I was six. No, five, I was five: my first snow.
I remember the angel suddenly coming together
and then bleeding out beneath me
like I was turning myself inside out,
and then I remember awakening
to a white field, because the angels
ALICE HICKEY 107
were always a surprise to me,
the way they kept falling in such
peculiar positions, like someone
screaming, or dying.
Like the wings.
Friends would take me aside,
tell me the wings were a bit too much:
Like a Babylonian lion's, really.
Those wings, they'd say.
They were right of course,
but what could I say to them except
I couldn't help it, that my arms
always moved up and down like that
whenever I fel out of heaven.
Sometimes I felt like telling them
maybe it would help
if they thought of the angels
as small relief-maps of my soul,
sudden, uncontrolled curdlings
that occurred whenever I stopped,
opened myself to the sun, or the moon.
And then there were times
I didn't know what to say, except
maybe they should think of the angels
as detailed descriptions of another life.
A life I was living but knew nothing about.
I have perhaps taken the long way around, but I wanted to make clear my feelings about the nature of poetry, because my problems in understanding why the myth took the form it did eventually caused me to question my most basic beliefs about poetry.
When I did, I came to the conclusion that the reason I had felt only my own intelligence—and the intelligent energy of the poem—was because that other intelligence—the one that Jane said authored the myth—was not a separate psychic intelligence but a seamless part of the poem’s energy.
I had always seen the Muse—the poem’s intelligent energy—as determining the rhythm and music and emotional attitude of the poem—and ultimately the words—but I had always seen the words as coming from what I know as me—
from my conscious and unconscious memories. It eventually became clear to me that the intelligent energy of The Witnesses Log had fed not just on the memories of my personal unconscious, but also on memories from the collective unconscious. That may be a mouthful, but I wouldn’t take back a word of it.
Why I had been so blind to that possibility, I can’t really say. I was aware that the great mythic poems of the distant past had to have come from the level of the 108 ALICE HICKEY
collective unconscious, but I had never thought of the Witnesses Log myth—
despite its strange concepts—in quite that way.
I had somehow still seen it as my poem if for no other reason than the myth felt like my other poems. As naïve as it sounds, it seems I had always imagined that if a poem came to me from the collective unconscious, I would experience it as something like the voice of my daimon. But I was wrong. Despite the origin and depth of the memories that fed the myth, the Muse’s voice hadn’t felt at all like that. What it had felt like was the voice of Poetry, the voice of the Muse, which has a very different psychic texture.
So in the end, Jane had been right about everything—although it had taken me a long time to really grasp the whole of what she was saying. I had understood what she had meant about the preliterate nature of the myth, but I had never quite grasped what she had meant about the myth belonging to somebody else . I had automatically assumed what she meant was that the poem had been given to me by a psychic entity like my daimon, or Alice's Spirit, whose voice I would have easily sensed.
I had never even considered that the intelligent energy of the poem itself could have been the carrier of the myth’s mindset and concepts (in the form of memories from the collective unconscious). What I had underestimated was the power of the poem's intelligent energy, or to put it another way—how much the Muse can bring to the table. What I found out, of course, is that the Muse can bring anything she wants to, and the poet had better be prepared for the possibilities.
The myth, of course, also fed on memories from my personal unconscious, which is why the myth did have some roots in me. The core of the myth, however, seems to have come from the collective unconscious. Where the dividing line lies is almost impossible to say, because as Jung takes great pains to point out, the collective unconscious always becomes visible in the company of the personal unconscious. It is what makes visions particularly difficult to decipher.
Our preliterate consciousness may have died with the early cultures it created, but some form of it survived down the long, dark chain of the collective unconscious, which, as Jung points out, is the repository of all our memories going back to the creation of life itself. And some part of it chose to come back into time as The Witnesses Log in Santa Monica, California on the evening of December 14, 2000.
