The Blazing World

Sweet Autumn Pinkney (edited transcript)

I heard a voice say “Harry.” The man’s voice was pretty loud, and I heard him talking right into my left ear even though nobody was standing anywhere close to me, because it was one thirteen in the morning and only a couple of people were out walking so late at night. I know what time it was because I looked at my cell phone right when it happened outside the Siri Pharmacy on Flatbush Avenue. Kali (she’s the little dog I adopted from S.O.S. — Save Our Strays — half poodle, half terrier, half Chihuahua) was having a pee and a sniff before I took her home. Right away I knew the voice was a sign. If you don’t pay attention to signs they pass on by, and you might miss being called to your rightful fate. No question the voice took me by surprise. I hadn’t even thought about Harry for a long time, and I hadn’t heard from Anton since the postcard, and I’d been concentrating on my spiritual becoming and development and healing gifts and helping people in my practice, Sweet Indigo Spiritual Healing, and I’d been making real progress with some backsliding, mostly in the form of guys I’d fall for who turned out to have bad karma that I would somehow miss. But then, backsliding is part of the progress to enlightenment, too. You have to recognize it and move on. In one of his lectures, the master, Peter Deunov, said, “Your consciousness can travel at the speed of slow trains, it can travel at the speed of light, and it can travel even faster.” I guess my consciousness was catching up to some airplanes by then.

The next morning while I was fixing my blooming green tea, I knew I had to answer the angelic voice by finding Harry, and I looked down at that blossom opening up in my tea and felt the expansion in my sacral plexus chakra, and the feeling of orange drifting up in the room. I remembered Harry’s red, smudgy auras. I found her name in the Brooklyn phone book, and I called her up. I had a speech ready in case she didn’t remember me. I was going to explain about the voice in the street, even though I know Harry wasn’t into the master’s teachings and astrology and chakras or anything like that, but it wasn’t Harry on the phone. The person on the phone said, “I am her daughter and my mother is very sick right now, and she isn’t seeing anyone except her family and closest friends,” and her voice made a little quaver that came right through the phone and into my body as a tremble. I asked her what her name was, and she said, “Maisie,” and I said, “Maisie, this is Sweet Autumn Pinkney. I used to know your mother on account of my relationship with Anton Tish, and I was an assistant for the artworks, and I think I can be useful to her now. You see,” and I spoke the next words slow and clear, “I have been called.” Maisie said, “But you called me,” because she didn’t understand my greater meaning, but that didn’t matter. I put on my vintage paisley purple dress with the full skirt, the best color for emergency healing, and packed up Kali in her carrying case and grabbed my bag of stones and called a car service because Red Hook is the absolute worst for subways. You just can’t get there underground, so I called up Legends, the trusty service I use in times of need.

I had the address written down, but I couldn’t find the exact building, and I saw some kids standing around, and I asked them if they knew where Harry Burden lived, and one boy with a tattoo on his neck and a black baseball cap said, “Oh, you mean the rich witch.” After we talked a little more it was pretty clear we were talking about the same person, and I asked him why he called her that, and he said he didn’t know except there were lots of rumors about “creepy shit” in her studio and crazy noises and yelling about Satan and God that sometimes came from the building. They petted Kali a little bit and then showed me the door, and I rang the bell. I explained to Maisie and to Bruno, who was Harry’s boyfriend, that I had come to see Harry, and he had to go in to Harry and ask her if it was okay to see me, and she said yes, and so I went up the stairs and into a great big room with windows all over the place and light coming in all over and a super beautiful view, and Harry was lying in a hospital bed with the railings, you know, the kind that lift up on both sides, and an IV drip in her arm. I could see her elbow sticking out from under the floppy sleeve of her T-shirt, and sure enough she was just bones, and then I knew she wasn’t going to get well at all. It made me hushed inside.

I saw the aura sludge around her and the dull colors — whites, grays, some ochre — and the toxins from the losses and the traumas built up over the years. My mission was not healing but cleaning the chakras so the luminous body would not be earthbound. I had to spin Harry’s luminous anatomy free. But she needed to give me permission. You can’t just run in and start cleaning and spinning without permission. Kali started barking, so I put her in the hall in her case. I knew she would whine a little but then probably go to sleep.

