensive, for sure." Our first, earlier round of communication had ended badly, with me suggesting somewhat enthusiastically that he had no f'ing business on a dating site if he didn't really want to date. He tried to demonstrate how he hadn't really said he wanted a date but the "company of one." "Oh, sure," I'd sneered. "Like anybody is going to reach that conclusion. Puh-leeze."
*********************************************************************************
The rocking chair is in a pool of yellow light, but lurid, not warm and friendly yellow light. There is no one visible in it, but I know they're there. The rocker is rocking. All around the bowl of light is blackness, and the voices are there, the words just out of reach. They're luring me into the attic where the rocker is sitting, rocking, empty. 

I want to close the door, the door right next to my bed in my third floor bedroom. My room is down a long hall from the back stairs leading to the rest of the family and safety. I know that if I step toward the rocker, the demon will be on me and I will be doomed. Maybe I'll be in the rocker, rocking endlessly in the dark, while the voices rise and fall around me, babbling their sobbing, greedy prayers.

I want to leap from the bed, and run down the painted boards of that long, long hallway, past the other silent rooms, down the stairs to the small landing, and finally down the last ten steps to safety. But I can't move.
********************************************************************************
By the time we were on the Mass Pike heading into downtown Boston, we'd had a long weekend at a bed and breakfast in the Catskills, mostly the bed part. He decided that he was ready for a real try at a relationship, and I was the lucky girl. Well, he didn't say that, but that was the deal. What he meant, and I suppose I knew it somewhere in my infatuated mind, was that he was ready for sex.

Me, too. But naturally, being a certain type of girl, it was supposed to be in the context of something more. And, being a not-very-savvy girl, I saw Relationship in even the smallest gestures and glances. I had never learned the fine art of The Lists, that talent some women have for tossing their scarf to a Knight Gallant, and demanding that he joust for the honor of her favors, that he prove himself first.

Still, he was interested enough to be concerned about my health, if not welfare, and as I watched the beautiful Boston skyline take shape in the summer haze, he enthused about the magic of flexibility and stretching.

"He's worked on some really famous people," he told me. "Olympic athletes, singers, actors. He cured himself when he was half dead."

"How do you mean?"

"He was hit by a car, oh, like twenty years ago, and he could hardly walk. So he figured all this out to heal himself. You should see him. Sixty years old and he looks twenty years younger."

"Amazing."

I wouldn't have said twenty years younger. I might not even have said younger at all, when I finally beheld the Master. He looked like a skinny sixty year old to me, with a slight overbite and an undisguised fatuousness.

The studio was an airy second floor former apartment, or more likely two apartments joined into a large two room space with a crystal chandelier, galley kitchen, and huge windows fronting on Boyleston Street.

A pile of shoes was haphazardly stacked at the door, and the place smelled of vitamins and some sort of way-too-healthy food. It appeared that not only was there a dress code--yoga pants, running shirts, and sports socks--but trainers and trainees alike were free to cook odd combinations of spinach, tofu, beans and grains with peculiar names I'd never heard of. I think if someone had walked in with a McDonald's bag, half the group would have passed out, and the other half would have taken their hand-thrown, no-lead mugs to the evil-eater's head.

After changing--I felt a little conspicuous as I was barefoot and in shorts--I was introduced to a few of the trainers, including the one assigned to me. Mats, towels, McKenzie rolls, stools, strange medieval-looking apparatuses, and, oddly, walkers were positioned all around the two rooms, as well as throw rugs of all colors and sizes cushioning the floor. I later learned that all of these were used to help contort the trainee's body in unnatural positions so that the appropriate meridian could be tortured.

I was sitting on the floor chatting with Alex and my trainer when the Great Man finally acknowledged me and walked over to be introduced. Perhaps introduced isn't quite the right way to describe what amounted to a semi-comic monologue that he launched into, with an occasional reference to me. "I don't know, I was going to say Lung, but look at her eyes, that's fear. That thing she's doing with her eyes, what do you think, Manuel? Small intestine?" he said, still not addressing me directly. I thought maybe it was amazement rather than fear, but he may have been more right than even I knew at the time.

He seemed frustrated, and that pleased me in a perverse sort of way. The rest of the chat was about him, and how he had stood on a billionaire's desk to demonstrate to the VC man how flexible he was while at a fund-raising meeting. The billionaire had evidently had the audacity to wonder how he could be sure that buying into an expansion plan His Highness had for the studio was a worthwhile investment, so Rob had figured stepping gracefully up onto the guy's desk was a good way to show him the results of the program.
*******************************************************************************
The wolf stood in the light of the streetlamp just outside the house. I could see it, sitting, staring at the house through the window on the side of the house on Parker Avenue. 

