Walking Through Walls (13 page)

One weekday morning in October, I slept through my alarm. When I finally opened my eyes, it seemed that it was still the middle of the night. The sky was an oppressive greenish charcoal black, the color of a still pond. This type of sky appeared only during major end-of-the-world storms—the torrential, awe-inspiring storms that shut Miami down for days. You knew the storm was bad when you heard the birds screeching frantically at one another to get the hell out of town. The typical aftermath of these storms left houses flooded, water wells backed up and undrinkable, cars unable to start, electricity out—and forget the phones; that would take another month. Downed power lines wove themselves across the road. Huge felled trees made many roads impassable. I felt as if I were in a surround-sound jungle movie as the birds continued to talk about the storm. The air had that heaviness to it that seemed to connote a lethal subelectrical charge surging through the atmosphere. You could feel the pressure throughout your entire body. The only light came from enormous cracks of lightning that appeared to rip open the sky.

I started to raise myself to turn around and look at the clock but found that I couldn't move my body. I was paralyzed—my arms, my legs, and my neck all felt completely numb, accompanied by a strange electrical tingling.

I heard my father getting ready for work. I tried to call his name. The best I could do was make a quiet whine:
“ehhhhhhhhh, ehhhhhhh, ehhhh, ehhh.”
I was trying to push out the sound with my breath.
“Ehhhh, ehhhh, ehhh, ehhh, ehhh.”
I lay there with my eyes open, listening to the thunder.
“Ehhhh, ehhh, ehh.”

My father walked past my bedroom but didn't come in. He headed for the kitchen. I could hear him turn on the blender. I tried sending him telepathic thoughts that I needed help. “Pop, please come help me! I can't move!” The only signal I got back was the
whirrrrrr
of the blender as he mixed up his usual morning breakfast. Then I heard the front door slam and the car start. He must have been leaving early for work. I couldn't believe he was going to drive in this storm. My only hope was that my mother would eventually get up and find me.

Moments later the front door opened. Pop must have realized that he had to wait out the storm. I was going to try to catch his attention by making some noise, but I didn't have to. He came into my room, looked at me, and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Uuhh, uhhh, uhhh, uhhhh,”
was my response.

He leaned over and put his hand on my forehead. “You're burning up. Let's see what's going on.” Pop sat down next to me and started running his hands over my body. At first they felt hot, and then suddenly they turned wonderfully cool. Like a slow-motion windshield wiper, he kept moving his hands back and forth, back and forth over my entire body.

After he pulled his hands away, my head seemed unbelievably heavy and fell to the side from its own weight. That was the first sign that I could move again. I wiggled the ends of my fingers. Whatever this paralysis was, it was slowly lifting. Pop looked at me and said, “You have nerve-gas poisoning. A lot of people are mysteriously getting sick, and no one knows what it is.”

“Nerve gas!” I thought to myself. “What the hell is he talking about? How did I get that? I haven't been sniffing any nerve gas.”

“I've got to remove this poisonous gas before it destroys your nervous system.” He closed his eyes and said, “I remove all the toxic nerve gas from this body and send it to the sun for purification.” With great regularity, my father used the blast furnace of the sun as a dumping ground for anything toxic. This included viruses, bad pharmaceuticals, and any kind of negative energy. Mentally, Pop would beam the offending items to the sun, where the intense heat would instantly obliterate the noxious substance, rendering it harmless. He always used this technique when he psychically removed cancerous cells and tumors from patients. Off the cancer went at the speed of light to be autoclaved by solar flares. I liked this idea and wondered if I couldn't use it to beam a couple kids from school to the sun for instantaneous incineration.

I vaguely remember watching a talk show at the time with Dick Cavett or David Susskind interviewing some genius think-tank type guy like Herman Kahn about how to dispose of nuclear waste. His solution was to put it on a rocket ship and send it to the sun for incineration. I told my father about the program, and he smiled and said, “Oh yes, we've been doing that for years with anything negative. It's a good idea.”

