CHAPTER ONE AUGUST 1948

“Not now, please, not now. Not with my friends around.” I dropped my hands into my lap and folded my fingers into a tight fist. I could do nothing but wait for the aura that had been plaguing me for the last five months to run its course.         If I was alone I wouldn’t have minded, but I was in an old auto repair garage my friends and I had been hanging out at since George Snauffer’s mechanic joined the Marines at the beginning of the war and got himself killed a few months later on Guadalcanal. That was the September of 1942, and as far as anyone knew George wasn’t planning on reopening the business.         I was seated on one of the three car seats my friends and I had found in the old cars in the junkyard that surrounded the garage. We placed them in a “U” formation in the middle of the garage. That made a good conversation arrangement. Since George was the uncle of Travis and Todd Uliano, two of the friends I mentioned earlier, he didn’t say anything when we claimed squatter’s rights.         The aura started with a lightheadedness followed seconds later by a sharp, penetrating ringing of bells that echoed inside my head. The sound was like that of wind chimes, blowing around frantically behind my eyes. After a few seconds the volume of the bells softened and I slipped slowly to the edge of a deep slumber. An indescribable pleasure like gossamer descending from heaven fell over me. It wasn’t that my brain caught fire, like the ecstatic auras described by Dostoevsky in his person accounts of epilepsy, but more like the satoris sought after by Zen Buddhists. Within the confines of my aura there was no separation of time. Past and present became one, and time not yet known lay just a breath beyond a translucent veil that separated me for the unknowable.         I knew where I was, and I was conscious of my surroundings, but the relationship between me and the objects around me was altered. I took no interest in the mundane. I was free from the restrictions of the ordinary. My feelings were unreal, far-away, unearthly. While time stopped I could neither talk nor move.         The wind chimes were accompanied by a quaint odor. The odor was pleasant enough but unfamiliar, like the scent of a flower but of a flower unknown. I thought, but didn’t know for sure, that the scent came from a mysterious girl who was always present at such times. On that particular occasion the illusory girl was sitting next to Peggy Cunningham on a car seat opposite the one I was sitting on. The girl was a couple years older than me, but I only felt she was and had no way of actually knowing. The girl wore a white sweat shirt with “Smith College” on the front in yellow letters. That shirt was given to me by my mother last May when I was accepted at Smith College just before the end of my junior year in high school. The unknown girl also wore a pair of my jeans and my penny loafers. I noticed a drop of white paint on the cuff of the girl’s jeans where it had dripped when Peggy and I painted the garage’s bathroom. I had the strangest feeling that I knew the girl and had an affection for her so strong that only an altered consciousness could call forth a feeling of that strength. I felt nothing unusual about the girl’s presence. It was only after I was back in the mundane world—after the past, present and the elusive unknowable were again separated—that I felt that my strong feelings for the girl were odd.         During every aura I was acutely aware that everything had changed, and yet everything was uncannily familiar—as though everything had happened before, but so long ago that time and measurements of time were transcended. I felt that I stood on the very edge of the unknowable, and that the veil that hung between me and the elusive beyond was about to be torn away. My sense of déjà vu was so keen I felt that I must surely know what was about to happen next. Over by the refrigerator Bobby Glassner was still talking about physics, and I knew, without doubt, that his next sentence was going to be: “There are too many inconsistencies in physics.” My prescience was so acute that when Bobby started talking about a book he had read, the inevitable unfulfillment of my premonition caused me severe mental pain.         And then, as suddenly as it came, the aura was gone and I returned to the commonplace. Time again traveled forward, and I no longer heard the wind chimes nor smelled the flower, and when I saw the girl had vanished I felt a deep loss and an incomprehensible sense of loneliness.         After my return to the commonplace, the same lightheadedness that preceded the aura returned and would remain for a few minutes. I would be confused and disorientated during that post-seizure period. If I talked, I would be at a loss to recall familiar words and facts and have difficulty talking even though in my mind I knew perfectly well what I wanted to say. The confusion would hamper my speech even after I believed my normal state of consciousness had returned, and I would have trouble concentrating for a half hour or so.         As a precaution, I shifted my position to assure myself I had full mobility. Strangely, the shift revealed a numbness in my left side I had never felt before. My arm and leg tingled like it had gone to sleep. Had I been sitting in a position that stopped the blood from circulating? Or did the symptoms of epilepsy include numbness and loss of motor control?         