I approached Harry with my soft walk. It’s a toe-heel walk like a dancer. I do it to show respect and not make noise, and I stood beside her. She was propped up in the bed. Her hair was short and stringy, not curly the way I remembered it, and her cheekbones stuck out over her hollow cheeks. The skin under her eyes was dark gray, but her green eyes were clear and hard. She looked straight at me and said in a husky voice full of the disease, “It’s the little mystic, isn’t it? The clematis?” And I smiled and put my hand on her arm. Then she squinted at me. I knew she was feeling the warm flow from my fingers. She closed her eyes. And I said, “Harry, can I pray for you?” Before she could answer, Maisie was standing right behind me and asking me what I was doing, and she said they weren’t a praying kind of family. Harry hated praying and on and on. Maisie had a blue aura but a little smoky because she was sad, clinging to her mom, so understandable. But I said in a firm tone that I wanted to know from Harry because she was the person I had been called to see.

Harry said, “Clematis, I’m a Jew.”

I said it didn’t matter and that every religion had its own ways, but God was the same everywhere. I told her that Peter Deunov’s Christianity was renewed by the principles of karma and reincarnation. He liked phrenology, too, head-bump reading that was popular all over the world when the master was young. And then, while I was staring into Harry’s sunken face, I saw pain in it, and her mouth stretched out, and I felt pains in my solar plexus, such hard strikes I had to put my hand down there to steady me. And after the pains, I had the revelation. The calling, the higher planes. Sweet Autumn, I said to myself. (I talk to myself like that when something is really important.) Sweet Autumn, I said, that was the message the voice was trying to deliver to you on Atlantic Avenue! A master is someone who has taken at least five initiations and completed the human stage of evolution and gone beyond it. Didn’t the master say, “A new earth will soon see day.” Didn’t he say that fire would come to “rejuvenate, purify, and reconstruct everything”? And some of the masters are artists — Michelangelo is one, an artist like Harry. He’s moved on to a higher planetary system called Sirius. The Siri Pharmacy! The voice! It was an angelic master, maybe it was Michelangelo, speaking to me from Sirius. I was pretty excited, and I told Harry. I could see Maisie’s face getting all screwed up and angry. And Bruno was looking funny at me, but Harry was listening with her eyes closed and then she said in a whisper, “I remember Deunov now. Clem, he helped save the Bulgarian Jews.”

And I said yes, yes, and I was really happy because Harry knew the story, and that was another sign. Forty-eight thousand people were saved because Master Deunov sent his messenger, Loulchev, to look for the king of Bulgaria, who was hiding out somewhere, to get him to save the people who were going to be deported. The king’s name was Boris the Third or the Fourth or something. Well, Loulchev looked and looked, but he couldn’t find the king, so he had to go back to the master and say he had searched every nook and cranny but no luck. So the master meditated, and the name of the town was sent to him, and lo and behold, the king was in that town, and the king respected the master, and the Bulgarians were behind both of them, and the king made a law that saved the Jews from being killed.

“I remember,” Harry said to me, “Tsar, not king.”

And I said I thought they were the same thing, and she said I was right; they were pretty close.

The signs were coming faster and faster, and it was almost too much for me. I felt dizzy, which sometimes happens when I’m feeling a lot in the atmosphere around me, but all the threads were coming together. That’s how I think of it, the threads were binding together to form circles, and Harry gave me permission. I could pray for her and clean up her luminous anatomy for its passage on to the next stage. The shamans in Brazil say you walk into mountains and see everything around you with new eyes — a sacred vision.

I came every day for five days. On the fifth day, Harry died.

