Just when I was thinking about having met my double, I was someone else’s, nearly. The year was 1996, the day a clear one in April, the beginning of the county Dogwood Festival. My neighbor, who worked for the city, reminded me, in tones that implied it would be approved if I was a good citizen and went, that the parade was about to begin. I set off up the street to the park about two blocks away, where the parade would pass by; but it wasn’t in sight yet, so I wandered down downtown to the pedestrian mall. In the air was the distant racket of a marching band. I stationed myself a block away and across the street from the wine store that I wanted to stop at afterward, at a good place to stand and watch. And here came the small town American parade. Leading off were the heavy armaments, military and police. The color guards of the police units couldn’t seem to march in time. Indeed, marching in time didn’t seem to matter to them. My mind had nothing significant to fasten on until the Living Stones Christian Motorcycle Club rolled by, looking a little bit like Hells Angels on their Harleys with teddy bears on the postern. Then passed lots of twirling girls managing batons, some tossing them high and doing handsprings before catching them perfectly. And so on, until a hand tapped me solidly, yet not familiarly, on the shoulder and a voice asked where I got my dress. I turned and saw a young woman looking at me intently. My first impression was that she was Yup’ik. I named the store and remarked that they had nice linen dresses but most of the clothes were for older women, meaning older than myself. She asked if I was twenty-seven. Forty-nine, I said, gently. Her eyes widened. Surgery? No, grandmother’s genes. Your face is so smooth. How old are you, I asked, thinking I ought not go on with this conversation, but wanting not to be rude and to see what would come of this.

She asked another question, and I asked one. She said she was a children’s book author. Her manner was all rapid speech, intensity, stiffness even, as if she had to speak; yet she was calm and very alert. She said: “We were sisters in a past life. You were a warrior in your past lives, a man and a woman, in many countries in Europe; you were beheaded many times, and stabbed in the heart, that is why you feel grief so often. You’ve lived many lives, but this is your last, and you will put all of those lives together. You’ll live forever, and you’ll be free and you’ll fly everywhere, fly above everything and see all. You’ll live to be 115, then you’ll be burned, cremated, and your ashes will be scattered over the ground, you’ll enter the ground and live forever. Flying, moving swiftly, traveling.”

She said, twice, that she was manic depressive; had slept with forty-five men; was raped in this life and past; now had a soul mate. Her father was a Methodist minister who wanted to direct her life. She was Korean, though identified herself as Russian (“we can choose”). Sasha Choi was her name. She came to our town at fifteen and was now thirty-two. She had a special affinity for children with autism and Down syndrome, she said: because of the rapes her seed was split and cursed, and her children would have these conditions.

She rocked slightly even while greeting people she knew, and spoke firmly. She “read” people. Often they didn’t like it and did not want it, she said; she did not do it for money. Her father had tried to prevent her. She went in cycles, rising and falling; when she fell she was weak and people tried to eat her. “I can tell by your teeth that you’re not a vampire. There are many vampires in the world; not all of them are bad, or want to be bad, but many are. They are people who had no light in their lives and are cursed.

“People want to touch you, they want to console and nurture you,” she said to me. “You don’t have to be afraid of it.”

I asked if she had been a shaman.

“Yes, in past lives.”

Korean? Korean shamanism is the province of women.

“No, Russian” (a slight hesitation here, or slight insistence, an intervening consciousness) “or Siberian.”

Was she a shaman now?

“Yes. The spirits of the animals and trees come and talk to me, and tell me about people. I can read people, but not everyone likes that.” Abruptly, straight at me: “Do you have a special feeling for Africans?”

In general I wished them well, I replied, but I didn’t know Africans or have a deep knowledge of Africa, so I supposed I didn’t feel a special or particular concern. She was surprised.

“But they were your servants! They braided your hair and made your dresses! In Denmark!”

This odd conversation continued in stages. It occurred to me that often in Alaskan villages Native people were equally direct, and at times visionary; I decided to unbend. I raised my eyebrows and asked if her children’s books were available. No. She made books about the various members of her family; they weren’t for sale. Later I realized they were about her families from past lives. Meanwhile, the parade was going by. I turned back to it. She stood behind and to my right. Suddenly: “You were my sister in a past life.” I felt sympathy for this; quite reasonable people say such things; sometimes people “recognize” a familiar quality in a stranger. She said, “I’ll fix some stir-fry for you one night.” She glowed with a sweet generosity; a sense of giving, drawing me toward her without threat. She wanted to give me her phone number; I did little to encourage it, but she found a piece of paper attached to something, tore it off, and wrote her name, then looked expectantly at me, so I told her mine and gave my second phone number. (Why that one?) She had two hard-cover notebooks in her pack: “This is what I write my stories in.” And so I took her slip of paper, then turned back to the parade.

