A Touch of Magic
11 Escaping Pain
16 September 1974, Minneapolis
THERE WAS AN AIR of expectancy in the apartment as they all gathered in the living room with coffee or tea. Judith offered Serepte and Paul the loveseat but Serepte pushed the young man into a large overstuffed chair and perched on his lap. Judith and Wayne took the loveseat while the other three huddled together on the massive sofa, leaving plenty of room for Judith and Wayne if they decided to join them.
“I need to tell you a story,” Serepte began, looking first at Paul and then at her roommates. “I’ve walked around this carefully for too many years. I nearly missed my initiation into the circle at Lughnasad five years ago because of it.” Paul shifted and brought his arm around the young woman who had already captivated him. She cuddled to his side, drawing strength from him. “I determined that I would not tell it until I felt it was critical. With Paul holding me, I believe I have found the strength.”
“Serepte, you don’t have to go on,” Wayne said softly. There was a tone of sadness in his voice. For the past five years, when something weighed heavily on his young friend’s heart, she had sought the comfort of being held by him. Now, she was truly in the arms of the one he knew would take on that role. As if reading his mind, Judith stood and pulled Wayne with her to the sofa so they could cuddle with the others. It was a tight fit, but none of them minded. “The night you recovered was the night this circle formed. Our first act was to create a bridge for you to return to us.”
“It was not just a recovery. I died,” Serepte whispered. “That’s the story neither my mother nor I have ever told you.”
I’d been sent to Doc and Margaret to keep me away from the dangers Mom detected. You’d experienced attacks in the theatre and Mom had been attacked, too. She wanted me somewhere safe while she performed the final rituals for summoning the tools at Litha.
While Margaret and William, Doc’s butler, were both kind and thoughtful, they were old. And Doc was bedridden with cancer that was eating away at him. It wasn’t like I had no sympathy for the old man, but it was so depressing to be in a house where death was just lingering somewhere in the corners. I did what I always did and played my flute for hours. With the door open so Doc could hear me.
We had our own Litha ritual while you were scrying in the cauldron. Everyone thought it might be Doc’s last night with us. I was shocked at how the disease had ravaged his body. It was clear that he was in pain. I became angry. The disease had no right to take Doc. As I stood before him, I could feel a pulsing strength flowing into me—directly from the Great Circle, I believed.
I took Doc’s hand, but before he could speak, I felt the ripping attack of the disease. I felt it—inside myself. I felt the pain as if it was in me.
I was terrorized. I couldn’t escape from the pain and disease. I screamed but I couldn’t let go. I just kept taking more and more into me. Sick. I was so sick. Color returned to Doc’s face and he looked like he’d just been resurrected. He flexed his hand in mine and then the pain overwhelmed me and I guess I passed out. They say I went into a coma.
When Mom got back a few days later, I was still in the hospital. Physiologically, the doctors said, there was no sign of injury or illness, but symptomatically I appeared near death as if I were eaten by cancer. And Doc stood next to my bed, miraculously healed of his cancer. Those are things you know, or may have assumed—that I healed him. But that day I crossed into a different world. That’s the only way I can describe it. I sure wasn’t in Kansas. Or Indiana or Connecticut.
The sun was brighter than I’d ever seen. Birds sang songs I’d never heard, and I saw colors more vivid than any I’d seen before. The flute note I’d been holding in my head suddenly burst into a whole song and I moved my fingers, even though there was no flute in my hands. I could hear a symphony. Beings more beautiful than I can describe floated from place to place. How can I… I saw pain and suffering as… beautiful creatures, caught in… or birthed in the wrong world.
It was so beautiful!
And they loved my music. When I played… when I breathed another note of the strange music in my head… illness, disease, and pain left me and entered this beautiful world where it belonged. As it slipped out of me, it bowed gracefully and thanked me for releasing it to its true form. It prayed that I did not find it too much of an inconvenience and apologized for any suffering it may have caused.
If you could see the pain of our world as I saw it then… when it was free in its own world… My words aren’t adequate to speak of such beauty. It was alive and loving. The beings meant no harm, but they suffered from being captured in human hosts and longed to be free.
The problem was, I’d entered their world and I didn’t know how to get back. I could fall asleep there and dream of my body in the hospital, but I couldn’t touch it. I wasn’t there. I just floated in the room looking at my body, watching doctors and nurses and Mom. Even Doc and Margaret hovered around, and Doc begged me to give the pain back to him and let him be the one to die. But I couldn’t even feel my own body. There is a Sanskrit word for different planes of being. I was in a different loka.
