"So you crossed the contested area you had to bypass by sea on the way in?"
"Sixty armored vehicles?" I said, eliminating her point of danger.
"You said the airport was closed."
"It was."
"How did you get out?"
"I’m not sure."
Jeanette waited for me to explain why that was.
Shrugging off my embarrassment, I said, "You’d think I would remember an overnight sail on the Junieh ferry, or a road trip to Tel Aviv, but a helicopter landing in the Sun Hall Hotel parking lot rings a hazy bell. That would’ve taken some kind of special wrangling between Lucy and the Marines, but if they somehow thought I was a wounded American journalist..." I shrugged. "She was good like that."
"You really don’t remember?"
"I had a bunch of drinks the night before, was on some kind of pain medication, and I had slept about fifty minutes out of the last thirty-six hours." I shook my head. "My passport stamp says I came into Cyprus through Larnaca, which is where the ferry comes in across from the Sun Hall Hotel." I shrugged. "Anyway, one thing led to another—no omens in sight."
"You should be dead a couple times over!" Jeanette said, shaking her head in disbelief.
"I think we covered that the first day we met."
"You weren’t as educated in the ways of the unseen as you are now."
"After all I’ve told you about combat, you’ve got to know I’m not being trite when I say again that shit happens. Sometimes you end up in Cyprus."
Staring at a spot between us, Jeanette nodded at a private thought; as a statement, she said, "You believe omens are knee-bending revelations bestowed only upon the worthy." She refocused. "All of your objections to the existence of Spirit as a loving, guiding force are based on your never-ending suspicion that I am doling out religious propaganda. That’s your focus, not mine."
"I was peppered with metal alloys that turned my shins into a barometer, and squeezed through a closed half-door that still allows my hip to register changes in humidity. Logically, I'm either destined to become a meteorologist, or the omen was that I'm on my own."
Looking disoriented, as if she had awakened in a stranger’s apartment, she said, "You were told you would be safe!"
"Sure, by you."
Opening her palms toward the ceiling, with papal appeal precluding any doubt that a monumental moment had just passed me by, Jeanette pleaded into the ether, "Please, not the long way."
"There’s a longer way?" I chuckled.
Sighing with eternal weariness, she said, "Maybe you would be more willing to recognize the presence of Spirit in your life if I used a term that appealed to your irreverence for all things unseen." Jeanette leaned back and crossed one arm below her breasts, resting an elbow in one cupped hand, and her chin in the other. She remained motionless for an uncomfortable time for me, other than a nibble on her lower lip challenging me to believe that she was browsing through sophisticated abstractions. The minute mark crawled by as I fought off the ghost of giddy to believe she was giving her all to help me. Thirty more seconds and shallow breaths began to betray my anticipation of hearing the single word that might change my life. Ten more seconds and the wisdom of the ages seemed to clarify behind Jeanette’s suddenly wide eyes.
I leaned forward to receive this vital knowledge a millisecond sooner.
"You can call them Smurfs," she said seriously. "Maybe that’ll get you past religion to see how momentum doesn't distinguish between targets and bystanders, except for you."
Apparently not.
Jeanette gathered her thoughts before offering me an overview of a Universal presence in our world, which she had discovered in the books Kha-lib had suggested I read. She said that from the First World War to the end of the second, Edgar Cayce introduced western cultures to the concept of channeling. From the early 1960's through the mid 1980's, Jane Roberts further established the Universe's intentions and teaching bona fides through her Seth channels. At the same time, Lynn V. Andrews and Carlos Castaneda were chronicling the dexterity of human consciousness, in separate apprenticeships from the male and female perspectives.
"In our time," Jeanette said, "there are growing waves of artists, writers, environmentalists, and healers moving away from traditional practices to form a bigger picture of a Universal influence underway. Their role is to contribute to the collective unconscious and add momentum to changing our world."
"Do you mean without knowing Spirit directly, like ordinary people in your book represent our audience?" I said.
"Yes. Not everyone has access to a teaching entity," she explained, "but they can attract one by making a conscious and consistent effort to do the right thing. To that end, Carlos recorded how don Juan said Spirit makes its presence known, so people can recognize the contact if it happens."
"So your audience can participate… good idea. How do they do that?" I dutifully asked.
"Spirit reveals itself to prospective students through coincidences and omens that don Juan called The Manifestation of Spirit. The average person ignores these because their normal state of mental tension has anaesthetized them to the magic of their existence. The next step is called The Knock of Spirit, which is essentially the same as a manifestation, but by virtue of a teacher witnessing it, they properly interpret the event as the Universe designating a new student."