As he placed his hands on my forearm, Pop began to explain how I had contracted this nerve gas. “Over the past few years, the government has been secretly dumping concrete containers filled with unused nerve gas off the coast of Florida. This was their way of burying this toxic waste that was left over from the government's chemical warfare program. Because of the movement of the ocean and, of course, this storm, some of those containers are cracking open, and the nerve gas is escaping. Somehow you were exposed.”

“Ohhhhhkay,” I thought to myself. “Last time I got sick it had something to do with my aura being out of alignment, which drained my energy from my etheric body, which resulted in my coming down with pneumonia. So now it's nerve gas coming up from the ocean floor. That sounds about right. I'll go with the nerve-gas explanation. Why not?” In situations like this, I felt that I had to humor my father a little bit, so I accepted each wacky new explanation with a straight face.

As cynical as I could be at times, I was also completely certain that my father knew things that no one else in the world knew. No matter how crazy they sounded, no matter how much I didn't want to believe him, no matter how everyone in the world would laugh at him, in the end, he was always right. The truth was that Pop could do things that no one else could do. Plus, after he ran his hands over my body, I could suddenly walk and talk again. Hard to argue with that.

Craaaaaack! Boooooom!
Nature's soundtrack was deafening. The Miami End-of-the-World Thunder and Lightning Show had picked up again. The rain was coming down in hard, solid sheets, as if the monsoons had arrived. Visibility was two to three inches, if that. These intense tropical rains washed the air, and I hoped that they would wash away all the nerve gas that was making me sick.

Forgetting that I had been completely paralyzed just a few minutes earlier, I propped myself up in bed to talk to my father. Clearly, whatever he did was working; otherwise I couldn't have moved on my own. It was a quick journey from near-total paralysis to a casual father-son chat, which was cut short when he said, “I'm going to be late for a new client that's coming in from Switzerland to see me. I've got to go.”

“But what about the storm? Do you think you should drive in this rain?”

“It'll be over within fifteen minutes.”

Looking outside my window at the dense gray air, I couldn't imagine this storm ending before midnight. By the time I finally pulled myself out of bed, the sky had cleared as if the storm had never happened.

For years afterward, I completely forgot about my nerve-gas paralysis—until I came across a 2000 report titled “The Concept of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Chemical and Biological Weapons, Use in Warfare, Impact on Society and Environment,” given at the Beijing Seminar on Arms Control. It confirmed that my father was correct about the dumping of nerve gas off the coast of Florida. The report stated: “During the 1950s, the U.S. conducted an ambitious nerve-gas program, manufacturing what would eventually total 400,000 M-55 rockets, each of which was capable of delivering a 5-kg payload of sarin. Many of those rockets had manufacturing defaults, their propellant breaking down in a manner that could lead to auto ignition. For this reason, in 1967 and 1968, 51,180 nerve-gas rockets were dropped 240 km off the coast of New York State in depths of from 1,950 to 2,190 meters, and off the coast of Florida.”

A few days after I read this document,
The New York Times
reported on October 9, 2002, that “the Defense Department says it used chemical warfare and live biological agents during cold-war-era military exercises on American soil…according to previously secret documents cleared for release to Congress on Wednesday…The reports, which detail tests conducted from 1962 to 1971, reveal for the first time that the chemical warfare agents were used during exercises on American soil…and that a mild biological agent was used in Florida…Some milder substances did escape into the atmosphere…in an area of Florida…” Milder substances? Apparently my father was able to psychically access military secrets and activities almost thirty-five years earlier than
The New York Times.

About a week after Pop neutralized the nerve gas in my body, I woke up in the middle of the night, hearing muffled voices. In my stupor, I thought I was at a séance and one of the spirits was trying to get through but had a bad connection. On several occasions I had actually seen this happen, where the guest entity (the dead person) could not quite align his or her vibrations with the host, and the message came out garbled, like a tape recorder playing something backward. This particular night, I wasn't fully awake and couldn't quite figure out where these voices were coming from. I wasn't sure if I was dreaming or not.