Then I heard music—a counterpoint to my own. Someone else was playing at the edge of my consciousness. One night I swung rapidly toward the music and shouted, “Who are you?”
It was as if I walked out of a fog into a beautiful garden with all the things of home in it. Everything had a magical glow but, unlike the beings of pain, the garden was earthly. I saw the world as if through the eyes of the creator who thought it into existence.
And I saw my house. Or at least it looked like my house. I could feel an invitation to enter, and like Alice in Wonderland, I went in. There were lots of familiar things. It was my home except it was a little grander. I could see some of Doc’s home in it. The detail of William’s carvings was ultra-sharp and clear. The pictures looked alive. It’s like I was in the essence of the house, not in its embodiment. A fire was laid in the fireplace and a man stood there in front of it looking at me.
He held out his arms and I just flowed into his embrace. I found my father—or he found me. There was so much warmth and love and comfort in his arms.
“I have been calling for you, my daughter,” he said softly. “You have been so wrapped up in the pain of your body and the beauty of the other world that you could not hear me.”
“Father? Daddy? Where are we?”
“In my head, I guess. In my world. I can’t leave here without bringing this world to an end. Can I do that? Perhaps I can if you help me.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You will discover it eventually. For now, what you must do is learn to release the pain and suffering without crossing into their world. You are as much a foreigner in their world as they are in yours.”
“I don’t want to cause them pain. They’re beautiful,” I said. “What should I do?”
“Use your music like your mother… like your muse did. It is your great gift and even greater burden. You can accept the pain of others into yourself through your intense empathy, but you must learn to release it quickly so you can survive.”
“It hurt, Daddy,” I cried.
“One day you will find that it is not duty that impels you to accept the suffering, but love. When that day comes, I will be waiting for you and will join you in your world,” he said. “Now, my daughter, before it is too late, play for me.”
I picked up my flute that just happened to be lying on a music stand, and he seated himself at the piano to accompany me. I played all the music I’d memorized over the past years and no matter what I played, his accompaniment was perfect. I finally ran out of repertoire and started to lay down the flute, but he stopped me.
“Play,” he said. “Don’t be frightened. Your flute knows you well. Kiss breath into her and she will show you your very soul.”
I considered what he was asking. I’d run out of music I knew and he was asking me to play music I didn’t know. Music that simply came from breathing life into the silver tube. His accompaniment ran beneath a beautiful new sound I played but didn’t recognize. It was… my flute… my hands… my breath, but the music was its own. We played the improvised and spontaneous music, deviating from the patterns of staves and notes as we broached new and unexplored paths, coaxing sounds from the instruments that they were not intended to create. And in that music, the secrets of life were opened. My soul was laid bare and I saw beyond time and space. I want to say more about it, but I find that even now I see it as if I glimpsed something through a parting of the curtains, but when I went to the window, it was gone.
At last, the music fell silent. We wept in each other’s arms. The house and library and music faded away, and we stood together looking at my body in the hospital bed.
“You must decide, daughter, and you must do it quickly,” he whispered. “Will you accept this gift you have been given or will you flee from the pain that it brings with it? The time is now.”
There was a sudden flurry of activity around the hospital bed. Mommy was crying, and I realized my body had just died. The moment had truly come, whether I was ready for it or not. I looked back, but Father and all the world that surrounded him were gone. The hospital room became my only reality.
Then a gateway to my body opened and I passed through. I heard a loud gasp as air rushed back into my lungs. They ached as if I’d been holding my breath for a long time. It hurt so much to be alive! I had to sing out the notes I’d so recently played and let the pain escape through an open window to its world. It shocked everyone to have this dead girl suddenly fill her lungs and start singing. All the aching in my life—my loneliness, fears, lack of direction—went rushing out of me like a tidal wave. With my next breath, I called out “Mommy!” Suddenly people crowded around again, and Mommy was holding me and crying. As the pain fled, I saw a remnant of the beauty that I had known for such a short time.
I made my choice. From that moment, I’ve been unable to turn my back on pain and suffering. I must heal and release the pain back into its world through my music.
Paul cradled Serepte against his chest as she sobbed. Tears flowed freely from the eyes of all seven in the room.