I want to say that I knew the others didn’t really accept me and that they don’t believe in what I believe in. Maisie called me an “interpolator,” which means an uninvited guest coming in from the outside, and, on the first day especially, Bruno and Pearl, who was Harry’s day nurse, sent me nasty looks from across the room while I was cleaning up the auras, spinning them first counterclockwise and then clockwise. It’s slow work, and they were rolling their eyes at me. Don’t think I didn’t see them. I’ve taught myself not to care, that’s all. People have been making fun of my gift since I was little, so it’s an ancient story. I wasn’t like the other kids, not ever. I was always seeing and feeling stuff they didn’t see and feel, colors and waves and electricity in my arms and legs, and they used to wait for me after school and yell “ugly albino” and “moron” and “retard” at me. Sometimes they’d trip me or knock against my backpack or rip it off me and throw all my stuff on the sidewalk. Not too original when you think about it. You just have to learn to walk with your chin up and let them scream their heads off. It doesn’t come easy. It took me a long time not to care about it.

Anyway, after the first day with the eye rolling and the interpolator business, things got better. Maisie had her little girl, Aven, who had to go to school, and she had her husband, Oscar, who was a really sweet man with a deep voice that made you feel warm when you listened to it, and she couldn’t just forget about them, after all. On the second day, I told Maisie I would cover for her because she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. They kept fluttering shut. I said I’d sit with Harry and that she should try to nap or she wouldn’t be much good for anything. Maisie could see Harry liked the feel of my hands and the comfort of the crystals on her belly, and she liked my singing — I sang some old ballads to her that my grandma Lucy used to sing to me. Harry especially liked “Leaving Nancy.” “The parting has come and my weary soul aches / I’m leaving my Nancy, oh.” Harry liked Kali, too. And Kali liked Harry. She licked her face and sniffed her, and after that, she stayed with us in the room and it was easier.

Harry said to Maisie, “Go and rest, love. I’m not dead yet. I’ve still got some kick in me.” Maisie told me she was sorry about being mad at me, and I said it was really okay and not to worry.

Bruno could get upset at all of us and furious at the hospice doctor, Dr. Gupta, who was actually a pretty decent man. He had a green aura, just right for healers. Dr. Gupta came and went to check on things because the meds didn’t always work the way they were supposed to. I remember Bruno in the hallway with the doctor, getting all excited but trying to keep his voice low so Harry wouldn’t hear him, and he kept saying over and over in his gruff way, “She’s not going to suffer. You hear me. She’s not going to suffer. You have to make the pain go away.” After the doctor left, Bruno sat down on a chair and covered his face with his hands and cried hard but not loud. I tiptoed over and put my hand on his shoulder. He looked up at me and said, “Who are you?” He didn’t say it in a nice way, and I didn’t answer him. I didn’t think it would help. Then I thought he said, “She called you untimely.” And I said, “Untimely?” And he said, no, not untimely, a word in German: un-hime-lick. It means uncanny, freaky, weird. I told him that was okay with me. I don’t mind, I said. Bruno shook his head at me, but he smiled just a teeny bit at the corners of his mouth, so I felt better with him after that, and, oh, I have to say, he loved Harry. I’d say he had a gift. He knew how to love her. It was a strong, pure, radiant beam, and he’d sit with her and kiss her hand and pet her head and whisper to her. I heard them laughing, too. I realized I’d like to laugh before I die. I hope I can. But I could tell Harry had been hurt, probably at home somewhere along the line like lots of us. Sometimes I could see and feel the anger burning out of her and into the room, the old red flames dark with smoke and negative energies, the ones I saw when I knew Anton. And I realized Harry had to get clear with everyone she loved before she went on, and that is awfully important no matter what you believe. Then I realized some of those people were already on the other side, and some of them were ghosts with their dim white bones still bound to this side. Poor Harry.

I didn’t meet Ethan until the second day. He had this warm hat pulled down to his eyebrows even though it wasn’t cold outside, and he looked scared and alone. As soon as he came in, I could see he was all blocked up with fears. I had to concentrate and walk around him, but then I saw a hole, a kind of tear or sore spot in his rear heart chakra. And I could feel the wishes flying out of Harry toward him. He sat down in a chair by the bed and he talked to her. He knew a lot. Right away I could tell he was a very intellectual person like Harry. I really didn’t know what they were talking about, but I could tell they were not saying the authentic words they needed to say, and it made me anxious. I started to feel pressure in my chest, so it got a little hard to breathe, and I had to take a break, go into the hall, and clean my own aura. I lay down on the floor and meditated for about half an hour. Winsome, the night nurse, was coming on duty. Isn’t that a pretty name, Winsome? Anyway, she went into the room and Ethan came out, and he sat down on the floor and we talked.

