A Spy in the Service of the Truth

I sing the body electric.
—Walt Whitman

Start with a whim, because that is how it starts.

I am resting in bed one warm spring evening when for no reason, just on a whim, I get to my feet, go to another room, and turn on the television. On the screen is an Asian doctor in a white lab coat making a series of rapid, artful movements with his hands. These movements he directs at a woman two feet away, and, behold, the invisible energy streaming from his fingertips turns the woman into a wind-up toy, her body shaking and jittering about. 

The show is Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and the narrator is Hollywood veteran Jack Palance. In his famous basso profundo, Palance explains that Dr. Chow is throwing healing energy called chi. As the segment ends, Palance lowers his voice to a dramatic whisper. Dr. Chow, he says, is a master of chi kung who practices this ancient art in Toronto’s Chinatown.

I sit stock-still in a state of astonishment. Now whether this Dr. Chow is a healer or a hoaxer, I cannot say. But if he is a bona fide healer, I have just witnessed something extraordinary, something unexplained by science, something that a few centuries ago would have been called magic. I have always been fascinated with magic -- not the stage variety, but the kind that becomes the science of the next century.

That night I turn over in my mind what I have seen. As an undergraduate I studied philosophy and religion and read widely in the fields of anthropology and parapsychology. In my mind, Dr. Chow’s demonstration places him, if not squarely in the shamanism camp, then at least bivouacking on the outer fringes. But is he the genuine article, or merely a trickster? 

For years I have been fascinated with shamans and sorcerers. I have been an avid reader of the works of Carlos Castaneda, a UCLA-trained anthropologist who wrote best-sellers describing his apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan. According to Castaneda, Don Juan was a man of power, someone who had extraordinary abilities that bordered on the supernatural. Critics have claimed Castaneda did his fieldwork in the deep stacks of the UCLA library, rather than rural Mexico and Arizona. The critics may be right, but Castaneda’s stories of magic, whether plagiarized or actually experienced, have entranced me. 

At first blush it would appear that Dr. Chow shares Don Juan’s ability to manipulate energy in extraordinary ways. Dr. Chow resides not in Mexico, however, but in Toronto’s Chinatown. And this fact is of particular significance to me, because I am currently living only half an hour away at my parents’ house in a suburb of Toronto, having just returned from graduate studies at Stanford.

By the next day I have devised a plan. I will interview Dr. Chow for an article, and maybe, just maybe, in the course of interviewing him, I will discover the truth behind his paranormal abilities. To locate my subject I phone every acupuncture clinic in the phone book, but no one has ever heard of this Dr. Chow. Another flurry of phone calls, and I learn that Ripley’s Believe It or Not is no longer in production; the episode I saw was over a year old. I am discouraged, but I mean to continue the search, though one thing is becoming clear: to hunt down the mysterious doctor will require sleuthing of a different order.

Strident Saturday. The entire Asian population of the world has descended upon Chinatown. Thumping rock music quickens the step of the thronging crowd. Against the side of a red-brick building I pause and wipe the back of my hand across my forehead. I am trying to find an herb store, an acupuncture clinic—any place with a connection to Chinese traditional medicine. As I move away from the building, I notice a large arrow, on which is hand-painted “Chinese Herbs.” The tip of the arrow points down a flight of cement stairs, and so I walk down to a landing below street level. 

Swinging open a heavy glass door, I hear a tinkling bell announce my presence, but no shopkeeper appears. As I move forward into the store, the contents of a long glass counter come into view. Exotic herbs, dried flowers, and strips of corrugated tree bark are crowding against velvety deer antlers and ginseng roots as large as a fist. I am perusing a tray of dried seahorses when, from behind the counter, up floats a cloud of thunderously dark hair. From inside this cloud peer two dark eyes, shielded by thick bifocals.

“Please?” asks the woman in accented English. 

“I’m looking for a Dr. Chow. Do you know anyone by that name?” To this she makes no answer.

“I would like to meet him,” I say. 

Her eyes go inward behind the bifocals. “You patient?” she inquires doubtfully.

“Yes,” I say without hesitation. “I am patient -- a patient.” The bifocals lower, and from under the counter appears a rotary phone. The woman dials a number with her middle finger, and then speaks into the receiver in short bursts of Chinese, tossing furtive glances in my direction. With a clatter the phone call terminates. 

“You patient,” she says with new-found conviction. “You go Beverly Street, one block. Go big house, left side.” I thank her and bend my head once again to the marvels of the glass counter. 

“You go now!” Her eyes widen with concern. “You patient!”

Big-house-left-side turns out to be a mansion of some antiquity. From a glance I can tell the stately dowager once housed a prominent family from another era, but the gradual encroachment of Chinatown has put the mansion under siege, and now the lawn has gone to crab grass, the white paint of the porch faded to a memory. Two raps and a heavy oak door opens, revealing a squat Asian man who appears to be waiting for me.

“First time apartment rental?” he asks, squinting with suspicion. 

