Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

Rachelle started to breath rhythmically and to move her hands in circles. She made guttural chanting sounds, random syllables, like a flautist playing scales to warm up. Then she began speaking. Her voice became almost comically low in pitch.

“I am Vywamus,” she said. “I am here to speak to you, Eileen Leary. I am here to tell you that your husband is one of the most repressed souls in the universe. For many lives, he has been fighting a battle with his spirit. He has been an Atlantean for centuries.”

Eileen knew that Bethany had never really gelled with Ed. Bethany had had a bit of this New Age streak even when they used to spend time together, and Ed had had little patience for it. She wondered how much Bethany had told this lady.

“This time through,” Rachelle said in a painful-sounding husky baritone, “he is fighting for his soul. The battle in his body mirrors the battle in his soul. It is not this disease that is making him obsessed with control. It is the other way around. His obsession with control has culminated in this disease. He needs to learn to open up in this life to save his soul from the battle it has been fighting for centuries.”

She had to hand it to her: once Rachelle started channeling Vywamus, she didn’t break character. Still, Eileen was having a hard time taking it seriously. She had to bite her cheeks to keep from making editorial grunts. It was all meant for someone else, someone weaker of will or less educated. Whatever kind of cult this Rachelle was running, she was mistaken if she thought she had a potential convert in the room. Eileen may have been through some difficult times, but that didn’t mean her brain had gone soft.

There had been times she’d wanted to kill Ed; now that he was declining so quickly, she just wanted him home until Christmas. It shocked her that her goals had dwindled to one, but that was all she could focus on, even now, eight months away from the holiday. Once Ed left, she knew, he was never coming back.

There used to be so many goals. They’d made a list at one point. Learn some Gaelic together. Visit the wineries in Napa Valley. She couldn’t remember what else was on the list. They hadn’t accomplished any of them.

They hadn’t finished the house. Much of the first floor looked new and appealing, but a good deal of the second floor was dilapidated and run-down.

She hadn’t gone back for a doctorate. She hadn’t learned to play better tennis. They’d never take another trip to Europe. They might never take another trip anywhere.

They didn’t need to go anywhere anymore, though. If she could get him to Christmas, she would take without complaint whatever was coming. A proper send-off was all she asked, surrounded by the regular crowd on Christmas Eve, the kitchen — the beating heart of the house — full to bursting. By midnight, no one would have left. Smiling Ed in his suit on the couch would be incident-free. Then Mass in the morning; then a short drive to someone else’s house, some coffee cake and a modest second round of gifts. Then let it come down. She didn’t need the whole day. Let him have a fit at four o’clock. Let him be raving and dangerous and inconsolable. She’d drive him over to the home herself. She’d always hated Christmas night anyway. It was the loneliest night of the year.

Eileen agreed to let Bethany take her back to her faith-healing, channeling psychic, whatever-she-called-herself friend Rachelle. She decided to experience it as a cultural phenomenon, like the be-ins and happenings she’d missed out on while she was in graduate school. She didn’t have to keep up a wall of suspicion if she went in knowing these people were doing something entirely weird and that she was going to study them anthropologically.

She joined the others in the circle and waited for “Vywamus” to come out. The woman, Rachelle, walked in barefoot, on the balls of her feet like a cat, gathered her robe under her and sat, Indian-style. Eileen couldn’t have gotten into that position if she’d been drugged and stretched into it by a team of men.

Rachelle/Vywamus started speaking to another member of the circle, the focus of the beginning of the session. When Eileen thought about the actual message Vywamus was delivering, and not the spooky way it was being delivered, she grew almost intrigued at how familiar and unthreatening the ideas in it were. The whole thing was a charade, but there was something quaint about the idea of conveying sturdy old wisdom through the medium of performance art. She imagined many of these suburban wives might be impressed enough by a brush with the avant-garde to actually hear a message they’d have dismissed if delivered by a priest, rabbi, or shrink.

After a while Rachelle/Vywamus turned her/his attention to Eileen. Rachelle had homed in on something essential about Ed right away. Eileen wouldn’t have put it the way Vywamus had, and Rachelle might have had help from Bethany, but she also appeared to be a master psychologist. Under the absurd pretense of this character, she was saying something borderline sensible.

At the end of the session, after Vywamus addressed a few of the other women and Rachelle made a big display of being physically drained, everyone stood in a circle talking and eating snacks. Rachelle returned in a different outfit, having shed the robe she was wearing, and mingled.

When Bethany drove her home, she said that she had covered Eileen for the first couple of visits, but next time there would be a one-hundred-dollar fee, and if she wanted to do private sessions it would cost one fifty.

• • •

For days, Eileen fretted over how to tell Bethany she wasn’t going back to Rachelle, but on Tuesday morning, as she dressed for work, she realized she was actually looking forward to Bethany’s visit that night. Bethany was the only one of her old friends who had gotten more involved in her life, rather than less, with the news of Ed’s condition. Eileen dug through her closet and found a pair of slacks she could still squeeze into, and a loose jacket that would hide the bulge forming at her waist. She hadn’t been indoctrinated into Bethany’s cult, and she wouldn’t ever be, but as she ironed her clothes and thought about which lipstick would work best with her green jacket, she knew she needed to be out in the world.

Ed was already in bed when Bethany rang the bell at twenty to seven. Eileen applied a last spritz of hairspray, shut the powder room light and yelled “Entrez!” toward the kitchen door. Bethany came dressed smartly again, in a turquoise blouse and white jacket. As they got into the car, she pulled down the visor and dabbed lipstick on her top lip and rubbed her lips together to smear it in. Bethany handed her a tissue to blot.

It was satisfying to be in the company of strong women, most of them semiretired professionals. Maybe she was exactly the sort of woman in a vulnerable state of mind that Rachelle sought to target, but these women didn’t seem that way. If they were, she didn’t care. She wasn’t planning to get to know them. She trusted herself not to be bamboozled by Rachelle’s charisma. There was a spiritual vacuum she needed to fill. She’d never imagined she’d find herself in the living room of a cult leader, or sitting unperturbed as she listened to the rates for future sessions.

She wondered what the others were getting out of it. The world, as Vywamus presented it, didn’t seem to matter very much; our real existence was taking place somewhere else as we lived out a shadow existence. She didn’t need to be signing on to a whole new program in her fifties. She was going for the hour it got her out of the house.

At the end of the session, she didn’t even feel awkward writing the check. Bethany took it with a smile and presented it to Rachelle. Eileen knew she was being played, but she was content to let it happen. It was good to have someone thinking of her, and she liked that Vywamus did so much of the talking. It was better than therapy. Eileen couldn’t stand the silence in Dr. Brill’s office, the fact that she was expected to open her mouth and let all the words she’d apparently kept stopped up come pouring out.