arkness is what I see. In his eyes. I mean, the Serpent. That is—in the beginning. Which is as good a place to start as any. The Serpent looks at me, and he is wrapped around the tree branch, not tightly, just rather devil-may-care almost flirtatiously wrapped around the tree branch, his tongue darting at the air. “Take the fruit,” he says. “The fruit of knowledge.”
What am I thinking? About banishment, damnation, the meaning and power of God? Or, perhaps, about the loving nature of a forgiving, all powerful God who has planned for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Because beyond the barrier in the world of souls, all is happiness and light.
No. I am looking into the darkness of the serpent’s eyes, and I can smell the fruit, that fresh, clean, sweet smell. And I feel hunger. Pure hunger. The crispness, the coolness of the fruit on a hot summer day. Nothing is more pure and inescapable than that. When you’re hungry, and you’re offered a piece of fruit, you take it. And it’s sweet, the first luscious bite, and the juice that streams down your chin. There can’t be any bad consequences to that, can there? A simple, unthinking, naive girl, just a babe, in a garden, eating a fruit. After all, I have no fear of a kind God. I have no knowledge of good and evil. Yet.
And it’s delicious.
Then I wake up from the dream. But perhaps that is a little too far back to start, after all.
Miriam Silver was an ardent believer. At nine, she became an Adventist, and to her parents’ horror, she refused to eat flesh. That is what she called it: “flesh.” She earnestly plead with her parents to give up tobacco, tea, coffee, and meat, so that they wouldn’t ruin their health and die and leave her an orphan.
After two months of this behavior, she had a vision from God. He told her that He would protect her and her family from the evils of eating meat, but expressly forbade, for the faithful, the eating of carrots except when baked with butter and brown sugar. Though this divine intervention was welcomed with relief by the Silver household, the episode was an indicator of the things to come.
Miriam took up popular movements as they came across her notice: suffrage, temperance, American Holiness evangelism, populism, self-sufficiency. She also took up various and sundry cures and patent medicines: Orange Wine Stomach Bitters, Wonderful Little Liver Pills, Laudanum, French Arsenic Complexion Wafers, Cod Liver Oil, Castor Oil, Olive Oil. There were Amazing Cures for All Your Ills, including—but certainly not limited to—thinness of the blood, nerves, weariness, diabetes, skin lacking in firmness, dissatisfaction, asthma, insomnia, and exhaustion. Each cure seemed better than the last, promising a bounty of health and wellness, and Miriam begged her family to try these miracle elixirs.
Increasingly, as time went on, Miriam developed her own unique patchwork of beliefs, advice, and medicinal wisdom. Through visions from God, experimentation with various concoctions, and the teachings of sundry fanatics, she cobbled together Errant Mysticism, “a mystic journey that travels outside the bounds of the limits of our minds, that truly passes beyond human understanding.”
In 1908, Miriam Silver met Charles Rowe, a practitioner in the young field of psychoanalysis. Miriam had left her family’s Chicago home after receiving a vision encouraging her to an evangelical mission in New York. She lived on an allowance from her father, acquiring a small shop with an apartment above. From this shop, she distributed pamphlets, peddled medicinal cures, and meddled in mysterious services which were not recorded. Although mystic folk medicine has a long and twisted history of spectacular success, Miriam was never successful.
She fervently argued the dangers of cigarettes and cigars, demonstrating the proper way to smoke with a pipe to the glory and goodness of God. Unfortunately, her pipe-smoking method, which had come to her in a dream, was strange looking, awkward, and embarrassing in public. She joyously advised on God’s preferences for baking special cakes, which were invariably flat and rather soggy. She proselytized on the benefits of her own patent elixir, which though high in alcohol content, tasted strongly of garlic.
Miriam became, in equal measures, more depressed and fanatical as she failed to gain a following among the forlorn. She began exhibiting hysterical symptoms, which she attributed to God’s visitations on her. She became unable to turn her head to the left and was compelled to touch the shop doorknob once every ten minutes. When one morning she awoke with the impression that her right hand was a great balloon, and was thereafter unable to lift or carry anything with it, she determined that this could not possibly be construed as a gift from God and contacted a psychoanalyst.
As a patient on Charles Rowe’s sofa, she struggled to untangle the complicated mesh of her unconscious mind. Miriam Silver was, by far, Professor Rowe’s most fascinating patient, and he became convinced that this earnest and beautiful girl was indeed gifted with visions from God.
“These visions,” he told her, “are interpreted through the disguising mechanisms of the mind. The Mind of God is so beyond the mind of man that His Word is treated as an ill-repressed memory, and dream-like, comes to you represented symbolically, as messages about carrots or cigars.”