"The person doesn't know?" I said.
"Not a clue," Jeanette said good-naturedly. "Spirit next resorts to trickery by arranging unusual events, or manipulating a person's awareness to bring the inexplicable into their field of vision." Rocking forward, she perched on her toes. "Trickery frees a person's attention from their compacted world view. However, personal fears and the elastics of social conditioning cause them to ignore, or reason the experience away." Jeanette released her toehold and rocked back. "They think the less-doubtful existence of an unseen force wouldn’t have practical value, and telling anyone about the event would only label them."
"Like you’ve proven—intentionally?"
"Being labeled for my beliefs and abilities wasn’t a choice. The teacher participates at this point," she continued her explanation, "so that the prospect knows they’re not alone." She rocked back and forth then stopped. "The final stage is an irrevocable act called The Descent of the Spirit. This event shatters the individual's view of reality in some way, because they can only attribute it to the direct intervention of an abstract force. So!" she said loudly. "Let’s start our search for Intent in your life, with your dabbling in the mystical realm. I know you’ve done this."
Playing her game as best I could, I said, "I had two psychic readings, twenty-one years apart. When I was a technical producer for a radio talk show, a guest speaker offered me information during a commercial break, and he finished his thoughts on air before taking more calls. The second was at a psychic fair; he said I would be leaving radio for television, but I wouldn't end up there, and I would write a book when I was forty-two years old." Anticipating the next question, I said, "I became a community programmer at a rural cable station a few months later. After a year and a half, I moved into real broadcasting because switching jobs is how you work your way up to the big shows. I was twenty-four at the time, and sitting at the console of a light bulb wattage radio station, so the psychic wasn't taking a big risk. As for the book, I'm thirty-five now and I can't imagine taking another seven years to finish it."(book)
"The psychic fair?"
"Last year in Kenora, a girl I met on a shoot wanted to go; I don't remember the reading."
"You were introduced to the mystical realm earlier in life, but not so early that you would bother to struggle with it," Jeanette said. "The psychic didn't say the book would be your first or last, just that you'd write one at age forty-two?"
"Conveniently."
"I told you months ago, there is nothing convenient about dealing with Spirit. That man tapped into the probability that you would become an author at the point in time when it had become inevitable. The actual time of production isn’t relevant." She stretched her legs as she said, "The teaching scheme is designed to prod a student's assumptions with the language of probability, and set up lessons that will eventually change these assumptions." She shrugged a miniscule effort. "That’s it?"
"That’s all."
"All physical events are spiritual at their core, so let’s look at an overview of your life."
"My whole life?"
"Do you know someone else’s better?"
Clearing my throat, I said, "I'm from middle class parents who gave me a carefree upbringing. When my father died, I left high school and joined the Navy. A few years later..."
"Explore that time," she said.
My cooperative spirit took a blow with her ungrateful command; I focused on the most insipid thing I could think of, as a warning for her not to push me.
"In the navy, I developed an accidental interest in dusters—Zane Grey and Louis Lamour westerns—because they were everywhere on board. Asimov and Heinlein sci-fi came after that, then spy novels."
Jeanette stared as if I was taking a leak in the windowsill planter; I made the connection to her world. "I also read books about the mysteries of the pyramids, the Bermuda triangle, runways on top of a mountain in Peru, and one Edgar Cacey book."
"Any other accidents?"
"That’s a leap."
"It was your leap," Jeanette said cheerfully. "Accidental interest?"
Technically, my experiences in aircraft were all incidents not accidents, so I bypassed them for a tale about a minor scrape in a car that had a far greater potential for disaster when the on-ramp lane merged with traffic.
Jeanette claimed to have experienced the identical conundrum—whether to boot it or stand on the brakes—then she led me by saying, "You also had an accident in the Navy?"
I told her that winter weather can quickly turn ugly in the Bay of Biscay, a half-moon Atlantic area that acts like a washing machine for hundreds of kilometers across the northern borders of Spain and France. This is what it was diligently doing while my destroyer, HMCS Nipigon, was conducting a replenishment at sea operation with the support ship, HMCS Provider.
The wind, initially a gusty fifteen knots, created a sea state that was borderline safe for a R.A.S., but we were seriously short of fuel at the conclusion of a NATO exercise. When the breeze freshened to a sustained twenty knots, we had no choice but to terminate the procedure that required us to keep station 150 feet abeam of Provider, doing twelve knots, because it didn’t take much of a helm mistake, or rogue wave, to close that distance suddenly.
