Authors: Cathy Perkins,Taylor Lee,J Thorn,Nolan Radke,Richter Watkins,Thomas Morrissey,David F. Weisman
He opened the door for Kate and reached into the car to shake my hand hello.
“Why don’t you guys stick around and we’ll take you to dinner?” he offered.
I thought quickly for a believable excuse not to do so but was saved from all that by Kate saying, “Jeremy doesn’t like driving in the dark and I don’t like driving at all so we are getting on our way so neither of us has to do what we don’t like to do. Thanks for the offer and you can rest assured that we’ll take a rain check on that.”
Luckily they didn’t offer to put us up for the night, and on our way we were.
“How are Warren and Louise?” Kate asked as we pulled onto the Brooklyn Bridge.
“You know, they looked pretty much the same as they did back in the day,” I said with some reservation.
“Are you sure they haven’t been mummified?” she said with a slight chuckle.
We stopped on the Thruway for coffee and a snack and resumed the three hour drive north, enjoying our conversation about our visit to the Big Apple.
* * *
That night I was visited in my dreams by the kid who claimed to be my Uncle. I was standing outside the same house as in the first dream and again it was raining. Uncle Joe was in the window staring at me but this time he didn’t beckon me toward him. As I stood there watching him a man came up to me and asked, “Did he tell you about the name?” There standing next to me in a dark suit and a fedora hat was the Marianist, just as I remembered him from high school, Brother Scheible.
I suddenly needed to get away from him and the house, and started running into the night as I saw Uncle Joe come out of the house and start running behind me. He called to me. “Wait, Jeremy! I have something to tell you… something I can tell only you.”
I was frightened by this and for some reason, wanted to find my way back to the hospital.
My wife was shaking me as I awoke. “You’re having a dream, Honey… you’re having a dream… wake up.”
A wave of relief swept over me when I discovered that I’d been dreaming, but I still felt as if I was being chased. I looked around to make sure that the dream hadn’t followed me back to the waking state.
“How long was I doing this?” I asked Kate.
“Don’t know, but your yelling and moving all over the bed woke me.”
“Sorry. It was such a vivid dream. Scary, it was absolutely scary,” I said, remembering the futility of trying to run away from what was terrifying me. That familiar and strange feeling was back to where it was the night I nearly died.
“Honey, I think we might want to get you some help with this. These dreams seem to take you over and make you act like something or someone is actually chasing you.”
“What do you mean? Do you think I’m losing it?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but
something
is going on and I’m concerned for you.” She looked deeply into my eyes as she spoke.
“Maybe you’re right, Sweetie. We’d better find us a shrink before I go completely off the train.” I was getting to the point of wanting some kind of help even if it was a psychiatrist. Which was something completely new to me.
CHAPTER THREE
“Doctor Keough, how are you?” I said extending my hand and responding to his greeting. He invited me to sit in a chair directly opposite of his. He had the stereotypical look of what I had always thought psychiatrists looked like. At least in the movies. He had wild hair, thick glasses and pudgy face.
“Can I get you something to drink? Water maybe?” he offered.
“How about a vodka martini?” I joked.
“Not just yet,” he said with a smile. “You have a unique name. I have to say, I’ve never met anyone named Storyteller before.”
“Yes, I did have a go of it when I was younger but I survived to tell the story. Get it? As a matter of fact my friends call me ‘Teller’, and my close friends call me ‘Tell’.”
“Like William?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Come now. The man who shot the apple off his son’s head…?”
“Oh yeah…
that
would be me. I couldn’t shoot anything off a building, even if I had a cannon. And was standing right next to it.”
We talked a bit more and then got into my reason for being there. I was not at all uncomfortable discussing my heart attack but was less comfortable talking about the near death experience and the dreams.
“Anything happen when you died? Like did you see a bright light or float around the room?” He was serious with his question but I sensed a veiled meaning in it.
I didn’t answer directly, but rather asked him if
he
had ever died.
