She pulled on soft slippers and shuffled across the dark room. As she passed the mirror on the back of the closet door, she glanced at herself. As a child, she had been afraid of the dark, and the only way she could calm herself was to rush to a mirror. Her shrink had later told her that she’d had a low self-image. No, she had answered back, she was just afraid of the dark.
She went into the kitchen, turning on lights as she walked. Well, she told herself, if she was up, she was up. As she filled the kettle with cold water for coffee, she reached over and turned on the small Sony on the kitchen counter. Maybe she would make pancakes, she told herself, and cook sausages. She’d have a big breakfast and forget about running and staying in shape for one morning in her life.
She had opened the refrigerator and was pulling out butter and milk and eggs, only half listening to the all-night cable channel she was tuned into when she realized she was hearing Kathy Dart’s voice.
Jennifer stood up and turned toward the set. Kathy Dart was sitting cross-legged, facing the camera. She was not channeling, but talking to the group of people who also sat cross-legged, in a tight circle.
“It seems to me,” she was saying, sweeping her gaze around the circle of people, “that there are two generally accepted views of why we are all on earth.”
“One view I’ll call the religious. It tells us that we are creations of God, and damaged creations at that; that we are born into the world with sin and must spend our lives proving our value to God so that at death we can be accepted into heaven.”
“The second notion about life is the modern view. It explains that we are here today because of a series of chance occurrences in space. The big bang. The small bang. The survival of the fittest. Whatever you want to call it! Every few years we are given a new explanation.”
“The trouble with these two views of life is that they exclude a lot. They cheat us out of all the possibilities of our wonderful minds.”
Kathy Dart paused and looked around the circle. Watching her, Jennifer noticed again how beautiful she was. It wasn’t really her looks, but the calmness of her face. No wonder Eileen responded to her, Jennifer thought. Kathy Dart had such a trusting face.
“We must remember that the mind and the brain are not the same thing,” Kathy Dart said next. “The brain is a physical organ, while the mind is simply energy that flows through this organ. As human beings, as bodies, we cannot be everywhere. But the mind can travel, relocate, be somewhere else, as when we have an out-of-body experience. For example, we all know how it is possible for the body to be on the operating table while the mind is up on the ceiling, looking down, watching the surgeon operate.”
“Yes,” Jennifer said aloud. She stopped breaking eggs into a plastic bowl and turned her full attention to the screen. “Yes,” she said again.
“We do have other levels of reality. We daydream, hallucinate, sleep, dream, and all have some sort of mystical, or psychic, communication with others.” She leaned forward. “I will tell you a true story. It has happened to each of you. You are in a restaurant, you are on the street, you think of someone, perhaps a friend, someone you once knew in another place and at another time. His name pops suddenly into your mind, and then within moments, you see him. He suddenly appears, as if out of nowhere!”
She leaned back and smiled knowingly, and then the camera panned the small circle of people, and they, too, were smiling, in recognition of what Kathy Dart was saying.
Jennifer set the eggs aside and pulled the small kitchen stool up close to the television set. Opening up the pad she used to jot down her shopping list, she waited for the woman to continue.
“Perhaps the best way to understand what is happening to us,” Kathy Dart went on, “is to think of our psyches, our minds, as houses with many rooms. In our everyday lives, we use only one or two of those rooms, but we do not inhabit the attic or basement, we do not know what is happening at night down the long dark hallways.”
She motioned to the group, gesturing back and forth with one hand. “We speak to each other on one level, but that is a limitation. It forces us to see our world as having only one level, one reality.”
“When I go into a trance, it is as if I am moving to another room in my psychic house. There it is possible for me to have a different state of consciousness, a different persona, different knowledge. It is possible for me to speak directly to Habasha, and to have him communicate directly with you. We came naked into this world, but our psyches, our spirits, came with the collected wisdom and knowledge of all time. Plato said that the soul has been ‘born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all.’”
Then, as the camera closed in on her face, Kathy Dart grimaced and added wryly, “So why, you might ask, aren’t we rich?”
Her audience laughed.
“We’re not rich,” Kathy said, “because we have in our present life only a certain amount of all the knowledge we possess, knowledge that Plato says we are remembering. Nothing is new under the sun, as the saying goes. We are only remembering what we already know but have forgotten.”
“Artists tells us that they create by intuition, by bursts of creativity. What is creativity?” She paused to study the circle of students. “The act of creation is drawing from within, from our heart of hearts, from the knowledge we already know. We create what we have already created.”
The kitchen telephone rang, startling Jennifer. She looked at it for a moment, puzzled by its ringing. It was not yet six-thirty.
“Jenny?” The man’s voice was soft and far away.
“David? Is that you? What is it? What’s wrong?” She suddenly felt cold and shivered in her wool nightgown. A window had opened, she thought. Or a door.
“Oh, Jenny,” David whispered. He began to cry.
“What is it, David? Has something happened?” Even as she spoke, Jennifer knew.
“She’s gone, Jenny. She’s gone. I found her a few minutes ago. I had gotten up to go to the bathroom
there was a light under her bedroom door.” He was crying, stumbling over his words. “She had taken an overdose of Valium. It was my prescription. She had said she was having trouble sleeping. I had no idea.” He kept explaining, telling Jennifer the suicide was all his fault.
“It’s not your fault, David,” Jennifer said, raising her voice so he would hear her through his tears. “Stop blaming yourself! I understand! Have you called the police?”
“Yes, yes, I’ve done all that.” He was suddenly angry. “They’re here. I have a cop in my goddamn living room. They won’t remove the body until the coroner comes and signs the death certificate.”
“What can I do? I don’t want you to be alone.”
“You can’t take the subway at this hour.”
“I’ll call a car service. Don’t worry.”
He started to cry again. “Why, Jenny, why in God’s name would she do this?”
“We’ll talk about it when I get there. Hang up so I can get dressed and call a car. ‘Bye, David. Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you, Jenny. Thank God for you,” David whispered. He sounded like a little boy.
When Jennifer hung up the receiver, her hand was trembling. She felt the cold again, a swift rush of wind, and from the dark hallway of the apartment, she could see across the living room, through the front windows and into the street. Dawn was breaking, and the very pale light of early morning was filling the dark corners.
Then she saw Margit in the room. She was standing by the door to the kitchen, smiling, motioning that everything was all right, that she was all right. She looked a dozen years younger, and beautiful in a way that Jennifer had never seen her. She moved through the dark apartment, her body a silver envelope of light. She was wearing a white dress, a long white dress that flowed around her and spread across the floor and furniture.