Lisette Coly and Anastasia Damalas are at a crossroads.
But, on a recent late-winter morning, they were also in the book-filled storefront of their foundation in the Greenport section of Long Island, when someone knocked at the door.
Ms. Coly, 71, and her daughter, Ms. Damalas, 32, were leery. Their family nonprofit is appointment-only, and no appointments were scheduled.
In walked a woman who said she had driven from Eatons Neck because she was interested in buying the building. She requested a tour, but Ms. Coly told her the foundation was closed for the day.
Still, the woman made her way into the quiet and pristine space, toward the back archive where Ms. Coly had just unveiled 90-year-old photos of her grandmother that had never been shown to the public. The photos feature Eileen J. Garrett, the celebrity medium of the 20th century, deep in trance.
The dull whir and arcade blare of McCarran International Airport rattles my skull even after I scurry into the cool dark Uber. I do not care for Las Vegas, particularly casino culture. But I am here, headed to a gambling conference. I recount the small sum I am willing to spend, to fritter away on a dream. For nearly an hour we cruise. Hot, unpopulated strip malls, distant red rockscapes. At some point we drive up into pooled and palm-treed hills, upscale and residential, where I am safe from heat and greed but not the question that beats like a low, steady drum. Why did you come?
The answer still startles me: to see the future.
He looked the same on screen as I remembered: sheepish smile and dewy eyes, with a 14-year-old's energy though now he was 35. Not the look of someone who almost suffocated from collapsed lungs on numerous occasions, left his body, talked to a white light, and then came back again. In fact, he looked good. Better than me.
I was jealous, just a little, of his tan and air of relaxation from a life lived outside. In the Skype window, I saw my smile and sincerity didn't hide my pale skin and tired eyes from city life and family life, from trying to do too much. He was cute, like I remembered. We were never flirty, but people who share extraordinary moments in their backgrounds connect almost involuntarily. They feel it in each other, and it binds them, like distant relatives with the same blood, or soldiers who fought and survived the same war.
Have you ever heard of an extraordinary moment? An extraordinary moment is an incident in which your senses tell you information in ways that defy the laws of science. You hear a song on a radio, and you know, somehow, it is a message from a deceased grandparent. You receive a phone call from an old flame the day before she is struck and killed by a commuter train. You feel physically held by loving arms in a moment in which you are entirely alone and despairing. Extraordinary moments are subjective. They are usually private, and unverifiable by others. They beg huge questions about how we are invisibly entangled with the larger world, with loved ones, and with ourselves.
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I heard it. Clear as a bell. It's a girl, and she needs your help.
Seventy-two hours after the first contractions gripped my pelvis, the baby was nowhere close to arriving. Days earlier, I had exhausted the home-birth pain management techniques, each less effective than the last. Drape my whale-ish form over an exercise ball? Done. Hang my head over an ylang-ylang oil diffuser and inhale, wishing for opioids? Done. Press repeat on the Eternal Om CD until the calming chant transformed to an ominous drone? You bet. I had been awake with searing contractions, two minutes apart, since Wednesday at dawn. Now it was Saturday, and we were still at home in our two-bedroom, purple-walled condo, which only a year earlier had been our dreamy, newlywed paradise.
Natural childbirth, like motherhood, had been a given in my mind. At some point after peeing on the stick, I decided the baby train was going my way and would reach an inevitable end: a drug-free, old-fashioned labor and delivery achieved by me in the company of my beloved husband. In the breezy first trimester, I made some reasonable concessions: a hospital birth only if I could choose a midwifery practice (I did). A handshake with the practice's surgeon as long as it was for the first and last time.
I want to say it was a just a bad dream, that I don't believe my husband is trying to kill me, or any part of me. When I tell friends about the nightmare, anticipating their dead pause, I laugh first so they know I am not worried. But they pause anyway, wondering, like me, why am I dreaming of my own demise at the hands of the one I love.
Physical violence is a real problem in many marriages, and an expert look at mine for indicators and risks would yield exactly nothing. But merging with another person is by nature an act of destruction—of preconceived notions and preconceived selves—and that chaos has had small but not invisible consequences for me. I feel foolish for complaining, so focus on the last decade's joys: working from our rented Victorian home, doting on our daughter, shuttling her to school, circus class, and girl scouts in SUV comfort, benefitting from my husband's downtown Chicago career to which he is also married. Sometimes, though, my vision blurs, and I catch glimpses of another more gothic truth in the rearview mirror, in my reflection in spring puddles dotting my path to the wine shop. The benign details of my traditional marriage that fall through the cracks during the day pop up at night as my worst nightmare—uxoricide—and I wish it felt as ridiculous as it sounds.
Before you brush me off as a pampered but paranoid woman, consider this: when we fell in love I was 34 and, though smitten and snuggling next to him in a rare outdoor winter moment on the Belmont pier, I had the distinct feeling that I was dying. So I told him.
“I don't know what to make of that,” he had said. And maybe he didn't. But now I wonder if his confusion was just a cover, something to say if I sensed his plans to care for me so well that my independent spirit would die. That his love would murder my independence.
Last June, while attending an academic conference about using extraordinary ability to predict the stock market, an elegant woman addressed me near the bathroom sinks, saying she’d like to give me a gift in the form of a reading.
“Like an astrology reading?”
“More like an energy reading. It’s an act of karma. I try to pay it forward once in a while.”
For the last several years, I’ve spent my writing life exploring the science and scholarship of extraordinary experiences. I am an observer, not a practitioner, and although I love the topic, conferences like these freak me out. Something weird—and I mean very weird– always happens. Two years earlier, on a glorious June day, I presented at an extraordinary phenomena conference at Gettysburg College, not far from America’s bloodiest Civil War battlefield. The blazing sun shifted once I arrived within a mile of the town; though the sky was still bright, a cold, dark cloud seeped through the metal of my car, into my heart. It was as though fifty thousand dead soldiers still drifted in the air.