I was standing by the front door. It was one of those Victorian doors - big, and thick, with a full pane of glass on the top half of the door, and ornate brass handle, and squares of stained glass surrounding the central, lightly frosted pane. 

I thought if I could pull the shade to the front door window, the wolf wouldn't see me, but I couldn't move.

Now he was pacing, trotting a few steps to the right, a few to the left, staying within the circle of yellow light cast by the balloon-shaped streetlamp atop the ribbed green pillar. The night was quiet, and no cars moved up and down the street. Leaves moved gently in what seemed to be a warm summer breeze. If I could move away from the door, or even check to be sure it was locked, I would be safe, I was sure. But I could not move.

There was just one light on in the living room - a desk lamp with a blue glass shade, and most of the room was in shadow, and I could make out hulking shapes of furniture. Maybe if I could push a chair in front of the door, I would be safe. But I could not move. 

I looked to the side window again, and the wolf was gone. The pool of light under the street lamp was empty. Before I could look back to the front door, I heard the shattering of glass as the wolf crashed through the front door to leap on me. But I could not move.
********************************************************************************
"There is a cult quality about all this," I said to Rob. "I mean, you're the man. Everybody listens to you, follows you, imitates you."

Rob flared. "This is not a cult. For one thing, I don't sleep with my female students."

I thought that was an odd way to put it, but I was listening intently while I was being stretched. Rob had a covey of acolytes at his feet, and he was explaining why his flexibility movement was not a cult. This was sort of my fault, as I had mentioned to him I saw the parallels between his typing system and the Enneagram's. That had launched a rant on his days spent in an Enneagram community, which really amounted to a cult, and how he had seen through it and been able to escape, and destroy the cult, and that the Enneagram was all bullshit.

I did notice, though, how everyone adopted certain ways of talking, sitting, dressing--all emulating Rob. How nobody talked to Rob as an equal. Except, of course, me, which seemed to be my first mistake. They simply listened when he went into one of his routines--it turns out he had been an actor in another incarnation--but nobody just chatted with him casually, or asked him questions, or volunteered knowledge that he had not imparted to them. Oops. I was not supposed to know about the Enneagram.

I left the studio feeling, admittedly, better. Lighter. Later, I realized, it was the same sort of "light" you feel when you do that trick as a child: stand in a doorway and press the backs of your hands as hard as you can against the doorframe for a minute. Then step out of the doorway, and your arms will "magically" rise up of their own accord. It's simply your muscles continuing to do what they've been doing, which gives the illusion of effortless movement. The same sort of thing is going on with resisted stretching. You're pushing your muscles against an opposing force, over and over. When you finally stand up, you feel lighter, you stand taller, you bounce around. It's a good feeling, there's no denying.

"So, how do you feel?" Alex wanted to know, as soon as we were in the car and on our way back to Worcester, where he lived.

"Good," I said, wanting to make him happy.

"You should have seen yourself," he chortled. "You were bouncing around. That's the way most people react."

"It's different, that's for sure," I agreed. "But Rob's a little strange. He didn't seem happy that I don't have a type."

"Oh, he'll figure it out. Everybody has a type, some people are just a little harder to pin down. He's got you as switching back and forth between a lung and a small intestine, or maybe a stomach."

"Yum."

"But he did say if you stay with me you'll get sick."

"Of course," I said, not bothering to hide my sarcasm.

"He said my ex is my balancing type, but that she has abuse somewhere in her past. He says he can help her,  but it will take a while."

"So, he's not really liking you and me being together, is he? Did it ever occur to you that maybe he likes you?"

"Oh come on," Alex didn't like that one bit. "Of course not. I'm his friend, he likes me, but not like that."

"Ok." Yeah, right.

The ride back to Worcester was quiet.
********************************************************************************
I am looking up at bushes along a forest path. I must be quite small, I realize. Bees and birds appear huge. I can see them overhead. But more than that, I realize. I can understand them. They are speaking, and I know what they're saying. It's mostly just chatter, but they fall silent as the bushes to my right begin to shake.

From out of the bushes comes a magnificent, huge ram. He is covered in deep, rich fleece, brilliant white with flecks of gold. He shimmers in the dappled light of the forest.

His horns are long, and curved, and sharp, and I am afraid of him. I want to move aside so that he doesn't step on me, or push me away with those horns. But I cannot move.

And suddenly a huge, booming, echoing voice calls out, filling the spaces between the leaves and halting the butterflies in mid-flight. It is sound and not-sound, all at once.

