Beyond This Point

Unusual book

At the Centre for Light Awareness, Gabriel Markovice left the meditation room to make a phone call. His partner, Lucinda, knew this fact because she was fixed on him, and particularly mindful of his every move. He bypassed the phone in the office, where, she thought, he suspected she might be, and quietly entered his bedroom. The door shut behind him. Working on the book in the meditation room first thing in the morning was his routine in the month since they had arrived home from a winter away. He was writing what was intended to be a sequel, a book to ride the heels of the first, which already had a following. He’d tried writing the manuscript by hand and tried word-­processing and now was talking it into a Dictaphone, gathering more words, as he put it, which could be progress should they turn out not to be merely repetitious. Writing a second book, he’d told Lucinda — the office phone lit as he picked up his extension — was like picking grit from your teeth in a dust storm. He smiled as he spoke because it was not an expression he normally used. His real gift, she thought, was as an intuitive. He worked best with groups because he was receptive to psychic emanations. In a group he appeared relaxed, waiting and listening through the opening chatter and introductions, collecting their psychological tensions, culling their personal histories out of the communal ether. When he had by this mysterious means grasped what the individuals in the group needed and why they were together, the workshop would begin. The teaching could last one afternoon or one week. What he said in one seminar was never repeated, in the same words, in another.

Part of the problem with the manuscript — the phone must have been ringing on the other end, Lucinda heard the squeak of the chair as he sat — was that true stories about healing sounded unhinged. Or the people were belittled or made trite, like those case studies in psychology texts. They had talked about this obstacle. Due to the pressure to get the manuscript done — his San Francisco publisher wanted it now — they made changes in the winter program, the getaway to Arizona, California, Texas. No long retreats, they decided. Fewer distractions, he said, would aid the writing. By then Lucinda knew he was lying through omission, but she ­didn’t know what the omission was and kept her silence. He asked her to put together a cycle of three-­day weekends that they named Intensities. They toked in the fireplace room and came up with names for these new, focused workshops: “Accessing the Light Within,” “Mapping Your Inner Landscape,” “Soul Embodied.”

His voice speaking into the phone was low, and he ­didn’t talk for long. He hung up — tenderly, it seemed to her, listening — the click of the receiver restrained. He slipped barefoot down the hall and back into the meditation room and in a moment came the scratch of a match — he was lighting candles. She was able, then, to spy on him through the crack in the door; her stealthiness had become slightly alarming even to her. He placed himself on his cushions, entwined his legs. Then he smiled. He was not smiling at her; he was unaware of her. He was smiling to himself about something she was not supposed to know.

This was it then, this was it then. You spent fifteen years with a man expecting this was it, then, this was it, and then, it was. The waking up hurt, like hell must feel to those who believed they would be cast down into it.
She had been in a state of despair when she signed up for her first workshop with the word transformational in it. She was separated from her husband, frail after a miscarriage, considered herself despicable. She’d been a dancer in a small troupe, and when she hurt her ankle, she’d married a guitar player from Guadalajara, for no reason other than it flew in the face of her strict upbringing, and consequently she was outrageous and unthinkingly cruel to him. When the miscarriage came — a few cramps, hardly a warning, her husband’s pyjamas scooped from the bottom dresser drawer to stem the tide — her life suddenly became real. The blood made it real. She thought that losing her baby was due to irredeemable transgressions on her part, a weakness in her character. Despite her reading and study of nature and human nature and, maybe, simply, the bad luck of the draw, she saw herself as tainted, incapable of right judgment in a spiritual sense, someone with a karmic imbalance. She was in that mood when she met Gabriel.

At her first workshop, a shy, straight-­haired girl had introduced herself by saying of herself and Gabriel, “We travel together.” At one point the girl was on her knees, collating fourteen copies, five pages each — Lucinda watching, as though learning a job — the girl apologizing because she’d forgotten to make the copies before the session, though (Lucinda was to find out how it went) Gabriel probably changed his mind at the last minute about what he needed.

The women in the circle on pillows were watching the girl, some envious and flirting with Gabriel behind her back, some toying with fantasies of being with him because he was so masculine, so beautiful and full of wisdom, imagining themselves in her place, and some sad already for her. Knowing the ending. You just had to look at him to realize he would never stay faithful to that wispy creature. For one thing, while she was talking, he ­didn’t glance her way even once, his eyes always resting on the cloudy windowpane. You knew — Lucinda certainly knew — that the straight-­haired girl’s time was coming to an end.

He was different from any man most women in his groups had ever met. All his women felt that way about him; Lucinda was not so untested. Gabriel, well, he had charisma and he was stunning to look at and he took her flying, literally swooping her over the foothills in his plane — he had an American Yankee then, a two-­seater with a canopy — and later he ordered champagne brought to the table and it was good champagne and the glasses the right ones. She went with him to his bed and then with him into his life, a pattern of women, she had come to understand over the years.