Luckily, my friends were watching Bob and didn’t notice me staring blankly across the room. I had been caught twice, once by Steve O’Kane and once by Peggy. I explained away the seizure to Peggy by telling her I had dozed off and wasn’t quite awake yet. I told Steve I was deep in thought and wanted to finish the thought before I forgot it. My explanations were lame, but, surprisingly, they both believed me.         “No, I’m serious,” Bob was saying. “Listen, man. Last week I was reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and a book on quantum mechanics.”         “What the hell does Mark Twain have to do with quantum mechanics?” Todd Uliano demanded. Todd and Steve were perched up on the workbench, both holding a Coke and swinging their feet. “You going to tell us Tom Sawyer invented gravity?” “No, dumb ass,” Steve offered, “Huck Finn did.”         Bob held up his hands, palms forward. “I’m not trying to put you on, man, just listen, okay.” Once Bobby was satisfied they were through heckling him, he continued. “I was reading about the solar eclipse in Connecticut Yankee and about the orbit of electrons around the nucleus of the atom in the physics book. The eclipse of the sun and moon is the same as the eclipse of an electron between the nuclei of two atoms.”         “For Christ sake, man,” Todd objected, “you can’t even see an atom. How the hell can you compare it to the sun?”         “Just listen and you’ll learn something—if that’s possible,” Bobby persisted stubbornly. “Gauss’ law states an electrical field ends on a point charge. When the electron of one atom eclipses the nucleus of a neighboring atom, it blocks the field, and the atom is no longer neutral. The nucleus is capable of attracting the electron on the atom it eclipsed—or any number of atoms. That’s why Coulumb’s Law and Newton’s Universal Law of Gravity look the same—for Christ sake, man, they are the same. Coulumb’s Law is nothing more than a special application of Newton’s Universal Law of Gravity.”         “So?” Steve said.         “Goddamn it, Steve, this is the biggest thing since Maxwell. Newton figured out what gravity does, but he didn’t know why it did what it does. Einstein thinks he does but he doesn’t.” “Or does what it did,” Todd said. “Where does Becky fit in?”         “Goddamn it,” Bob said and spun around. “Vonnie, do you understand what I’m talking about?”         I shook my head “no.” I stood up and put my weight on my left leg. I was relieved to find it was still strong and started for the restroom.         “You got another migraine?” Peggy asked.         I uttered a sound I hoped sounded like yes and shook my head. I didn’t have migraine headaches, but I told everyone I did in case I was caught having a seizure and needed an explanation. Learning I had epilepsy hit me pretty hard, but my fear of being discovered was greater than the infliction itself. Once people found out I was epileptic, and they would eventually, I would be shunned like a leper.         I locked the restroom door turned the cold water on. I splashed water on my face and dried it         with a paper towel. I rubbed my arm. Damn it, it was still numb. Earlier that summer, after the first aura, I thought the experience was a fluke, but a week later I had another one. That sent me rummaging through the Elkhart Library for every book I could find on brain disorders, and when I had read all the books in that library, I went to the South Bend and Notre Dame Libraries and read all their books. I found that the epilepsy I had didn’t go beyond the aura stage, and it didn’t cause paralyzation and unconsciousness like a grand mal seizure. I narrowed the symptoms down to temporal lobe epilepsy with post-seizure speech impairment called “postical dysphasia.” I read every publication I could find by Hughlings Jackson, a pioneer in the field of brain disorders, and anyone else who wrote on the subject of what Jackson coined the “dreamy state.” I even read first person descriptions of the affliction in novels by Dostoyevsky and Dickens. It was Dickens who best described my own experience in David Copperfield. He wrote:

We have all some experience of a feeling which comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said or done before, in a remote time—of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances—of our knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if we suddenly remembered it.—Charles Dickens.

After several minutes in the restroom I whispered softly so no one could hear, “I’m in the bathroom waiting for the affects of the aura to go away.” The words were correct and the thought complete. Satisfied I could talk, I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked terrible, but I went back into the garage. Bob was staring at me. “You alright, Von?” he asked.         “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t feel like talking about physics right now. I think I’m coming down with a cold or something.” I started for the door. “I gotta go home. I really feel rotten.”         “Are we still going swimming at your place?” Peggy asked.         I opened the door then turned. “Yeah. If I’m not better, you guys can still come.”         Once outside I felt relieved. I sat in my car and laid my head on the steering wheel to allow my system to return to normal. I then started my car and backed out onto Conn Road. I drove home slowly, prepared to slam on the brakes if I became woozy.

Go back to top