by Jordan Gisselbrecht
Alice told me before she told anyone else about her visions because I was there when they happened; she needed to tell someone and we shared the same bedroom, two twin beds three feet apart. I can’t think of any other reason why she came to me first. She certainly didn’t tell me with the hope that I would reassure her. I’m a skeptical person, especially of the things that Alice says, and I told her from the start that I never saw any angels or Beings, or whatever. But she insisted that they were there, standing in the doorway, so huge, supposedly, that the tops of their bodies clipped through the ceiling, living voids which spoke to her through the open door with voices that shook the whole house. (Not once did I feel the house shake.)
No, Alice said, correcting herself, they didn’t speak. Rather they transmitted feelings and images directly into her, writing straight upon the foundation of her consciousness, as if you could passionately read a novel in a few seconds by holding the book tightly to your chest. For an instant or for several hours or for an unbounded, unlimited, meaningless interval, these visitors stood at the door and beamed things into her.
I couldn’t see her face as she told me all this. It was too dark. And because I could see only her silhouette in front of the open door, I couldn’t tell right away if she was lying. She went on telling me how, during these visits, time passed at exactly the right pace. She was thirteen years old, very young, but already running out of time, she felt. Not during these visions, no, each elapsing second completed and sealed the sensation within it, demarcating those impressions within the steam of reality and allowing her to appreciate them that much better as they passed. Nor did the seconds—long as they were!—overstay their welcome. How could they? Every moment gave way to the next as soon as it had reached its fullness, like drops of water that swelled up and dripped off the end of a faucet, one after another.
I told her that this was all very abstract. These were probably just dreams. Sleep, Alice, sleep. You’ll wake up mom and dad.
Alice stopped talking. Then she started again: How could she go back to bed when they were standing right there, real as you and me? They came to her at the edge of sleep, true, but they weren’t dreams. Dreams evaporated upon waking while these things lingered. They were here now.
Right now?
Yes.
Here?
Yes.
I don’t see anything.
Too bad.
Do they visit you a lot?
Yes!
But I haven’t seen them. Not now. Not any other time. I haven’t even seen you awake.
So what? You’ve been sleeping. I have this whole life that goes on existing when you’re asleep. The whole world goes on existing.
Alice . . .
Our conversation continued like this, unpleasantly, for several nights. Around 2 or 3 am she’d wake me up with a story about her latest vision, and I’d tell her that nothing was there, and she’d go on talking like I hadn’t said anything to contradict her. She was fixated on how they looked, how they glowed in the dark of our bedroom, their light reflecting softly off the wood floor and our dresser, a glow that warmed her entire body when she saw it.
Then why can’t I see them, I hissed. Five nights in a row of this nonsense—I was worried that Alice had become impaired somehow, that I‘d have to spend the rest of my life guiding her around softly by the shoulder and dabbing her lips with a paper napkin, the older-sister nurse, even more so than I already was.
Because you don’t want to see them, she said. Or they don’t want to see you. They had returned while we were talking, apparently, glowing green. They always glowed green. She said that they looked like they were made up of thousands of shimmering pixels, tens of thousands of them crawling over one another like a swarm of green-black horseflies. Look. Look! An oozing radioactive wound of love. But it was just us in the room, the orange light from the Himalayan salt lamp down the hall, the darkness welling at our feet, same as every night.
***
After a week I involved the authorities. Our parents called Alice to their room and spoke with her for about an hour. Their door was closed, which rarely happened, but I could imagine her on the edge of the bed, swinging her legs, answering their questions nonchalantly and in complete sentences, rarely backtracking or requalifying, and pausing only occasionally to collect her thoughts.
Our parents didn’t know how to handle the visions. They were secular people with a few woo touches, like the Himalayan salt lamp, and had no concept of a divinity that was active in daily life. Our mom was especially lost. She had a concrete mind trained on the here and now: logistics, grades, money, weather. She wasn’t shallow, necessarily, just attuned to the particulars and distinctions that made up our physical and social reality. How do we medicate this, was probably her first thought. Our dad was gentler, more open-minded, prone to fantasy himself. He noted the mild, uplifting character of Alice’s visions, their lack of violence or narcissistic delusion. Maybe we could make room in our lives for this.
They called in a child psychiatrist at great expense, a short, stern woman who smelled faintly of burnt hair. She examined Alice in our bedroom, the door closed, and I hid among the linens in the hallway closet so I could eavesdrop through the wall. The psychiatrist wanted to know what Alice’s visitors wanted. Did they ever ask Alice to do anything? Did they want her to hurt somebody? Herself? Did they ever touch her?
Alice laughed. Her visitors didn’t want anything from her. They came bearing a message of love! Or they were love, a cosmic all-embracing love that revealed everything as unified, one, and whole. She knew that sounded silly, especially coming from a kid, but it was hard to explain her experiences to the uninitiated, to a scientist no less. Moreover her visitors conveyed ideas unhindered by language, while we had to approach such abstractions through long winding trails, spending hours zigzagging laboriously up the face of a single idea with no assurance of being understood, of there being a clearer vantage once we had reached the top.
