I called Diane and told her I had to talk to Alice Hickey. Could she find her for me? There was a pause. I knew she didn’t want to have anything more to do with Alice. To my surprise she said, “OK, but give me a few days.”
I wanted to make sure she was really OK with it, though, so I said, “I hate to make you go through that awful dream again.”
“I don’t have to,” she replied. “I know who she is now; I can smell her. It may take some time, but I’ll find her.”
“Are you sure it’s OK?”
“Yes, yes, it’s OK. I’ll call you in a few days.”
Three day later she called. “I found Alice.”
“Where”
“You’re not going to believe this. I found her at Starbucks.”
“Starbucks? Jesus. ”
“She told me she goes there every afternoon to read the Times and have some good java, as she puts it. She has a nice sense of humor; I was surprised.”
“What did she say about seeing me?”
“She said she’d be glad to.”
“Where, at the tomato bin?”
“No, at Starbucks.”
“Which one, they’re all over the place?”
“She likes the one on Bee Ridge.”
“When, what time?”
“Any afternoon, but she said don’t come until three because she’s not finished with the Times until then.”
When I walked into Starbucks the following afternoon, sure enough, there she was, sitting in the corner by the window, reading The New York Times. She looked up and nodded. Those eyes. I went over to where she was sitting.
“Alice,” I said, “I need to know some things.”
“I bet you do,” she replied, “but I don’t know if I have the answers.”
That set me back; I hadn’t been expecting it. If she didn’t know what was going on, who did? By this time, however, I was too pumped up to quit. I decided to start at our last meeting at the market: “How did you speak to me inside my mind at the tomato bin?”
“Aren’t you going to have some coffee first?” she asked, holding up her cup.
I had completely forgotten about ordering. “Not right now,” I replied, “right now I want to know how you spoke to me inside my mind.”
“I told you then what I’m telling you now: it’s not important. What’s important is
ALICE HICKEY 89
you accept it as real.”
“I know it was real. That’s the problem. It’s not supposed to be real, it can’t happen, it’s impossible.”
“That’s your problem. It’s not impossible: it happened. As for me, I don’t know how I do it. The Spirit directs me to the person and then it speaks through me.”
“What do you mean ‘The Spirit directs’ you? Is it a voice, or a thought? What is it?”
“It’s an entity—an intelligence. I can feel it, but I can’t see it or hear it.
Everything brightens when it comes to me—like I just discovered something—
and then it leaves me with a ‘feeling’ of the person I’m supposed to contact.”
“What do you mean by ‘feeling’?”
“It’s like a memory of the person but much stronger. It’s not a memory of what they look like, or what they’ve done. Those are the kind of memories everyone has. What I get is a memory of their essence, their soul.”
“OK, so the Spirit directs you to someone. What happens then? How do you speak inside their minds?”
“Hold on: first I have to find them. I do that by following the memory, just like Diane does. I usually get pictures or sounds or signs that narrow it down until I eventually find the person. Sometimes it’s easy. The first time I found you was easy. I went to the market to buy some tomatoes and there you were. Sometimes it’s not that easy. You were very hard to find the second time.”
“Why?”
“Because I was directed to Diane, not you.”
“Why was that?
“Beats me; I had no choice in the matter. Perhaps the Spirit could have left me a soul memory of you, but it didn’t—it left me with a memory of Diane. You know the rest.”
“Wait a minute. You knew who I was. You spoke to me years ago in the market.”
“I may have spoken to you but I didn’t have any soul memory of you. That’s what directs me. When the Spirit gave me your soul memory years ago, I used it to find you in the supermarket. But your soul memory disappears once the Spirit speaks through me. That’s how it works, and don’t ask me why.”
“So how did you get to me if you didn’t have a soul memory of me?”
“You’re not listening. The Spirit directed me to Diane, not you. When I went to Diane with the dream, she also got a soul memory of me. That’s how she found me.”
“Did she get a soul memory of the Spirit too?”
“You might say that’s what the dream was.”
“Jesus. But when Diane went to Arcadia to find you, how did she know it was me you were looking for, if you didn’t know?”
“Because she’s Diane, remember?”
