A Lesson On Learning Your Place In the Universe

The class flyer was tacked on the rec center bulletin board among others advertising hot yoga, kiddies gymnastics, and beginner macramé:

Four weekends to learn how to exercise demons, spirits, and malevolent entities from people, places, and objects. Results guaranteed.

I wasn’t prone to mystical or religious practices, but it seemed a sufficient solution to my sleep problem. I wasn’t sure if the use of exercise instead of exorcise was intentional. Perhaps a witty marketing ploy due to the class’s location

My sleep problem was related directly to the Woman, the ghost that had come with the dirt-cheap house I’d scooped up during the Great Recession, a new home after the Year of Mourning, a space free of memories of Robert, of Robert and his new Cirque-du-Soleil contortionist boyfriend. Every night, the Woman moved from room to room, wailing her sadness at being abandoned.

During the first class, the instructor reassured us that we didn’t need to know the Latin or Greek or Sumerian. Incanting was all about getting the sound right because melodic chanting had power, and it was that power that dispelled the being. As it turned out, exorcising (or “exercising the ethereal liminality” as the white board read) was all about vibes. Unfortunately, I discovered I didn’t incant well. The mere intoning of words with purpose, to cast meaning  into the world—at this, I was garbage.

I was focused on the text for cleansing when Sports Jacket started talking to me. He had given me an intense but pathetic smile the first day of class, one I returned weakly. I avoided him during breaks, even secluding myself in bathroom stalls until he finished and left the restroom. He’d linger at the sink, washing his hands too carefully, waiting for me. Despite finding him handsome, he reeked of desperation, and I had sworn off plastic wrap lovers.

He had moved closer with each class, finally taking the desk next to me. He pulled a travel-sized bottle of mouthwash, blue like glass cleaner, out of his jacket pocket. He nearly drained it, swished it in his mouth, and then swallowed.

“That will give you ulcers,” I said and then regretted speaking. It opened the door.

He smiled, popping two pieces of gum into his mouth. “Isn’t that one of those things mothers tell you? Don’t talk on the phone during a thunderstorm.” He tore dried sage leaves into little shreds. “Have you ever met someone electrocuted on a landline?”

He smelled like notes of a first date. Sage and mint: cologne and toothpaste. He told me he had signed up for the class as a part of his side hustle: part-time exorcist. “Today, people are so full of anxiety. We’re just swimming in constant stress waters. Why not make some money cleansing what haunts people?” He had taken other classes to beef up his resume: tarot and transcendental meditation and reiki.

“Palmistry,” he said, eyebrows raised.

He had my hand in his own seconds before the word registered in my mind. The word like a spell to break the boundaries of physical intimacy. I searched for the Latin phrase that created protections from foreign energies as he ran his fingertips over the bones in the back of my hand. He made comments on the lines, but I didn’t hear them. How long since a man had touched my skin? Certainly not during the Year of Mourning.

He traced my lifeline and began a stream-of-consciousness ramble about his own existence: broken home, mentally ill mother, whisked away by his father for some unpleasant teenage years. Sexual shame, self-hatred, and eventual acceptance. His fingers rested on my wrist, feeling my pulse, and I thought I felt his own rapid heartbeat through his skin. I told him about the Woman, to fill the awkward silence. When I mentioned her, his focus changed. Still desperate but the cheesy confidence dropped away.

The instructor ended the class with white light, promises of peace and healing. I let Sports Jacket follow me out of the classroom, into the parking lot, and then home. When he reached the front porch, he stopped, as if fighting a repelling force. I took his hand and led him through the front door. It should have been raining, because of some romantic celluloid notion about serendipitous encounters. But it wasn’t raining, and the bed was unmade, and there was dirty underwear on the floor.

Still, our sexual positions were like praying, mystical shapes made by two bodies. A metamorphosis, a joining. Or maybe the radiance was just the release after a year of post-breakup celibacy.

When I awoke in the middle of the night, he stood naked at the end of the bed, back to me, swaying hypnotically. The streetlight shone through the blinds, cutting slashes across his skin and through the translucence of the Woman. She wept but quietly this time. 

He turned to me with saucer eyes. “I lived here once,” he whispered.

The Woman raised a hand to his face and nodded.

I waited for him to fall on me with a kitchen knife, the mood shifting from erotica to ghost story to slasher. But he only dressed and left, and as he passed through the front door, so too did the Woman disappear. I watched him drift to his car; it was raining now. Dead wet leaves stuck to the front walk. Briefly, the Woman stood there, just behind him, an illusion found within headlights in rain.

I returned to bed, pulling the blankets up, with the house quiet for the first time. I smiled at the notion that our bedroom exercise, skin to skin, had undone the haunting. But remembering the Woman’s gentle touch on his face, perhaps it wasn’t my exorcism, but Sport Jacket’s. I only played a small part in the crux of where his heart and fate line converged. To be such an insignificant moment in a grander scheme felt diminishing. The silence like an accusation. I felt like I might get lost in the bedsheets.

But maybe it was a small price, being a footnote in another’s story, for a night of rest. Results guaranteed.

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Ⓒ Thomas Price