As a child with a hyperactive imagination, I frequently woke up in the middle of the night because of Technicolor nightmares with full Dolby sound. If only I had written them down, I could have sold them all as scripts for science-fiction B films and become the king of drive-in movies. At night I often heard possums walking on our roof. I thought these rapid little footsteps were aliens about to break into the house and kidnap me. Or I feared that there were unspeakable monsters gathering in my closet waiting to attack me. I would wake up terrified and cry for my father to come sleep with me, which he did. After some time, I would fall back asleep, feeling protected. Sleep was not my favorite activity as a child.

On good nights I dreamed repeatedly of flying enormous distances with great velocity. I not only flew around Miami proper but around the earth's upper atmosphere. Whenever I wanted to lift off, I just had to give a little jump, and I was quickly airborne. I did not have a cape like a superhero, just my own natural jet propulsion.

Even more disturbing than these nightmares was when I occasionally woke up to find myself actually floating about five feet above my bed. I would turn my head and look down, as if I were peering over a railing, and see my bed below me. During these events, the room was always illuminated with a kind of pulsing pinkish light with gold sparkles. Sometimes my body would rotate slowly as if on a gurney. Nothing much happened; I just hovered in midair for a few minutes and then would slowly descend until I landed softly back in my bed. It would take me another ten or fifteen minutes to relax and go back to sleep. I never told anyone about these occurrences, as I simply assumed that everyone woke up in the middle of the night floating five feet above his bed.

Many years later my father and I attended a lecture on astral travel. I learned that these experiences are known as out-of-body experiences. Among my father's friends, they were reverently referred to as OOBEs (pronounced “
oh
-bees”) and were considered quite an accomplishment. Not everyone was able to have an OOBE. For some reason, I assumed they were pronounced
oooh-bees,
as in, “Oh boy, did I have a big oooh-bee last night” or “I'm exhausted because I was out all last night on my oooh-bee.” Like participants at an AA meeting, his friends were always eager to share a report of an OOBE, especially if they could claim to have traveled to a distant planet or visited dead relatives who were now living and working on the other side. My father often spoke about leaving his body at night to travel to different dimensions where he would learn new healing methods. He was always met in his journey by knowledgeable spirit guides who took him to laboratories as well as other places of advanced healing. My father truly went to night school, only it wasn't on this planet.

That night in bed, I listened intently to the hushed voices, trying to make out what was being said. It sounded like code spoken in staccato tones, intense with emotion. As I became fully awake, I realized that the sounds were coming from my parents' room. They were having a discussion in the middle of the night. Something was wrong.

The truth is that something had been very wrong for the past year. Weeks went by when my mother moved into the living room and slept on the couch. She smoked and watched TV, and retreated to her own world, just as my father retreated to his. This was her form of protest, a sit-in against her crumbling marriage. Looking back, she badly needed someone to talk to about her pain and her loss of the joyful marriage that was once her dream come true. She was alone with her grief. No one was there to help her through this catastrophic crisis. Her SOS went unnoticed by the only two available witnesses: my father and me.

Glittering nights in Havana casinos, glamorous clients, and a stable, happy home—all the touchstones of her life—had vanished. There was nothing there to replace it. Bleak House had arrived. I was too young to know what questions to ask, to know how to listen, or to know how to even raise the topic, except anonymously with Sophie Busch. My father was overwhelmed by his new abilities and failed to notice that in the process, my mother and I had been displaced. It appeared that at this point Pop was so busy with his new life that he didn't care what happened to any of us. Mom's courage and her determination not to appear weak or needy created a facade of stubbornness. In this standoff, she was not going to be the first person to raise the white flag. Unlike my father, she did not have a flying saucer parked outside waiting to whisk her away to a new life.