Is AA a Cult? . . . . .Well, IS it?

I found this excellent article on AA recovery when googling the age-old question: is AA a cult? I obviously wouldn't have asked unless I had a lot of suspicions about it. I've been away from the "cult" for longer than I was in it, have stayed sober all that time, and never did go stomping off, but drifted away from meetings when I began to feel disaffected by what I saw as the rigid fundamentalism of the program.

As outlined in this article, there are many cultlike dynamics in 12-step groups. I remember hearing things like, "AA is all you need","never say no to an AA request", and "no mind-altering substances" (with a cigarette in one hand and a coffee in the other). Sexual predation, which is finally coming out of the closet, was never spoken of - it was just one of the many taboos you found out about the hard way. And, yes, I was a victim of it, and never told anyone, largely because I had been conditioned not to "tell" by being sexually assaulted as a child.

You learn to keep quiet to survive. But why weren't we allowed to talk about the root cause of so much addictive behaviour? Why is it therapeutic to tell victims of assault that they were responsible for what happened, and that they had to let go of their "resentment" of the people who had assaulted them?

I found no help for this dilemma at meetings, but I did find a competent therapist and spent years untangling the threads. It was painful but necessary, but I found no support for this process  at meetings, where if I even mentioned being in therapy, I'd get a sort of sideways glance, almost an eye-roll. Why wasn't AA all I needed?

It's thick and thorny stuff. The last time I seriously thought about going to a meeting was during the depths of the pandemic, when nobody could go anywhere or do anything. I wasn't too concerned that I would drink. I just wanted to sit in a room with like-minded people who were there to support each other. It didn't happen, because all meetings were now on-line, and I could not see myself doing AA on a Zoom call.

I was shocked but not surprised to learn that a lot of these Zoom meetings were invaded by "Zoombombers" (sounds like an awful wartime thing, but there it is). The meetings were basically hacked by people who obviously were able to listen in to every word, and even intruded with abusive or pornographic messages. Not exactly the way I first came in, just walking through the door, knees shaking or not. It's yet more proof that there really is no such thing as online safety: it's practically an oxymoron.

But just as you could have your boundaries breached with a suffocating hug (one guy would run his hands up and down my body while moaning about how good it felt), baring your soul online is just a very bad idea in general.

But one must ask: is anywhere safe? I realize now that I tolerated a lot of behaviour which at least bordered on abusive, and tried desperately to stay within rules that often did not make a lot of sense to me. A similar thing happened with the United Church, which for all its boasts of inclusivity is just about the most narrow and dogmatic organization I've ever been a part of. Outside of AA.

Deprogramming From AA—When a Fellowship Resembles a Cult

by April Wilson Smith   May 2, 2019

Katherine was on the subway home from a meeting with her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor when it hit. They had just gone over the worksheet she was supposed to complete for her Fourth Step: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

“What if I was too sexy? I knew men looked at me even back then when I was 12. Was I seductive? I liked the attention. I sat on his lap. I hugged him. I didn’t leave when he started talking about those things.”

Suddenly, Katherine* recalled, the pieces seemed to fall into place. The sexual abuse from her stepfather, of which she had been too ashamed to even tell her mother until years after her mother left the marriage. The long-term relationship with a sociopath who had alternated between worshipping her and berating her. The three rapes. It was all her fault.

She looked at the worksheets her sponsor had given her for her Fourth Step. Each one had three columns: for the “resentment;” for the person the resentment was against; and for “my part” in the resentment. It was a given that every resentment, every bad thing that had caused anger, was at some level caused by the “alcoholic”—by Katherine herself.

She felt a sense of peace coming over her, she recalled of that night five years ago, like a great mystery had been solved. She was an alcoholic. The rapes, all three, she had invited them. Like her counselors said, they never would have happened if she hadn’t been drinking. Even the childhood abuse. She must have wanted it, sought it out. That was alcoholic behavior: self-centered and seeking attention.

As she waited on the platform for the next subway to transfer home, she briefly thought about letting herself fall onto the tracks.

A Desire to Deprogram

Rachel Bernstein, MA, LMFT, is a therapist who specializes in helping people who have left cults of all kinds to recover from the damage. “In an organization for people who have dealt with shame and looking down on themselves, as well as having other people look down on them, that shame shouldn’t be recreated within the organization that is supposed to heal them,” she told Filter. “They should have a place to go where they feel only supported and empowered and safe. If people come feeling broken and then the finger is pointed at them, it just takes them farther into a spiral of poor self-esteem and shame.”

Without condemning AA itself, Bernstein acknowledges the dangers of this kind that AA’s program can pose for some people. “While I think that there is some merit to some of the Steps, there needs to be flexibility to take away the Steps that are getting in the way of some people’s recovery.”

Katherine met Bernstein through Monica Richardson, the founder of an international Facebook group called “Deprogramming From AA or Any 12 Step Group.” It has over 1,000 members, all of whom are at some point in the process of leaving a 12-step group.

Richardson has led a crusade to spotlight how unregulated 12-step groups can form a happy hunting ground for sexual predators.

Katherine found the group through a friend from an online AA support group who was also dissatisfied with the pat answers she said fellow members gave to everything: You got raped? “Go to a meeting, call your sponsor! Find your part in what happened!”

The members of “Deprogramming” were in 12-step groups for anywhere from a few months to 20-plus years. It is not only the content of the program that they found problematic: Some have been raped, sexually abused or assaulted through their associations with AA or Narcotics Anonymous.

Richardson, who joined AA at 18 and had spent 36 years abstinent from alcohol in the program by the time she left, has led a crusade to spotlight how unregulated 12-step groups can form a happy hunting ground for sexual predators. She is the creator of the award-winning 2015 film The 13th Step—an expose of sexual harassment and abuse within The Rooms (“13th stepping” is the practice of old-timers hitting on newcomers).

Her work on the film involved researching the tragic 2011 murder of Karla Brada Mendez, a young woman who was introduced to AA by the rehab she attended for problematic prescription drug use. She met a man at those meetings who had been in AA for years (often court-ordered). He never stopped drinking, but used the meetings as a way to meet vulnerable women. The man, Eric Allan Earle, was convicted in 2014 of beating and choking Karla Brada Mendez to death.

The members of “Deprogramming” have many other grievances. Some report having been coerced into going off their psychiatric medications, against their doctors’ advice. Others became frustrated with the lack of scientific evidence behind AA’s program. Others still are angry that any inquiry into other options is not only discouraged, but sometimes actively punished—by exclusion from social events, public humiliation at meetings, and constant reminders of the AA saying that to leave the program can only result in “jails, institutions and death.”

All found that AA’s promises did not come true: They may have stopped drinking or using drugs—often defined by 12-step groups and the treatment industry to include prescription psychiatric medications such as benzodiazepines or MAT drugs like buprenorphine—but they did not become “happy, joyous and free.”

Many feel that they replaced their addiction to a substance with an addiction to the program.

Why It Can Be Frightening to Leave a 12-Step Group

However, many members of “Deprogramming” report feeling afraid about leaving 12-step circles.

They fear not being able to stay “sober”—a fear instilled by 12-step teaching that as an “alcoholic” or “addict,” you can’t take so much as one sip of alcohol without complete reversion to dangerous patterns (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary).

Fear of social isolation is another important common factor. Twelve-step groups typically encourage members to build their lives around the program, to attend meetings every day for the first 90 days and many more ever after.

Many who leave the program therefore fear that they will no longer have friends once they do.

Many sponsors require their sponsees to call a certain number of people in the program every day, no matter what. Phone numbers are given out at meetings. Katherine’s sponsor made it mandatory that she call seven AA women daily.

“Service,” is also pushed, with new members strongly encouraged to commit to at least weekly duties—ranging from making coffee to chairing meetings, going to detox facilities to speak at patients’ mandatory AA meetings, and serving on committees.

If a member complains that daily meeting attendance and other demands are interfering with work or family life, the AA mantra, “Anything you put before your recovery, you will lose,” is typically repeated. So members often reduce their other social connections, actively encouraged to change the “people, places and things” in their lives. Many who leave the program therefore fear that they will no longer have friends once they do.

Another issue that departing 12-step members report as concerning is suddenly dealing with all the issues that drove them to substance use in the first place, but weren’t adequately addressed in the program. People with a history of trauma, in particular, can find that the onslaught of pain and memories—repressed while they were told in AA that “alcoholism,” was the root of all their problems—can be almost unbearable.

“I would venture to say three-quarters, if not more, of the people in AA are suffering from depression or anxiety or survivors of trauma, and were using alcohol to self-medicate,” said Rachel Bernstein. “So then you have people who are derailed from a more direct and relevant path to dealing with their particular issues, and instead they are told that alcohol is the only source of their problem.”