Perfect union with all creation sounds nice, the psychiatrist said, her voice impossible to read.
It wasn’t a ‘perfect’ union, Alice said. Wouldn’t she be inseparable from everything from that point forward if it was perfect? Otherwise the ‘perfect’ union would be dissolvable, contingent, and thus not totally complete. No, it was more like a momentary insight into a fundamental state of affairs, something she was usually oblivious to. If that made any sense.
It does, the psychiatrist replied. And that sounds nice.
Oh, it’s so much better than nice. It’s rapturous!
The doctor didn’t answer, or said something so quietly that I couldn’t catch it.
It’s obvious, Alice continued, when they share this news with you, the truth of what they’re saying, I mean. Not to beat a dead horse, but words cannot do it justice. The impression they make in person, it burns through you completely while leaving your body intact. I’m all cinders.
Thank you, Alice.
After the examination, the adults quietly conferred in the living room for a while and concluded that the child was likely experiencing benign, recurring waking dreams. They didn’t seem to upset Alice or disrupt her normal activities, or even make her tired during the day, which were all encouraging signs that she was indeed dreaming. (The impacts on me, on my sleep, were overlooked.) The plan was to monitor, tolerate, and, if possible, accept, perhaps take her to a few religious services, perhaps a visit to the local Unitarian church or a Buddhist temple; it wasn’t unusual for girls her age to become interested in different religious traditions. Our dad showed the psychiatrist out and our mom quickly shut the door behind her.
***
They reached an agreement with Alice: no antipsychotic medication or other drastic psychiatric interventions, provided that Alice didn’t wake me up or talk about her visions at school. Having no choice, Alice agreed. She did her homework, went to school, and refrained from preaching on the blacktop, remaining in daily life the same mousy, precocious brat that she had always been. The only real difference was that she now kept our bedroom door closed. That was because she had begun to tell her story to strangers online—technically permissible under the letter of the proviso—having found a server for relatively sane people with visions and other ecstatic religious experiences. Under the name “Hildegardxx” she became a darling of the platform, being extremely articulate and self-assured for a thirteen-year-old, posting throughout the day, and diligently corresponding in her DMs. She got some fans. Then she got some more. Before her livestreams, she’d let the comments build—
> Tells u more about what they looked like this time!
> Yes! PLEEEASE
> Love that shirt!
—and then she’d wave at the camera and share the word of her latest visit, the same kinds of things she used to tell me.
I know all this because I was there. As long as I kept out of frame, Alice would let me hang around the bedroom while she streamed; me being there helped hide her ministry from our parents, while I played along out of curiosity. It was interesting to watch a microcelebrity in bloom, the numbers go up, the fandom form around her. But my idle interest soon gave way to indignation: Alice was lying and always had been. That was clear to me by now. I hadn’t seen a single glowing pixel this entire time, nor, more importantly, any change in her behavior that would indicate a sudden holiness. This was another game for Alice, a LARP, this time pretending to be a child prophet. It revolted me, sickened me to the pit of my stomach, as if I had stepped into a pile of rotting dog shit on the street, that Alice would use her considerable intellectual gifts to lie for attention. And so much attention!
So I told on her again. I had no choice. Our mom and dad called Alice to their room and had another long conversation with her, their door closed once again. When it finally opened, only our dad came out, his jaw set; I pretended not to watch from the sofa while he went to our room and, with some difficulty, unplugged the computer and monitor. Then he carried the computer into their bedroom and slammed the door shut behind him.
Alice came to our room only much later, long after I had given up my watch in the living room and was pretending to be asleep in my bed.
Why’d you do that? she asked.
Without turning away from the wall, I reminded her of the time that she had faked a limp at school and told the other kids that she had a rare degenerative disorder of the joints. Then I reminded her of the time at summer camp when she pretended we were ex-professional children ice skaters, recovering from overwork and experimental performance-enhancing drugs.
You went along with the ice skating thing, she said, if I recall correctly.
That’s not the point, I said. We’re talking about a pattern.
I was like eight when I did those things. Or nine. It’s normal for little kids to make things up. You know. Get lost in the make-believe.
No. Not like that. Not you. You were born older.
Oh, how nice.
Do you plan to keep this up forever?
Whatever.
***
A few weeks later our Aunt Janice died of a stroke. As we drove to the funeral home, Alice asked if she could say a few words at the service. We ignored her.
At the funeral, Alice went up to speak anyway, and we all let her stand before the open casket as if this had been part of the plan, watched her stony-faced as she gave her remarks on death and reunification, her voice filling the room of about a hundred people, clear and confident from her online sermonizing. She pronounced—on what authority we didn’t know—that only the least substantial part of us dies. True, this was the part that we know best because we can observe it directly through our senses and model it within our memory: our bodies, our personal histories, our preferences. But all this stuff that we think we are bobbles like foam on the surface of a great ocean, those waters that we emerge from and that endure eternally. We recognize that aspect of the eternal in the people we love, as they do in us, and so too with every beautiful object and creation that draws us toward it. Bear with me, she joked. The room chuckled, having listened closely for three or four minutes now. Alice took stock of her audience, beaming. Our aunt was lying dead in the open casket behind her, her face covered with makeup to the point that it looked waxy, her brow troubled as if she were trying to sleep through a fever, her body shrunken, grievously thin in a pillowy purple dress bedazzled with sequins.