Gosh, I can’t remember everything we said to each other. Ethan petted Kali for a while and asked about her, but then we somehow got onto the subject of being a kid and how hard it can be just because you’re little. Well, I ended up telling him about the time Denny broke my arm. He was having one of his big fights with Mom at the dinner table, and I was just trying to get out of the way because I knew what could happen if I didn’t, but he grabbed me by my arm to get to Mom and threw me against the wall, and then I fell on the floor hard, and a bone broke and my arm was sticking out in a crazy direction. It hurt so much and it looked so different from before, I started screaming. That stopped their fight, anyway. They both looked so surprised. Then Denny came over to me, and I was scared of him and backed away, but he grabbed my arm and set the break. It hurt like the dickens, but right after, it felt much better, like a miracle, really. He did that for me, even though he was the one who smashed my arm to begin with. We all went to the emergency room in the car. Denny and Mom lied about how it happened. They said I fell out of a tree, and the doctor congratulated Denny on his great job, and Denny was proud. Jeez, I could see it in his face. It was like he forgot about hurting me. All he could remember was fixing my arm, not breaking it. Ethan said that was pretty ironic. I said, yeah, it was. We were quiet for a while and then I told him he had aura blockage, and he said, “Really.”

Anyway, I talked to him about Harry and Anton. He wanted me to write something that said I knew it was Harry’s work, and Anton had told me so. I said I would for sure. I asked him why he was talking to his mom about some book when she was about to go over to the other side. After a while, Ethan mentioned this world Harry made up about the Fervidlies, and Ethan said he thought about the bedtime stories she told him and Maisie all the time, and that’s why he became a writer, but he had never told her that. “You ought to tell her,” I said, “because your mom is not going to be here. She’s going on, and for her sake and yours you ought to tell her.” Ethan said he didn’t know why but it was awfully hard for him. He let me put my hands on him then, on his face and shoulders. The laying-on of hands is the oldest healing method and goes back to the Bible. “Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.” It gave him energy. I could feel it. And then we kissed a couple of times. I know this is for the book, and Ethan will probably read it, but that’s okay. The kissing made him feel better, and the colors around him got brighter, and I could see how handsome he was, and I took off his hat. He had nice hair, curly but not as curly as Harry’s used to be, kind of silky curly, and I asked him if I could touch it and he said yes and so I did. I stayed at the lodge, that’s what they call the place. Ethan, Kali, and I slept together in one bed, no sex or anything. In the middle of the night I heard someone talking loudly down the hall about angels. Ethan said not to worry, it was someone called Barometer. He’d explain in the morning.

The third day, Harry looked whiter and weaker. She had to squeeze the drip for more morphine, too. Still, she had a black-and-white checkered notebook on the table beside her and a pen, and even though her hand was shaking badly, she managed to scribble down some words into it. It took a long time, and when she had finished, all her energy was gone. Big pains. I dabbed away her tears with a Kleenex. We put lip balm on her mouth because it was cracking. I put a new crystal on her stomach under her shirt, and we had to adjust the sheets. For the first time I saw the scar with puckered skin around it down there where they had to cut her open. Her whole belly looked funny, really white and soft, but you could almost see through the skin. I kept cleaning the chakras, making the circling motions to clean and comfort. It was working all right, and it made me feel good that I was making progress. I wanted Harry’s last dreams on this side to be good ones, and I knew the purifying would make for peaceful dream pictures.

