Eloquent Silence (46 page)

I spoke of all this to Harry of the Theosophical Society and he asked about the time lapse between the death of Grandfather and the birth of my son. I told him it was four years. Harry believed that was too quick. The rules of the Society were that it took approximately seventy years for the soul to rest between incarnations.

This was a moot point with me so Harry and I agreed to disagree upon it. I knew my own Grandfather when I met him. Experiments with young children have proved by investigation that the intervening time need not be so lengthy as Harry claimed. In later years there have been studies done on small children who clearly remember past lives that were not so very long ago. The strict seventy year does not seem to apply to them so perhaps the Theosophists err on the side of caution.

My Theosophy phase was rudely interrupted by a marriage to a European who spoke little English, if it could be described as that. Guido thought that ‘Theosophy’ was the equivalent of ‘orgy.’ Hiding behind the mask of Theosophy the members were participating in debauchery unequaled since Roman times. According to my new husband, an extremely good time was being had by all. I was forbidden to go to the weekly ‘orgies’. So much for that.

Down but not out I continued to indulge my passion for the unthinkable and unknowable behind Guido’s back. He was a little atheist who set up a shrine to the Madonna in our bedroom,—candles, statue, the lot. Yet there was no God in Guido’s world except when he swore. My Latin roots had been very good at school. He would stomp around the house braying, ‘Dio Porco’, (God is a pig), ‘Dio Carne’, (God’s meat? Meaty God?), ‘Madonna butana bastardo’ (The mother of God was born on the wrong side of the blanket). I waited hopefully for God to strike Guido down in his prime but it didn’t happen.

I wonder what it would be like to be born on the shores of Galway Bay two hundred years ago, illiterate and unable to assuage the longing for the power of the written word. Such has been a prior life of mine.

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I
adore reading about the experiences of people who have died and returned to their bodies either naturally or through resuscitation. It puts paid to the old theory about nobody ever coming back to tell us what the other side is like.

Crazy about children who recall past lives; mad about philosophers; iffy about fortune-tellers and some spiritualists. Still comfortable with the knowledge that I have lived lives in Egypt, Ireland, America and suffered persecution through the life of a Russian Jew.

So should these things be in conflict with Christianity? Skeptics tell us that Reincarnation is not mentioned in the Bible, but Christ Himself spoke of His soul in relation to being Moses’. It sits very easily, I believe, to acknowledge that the Great Souls return to guide us in our meanderings through life and that our own souls will have another opportunity to polish up our act.

At this stage in the history of Mankind we are sorely in need of a Great Master to come and lead us through the turmoil which humanity is presently flaying against. We are looking for eternal peace but it seems unlikely that we will now find it on this planet that is almost ruined.

Time is the only thing that will tell, I suppose, who gets the halo and who gets the flick. The immortal soul has plenty of time. Time is the essence the soul deals with eternally.

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N
obody knows what it’s like to be me, Reba Johansenn, clouded around and about as I am and crowned in the glory of the Lord while living in a miasma of doubt and suspicion. I am struggling with an insoluble problem not of my own making, but which was thrust upon me from external sources. They, (the originators of this fierce cause for concern), don’t know what I’ve been coping with spasmodically for as far back as I can remember, some seventy odd years, give or take a year or two. Odd being the operative word, I must admit as applied to others beside myself. Not that I’d say that to too many people. They’d think I was just having a word-play but I do not play in any way, shape or form, words or not.

Maybe I have lost my looks and my body is shapeless now, my hair all messed up and a bit tatty, steely gray with age and hanging listlessly about my shoulders. Maybe I’ve lost the sparkle and the dancing eyes I had back in my teens when I had graduated from an exclusive girl’s boarding school and taken on the world as a measure of my capability. They have settled into black hollows sunken into my cheeks.

Dancing all night with the cream of the crop back in those far off days was what I did best, glamorous in my evening gowns being courted by the bank johnnies of this little one horse town called Harrow. Well may you say ‘Harrow’ because harrowed is what am these days. Playing netball and basketball in those little short skirts that showed off my powerful muscular thighs and shapely hips was another activity I enjoyed when I was a graduate from the All Hallows Girls School in central Murrimba Heights.

Those days are gone and now I have to just be who I am, Reba Johansenn, vessel for the voices which are going to save the world. Or this little corner of it, anyway. Don’t quite know when but it
will
happen. I have been promised that and my hopes are high as I await the coming of the beings who will take over this planet and make it into a world fit for Our Savior to return to. I am the crucible through which this change will be implemented but I am not at liberty to tell you how.

It’s not as if I don’t try keep up an ordinary way of life, try to cope and fit in and be what the Earth beings consider to be ‘normal.’ I try so hard and I know I can’t possibly get through the day so that no one knows the evil forces that are dwelling within me. I say they are evil, but once they have taken control of humanity, they will no longer be so and harmony will rule the world. I hope. At least, that’s what they promise me.

They do not tell me their names but they are stalking me, talking to me in my head with their didactic voices. Even as I make general conversation with the person outside my head, the person in front of me assumes they are normal and I am not. That’s their loss, their poor judgment. I know who I am and where I’m going even if they do not. The entities will eventually make their paths clear to them in the course of time.

The acid-edged voices are not prepared to be angered further than they already are and I have no wish to reach the turning point where they will engulf me with their fierce faces and gnawing jaws. I can hear the rise and fall of their breathing as they wait for my reaction to their latest hugger-muggery. Murmuring and muttering in my head, causing me sensations of fear or superiority, depending on whether I am feeling morbid or fanciful on that particular day.

That’s why I often lock the doors and windows and then I will be invisible, if not to myself, then to them, even though my life will still be totally incomprehensible to them and to me for that matter. Locked inside my house I can get at nobody and nobody can get at me. I work hard not to rise to the bait they put into my head, but eventually I have to stop and listen even if I don’t obey.