“But I still don’t understand why you were directed to Diane?”
“Again, I had no choice. Diane was who I was directed to, but I didn’t know she was an intermediary. I just knew I had to get to her.”
“Why did you come to her in her dreams? Why didn’t you just walk up to her and 90 ALICE HICKEY
speak to her like you did to me?”
“I don’t get to choose. Sometimes I find the person in their dreams, sometimes in person. I never know which. If I’m awake when the Spirit comes, I find them like I found you the first time. If I’m asleep when the Spirit comes, I find them in their dreams. Outside of that, all I can tell you is the Spirit comes to me and then, one way or another, sooner or later, I find them.”
“What happens then?”
“If we’re awake, the Spirit speaks through me.”
“What is that like? Do you hear the words and repeat them?”
“Not quite. What I hear are muffled sounds, like someone talking in another room. What it feels like is hard to describe, but it’s very distinct. It feels something like an orgasm—a very slow, intense orgasm.”
“So when the Spirit speaks through you, you hear muffled sounds while you’re having an orgasm?”
“You could put it that way, but I wouldn’t. Let me put it this way: I’m physically there, but I can’t understand what is being said. Only the person the Spirit is speaking to hears it clearly. What I hear, or maybe feel is a better word, is a kind of muffled sound, like the voice is coming from behind a door. The sound always carries an emotion. It can be sad or confused or angry or loving or run the whole gamut. It’s always hard remembering it exactly because of the orgasm. And don’t look at me that way. You wouldn’t remember much either.”
She had me. She was hypnotic. It felt as if she were slowly unfolding a mysterious flower, petal by petal. I had to know more.
“Diane says when she’s dreaming she can leave a soul memory of herself with someone who’s also dreaming. She calls it a psychic scent.”
“It’s just a different way of talking about the same thing.”
“She said that’s how she found you. She said she got your scent when you came to her in her dreams.”
“I know. Diane and I talked about it. Any highly psychic person can leave a soul imprint of themselves.”
“Can you do it for me now?”
“No. We’d have to be dreaming, or in an altered state. Do you want me to come to you in your dreams tonight?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m not scaring you, am I?” She let out a wild cackle. “Justin, I’m not the Spirit.
I’m Alice Hickey, an old woman. You’d wake up in the morning without the slightest idea I’d come to you. Maybe something about me would come to mind, like my face, or contacting me, and then again, maybe it wouldn’t.”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“Because you’re afraid of me.”
“You’re right. I am.”
“Listen Justin, if the Spirit gave me a dream for you, you’d have good reason to be scared. But that’s not going to happen.”
ALICE HICKEY 91
“Why not?”
“Because you’re too thick for the Spirit’s dreams. Trust me on that, will you?”
“I don’t have much choice, do I?”
“No, darling, you don’t.”
“Alice, listen, I’m still not clear why you decided to speak to me years ago at the tomato bin. Why didn’t you come to me in a dream?”
“I told you. I have no say in the matter. When I saw you at the market, I had no idea who you were. You looked like one more uptight guy looking for ripe tomatoes. Right then the Spirit gave me a feeling of you, a soul memory, and I looked up and there you were, bingo, right next to me. It happens that way sometimes; it usually means the Spirit is going to speak through me right away—
which is what happened—because I remember the Spirit rising up inside me like a hissing in my spine, and then it spoke through me.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that. Except I didn’t want it to happen right then and I tried to stop it, but it was impossible. I don’t know how to say this to you, but trying to stop the Spirit from speaking is like trying to stop an orgasm.” She laughed. Cackled was more like it.
“Why didn’t you want the Spirit to speak to me?”
“I was busy shopping for some ‘Blood Eggs’, you know, really ripe tomatoes, so I could make a fresh Bloody Mary. I thought you were going to beat me to them.”
Her reference to ‘Blood Eggs’ rang in my mind: it was the inner voice I’d heard saying “Blood Eggs” as I was browsing through the tomatoes the first time we’d met. At the time I had thought it was my own internal voice clarifying what the tomatoes really were, but it obviously had come from Alice.
“Don’t you remember anything at all?” I asked.