A little while later, I heard echoes of bands from behind me, down the hill past the pedestrian mall, and turned to see if the parade were still coming from that direction. She tapped my shoulder again, a kind of prodding, but with no emotion or urging to it – not comforting, not threatening; affirming. Later she said, “In Zen they hit you hard on the back.” To make you think? I asked. “And to drive out spirits,” she said, and hit my back. All this was non-aggressive. That’s when she said that people want to touch me.

To a friend I wrote: I think I'm going to see her again. I want to know more about this curious person and her fascinating state of mind/being. The gift of “reading” is, I think, genuine – she's like an entranced, archaic seer, or a pre-Homeric poet: the imagery she uses about me is recognizable, metaphorically. The explanation of it (past lives) is not what I would have chosen, but, oddly, I've been finding it rather comforting. It accounts for my martial energies.

In June of that year, Sasha Choi phoned to invite me to dinner. She had moved, she said. She and her boyfriend, who wasn’t good for her, had broken up. Now she lived in a single room over near the university. Her voices sounded dulled.

I looked forward to stir-fry, and was curious to find out what she had to say. Would she talk about our past life, when we were sisters? But I wanted to hear more about her: what the plant and animal spirits were telling her. I reflected and decided to wear jade earrings and a pendant, both of Chinese origin. These were given me by a beloved friend. The Chinese esteemed jade as pure and protective precious stone.

Her street was dismal, lined with shabby student-apartment buildings. Her room was in a shed-like addition to a house now divided into studios, and was hardly bigger than a dorm room. It looked out on gravel and weeds. Her paintings hung on the wall and showed energy and talent: images of intense sun, trees, water; brilliant colors. “I was thinking about global warming and how the trees will suffer without water,” she said.

She was grave and self-contained. Dinner was prepared, and was awful, overcooked minute-steak and chopped frozen asparagus and indifferent noodles from a packet. Cold water to drink. She hardly spoke, but let me settle in before telling me why she had moved. She had left her boyfriend; he was a dour sort. He was unhappy without her, though. “This is going to be a hard time,” she said. “I realized I had become dependent on him. For the last two years I’ve been with him alone, not making any friends. So I have to begin doing that. I know it will be hard at first, but then it will get easier, and I’ll be all right.”

I was casting about in my mind for conversation. “You said we had been sisters in a past life: what was that life?”

She laughed. “Yes, sometimes I talk that way. I told you, didn’t I, that I’m manic- depressive?”

“Yes. But what made you tap on my shoulder?”

“I was feeling confident then, and you looked confident. When I feel that way I can talk to anyone. I prefer it. Now I’m feeling weak. That’s what I call it when I’m depressed. Do you sleep much?”

“Six or seven hours a night, but sometimes I take a nap during the day.”

“That’s not much. I sleep twelve hours. It’s the medication, I need sleep.”

She received disability payments, six hundred dollars a month, from the government; thus, she could afford to live on her own. The lithium was good, and she had felt good, until 1989 (when the world changed), when it didn’t work anymore. “They’re still testing to find the right dosage, but haven’t succeeded. My psychiatrist is brilliant,” she said sympathetically, “but he has so many patients to see every day that I only get about fifteen minutes, every two weeks.

“You’ve traveled a lot. I have, too; the government lets me, with this support. I can go anywhere – I don’t want to be in just one place, or from just one place. I think I’ve lived, as man and woman, in Russia, for many generations. I liked it there. That’s why I’ve named myself Sasha.”

About past lives and our having been connected she said no more. She needed my attention and would answer questions.

The doctor was intelligent about the physiological basis of her disease, she said, but she thought there was another level to it, as well, which she had studied and reflected on for years. She was born in Korea. Her mother’s mother had felt contempt for her – the birth was difficult, her mother was sick for a long time afterward – and had taken the baby Sasha to a “witch-doctor who cursed my life. She invited the spirits of generations of dead people to live with me. They weigh me down, and keep telling me to come join them, that life is full of suffering. For a long time I carried them, and was pulled down by them. But my life-force is very strong, and sometimes I felt myself rising above them, and lifting them up with me. They were happy! They were glad to rise; but then they would sink, and pull me back down with them. Fortunately, I’m strong; otherwise, I’d be dead by now.