Sometime in the afternoon, a short, trim older woman came into the room with Maisie. Her gray-and-white hair was cut short and straight at her chin, and she was wearing a long, light green skirt that went all the way down to her ankles, and swished a little when she walked with fast, small steps. Ethan told me she was Harry’s oldest friend, Rachel Briefman. You could feel how wise and confident she was right away. She sat beside Harry for a long time, stroking her cheek and talking to her in a low voice. I think they were remembering when they were girls or maybe Rachel was remembering for Harry. Actually, I had to turn my back for a little while. I pretended to play with Kali because I could feel Rachel missing Harry already, missing her before she was dead, if you see what I mean, and I felt like crying all of a sudden. Harry’s doctor came, too, her shrink doctor, not Dr. Gupta. He was a white guy, pretty old, with thin hair, bald spots, brown horn-rimmed glasses, and a potbelly, not too big, though, just well-fed and comfortable. I liked his eyes. We all left the room, even Bruno and Pearl left. They must have been in there alone for close to an hour. Bruno was pacing back and forth, pushing his hair back with both his hands over and over again. When the doctor came out, I could see on his face that he was sad. He shook my hand in such a polite, respectful way. He let Maisie hug him. Bruno walked him downstairs and outside. I don’t know what they said to each other but the mood around us was changing fast because of time, the time here on earth, not the other time of forever. I prayed and meditated and prayed and meditated for strength to finish the job. Nobody had to know about my praying. Kali knew. She put her head in my lap and looked up at me so tenderly. Sometimes the purest energies come from animals.

Harry wasn’t eating anything. Maisie tried to feed her broth, but she couldn’t do it. I could see that Harry wasn’t going to take any more food, but Maisie wanted to keep her mom alive, keep her going. Harry said she couldn’t feel her feet anymore, so Maisie and I rubbed them, and while we rubbed them, Ethan sat down beside her and started in on the Fervid stories. There was this girl named Nobisa, who wasn’t very clean or very pretty. I liked that because usually, you know, it’s the beautiful princess and blah, blah, blah. Nobisa had adventures with some pretty strange types, an ogre named Burnt because he was once almost killed in a fire and was all scar tissue, and there was a fairy named Fat for the good reason that she was obese and it made flying hard for her. She was so weighted down, but she couldn’t get thin because she had a gigantic hunger for bacon and eggs. She ate her way through all the pigs in the kingdom and the chickens couldn’t lay enough eggs for her appetite, and a war started with the neighbor kingdom because of it. Ethan kept on telling, and Harry lay there with her eyes closed and her fingers holding the morphine drip control, but she smiled now and again.

Then Harry threw up slime with blood in it. She gagged, and I put my hand on her chest and breathed out to her. She moaned. Then she said, “You know, they chopped me up for no reason, Clemmy. They took me apart and poisoned me, but it just made it worse.” Bruno looked so upset. Tears spurted from his eyes.

Right at that moment a wiry man, with long hair and a beard, wearing a T-shirt with a skull on it, came skipping into the room — I mean skipping the way kids skip, step-hop, step-hop — and he started talking real loud and waving his arms like a windmill. To be honest, for a second I thought one of those crazy characters from Harry’s stories had come to life. He bowed down to us like a man who was going to play the piano for a whole hall full of people, and then he shook his fist at the ceiling. But he was winding himself up into a sermon. The words came out fast and furious. The way he talked reminded me of this inspirational preacher Grandma Lucy took me to once, but that guy had his hair all slicked down with grease, and he wore a navy blue suit. The wiry man talked about faith and zeal and tribulation and the blood of the cross and lambs and angels and storms and lightning crashing in the sky and September 11 and even the Internet, although I wasn’t sure how that fit into it. I kept trying to read his aura, but he was hopping around the room on his bowed legs, all jerky and nervous, and it was hard to tell what he was sending off. Harry was moaning, and Bruno looked very angry, and I thought he was going to hit the little man.

Suddenly, the preaching man turned quiet. He said, “Break thou the arm of the evil and wicked man.” It’s from one of the Psalms. I learned most of them when I was younger. It’s not one of the comforting ones, though, not like lying down in green pastures. Then he hopped right over to Psalm 22, another scary passage: “I am poured out like water, / and all my bones are out of joint; / my heart is like wax; / it is melted in the midst of my bowels. / My strength is dried up like a potsherd; / and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; / and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.” I never knew what a potsherd was.

I still had my hands on Harry, and I was breathing in rhythm, and she breathed with me. She said, “I am like a broken vessel.” So Harry must have known her Bible too. I wouldn’t have supposed it, but later Ethan told me Harry had read so many books and of course she knew the Bible because it was “great literature.” He was a little snobby about it. Oh well.