"THIS IS MY SON!" It insists. It demands. And I cannot run, or hide, or even close my eyes. "THIS IS MY SON!"
*********************************************************************************
I refused to admit to Alex, after several months of us being together, and several visits to the studio, that my headaches were getting more frequent. If I told him that, he'd say that Rob was right, and that he's causing it. And I'd have to admit that Rob is doing me no good, and that would disappoint him, because he seemed so invested in Rob's ability to heal people.


I'd done my best to work on Alex about the goofy side to all this--the personality typing thing, and the miracle cures for all your psychological problems.

"I'm not totally opposed to the idea that there are archetypes," I explained. "Jung had a system, I used to teach a couple of them when I was in the training business. I think they've got some useful features, you know, helping us understanding basic components of our personalities. But come on, we're all the result of our experiences, and everybody's experiences are different."

"He said you'd say that," Alex smirked.

So the day in the studio when Rob told me I had demons, which is why I haven't been cured yet, I hoped that he was kidding, but I was pretty sure that he wasn't. Still, I treated it as humor.

"Oh, really?" I smiled. "And what do you do about demons?"

"My demon is bigger than yours." Rob said, looking pointedly at me, with not a trace of humor or friendliness. "My demon will beat the shit out of yours."

"Ok," I said, looking over at Alex to see what his reaction was. I'd become more than a little discouraged about Alex--he loved me, he said. We had progressed to "boyfriend-girlfriend," we had unio mystica sex, but he continued to be skittish, and My Critic continued to natter at me.

"He whines," she said. "When he doesn't get his way he literally whines. Not very manly."

"He's never just happy," she warned me. "There's always something not quite right."

"He's constantly pushing you to follow his master plan," she sighed. "He's got to be in charge, and he just won't let things rest."

"And worst of all," she objected, "he says, 'Thank you for sharing that with me,' when you say something that begs for a real response."

So this time the drive back to Worcester was me wanting to know how Alex felt about the demon comment.

"You're supposed to be a Christian," I said. "Do you think he really believes that people have demons?"

"Well, demons do exist," Alex said. "But I don't think he meant demons like that. I think he meant there's more going on with you that you admit."

"Really? Like what?"

"He said he thought you might have been in an abusive relationship. You have a very tight thymus."

"What, do all women have abuse in their backgrounds in his book? Isn't that what he said about your ex?"

"Well, hers is worse, Rob thinks. But there's something you're not saying."

"I think there's something in everybody's background," I said, more than a little huffy. "I mean, I doubt that there's a girl in the country who hasn't had some sort of weird stuff happen at some point in her life. It's just part of growing up. It all depends on how you take it."

"So what happened to you?"

"Nothing in particular. An uncle wanted to know if I'd had my clothes off in front of a boy. I ran back to where my parents were. End of story. And a boss told me it must have been cold in the room, and looked at my boobs. You know, the nipples. I asked him to say it again, in a really loud voice that other people could hear. He got out of there fast and never said anything out of line again. I don't think I'd call that abuse, exactly. Plus I think I handled it pretty well, don't you?"

"There's more. Rob and Carl can both feel your thymus just won't stretch out."

"Or maybe I just have tight muscles from working on the computer all the time, you think? But anyway, seriously, demons?"

From there we progressed to Alex's Standard Whine: he needed more time with me to know if we had a future. I wasn't prepared to leave my job and home until and unless I had some sort of commitment to commit. We had a stalemate, but neither of us was prepared to wipe the pieces off the chessboard.

"I'm not getting my needs met," Alex drawled, in that unhappy wheedling voice.

"I can't do anything about it," I said, in my "I'm so sick of this conversation" tone. "We're doing the best we can with what we've got, right? This is the situation we're in, that's all."

It was a duet we sang regularly, and I sometimes wondered if it wasn't something we both enjoyed on some perverse and incomprehensible level. It was tension, tension creates emotion, emotion fuels intimacy, or as one crude male in my past would sometimes say, it heightened the orgasm.

I could see my father on the balcony of the house in the woods. He was standing still, not looking at me, not looking at anything. But I knew that he was in trouble, and I needed to get him out of the house.

I tried to call to him, but no sound would come. I looked for stairs to try to reach him, to pull him from the house, but there were no stairs. 

There was a door, and I went through it. It led to a room with two doors, so I opened the second door. That led to another room, again with a second door. The third room had no door, but it did have a mirror. The mirror was fixed in the wall, but it was on hinges. I pushed on it, and it rotated on its axis, so that I could crawl out the opening when it was horizontal. 

I was on the balcony. And now my father was down in the large main room of the rustic house, its vaulted ceiling stretching high above my head. He was still not looking at me, but standing still, and sad, beneath me. I still could not make a sound.

I retraced my steps, through the mirror and the doors, and when I reached the ground floor, he was at the top of the balcony. And I knew there was no time left. I had to leave, I had to get away before the house was destroyed.