“Deprogramming from AA and Other 12 Step Groups” provides a community to share experiences, advice and validation for a perspective that the treatment industry and mainstream America deny: AA doesn’t work for most people. And for many, it does tremendous harm.

Cult-Like Characteristics

But do all of these program- and community-related problems within 12-step fellowships mean we can accurately describe them as cults?

I asked Bernstein about the extent to which AA and the rest resemble the bona fide cults in which many of her patients have been involved. Part of her answer depicted an environment in which unregulated autonomy—from group to group and from sponsor to sponsor—sees abuses go unchecked.

“People who came to see me got involved in 12-step programs wanting to turn their lives around, but then had a sponsor who became a controller, an abuser and a boundary violator, and there was nobody to talk to about it,” she said. “There are no safeguards within these groups. There’s no governing body to go to and say, ‘My sponsor followed me home and went into my apartment.’”

“That is cult behavior: Cults will give you an identity.”

“The other issue,” she added, “is that unlike a lot of the other anonymous groups, within AA, you have to call yourself an ‘alcoholic.’ That is cult behavior: Cults will give you an identity. Then you build not only your life but your self-esteem around that identity.”

Regarding the nature of “sharing” in meetings, Bernstein said, “Within 12-step groups, there are people who can defend against the social pressures, and others who can’t. They don’t want anyone to be unhappy with them so they’ll say what they need to say, they’ll make commitments, they’ll ‘admit’ things about themselves even if they aren’t true.”

“They’ll do that in a room full of people who are not mental health professionals and do not know how to hold onto that information in a safe way or help you heal,” she continued. “Other times people will feel the need to share information because they have someone else they know in the organization who brought them in, so they don’t want to disappoint that person.”

Katherine’s Path Out

Katherine, now in her 40s, didn’t throw herself onto the subway tracks that fateful night. Despite fear that her parents—who had sent her to a tremendously expensive 12-step rehab and were very invested in her AA participation—would be horrified, she called her sponsor the next day and said she was going to take a break from doing the Steps.

Before long, people at the meetings she attended daily began to shun her. They would talk about how, since she was pursuing a graduate degree, she thought she was too smart for the program. “We’ve buried a lot of smart people,” a familiar AA saying goes. “You have to get stupid to get the program.”

Gradually, Katherine cut back on her meeting attendance. She found other support in SMART Recovery and Refuge Recovery, and eventually left AA all together. But the pain didn’t stop.

She would find her days interrupted by intrusive thoughts of AA. She alternated between terror that she would drink again and lose everything she had gained since leaving rehab, and bursts of anger at the program that had told her that she was nothing but an “alcoholic.” That none of her accomplishments or good qualities mattered.

Katherine’s rehab counselor had recommended that instead of returning to graduate school, she spend $4,000 a month to live in a “sober living” home. In this facility, she would have been isolated from the general population and made to go to daily meetings and group therapy with non-professional counselors, while working a minimum-wage job. However, her family didn’t have the money to throw at this, so she returned to graduate school, where she could live on student loans, and attended AA in the community instead.

And it was then that Katherine’s fear of being raped again turned into full-blown agoraphobia. She would walk home from meetings at night terrified. But the strange thing, she recalled, was that she wasn’t so frightened of the physical violation and pain of rape itself. She was afraid that she would be blamed. Because she was an “alcoholic”—and now everyone knew it because she had been to rehab, even though she hadn’t had a drink in months.

Seeking help, Katherine reached out to Monica Richardson, who recommended Rachel Bernstein, the cult deprogramming therapist. Katherine worked with Bernstein for nine months to recover from her AA experience.

As the stories of “Deprogramming” members attest, many others have had comparable experiences. Alice,* for example, was raped at a graduate school party. Though she had no history of alcohol-related problems, her parents insisted she get an alcohol evaluation because she had been drinking at the time of the assault. It was a classic case of victim-blaming.

Alice was assessed as an “alcoholic,” as is almost anyone who is referred for an assessment to a treatment provider. She went to an Intensive outpatient program and then immersed herself in AA. Within AA, she experienced sexual abuse from her sponsor and men her sponsor insisted she date. She was told that the sexual abuse she endured as a child and the rape she experienced as an adult were her fault.

Even more frightening, Alice said, is that she looked and even believed she was happy during this time. “Upon hearing that I had a negative experience in AA, people that knew me during that 10-year period might be shocked. ‘But she seemed so happy,’ they might say… ‘How could she say that?’”

“My answer to this,” she continued, “is that yes, I was very happy–in fact, I was euphoric at times when I went to AA. This was because I was suppressing all of the emotions and things that AA told me would lead me to drink: anger, sadness, grief, critical thinking, negative thoughts, my intelligence. This led me to have a kind of false gratefulness, happiness and peace that only lasted for so long.”

Finally, Alice related, “at nine-and-a-half years of sobriety I could repress and suppress all of these things no longer” Dealing with all these feelings led to what she calls “the hardest period of my life.”

“I was hospitalized two times,” she said, “and was also suicidal for about two-and-a-half years. Over time, though, I have gotten more accustomed to having thoughts and feelings like I did before I went to AA, and have found that they pose no risk to my sobriety.”
Guidance on How to Deprogram

Both Rachel Bernstein and Monica Richardson give concrete advice on how a person thinking of leaving AA or any 12-step program, and wishing to deprogram, should proceed.

Bernstein advises:

1. Learn about methods of control and manipulative tactics. Bring a checklist to your next meeting and check off the techniques as you see them. You’ll be able to see for yourself if this group is treating you respectfully and being open about its intentions, or if it’s using manipulation to not only keep you there but make you feel like you have no choice but to stay. Here is a checklist of tactics to look out for:

* You are taught that the teachings and techniques are perfect. So if they are not working as intended, it’s because you are not following them the right way, or trying hard enough.

* The organization defines you, tells you what you are, who you are, and how to see yourself.

* Questioning or doubting the teachings is wrong and seen as an issue/problem of yours instead of your fundamental right.

* The organization is a closed system, and any issues you have with it have to stay in-house; there is no outside and/or objective governing body to bring your concerns to.

* Dependency is built into the system by making you feel that you cannot trust yourself on your own, and left to your own devices you would always make the wrong decision and your life would spiral downward.

* You never graduate. You are never done. Your participation and adherence to the teachings are expected to be lifelong.

* You are made to feel these are the only people you can trust in your life, and those outside the group are not able to support and ensure the path you should be on.

* The influence technique of “scarcity” is used by conveying the message that this group is the only group in the world that can give you what you need.

* It has its own social norms and lingo that are different from those in the outside community, so you feel more understood by those in the group and more a part of the world of the group, and this can separate you from those in the outside community.

* The group has one system it provides. No other systems or philosophies are integrated. So, whatever the system is designed to address is the only thing that’s addressed, and other potentially primary issues are ignored. Part of the “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” idea, this can cause people to be misdiagnosed and to be derailed from getting help they may need with their true underlying issues.

2. Address the things that 12-step groups have taught you about yourself, such as that you are powerless or can’t control your life. Write them down, show them to somebody not involved in the group and ask, “Is this how you see me?” Some people in 12-step groups feel that they are reduced to the kind of person who can not trust themself. So if you can find people in your life who see the good in you and see your strengths and can remind you of them, you start to rebuild your sense of self and then you won’t tolerate the messages about how, left to your own devices, your life would be awful.

3. Talk to people who were involved in 12-step groups, then left and are doing okay. The more you see that there are people who are okay without AA, the more you see that you don’t need to go to keep yourself alive.

A Singing Tree (Part Six of Six)

 

ZOË   

     Fuck!     I am enormous.  More than six months along.  This so-called “miracle” stinks.  All my clothes have stretched way out.  I can’t turn over in bed so I’m stuck lying on my side all night, like a beached beluga.  I have piles.  I didn’t even know what they were until I got pregnant.  I’ve changed my mind.  I want to take it back.  Return to sender.  I don’t want to be a mother, or even a “co-mother” like Cass says.  “Cow-mother” is more like it, at my size.  I have big tits for the first time in my life, but they’re sloppy, like udders.  You bet this is bringing up a lot of “issues”, such as:  if it’s this bad now, how is it going to be when the little bugger is actually born? 

     And the dreams.  They’re disgusting.  Birth defects, cleft palates, extra fingers, horrible accidents, the baby sliding out of me and landing head-first on the floor.  Falling down the stairs with the little blighter and being charged with manslaughter.  Cassie’s into books on prenatal influences now and says every single thought and feeling I have will influence the baby’s development and psychic wellbeing.  At this rate it’ll be born with two heads.

     Speaking of.  Nobody knows where David is.  We’ve been collecting his mail for him while he goes on this mysterious “trip”, and not long ago he got a letter from his sister Leslie, the crazy one.  Cass absolutely would not allow me to open it. “It’s private stuff,” she said.