At least they back off for a while after they have delivered their latest message and I have given in and listened to it. You might think it’s a battle and I would have to agree with that but it’s all in a good cause, eventually. Saving the world is as good a cause as I’ve ever heard of, don’t you agree? Not that I will be doing it alone but I will be a major part of it. Humility is not my strong point, as you may have already guessed.

The trouble inside my head begins as the direct consequence of the hostile hookup between myself and the beings, the entities from beyond this galaxy, who come from several light years out into space beyond the sun. That’s when I start to hear other voices on the telephone going a mile a minute when I’m talking to someone who may or may not live in this stratosphere. A shiver of much magnitude fills me with such apprehension that I positively throw the phone at the cat, sweet little darling that she is, my Pussa. You should see her jump, but she knows her mummy wouldn’t really hurt her unless it was unavoidable.

How am I to know where the voices come from since they only arrive fully formed in my head? They do not give out with their names and addresses. “Unearthly Being Number 4711,  from Planet Pinochet One Million Light Years to the Left of Earth’s Sun.”

I do not know the name of the planet beyond the sun, nor do I have a street address, so I’m left feeling disorientated and without a compass except for my moral compass which is pointing me in the direction of saving the world. Saving mankind from itself. I have the power to do this but not as yet the means. The interplanetary beings have the means and the know-how. I am simply the conduit of their plans and will be further informed when the time is ripe.

It’s not the cat’s fault that I toss things around though, poor little mite, and that I am forced to throw things at her from time to time. I am only trying to alert the entities and show those beings I will not submit to their control over me without a fight. That I am not their puppet. The only one who backs off is the cat as the beings seem to rather enjoy the tumult in my head. It seems as if I puzzle the cat by tossing things around but that’s just an unfortunate side effect.

That’s always the genesis of it, though.  Small voices at first, whispering voices, snide or whining or derisive or even seductive, contradictory at times, not always telling me what to do, at others just being there whispering to each other, one another....whisper, whisper, giggle, grunt. They ignore my presence then they expand in volume and sweep me up whether I want to be swept up or not. Riding high in my head with my feet firmly planted on the ground.

Or they’re telling me long and maudlin stories about people who are trying to take advantage of me in ways which only the beings can understand because they can see and understand things that I cannot. They tell me pointedly to keep quiet so they can illustrate all the less endearing qualities of these people they are describing who are pretending to care about me. So I surrender to keep the peace and to find out the ways my enemies are trying to overcome me.

That’s if I am at all settled and haven’t already thrown the phone as far as I possibly can and picked it up once or twice, testing to see what’s going on at the far end. That’s where the beings are and I want to know if they have hung up yet. But they never have so on we go with the same old cycle.

They make it awfully difficult for me to communicate with other humans as they’re very demanding of my time and attention. Even though I want a peaceful life it’s often stormy and uncertain as I have to interact with them even when I don’t want to. Especially when I don’t want to and am feeling bewildered and isolated. That’s when they really come calling, high-pitched and menacing.

I wonder what their shape is like, what features they have, what color they are? How different are they? I have impressions of their difference from our race but they are only impressions and not actual photographic evidence. I wonder how long I will have to wait before they show themselves to me?

Sometimes I hope fondly that I won’t have to interact with them, that they will simply go away and leave me be but it never works out quite that way. They come creeping back in spite of the fact that I tell them I’m not interested or available.

That makes them angry and they screech at me or chatter aimlessly amongst themselves until I finally go to sleep, passing into the bliss of limbo. The noise of their shrill little voices sounds for all the world like a lot of monkeys in a zoo. I can almost feel their clammy hands reaching out to grab me and escort me out of here.

Those clammy hands are coming through the phone to claim me for their own, drag me into that small space and manage somehow to get me down the telephone line and into outer space, traveling towards their planet. It will be awfully difficult for them, a hard task indeed, as I am a rather large person with big feet so I won’t fit very well into the phone and down the line. But all things are possible to the aliens.

They come regularly from the spaceship, the voices and the invisible beings who contain them.  They hook me up to the mother ship whether I want to or not.  I have to exercise a great deal of self control to remain still and receptive in the hope that they will forget their plan and go on their way to whichever planet it is they’re really aiming for. Naturally, at times I fail to do this and then all hell breaks loose as I have described. Have I described it?

If I am not on the phone but with another person, a human being, I have to look past who I’m conversing with, just look a little behind their head into a sort of middle distance. Unfortunately I can still see how their mouth curls a fraction over their teeth and realize that they’re smiling a querulous smile at me and are puzzled, as if they know I’m not really looking at them at all. Puzzlement sometimes mingled with contempt as if I were a virago of some kind who would burst into curses or mount my broomstick and leave the spot.

I might be a little wild-haired, my eyes might rove a little but I am totally in control of the situation and will not frighten the wits out of them if at all avoidable. Making definite efforts not to frighten the horses in the street as the old saying goes. But that had something to do with sex, if I remember rightly, and that is not part of my agenda.

They’re trying to be polite, these visitors to my door and strangers I meet in the street,  but I think they would like to bolt into another biosphere or underground into a cave or a catacomb if there are any nearby. I don’t blame them. There have been times when I would like to bolt from myself, indeed. I have to struggle with myself to not submit to this urge to be elsewhere when the beings are sometimes saying polite nothings in my head.

When I pace about fiercely others look askance at me, knowing I am clearly in a mood but not knowing what to do about it except to turn up their noses in criticism. They recognize my moods without knowing how to cope with them any better than I do. That gives me a small sense of powerfulness. Then I am truly in control when I recognize the fact that they are bewildered by me.