ALICE
Grandmothers in Botswana tell their children that if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together. Certainly this is true of the villagers I have met. But it might surprise you to know that it is also true of elephants.
Elephants are often seen checking in with others in their herd by rubbing against an individual, stroking with a trunk, putting that trunk in a friend’s mouth after that individual has suffered a stressful experience. But in Amboseli, researchers Bates, Lee, Njiraini, Poole, et al. decided to scientifically prove that elephants are capable of empathy. They categorized moments when elephants seemed to recognize suffering in or threat to another elephant and took action to change that: by working cooperatively with other elephants, or protecting a young calf that couldn’t take care of itself; by babysitting another’s calf or comforting it by allowing it to suckle; by assisting an elephant that had become stuck or had fallen down, or that needed a foreign object, like a spear or snare wire, removed.
I did not get a chance to conduct a study on the scale of the one at Amboseli, but I have my own anecdotal evidence of elephant empathy. There was a bull in the game reserve that we nicknamed Stumpy because, as a youngster, he had lost a large part of his trunk in a noose-shaped wire snare. He didn’t have the ability to break off branches or twirl the grass with his trunk like spaghetti, cutting it off with his toenails to put in his mouth. For most of his life, even when he was an adolescent, his herd would feed him. I’ve seen elephants create a definitive plan to get a calf up the steep bank of a riverbed—a series of coordinated behaviors that includes some of the herd breaking down the bank to make less of a grade, and others guiding the baby from the water, and more still helping to pull her out. But you could argue that there’s an evolutionary advantage to keeping Stumpy or that calf alive.
It gets more interesting, though, when there is not an evolutionary advantage to empathetic behavior. When I was in Pilanesberg, I watched an elephant come across a rhino calf that was stuck in the mud of a watering hole. The rhinos were distressed, and that in turn upset the elephant, which stood around trumpeting and rumbling. Somehow, she managed to convince the rhinos that she had practice doing this, and to just get out of the way and let her take over. Now, in the great ecological sphere of things, it was not beneficial to the elephant to rescue a rhino baby. And yet she went in and lifted the baby with her trunk, even though the rhino mother charged her each time she tried. She risked her own life for the offspring of a different species. Likewise, in Botswana, I saw a matriarch come upon a lioness that was stretched out beside an elephant path while her cubs played in the middle of it. Normally, if an elephant sees a lion it will charge—it recognizes the animal as a threat. But this matriarch waited very patiently for the lioness to collect her cubs and move away. True, the cubs were no threat to this elephant, but one day they would be. Right then, however, they were just someone’s babies.
And yet, empathy has its limits. Although elephant calves are allomothered by all females in the herd, if the biological mother dies, her baby usually will, too. An orphaned calf that is still milk-fed will not move away from its mother’s fallen body. Eventually, the herd will have to make a decision: stay with the grieving baby, and run the risk of not feeding their own calves or getting to water … or leave, and consider the certain death collateral damage. It’s quite disturbing to watch, actually. I’ve witnessed what looks like a good-bye ceremony, where the herd touches the calf, where they rumble their distress. And then they move away, and the baby dies of starvation.
Yet once in the wild I saw something different. I came across an isolated calf that had been left behind at a watering hole. Now, I don’t know the circumstances—if its mother had died or if the calf had gotten disoriented and wandered off. At any rate, an unrelated herd came by at the same time a hyena trotted in from a different direction. The calf was fair game for the hyena—unprotected, luscious. However, the matriarch of that passing herd had a calf of her own, maybe a tiny bit older. She saw the hyena scoping out the abandoned calf and chased the hyena off. The calf ran over to her and tried to nurse, but she pushed him away and started to move on.
For the record, this is normal behavior. Why, from a Darwinian standpoint, would she limit the resources of a calf with her own genetic makeup by nursing an unrelated baby? Although there are records of adoption within herds, the majority of allomothers will not nurse an orphaned calf; there just is not enough milk to go around without compromising their own biological offspring. Moreover, this elephant was not related; the matriarch had no biological ties to the orphaned calf.
That baby, however, let out the most desperate, lonely cry.
The matriarch was a good hundred feet ahead of him at this point. She froze, spun, and charged the calf. It was shocking and terrifying, and yet that baby stood his ground.
The matriarch grabbed him with her trunk and tucked him fiercely between the playpen of her massive legs, walking off with him. For the next five years, every time I saw that calf, he was still part of this new family.
I would argue that there is a special empathy elephants have for mothers and children—either their own species’s or another’s. That relationship seems to hold a precious significance and a bittersweet knowledge: An elephant seems to understand that if you lose a baby, you suffer.