We took her outside because Harry said she wanted to see the water and the sky. Pearl thought this might be too much. But Harry really wanted it, and Bruno said we were going to do it no matter what. His face was all red, and he said, “Goddamn it, if that’s what she wants, that’s what she’s getting.”

It was a big production. We took the IV with us because it rolled, but we had to get her into the wheelchair, which wasn’t easy because she was so tender everywhere; and she was so cold, we had to bundle her up in a big sweater and scarf and wrap two blankets around her. Maisie found a nice green hat with a brim for her head, even though it was spring and the air was warm. Harry looked pretty funny, I have to say. When she was all ready to go out, it was awfully hard to find the person inside all the wrappings. It looked like we were wheeling out a long sleeping bag in a hat. We took her down in the building’s freight elevator. I hadn’t even noticed it before. Bruno said he was the one who had to steer the chair because he knew how to handle it, but he bumped Harry a couple of times anyway, and she would squawk “Ow” every time, but just for a second. Pearl came along with us, all calm and clear with her straight-up-and-down posture, very dignified, and the skinny man, too, who seemed tuckered out from his sermon, was walking with a limp all of a sudden. I wondered if he wasn’t feeling sympathy for Harry and it made him lame for a while.

Ethan whispered to me that the wiry person was the Barometer. His mother was killed by a tornado, and he had spent time, a lot of time, in mental hospitals, but he lived with Harry and Bruno now. We wheeled Harry down by the water so she could take a look at it. I think she wanted to feel the sun on her face, because she lifted it up to the sky. Kali was prancing on the leash and pulling me here and there to get in the smells. How she loves her smells.

I pulled Kali back from the others and walked a few yards away. I thought they should have Harry to themselves — Bruno and Maisie and Ethan should, anyway. I watched the gulls and looked over at Lady Liberty. I thought about what Harry must be feeling because she wouldn’t see her again, not like this, anyway. I wanted her to know it would be better, more beautiful on the other side, but it was sad because we can’t help loving what’s around us even if it is grasping and attachment to the things that don’t really matter when you take a higher spiritual perspective. The trip didn’t last long. Harry couldn’t take it. Her hat fell into her face, and Maisie had to straighten it out because Harry was too feeble to do it. She fixed her mom’s scarf, too, and I heard Harry whisper, “I’m the baby now.” And Maisie smiled, but when she walked along beside Bruno and Harry couldn’t see, Maisie’s face was wet as wet could be with all the tears.

Aven, Harry’s granddaughter, arrived after her school was over. She was a tall kid for her age, with short hair, big eyes, and a serious face. She looked like a tomboy. Ethan said, “She hates pink. Won’t wear it.” He said she was a math whiz, too: “Calculates like that.” He snapped his fingers. I think she knew she was going to say goodbye to Harry. She called her Grandmother. I kind of wish she could have seen Harry a little earlier in the day, because Harry was so exhausted from the trip down to the water that she couldn’t really say much. Maisie brought Aven up to Harry, and Aven looked at her grandmother’s white wrinkled skin with a big vein standing out in her temple and at her eyes, which were all caved in, and at her flaky chapped lips, and she was afraid. She held back, didn’t want to touch her grandma. Maisie gave her a little punch in her back to push her toward Harry, and I could see Aven’s face crumple up, and she sucked her lips into her mouth. She was only eight years old. Maybe nine. I knew Aven was about to burst out crying, so I picked up Kali and brought her over to the two of them. Kali whimpered a little, and she sniffed Harry. Kali knew. My little dog knew just what was going on. So I took Aven’s hand in mine, and we petted Kali together, and then I put our hands on Harry’s shoulder very gently, and we petted Harry together for a while, but I kept my other arm around Aven’s shoulder. Then I felt Maisie’s hand on my back. That was nice. Maisie thought it was okay. Harry’s eyes were teary, and I thought she was going to start bawling with her granddaughter standing there in front of her; but she looked at Aven, and her bleary eyes didn’t look so bleary for a second, and she made a noise in her throat and then, as loudly as she could, which wasn’t very loud, she croaked out, “Fight for yourself. Don’t let anybody push you around. You hear me?”