“Well, I do remember your face, it was a sight, but I have no idea what the Spirit said. It was sharp though; I remember that. Like I said, it’s always a bit vague.”
I thought immediately of Betty Hagan with the spittle in the corners of her mouth and I thought, Jesus, no one knows what’s going on, not even her. But I kept going, “Don’t you remember? You had asked me that night if I had found what I was looking for, and I said I don’t think so, and then you said ‘ Not yet. ’ Don’t you remember that?”
“OK, I remember it now. I don’t really remember the words, but I remember the rhythm, the sound of it, and it’s just like you said. You’re a pretty good mimic, you know. Do you do imitations of movie stars? I get the biggest kick out of them.”
I couldn’t believe her. “The only one I do is Rich Little, the impressionist.” I said, hoping that would put an end to it. It didn’t.
“Oh, that’s a tough one, he’s so bland. Frank Gorshin is much easier. He’s so quirky.”
92 ALICE HICKEY
I remember thinking, Jesus, she’s going to peel me like a tomato before this is over. I was desperately trying to keep my balance and blurted out: “If you don’t know what you’re saying when the Spirit speaks through you, how do you do it?”
“I told you, I don’t do it. The Spirit does. And don’t ask me if the Spirit is female or male or if it’s smart or funny or sad or whatever because I can’t tell. The only spirits with personalities are usually ghosts, those who have died recently. Spirits like this one usually don’t have personalities. They’re too primal.”
“What happens after the Spirit finishes speaking?”
“Unless I get sick, you know, nauseous, which can happen, I check the person out to make sure they’re OK and then I let them go their own way.”
“You mean you just go up to people, let the Spirit speak inside their heads and then walk away?”
“Yep. Like I told you, it just happens. It’s like when a poem comes to you, it just happens.”
“But a poem is different. I should know—I’m a poet.”
“Can you do what I do ? ” she snapped.
“No, of course not.”
“Then how do you know it’s different?”
“You’re right,” I confessed, “I don’t; I just assumed it was.”
“Well, it’s not. It’s the same goddamn thing—you got the message didn’t you? It just happened, right? Well, it just happens to me too. But I guess you could say I’m more like the Muse than the poet—I get to pass the thing along.
“By the way, I write poems too you know, but they probably have too many flowers for you. Anyway, you’re half right: it is different in the sense that the feeling is a little different; it’s stronger, more raw is probably the best way to describe it, and it feels more direct than a poem, like a command. And it can be very strong physically. Sometimes I get diarrhea later.”
I nodded my sympathy, “I understand, but do you have any idea, now that I’ve reminded you, as to what you actually meant when you said, ‘ Not yet?’”
“You mean when I asked you if you’d found what you were looking for and the Spirit said, ‘ Not yet?’”
“Yes, what is it I’m looking for?”
“I have no idea. Only you know that.”
“But I don’t know; that’s why I’m asking you, Alice.”
“Maybe you don’t know now, but you will. You may have to die first though.” I can’t describe the grin that spread across her face. It was like frosting on a kid’s birthday cake.
“Thanks for the invitation,” I said, “but how can you be so sure I’ll eventually find what I’m looking for?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. But when the Spirit has spoken through me to others, a few found me later and told me I had said exactly what they needed to know.”
ALICE HICKEY 93
“Which was what?”
“Beats me. Ask them. Can you do Rich Little for me now?”
94 ALICE HICKEY
Chapter 23: ISLAUGGH and San Blas
April, 2005, Sarasota
Pinga called. “I’m in Panama. I’ve been calling you for weeks. Where the hell you been?”
“Mexico,” I replied, “What’s up, you need money?”
“Why would I be calling you for money?” He had me. I was always broke.
“Listen, you know that face in the mirror you saw, the Islag guy?” He was talking very fast; I couldn’t tell if he was drunk or just excited.
“It’s pronounced ee-slaw, not Islag,” I said, correcting him. I spelled it out: “I-S-L-A-U-G-G-H.”
“OK, OK, whatever. Listen Mr. College, Angelo found the name carved in a quarry here while he was taking a leak. There were a lot of stick figures too.”
I looked at myself in the mirror. What the hell was going on? “Are you jerking me?”
