From the Corner of His Eye (37 page)

On the third of June, he found another useless Bartholomew, and on Saturday, the twenty-fifth, two deeply disturbing events occurred. He switched on his kitchen radio only to discover that “Paperback Writer,” yet another Beatles song, had climbed to the top of the charts, and he received a call from a dead woman.

Tommy James and the Shondells, good American boys, had a record farther down the charts—“Hanky Panky”—that Junior felt was better than the Beatles’ tune. The failure of his countrymen to support homegrown talent aggravated him. The nation seemed eager to surrender its culture to foreigners.

The phone rang at 3:20 in the afternoon, just after he switched off the radio in disgust. Sitting in the breakfast nook, the Oakland telephone directory open in front of him, he almost said,
Find the father, kill the son,
instead of, “Hello.”

“Is Bartholomew there?” a woman asked.

Stunned, Junior had no answer.

“Please, I must speak to Bartholomew,” the caller pleaded with quiet urgency.

Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, and charged with anxiety; but under other circumstances, it would have been sexy.

“Who is this?” he demanded, although for a demand, the words came out too thin, too squeaky.

“I’ve got to warn Bartholomew. I’ve
got
to.”

“Who
is
this?”

Fathoms of silence flooded the line. Still, she listened. He sensed her there, though as if at a great depth.

Recognizing the danger of saying the wrong thing, the potential for self-incrimination, Junior clenched his jaws and waited.

When at last the caller spoke again, her voice sounded kingdoms away: “Will you tell Bartholomew…?”

Junior pressed the receiver so tightly to his head that his ear ached.

Farther away still: “Will you tell him…?”

“Tell him
what
?”

“Tell him Victoria called to warn him.”

Click.

She was gone.

He didn’t believe in the restless dead. Not for a minute.

Because he hadn’t heard Victoria Bressler speak in so long—and then only on two occasions—and because the woman on the phone had spoken so softly, Junior couldn’t tell whether or not their voices were one and the same.

No, impossible. He had killed Victoria almost a year and a half before this phone call. When you were dead, you were gone forever.

Junior didn’t believe in gods, devils, Heaven, Hell, life after death. He put his faith in one thing: himself.

Yet through the summer of 1966, following this call, he acted like a man who was haunted. A sudden draft, even if warm, chilled him and caused him to turn in circles, seeking the source. In the middle of the night, the most innocent of sounds could scramble him from bed and send him on a search of the apartment, flinching from harmless shadows and twitching at looming invisibilities that he imagined he saw at the edges of his vision.

Sometimes, while shaving or combing his hair, as he was looking in the bathroom or foyer mirror, Junior thought that he glimpsed a presence, dark and vaporous, less substantial than smoke, standing or moving behind him. At other times, this entity seemed to be
within
the mirror. He couldn’t focus on it, study it, because the moment he became aware of the presence, it was gone.

These were stress-induced flights of the imagination, of course.

Increasingly, he used meditation to relieve stress. He was so skilled at concentrative meditation without seed—blanking his mind—that half an hour of it was as refreshing as a night’s sleep.

Late Monday afternoon, September 19, Junior returned wearily to his apartment, from another fruitless investigation of a Bartholomew, this one across the bay in Corte Madera. Exhausted by his unending quest, depressed by lack of success, he sought refuge in meditation.

In his bedroom, wearing nothing but a pair of briefs, he settled onto the floor, on a silk-covered pillow filled with goose down. With a sigh, he assumed the lotus position: spine straight, legs crossed, hands at rest with the palms up.

“One hour,” he announced, establishing a countdown. In sixty minutes, his internal clock would rouse him from a meditative state.

When he closed his eyes, he saw a bowling pin, a leftover image from his with-seed days. In less than a minute, he was able to make the pin dematerialize, filling his mind with featureless, soundless, soothing, white nothingness.

White. Nothingness.

After a while, a voice broke the vacuum-perfect silence. Bob Chicane. His instructor.

Bob gently encouraged him to return by degrees from the deep meditative state, return, return,
return….

This was a memory, not a real voice. Even after you became an accomplished meditator, the mind resisted this degree of blissful oblivion and tried to sabotage it with aural and visual memories.

Using all his powers of concentration, which were formidable, Junior sought to silence the phantom Chicane. At first, the voice steadily faded, but soon it grew louder again, and more insistent.

In his smooth whiteness, Junior felt a pressure on his eyes, and then came visual hallucinations, disturbing his deep inner peace. He felt someone peel up his eyelids, and Bob Chicane’s worried face—with the sharp features of a fox, curly black hair, and a walrus mustache—was inches from his.

He assumed that Chicane was not real.

Soon he realized this was a mistaken assumption, because when the instructor began trying to unknot him from his lotus position, a defensive numbness deserted Junior, and he became aware of pain. Excruciating.

His entire body throbbed from his neck to the tips of his nine toes. His legs were the worst, filled with hot twisting agony.

Chicane wasn’t alone. Sparky Vox, the building superintendent, approached behind him and hovered. Seventy-two yet as spry as a monkey, Sparky didn’t walk so much as scamper like a capuchin.

“I hope it was all right I let him in, Mr. Cain.” Sparky had a capuchin’s overbite, too. “He told me it was an emergency.”