SERENITY
My mother, who had not wanted me to showcase my Gift, lived long enough for the world to hail me as a successful psychic. I brought her to my set in L.A. to meet her favorite soap star, from the original Dark Shadows, who came on my show for a reading. I bought her a little bungalow near my Malibu home, with enough room for her to have a vegetable garden and orange trees. I took her to film premieres and award shows and shopping on Rodeo Drive. Jewelry, cars, vacations—I could give her anything she wanted—but I couldn’t predict the cancer that eventually consumed her.
I watched my mother shrink away, until she finally passed. When she did she weighed seventy-five pounds and looked like she would break in a strong wind. I had lost my father years ago, but this was different. I was the best actress in the world—fooling the public into thinking that I was happy and rich and successful, when in reality I knew that a fundamental piece of me was gone.
My mother’s passing made me a better psychic. I understood viscerally, now, how people would grasp at the threads I could give them, in an attempt to sew shut the gap where a loved one had been ripped away. In my dressing room at the studio, I would look in the mirror and pray for my mother to come to me. I bargained with Desmond and Lucinda to show me something. I was a psychic, dammit. I deserved a sign, to know that wherever she was on the other side, she was all right.
For three years, I got messages from hundreds of spirits trying to contact loved ones here on earth … but not a single syllable came through from my own mom.
Then one day, I got into my Mercedes to drive home and went to toss my purse on the passenger seat and it landed in my mother’s lap.
My first thought was: I am having a stroke.
I stuck out my tongue. There was something I’d read once in a viral email about diagnosing a stroke and not being able to stick out your tongue, or maybe it was having it flop to one side. I couldn’t remember.
I felt for my mouth, to see if it was drooping.
“Can I say a simple sentence?” I said out loud. Yes, fool, I thought. You just did.
I swear on all that’s holy, I was a practicing, celebrated psychic, but when I saw my mother sitting there, I was certain I was dying.
My mother was just looking at me, smiling, not saying a word.
Heatstroke, I thought, still not taking my eyes off her, but it wasn’t all that hot.
Then I blinked. And she was gone.
In the aftermath, I thought of a lot of things. That if I’d been on the 101, I probably would have caused a multicar pileup. That I would have traded everything I owned to hear her speak one more time.
That she did not look the way she had when she died, feeble and brittle and birdlike. She was the mother I remembered from my childhood, the one strong enough to carry me when I was sick and scold me when I was being a pain in the ass.
I have never seen my mother again, although it’s not for lack of trying. But I learned something that day. I believe we’ve lived many times and have been reincarnated many times, and a spirit is the amalgam of all the lifetimes in which that soul existed. But when a spirit approaches a medium, it comes back with one particular personality, one particular form. I used to think spirits manifested in a certain way so that the living person could recognize them. Yet after my mother came to me, I realized that they come back in the way they want to be remembered.
You may hear this and feel skeptical. You’d be right to feel that way. Skeptics keep the swamp witches at bay; or so I thought, before I became one myself. If you haven’t had a personal experience with the paranormal, you should question what you’re being told.
This is what I would have said to a skeptic, had they approached me the day I saw my mother in the passenger seat: She was not translucent or shimmering or milky white. She was as solid to me as the guy who took my parking ticket minutes later when I pulled out of the garage. It was as if I’d Photoshopped a memory of my mother into the here-and-now, a trick of mechanics, like those videos where the dead Nat King Cole sings with his daughter. No question about it—my mother was as real as the steering wheel under my shaking hands.
But doubt has a way of blooming like fireweed. Once it takes hold, it’s nearly impossible to eradicate. It’s been years since a spirit has come to me for help. If a skeptic said to me right now, Who do you think you’re kidding? I suppose I’d say, Not you. And certainly not me.
The kid at the Genius Bar who is supposed to be helping me has the people skills of Marie Antoinette. She grunts as she turns on my ancient MacBook and lets her fingers tickle the keyboard. She doesn’t make eye contact. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
For starters? I’m a professional psychic with no connection to the spirit world; I missed my last two rent payments; I stayed up till 3:00 A.M. last night watching a Dance Moms marathon; and the only way I could get into these pants today was by wearing Spanx.
Oh, and my computer’s broken.
“When I try to print something,” I say, “nothing happens.”
“What do you mean, nothing happens?”
I stare at her. “What do people usually mean when they say that?”
“Does your screen turn black? Does anything come out of the printer? Do you get an error message? Did you document anything?”
I have a theory about Gen Y, these narcissistic twenty-somethings. They don’t want to wait their turn. They don’t want to work their way up the ladder. They want what they want now—in fact, they’re sure they deserve it. Young people like this, I believe, are soldiers who died in Vietnam, and have been reincarnated. The timing’s right, if you do the math. These kids are still pissed about getting killed in a war they didn’t believe in. Being rude is just another way of saying: Kiss my twenty-five-year-old ass.