All this took months to become completely clear to me. It didn’t happen all at once. But once I saw that the intelligent energy of a poem can choose to feed where it wants and then come into time as something completely beyond the ken of the poet, I had to step back and take a breath. I’m familiar with psychic intelligences, but those intelligences were, for the most part, guides to action. As
ALICE HICKEY 109
powerful as they could be, the intelligence that formed the myth seemed in a whole other league. The myth was not a momentary directive; it was a complex, exquisitely formed poem about the nature of preliterate consciousness that had come from the collective unconscious completely of its own accord. I was simply along for the ride.
When the implications of that sank in and I began to see how complete and beautiful and strange the myth was, my sense of poetry changed utterly. What I had only understood intellectually before—poetry was the way the Gods spoke to men — came wheeling down around me like a flock of crows.
That’s an unlikely statement from someone who long ago rejected the religious thought of both East and West. But I’ll tell you this: I was totally unprepared for it. Every time I thought about it in the months that followed, I felt like the proverbial man downstairs waiting for the other shoe to drop.
110 ALICE HICKEY
Chapter 26: Alicia La Verne
May 2005, Sarasota, Starbucks
I had gone to Starbucks several times to find Alice, but I kept missing her.
Finally, I asked the girl behind the counter if she had seen Alice, the old lady with the pale eyes, and she sort of jumped a couple of inches inside her body and said,
“Oh, her. She just left, just a few minutes ago.” There was a short pause as if she were trying to remember something and then she asked, “You Justin Springer?”
“Spring, S-P-R-I-N-G, it’s Justin Spring,” I replied.
“Oh, OK, Springs, whatever. The lady said to give you this,” and she held up an envelope with two fingers as if it contained anthrax. There was a short note inside.
Justin: Meet me by the tomatoes. Alice
I went down to the market that evening and there she was. “Sorry, I messed you up,” she said, “but there was something I had to tell you and Starbucks wasn’t the place. It’s OK for talking, but not for showing. Did you do Show and Tell as a kid?”
“No, I’m afraid Show and Tell was after my time. We had nuns. We played Hold Out Your Hand for the Ruler.”
“Oh, no kidding, that must have been fun.” Then she suddenly looked at me very intently and asked, “There’s something you want me to tell you, something personal, isn’t that so?” Alice always claimed she was just an ordinary person, but it was at times like this that I really doubted it. She seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. “Yes, I want you to tell me what the hell is going on,” I replied somewhat testily.
I could never account for how cantankerous I could get with Alice. I was in awe of her, but that didn’t stop me from mouthing off. My respect for her, which bordered almost on reverence, would simply fly out the window for no reason at all. Strangely enough, it never seemed to bother Alice. In fact, I think it amused her to some degree, which undoubtedly encouraged me to keep doing it, although once in a while she would snap back at me so fast it made my stomach jump.
A few moments passed. Then she said, “I’m sure you would like to know what’s going on, and so would I, for that matter, but that’s not what’s bothering you,”
and she fixed me with her eyes like she was looking inside me and said, “No, there’s something else you want to know. I saw it in your eyes: you want to know who my friend was that told me about Betty Hogan, don’t you?”
“Its Hagan, not Hogan,” I snapped, trying in whatever way I could to maintain my balance.
“Don’t play with me,” she snapped back. “Who cares how it’s spelled. And for Christ’s sake, lighten up, will you?”
ALICE HICKEY 111
I tucked my tail between my legs. “OK. You’re right. I do want to know who told you about Betty. It’s been bugging me for days. If you had been with me the day I met her you’d know why.”
“And why is that?”
“It’s not important, not really, but I had the suspicion I was being set up.”
“By Betty?”
“No, by a friend who brought me to her place.”
“Listen Franklin, we’re always being set up, except we don’t know by whom, or for what reason. I thought you would have learned that by now.” She took the wind right out of me. Then she said, “I know about Betty because Kiki Dentista told me about her.”
My mouth dropped fifteen floors. There couldn’t be two Kiki Dentistas; that was impossible. Yet it seemed unbelievable she could have known Kiki. I looked at her face for some trace of humor, but there was nothing, only those pale, unreadable eyes.
“Alice, what is going on here? I know Kiki, at least I did know her; she’s been dead for some time now you know.”