     Yeah, I have a sister too, and she had a baby at fifteen and gave it up for adoption.  I think she popped a mainspring mentally over that episode, although I know it’s the “noble” thing to do.  What gets me is that even though this is a wanted pregnancy, or at least a planned one, I still have all these lousy negative feelings – “ambivalence”, Cass calls it.  We still can’t agree on a name.  I don’t want to call him something that will be an embarrassment to him later on in life.  Cass came up with a real ring-a-ding-dinger the other day – “Cassidy”, which she called “a variation on my own name” (like hell it is!  Cassie’s real name is Sandra.  As a matter of fact, I saw her high school yearbook and she used to sign her name “Sandee”.)  I said, “Yeah, and he’ll be called Hopalong, you wait and see.”  “No she  won’t.”  And that’s another thing.  The sex of this baby changes like lightning.  We could find out the sex any time we wanted to but Cass thinks it would create “gender expectations”.  So how is it when Cass refers to the baby, it’s always a “she”?

     If it is, we should consider Susan Sandra, a combination of our old rejected names.  At least it’s honest, and less pretentious than the Gaias, Indigos, Quades, Netonias, Velvas and Willows that Cass keeps on coughing up.

     Who’d want to name their kid after a tree?

 LUCY’S JOURNAL

     First I got a terrible letter. Even the handwriting didn’t look right (though at the best of times David’s hand looks like a long line of frazzled wire).  It was almost like a satire of someone who was mentally ill, so at first I actually felt some hope.  Then I realized with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that he was running true to form – turning into every other crazy person I had ever met, though expressed in somewhat more articulate terms.

     “God couldn’t be everywhere,” he opened cheerily, “so He created Satan.”  And I thought to myself:  Jesus God, he’s even doing the Satan bit.  That line is so old and tired, right up there with space aliens controlling your thoughts.  Next he’ll be wrapping his head in aluminum foil to keep out the negative vibrations.

     It was a long rambling thing about Leslie and life and bitterness and music, maybe based partly on Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament (David can be dramatic), but with real raw anguish peeping through.  And there were clues as to where he was.  A hospital.  A psych ward.  I was a little relieved.  Not living under some bridge, or jumping off one (there are too many bridges in this town).  Even in his letter the place exhaled the same grey atmosphere of every psych ward I’ve ever been incarcerated in, and seemed to be full of the same Nazi doctors, not that David’s current perception of people is very accurate.  In our illness, we are all the same, even surrounded by the same henchmen, prison guards with their own sick need to marshall the sick.  Of course David right now wouldn’t know human compassion if it bit him, and that too is part of the illness.

     It didn’t take much to figure out which hospital.  There were these cryptic references to Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, a mention of an August birth-date  (and he always claims that astrology is bunk – so how does he know which sign is which?), and howlingly, a statement:  "I’m telling the truth” – in other words, “not lyin’”.  So he did want me to come see him in the Lion’s Gate Hospital, but perhaps didn’t know the proper etiquette to invite someone to the psych ward.

     I had to hold my breath to keep out the stink of grey broccoli served on dull green, scratched plastic trays, hold a shield against my eyes to blot out the sight of shuffling bathrobed inmates, name and number dangling from their wrists like newborn babies.  The same East Indian woman on the pay phone, howling in a universal language of grief that she wants to go home.  The same smug, rotund European doctor striding the halls, Dr. Pavlov (Mengele?), heavily accented, hair full of oil, out of touch with the decade, if not the century.  Still touting Freud.  Still dirtily referring to penis envy and getting a hard-on behind the desk with young female patients while plying them with questions about “ze orgasm”. Oh, I shouldn’t be bitter, but sameness infuriates me.  The lack of change.  How long has it been since I’ve been in – seven years?  All the cells of my body have changed since then, so supposedly I am a new person.  But the memories are old as bedlam.  Craziness is craziness, a sort of psychic bailing out.  And people act that way, in part, because they are expected to.  It’s part of the etiquette of the deranged.

     I went through the usual heart-thudding process of getting lost in the place,blundering into rooms blue with forbidden smoke billowed out by coughing dowagers in for the fifteenth time, missing their Yorkies.  All wearing the same straining mauve polyester I remember from other places, other times.  But when I found him my heart didn’t sink.  He was even wearing clothes and looked clear-eyed.  Shockingly – no, horrifyingly – I felt a sudden, massive rush of sexual desire, unstoppable, and for the thousandth time thanked God that women don’t get erections.  “Hello, David.”

    “How are the cats?”  (He’s going to be okay.)

     “Fat and happy and unconditionally loved.”

     “Clara eating?”

     “Like a veritable fiend.”

     “How’s Stanzi?”  (Oh my God.)

     “David. . . “

     Then he wept.  “It was my fault.  I shouldn’t have let her out of the house.  She died in my arms.  I always do this.  I have a demon.  My mother always told me – “

     “Your mother was insane.”

     “Bad choice of words, Lucy!”

     “David, you’re not nuts.  You’re just having an el foldo.”

     “Is that the technical term?”

     “Yes.  This is all about Leslie and the past.”

     “Leslie.  I crushed her too.  I pushed her under the wheels as surely as I killed my Stanzi.”

     “Get me some air freshener.  I think I smell bullshit.”

     For just the flickering of a second, I thought I saw a suppressed smile in the corner of one eyebrow.  The old, ironic David.  Then the curtain closed again.

     “You don’t know the whole story, Lucy.”

     “Isn’t it time you told someone?”

     “They don’t believe me.  The memories just came flooding back when I landed here.”

     “So they’re calling it ‘false memory syndrome’?”

     “Sort of like that.  Maybe they’re afraid of lawsuits.  God, I wish I smoked.”

     “You’ll get used to it,” I said, waving a stray bedroom slipper at the creeping blue haze from the next curtained-off bed.  We heard the hollow boom of a juicy, phlegm-rattling cough, the sound of suicide on the installment-plan.

     “I used to sit with her on the front-porch swing,” he began dreamily, and then I knew it would all come out in one piece, so I waited.  “It felt as if we were the only two people in the whole world.  She understood Rachmaninoff, and Liszt.  God, you should have heard her at the piano.  Her Scriabin was like a dream.  My thug of a father wanted her to play show tunes for his stinking gin buddies.  Did I tell you she was a composer?  Just like Clara Schumann.”  He covered his face with his hands.  A nurse barged her fat head in the door and twanged, “Yes or no?”  “Yes,” David replied miserably.  The head popped back out.

    “My God, they still do that?”

     “They’ve brought it back.  Too many constipated patients.  You know, from all the meds.  I haven’t gone in three days.”

     “Everybody lies.”

     “It’s just easier to say yes.”

     “I know.”

     “We’d sit with our thighs pressed together and - . My God, it was like a desert island.  An escape from all the lunacy of the world.  You know what I looked like then?”

      “Gilligan?”

     “Worse.  Gollum from ‘Lord of the Rings’.  Just disgusting, skinny with bad skin and a stutter.  Leslie didn’t mind.  She was my haven.”

    “So now you’re going to tell me that things got out of hand and you’ve been destroyed with guilt ever since?”

     “Lucy, try to understand.  We never talked about sex in our house – I mean never.  My mother probably bathed with her clothes on.”

     “That’s the kind of house where it happens.”

     “It was as if we had discovered this transporting miracle of sensation.”

     “Orgasm?”

     “We didn’t even know what to call it,” he said dreamily, probably turned-on.  I felt an uncomfortable tightening between my legs and wondered once again why the sexual urge is so arrogant.  No wonder it leads us into temptation, not to mention abuse.

     “You didn’t rape her.”

     “Of course not.  We kept our clothes on.  But it’s amazing how much – “

     “You don’t have to tell me.”

     “We know what kind of damage incest does.  And I know it happened, no matter what kind of theories are floating around in psychiatric circles these days.  Look what happened to her, Lucy!  One psych ward after another.  They say she has a ‘chemical imbalance’ and that it’s probably ‘genetic’.  Well, that’s just the flavor of the month.”

     “I know.”

     “Maybe the whole family is crazy, I don’t know.  Dr. Karlov keeps on talking about ‘confused boundary issues’, as if the whole thing boils down to geography.”

     “Maybe it does.  Proximity, hormones, a wretched adolescence. . . Did you smoke up?”

     His eyes flew open.  “How did you know?”

     I shrugged.  “Me and Andrew. . . “

     “My parents would have had me killed, or at least incarcerated.  But it was only a couple of joints.  We pretended we were Berlioz and Harriet Smithson.”

     “Was it ‘fantastique’?”

     “Lucy!”  But then he smiled, an awful, subversive, lifeward, resurrecting smile, and then I really did know that he would recover.

     “I know, I’m terrible.  But the truth is, I’ve been there.  You learn to laugh or die.”

     “Well, the meds are finally kicking in.”

     “What are you on?”

     “Lithium.”

     “Prepare to get fat.”

