Science and Derision
by Silvia E. Hines
On that January night, we trekked into the Artful Café in downtown New Haven, stamped snow off our boots, and draped our wet parkas over the backs of the mismatched chairs. Most of us were tired from the cold or the day’s work; but Eden had sailed in, smiling and dressed as usual, in layers of deep pink, purple and fuchsia. She looked even more ethereal than ever that evening, the way people might look on returning from a week-long silent meditation retreat.
Everyone in the science and religion study group knew Eden had recently traveled to the Amazon Rain Forest, where she’d gone to experience an “ayahuasca healing ceremony.” None of us realized at the time that Eden was ill, although a quick online search could have revealed that a quest for healing often motivated these sojourns to South America. We did know she was eager to tell us about her trip, so we’d made her our discussion leader for the evening.
Nathan and Benny, good friends of an odd-couple sort, sat down on adjacent chairs. Nathan’s long hair and dreadlocks were unruly as usual, while Benny was still in the suit he wore to work at his law firm that day, minus the tie. Nathan owned the café, and Benny had provided the legal papers for the enterprise and probably most of the deposit for the lease. I’d written a story for the local newspaper about the opening of the place, then called Nathan’s Coffee, and, in referring to it as New Haven’s own Café des Artistes, had inadvertently come up with its present name, The Artful Cafe.
After the obligatory period of socializing, Benny started us off. He held his latte mug in front of him as though in a toast. “I want to hear about the wilds of Brazil.”
“Peru,” Eden corrected. “They’re different, you know.”
“Okay, Peru.”
“Where to begin?” Eden said. “So the idea was to change your way of looking at your life and being in the world through a transformative experience with the mind-altering drug ayahuasca. We took it under the guidance of a shaman.”
“Is this like in those Carlos Castaneda books we read back in the 70’s?” Nathan asked. “With that Indian shaman, Don Juan something or other?”
“Yes, maybe,” Eden agreed. “Something like that.”
Benny frowned. “Most anthropologists now believe Castaneda invented his Don Juan character and all his feats, as well.” Benny’s look had more than a hint of complacency.
“That’s disappointing,” I said. “Although all I can really remember of what I read back then is a scene at a waterfall in which Castaneda saw what he described as... tentacles of light, I think, coming out of Don Juan’s stomach. Don Juan then climbed up the waterfall using the tentacles as a ladder! Well, actually, I’m not sure if I read that or dreamed it.”
“One of the more believable episodes, I take it,” Benny said, with a sarcasm he may have hoped would seem benign and fatherly, a reminder of the benefit of rational thinking. Ordinarily, I liked Benny, a generous person who administered the pro bono work for his law firm and was a member of Yale’s chapter of Amnesty International. But tonight I wanted him to shut up.
“Why don’t we let Eden continue with her story?” Nathan said.
Eden took a breath. “So we sat in a circle in a clearing in the jungle, and we took the drug; actually, they call it medicine. And I had a... what I would call a breakthrough. At first I saw a lot of images, amazing intricate and colorful designs. And then, suddenly, I saw my family as it was when I was a baby. Way before a time I can remember. My mother was crying — something had happened — and my father was trying to comfort her. I don’t know why, but I felt it was a miscarriage at a late stage. Then I saw she was angry at my father, and I sensed he may have encouraged her to do something late in the pregnancy, a grueling bike ride or tennis or something, against her better judgment.”
She paused, and we could hear quiet classical music coming from a CD player and the din of voices from nearby tables. It wasn’t typical for us to have nothing to say.
“Fascinating,” I said, mostly to break the silence.
Eden went on. “So I felt like I understood something about my family’s dynamics for the first time. The tension between my parents, and their... ugly divorce when I was still pretty young.” She smiled, and looked around the table. “And then I went home and talked to my mother, who told me she’d had a stillborn baby the year after I was born. She had never mentioned it before.”
Another silence, this time lasting almost a minute. Benny cleared his throat.
“When something like this happens,” he said, taking on a professorial tone, “although it is very interesting and tempting to give it meaning, it is best to start with what might be the simplest explanation—”
He was interrupted by Eden, who’d quickly changed her demeanor from softly emotional to loud and angry. Her body tensed. “Don’t start with your heady, rational stuff now, please. I don’t need your sociological explanations for my personal experience!”
Strangely, Eden was actually crying; this was surprising, since I was pretty sure Eden didn’t cry easily. I was sitting next to her, so I put my arm around her shoulders.
“She’s right,” I said, firmly. “Eden has shared an experience with us. Give it its space. This isn’t a court of law, you know.”
Nathan looked uncomfortable. I thought he agreed with me but didn’t want Benny to feel ganged-up on. The other group members looked absorbed, as though witnessing a dramatic moment in a play. Benny peered at Nathan, saw he wasn’t about to speak, and intrepidly pushed on.