Professor Rowe disagreed fundamentally with the Freudian emphasis on sexuality, and particularly the formulating influence of infantile sexuality, that oxymoronic concept. In Miriam Silver, he saw the promise of a revelation in understanding not only the human mind, but in a greater scope, the fundamental nature of the universe.
“Is it not true,” he wrote, “that the prophetic nature of dreams is well-documented throughout the world, and in ancient cultures? Dr. Freud dismisses these prophetic qualities in favor of degrading, animalistic explanations. There is no doubt that in the heritage of man, the spiritual is the essence that defines and controls all human behavior. The metaphysical pervades every culture and every aspect of life, but it defies human explanation. Why is this? Because the metaphysical comes to us garbled and distorted, in a code that must be broken. We have so many competing and various definitions of God and explanations of the universe that the mind becomes boggled. The ancient Greeks and Romans had their pantheons of mythic characters. The native African tribes have their strange masks depicting the preternatural element. The far eastern cultures have their own mythic traditions that defy western understanding. Even our blessed Christianity is broken and shattered into diverse sects.
“We cannot understand the nature of God because it comes to us perverted through the nature of our imperfect mind. Dr. Freud is greater than he can allow himself to believe, in that he has stumbled upon the keys that will allow us to solve this great mystery through the undeniable power of psychoanalysis.”
In 1909, Dr. Sigmund Freud gave a series of five lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University. Charles Rowe attended these lectures, bringing Miriam Silver with him. They registered at a Worchester, Massachusetts inn as Professor and Mrs. Charles Rowe, and explaining that she suffered from blinding headaches, Miriam spent the trip confined to their hotel room. Professor Rowe attended only the lectures by Freud and stood in the back of the lecture hall, with his head lowered and eyes closed, so that those around him thought he might be sleeping.
At the end of the first lecture, the quiet and unobtrusive man was first to the exit, and rushed away across town to his hotel. He arrived and burst open the room door in a fervor.
“Miriam,” he said.
She lay on the bed in a silent posture, her arms crossed on her chest. When Professor Rowe burst in, she opened her eyes and languidly turned to him.
“I can see,” she said. “I can see Dr. Freud in my mind’s eye. He glows with a spiritual aura that he will never know!”
Charles rushed to the bedside.
“I can feel the power rushing through us, like an ocean let loose upon our souls.”
“Yes, Charles, it is the power of God.”
“It is everywhere around us.”
“And in us.”
The two fell together on the bed in a passion of ecstasy.
Three months later, Charles Rowe and Miriam Silver were wed in New York by a justice of the peace, and in 1910, Miriam Rowe gave birth to a baby girl, six pounds and two ounces. She was named Charlotte Abigail Silver Rowe, and her overjoyed parents showered her with every affection.
“We expect great things from you,” Miriam whispered to her newborn girl, when the baby was first laid in her arms. “Great things.”
Soon little Charlotte grew into a vibrant toddler with silken blonde hair, cornflower blue eyes, and a winning, constant smile. The small family was inseparable, and Professor Rowe saw his psychoanalytic patients in an office on the ground floor of their brownstone.
Professor Rowe’s science of psychoanalytic mysticism was the constant topic of conversation in the household. Through his sessions with his patients and consultation with his helpmeet, he came to focus his practice on the aspect of memory.
“What is this beautiful thing,” he would say, patting his small daughter on the head, “but a biological mechanism of memory: the memory of a moment of love, the memory of my physical and psychical person, the memory of your physical and psychical person, my dear. So that the memories in her mind are the memories of a memory, another level in this complex recording of the past on the present.”
Though his small practice grew, finding new patients every month, he found no publisher for his lengthy and convoluted semi-mystical arguments. He spent long evenings composing an ever-lengthening volume documenting his case studies and extrapolating experiments in the supernatural that would allow mankind to converse with God.
On May 22, 1915, Charles Rowe burst excitedly into the sitting room on the second floor of the brownstone, where his wife sat reading to their young child.
“Miriam,” he said, “I have done it.”
Charles had been spending long nights for the last several weeks in the brownstone’s basement, which was set up as a workshop for both woodworking and mechanical tinkering. Charles Rowe had never been truly clever with his hands, but his father and brothers were all accomplished in these manly, mechanical skills, which were valued in his family beyond the more bookish qualities that Charles exuded. As a result, Charles admired the making of things and aspired to complement his intellectual exercises with practical machinery.
When he pronounced his success in the sitting room, his wife looked up from the fable she was reading and smiled.
“Of course, dear,” she said, “you will succeed at anything you put your mind to.”