After prying Junior out of the meditative position, Chicane pushed him onto his back and vigorously—indeed, violently—massaged his thighs and calves. “Really bad muscle spasms,” he explained.

Junior realized that thick drool oozed out of the right corner of his mouth. Shakily, he raised one hand to wipe his face.

Apparently, he’d been drooling for a long time. Where his chin and throat were not sticky, a crust of dried saliva glazed his skin.

“When you didn’t answer the doorbell, man, I just knew what must have happened,” Chicane told Junior.

Then he said something to Sparky, who capered out of the room.

Junior could neither speak nor even mewl in agony. All the saliva had been draining forward, out of his open mouth, for so long that his throat was parched and raw. He felt as though he had munched on a snack of salted razor blades that were now stuck in his pharynx. His rattling wheeze sounded like scuttling scarabs.

The rough massage had only just begun to bring a little relief to Junior’s legs when Sparky returned with six stoppered rubber bags full of ice. “This was all the bags they had down at the drugstore.”

Chicane packed the ice against Junior’s thighs. “Severe spasm causes inflammation. Twenty minutes of ice alternating with twenty minutes of massage, until the worst passes.”

The worst, actually, was yet to come.

By now, Junior realized that he had been locked in a meditative trance for at least eighteen hours. He had settled into the lotus position at five o’clock Monday afternoon—and Bob Chicane had shown up for their regular instruction session at eleven Tuesday morning.

“You’re better at concentrative meditation without seed than anyone I’ve ever known, better than me. That’s why you, especially, should
never
undertake a long session unsupervised,” Chicane scolded. “At the very least, the
very
least, you should use your electronic meditation timer. I don’t see it here, do I?”

Guiltily, Junior shook his head.

“No, I don’t see it,” Chicane repeated. “There’s no benefit to a meditation marathon. Twenty minutes is enough, man. Half an hour at the most. You relied on your internal clock, didn’t you?”

Abashed, Junior nodded.

“And you set yourself for an hour, didn’t you?”

Before Junior could nod, the worst arrived: paralytic bladder seizures.

He had been thankful that during the long trance, he hadn’t wet himself. Now he would gladly have accepted
any
amount of humiliation rather than suffer these vicious cramps.

“Oh, my Lord,” Chicane groaned as he and Sparky half carried Junior into the bathroom.

The need for relief was tremendous, inexpressible, and the urge to urinate was irresistible, and yet he could not let go. For more than eighteen hours, his natural urinary process had been overridden by concentrative meditation. Now the golden vault was locked tight. Every time that he strained for release, a new and more hideous cramp savaged him. He felt as if Lake Mead filled his distended bladder, while Boulder Dam had been erected in his urethra.

In his entire life, Junior had never suffered this much pain without first having killed someone.

Reluctant to depart until certain that his student was out of danger physically, emotionally, and mentally, Bob Chicane stayed until three-thirty. When he left, he broke some bad news to Junior: “I can’t keep you on my student list, man. I’m sorry, but you’re way too intense for me. Way too. Everything you do. All the women you run through, this whole art thing, whatever all those phone books are about—now even meditation. Way too intense for me, too obsessive. Sorry. Have a good life, man.”

Alone, Junior sat in the breakfast nook with a pot of coffee and an entire Sara Lee chocolate fudge cake.

After the paralytic bladder seizures had passed and Junior had drained Lake Mead, Chicane recommended plenty of caffeine and sugar to guard against an unlikely but not impossible spontaneous return to a trance state. “Anyway, after pumping alpha waves for as long as you just did, you shouldn’t actually
need
to sleep anytime soon.”

In fact, although weak and achy, Junior felt mentally refreshed and wonderfully alert.

The time had come for him to think more seriously about his situation and his future. Self-improvement remained a laudable goal, but his efforts needed to be more focused.

He had the capacity to be exceptional at anything to which he applied himself. Bob Chicane had been right about that: Junior was far more intense than other men, possessed of greater gifts and the energy to use them.

In retrospect, he realized meditation didn’t suit him. It was a passive activity, while by nature he was a man of action, happiest when
doing.

He had taken refuge in meditation, because he’d been frustrated by his continuing failure in the Bartholomew hunt and disturbed by his apparently paranormal experiences with quarters and with phone calls from the dead. More deeply disturbed than he had realized or had been able to admit.

Fear of the unknown is a weakness, for it presumes dimensions to life beyond human control. Zedd teaches that nothing is beyond our control, that nature is just a mindlessly grinding machine with no more mysteries in it than we will find in applesauce.

Furthermore, fear of the unknown is a weakness also because it humbles us. Humility, Caesar Zedd declares, is strictly for losers. For the purpose of social and financial advancement, we must
pretend
to be humble—shuffle our feet and duck our heads and make self-deprecating remarks—because deceit is the currency of civilization. But if ever we wallow in genuine humility, we will be no different from the mass of humanity, which Zedd calls “a sentimental sludge in love with failure and the prospect of its own doom.”

Gorging on fudge cake and coffee to guard against a spontaneous lapse into meditative catatonia, Junior manfully admitted that he had been weak, that he had reacted to the unknown with fear and retreat instead of with bold confrontation. Because each of us can trust no one in this world but himself, self-deceit is dangerous. He liked himself better for this frank admission of weakness.