“Scientists tell us that human life on this earth is 50,000 years old, or 150,000 – whatever their numbers are. But I believe we are much older than that; that life itself is much older. I can see this as if I am remembering. You know, I feel such affection for human beings. We can do so much. For instance, a tree is sick: we can find a way to heal it! The tree can’t do that. I think we all were together once, we were – globules, that’s the best way I can describe it, we were little globes floating around, bumping against each other, streaming along. We knew each other; but most people forget this, I guess. They don’t pay attention to it, and don’t remember; they don’t try to remember, or don’t want to remember. But I remember: we were all connected, we were all floating around together. Now when I walk down the street and pass so many people I am thrilled, because I’ve known all of them! We walk right by each other now, but we all came from the same source. This makes me so happy!

“My boyfriend didn’t like it when I talked this way. He believed, like the doctors, in the physiological basis of my disease. He was very scientific. I couldn’t talk to him. Then, I began to go to church again; but he didn’t like to talk about that, either. That was hard for me; it made me feel weak. But he was kind, too, and he did support me – he supported me for seven months while I was in the hospital, and other times, when the medicine didn’t work. He was good, in that way. I tried to explain this to him last night, about why I needed to be away from him, but he wasn’t very mature, and didn’t care about what I needed. He turned it around and sent it back at me, talking about himself, and what he needed. He wouldn’t listen. This made me sad.

“Do you know what he said? He said Jesus, too, must have been manic-depressive! He said, In the Bible it tells how Jesus tried to bring different kinds of people together, preached to them, fed them – he could reach all of them, as if he were above them and could see everything. And then, he’d be depressive, angry, go into the desert and be alone. Sometimes I feel like Jesus: I could do that, bring all different kinds of people together. It’s my assignment,” she said simply.

“A few weeks ago I went to a Black church near here. The minister was a woman. I enjoyed the church, and enjoyed listening to her, and I kept going back. But then it became confusing. They talked about bad spirits, and how people might be possessed, and how those people had to be sent away. But I’ve known people who talked to spirits – were they ‘possessed’? – and they were good people. I couldn’t see why they had to be ignored, or sent away; this was confusing. So now I don’t know whether to go back to that church.

“I am an old soul, and can remember back to before we were human; but in one way I’m disconnected, or not grounded. I only knew one of my four grandparents. My father’s parents are in North Korea; he would never tell me their names, he wouldn’t speak about what had given him pain. But he abused us, and abused his wife; isn’t that strange, when he was a Methodist minister? How could a man who believed in religion turn around and be cruel to people? He didn’t like it when I talked about spirits; he tried to beat them out of me. Finally, four years ago, I had to run away.”

I asked about her mother’s father but didn’t hear her, if she did answer.

“Maybe there is some hope: two years ago, my mother sent me a letter giving me the names and addresses of my father’s parents. They are still in North Korea.”

“Do you ever think of going back to visit Korea?”

“Yes; but I haven’t got the resources for that yet.”

What about the grandmother: was she still alive? I had the sense that the mother was not well, mentally or physically. I asked about the Korean shamanic tradition: could the curse not be lifted?

“After I realized what had happened, I was exorcised several times. I’ve been able to do it myself, but not completely; some of the spirits of the dead have dropped away over time. I feel lighter. But I realized, too, that this disease is not only physiological. About ten years ago I said what I still believe: that my depression is also the world’s.”

Her lovely skin, body, features; her bad experience with men, at least one brutal rape. Was there no self-protection? She talked about floating, about wanting to be free of the weight of these spirits, yet I sensed she didn’t want to lose them completely. I asked if she liked being in her body.

“No, I don’t like this flesh. It holds me down, and it is in the body that there is such great suffering. The spirits tell me that: it’s the flesh that causes all this suffering: be free of it! But I can’t; and I don’t want to, yet, because I love life. I love this world. I would love to paint it! I think that if I had enough energy, I could bring everyone together, and persuade them to stop all these wars and this hating, all this suffering. But you know, the lithium doesn’t let me be as confident as I’d like to be; it gets in the way, like a cloud in front of my eyes and I have to fight my way through it to see properly. And I still have something to do here, I believe I must try to being people together. My time is not finished; I can’t separate myself from this flesh, I can’t pull free. Gradually; gradually. In time, I’ll be entirely free of it, and be able to see everything!”

Thunder rolled. My car was a few blocks away. We walked to it to get an umbrella. Along the way I offered refreshment and we entered a coffeehouse, where she ordered tea and cheesecake. She drank her iced tea and ate these with pleasure. Again she talked about religion, and how she thought that her disease really existed at this level, and that until she could address it there, she would not be free of it. Of course, the psychiatrists didn’t want to hear about that; they believed in the physical side, of course, that was their specialty. Her face looked happy. She became a young girl, a teenager, as if going back into a happier, secure time. I felt old, and asked if she knew about Sufism and its joy.