“No, no, I swear, Carl was with us, here talk to Carl.”
Carl Fismer, the skipper, was pretty much a straight arrow. “Justin, I know it sounds crazy, but what he’s saying is right. I don’t know how old the carving is, but the stone is granite; it’s been here forever. The Indians carved on it. The locals still use it for construction. They dynamite it out.”
“OK, OK. Thanks Carl. Could you put Pinga back on?”
There was a great deal of rustling as if the phone was surrounded by a horde of people, and then, finally, Pinga got back on the phone. “Pinga,” I asked, “where exactly is this quarry?”
“It’s in the Caribbean, around San Blas.”
“What the hell are you doing there? Aren’t you supposed to be on the Pacific side, around Panama City?”
“We were, but some competition developed with these other guys and Angelo got pretty hot and then I did and then it got real ugly and the police stepped in and took everything. I tried calling Mercedes but she stiffed me.”
“What happened?”
“She didn’t do shit. You know what she did? She told me (and here he did an imitation of Mercedes so outrageous it belonged in a South Beach drag contest),
‘ Leesen Peengo, daht is too hot for me to doo hawnyteeng. Eef you hod a trahffeek teecket or sohmteeng like daht, I could doo sohmteeng, but Peengo, eet ees el Preseedehntay, not the poleecia, I know how dese teengs go. Beleeve mee Peengo, el Preseedehntay haas all daht gold een hees Palahceeo. Eet ees too mas caliente heeven for Mercedes. Sorree Peengo. Ciao.’”
“What the hell is that noise?” I asked. I could swear I heard what sounded like face-slapping going on in the background.
“What noise? Oh some guys are putting in a window behind the bar.”
“OK, but why aren’t you still on the Pacific side?”
ALICE HICKEY 95
“We figured the police might come back so we took the canal over to the Atlantic and started scanning the San Blas area with some old charts. It was so fucking hot one day we couldn’t work and Carl said there was a cold quarry pool on an island about two miles up the coast so we anchored there and rowed in and there it was, just like Carl said.
“He says it’s cold because the quarry’s so narrow and deep the sun never hits the water. I’ll tell you one thing, it must go down to the South Pole because you dive down 10 feet your balls freeze. Anyway, Angelo was taking a leak against the quarry wall, looking up at some of the stick carvings above his head and he starts laughing, ‘Hey, I think there’s a gangbang going on here, take a look.’ So I went over and all these stick bodies were piled on each other and then I saw your name, you know, Islag. I couldn’t believe it.
“We didn’t have any tools for carving it out, so Carl copied it by rubbing the back of an old map with a pencil. I can’t make out some of the letters, but it looks pretty close to me. I’ll go to the marina and fax it as soon as we hang up.”
My head was spinning. I immediately suspected this was one of Pinga’s little jokes—like Betty Hagan. While I never doubted Betty was for real, I never quite believed Pinga had nothing to do with her being at the end of the bar waiting for me to come back from the men’s room, and this call definitely felt like one coincidence too many.
When the fax arrived, though, I wasn’t so sure it was a prank. The rubbing was very rough, and I could make out only half the letters (the rest were very indistinct). But the lettering seemed ancient, more like slashes than letters, something like the Runic alphabet. My initial intuition that ISLAUGGH was an ancient Celt made even more sense now. One curious thing about the carving was how orderly the letters were. Whoever did it knew what they were doing.
I studied the letters on the faxed rubbing: ISLA??A??G? If I took out the indistinct letters, I was left with ISLAAG, which was as close as any of the other matches to ISLAUGGH that I’d found in all the Celtic-English dictionaries at my disposal. I pulled my file on what I had determined to be the possible Celtic translations of ISLAUGGH .
Initially, there hadn’t been even a rough match for ISLAUGGH, so I decided to break it up into two words: IS (is, am) and LAUGGH. I found some close matches using this technique, but they were never exact. The Celtic-English dictionaries I had access to didn’t employ multiple repetitions of the same letter, like GG, and seemed to favor certain vowels, like O over U, but I figured that was probably due to any number of simplifying forces working over time and maybe Diane had channeled a very old spelling used long before the dictionaries were established. Here are the closest matches I found:
96 ALICE HICKEY
1. Is laog
is (am) hero, champion, warrior
2. Is lich
is (am) brought low, humbled
3. Is laghf is (am) calf
4. Is lagh
is (am) order, method, law
And now I had ISLAAG, which could have been an alternative spelling of Is lag.