     “It’s just a trial.  God, you should see the size of the pill, like an elongated golf ball – “

     “And the blood tests!”

     “And the shaky hands.”

      “And that funny taste in your mouth, like bug spray – “

      “It’s only a salt,” he said defensively.

     “Yeah, and booze is just rotten grain.  Lithium changes you.”

     “But it doesn’t take away the pain,” he murmured.

     “Nothing does. “ I brushed back a stray lock of his hair, which looked surprisingly clean.  “Well, time does.  Determination does.  This is just a way-station, David.  All part of life’s rich pageant.  You don’t live here  Remember that.  Hey, you don’t even own a Yorkie.”

    Then – miracle of miracles – a clap of thunder, a carillon of life – he laughed!

     “But the cats miss you, David.  Come home soon.  Maybe you and Leslie can talk.”

     “She’s beyond hope.”

     “Don’t be too sure of that.  Maybe she’s like you – a tough little customer.  She has her music and her intelligence.  Those are both powerful saving graces.  Look at Beethoven.  Deaf, ugly, unlucky in love – “

     “Today we’d call him socially challenged.”

     “And he made art.  No matter what.  He wrote about joy, the crazy  bastard.  What did he have to be joyful about?”

     “His Immortal Beloved.”

    ‘Phah.  She didn’t exist in fleshly form.  He was in love with art, so passionately that art incarnated into all that incredible music.”

     “You should make a movie out of it.”

     “Someone already has.”  A beat.  “Get better, David.”

     “I’ve missed half the season.”

     “They’ll understand.  Even Beethoven needed time off.”

     “I’ll be so out of practice, I’ll – “

    “You’re better already.”  I kissed him, and left.

      Update:  today I got a call from Brian’s folks asking me if I’d take back the cats, as their owner would be back home by the first of the month, only a couple of days away.  Cassandra called them, apparently.  (God, this Zoë must be about ready to pop.  I wonder what David thinks about that.)  I know lithium can be a sort of mental springboard for some people, but I couldn’t help but wonder  - .  At least our talk didn’t hurt.  Call it my social work.  Took a shower afterwards to wash the stale smell off me, the burnt-rubber stink of nicotene gas. So he’s out.  Flown the coop, and probably back at work at the earliest possible date, which is the best thing for him.

     So Jesus and cats aren’t the only creatures that resurrect.  Some of us are doomed to life.  To stick our hearts back in, even upside-down if we have to, and carry on.

   MONIKA

     I have a new theory about life – not original, really, but taken from anthropology – “punctuated equilibrium”, meaning that things go along, and go along, pretty much the same, in a state of boring stasis, and then – boom!  Change, change, change.  Everybody changes chairs, so to speak.

    When I finally did get together with Lucy she seemed kind of tapped out, even a bit fed up with her violin, and totally drained by David who is now on the mend, thank God.  He apparently received some sort of crucial letter from somebody and it let him out of the trap, so to speak.  But I know Lucy.  She gave him a transfusion and it worked, but at what cost?  Lucy has a way of receiving other people’s pain, but in so doing she becomes a sort of receptacle for their psychic poison.

     Meanwhile, I’m the one who’s up on the see-saw now, with my new venture in midwifery (at last!  Something lifeward, creative in the most primal sense).  Let’s face it, I need the extra income, and the thought of assisting at births absolutely fascinates me.  The training will be relatively long and I’ll have to sit in on a lot of births, but I can’t think of anything more enthralling and renewing.

     But it’s the other big development that really has me humming.  And the hard thing is, I really can’t tell Lucy about it, not yet anyway.  It was just one of those things but it has me foaming like hot cappuccino (can you believe what this has done to my brain?).  We ran into each other completely by accident, but I knew him from when Lucy introduced him to me several months ago.

     Rafe Williams.

     My God, Lucy was right.  Perhaps this guy is only good for one thing, but what a genius he is.  Why shouldn’t there be sexual savants?  Talent shows up in every other field of human endeavor.  Why not this one?  He plays me like a cello.  I am humming with hormones and maybe now I understand Lucy’s ripe, bursting state a few months ago.  I only resented it then.  Oh, of course Lucy picked up in a flash that I was seeing someone; frequent orgasm affects the skin, not to mention the aura, and she saw the glow before I even opened my mouth.  But I played it canny and didn’t reveal a lot of details “because I’m not sure it’ll work out long-term”.

     “Who cares?” Lucy replied.  “I’m just glad one of us is getting some.  Too bad it always seems to be one at a time.”

     “Your time’ll come.”

      “I hope not.  I have enough to do taking care of David.”

     “You’re not – you know – “

     “With David?  Are you kidding?  That’d be incest.”

     “But haven’t you – “

     “Oh, shut up.  I hate psychics.  They’re always in-seeing into stuff that’s none of their beeswax.”

     “Fair enough.  Urges don’t count anyway.”

     “Good thing too, or we’d both be arrested.”  We guffawed in the old, belly-rocking way.  Like old times, except that life keeps on rocketing us forward, events unfolding like labor-contractions that squeeze the course of  life ahead and ahead.  No one warned me that birth would keep on happening, perhaps unto my death.

 ANDREW

     There are times when seeing everything is an anguish. We have no way of stopping time, the speeding flow of events.  It frankly sickens me to know what lies ahead for Lucy, even though I’m supposed to be more evolved than that.  I should be able to see that it is all for the best, that everything happens for the sake of gaining wisdom and strength.  But at such a cost!  I look at God and wonder, “What can she be thinking of?”  She is to me as water to a fish, my ground of being, but I cannot understand her mind.  All things seem settled, then – change, change, change, and not always for the better.

     Lucy will be grateful for all her strength in the coming weeks, but events will still stretch her moral fabric as far as it can go, and farther.  “Stretch marks!” she’ll cry, never quite losing her grim survivor’s sense of humor.  Comfort will come from an unexpected source, and as always in these cases, grace will flood in.  Lucy will stand in church with tears streaming down her face, singing, “She comes sailing on the wind, her wings flashing in the sun/On a journey just begun, she flies on.”  And for the first time she will know in her core what those words mean.   Having developed a strength, she will now be called upon to use it as never before.  And yes, I see the beauty of it!  And yes – how I wish I could spare her completely from what is about to happen!

 CASSANDRA MARTIN

     You could have gagged me with a feather.  At rehearsal the other day, there he was, the prodigal son, David, sauntering in as cool as can be, blithely ignoring the palpable wash of concern swirling all around him.  He came in and stood there by his chair for a moment while everyone held their breath and tried very hard not to look at him.  Then – horror of horrors – he began to slowly unbutton his shirt.

    One button.  Two buttons.  No, no – three. Then:  “Nah,” he said, “I’ve changed my mind,” quickly buttoning himself back up again.  The room burst into spontaneous applause and David, grinning like a fiend, took a bow.  So things are back to normal, as we like to call it.

     I don’t notice any difference in his playing, but then that’s not surprising, since he’d rather practice than sleep.  He does look good.  Something must have happened when he read that letter from Leslie, though God knows what was in it.  He just sort of went back to his natural color again.  Obviously he doesn’t want anyone to make a fuss.  People expect oboeists to be a little weird anyway – it’s from forcing air into that tiny little reed.  A chronic lack of oxygen.  We’ll call his absence an “oxygen leave” and let it go at that.

       And to think we almost lived together once.  We tried it out for a few days, but I couldn’t stand the way he counted out his Spoon-sized Shredded Wheat into the bowl every morning (there had to be exactly twenty-four biscuits to match the caloric count on the side of the box.  I know Beethoven used to count coffee beans, but this was too much.)  He said I had “breath odors” in the morning.  Well, his feet smell.  I don’t care if he’s a musician, he sweats and farts like anybody.  No wonder he lives alone.

    I think Zoë’s pretty okay, considering.  We have mere weeks left and I try not to think too much about the actual event.  We’re trying to arrange a home birth because hospitals are so awful, I don’t care if they’ve improved, it’s all that technology, fetal monitors, unnecessary episiotomies, etc.  Enough to scare the hell out of you at a time when you’re supposed to be calm.  She’s down to a pack a day which for her is a miracle.  But it could affect the size of the baby, whom at the moment is named Calista (though Zoë calls her “Calista-my-ass”).

     Zoë’s tongue could open letters.  My suggestion of Cassidy, a variation on my own name, was shot down immediately.  “Why not call it Cassette?”  she snarled.

     I didn’t appreciate it.

  LUCY’S JOURNAL

     Bad dreams last night. Way bad.  Dr. Pavlov won’t leave my head.  I was “assigned” to him (or he to me) every time I landed in Silverbrooke nut farm.  Which was often.  The two of us together were a bad match; he’d talk to Michael about me while I was in the room, as if I were a bad dog at the vet’s.

     “What is your first memory?”  he asked in the manner of an interrogator, fingering a pencil in a way that seemed vaguely obscene.