“This is beyond anything I could have hoped for!”
“What is it, darling?” she asked. Charles had been incredibly secretive about his project, and his wife had not pried into his work.
“It is what you and I have talked over, dreamed over, for years. It is the mechanism for talking with God.”
Miriam stood up, almost dropping her child on its head.
“Charles! Truly?”
“Yes, yes. Come see it.”
Miriam held the child to her breast. “Dear Charlotte,” she said, “your father is the greatest man in the history of knowledge.” Charlotte, a quiet child by nature, smiled at her mother.
“Well, come on,” said Charles, “the proof is in the pudding.”
He led the way down the two flights of stairs to the basement workshop. Along the largest wall there was constructed a large scaffolding, from floor to ceiling and from end to end. It was three feet deep and composed of thin wooden timbers crisscrossing like an asymmetrical spider’s web. Complicating the structure was a secondary crisscross of copper wire, moving along and among the beams. Sometimes the wires would follow the pattern of the wood, and then one wire at a random spot would break the pattern and streak off through its three-dimensional space at its own random-seeming angle. Among and between these two interweaving webs were small pockets, bulges of machinery that formed nodules, sometimes on wires, sometimes on wood. Some nodules contained lights or dials, and others seemed to be simply lumps of metal. Some were spherical, some square, and some completely irregular in shape.
“Charles, it’s amazing,” said Miriam.
“Can you feel the energy emanating from it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, holding Charlotte tightly. “A holy energy.”
Charles walked over to the machinery and caressed it with his hand. “This is the moment that culminates my life work. Our life work.”
“How does it work?” Miriam asked.
“I will show you. No, wait. We need to document this occasion well. Go to the kitchen and get Mary and Bridgett.”
Miriam rushed upstairs again and summoned the two maids, who were at work peeling potatoes.
“But the potatoes cannot sit, they must go into the water,” said Bridgett, always a worried girl.
“Damn the potatoes,” said Miriam. “Oh, forgive my language, but this is important.”
The three women and one child descended the stairs again, to find Charles adjusting dials and buttons.
“What will happen, my dear?” said Miriam.
“I do not precisely know,” said Charles. “I cannot precisely tell you that, but you will see a dramatic result.”
He turned to them.
“On this day,” he said, “we make history.”
Then he turned back to his great machine and flipped a switch on the wall within the structure. A low humming filled the room. Charles stopped to secure his goggles on his head and flipped a second switch. The humming was joined by a flickering of lights and a quiet click-click-click.
“Now, here we are,” he said, “the last switch.”
He glanced behind him and smiled at his family.
Charlotte blinked at him.
Charles turned and flipped the final switch.
There was a crackle and a large clap, and the room filled with smoke. The lights and sounds stopped, and the three women began to cough.
When the smoke cleared, Charles was gone.
Miriam stepped forward wonderingly toward the machine.
“Charles?” she said.
She touched lightly a board in the matrix, and the whole thing came crashing down with a thunderous roar.
Of course, I don’t remember any of this. I don’t know any of this. I am completely in the dark. My mother would tell me things about herself, about my father, about his work, about my birth. My birth was, she assured me, a miracle that brought together man’s scientific knowledge, man’s psychical powers, and God’s love. From these mystic beginnings come my great gifts.
I constructed in my mind a version of the truth about myself and my family, based on what I was told and what I observed. Much later, I started seeing it in my mirror.
I saw my father working on his machine in the mirror, and it seemed to resonate with some childhood memory. The vision of my father’s machine completed itself in my mind when I saw it in the mirror. That is what the mirror is like, a completion, a bringing into being, of something I already know in my own mind. It feels true.
Then, of course, several years later I ran into Bridgett, the maid. I had only vague recollections of her, but I felt a stir of recognition immediately. She knew me.
I asked her about the night my father disappeared.
She said, “You are still young, but you are old enough to understand. You know what men are. Men leave, sometimes.”
“What about men? What about the basement?”
“The basement?” she asked. “Yes, the professor was always tinkering in the basement.”
“Don’t you remember going down to the basement, to look at the machine?”
“I remember there was a great crash from down there. We all rushed down, and there was a heap of rubble.”
“But my father?”
“Yes, that was the day your father disappeared. I remember now, we went down, and there was a great heap of rubble, and your father wasn’t there.”
“You didn’t see him disappear?”
“How could I see him disappear?”
I have two alternate explanations. To witness the supernatural goes against everything our brains are programmed to believe. Perhaps Bridgett merely blocked out the events of that night and constructed her own memory of what happened.
Or, of course, it could all be a lie, invented by my mother, and perpetuated by me.
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