“Hey, hey, LBJ,” I say under my breath. “How many kids have you killed today?”
She doesn’t glance up.
“Make love, not war,” I add.
The techie looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Do you have Tourette’s?”
“I’m a psychic. I know who you used to be.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“No, not him,” I correct.
Chances are, if she was killed in Vietnam in her past life, she was male. Spirit is genderless. (In fact, some of the best mediums I’ve ever met are gay, and I think it’s because they have that balance of masculine and feminine in them. But I digress.) I once had a very famous client—a female R & B singer—who had died in a concentration camp in a previous existence. Her current ex was the SS soldier who had shot her back then, and her job in this life was to survive him. Unfortunately, in this existence, he was beating her up every time he got drunk—and I will bet you anything that, after she dies, she’ll return in some other incarnation that crosses with his. That’s all a human life is, really—a do-over, a chance to get it right … or you’ll be brought back to try again.
The techie opens a new menu with a few keystrokes. “You have a backlog of print jobs,” she says, and I wonder if she will judge me for printing out the Entertainment Weekly recap of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. “That could be the problem.” She pushes some buttons, and suddenly the screen goes black. “Huh,” she murmurs, frowning.
Even I know it is not good when your computer technician frowns.
Suddenly the store printer, on a table adjacent to us, hums to life. It starts spitting out pages at breakneck speed, covered from top to bottom with Xs. The papers pile up, overflowing onto the floor, as I rush to pick them up. I scan them, but they are gibberish, unintelligible. I count ten pages, twenty, fifty.
The techie’s supervisor approaches her as she tries furiously to stop my computer from printing. “What’s the problem?”
One of the pages flies right from the paper feed into my hands. This page is covered with nonsense, too, except for one small rectangle in the center, where the Xs give way to hearts.
The techie looks like she is going to burst into tears. “I don’t know how to fix it.”
In the middle of the string of hearts is the only recognizable word on the page: JENNA.
Holy Hell.
“I do,” I say.
There is nothing more frustrating than being given a sign and not knowing which way it points. That’s how it feels when I go home, open myself up to the universe, and get served up a steaming hot bowl of Nothing. In the past, Desmond or Lucinda or both of my spirit guides would have helped me interpret how the name of that kid glitching up my computer is connected to the spirit world. Paranormal experiences are just energy manifesting itself in some way: a flashlight flickering on when you haven’t pressed the button; a vision during an electrical storm; your cell phone ringing, and no one on the other end of the line. A surge of energy pulsed through networks to give me a message—I just can’t tell who’s sent it.
I’m not too thrilled about contacting Jenna, since I’m pretty sure she hasn’t forgiven me for leaving her at the steps of the police department. But I can’t deny that there’s something about that kid that makes me feel more genuinely psychic than I’ve felt in seven years. What if Desmond and Lucinda sent me this as a test, to see how I’d react, before they committed to being my spirit guides again?
At any rate, I can’t risk pissing off whoever’s sent me this sign, just in case my whole future depends on it.
Fortunately, I have Jenna’s contact information. That ledger I make new clients fill out when they come for a reading? I tell them it’s in case a spirit comes to me with an urgent message, but in reality, it’s so I can invite them to like my Facebook page.
She has written down a cell phone number, so I call her.
“If this is supposed to be some kind of customer service survey with one being total crap and five being the Ritz-Carlton of psychic experiences, I’ll give you a two, but only because you managed to find my mother’s wallet. Without that, it’s a negative four. What kind of person abandons a thirteen-year-old alone in front of a police department?”
“Honestly, if you think about it,” I say, “what better place to leave a thirteen-year-old? But then again, you’re not the average thirteen-year-old, are you?”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Jenna says. “What do you want, anyway?”
“Someone on the other side seems to think I’m not done helping you.”
She is quiet for a second, letting this sink in. “Who?”
“Well,” I admit. “That part’s a little fuzzy.”
“You lied to me,” Jenna accuses. “My mother’s dead?”
“I didn’t lie to you. I don’t know that it’s your mother. I don’t even know that it’s a woman. I just feel like I’m supposed to get in touch with you.”
“How?”
I could tell her about the printer, but I don’t want her to freak out. “When a spirit wants to talk, it’s like a hiccup. You can’t not hiccup, even if you try. You can get rid of the hiccups, but that doesn’t prevent them in the first place. You understand?” What I don’t tell her is that I used to get these messages so often, I got jaded. Bored. I didn’t know why people made a big deal out of it; it was just part of me, the same way I had pink hair and all my wisdom teeth. But that’s the attitude you have when you don’t realize that at any moment, you might lose it. I’d kill for those psychic hiccups now.
