Free Scream by Tama Janowitz Page A

aura around that person and figure out what color it was.
    There was always that ad on the back that said to contact the Rosicrucians: YOU MAY HAVE LIVED ON EARTH BEFORE .
    I never did meet a Rosicrucian. I thought the Rosicrucians were something Catholic, like Jesuits. You could write to them for the free literature, but I don’t know why—I didn’t.
    From the pension in Netanya, we moved to the ulpan nearby. My mother was studying Hebrew with the other new immigrants. Then, for reasons I no longer remember, we moved to another ulpan, this one in Beersheba, where there was a camel market in the center of town on Wednesdays. Here the new immigrants got into food fights on a nightly basis, arguing over the limitations of one hard-boiled egg or one baked potato for each of us. Pitchers containing water were tipped over others. Tables were knocked down. It was a dangerous place. So was school, where the new immigrant kids from Morocco would spit and beat you up. The day we had to line up and get smallpox injections—a needle as huge as something you’d stick in an elephant, reheated between kids over a bunsen burner—I ran away before it was my turn. Each child ended up with a permanent protrusion, sticking up like a little finger, at the site where the needle was poked. Shortly thereafter, we made another move, this time to a beach shack on a deserted strip of road in Herzliya Pituach.
    When that place blew down in a hurricane—or at least became uninhabitable—we moved into a nearby hotel. But the beach cottage was, while it lasted, a fun place. At night in our two rooms, with only one small reading lamp and a small electric heater to keep out the chill, water pouring through the walls when it rained, we would practice automatic writing, where you gently hold a pen on a piece of paper and hope it channels words, or use a Ouija board.
    I had grown up with a psychiatrist father who said that acupuncture worked because it was utilized on poor, illiterate peasants who believed in whatever they were told. And my mom, while we lived in Israel, found in a used bookstore all the books by the Tibetan monk Lobsang Rampa, a guy who ended up in the body of some Englishman after reincarnation and was able to remember and write twelve or fifteen volumes about his past life as a Tibetan monk. At age thirteen, once he was almost fully enlightened, another, more senior monk had opened up his third eye.
    Apparently all Tibetan monks got this done: a spike poked into the forehead, where that third eye is located, which enabled him to see auras and engage in astral projection. This interested me because, if it was true, how come people just don’t go to a doctor to get their third eye opened? And how did Lobsang Rampa end up reincarnated in the body of a British person living in the English countryside, able to recollect every detail of growing up in Tibet and breakfasting on tsampas and entering a lamasery at an early age.
    That was a strange year of reading, that year in Israel.
    We took the bus from the deserted beach, where we lived in a cottage alongside two other mostly empty cottages, in Herzliya Pituach, into Tel Aviv, maybe a half hour away. There was nothing else there, where we lived: just these three run-down cottages and, across the road, the rusted skeleton of a twenty-story hotel that the builder had never finished because he ran out of money. Nearby was an abandoned munitions factory—it had been burned down or blown up. We were warned not to pick up anything metal, which could be an unexploded grenade or shell. If you dug in the sand you would find scorpions—black and deadly yellow. And on the beach, deserted, bags of drowned kittens washed up. I have never been back, but I think today it’s all built up and that little beach cottage, had we had the money to buy it, would be sitting on property worth millions.
    I wasn’t going to school, either, so the Lobsang Rampa library