Aven bit her bottom lip, and I could see her white teeth. She looked at her mother because she didn’t know what to say. Maisie nodded at her. It was the smallest nod I ever saw in my whole life, and Aven said, “I won’t, Grandmother. I promise.” To be honest, I said a long “Whew” to myself. I felt glad we had gotten through that one without some big emotional disaster.

Well, after that, we waited mostly. Bruno didn’t leave Harry. He had a bed set up right beside her. There was room for all of us. Maisie, Oscar, and Aven slept in one of the rooms, and they gave me and Kali a little study room down the hall, where Harry had done her bills for her foundation and stuff. Ethan kissed me again but he went into a room by himself. Winsome arrived for her shift. Harry was still alive in the morning but restless, talking and moaning. Dr. Gupta came to look at her, and he talked to Bruno in the corner. Bruno was nodding. I didn’t understand the medical stuff, but they weren’t going to let the pain get the better of Harry, so they gave her drugs and Harry got really quiet. She lay there as still as could be, so still it made me think about how all the leaves stop moving right before a big storm. I kept cleaning even though Bruno yelled at me, “I still don’t know what the hell you’re doing here!” Ethan told him to leave me alone. “Mother wanted her here. You know it and I know it,” he said. “Let her stay.” Ethan was a hero to me right then.

Well, late in the morning, around eleven thirty, we were all sitting around, just waiting for Harry to die. I had done what I could, and I felt pretty confident the chakras were as clean as they were ever going to be. I had put my purple agate on her belly to open the spiritual flood when the time came, because it works on the upper chakra. Then, all of sudden, we saw Harry jolt in the bed, and in a voice that woke us all up, she said, “No.” Then she said it again, and then a third time just for good measure. And after that, she said nothing at all.

A man named Phineas arrived that afternoon. He was a slender black guy, medium height, actually he was very light brown if you want me to describe him right. He had lots of freckles on his face and thin, arched eyebrows, and a soft mouth with a bottom lip that stuck out a little. I liked his clothes, skinny pants, boots, and a nice-looking sports jacket. They all knew him. Harry couldn’t talk to him and that was too bad, because he’d come all the way from Argentina. Ethan informed me that he was one of Harry’s covers. He had played a part for her, like Anton, but he hadn’t been upset about it the way Anton was. Phineas sat beside Harry and talked to her even though she couldn’t hear him, at least not in the ordinary way, because she was not awake anymore. He talked for a long time and he held her hand. I remember he called her “pal” and “my pal, old pal.”

Later, Phinny — that was his nickname — ran out to get sandwiches for us, and we all sat and ate them and talked about this and that. Ethan read the newspaper that was lying on the table, and Maisie got upset and said we were all forgetting Harry, who was lying over there almost dead, and what were we doing? But I told her that’s how it is. We aren’t dying now. We will all die later. We have to eat. Harry would want us to eat, wouldn’t she? It was raining outside, raining hard outside the windows, which were covered with little droplets that ran down the glass like tears. I remember thinking that.

That night I slept with Kali curled up next to me, and I wondered if Winsome or Bruno would come in and say that Harry had died, but she was alive in the morning. Dr. Gupta told us her body was shutting down. But Harry was still breathing. And the rain stopped, and the sun came out, and Bruno opened the window to let in some air. I took Kali out for a walk and ran with her past the water taxis and the big warehouse where they show art, and I thought maybe Harry should have had her works in there. When I came back in we waited some more. I studied Harry’s aura — so much cleaner. The colors were pure. Some red, but lots of greens and blues. It made me happy because I had answered my destiny. I daydreamed about my apartment and my teas all lined up in my kitchenette and the clients I had canceled to be with Harry, and I was a little bored while I was waiting, to tell the truth, but I didn’t want to leave her yet. I wanted to be there for the transition, for the time when Harry would leave our world for higher realms of consciousness.