     There was no hesitation.  “My father sodomizing me when I was three.”

     His lips tightened.  I had a gauze bandage with salve under it around my neck, to ease the burn from my bathrobe cord.

     “Memory doesn’t go back that far,” he stated.  “It begins at age five.”

     Thus, the price of visiting David in the psych ward.  Dredged murk from a seething, stinking past.  I’ve been jumpy lately, the “no-skin-on” feeling.  During my session with Zoltán I was attempting to play Grieg’s lovely Ich Liebe Dich, and even with my raw tone and jittery bow the sheer greatness of the music started to get to me and I felt my face swell with incipient tears.

     I felt the need to explain myself to Zoltán, who was leaning his eyeballs on me questioningly.

     “It’s just an anniversary reaction.  Sorry.  All those years ago.  I lost a brother, a musician.”

     “So did I.”  The tiny soft hairs on my face stood at attention.  It was the last thing I expected to hear.

     “His name was András,” he said.  “A great flutist.”

     “But this is impossible.  So was Andrew.” I gulped.  “I mean, he played the flute.”

     “Yes.  András, he. . . took his own life nearly twenty years ago. “ Zoltán’s voice was unusually flat.  “I found him on the floor.  It was on my uncle Gábor’s farm.  He raised foxes.”

     Something crept along my neck as the memory flashed through my head – Monika, the coffee shop, the pen, the psychometry. A blue carpet with a diamond pattern.

     “He had a gun.   He was. . .” He waved his bowing-hand as if trying to banish a cold, bad power.  “Then two years later, I lose Anika.”

    I looked at him questioningly.

     “My first wife.  Dead from cancer.  She was going to have a child.”

     “Zoltán, I don’t know what to say.  That’s so – “

     “I was very sick for a long time.”

     “Of course.”

    “Then I start over. Here, in Canada.  Was very bad at first.  I had to work as security guard.  But here in Canada, I find Faith.”  His eyes darkened with warmth.

     “She’s a lovely woman, Zoltán.”

     “And you.”

     “Thank you.  But you’re only as good as the company you keep.”

     We smiled at each other, a little tearily.  As he lifted his violin, time stopped. Freeze-frame:  on his left forearm, a blurry smudge that once might have been a number.   A long piece of memory, or something more mysterious than memory, pulled itself out of my brain like a knotted hank of yarn:

     Anyone dark was in trouble then.  Selling a horse, or, worse, playing a fiddle was suspicious.  Any interest in the psychic arts had the smell of suspicion too.  It almost didn’t matter whether his family was Romany or not.  Their eyes were the wrong color, they were musicians, they were full of charm and a defiant joy in being alive, so off to the camps they went, guilty by association.

    He brought me out of my dream.  “And now we play.”

    “Yes, we play.”  The two stringed voices, one raw as green wood, the other dark honey, twined in a soft remembrance.

    REV. MARIAN CARSON

The phone rang at 3:30 in the morning, and as I bumbled over to answer it in the dark my gut suddenly knotted up in an involuntary ball of dread.  I knew this was the kind of call I’ve only had to answer a couple of times in twenty-five years of ministry.  It was Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster asking me if I knew a Mrs. Michael Sandner.  It took a minute for me to figure out who they meant.  The knot let loose and I relaxed into the deep, dead calm of crisis.  I had to be clear and grounded, and so I was, even with thoughts swarming into my head – did she drink again?  Did she do herself harm?  Is this somehow connected to her friend who has been in the hospital in Vancouver? Or – Kate?  No, it couldn’t be Kate.

     “Mrs. Sandner has been kind of, well, I hate to use the term hysterical, but I don’t know what else to call it,” the voice said, sounding appallingly unconcerned.  “She was down on her knees just – I don’t know, making this sound, it was kind of freaky.” 

     “What happened?  How did she get there?”

     “Oh.  I’m afraid there’s been an accident.  Her daughter Kate has been injured.”

     “How badly?”

     “She’s in the ICU right now and is resting comfortably.”

     “But how – “

    “It’s Mrs. Sandner I’m concerned about.  We wouldn’t normally call you at this hour, Reverend Carson, but she’s been calling for you.  This is a bit of an emergency.  We wouldn’t want to have to put her in the psychiatric ward, but she just keeps on making that weird sound.  She won’t stop.”

    “Is she screaming?”

     “Oh, no.  Nothing like that.”

     “Is she hurting anyone?”
     “No.  But it’s just so odd, and it’s disturbing the people around her.  She won’t even let us sedate her.”

     “No, don’t sedate her.  And do not, I repeat, do not put her in the psych ward. It’s the worst possible thing you could do.  Try to put her in a quiet room somewhere and I’ll be over as soon as I possibly can.”

    Keening.  That must have been what they were trying to describe, and I heard it as I raced down the hall to the emergency waiting room.  The only sound I can compare it to is the prolonged shriek of a dog that has been hit by a car.  But this was worse; it was human.  Lucy sat clutching her chest as if in physical pain.  A nurse stood rigidly over her and several onlookers gawked in open fascination.

     “Can we go somewhere alone?” I asked the fat stolid nurse.

    “Sorry.  No space.”

     “Leave me alone with her, then.”

     “She refused the thioridazine.”

      “Just leave us alone.  Please.”  I sat beside her and began gently rubbing her back as the keening subsided into deep shuddering sighs.  I wondered if she were even capable of speaking.

     “Lucy, Kate is alive.  They told me she’s in intensive care and they’re looking after her.  She’s alive.  Can you tell me what happened?”

    “It’s her head.”

     “Oh, no.  Lucy.”

     “She and Brian went to a party tonight.  I don’t even know exactly what happened.  But the police said it was the other guy’s fault.  Drunk driver. A head-on collision.”

     “Is Brian – “

     “He didn’t make it.”  She doubled over.  Then sat up, trying very hard to compose her shivering breath.  “His parents just left.  It’s her head, Marian.  It looks like there’s going to be brain damage.  That is, if she makes it at all.  Oh Jesus, Jesus.”

     I grabbed her hands and repeated with her:  Jesus; Jesus.  There was nothing else to do.  Her keening, quieter now, sounded almost like singing.  I knew the hospital would disapprove, though she was hurting absolutely no one.  Then I began to pray out loud, almost as an automatic response:

    “Dear God, there are times when we don’t understand why we must endure suffering such as this.  We ask that you sustain Lucy in this time of terrible trial.  Be with the doctors as they. . . “

     “Save Kate,” Lucy broke in fiercely.

     “Dear God, we ask that you guide. . . “
     “Save Kate!”

     “Save Kate,” I sighed.  “God, just save that girl.  I don’t care how you do it.  Just bring her back.”

     After a moment, Lucy said in a shaky voice, “That was the most politically incorrect prayer I’ve ever heard.”

    “Good.  Maybe the big lug will hear us.”

    “It’s worth a try.  A minute ago I said, ‘Look, take me.  Take me instead.’”

     “Understandable, if illogical.”

     “Too bad it doesn’t work that way.”  At that moment a distraught-looking dark-haired man burst into the room.  Lucy jumped up as if jolted with a current, then rushed into his arms.

     “How did you get here? I thought you were in Calgary.”

     “I was already here on business.  Remember?  Every three months.  I just happened to check my messages from home.”

    “Thank God.”

     “Is she alive?”

     “It’s her head.”

     “Oh, sweet Jesus, no.”

     “But she’s alive, Michael.”

       “Dear God.  God-damn it.”

     I have noticed in the long course of my ministry that even atheists become religious in their blackest moments, salting the air with curses indistinguishable from prayer.  God, Jesus, damn you, help us.  The two of them were one body, the moment almost unbearably private.

     “I want to see her,” the man said.

     “We can’t. Not yet.  They’re going to operate.”

     “Fucking Christ.”  Michael suddenly unclasped Lucy and turned to me. “I’m sorry.  You’re the minister, aren’t you?”

     “Don’t worry about it.”

    “Thanks for being here,” he said, meaning it.

     “I wish I could do something,” I replied, feeling that too-familiar sense of utter powerlessness in the face of raw fact. 

     “We’ll be here for hours. You don’t have to stay, Marian, you’ve done enough,” Lucy said, looking much calmer.  All she needed was for someone to hear her.

     “I don’t mind staying a while.”  We smiled at each other.  Smiling, in the midst of all this.  But that’s what we did.

     And we sat for an interminable, timeless time in that dull institutional room until a doctor came to tell Lucy and Michael that it looked like Kate would live.  Lucy’s legs gave way and Michael lifted her up off the floor and the two embraced, sobbing helplessly.  Then I was able to leave them, praying from my depths that love and health would win, that Kate would somehow be all right.  “Save Kate,” I said aloud again, and it was the only possible prayer. 