“Okay,” Jenna says. “What do we do now?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking that maybe we should go back to that place where we found the wallet.”
“You think there’s more evidence?”
All of a sudden in the background I hear another voice. A male voice. “Evidence?” he repeats. “Who is that?”
“Serenity,” Jenna says to me, “there’s someone I think you should meet.”
I may have lost my mojo, but that doesn’t keep me from seeing, in a single glance, that Virgil Stanhope is going to be as useful to Jenna as screen doors on a submarine. He is distracted and dissipated, like a former high school football star who’s spent the past twenty years pickling his organs. “Serenity,” Jenna says. “This is Virgil. He was the detective on duty the day my mother disappeared.”
He looks at my hand, extended, and shakes it perfunctorily. “Jenna,” he says, “c’mon. This is a waste of time—”
“No stone left unturned,” she insists.
I plant myself squarely in front of Virgil. “Mr. Stanhope, in my career I’ve been called in to dozens of crime scenes. I’ve been in places where I had to wear booties because there was brain matter on the floor. I’ve gone to homes where kids were abducted and led law enforcement officers to the woods where they were found.”
He raises a brow. “Ever testified in court?”
My cheeks pinken. “No.”
“Big surprise.”
Jenna steps in front of him. “If you two can’t play together, there’s going to be a time-out,” she says, and she turns to me. “So what’s the plan?”
Plan? I don’t have a plan. I am hoping that if I walk around this wasteland long enough, I’ll have a flash of recognition. My first in seven years.
Suddenly a man walks by, holding a cell phone. “Did you see him?” I whisper.
Jenna and Virgil lock eyes and then look at me. “Yes.”
“Oh.” I watch the guy get into his Honda and drive away, still talking on his cell. I’m a little deflated to find out he’s a living person. In a crowded hotel lobby, I used to see maybe fifty people, and half of them would be spirits. They weren’t rattling chains or holding their severed heads but rather talking on their cell phones, or trying to hail a cab, or taking a mint from the jar at the front of the restaurant. Ordinary stuff.
Virgil rolls his eyes, and Jenna elbows him in the gut.
“Are spirits here right now?” she asks.
I glance around, as if I might still see them. “Probably. They can attach themselves to people, places, things. And they can move around, too. Free range.”
“Like chickens,” Virgil says. “Don’t you think it’s weird that with all the homicides I saw as a cop, never once did I see a ghost hanging around a dead body?”
“Not at all,” I say. “Why would they want to reveal themselves to you, when you were fighting so hard not to see them? That would be like going into a gay bar if you’re straight, and hoping to get lucky.”
“What? I’m not gay.”
“I didn’t say—Oh, never mind.”
In spite of the fact that this man is a Neanderthal, Jenna herself seems fascinated. “So let’s say there’s a ghost attached to me. Would it watch me when I shower?”
“I doubt it. They were alive once; they understand privacy.”
“Then what’s the fun in being a ghost?” Virgil says under his breath. We step over the chain at the gate, moving with unspoken agreement into the sanctuary.
“I didn’t say it was fun. Most of the ghosts I’ve met haven’t been too happy. They feel like they’ve left something unfinished. Or they were so busy looking into glory holes in their last life they have to get their act together before they move on to whatever comes next.”
“You’re telling me the Peeping Tom I arrested in the gas station bathroom automatically develops a conscience in the afterlife? Seems a little convenient.”
I look back over my shoulder. “There’s a conflict between body and soul, sometimes. That friction is free will. Your guy probably didn’t come to earth to spy on folks in a gas station bathroom, but somehow ego or narcissism or some other garbage happened to him in his life while he was here. So even though his soul might have been telling him not to look through that hole, his body was saying Tough luck.” I push through some tall grass, untangling a reed that has gotten snared in the fringe of my poncho. “It’s like that for drug addicts, too. Or alcoholics.”
Virgil abruptly turns. “I’m going this way.”
“Actually,” I say, pointing in the opposite direction, “I’m getting the feeling we should go this way.” I am not really getting that feeling at all. It’s just that Virgil seems like such an ass that if he says black I’m determined to say white right now. He’s already judged and hanged me, which leads me to believe he knows exactly who I am and can remember Senator McCoy’s boy. In fact, if I weren’t so completely convinced that there is a reason I have to be with Jenna at this moment, I would bushwhack back to my car and drive the hell home.
“Serenity?” Jenna asks, because she’s had the good sense to follow me. “What you said about the body and the soul back there? Is that true for anyone who does bad things?”
I glance at Jenna. “Something tells me that isn’t a philosophical question.”
“Virgil thinks the reason my mother disappeared was because she was the one who killed the caregiver at the sanctuary.”
“I thought it was an accident.”