Into the air surrounding the soft sobs of the group, a voice sang softly. It used no words—or the words were not understandable. One might have thought it was gibberish. But it had a calming effect. It was peaceful. Serepte looked up into Paul’s eyes as he sang to her and reached for a recorder on the table nearby. Meaghan placed it in her hand as the rest of the circle gathered around the couple and joined hands. Serepte played a few notes, joining Paul’s voice, then blended with the flow of his music. Wayne and the women closed their eyes and each found a tone to hum—a drone beneath the blending of their instruments.
At last, the music wound down and each sagged against the others. Serepte lifted her lips and kissed Paul.
Paul held her in his arms at the door and kissed her again.
“You should go now,” she said, holding him closer. “I don’t want you to go. You should go now.”
“Your cab is here, Paul,” Elizabeth called from the living room.
“I should go now.” He kissed Serepte again.
“Maybe next time… you could stay… later,” she whispered.
“Tomorrow?”
“Better make it Wednesday. I’m going to be too combustible tomorrow.”
“Whatever speed you say, Serepte. I… I’m going to spend tomorrow looking at some of my options for the rest of my tour this fall. I’m thinking I might want to be based here in Minneapolis.”
“Here. In Minneapolis,” she giggled. “I have a chamber recital at the Art Institute on Wednesday afternoon. Perhaps you could see me there and then come home with me. For dinner. You know?”
He kissed her again and slipped out the door to the cab.
“He’s a very nice young man,” Elizabeth said from her seat on the sofa in the living room. She watched the cab pull away from the curb and Serepte approached her with a sigh. Elizabeth patted the seat beside her. Serepte cuddled up against the mother figure of their circle and Elizabeth wrapped her in a hug.
“He really kisses good.” Serepte giggled. Elizabeth snorted. “Not that I have that many to compare to. I just… Liz? Is it too soon to think I’m in love?”
“Oh, honey. Too soon? Too soon to have your heart opened? Too soon to know joy? Too soon to love? No, dear,” Elizabeth said softly. “But it is always too soon for heartbreak. Too soon for loss. Too soon for sorrow. Still, when we open ourselves to love, we open ourselves to all the others as well.”
“You still miss your husband, don’t you?”
“Every day. Even when I am with the loving family of our circle, I miss him.”
“I never knew my father. Not really. I mean, it seems like we still talk sometimes, but he was never ‘here’ as part of my daily life. Still, something inside me yearns to bring him home because I know my mom misses him every day. And I miss her.”
“Why did we come here to Minneapolis?” Elizabeth asked.
“Because she had to know there was nothing at home to hold her back. There was nothing to prevent her from going where she needed to go,” Serepte sighed.
“She’s not coming back, is she?” Elizabeth said.
“Not without my father.”
17 September 1974, Minneapolis
Paul was driven. He ordered room service for breakfast, so he could continue to make phone calls. His agent was uncooperative until Paul threatened to cancel all performances to care for his health. His agency, of course, had heard about his success in Minneapolis. The Showbox had contacted them to revise the schedule for the following weekend. They wanted more performances and had offered both the cover and a percentage of the bar as an incentive. When Paul threatened to not sign the new contract, his agent caved.
“Paris, you are a hot property after this weekend. This is the break you’ve been waiting for. I can get you into Vegas on the strength of this one review. Don’t throw that away,” the agent said.
“Ricky, I know you want me to be successful and I’m not fighting you on this. I just need to establish Minneapolis as my base right now. I’ve gone everywhere you wanted for the past five years. I’ve never complained about taking a train for twelve hours in order to get to a two-night engagement. You’ve booked every opportunity no matter where it was and how long it would take me to get there. I’m just asking you to give me a break for a few months and focus on what I can get to from Minneapolis,” Paul protested.
“You don’t know what you are giving up here,” Ricky responded.
“You don’t know what I’d have to give up in order to continue,” Paul shot back.
“So that’s it,” the agent sighed. “You found a girl. Paris, in your situation, you could have a hundred girls. I’ve even suggested a few in places you performed.”
“Not this girl.”
“Right. Okay, kid. I can get you off the train to Spokane and Seattle. That clears you for the next three weeks after you close in Minneapolis. It’s a big mistake to cancel the Coast Starlight, though. Portland, Sacramento, and the California Coast to LA-LA Land. Bundle up your sweetheart and take her with you as your assistant. And keep me posted!”
“Thanks, Ricky. I need to find a place to live here. Minneapolis is going to be my home base.”
“You’ll feel different about it when you’re shoveling six feet of snow.”
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