 MONIKA

     Sometimes I have a lot of trouble with this God Lucy claims to believe in so fervently.  When obscene and perhaps irreversible damage is done to a complete innocent, how are we to continue to have faith that something good is guiding our lives?  But it was Marian Carson Lucy called first, not me.  Not that this is any time for jealousy.

     She needed me to lay hands on her daughter, her Kate, as she lay in a coma, her soul still puzzling over whether to leave or stay.  I wanted to convey to her, through touch, through love, through whatever healing power I possess, that she is needed here more than she realizes.  That this is not a decision to be made lightly.

     Kate’s delicate young face is battered and purpled almost beyond recognition, her fractured head swathed.  A respirator breathes for her.  Lucy has barely left her side and even spent a night dozing in a chair by her bed, which she was not supposed to do.  The nursing staff looked the other way – “they don’t want me acting weird again,” Lucy said sardonically by way of explanation.  I think she’s remarkably calm and composed for someone who has just had her heart ripped out by the roots.

     Michael hovered around the room exuding a palpable air of anxiety while I attempted to reach Kate.  I sensed her far out of her body and it made my skin prickle.  Does she know how much these two people love her, need her to continue?  (Enough to accept her back even in impaired form?)  Will she re-enter a damaged vessel and live out the soul-changing consequences, or flee into some kinder, if less-known dimension?  It comes down to courage. Kate is awfully young.  I just don’t know.  I want her back for Lucy’s sake, but she may never be the full Kate, the whole Kate, ever again.  Is this a worse calamity than death?

     But Lucy – Lucy’s no quitter.  Michael won’t leave her during this; I can sort of smell it.  They’re in this together.  Both are gut-stubborn, beyond all reason, and I am beginning to think stubbornness is a prerequisite for getting through life intact.   It’s a stark refusal to let the dark side win, and it wants to.  Believe me, it wants to badly.  Brian has already crossed over, and he’s confused, disoriented, feeling lost.  I’ve asked Lucy to pray for his soul, but she’s sort of busy right now, busy drawing her next breath.  It’s taking everything she’s got to face the fact of this, the bald immoveable fact.  She will wake up in the morning and at first she won’t remember, then will slam up against the fact once again, and will steel herself.  She’ll get mad later.  She’ll fall apart later.  She’ll hate God, or not, depending on the outcome.  She’ll live through this, changed badly, forced out of shape, but generally whole.  Stubbornly, angrily whole.

 KATE

     It’s not that bad.  Really.  I think I could get used to this.  It’s such a light, loose feeling, and you can go practically anywhere just with a thought.  You can even contact people, but only certain people.  An old, old woman who lives six houses down from us suddenly sat up in bed last night and said out loud, “Kate.”  I told her it’s okay, I’m not a ghost or anything, just on a very loose thread, and she understood right away, being a veteran of such impressions.

     Then I met Andrew, Mums’s brother, even though I never really knew him in life.  He’s nice and not at all weird like he was on earth and seemed glad to see me, but really worried about Mums.  I can sense them in that place down in the old solid fleshly dimension where I used to be, and they’re dithering around in a panic.  I wish they wouldn't. Even after this short time I already think I know what “heaven” means.  There’s such a sense of love here, of love abounding, love absolutely unlimited, and I’m seriously tempted to stay.  The doctors down there are talking about a “brain-stem injury” and I have a feeling that means I’d be substantially handicapped if I went back.  But how can I leave Mums and Dad?  Mums in particular has been through enough already.  This episode has pulled the two of them back together in a way that’s nothing short of miraculous.  Andrew asked me if I was up to the challenge and said that if I turned it down this time, another opportunity would come up in my next life.  Opportunity?  To be handicapped?  But it’s a different set of rules here, with everything based on grace.  There’s no commerce, no striving, no sense of “success”, none of that.  You’re stripped down to a bare essence of love.  Since it’s all there is, being handicapped might only intensify that blazing truth.  It would force my parents to bend and stretch their hearts to accommodate; they could either grow a size, or break.  The outcome is never sure, and no one ever sees the generosity in being allowed the opportunity of such a stretch.  It must seem like a bloody curse.  I know I won’t be able to articulate any of this if I come back, either, so there is no guarantee they’ll even get it.  Do I trust their generosity, their flexibility, their amazing capacity to love?  Isn’t that what brought me into being in the first place?

 HARRIET SMITHSON

     I am only a violin.  To some minds, a mere piece of  wood.  Yet to Lucy I am a presence.  Would it surprise you to learn that she is still playing me, needs to play me, to keep up her sessions with Zoltán every week and to practice her etudes while the world crashes down around her ears?  The surgery was a partial success in that the pressure inside Kate’s skull was at least temporarily relieved.  But no one can say when she will wake up.  (At her worst times, Lucy substitutes “if”.)  She keeps vigil at the hospital, murmuring quietly to Michael who gives her the only thing he can, his presence.  She goes to her job in the afternoons, needing the sanity and structure of routine.  She talks to friends, she eats and sleeps, she prays.  A terrible calm has come over her, the calm of absolute crisis, but she knows it can be ruptured at any moment by the crashing-in of the knowledge of what might be.  A daughter dead – or, perhaps worse, permanently changed.

     Grace comes in the back door.  Her friend Manny from AA drops around the hospital from time to time just to sit with Kate.  Twenty-two years ago he suffered a brain-stem injury in a car crash and his life has never been the same.  Manny does not say much, does not have to say much, but is simply there.  He does not expect thanks.

     Her friends all give her that careful, concerned look.  Mostly they are surprised at her calm.  I am surprised at her musical focus, her resoluteness in the face of an impossible situation.  Where is all this grace coming from?  Last lesson she began to play Grieg, Solveig’s Song from Peer Gynt, with more intensity and depth of soul than she has ever shown before.  It was obvious that Zoltán wanted her to stop playing, to bend over and just sob for a few minutes, get it out of her system, like being sick.  Instead she did something else with the energy, and it opened my throat to music, real music, perhaps for the first time.

     Then she couldn’t play any more.  She took deep breaths and thought of Jesus.  The moment past bearing had almost passed.  She saw Christ’s face, ate his bread and drank his wine.  Zoltán, the depth of his respect palpable, leaned subtly towards her.

     “If there is something I can do.”

     “There is something.”

     The grave look on his face said, “Name it.”

     “Pray for her?  For all of us.”

    Zoltán stood enfolded by one of his profound, respectful silences.  How is it that silence can be so malignant in some circumstances, and so perfect in others?  Lucy grew up with a cancerous, throttled silence which came close to choking off her very life.  But Zoltán’s silences are as right as the deep pauses in Beethoven’s symphonies.  They are rests, in which one rests.

     As delicately as if he were wielding a bow, he reached out with the tip of his right index finger and touched a fresh tear at the corner of her eye.  Then he brought the finger to his lips.  His eyes shone blackly silver, like hematite.  Zoltán knew, and Lucy knew, and even I knew in that moment that there are many different ways of praying.

 ANDREW

     Of course!  I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.  I’d be smacking myself on the forehead, if I had a forehead.  It’s the perfect way for me to be near the situation, but not terribly intrusive.  In fact no one will ever know, except maybe Lucy’s friend Monika who picks up on the strangest things.

     It’s been a while, after all, coming close to 20 years, since I left the material world.  I know there are still things to experience, though I took on a lot in the last life, being a schizophrenic.  And infancy, even normal infancy, is way more traumatic than most adults can ever remember.  Can I go through it all again?

     How can I not?  It’s all so perfect.  Lucy needs me close.  I know somehow she’ll take some kind of a role in my upbringing – and Lord knows the two birth custodians will need all the help they can get. 

     Eternity is such a strange place, full of unlikely thunderclaps like this one, ideas which at first seem ridiculous (and how God does love the ridiculous), but which work out beautifully in the execution.  Soon – ah, soon I will breathe again, feel pleasure and pain, and live through all the stages.  It is yet another chance to love imperfectly, which is the way of human beings.  Why do I yearn for it so? when this dimension is infinitely more perfect? 

       Because God loves broken vessels. 

       Because earthly life, the whole glorious muddle, is absolutely irresistable. 

       Because.

   MICHAEL SANDNER

     God – and I’m not even sure there’s such a being in the first place, but – God, because I don’t know what else to call you – God, if you exist, if you are there at all, if you are the healing force which Lucy seems to believe in so completely, please hear me.  I need help with my girl.  My Kate.  God, she is young.  If you have the power to do anything at all, can you heal her brain?  Can you bring her spirit back?

     Can you show me what to do here?  Suddenly after all those years of practice I have no idea how to be a father, a husband, a man.  Everything I was once certain of has been taken away in the breaking of my Kate.  I don’t know why you didn’t break me instead.  Kate has never sinned or screwed up or hurt a single soul.  All her life she has been my joy.  Why didn’t you do this to me?  Do you consider this to be a more refined form of torture, watching me squirm while my daughter’s life hangs in the balance?