When the Chief Boson’s Mate confirmed for the Deck Officer that all hoses, communications wires, and transfer lines between vessels were clear, the captain ordered Nipigon to full speed, with port helm, to take us away from Provider.
George and I were stowing the last of the jackstay lines down the forward hatch when the ship fell into a trough, as it turned to weather. Our heels left the deck, so we knelt to finish the job just as Nipigon punched into the top third of a breaking roller, shuddered as if she was stuck in mud, and threw us face down on the deck. Recovering, we slammed the hatch shut and lay flat hanging onto the spindle wheel as the bow, twenty feet forward of us, yawed mightily to starboard cutting a deep groove into the quarter-face of the next monster swell.
Our 365-foot ship motored as far on the slant as physics allowed, before the stern slid off the rolling mass and we backed into another trough. The unusual angles of momentum and relative motion combined to point the bow toward the sky, twisting the ship broadsides to what had then become howling winds. A huge smack followed, a disconcerting wobble-shudder raced through the superstructure, and Nipigon yawed dramatically toward Provider, our starboard mid-ships scuppers under water: our helmsman wheeled opposite rudder, and we began to climb an elongated fluorescent green wall.
Between the ship’s natural buoyancy stored beneath the gunwales, and twin screws chewing up huge chunks of ocean on full power, Nipigon rose like a reluctant rocket to punch through a breaking crest, plunging like a broken elevator off the back of a square wave. The main deck was awash as we hit bottom dead center of the trough.
Looking up in wide-eyed wonder, with the sudden stall all we could see was the froth rimmed, curling face of frigid Atlantic effervescence about to sweep us from the world. Anticipating the captain sending my mother a telegram, I clenched my sphincter muscle in a walnut-crushing strain, and hoped my grip was just as strong.
It wasn’t.
The rush of water tore our grasps free, then played pinball with our bodies between bollards on the non-skid deck, before depositing George beneath the port side cannon-well breakwater, a three-foot high inverted V. I came to rest in a mirror position to starboard. In time, I don’t know how much, George got up, didn’t see me, and went to report me overboard.
Regaining my senses, I opened my eyes to see a pair of legs draped over the lifelines, realized they were mine, but I couldn't move them. A couple of drenching elevator rides into the bay convinced me this wasn't the worst thing that could happen, and I managed to hoist myself over the breakwater, flopping into the safety of the cannon well where a lookout eventually spotted me from the bridge. Two days later, the storm subsided enough for a helicopter to take me to Provider, also a hospital ship, where I received my first real medical attention.
I told Jeanette that a radar mast about a hundred feet off calm water line had been damaged: I was fifteen-feet from the normal water line so I granted her the miracle that a greeny didn’t wash me overboard.
"Nobody looked for me topside until the ship's interior had been searched," I added, "so I probably should've been swept overboard before I got over the breakwater, as well. But I don’t see what was so great about tearing my elbow to the bone, cracking three ribs, fracturing my skull, and turning eighty-percent of my body the color of ochre and plums."
"In the grander scheme of things there are no accidents; we are Phillip."
Jeanette’s voice had changed to a masculine timbre, but not as deep as the Kha-lib persona.
"Cool, hi. What about accidents?"
"In part, you chose this adventure in treacherous waters to experience the inept casualness with which the bridge officers would treat your life. Did you not feel this way?"
"The thought occurred to me while I was congealing on deck like a Popsicle."
"You were also less enthusiastic about pursuing that career, because you received what you believed to be indifferent medical treatment, and no special considerations afterwards. Is this not so?"
"The medic didn't bother to wash me after I had been drenched in salt water. I shook for hours, was itchy all over for days, and any voluntary movement I could make, which wasn't much because I was one big charley-horse, registered like a hammer. I’ve never hurt like that. A pill would’ve been nice. A pillow over my face would’ve been better. Anyway, I asked to be compensated for a broken watch, and they said it wasn't required for the job, and they refused."
"Thereby failing to acknowledge your suffering," Phillip said. "Less dangerous events followed, and at levels of awareness unencumbered by self-involvement you knew that the Navy had served its purpose and you requested and received an early release."
I hadn't thought of it that way, but it fit.
"Now," the Philip persona said, with emphasis, "other miracles also took place. Your shipmate escaped unscathed, because his purpose was to ensure you would be found. There was also a disruption to your energy field. This offered us the opportunity to insert a pulse of energy, which we subsequently used to educate you about the dangers that lay ahead. This type of event occurs when there is an agreement between the individual and their Source, for it creates a point of change in their evolutionary momentum. There are many stories of individuals becoming psychically aware through apparently accidental means."