I ran, still silent though in my mind I was screaming to him to come away, to get away. And the last thing I saw was him, looking out the window on the balcony level, staring at nothing, a look of unutterable sadness on his face.

The acolytes were all gathered at the foot of the Great Man when Alex and I arrived at the studio that Saturday. We had been in the day before, but Rob was gone on another fund-raising mission, and he was relating his adventure to his people. Evidently, these VC people didn't understand his Awesomeness, either.

"Boundaries," he said. "I knew how to set boundaries when I was five. My parents tried to tell me to do things I didn't want to do, and I'd tell them no, because I knew they were crossing my boundaries."

Alex and I sat with the others, Alex in an armchair, and I on the deep windowsill of the huge front windows, which were open, the hot summer city air barely stirring through them.

"These men had no idea who they were talking to," Rob continued, with his slight lisp and highly animated delivery. "When I told them the names of some of the people I've healed, and the movie stars who are making movies because I cured them, they were shocked. Shocked.  And I said, yeah, that's right, and now it's too late for you because you were too imbecilic to appreciate what we're doing here."

I glanced around me, wondering if I was the only one who found this all a little much.

"You," he said suddenly, breaking into his monologue. It took me more than a moment to realize he meant me. "We can't help you here. Your demons are too powerful. Yeah, that's right, look surprised. I mean you, and no, I'm not talking neuroses. Psychoses," he put the word in neon quotes hanging in the air. "I can't expose my people here to your demons; they aren't equipped for them, and I can't risk their safety."

"Excuse me?" I finally managed.

"And you're draining him," he pointed to Alex, who sat mutely in his chair, his hands clasped in his lap. "He's putting his energy into fighting your demons, and not getting well himself."

I looked at Alex. Silence.

"You might try an exorcism. Or a psychiatrist. I can recommend one to you, but you have to get out of here."

"Ok," I said, standing up and gathering my things. "I forgive you for this," I said, knowing exactly how to infuriate him. "And God bless you."

Infuriate was hardly the word. Apoplectic, maybe. His face got bright red, his small eyes narrowed further. "There is no God," he spat. "You have ten seconds to get out of this studio."

That was eight seconds too many, in my estimation. I reached the street in moments, realizing as I raced down the two flights of stairs that I had no way home--I had driven in with Alex. And Alex wasn't, as I would have expected, on my heels. I paced up and down, expecting him to appear at any moment, his face dark with anger. I waited. The day was wiltingly hot; a man and woman with a baby in a stroller walked by me and smiled. A girl in heels and a short dress pranced by, and I wondered if her feet didn't hurt in her impossibly high heels. A homeless man shambled by in a heavy coat, long pants, and boots, and he smiled, too, and I wondered how he could do that.

Alex finally appeared, and I watched him walking down the street, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet the way he did when he was stressed, his upper body rigid. I followed him for about a block before finally calling out to him.

We had left the city and were on the Mass Pike before we finally spoke.

"Why didn't you leave with me?" I asked. "That was insanity up there."

"I was trying to smooth the situation over," he said.

"Smooth what situation? The guy is a loony tune. He attacked me, for God's sake."

"He was out of line, but he's trying to help."

"Help?" I squawked. "What if I really was crazy? He might have driven me to jump out the window, or jump on him. That was completely wrong and irresponsible! You don't seriously think I'm psychotic, right? That I have demons?"

"I think he may see something we don't," Alex said.

I am still so angry by the time we get back to his house, I left three times, each time he pulled me back in to continue trying to talk about it. I thought his neighbors must be enjoying the sideshow of me walking to the car with my things, and him trotting after me, asking me not to leave, asking me to talk about it.

I don't know what he wanted from me; I wanted him to apologize, I think. He probably wanted me to say that it was ok, that Rob had a point, and that I needed spiritual intervention. Another stalemate. I'll never know, because after I left the final time, I never spoke to him again.

There are hundreds of demons, somewhere behind me. They're creeping closer, and whispering, chattering.

I know they're there, and if I  just lift my arm, I think I might scare them away. They're mocking me, hissing and singing and shouting in a chorus of horrific sound.

I can see the ceiling high above my head, and I know that my parents are no longer in the room at the end of the hall, that the house is empty except for me and the demons. It's dark, and I also know that if I push the black lacquer button of the light switch, I will scare the demons back into hiding.

But I want more than that, so I pull the pillow out from under my head, and, stretching, stretching my arm over my head,  I slam it down behind me, again and again and again, until the last whisper is quiet, the last chatter is silenced, and there is no sound in the house at all, not even the soft sifting of dust settling back down onto the floor of the long, empty hallway.