Siri Hustvedt - The Blazing World

I had the address written down, but I couldn’t find the exact building, and I saw some kids standing around, and I asked them if they knew where Harry Burden lived, and one boy with a tattoo on his neck and a black baseball cap said, “Oh, you mean the rich witch.” After we talked a little more it was pretty clear we were talking about the same person, and I asked him why he called her that, and he said he didn’t know except there were lots of rumors about “creepy shit” in her studio and crazy noises and yelling about Satan and God that sometimes came from the building. They petted Kali a little bit and then showed me the door, and I rang the bell. I explained to Maisie and to Bruno, who was Harry’s boyfriend, that I had come to see Harry, and he had to go in to Harry and ask her if it was okay to see me, and she said yes, and so I went up the stairs and into a great big room with windows all over the place and light coming in all over and a super beautiful view, and Harry was lying in a hospital bed with the railings, you know, the kind that lift up on both sides, and an IV drip in her arm. I could see her elbow sticking out from under the floppy sleeve of her T-shirt, and sure enough she was just bones, and then I knew she wasn’t going to get well at all. It made me hushed inside.

I saw the aura sludge around her and the dull colors — whites, grays, some ochre — and the toxins from the losses and the traumas built up over the years. My mission was not healing but cleaning the chakras so the luminous body would not be earthbound. I had to spin Harry’s luminous anatomy free. But she needed to give me permission. You can’t just run in and start cleaning and spinning without permission. Kali started barking, so I put her in the hall in her case. I knew she would whine a little but then probably go to sleep.

I approached Harry with my soft walk. It’s a toe-heel walk like a dancer. I do it to show respect and not make noise, and I stood beside her. She was propped up in the bed. Her hair was short and stringy, not curly the way I remembered it, and her cheekbones stuck out over her hollow cheeks. The skin under her eyes was dark gray, but her green eyes were clear and hard. She looked straight at me and said in a husky voice full of the disease, “It’s the little mystic, isn’t it? The clematis?” And I smiled and put my hand on her arm. Then she squinted at me. I knew she was feeling the warm flow from my fingers. She closed her eyes. And I said, “Harry, can I pray for you?” Before she could answer, Maisie was standing right behind me and asking me what I was doing, and she said they weren’t a praying kind of family. Harry hated praying and on and on. Maisie had a blue aura but a little smoky because she was sad, clinging to her mom, so understandable. But I said in a firm tone that I wanted to know from Harry because she was the person I had been called to see.

Harry said, “Clematis, I’m a Jew.”

I said it didn’t matter and that every religion had its own ways, but God was the same everywhere. I told her that Peter Deunov’s Christianity was renewed by the principles of karma and reincarnation. He liked phrenology, too, head-bump reading that was popular all over the world when the master was young. And then, while I was staring into Harry’s sunken face, I saw pain in it, and her mouth stretched out, and I felt pains in my solar plexus, such hard strikes I had to put my hand down there to steady me. And after the pains, I had the revelation. The calling, the higher planes. Sweet Autumn, I said to myself. (I talk to myself like that when something is really important.) Sweet Autumn, I said, that was the message the voice was trying to deliver to you on Atlantic Avenue! A master is someone who has taken at least five initiations and completed the human stage of evolution and gone beyond it. Didn’t the master say, “A new earth will soon see day.” Didn’t he say that fire would come to “rejuvenate, purify, and reconstruct everything”? And some of the masters are artists — Michelangelo is one, an artist like Harry. He’s moved on to a higher planetary system called Sirius. The Siri Pharmacy! The voice! It was an angelic master, maybe it was Michelangelo, speaking to me from Sirius. I was pretty excited, and I told Harry. I could see Maisie’s face getting all screwed up and angry. And Bruno was looking funny at me, but Harry was listening with her eyes closed and then she said in a whisper, “I remember Deunov now. Clem, he helped save the Bulgarian Jews.”

And I said yes, yes, and I was really happy because Harry knew the story, and that was another sign. Forty-eight thousand people were saved because Master Deunov sent his messenger, Loulchev, to look for the king of Bulgaria, who was hiding out somewhere, to get him to save the people who were going to be deported. The king’s name was Boris the Third or the Fourth or something. Well, Loulchev looked and looked, but he couldn’t find the king, so he had to go back to the master and say he had searched every nook and cranny but no luck. So the master meditated, and the name of the town was sent to him, and lo and behold, the king was in that town, and the king respected the master, and the Bulgarians were behind both of them, and the king made a law that saved the Jews from being killed.

“I remember,” Harry said to me, “Tsar, not king.”

And I said I thought they were the same thing, and she said I was right; they were pretty close.

The signs were coming faster and faster, and it was almost too much for me. I felt dizzy, which sometimes happens when I’m feeling a lot in the atmosphere around me, but all the threads were coming together. That’s how I think of it, the threads were binding together to form circles, and Harry gave me permission. I could pray for her and clean up her luminous anatomy for its passage on to the next stage. The shamans in Brazil say you walk into mountains and see everything around you with new eyes — a sacred vision.

I came every day for five days. On the fifth day, Harry died.

I want to say that I knew the others didn’t really accept me and that they don’t believe in what I believe in. Maisie called me an “interpolator,” which means an uninvited guest coming in from the outside, and, on the first day especially, Bruno and Pearl, who was Harry’s day nurse, sent me nasty looks from across the room while I was cleaning up the auras, spinning them first counterclockwise and then clockwise. It’s slow work, and they were rolling their eyes at me. Don’t think I didn’t see them. I’ve taught myself not to care, that’s all. People have been making fun of my gift since I was little, so it’s an ancient story. I wasn’t like the other kids, not ever. I was always seeing and feeling stuff they didn’t see and feel, colors and waves and electricity in my arms and legs, and they used to wait for me after school and yell “ugly albino” and “moron” and “retard” at me. Sometimes they’d trip me or knock against my backpack or rip it off me and throw all my stuff on the sidewalk. Not too original when you think about it. You just have to learn to walk with your chin up and let them scream their heads off. It doesn’t come easy. It took me a long time not to care about it.

Anyway, after the first day with the eye rolling and the interpolator business, things got better. Maisie had her little girl, Aven, who had to go to school, and she had her husband, Oscar, who was a really sweet man with a deep voice that made you feel warm when you listened to it, and she couldn’t just forget about them, after all. On the second day, I told Maisie I would cover for her because she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. They kept fluttering shut. I said I’d sit with Harry and that she should try to nap or she wouldn’t be much good for anything. Maisie could see Harry liked the feel of my hands and the comfort of the crystals on her belly, and she liked my singing — I sang some old ballads to her that my grandma Lucy used to sing to me. Harry especially liked “Leaving Nancy.” “The parting has come and my weary soul aches / I’m leaving my Nancy, oh.” Harry liked Kali, too. And Kali liked Harry. She licked her face and sniffed her, and after that, she stayed with us in the room and it was easier.