So I had a fifth possibility. Here is the closest dictionary entry: 5. Is lag
is (am) weak.
As far as the first four translations were concerned, I had quickly discarded the third ( I am calf), but the first ( I am warrior) could easily fit the mood of the figure in the mirror. After all, he was very sturdy and seemed to have seen horrible things. The second translation ( I am humbled) was also a distant possibility because of the emotional burden the figure seemed to be carrying. The same could be said for the fifth translation ( I am weak). The fourth translation (order, method) didn’t make sense at first until I realized it possibly described the nature of his leadership. Unlike names in modern cultures, names in preliterate cultures were descriptive and not given lightly. Naming was a spiritual activity because the name given was seen as honoring—as well as predicting—the essential character of the person coming into the world.
I needed to talk to Diane some more about the spelling of the name and was about to dial her up when it occurred to me that there was a more important question if I was really going to take Pinga’s find seriously. The question that had to be answered first was whether it was reasonable to expect that a preliterate Celt could have made his way to Panama thousands of years ago and carved his name on a quarry wall.
My immediate answer was: yes, of course it was reasonable; there was nothing impossible about the idea. We give preliterate cultures little credit for ingenuity despite such beautiful masterpieces as the 17,000 year-old cave drawings in Spain. And being a sailor, I knew Trans-Atlantic crossings weren’t that difficult, even in small craft.
So the really important question was not how, but why someone who lived 4,000
years ago (or 40,000 years ago) would have come to Panama in the first place?
(These are the dates that kept coming to me as the time of the figure in the mirror.) When I asked one scholar about the possibility of such a voyage, he waggishly dismissed it with, “I think it’s more likely you’d find the Celts knee-deep in peat bogs murdering each other around that time.”
No one really knows what motivated preliterate cultures. All we can do is guess
ALICE HICKEY 97
from the surviving evidence, which is meager at best. Determining that motivation is always left to the imaginations of our anthropologists, who are sometimes the worst people to turn to, because they are almost always dealing from the slim book of science: more food, better climate, more forests, more water, more animals, those kinds of physical factors.
I don’t think they’ve even begun to figure into their equations how spiritually driven preliterate peoples were, and that it may have been that same deep, reflexive spirituality that drove the earliest mass migrations out of Africa and into the east all the way to Australia and eventually, further eastward to the tip of South America, which seems to be the case if the 40,000 year-old Negroid skeletal remains recently discovered in Tierra del Fuego.
That bold a migration would never have taken place in order to find better hunting grounds—only a fool would posit such an explanation. More likely, our ancestors were trying to find the place where the sun was born. In short, they were trying to find Creation.
So we might be tempted to say ISLAUGGH was trying to reach the sun, except to reach Panama he would have had to go westward, toward the setting sun, and most of the major sea and land migrations, including the ones just mentioned, went eastward in order to reach the rising sun: the place where the sun was born—not the place where it died.
Still, there were some minor migrations that went westward, like the migration from the connecting neck of Africa toward the Balkans and then further westward into continental Europe and then the British Isles and even further westward toward Greenland and, finally, to Newfoundland and the Americas. But why this contrary migration, this movement toward the dying sun?
One answer might be that’s where the new land was, especially in the case of the migration through continental Europe, but that hardly explains the direction of the great westward transoceanic voyages. After all, the Vikings could have gone south—it was a lot warmer, and the winds and currents flowed that way. There were undoubtedly many factors at play in all these migrations, but the one factor nobody seems to have recognized is the highly spiritual nature of these early cultures.
My own sense of the matter is that they went west precisely because it was the place where the sun died. These were fierce Nordic and Celtic peoples who never shied from death, even gloried in it, so why wouldn’t they continue westward toward the dying sun? You might say it was in the blood to search for the home of death, for night, for the dark sid