“I know,” she said, “since February 17, 2001 to be exact. I miss her. She was one of the few people I could really talk to.”
Jesus. Now they’re bosom buddies. It was too much. And that date, pulled out of the air like a rabbit. I was sure that Pinga was mixed up in this, but how? I had never told him about Alice. But maybe it had gone the other way. After all, Alice and Kiki had been very close, so Alice was sure to have known about Pinga.
Maybe she had somehow discovered we were friends and approached Pinga about a little devilment. God knows what her reasons might have been, but one of them might have been my wiseacre claim I could imitate Rich Little. I was going to pay for that one forever.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Alice knowing Kiki was either entirely coincidental, or I was being set up in ways I didn’t even want to think about. It was bad enough that the psychic world was driving me crazy; I didn’t need any additional help from Pinga. And just the thought of Alice being involved was enough to drive me straight up the wall.
I looked for signs in the sand. “When did you meet Pinga?” I asked.
For a moment, she looked absolutely blank. I was sure I had her.
“Oh, you mean little Ernest. Kiki talked about him all the time, but I never met him; he was always out diving or drinking.”
I could feel myself losing ground. I plunged on. “We’re good friends, did you know that? He’s a great guy, always up for some fun.” Nothing. Not a flicker.
“I didn’t know that, but it doesn’t surprise me. Kiki said he was a rascal; she 112 ALICE HICKEY
loved him for it.”
If she was lying about not knowing Pinga, she was way too fast for me. It didn’t seem to matter what I asked her: she’d have an answer, and not just a sentence or two. She was ready to put up a whole Potemkin’s Village if the occasion called for it. I kept thrashing about, hoping to touch down on something solid. “But how did you meet Kiki? She lived in the Keys.”
“I know,” she replied, “Tavernier. That’s a nice little place—don’t you think? But I didn’t meet her in the Keys. I met her in Boston, as a girl, while I was staying with my aunt Alicia. Kiki’s older sister, Kathy, lived on the second floor of my aunt’s house. I met Kiki through Kathy.
“I didn’t meet Kiki right away. I had been living with my aunt Alicia for almost four years before I first met Kathy. I met Ivory at the same time. Ivory lived on the third floor. Up until then, Kathy and Ivory had been a sort of mystery because the only thing my aunt had told me about them was they were both suffering from tuberculosis and had a separate floor and entrance.
“I liked my aunt. She didn’t pull any punches. She wasn’t psychic like me, though. I asked her once. She said she just had the same color eyes but that was it; everything she knew she read in the papers. She was full of one-liners like that. My mother was in awe of her because Alicia had left home at fifteen. No note, no warning, nothing. And then, twenty years later, my mother got a letter from her saying that she had become a famous dancer and she owned a brownstone by Boston Commons and if there was anything she could do to let her know.
“It didn’t take my mother more than two seconds. She wanted me to be successful like Alicia, so when I graduated eighth grade my mother kissed me goodbye and put me on the all-night Greyhound and the next day I’m standing at my aunt Alicia’s front door looking up at her and she's looking down at me with all these spiky orange curlers coming out of her head and her eyebrows all tweezed out saying, ‘Oh, Little Alice, how nice of you to visit me, your momma wrote you were coming,’ but I could tell the way she walked back down the hallway looking up at the ceiling she’d forgotten all about it.
“It didn’t make any difference, though. She couldn’t do enough for me. It was like living in Hollywood. She had closets full of lingerie, just like Joan Crawford. And she had framed photographs of herself all over the house. Some were color but most of them were black and white publicity shots. She was always posed in a real sexy costume with high heels and lots of jewelry. Most of the photographs she’d autographed with her stage name: Alicia La Verne, which I liked. It had a certain ring to it.
“It wasn’t until three years later, when I was about to graduate, that I found out she wasn’t really a ‘dancer’ but a strip-tease artist, like Gypsy Rose Lee. She must have been pretty good, because she made enough to buy a brownstone in a millionaires’ row and become a high-class madam. It turned out the two women on the other floors weren’t sick, but ‘those kind of women’ as my
ALICE HICKEY 113
mother would say.