Before she left, Harry made a strange sound, a deep, dark shaking noise, and when I heard it, the sound bounced around in my own head, an announcement of an end and a new beginning. We were so quiet. I did not go to Harry, but I saw the light leap up and out around her. Dr. Gupta, solemn and straight, told us she was dead. Harry looked so still and her skin was kind of see-through, but I didn’t see a shred of pain in her face. I knew it was time for me to step away. Bruno was holding her, and Maisie and Ethan were standing by the bed, so just a few minutes later, I picked up Kali and my bag of stones and toe-heeled my way out of the room as quiet as a mouse and called Legends from the kitchen to come and pick me up. I left the purple agate, and I hoped they would remember to rinse it.

I have only one thing left to say. I stayed in touch with Ethan and, about eight months later, he asked me if I wanted to come and see some of Harry’s work while it was still in the studio. They were organizing it or something. I said yes. Maisie and Ethan took me in. I’d left Kali with Deborah, my neighbor in the building, because Deb just loves babysitting her. Ethan unlocked a door, opened it, and flicked on the lights that came on above me. It was late fall, and the sky through the windows was gray with some brown and white in it. They told me Bruno and the Barometer were still living there in the building, and that they didn’t get along too well, so there were problems, but they were trying to sort them out and there was something about Harry’s will and that she had provided for them; but I wasn’t listening, because I was looking around me at all the things in the room, the big soft dolls and the rooms and the houses. There were some small sculptures hanging from the ceiling. One was of a penis, and I just had to laugh at it. And then I felt that funny lifting feeling I get sometimes, as if I’m getting pulled up toward the ceiling. It was a sign, maybe it was coming from Harry. I could feel something important was happening to me and then I saw a woman squatting on the floor, not a real person, but a great big statue with no hair. And she had lots of people inside her head, but also numbers and letters, and she was raining numbers and letters and little people from her private parts, her vagina, anyway, and I felt a big grin come over my face, and I walked over to her to get a close look. There’s a lot of art I don’t understand. To be honest, it’s kind of boring to me, but this was different. I got down on my hands and knees and started looking around at the tiny ones, and I had the sacred feeling. I told Ethan I had it. I opened up my arms and said, “Wow,” and then I saw her. “Look,” I said to them. “Look, it’s Harry. Can I touch her?” They didn’t know that Harry had put herself into the art, so it was exciting. I pointed at the little person, and Ethan and Maisie got down on their knees. They saw her right away. Maisie said, “It’s Mother, all right.” “Look,” I said, “she’s just walking along, all happy and healthy, just minding her own business, looking up at the sky.” I guess there were too many little sculptures for them to have noticed their teeny-weeny mom among all those other little people.

They told me about the lady philosopher who was almost forgotten, whose name I can’t remember, but who inspired the big woman and all her little people. She lived a long, long time ago, in the medieval times, I think. Margot, maybe. I’m awfully bad at remembering names. I’ll have to ask Ethan about her when I see him again. But the important fact is this: While I was down on my knees looking at the little figure of Harry, it started to glow. I swear. It glowed purple. I was seeing its energy. It had an electromagnetic field — that little thing did. I was very quiet then. We walked around and looked at some of the other pieces of art, and then, when we were just about to go through the door, I turned around to take one last look at Harry’s artworks, and then I saw their auras blazing out all around them. I took a big breath in and held it for a few seconds. They weren’t people, after all. They were just things a person had made. For the first time, I really had the understanding of why the master taught that there were artists on the higher plane living on Sirius. It was because they had given their spirits and energies into what they made. They must have had a lot of extra energy to give away. Anyway, I swear the whole room was lit by those shivering rainbows.

Ethan and Maisie must have seen that something had happened to me, because they asked me what the matter was, but I said nothing was the matter. I said I was fine, which I was. If I had told them about the lights and the colors, they would’ve given me more funny looks, even though they meant well and were really kindhearted. Both of them were. I closed my eyes. I opened them again, and I just stood there smiling because the colors were still there — reds and oranges and yellows and greens and blues and violets — blazing hot and bright in that big room where Harry used to work, and I knew for certain that each and every one of those wild, nutty, sad things Harry had made was alive with the spirit. For a second there, I could almost hear them breathing.