“Yes I did,” he said. “I did indeed. And I had quite an experience right after. That’s why I asked you what I asked you.”
“Did you see people from your distant past?” I asked.
“Did you?” He responded.
“Please answer me. I need to try to figure out what exactly happened to me… and is still happening,” I continued.
“I was asked a few questions by several people. They were interesting questions,” he said as he relaxed back in his chair.
I leaned forward and said in a whisper, “What the hell is going on here? Is this something that is happening to everyone or what? How is it that I come to you for help and you tell me you’re having the same experience?”
“There are no accidents, my friend. There is a pattern here and not only with you, but several other people with whom I have had one form or another of contact since my near death.” He looked up at the ceiling and laced his fingers behind his head. “I am supposed to come at things from a scientific perspective, not a metaphysical one… and, I am being totally out of line here.”
“This is beyond weird,” I said, the words involuntarily falling out of my mouth. “I was visited by a teacher I haven’t seen since I was in high school. Then he shows up in my hospital room, in the flesh after I saw him in the spirit.”
“Where did you go to school?” he asked.
“High School, or college?”
“Where your teacher was. The one you saw.”
“That was Sacred Heart High School in Brooklyn.”
“You saw him during the experience
and
then after they brought you back?” Doctor Keough was being drawn into my story and seemed focused on Brother Scheible.
“How would you describe him?” asked the good doctor.
“Oh, I guess about 5’10”or so. Stocky build. Germanic features. Light hair. Wagnerian.”
“Was he as old as he should have been?”
“No, he was exactly as I remembered him looking the last time I saw him, over 30 years ago. I thought he was a hallucination until he started popping up where he popped up. They gave me some heavy drugs I think. That could cause hallucinations, couldn’t it?” Keough just stared at me.
“After that long of a period of time, Jeremy, how is it that you have such a clear memory of him? Did that ever occur to you?” Keough asked after some hesitation.
“He was of a belief that I had the essence of being a great writer,” I stated with satisfaction. “I wrote a piece for the school newspaper that was about what was at the edge of the universe, and after reading it he told me that I should pursue a career in creative writing because he felt that I had a natural talent. So I did and although I never considered myself a great writer I did make money from my novels and short stories, enough money to raise a family and keep my wife happy.”
“What’s at the end of the universe?” Doctor Keough jumped on my statement with an odd curiosity, I thought.
“God… or another of His creations. Maybe another universe,” I shrugged.
“Does God have a name?” asked the doctor rapidly.
“Does He need one?” I replied. “The creator is the one who shouldn’t need any name but who He who is. Would you think He could answer to Charlie or Howard? We tend to paint Him in ways that we can understand Him to accommodate how
we
understand… not in any way knowing how He really is.”
“Did Brother Scheible really get hung up on this? What do you think of his reaction to your story? Did he push you for an answer? Tell me more about him.” Keough seemed on fire with curiosity.
“He was a very unique sort. He was naïve beyond belief and we played lots of practical jokes on him in class.”
“Tell me about some of the jokes.”
“Oh, one time we faked a two-way system call that ordered him to the principal’s office,
ASAP.
He got flustered, looking like he thought he was in trouble with the principal and ran out of the classroom. By the time he found out there was no call from the principal and got back to the class room, we had locked the door, pulled the shades, and thrown the erasers and chalk and some of the books out the window. (We were sophomores, after all.) He started knocking on the door and demanding we let him in. Of course, he was now caught between a rock and a hard place. He couldn’t let on that we had tricked him this way and he had to get control of the class room again.” I chuckled a bit.
“Hmm… very funny.” Doctor Keough was sounding like he wanted to hear more. “Was he as pissed about this as he should have been?”
“Sure, and another time we had this very fine black thread and everyone of us ran a piece of the thread through our ties earlier in the day, then at exactly 1 PM we ran the thread around and under our desks and began to pull on the threads in concert and all the ties appeared to rise at the same time. When he looked up from the Latin book he was reading and translating for us he went absolutely berserk. I mean nuts, he started shouting at us and waving his arms in the air like a maestro as we all sat with our ties standing straight out in front of us. Again, we were sophomores.”