“I didn’t discover this all by myself. Owen Feeney told me. He was a boy in my class with flabby lips who was always scratching his crotch and blowing up condoms in the back of the room. He seemed to know everything about sex, like the ways you could do it, and he had a hundred stories about my aunt and the two girls and the mayor and the bishop, people like that. Anyway, it was Owen told me everything.”
I didn’t know what to say. If she had been acting, she should have been in Hollywood. After a moment or two I said to her, “But you still haven’t told me how you met Kiki.”
“Oh. I guess I didn’t,” she replied. “You know, she was already here with me in my mind and I guess I forgot. Well anyway, after Owen Feeney told me all this, I went to my aunt and asked her if it was true. I told her everything, word for word.
It was quite a confection. I didn’t really care what Owen had said, because as far as I was concerned, Alicia was just about as perfect as anyone could ever be. I just wanted to hear it from her lips, not Owen’s.
“She didn’t disappoint me. ‘So Owen Feeney told you all that, did he?
That little shit. The best part of that little bastard went down his father’s leg.’ I asked her how Owen knew all those things about her. ‘Owen’s the handyman’s son,’ she said. ‘Old man Feeney would never say anything—I pay him too much.
But Owen’s another matter. He’s always creeping around the house like a wet rat while his father’s fixing things. I wouldn’t doubt Owen has made himself a world of peepholes.’
“Anyway, she told me everything, right down to the small hairs, and she then called up the two women and had them come down to meet me because I had never seen them, and when they appeared in the doorway it was like they’d come right out of the movies. One was a tall, beautiful blonde with almost translucent skin. Her name was Ivory Bennett. And the other was a very funny brunette with quick, dark eyes. That was Kathy Alvarez.
“I was about sixteen by this time. When the two women walked in, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I’ve always had a bad girl thing: I hated goody-goodies, and here I was, in bad girl Paradise. The four of us became like sisters after that. The fact I was sixteen didn’t seem to matter. They treated me as a complete equal. I think it was because of the séances I used to hold for the three of them: I’d just lift out and let it come through me and they’d be stomping and screaming and laughing and crying like it was a revival. That was reckless of me, but I didn’t know any better at the time. I didn’t know that somebody could have been hurt.
“Anyway, one Sunday, Kathy took us all over to her mother’s in South Boston. That’s when I met Kiki. We became instant friends. She had a boyfriend named Ernie Dentista who was always giving her jewelry from his father’s pawnshop. I liked him. He had sideburns and rode a Harley like his foot was made of gas. He wanted to marry Kiki in the worst way, but she was always 114 ALICE HICKEY
putting him off. She was her own woman. She had to be. She was very open; she couldn’t control it. She‘d be talking to you and all of a sudden she’d lift off to who knows where. Her body was there, but she wasn’t. Sometimes she’d stay out for days at a time. I could talk to Kiki like I could talk to nobody else. She understood everything.
“When it was time for me to go back home to Florida, I thought I’d never see her again, and then a few years later she wrote saying she was going to marry
‘ Ernie What The Hell,’ that’s what she called him, and move to Florida—that he was going to open a pawn shop in Tavernier. It’s funny how things work out like that.”
“Yes, it sure is,” I replied. I launched one more desperate probe: “You know, it’s almost unbelievable that in all those years of knowing Kiki you never bumped into Pinga, or me for that matter.”
“Maybe it’s because most of the time Kiki used to visit me in Arcadia. She liked getting out of the Keys. After a while, when we got older, the traveling back and forth got too much, it wore her down, so we’d meet in our dreams. It wasn’t as much fun, but it was easier.”
That last touch was perfect. The woman had answers I hadn’t even dreamed of.
“By the way,” I asked, “what was it you wanted to show me when I walked in?”
“Oh, I almost forgot,” and she leaned in toward my left ear until I could barely see her out of the corner of my eye and then I heard a very distinct voice inside my head say to me, “The Witnesses know everything. ”
“Alice,” I snapped, “what in God’s name is going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what you just spoke inside my head again. “
“I told you, it’s not me—it’s the Spirit.”