"Why use a monster wave when a brick to the head would have done it, and left the rest of me alone?" I said.
"We did not choose to be on that deck."
"From what Jeanette has explained to me about your abilities, you must have known it was coming—you used it for your own purposes, instead of influencing things so that I wouldn’t have been there."
"Were we so arrogant as to interfere with the essence of personal evolution, neglect our responsibilities, or so cruel as to punish ignorance, you would not have survived many incidents. Yet you are still here, all be it little wiser for your experiences, but that too will change."
Feeling combatant, I said, "I had an allergic reaction to a cat that drove me from a building into incoming shelling, and I’ve been saturated, dehydrated, and frozen. Am I missing any more signs of Intent?"
"You chose your own path. View your experiences in this way, and you'll find purpose unfolding with the dawn of each day."
"We stray so often…"
"The design you choose unfolds according to the nature of your beliefs. It follows that even a conscious effort to avoid challenges will bring you face to face with them." Philip scanned my face, "We realize it is difficult to accept how clever you are," he said cheerfully.
"If my strategy is so good, why do I need your help?"
"The scope of your beliefs is too limited for the time you have left to broaden them on your own. However, to identify the boundaries of your personal attention is the first step in identifying responsibilities from which you need not repeat what has befallen you. Continue to trace the steps that led you to this meeting, and you might see how your strategy was as flexible as free will, and so precise as to have made your arrival inevitable."
"They weren't necessarily just my steps, or thought through, for that matter."
"To recall one’s journey is the first step in transforming your apparent errors and successes into an encompassing empathy for the efforts of everyone’s journey. From this place, recognition of the awesome forces at your command converts the formerly unremarkable into acts of creation. What will you create today?"
Jeanette twisted her neck, implying the Phillip persona was gone, but the unnatural positioning of her hands resting in her lap—upturned, with fingers splayed like a doctor waiting for a drying towel—signaled that she wanted me to believe another persona was on standby.
I took this as a reminder to not lose focus, and to continue my serious "as if" charade.
I began explaining why I moved from Toronto, but Jeanette interrupted me to say that I had to go further back. I restarted with my move from England, but she stopped me again. A final false start brought me to where "Phillip" had left off…
"A year after I left the Navy, I was working in a northern Manitoba construction camp with Ed when it burned down, and we transferred to a site where I worked twelve sevens at night. It wasn't long before I figured out that watching generator dials wasn't my calling, and I wrote to colleges in Manitoba and Ontario to see what they had to offer. Radio and television courses caught my attention, and I got an interview in Toronto for the September seventy-four class."
"Where you were supposed to be," Jeanette said.
"My academic history and the communication’s director's assessment of my personality would determine if I would be accepted. I didn't meet the first standard, because my grade-twelve math teacher had told me to leave class until I was ready to learn; that moment never arrived. My father died the day before the final exam, and so after I made that point to the director I was going to imply that I had a genetic predisposition for the course. My mother had written over twenty children's books, and my father had been in radio and print journalism."
"Genetics is the physical manifestation of ideas. You are predisposed," Jeanette said.
I next explained that I had traipsed through a maze of vacant summer corridors until coming upon two men standing in an office doorway, where I introduced myself as Mr. Gunkle’s one o'clock interview. Gunkle identified himself by grimacing at his subordinate, who immediately offered to do the interview. Michael Monty introduced himself as we passed through a hole in the wall that contained a desk and two chairs; motioning for me to sit, he began reading the short story I was required to prepare as a demonstration of my raw talent. Too soon, he set it aside to read my résumé.
Flicking through pages as if he were reading a teenager’s phone bill, I thought I had come a thousand miles to be imposed on a man who couldn't see the top of his desk through the pile of audio and video tapes that would have been filed in a closet had we not been sitting in it. Then his face lit up.
"You're well travelled," he said, giving me hope.
At the age of twenty-two, I may not have been as mature as parents hope their children will be, but I wasn't stupid: Michael had a tan, and I had overheard Gunkle talking about vacations when I first approached the duo so I translated Michael’s remark to mean, "Have you been to...?"
I said the Navy had taken me to more places than most young people get to see, then I rattled off my ports of call, adding some logical stops in the hope of finding common ground.
"Ah …Spain," he said wistfully. "I just came back from there."
Which was good, but not as good as Portugal would have been; I imported an infamous strip of bars from Lisbon to Malaga.
