Star Woman in Love (17 page)

By the time he was five, Oscar had become very afraid of his father and very sorry for his mother. He thought that life was hard and burdensome. All he wanted to do was to sleep or daydream, and protect his brother from the unhappiness of their household. His baby brother was an angel who didn’t need to be exposed to all that hurt.

The little people appeared for the first time one afternoon while he was playing in the playground of their family estate. Mum was pregnant with Conor and was sitting on a bench, writing a letter. Salvador, the gardener, was watering the rose bushes and whistling a tune. Mum stopped writing and smiled at him. Salvador nodded back. Oscar walked away from the baby swing, entranced by the blueness of the sky above him. Then something sparkled in his sight. He thought it was an ingot of gold, or a magical ring, or a secret treasure chest hidden among the oak trees at the back of the playground. He followed the shimmering till he was out of the grown-ups’ visual range.

That’s when he saw them, sitting on a rock, sunbathing: two little elves, one male and one female, dressed in the leaves and flowers of the summer. He wasn’t too surprised. He had always suspected that there was more to life than met the eye. The two little persons were staring at him too, motionless. All of a sudden, they stood up and ran towards him, sprinkling fairy dust around his feet. Before he could say a word, they had disappeared. No way could he tell anyone of this magical encounter! This would be a secret for as long as he could keep it. And he had only just learned to say a couple of words by then anyway: he was only two and a half after all. These new friends would keep him company in months to come, when life in his family would take a very unhappy turn.

These elves had also followed Oscar to Tokyo three and a half years later, at the height of his sadness. Grandma couldn’t see them but she didn’t doubt that they existed. She would do anything to make his grandchild feel accepted, and she always showered him with love and her full attention. During the first six months of his stay, his health improved although he missed his family. But Grandma would teach him many things. She would read him beautiful stories and let him have all the treats he wanted. Peace seemed to have come to stay, until one dreadful night when the Lord of the Darkness himself came to Oscar’s bed and sat at his side. He told him that he was his own child, and Brian wasn’t really his dad. Oscar screamed: “I don’t believe you!”

Grandma switched the lights on only to find her grandson had wet his bed and was shrieking like a lunatic, beating his head and fists on the wall to the point of bleeding. It took her all of her strength and the help of the night servants to calm him down. Oscar’s seizure ended after twenty minutes of madness. The boy collapsed in bed, as white as a sheet and covered in sweat. His temperature was sky high and he was foaming at the mouth. The following day he was sent to the best neurologist in Tokyo who gave him some medication to calm his nerves. Two days later, he and Grandma were on a plane back to Dublin. The following week, he found himself at St. Anthony’s Institution in Bray. He was to spend the next three weeks there. His life was about to change forever.

At the Institution, Sister Nora was one of the people he feared the most, almost as much as the bogeyman. She was very violent. Beatings were one of the ways used to keep naughty children under control, and she relished her role as teacher of these lessons. Oscar misbehaved all the time. He had to do what the voices told him to do. They made him do the dirtiest of things. He couldn’t help but take off his clothes and run around naked. He couldn’t help but play with his willy until thrilling sparkles ran through his limbs. He couldn’t help but say bad words. He couldn’t help but wet his bed. He couldn’t help but break windows, smash furniture, fight with the other children. What else was he supposed to do? He was a sinner: the grown-ups had told him so many times.

In the second week of his stay, he was sent to the special ward where they housed all the boys as bad as he. They all seemed very quiet at first. Of course, they were sedated. Most of them had already undergone electroshock therapy, and soon he would also face this treatment. It was the last hope. His parents came to visit him twice. Mum cried every time she saw him. Dad wore a serious expression and told him to chin up. All Oscar wanted to know was how Conor was, and if he missed his big brother. Otherwise, words failed him.