Alice continued: thus we give up very little when we die, if we give up anything at all. The body doesn’t understand this. The body understands life alone and fears death like it fears the dark, the cold, and sharp teeth. But we know better. The spirit knows better, and this contradiction produces anguish, the disbelieving, unintelligible emptiness that we call grief. We can’t tell ourselves to not grieve: that’s impossible. And that’s not what I am saying. Rather we should fix ourselves to our better understanding and return to it when we can. That’s how I see it, anyway, she concluded. That’s what I’ve been brought to believe. I’m going to miss you, Aunt Janice.
The room mumbled affirmatively, seeing that she was done, and she came back to sit with us through the rest of the speeches: The First Time I Saw My Wife, Janice; Words of Wisdom My Mother Told Me; a reading from Ecclesiastes. Or aunt’s family came up to Alice after the service. They enjoyed the eulogy, and though they hadn’t followed the meaning exactly the entire time, the feeling had come through, the sincerity, the intention to provide comfort, and that was what mattered. Thank you, Uncle Bob said, thank you, and he took Alice into a hug, tears running down his face. I clenched my teeth so hard that a piece of filling cracked off, the size of a grain of sand and tasting of grit, big enough to feel go down as I swallowed.
Thank you so much, Uncle Bob said.
On the drive home, Alice told us that she was sorry. She had loved Aunt Janice and needed to speak from the heart.
Shut the fuck up, Alice, our dad said. Our mom shrieked. We all jumped; she hadn’t said much since we had gotten the news. She was laughing, we realized. We listened to her laughter, and then she was silent again and staring out the window like before.
***
That night I told Alice how sorry I was. She had been sobbing in her bed for over an hour by that point. I told her I was sorry so sincerely that my own eyes teared up. She didn’t answer.
I believe you, I added. That you’re experiencing something. I had been doing research in the library, in fact. Reading about ecstatic experiences like hers, which were known neurological conditions—the absolute and euphoric conviction in oneness, the dull sheeny aura emanating from everyday objects, the velvety warmth throughout her body—all well-recognized phenomena, the come-up to excessive electrical activity in brain. Her stories confirmed this! Their ineffability, religiosity, the sense of what one neuroscientist, quoting Dostoevsky, called an “ultimate state of harmonious beauty” provoked by intense, uncontrolled bioelectric signaling in the brain’s insular region, that throne of inward and outward perception, that dwelling place for our sense of embodied awareness in the world.
Why now? she asked the wall. Why say this now?
Because I think it explains what’s happening to you, I said. You’re seeing things because of something happening in your brain. The way we experience anything else, by like… brain chemicals, blood flow, electricity. And meds might make it better.
Are you trying to comfort me? She had finally turned around, though it was too dark to see her face. Is this you making me feel better?
Yes, I said hotly.
Stop it then, she said. Please, Anna, stop. And she turned away again.
***
Alice left a handwritten letter neatly printed in block letters. I don’t know where she learned such good penmanship. I never had. The letter said that her experiences were undeniably real and that it was cruel and violent to make her chemically suppress them, drawing a dramatic analogy to the barbarity of chemically castrating LGBT people in the 1940s. The letter said that she was going to be with people who understood her, a place up north in Wisconsin, in the forest, that was equipped to care for people like her in a holy place tucked away. She’d be able to follow her own lights there. She planned to write a book about her experiences. That was the most important thing—to follow what she knew to be true. But she still loved us completely. She would still be with us, separation being impossible, metaphysically speaking. She also empathized with our trouble understanding the certainty that she had in her convictions, given that we had never felt that kind of certainty for ourselves. She wouldn’t have understood it either if she hadn’t been so blessed. And she hoped that I, specifically, Anna, would find my own way and not be so wrapped up in other peoples’ journeys.
It’s been two days, an agonizing wait. I know she’ll come back. Our parents are growing insane with worry. But she’ll be back. She’ll run out of the money she stole, wake up outside covered in dew and bug bites, and she’ll come home, telling herself that she’s proven her point, that we can’t tell her what to do, and write her book or preach or whatever else, me shipped off to the basement so she can have the bedroom to herself. But part of me hopes that she never comes back. That she has a vision and a spasm and drowns in a puddle. Or that the people she was talking to online about that retreat or commune or whatever were lying. There are lot of creeps online who flock to stupid kids like my sister. I watch my parents wander around the house unshowered, half-dressed, sleep deprived, talking to themselves, like crazy people, literally becoming crazy people, and I hope that Alice gets what’s coming to her this time. I hope the bitch stays away for good.
THE END
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Jordan Gisselbrecht lives in Washington, DC. His fiction has appeared or will be out soon in The End, The Hopkins Review, HAD, PRISM international, and elsewhere.
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