“It began in Turkey, didn’t it? I saw those spinning dancers once on TV.” Her ex-boyfriend used to talk about them and had their literature.

I spoke about their joy, their ecstasy, and their acceptance of the large Mind or Intelligence. I mentioned the poet Rumi.

She shone. “I’ve held his books in my hands. Isn’t that interesting? I’ve picked them up and held them. Maybe I should look at them now.

“I’m so happy to be able to talk about this, about religion, with someone. I don’t have anyone to talk about this level of my disease with, and yet I think it’s the most important level. I think I’ve been lucky, in that I’m able to see things from different perspectives, at different levels.” – graceful hand play – “First I see things this way; then I move to another level, and see from another angle. This is a long pilgrimage I must take through this world, but I’m happy with it, because finally, when I’ll have seen it from every possible angle, it will all come together in my mind, and I’ll understand everything. Then I can leave the world!”

We went to the car, and I unlocked the door. She didn’t want a ride back. Hesitantly, she said she had called the Boys and Girls Club, trying to volunteer; but they had not responded. She asked if I thought she should try to do this; she was persuading herself not to volunteer.

“I’ve worked with children, especially little black children; I’ve felt a great connection to them, because I was treated badly, and I see that so many of them are treated badly. You see parents slapping a little child, if he does something they don’t like: they slap and slap him, even though he’s crying! They don’t know what to do; they don’t know how to be good parents. I know what that was like, my father didn’t know, either. But I could help them.

“But maybe I shouldn’t do it – when I’ve done it before, they haven’t been very nice to me. I want to give them something, but they don’t give me anything back, and I’m feeling very weak now. Do you think I should wait until I feel more confident? Maybe I shouldn’t have to feel as though I have to bring everyone together: what do you think? I should stop thinking I can heal the world. Do you think I should do that?”

Yes, I said; also, you should stay away from men, until you’re strong again. You must take great care, and take care of yourself.

In March of this year I was thinking about Sasha Choi, and about the little story I had written years before about her and our meeting. One night, the phone rang. A very young, uncertain voiced asked if I were Katherine McNamara. I said I was. The voice said: “This will sound strange. Are you the person I met about four years ago? My name is Sasha Choi...”

“Sasha, of course I remember you.”

She wept. There was the same old directness. She remembered a great deal (until later, when she began to drift away): our last meeting, in 1996, when I went to the little efficiency apartment she lived in, and she cooked – over-cooked (she remembered) – wagon-wheel pasta. She had then spent three years in Western States Hospital; she was bi-polar (she was a shaman, also). She had come out in January, and now lived in a supervised apartment in a group home in a poor part of town. Her mind was flying. She talked, I think, for about an hour and a half. I said I was glad to hear from her; I could say this truthfully. She had suffered a great deal, yet, she maintained through strength of will a resolute sense of joy. But she also said she thought it might be time to think about going to a higher plane. She didn’t dislike this earth but was growing tired. She was thirty-nine; “that’s old enough, isn’t it? I’ve lived for thousands of years.” The wars and killing in the world were pressing on her. Every day, her mind flew on a journey.

There were long moments – minutes, tens of minutes – when she sounded strong and coherent, though still in her hyper-sensitive world, and I felt I was being told something, that she was revealing or seeing something; but her sadness rose. She felt she had no friends, and that she was controlled by the supervisors, who knew everything about her, even her thoughts...

She asked if she could call me in a month. Maybe we could go to the Thai restaurant on Fontane Avenue. Yes, I said, I wanted her to phone, and I wanted to try the restaurant, too.

About two weeks later she phoned again. I said it was a busy time, but she asked for a moment. She said she was leaving the guided-living residence, because she couldn’t get along with the rules of the house and the other people in it. She wanted to store her notebooks and journals with me. Of course, I said. Could I pick them up early the next morning, she asked? We made an appointment.

I arrived on time the next morning. The house was at a busy intersection, but it had a yard and pretty plantings and looked clean and well-cared for. Her room was a one-bedroom suite near the entry.

I had not seen her for five years. She remembered exactly when we met, at the parade for the Dogwood Days celebration. (I wondered if the county still did this; if so, I had missed it consistently.) She looked perfectly coherent and was nicely, even stylishly, dressed, but her face looked somewhat blunted, whether from sadness or medication I could not know. Her smile was still brilliant. She still reminded me of Yup’ik women.

We loaded piles of journals into two cartons I had brought, then carried them, and three sitting-pillows she didn’t want to abandon, to the car. She was curious about my new book and wanted to go to the bookstore to find it. In the bookstore she picked up the book, held it, then replaced it. “I don’t need to read it now, I know what’s in it,” she said kindly.