The more silent he turned, the louder the voices started to become in his head. One night the bad ones told him that the next day was going to be the toughest day of his life. That he would lose his mind completely. That the treatment he was to undergo was very strong and very painful. Oscar wanted to sleep and forget about it all, except he knew that upon awakening he would be greeted by the worst, scariest day of his life. He wanted to die. He started praying that he could die. The voices laughed at him. He was the child of the devil. He opened his eyes in the hope that they would stop.

When he turned his head to the window next to his bed, he saw a face reflected in the windowpane, although no one else was with him. Perhaps the little people were now playing tricks on him. But this was the face of a little girl. She was probably a couple of years younger than him and had big, bright eyes. She put her index finger to her lips and signalled to him that he should hush. Then she nodded and smiled. Light radiated around her. Oscar’s breathing became deep and regular. A strong sense of peace pervaded his mind and his limbs.

Who was that girl? Surely she was an angel. Or perhaps a ghost, a girl who had died in the hospital, suffering at the hands of Sister Nora and her entourage. Oscar thought that now he didn’t mind dying. It was definitely a much better choice than recovering and having to go through life with the mark of the devil branded on his soul.

“Shhhhhh,” the girl said.

Sleep came to Oscar’s rescue. His thoughts melted into a pharmaceutical kaleidoscope of shapes, spiralling down to the pitch-black depths of his love-starved heart. Then there was a long interval of void-like nothingness, until he saw two green eyes that shone like fluorescent lights. They opened up in the blackness to spread Light on that dark night of his soul. They were so bright that even the charcoal shadows of his personal hell couldn’t defeat them.

The pale light of the morning came filtering through the curtains, and Oscar awoke to another wet bed. He wasn’t ashamed anymore. He expected to feel afraid at the thought of what was in store for him that morning, but the fear wasn’t forthcoming. He was calm and centred instead. That girl was his Saviour: she could sweep all bad thoughts away. He sat up in bed rubbing his fists onto his eyes. He was still sleepy. He went to the washroom and took a quick cold shower. He got dressed in his daytime clothes and went downstairs to the laundry room where he washed his bed linen. Then he returned to the bedroom and made his bed. Now he was ready. He sat and waited for Sister Nora and Doctor Morrissey. He noticed something on the chair next to his bed: a golden chain with an angel medal. The girl must have left it. He put it under his pillow. That medal would have the power to return him to her even after what was awaiting him that day.

The nun arrived. He followed her along the long, white corridor, walking on automatic pilot and breathing deeply. They entered an otherwise claustrophobic lift that took them to the vaults under the dormitory. The darkness in the huge room made his eyes squint. A bed stood in front of him, with a machine behind it. It looked like a shelf with many glass tubes on it. A number of wires spread out of the support, with pads attached to their ends. Oscar was put lying down on the bed and was injected with the medicine that had never failed to tranquilise him. He fell into a state of numbness. All he could think about was his breath. The little girl was next to him in spirit. He detected her presence and this made him feel calm. It didn’t matter that he might have died in that experiment. She would be there with him whichever way, whether he was going to be alive or dead after the electroshock. He wasn’t altogether certain that she belonged to the land of the dead already.

* * * *

Shambhala watching the same event, 19 December 1971

The Great White Lodge was in session. We, the Ascended Masters, were sending high frequencies to Oscar right when the anaesthetic was entering his blood flow. There were four adhesive pads applied to his forehead. We saw a nurse put a belt around his temples and fasten it tightly. Oscar was made to count backwards. When he became unconscious, the doctor put a teeth-guard in his mouth. Then the current was switched on. Oscar’s body jolted as if struck by a lightning bolt. One hundred and seventy volts ran through his tiny, fragile limbs for five whole minutes. Cassandra’s astral body – she was indeed the little girl who had comforted him the previous night - stood next to him with her hands on his heart, to protect him from certain death. Nobody in the room could see her. She was making sure that Oscar, one of the youngest patients ever to undergo electroconvulsive therapy in Ireland, would wake up after the treatment. His heart was weak, but it belonged to her. She would do everything in her power to preserve it.