     I don’t know what I’ve done to make this happen, or what I have to do to change it.  The shock of being close to Lucy again is amazing, almost like a miracle, but a bizarre one, forced like a hothouse plant.  I never thought that it would take something as horrible as this to make our family whole again.

     So I thank you for that.  Don’t leave me, because I have no idea what to do next.  I don’t know you and I only half-believe in you but if I didn’t at least try to reach you now, I would die.  So I’ll throw it all open to you, whoever and whatever you are.  Only because I have no idea what else I can do.

 BRIAN HAMPTON

     For quite a long time I really didn’t have a clue where I was.  It was like I’d been picked up and hurled halfway around the world, coming down hard in a completely foreign country.  I didn’t feel alone exactly – in fact I swear at a certain point I thought I saw my Katie, or at least felt like she was around.  Then things started to settle down a little bit.  Someone was trying to get a message across to me, that what I was experiencing is just what people would normally call “death”.  It was a woman with dark hair, the same woman who has been laying her hands on Katie.  She was telling me not to be so afraid of crossing over.  But it wasn’t my choice.  It all happened so fast.  I don’t know why I was cut loose when Kate wasn’t.  But this woman with the dark hair kept telling me I’ll soon have a sense of freedom, even power.  Then I had the strangest sort of talk with my grandfather, but without any words. He said he wanted to be the one to take care of me, look out for me and help me get used to the new place – if you can even call this a place.  I don’t really remember much about him when he was alive and I was sort of bored and fidgety at his funeral, but I guess there are no hard feelings.

     I could get used to this. There’s no pain or struggle or worry or anything like that.  I’d really like to be able to tell my parents that I’m okay but they don’t think anything happens to you after you die.  Their minds are closed.  So it’s going to take them a long time to get over this and that bothers me.  I don’t know why people have to learn so hard but they do ask for it, that much is clear.  They want the lessons.  It’s the way they’re delivered that throws people off.  I saw what they did at the funeral and the way they handled it was to say that so long as people remembered me, then I wasn’t really dead.  They’re getting warm.  If the truth came out and people realized that death doesn’t even exist, it’d set back the funeral industry for sure.  And people wouldn’t waste so much energy on too much grief.  People are so grabby, wanting to own and possess, to hold on to the people they love, when the truth is we’re all just there on loan, temporary.  At the same time, the opposite is true in that nobody ever really dies, so we’re all eternal.  It’s pretty far out and I have to admit I’m starting to like it.  I think Katie was the best thing I ever had when I was alive, and it’s sort of too bad that she’s the one person who won’t remember me.  But this sense of freedom and being awake is even better, because I know it never has to end.

 MONIKA

     I have never been so exhausted in my entire life.  I don’t know why it is that things can go along relatively placidly for so long, to the point of near-boredom, and then suddenly everything reverses and it’s one disaster after another.  I shouldn’t say disaster, I suppose, because somehow or other everything worked out okay last night, but it was only by luck, or the grace of God, or something.

     I’ve been pretty drained lately by all the hospital visits, with no real sign of improvement in Kate.  I do sense a slightly stronger connection to her body, a sort of will to continue, but at the same time I understand her reluctance to come back.  Lucy is relying on me a lot now to just be there as a sort of steadying influence.  Last night I fell into bed at midnight and was jolted awake at 2:00 a.m. by a phone call from the midwife I’ve been training with:  could I come to Kitsilano to sit in on a home birth?  It wasn’t the best of times, but this was my first opportunity to see a real birth, so I said yes.  I was supposed to meet her there as soon as I could but assumed she’d be there well ahead of me, as she lives only about 15 minutes away.  “Plenty of time,” she told me.  “It’s a first birth and might not happen for hours.”

     By the time I got to the address, which was on the bottom floor of an old house, I sensed something was wrong before I even rang the doorbell.  I couldn’t see another car parked anywhere, for one thing.  And I could hear this faint but very strange noise, definitely a voice, but not like anything human.  More like something out of a horror-movie, in fact.  When I opened the door a thin, white-faced young woman with long red hair was standing there in a lather of panic:  “Please help us!  It’s coming!”  Then I figured out the source of the noise.  There was this creature rolled up in a ball on the floor in the middle of the room, a dark-haired, nearly-nude, huge-bellied, squatting female emitting the most primitive sound I have ever heard.  The large dark gob of blood on the blanket under her crotch told me that things were well underway.

     “Where’s the midwife?  You know, Dorothy Sanders,” I asked the long-haired one.  “She’s supposed to be – “

    “Not here yet.  Car trouble.  She called on the cell phone fifteen minutes ago.  I told her we were fine, the contractions were still 20 minutes apart.  No rush.  No rush, I told her!  Then this happened.  God help us!”

     My first job was to get everyone calmed down, a nearly-impossible task since I was in a barely-controlled state of panic myself.  The young woman who was giving birth seemed barely capable of human speech except for obscenities.  She kept yelling out the strangest things, like, “Goddamn you, Calista!”  and “Fuck you, Quade, you little bastard, you’re going to kill me!”  At one point she asked for a cigarette and the long-haired woman looked at me anxiously, as if for approval.  “If it’ll help her calm down,” I said, wondering if Dorothy would fire me instantly for even saying it.  I tried to put a cool cloth on the woman’s forehead and she threw it across the room, starting up that unearthly grinding roar that signalled the onset of another contraction.

     “How dilated is she?” long-hair asked me (in my panic I had forgotten even to ask their names).  Dilated?  Am I supposed to know?  I’ve read text books.  That’s it.  Is there a way to tell?  Yes, but – would I have to –

     “It’s coming!”  dark-hair roared, and she bore down fiercely, her flesh tearing as the top of a head appeared between her legs.  Good God!  Birth!  Give me a catcher’s mitt because it is happening, and I don’t have the first idea what to do.  Long-hair knelt behind her partner supporting her shoulders while she pushed and squeezed and heaved, and I tried very hard to look like this was the way it was supposed to happen.

     Lord! but birth is messy, hot fluid and clotted blood and slime sluicing out everywhere, along with other bodily products too fierce to mention.  But when I saw a crumpled little face emerge, all compressed in that tightly-packed newborn way, my heart leapt with joy.  “Push, push,” I yelled as dark-hair roared and screamed.  Then – it happened so quickly, a spasmodic, twisting slithering-out of an entire whole, healthy, newborn-infant body.  The birth-scream came instantly, and he – yes, a he – pinkened up reassuringly, his tiny balled fists jerking spasmodically as he howled.

     “It’s a boy!” I cried.  A small arc spewed from his tiny penis.  Piss landed in my eye and both women laughed as I tried to see his beautiful little face through a haze of pee mixed with tears.

     And then the doorbell rang, and it was Dorothy Sanders.  “Goodness,” she said, upon seeing the strange tableau.

     He really is a little beauty, so dark like his mother, with something else about him, something almost exotic.  I’d say “familiar”, but maybe that’s going a little too far.  Of course you never ask about the father, these days.  He could even be one of those turkey-baster babies I’ve read so much about.  Anyway, it all ended well, I was congratulated, and there were deeply-felt hugs all around.  Even black-hair hugged me and said, unexpectedly, “Thank you, sister,” as if she really meant it.  Then I went home, threw myself down on the bed and howled from relief and exhaustion, elated and knocked completely flat at the same time.

      Accident, death, disruption, howls of atrocious pain, blood, birth – what is it Carl Sandburg said?  “A baby is God’s way of insisting that the world continue.”  It happens even without us “experts” to help it along.  Humbling, I suppose, and awe-inspiring.  And I am sure this miracle will renew my soul completely, after 24 hours or so of sleep.

 LUCY’S JOURNAL

     I took Harriet out of her case this morning and practiced for an hour and a half.  Unable to spare the time because I knew I had to be over at the hospital by 10:30.  But equally unable to leave it aside.  The strange truth is, I have a gig.  My friend Sandra, the lady with the brain tumor, has suddenly died.  In going through her papers, her sister Lynn found instructions for her memorial service, including a specific request that I play the violin.  I have been working on J. S. Bach’s Bist Du Bei Mir – “Art thou with me, I go with joy, to my death and to my rest” – ever since.

     No doubt everyone around me thinks I am out of my mind to even be thinking of violin at a time like this.  But that’s just the point.  Violin is an insistent flowering in the midst of death, or the even more mysterious phenomenon of irrevocable change.

     In other news, there has been a birth.  Nothing surprises me any more now that my life is turned completely upside-down, so I wasn’t even particularly shocked when Monika phoned to tell me about her first midwifery experience.  At a certain point in the story the pieces all fell into place.  “Good God!” I exclaimed in disbelief.  “That’s David’s baby!”

     We both howled with dismayed laughter.  When she described this beautiful dark-haired infant to me, I got the strangest feeling at the back of my neck.  I called David right away and he was acting very strangely, not at all like the proud, puffed-up Papa I thought he’d be.