At this point, Mike leaned forward to talk to John, not his boss's one o'clock, and I risked mentioning a particularly active attraction for seafaring men I had heard much about. Apparently, one house stood out from the mass of green and rose pastels because it was painted in distinctive Navy grey.
Gently closing a predominantly unread packet of altered truths, a scholastically somber Michael said he hadn't seen it himself, but he could imagine that the wear path in the cobblestones would make it easy to find. Taking a solemn breath, he said my experiences and perspectives were suited to a life in the media, a judgment I confirmed by taking him for a beer.
My professional grades were adequate before I jobbed out to a radio station, shortly after which I went to cable TV as a community programmer. A year later, a former classmate hired me at a local television station, and a year after that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation advertised for editors experienced in the new electronic systems. Two weeks passed before I was turned down for that job, but a department head asked me if I'd be interested in becoming a soundman; it was my experience with new technology they were after. Three years later, Doug quit to freelance in London. I was subsequently resting there between back-to-back assignments in India and Pakistan when he and a barrel of Guinness got me thinking about freelancing. For want of something to do, the next day I hopped a train to the East Croydon Immigration Office, explained my circumstances, then I left the decision in the hands of a petite immigration official. To my surprise, she issued me a work visa on the spot.
"Why did you even consider working in England?" Jeanette said.
"I loved London. Different stories."
"Carry on."
"I finished the job in India, came home, quit, sold my sailboat, motorcycle, and sports car to friends, and three weeks later I moved to London."
"Fast and smooth," Jeanette noted.
"I sold cheap. Anyway, I was about to lie down in a Knightsbridge hotel when the I.R.A. car bombed Harrods, half a block down the road. I was looking out my window at the billowing smoke when CBS phoned. Twenty minutes later, I was working my first freelance job with Sean Bobbitt. At seven the next morning we were on our way to Beirut. After that job, I worked as nonstop as I wanted to work, including all kinds of cushy jobs, like touring Scotland's scotch industry, snooker and darts tournaments, rugby—all kinds of fluff stories."
"Hard life," she said dryly.
"It got better. I took time off in the south of France, and sailing the Greek Islands. The only crappy thing that happened was that my allergies kicked in big time."
I next explained that my visa would expire while I was out of England so I got an extension at the airport before leaving for Africa. When I came back, Immigration asked me about the recent date on the stamp, and I told them what I had done. They next asked me how I had obtained my original visa, a story that revealed a problem; apparently, I should've applied for it from outside the U.K. for it to be valid.
I explained that the issuing officer must have considered me out of the country, in the sense that I was leaving England to quit my job before I would come back to live, but it was a moot point; I had a visa. We argued that point back to the details of my original application, which revealed that I didn't qualify for a work visa—the issuing officer had made a mistake.
Maybe so, I said, but I already lived in their country, to which an officer blandly replied, "This is no longer the case."
Another official said it was the responsibility of the air carrier to take illegals back to their point of embarkation; I was going to be to put on the plane I had just got off, and returned to Johannesburg. I explained that I was one of many journalists who had been banned from entering South Africa, and that our crew had chartered a plane from Mozambique to catch the SAA connection without going through South African Immigration. In other words, the Republic would send me to Mozambique where my entry visa had expired. I was returning from six weeks covering the famine in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and working around another civil war in Mozambique. I was emotionally drained, fatigued from twelve hours on a plane, and stunned at hearing I was a vagrant. I asked them to have a heart.
"We’re British," an officer replied to my request, as a fourth official arrived at our counter accompanied by an SAA representative. He said that considering where I had come from, South African Airways would be pleased to fly me anywhere in the world. I said nine pounds sterling didn't go far anywhere in the world; I needed access to my bank. This prompted a short conference between the representative and immigration officials who agreed to send me to Canada where the value of my money would more than double: I would have cab fare to a homeless shelter.
The absurdity of suddenly being a penniless refugee had me babbling about my work not taking bread off British tables, when a fifth immigration officer appeared from the Arrivals Concourse escorting my British girlfriend. Realizing I was in some kind of shit, because Barbara had greeted the rest of our crew hours earlier, she had approached officials and asked where her fiancé might have gotten lost. Upon hearing this, the first official I had dealt with pointedly asked me why I hadn't mentioned my impending nuptials. Truthfully, I told him that it had not occurred to me.
The growing gang of officials apparently decided that my oversight was logical for a fellow who believed he was legal, and they grudgingly granted me temporary permission to enter England. I had to surrender my passport