In this life, Oscar had chosen a difficult way to remember his True Identity: the Path of Sorrow. Only by allowing himself to experience the depths of despair would he remember his function in the Plan. He was Cassandra’s earthly Twin Soul. She had known of him and his fate even when she was still a little girl. She hadn’t quite grasped it rationally. But she would often daydream of a beautiful little boy with almond-shaped, sad hazel eyes. Oscar was her invisible friend in her make-believe stories in which he needed her protection to escape from the Darkness. She would always shine her Light on his scared little heart. But her imaginary friend and his misadventures were more real than she could have envisaged then.

We could read the thoughts of the medical staff in the room as the procedure was being carried out. They didn’t mean to harm Oscar. They wanted the boy lying on the plinth to wake up only with the memory of good episodes and experiences from his past. Everything else would be swept away by the current, they believed. Of course, they knew that there was an inherent risk that his mental capacity would be reduced by the seizures induced by this therapy to modify his behaviour, to damage what they saw as problematic portions of his brain. If all went well, he would forget the symptoms of his badness because that brain damage would simply delete them. He might end up with some cognitive impairment, but his life would be near almost normal.

Sister Nora looked serene as she glanced over the activities around Oscar’s unconscious body. She was shrouded in a cloud of Darkness, and she was praying for ‘the mark of the devil’ to be washed away from ‘this little sinner’s soul’. She wasn’t really sure that it could be possible. We knew that the nun was evil. How could she otherwise have kept silent in the face of the Oscar’s terrible ordeal a week earlier? Just like Cassandra, we had seen what had happened to him in the Infirmary. Yet we couldn’t do anything to prevent it. Of course, the wound it would cause in his soul couldn’t be wiped away by any machine. It would take time, awareness and love to heal it. Right then, all we could do was to send high frequencies of Light to Cassandra at such a delicate junction, as her love for Oscar was helping him to stay alive.

______________

Paris, spring 1990

In a dimly lit underground chamber in the guts of Paris, a group of laboratory-suited individuals sat around an oval table. Their words were muffled by the freezing cold air of the surrounding vaults and the antiseptic masks on their faces. The soft neon light disclosed well-groomed men and women of middle age underneath the scrubs. The room was sterilised, as required by its function as a microbiology laboratory. The catacombs of Paris hide many terrible secrets: this rendezvous was one of them.

A grim centre table had the undivided attention of the symposium. Lying on it was a human-sized glass pod. A body was wrapped in muslin bandages inside this unusual incubator. It looked like a mummy with the shape of a woman. The mummy was alive. Her right hand was moving, signalling ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to questions being posed. Her vacant eyes and shaven head were the only parts of her body that had not been covered in gauze. Electroshock pads were still attached to the skin on her skull. Wires and fibre optic cables connected the pod to a machine at one end of the table.

“Can you hear me?”

The mummy raised her left forefinger slightly.

“She’s come round, Monsieur Harker, she’s come round! We’ve made it! The electroshock didn’t kill this one! We’ve made it!”

The man with glasses spoke with a strong French accent. His eyes were beaming. He stopped the flow of current that was still directed at the woman. The tall man next to him, with chin-length wavy hair tucked under the protective clothing, was Robert Harker. He looked to be in his mid-thirties and was known around the world for many reasons, most particularly for being one of the most handsome men ever to grace the planet. He raised his hands and pushed them forward. Silence fell on the room at his gesture.

“Hush, Francois,” he said, “we’re not there yet. She needs to survive the first 24 hours before we can sing our victory song. Marion, what is her temperature?”

“42 degrees, Robert. It’s been decreasing slowly and steadily. Her brain activity is within normal parameters. No damage has resulted from the procedures. The lobotomy was successful. Likely, she has retained a comprehension of the basic rudiments of language, but hopefully she has no notion of her identity anymore.”