“Sor-ry,” he said. “I thought we all had a right to speak here at the Artful as we saw fit. I thought that was the point of the place. An oasis in the city for urban art and intellect, or something like that. I certainly feel censored.” Then, looking at Eden, he continued. “And you interrupted me before I had the chance to say what I was going to say. You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“I know what you were going to say!” Eden declared loudly, her tears gone but her anger intact. “I always know what you’re going to say. You want to pull us all back to our thinking mind, our left brain, where I don’t want to be all the time. I thought Nathan opened this café so we could experience and talk about something else: art, spirit, transcendence, a deeper reality.”
“Without your thinking mind,” Benny said, “you would be nothing. Humans would be nothing but animals.”
Eden replied quickly. “This wasn’t an experience of my thinking mind,” she said. “I felt this, the truth of it, in my... my heart center, my heart chakra.” She laid her hand across the center of her chest. “After this experience, I understood something crucial to my spiritual unfolding—”
But Benny was on a roll. He looked to me like a hunter who’d set his sights, had the deer in the crosshairs.
“The heart chakra?” Benny said, scowling. “Now there’s a trendy term. Actually, as you know, the heart is a muscle. That’s it. It is simply, and solely, a muscle. Its only function is to pump blood.” He looked over at the rest of us, each in turn, as though for confirmation. None of us said anything. He went on. “Chakras, meridians, chi, or what have you, have not been proven to exist.”
Eden’s voice was steady but shriller, and her face was turning crimson. “Chakras have been described in many different esoteric teachings,” she said. “They are part of the subtle body, and they are demonstratable!”
She stood abruptly, scraping her chair away from the table. Nobody spoke. Surely all this was too important to take sides on. It wasn’t as simple as the Bronx and Brooklyn uncles of my childhood loudly debating the merits of the Giants versus the Dodgers. This was the nature of reality we were talking about.
Nathan shook his head. “Hey, can we tone this down a little? Talk about something less incendiary, like, say, the Middle East or, uh, nuclear war.”
But it was too late. Eden stalked to the door. Benny stood, dumbly, one hand resting on the table. He wasn’t going to chase after her.
“I’m leaving!” Eden shouted, in that dramatic way that can morph into satire or spoof. Then, as though an afterthought, “And you are an effing idiot. You know that, don’t you?”
Benny’s reply was equally out of character for our rather staid discussion group. “Now how enlightened is that? There goes another New Age imbecile.” The door slammed shut.
* * *
Eden never returned to the group, and our small band of aging seekers broke up soon after. I thought often, in the years that followed, of the meanness that had overtaken our usually genteel discourse, and with sadness at the lack of resolution. Oddly, I realized, Eden and Benny had a lot in common: While most of us in the group were seeking truth, Eden and Benny already knew it: each their own version.
I lost touch with everyone except Nathan, whom I saw from time to time at the café, when I would come by for lunch. One time, he told me Benny had moved to New York, joined a law firm that specialized in social justice cases, and gotten married, his first marriage at the age of 65. Around the same time, Nathan told me he’d heard that Eden had died; he thought it was one of the blood cancers.
That might have been the end of the story, except for a brief incident that occurred about ten years later. I had stopped at the café to have lunch with my grandson, Jonah, who was visiting from Boston and wanted to show me his latest repertoire of card tricks. There, at a corner table, sat Nathan and Benny, drinking red wine and laughing heartily. I pulled Jonah over to introduce him; he nodded and quickly retreated to a nearby table to set up the cards.
“Very handsome boy,” Benny said, after we’d hugged and lied about how we both looked exactly the same. “Hey, I want you to meet my wife, Tanya. She just stepped out to the ladies room.”
They offered me a chair, but I motioned toward Jonah and stood awkwardly waiting.
Benny broke the silence. “Sad about that group we had,” he said. “We did have a good run, though, didn’t we?”
Before I could agree, he went on. “I heard she died.” No need to ask who.
Then, slowly, he added, “So now she knows the truth, doesn’t she?”
I caught no trace of his old sarcasm and was taken aback. How could he think Eden would know anything now?
Benny kept going. “You probably think I was a jerk back then,”
I was startled. What was I supposed to say? Ten years was a long time to hold onto judgment or to guilt. The young boy stacking playing cards into three neat piles one table over hadn’t existed ten years ago.
“Just for that night,” I answered, grinning. I looked down at my feet. When I looked up, a tall woman was floating toward the table, wearing a long purple print skirt, yellow peasant-style blouse, and dangling silver earrings. She looked familiar, although I was sure we’d never met. She shook my hand and sat on the chair next to Benny, kissed him, and laid her hand on his knee.
She gestured for me to sit, but Jonah’s pleading look kept me standing. He was waving the ace of hearts with one hand and motioning for me to come back with the other. I said my goodbyes and retreated to join my grandson, but not before I caught a glimpse of the pendant hanging from Tanya’s left earring. It had the etched outline of a flash of lightning, superimposed on a tower. I knew it was a Tarot card. A quick search on my phone, while Jonah waited impatiently, confirmed my suspicion. The card is a symbol of sudden change, revelation, and awakening.
Copyright © 2019 by Silvia E. Hines
