Tag: Wounded Healers

 
Across South Street from the Port Authority’s Downtown Manhattan Heliport is the Viet Nam Veterans’ Plaza. The city is still deserted, at least at this end, and a mixture of police, National Guard, Army, Marines, and Special Forces surround us. Some have their weapons on us, others are buying doughnuts and coffee from some street vendors. The police are told to remove the vendors, this is a secured area. The police say, “Back it up, get out of here,” then count their change, their mouths full of donut. Out in the East River are warships, their guns set to level Manhattan. Above us, swarming like locusts and near blotting out the sun, are Cobras and BlackHawks, combat helicopters in steady formation. Further above are bombers which I can hear but not see. The sky, where it shows between and above buildings, is bluer than I remember seeing except for up north in New Hampshire where pollution is petitioning for repatriation. Clouds and mists rise off the river, both due to the warbirds’ blades. Despite all the activity, there is no wind and the smell of the river hangs on us like old, rotted clothes. There are no birds where we stand, but several pigeons wait for the soldiers and police to drop their donuts and flee.

Prior to the Healers coming to the Island, movable versions of The Wall, The Memorial Flag, The Book, and a few other, similar memorials are on display in Veterans’ Plaza. Beriah and Jenreel walk towards them. Our ocean of defenders moves with us. The birds race forward and scramble to gather crumbs and avoid boots before they take to the air again.

Beriah places his hands on The Wall, presses his fingers into the names, and closes his eyes.

“Is everything okay?”

Jenreel leans against The Book, his face and eyes looking at the guardians of our peace occulting us as much as possible from onlookers. “These serves as a memory for those who passed in conflict.”

“Yes.” I notice some officers and older enlistees are acutely attentive to us.

“We don’t have such things.”

The secret of world peace is at hand? “You don’t have conflict?”

Cetaf bends over The Memorial Flag. “There is always conflict. We don’t have such memories.”

“Are there no fighters, no soldiers, no warriors where you come from?”

Jenreel shakes his head. “Of course there are. They’re all dead.”

“Don’t you wish to remember them?”

“Time spent dwelling on the past can blind one to today.”

“There are those of my people who say, ‘If we don’t study the mistakes of the past we are doomed to repeat them’.”

“Each morning be a blank slate that the new day may write itself upon you. Be wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.”

Frog Lips, The Wisp, and Elephant Toes are Zen Christians? Did they read earth literature before they came, deciding whether or not they’d enjoy this holiday spot?

The police and soldiers shrug and away. The Healers don’t threaten their job security after all, they’re just Joseph Campbell students. Birds land on Cetaf and he picks up crumbs and scraps to feed them.

“I don’t understand.” This has become my stanchion in the short time I’ve known them. “Doesn’t that leave yourself open to repeating your mistakes?”

“It leaves you open to experiences unique to this moment. Sometimes experiences follow patterns. Respond differently to the pattern and it breaks. Mistakes are not repeated.”

“But – ”

Beriah waves his four fingered hand palm up at the memorials. “As long as you need to mark how long you’ve been free of a drug, you’re still doing a drug. You must become “Do something else” to be free of a drug. If you continue to accept your disease, you can never accept your health because the two do not leave room for each other. Continue to glorify conflict by remembering it and you’ll never be free of it.”

“But you said there would always be conflict.”

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Previous entries in The Book of the Wounded Healers (A Study in Perception) series

 
Fourth grade, now a student in Mrs. Woodbury’s class, and we’re watching a US-centric documentary about the 1960s Space Race. One of the kids in class asked why the Russians always landed on land and we always landed in the ocean. I remember Mrs. Woodbury dismissing the question. “Oh, we could land on land if we wanted to…” I don’t remember the rest of her answer. What I do remember is knowing, knowing even then, that Mrs. Woodbury was lying, that we couldn’t land on land and that water was safer for us. What I remember most was knowing in that sacred unspeakable way only a child can know, even as Jiminy would know, that Mrs. Woodbury was afraid of the truth, afraid to admit that the Russians could do something we couldn’t.

The man is in the fifth floor window of Southbridge Towers, looking onto Pedestrian, with a gun aimed at Beriah. He isn’t dressed as a laborer, which surprises me. He is smartly attired and I have the impression he is well educated and successful.

Beriah stares up at him. “We represent an end to all he believes is true.”