We had only about an hour before she was due back. She said that in the house there were many meetings and one meal in common required every week. “But I’m an artist, and I need time alone, I need to think and not hear all this noise.” I agreed; of course she was right. She mentioned the traffic and how that exhausted her, too; she was terribly sensitive to ugliness and loud sounds, and bewildered because it was so difficult for her to find a place of loveliness. We drove to my house because she wanted to see it. “It looks familiar. Maybe that’s why I knew so much about you when we met,” she said as we entered. She walked from room to room and peered at furniture and pictures and bookcases. Gently, she lifted a curtain and remarked that curtains must be very useful, although she seemed to be saying that, really, they were an unfortunate necessity.

On her door was taped a drawing of a lovely woman, and she had given it to me, because – she said – it resembled me. She spoke again about my beauty as being startling and special.

She drank a glass of water, then another. Soon it was time to leave. She was quiet, sad, very angry, I thought. Several times since her first phone-call she had mentioned having been gang-raped. She had used terrifying imagery: “like being inside a Dumpster, treated as garbage.” She mentioned it again and said, “This town is my grave yard.” I asked if she could go to her mother, who was in California. No, she said, paused, and then: “Your family can be your enemy.” All she had offered to the community had been refused and rejected. This puzzled her. Angrily, bitterly, though softly, she said, “I give service. I’ve given so much service. But why...?” As we pulled into the driveway of the residence, she was in tears and nearly trembling. I had the sense of her inner speed, as if some huge energy were cycling through her. I put my hand gently behind her shoulder and tried to send calm into her body. I told her I loved her. She was facing something that interested and frightened her. She said, “America is a big country and there is still a lot I haven’t seen.” She was going to travel light. I asked when she was leaving. She was already distracted when she got out of the car. I asked her to call me over the weekend to let me know where she was going; I said I was going out of town on Monday for seven days. But she didn’t call.

Two weeks later, Sasha Choi phoned from Colorado. That was as far as she had gotten on Amtrak. She had caused a disturbance on the train, passing back and forth from car to car talking to people, commenting on articles and headlines in magazines and newspapers in such a way that they knew she was not one of them. She began predicting. The train had stopped at a small town and put her off, and the police had met her. She was calling from a state mental institution. She had about ten minutes left on her phone card. She wanted to keep in touch; she had written me a short letter.

It was late and once again I was packing for a trip, and I did not listen closely, until I heard tears in her voice. I asked if she was physically safe; I could hear a babble of voices in the background and was sure that emotionally and aesthetically she was in hell. She said that, after all, she hadn’t gotten very far, because she was back in the same kind of place she had left. The people even had some of the same names, only they were meaner; this was like the basement of our town.

She said that she had been thinking for a while that maybe she was going to leave this world and this life; thirty-eight or thirty-nine years was plenty long to live in this body, though she felt she was much older than the numbers of her years. She felt she wouldn’t mind leaving. She had been feeling sensations lately, pricks and jabs, and she thought they were a signal. She felt like General MacArthur; she felt he was in her body, giving orders. This was good, because people obeyed; but she felt he was giving her directions also. “It’s the whole Korean conflict,” she said.

She asked if it was all right if she kept in touch. I said yes. She asked about my earlier trip to New York. I said it had been good. She said she had felt herself there, although she had never been to New York, felt herself in the bad parts of the city. She wished me well for the next day’s travel. She said everything was becoming more difficult, but that she had a strong spirit and it would see her through.

I asked if she would mind if I wrote about her. “In your magazine?” she asked. Yes, I said. She seemed satisfied. “Then I could read it on a computer in a library somewhere?” Yes, I said.

By the end of May, Sasha Choi had phoned again, twice. Lately she had realized that, after all, she might be going to live for a very long time, although earlier, she reminded me, she had sensed that she might not remain long in this body or on this earth. She said, too, that she expected to be able to leave the institution in Colorado, where she was presently – what? incarcerated? – to go to her mother in San Diego. I asked if this would be all right, going to her mother. “Yes,” she said, with some surprise.

Once more she called, collect, saying she wanted to hear my voice before the phone was shut down for the night. Big things had been happening nearby, tornadoes, which she thought were not necessarily bad, as they drew down energy and got people organized to help each other. She was still trying to persuade the overseers to give her a pass to visit her mother, if she promised to return. She said she had decided to conduct this as a military campaign in order to get out.

She depends on me for something I cannot or will not give. It is as if I am a vessel, and my voice is a conduit over which I have no authority.

-KM

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