    Here’s the story.  He got a call from Cassie saying everything had gone smoothly and mother and child were doing just fine, but would David mind waiting just a little while to see him?

     Like, maybe a month?

     A month? Immediately all his alarm-systems went off.  Was his son deformed?  Below

 average intelligence?  What?

    “So what was it?  A birth defect, or – “

     “Worse than that.”

     “What could be worse?”

     “I’ll tell you.  I came around to their place and pounded on the door and just demanded to be let in.  Finally Cass let me through the door.  So there was Zoë looking like the virgin mother herself, giving off a sort of soft glow of maternal care, swaddling in her arms the most beautiful Asian baby I have ever seen.”

     “Oh!  So he’s – “

     “Not mine.”

    “But how – “

     “It seems Zoë neglected to tell the whole truth.  Or maybe she forgot.  The guy’s apparently back in Hong Kong by now anyway, completely off the scene.  Just one of those things.  It’s like letting your  pedigreed bitch run loose for one evening, and she comes back impregnated by God knows who.”

     “David, are you okay?”   

     “I’m – “ Then his voice cracked and he began to laugh.  “Well, what choice do I have?”

     “And what did they name him?”

     “Martin David Zwierzchowski.  At least I got second billing, even though I wasn’t even genetically involved.”

     “So what happens now?”

     “Oh, you know.  I’ve been asked to stand godfather.  Play oboe at the christening.  It’ll all work out.  A hoot, isn’t it?  My ‘son’.  Life is full of such delightful surprises.”

     “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

     “This way it’s easier.  If he turns out to be a mess, it won’t be from my DNA.”

     “Oh David.”

     “And at least the father’s a musician.  His name’s Bill.  Bill Chow.  A jazz player, but still.  Tenor sax.  Wind instrument, at least, so it’s in the ballpark.”

     “You can teach him emboucher.”

     “Yes, and breath control. Along with walks in the park, deer-hunting trips and the like.  It’ll be simply grand.”

       I’ve always felt that a person’s finest comes out under the steamroller, and in David I am not disappointed.  He asked respectfully about Kate and listened, but didn’t reassure me or try to make the situation any better, and I appreciated that.  When things are bad, they’re bad, and David is enough of a veteran of bad to know this and just let things be.

 MICHAEL SANDNER

     Sometimes prayers get squeezed out of you – “no atheists in a foxhole”, as they say.  Then things happen and you wonder if God had anything to do with it.  Kate woke up today.  Opened her eyes.  Those big clear heartbreakingly-blue eyes.  I wasn’t there, but Lucy and Monika were.  Lucy just fell down on the floor – her knees gave way.  All those cliche things really do happen in moments of epiphany. 

     “Mumma,” Kate said.  Her old name for her.  So she could still speak.

     She could sit up.  She could use her hands, feed herself.  She knew her Mum right away.  It was enough.  I rushed over to the hospital and Lucy and I crashed into each other’s arms and bawled like babies.  And for just a little, blessed while, everything was perfect.

     Then came the conferences with the doctors, the vague answers to our endless questions.  The truth is, no one really knows what’s going to happen with Kate. She seems miraculously intact and we were ecstatic to hear her speak.  But it’s the speech of a very intelligent eight-year-old girl.  “Can I go home now, Mumma?” she asked, her face crushingly innocent.

     “Never mind, she’s alive, she’s okay, she’ll get everything back,” we kept telling each other, knowing we had no idea what we were talking about.  A brain injury can do just about anything.  Sometimes they get better, sometimes worse.  The prognosis is maddeningly vague.  I look at that friend of Lucy’s who often comes around – that Manny – and I think, God, don’t let it happen to my child.  But from everything I’ve heard, Manny’s recovery has been nothing short of a miracle.

     The truth is I don’t want that “differentness” in my child.  That shadow, that handicap.  I want her perfect, the way she was before, and realizing it makes me feel deeply ashamed of myself.  What kind of love is this that can’t stretch to include imperfection?  Is that why I broke up with Lucy?  Is all this a sort of lesson?  (Don’t tell me all those New Age types are right.)  Neither of us knows.  We’ve fallen back into living together almost like we were never apart, except there’s a difference.  For the first time I feel truly married, in soul as well as in body, and it is this atrocity that has brought it about.  A horrible, obscene way to a blessed gift.  Lucy is adjusting better than I am, being no stranger to disaster.  She’s calmly making arrangements for physiotherapy and home tutoring while I’m still trying to get my mind around the fact that Kate, my Katie-cakes, is mentally disabled and may never be completely whole again.

 KATIE

        I liked it when I got to go home.  We have a cat.  Mumma says I just don’t remember from before.  He’s a nice cat.  His name is Max and he has no tail.  Some cats don’t.  Mumma said I could play the piano so I played it with two fingers and it was neat.

I don’t remember Daddy very much.  Something happened to my head and it still hurts.  I told Mumma about something I found out in school.  She said said it happened nine years ago.  I don’t remember that either. I have a new teacher coming to my house now and it’s nice.  I also get to be with some other kids who had something happen to their head, except some of them aren’t kids.  Oh I love Mumma so much.  I want to hug her.  Sometimes she cries and I don’t know why.  Daddy is nice too but he looks worried all the time.  I can’t ride my bike yet but I can walk okay.  This man named Manny comes over and he’s okay but he talks sort of funny.  I don’t talk like that.  Mumma showed me a picture of me but it didn’t look like me.  But my face is still all purple from the accident.  Mumma says I’m really pretty.  I’m glad to be out of the hospital so quick but they needed my bed.  I guess I’m not really sick any more, just getting better.  Some friends from my old school came over but I didn’t know what they were talking about.  Then they started crying and I asked them to leave.  But I can make new friends.

     Mumma plays the violin now and she lets me listen to her practice.  I even know some of the songs by heart.  Mumma was so glad I remembered them.  She said when I’m better she can take me for piano lessons again.  She says she knows a really nice teacher, the one who teaches her the violin.

     I like that.

 HARRIET SMITHSON

    In the midst of all, there is music.  In the deaths and in the births and in all the chaos in between.  Today Lucy played what Zoltán refers to as her “first gig” at Falconridge United Church.  A memorial service.  The wonderful thing about tragedy is that it produces an unnatural calm in which you can face absolutely anything.  Just the way she plucked me from the case was different.  She lifted me with assurance.  Her bowing was precise.  Her pitch was better than usual.  This was real violin.  Through it all there was a curious dearth of emotion.  Lucy had a job to do, a promise to fulfill to a friend, and she did it well.  It was only after the playing was over and the tears were dried and people began to disperse that she realized what she had just done.  She had just played me in front of other people – not in the safe bounds of a school recital, but in an actual performance.  “Come play in our church sometime,” an elderly woman said to her.  Another asked, “Are you free to play at our senior’s tea next week?”  Without thinking about it, Lucy said, “Yes, of course.”

     She has won.  I have become an instrument in her hands.  Opportunities to play will slowly spread out in all directions.  Within one year, she will be playing in an amateur orchestra.  As she copes with a daughter who has suddenly been rocketed backwards in time, as she adjusts to unexpectedly being married again after resigning herself to a life alone, she will have me, her amber companion, for always.

     When the pressures of teaching Kate to read again become too great, she will quietly withdraw to her practice room and close the door.  She will pray for a moment, gathering herself.  Then she will take out her book of Kreutzer etudes, open it to page one, and begin.

 DAVID’S JOURNAL

     Rose at 6:55 a.m.  Weight 171 pounds.  Did 45 minutes on the treadmill before practicing for 3 hours.  Yes, and I’ve seen my godson again, this time under happier circumstances.  It’s been a long time since I’ve attended a baptism.  I can’t say as it ever meant anything to me before. I also don’t fully understand why Cassie has suddenly gone all Anglican on us again, after thirty years as a so-called atheist.  I thought it was the mother who usually goes off the deep end after a birth. But Cass suddenly got the idea in her head that Martin has to be properly baptized.  He’s a cute little nipper, with those almond eyes (the Chow genes) and black hair. Zoë noted that he screams right on pitch.  “E flat,” Cass said (she always gets it right).

     But the really big news came later that same day.  Out of the blue, a friend from my university days called to say, “I hear you’re in the market for a new cat.”  Somehow or other Tom had found out about the death of Stanzi.  For the longest time I couldn’t bear to even think of replacing her.  But when I got the call, I thought to myself, “Why not?”  Fanny and Clara have been good company for each other, but I could tell they were lonely for a third, to complete the circle.  On impulse I went over to Tom’s and fell instantly in love with this wee, sleekit, tortoise-shell pussy with white gloves, a white bib and golden eyes.  She’d fit into a teacup, that’s how dainty she is.  I named her Alma (and I’m sure Mahler would approve).

    And then there were three.  It seems the surprises never end.