“Sophomores In high school… or would that be second grade in elementary school?” He paused for effect. “No wonder he’s haunting you.”
“You think he’s dead and has come back to wreak havoc on me?”
“I would,” he said.
“I’m serious.”
“You should be,” he countered. “Brother Scheible could be just a suppressed guilt memory that for some reason has come to the fore due to your trauma of dying. That would serve you right… imagine, you little shits, pulling that stuff on a poor vulnerable teacher. But it does sound hilarious when one stops to think about it.”
The session ended uneventfully, but then a few days later Doctor Keough called me asking if I’d be interested in trying regression hypnosis. He said it might help me get at the root of what was going on with myself, and help him find a way to deal with all this for me… and him.
I told him I preferred to put it off for a bit, but wanted to keep going with the regular sessions. What I
didn’t
tell him was that I wanted to hear more about his own experiences with near death so that I could frame out what was going on with me. I also didn’t tell him that I wasn’t sure of how much faith I had in psychiatry and psychiatrists.
We agreed on a date for the next session as being one week later.
That session began with a request from my shrink, “Please tell me everything you can recall of the first near death experience. That is all we should be working on until we get to the bottom of how this began. We’re going to do a little mind traveling.”
I relaxed into the great chair, putting my feet on the ottoman in front. “I am beginning to believe that what I saw in death, is sitting just on the other side of reality,” I said.
“Explain please.”
“You know, sort of like when you lose focus or that moment right before you fall asleep. That place that you know is there, but you don’t really know it. Make sense?” I questioned.
He took a moment before saying, “Does it make sense to you?”
“In a strange way… it does.”
Doctor Keough stared at me intently, and then lightened his gaze suddenly, as if realizing he was allowing his emotions to show. “What does the word ‘strange’ mean to you… in this context?”
“I can’t answer that. You know, you hear words like ‘that’s strange,’ or ‘I had a strange feeling,’ but the expression is used so frequently it loses its meaning. Or better said, it is one of the numb words in our language.” I responded.
“What’s a ‘numb’ word”? he asked.
“Something I made up, to describe words so over used that they have no meaning. Like ‘How are you?’… or ‘What do you think?’ Words or phrases that are usually spoken by people who really don’t care about what they mean.”
“Okay. So if you were asked to describe the feeling in another way, could you?” he questioned.
“Doc, I am into the meditative arts — and as such, I meditate every day. Where I go is what could be described as strange or different if I were to try to explain it to someone who doesn’t meditate. That be you?”
He shook his head. “Well. As I see it, meditation is something everyone does on a daily and continuing basis. Daydreaming, praying, or listening to music, are all forms of meditation. Was your feeling on the other side at all similar to the feeling you get when you meditate?”
“Sort of, I guess. It was similar but had an added dimension. Now that I look back on it I think why would I see just Brother Scheible, why not my mother or my father?”
“That’s what we are trying to ascertain here. You know, I always thought that the first person I would meet when I died would be Mozart. I am a big fan.” He said it almost as if he were embarrassed. He was very different.
We found a path when he suggested I tell the story of what happened from the moment my wife and I sat down in the restaurant I died in.
I remembered ordering us some Merlot and looking at the menu. It was an Italian restaurant and the smell of it was comforting and made me feel quite hungry — a dangerous thing for someone who watches his weight very closely. As I told him this he sat with a pen and pad, seeming to not be looking at me. I closed my eyes as I went on. “I get some strange things, there’s that word again, when I meditate.”
“Elaborate, please.” He moved a bit in his chair as he peered more closely at me.
“Well, for one, I often think of what would happen if I dialed my old telephone number. The one I had growing up, way back when there were words or names of places and things in combination with 5 numbers. I remember that number, over all the other numbers I have had in my life.” My words came slowly as I continued to relax. “I have had that thought reoccur several times.”