“Huh?”

“The man up there, the man aiming the weapon at me.”

“Aren’t you going to do anything about him?”

“There is nothing I can do.”

“You can duck, you can hide. You changed Brooklyn and the East River into a desert to get here. Don’t tell me there’s nothing you can do.”

“The man holds the weapon, not I. We changed nothing, only took the path which opened for us.”

I’m not listening. “But he’s going to kill you.”

“No, he’s going to kill himself.”

I have trouble with this. The gun is aimed at us. “How can you say that? He’s aiming at us, dammit.”

“He aims at us because he sees a world beyond that which he knows, beyond that which he has worked to make real. He sees in us a truth incongruous to his truth. Our destruction means his world is safe, nothing is new, his security is affirmed. Either he destroys us or he starts over. But we are already here. By being there he acknowledges we are here. Destroying us would not destroy his memory of us.”

“Huh?”

Beriah waves at the man. It’s such a human movement I wonder where he learned it.

But then again, he could want to make sure the man in the window hits him and no one else. “No. No matter what he does, he can not destroy us.”

There is a gunshot. A deep, dark blast which echoes along the city’s canyons and blots out the sun as thousands of pigeons take flight. I dive to the crash of glass and metal, thinking his first shot went wide, soon there will be another, and I curl into as tight a ball as I can.

Jenreel, Beriah, and Cetaf look down at me. All three offer me their hands. They are fine therefore I am shot. I run my hands over myself while still on the ground, realizing that to do so meant the bullet hasn’t penetrated anything above my waist.

There are no wounds, no holes, no penetrations, no broken bones. Only a bruised knee from when I went down. The Healers help me up.

“Are you okay?”

Beriah’s face, if completely human, would show concern. “No. We are the Healers from the Land of Barass. I am Beriah.” He motions toward Cetaf.

SNAFU.

I interrupt him. “Yeah, yeah. You’re not hurt? I thought I heard a gunshot. I’m sure I did.” I look up to the man in the window and see him hanging there, half in and half out of the window, his tie a creek from which blood streams down the building’s side.

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Previous entries in The Book of the Wounded Healers (A Study in Perception) series

 
Have you ever noticed that your sock can drive you crazy? If the seam makes a little ball or wads up under your toes, it can drive you crazy?

Cetaf nudges my arm.

“What?”

“It hurts.”

I watch a corporal being ragged out by a lieutenant. The reason for this ragging is the corporal ordered some men to move back as we moved forward. The corporal did this just as every other corporal I’ve known to do it, the way he learned to do it by watching the DIs at Basic, by yelling at the top of his lungs and degrading his men in front of others.

The problem, it seemed, is Frog Lips, Elephant Toes, The Wisp, and I are the others and the lieutenant is concerned the corporal’s behavior may cause these three to shit sparks and otherwise cause more damage to our ozone layer.

He does this by spinning the corporal around and spittily saying he is dismissed, go away, be here no more.

As I watched the corporal being punished for doing his job how he thought he was suppose to do his job, I remembered Mrs. Woodbury, grammar school fourth grade. My strongest memory of Mrs. Woodbury stems from third grade, not even in her class yet. I had to get the boys in my class in line at the end of recess. We’d all go back into the school, nice and orderly, side by side, all in a line. It was my first day with this monumental responsibility. Everybody was making noise. I did to them exactly what my father did to me when I was making noise and he wanted it quiet. I yelled at the top of my lungs, “QUIET!” Mrs. Woodbury grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around, slapped me hard across the face and shoved me into the school. All by myself. All the kids, boys and girls, laughed. I didn’t know what I did wrong. Never even let myself cry.

“What hurts?” I ask. “Where?”

There are tears in his eyes. This walking wall sheds tears like a mourner on overtime and does nothing to stop or hide it. From me.

From anybody, really, but it is my arm he nudged.

He held his face in his hands and shook it from side to side as if caught in some kind of rage. “These are the strongest tears of all.”

I looked at Cetaf, Jenreel, and Beriah. I looked up and down the street, at military types coming closer and police types moving away. “I don’t know what to do.”

Jenreel and Beriah move to either side of Cetaf and touch him. Jenreel stands in front and wraps his arms as much around Cetaf as he can. “The first communication must be instructions on how to build a receiver.”

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Previous entries in The Book of the Wounded Healers (A Study in Perception) series