“OK, but what does it mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“What the Spirit just said to me: ‘ The Witnesses know everything.’”
“Oh, I have absolutely no idea.”
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Chapter 27: The Other World
May 2005, Sarasota, Starbucks
Alice must have smelled me coming, because as soon as I came in the door at Starbucks, her eyes started to float like a blind man’s, which is what they look like just before the Spirit comes. I flinched like I was about to be punched and she let go of a cackle that totally unscrewed me. It sounded exactly like Kiki’s laugh, a totally wicked cackle; I couldn’t believe how close it was.
She must have seen my confusion because she suddenly barked, “Hey, I was kidding! That was just a little get-back for saying you could do Rich Little.”
“Jesus, Alice, that wasn’t funny,” I said, but no sooner had I said that than she shot me that same blind look and I jumped back yelling like I did when Pinga told me he was going to rip my ear off.
She motioned me to sit down. “You have something you want to ask me, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do, but first I want to know how you just gave me that look. You told me it’s the Spirit that does all that.”
“It is the Spirit . All I can do is imitate what it feels like when the Spirit enters me.
When I do that, my eyes change, but that’s as far as it goes: I’m firing blanks.
Nothing happens. Well, most of the time. If I get the feeling exactly right, the Spirit can appear, but it’s kind of a long shot.” She stopped and looked at me like someone training a very slow dog and said, “I’m not much help am I?”
“No, no, you are,” I assured her. “You’re a big help except I’m not quite in step with you yet: everything is still a bit patchy.”
I told her I knew she didn’t want to talk about the myth yet, but I needed her to help me understand a vision, a figure I saw in a mirror years ago, just after we had first met in the market. I proceeded to tell her about ISLAUGGH—how he appeared to me three times but he wasn’t a man like I’d first thought but a woman, at least according to Diane who’d told me his name or her name, it’s spelled “I-S-L-A-U-G-G-H”, but I could tell by the expression on Alice’s face that I was completely out of control.
I didn’t care. I was desperate for some kind of explanation. Alice just kept looking at me, saying nothing, so I told her about the possible meanings of the name, and then about the voice inside my head that had said ‘ Witness’ as I stared at ISLAUGGH in the mirror and then how I’d been trying to puzzle the myth out and that I sensed everything was connected but I didn’t know how, not really, except sometimes I thought I did, and then, thankfully, just as I took another breath, she held up her hand.
“Is that all you want to tell me?” she asked. I felt like an idiot. She looked at me 116 ALICE HICKEY
with the smile of the weary and said, “That’s what trying to deal with the psychic world is like: it will fool you. You think it’s one thing and you go to touch it and it’s not there, or it turns out to be something else, like a fish in shallow water. It’s never where you think it is, or the color you think, or as big as you think.”
“But something has been standing still long enough to touch me and it’s been happening for years now.”
“Oh, touching us is easy. We’re like roses waiting to be picked. It’s touching the other side that’s tricky.”
“OK, but listen, there has to be a reason why you keep appearing. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”
“Yes, it’s never happened before, this coming back to the same person. I can’t tell you what it means; I’d only be guessing.”
She wasn’t the only one in the dark. My old theory about her being the éminence grise behind Diane’s terrifying dream had long ago gone up in smoke. It was clear Alice had been as much a pawn as Diane. I suspected, however, that Alice hadn’t quite told me the whole story. I decided to find out:
“You know what I think about the dream Diane had?”
“No. Tell me.”
“I’m sure the dream was meant for me. As soon as Diane described it, my whole body lit up. You know what else I think? I think Diane took the hit for me, had the dream for me.”
“Oh, do you? And why do you think that?”
“Because the dream might have killed me. Diane said so.”
“She was right about that, but she forgot to tell you your chances of receiving a dream from the Spirit are just about zero.”
“Why is that?”
“You’re too thick.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just that: you’re too thick. You have to be in a very special psychic state for the Spirit to give you a dream.”
“What state is that?”
“Now is not the time, Justin.”
“Wh