“I don’t understand.”

For my benefit he articulates each syllable: “First time a-part-ment rent-al?”

“I’m not here to rent an apartment,” I say very slowly. “I’m here to see Dr. Chow.”

After a moment’s hesitation he retreats inside, leaving the door ajar. I blink away the streaming sunshine and stroll inside the foyer. The squat man has gone from sight, but another man has appeared in his place and is crossing towards me. He is a much younger, much larger man, with the slightly hunched shoulders of a tennis player and the weightless gait of a martial artist. His outsized hand swallows mine in a pumping handshake. “Dr. Chow’s brother,” he says in a high tenor voice.

At once I drop the ruse of being a patient and tell him about the article I want to write. Either he does not understand, or does not care, for a moment later he thrusts a sheet of ruled paper into my hand. “Name, birth date, phone number,” he adds.

I look around for a place to write, and Dr. Chow’s brother indicates an old phone booth that has taken up residence in a corner of the foyer. Sitting on the plastic seat inside the phone booth, I ponder whether the request for a birth date might be a nod to numerology. Who knows what ancient superstitions are practiced here? I finish writing and cast about for the brother, but he is nowhere to be seen. Waiting, waiting -- is this some kind of supplicatory ritual the patient must endure before the great wizard grants him an audience? 

My mind falls into a series of reminiscences about a certain wizard who captured my imagination as a child. Mr. Wizard was a character in a cartoon series. A reptile of indeterminate genus, his wardrobe consisted of a flowing robe and conical hat. His home was the hollow of a tree, his fan club, a young male turtle. The turtle wore a straw hat and starched white collar and lived in a shoe box. Each week the turtle would implore Mr. Wizard to give him a new life, a life where he could live out a fantasy career, be it as a sailor or knight-errant or some other unsuitable occupation. An exasperated Mr. Wizard would then wave a magic wand and send the hapless creature to his chosen destiny, and inevitably the turtle would get himself into a terrible fix. “Help me, Mr. Wizard!” he would cry out, whereupon Mr. Wizard would incant, in a thick German accent, “Drizzle drazzle drone, time for this vun to come home!” And through a spiraling vortex of primitive animation effects, the turtle would return back to safety. The turtle was a young male like me, but it was Mr. Wizard with whom I always identified. To be wise, to have in my possession a magic wand, to live in the hollow of a tree -- this was the life to which I aspired. Is Dr. Chow another Mr. Wizard? In what secret hideaway is the doctor sequestered right now? The turtle never had to wait this long for Mr. Wizard to appear. Another ten minutes of perching on the hard plastic seat in the phone booth, and I get to my feet. Drizzle, drazzle, dradle, drone. Time for this vun to come home. 

I am heading for the front door when, like an apparition, Dr. Chow’s brother materializes from nowhere. He brings me to bay with a smile that stretches right across his face. “Sorry, Dr. Chow busy,” he says. He takes the sheet of paper from my hand and lopes down a hallway, beckoning me to follow. We voyage to a large storage room at the back of the house where yellow light slants on a wooden floor through wooden shutters.

“Dr. Chow busy,” he repeats. “But Jerry answer all question.”

“Jerry?” I ask. With his head he gestures to a beige office-divider on the far side of the room. I turn to ask him who this Jerry is, but the brother has vanished. Tentatively I walk toward the divider and peer around. No wrinkled sage in full-lotus here, but instead a burly young man in black leather pants, sprawled out on an examining table. His shirt is wide open, and running down the center of his chest is a river of silver acupuncture needles. A black-visored motorcycle helmet rests on the chair beside him. Black mirrored sunglasses wrap around his face and submerge under a mop of black hair. As I step forward, his head rolls towards me, and his mouth opens. But instead of the gravelly timbre of a Hell’s Angel, there comes a thin voice pitched to a high key.

“Why are you here this morning?” he asks. I tell him of my proposed article on Dr. Chow, but he interrupts. “Better watch out when you travel.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“I’m a psychic, so listen to what I have to say. You’re going to travel to a third-world country, and better watch out because they’re going to put you in jail.” He gives himself over to a cough. “And furthermore -- ”

“Can we get back to Dr. Chow for a minute?” 

But the psychic will not be deterred. “And furthermore, it will be several days before they let you out of jail.”

The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once remarked that television was a cool medium -- meaning that the viewer had to try hard to connect with it -- but it is television that has put me in a storage room with a psychic telling me I will do time in a third-world jail.

“Hello, Jerry.” I wheel around at the sound of the low voice. Dr. Chow is standing not three feet away in the open space of the door. Slenderly built, of medium height, he has a visible vitality -- as if the atoms of his body were continually releasing small bursts of energy. He is wearing the same uniform from the television show: a white lab coat over a white shirt and nondescript tie. A thin black moustache, barely visible on television, is scattered above his lip. Gleaming black hair, barbered in a modish cut, falls half-way over his ears. It is hard to guess his age, but I put him in his early thirties.

“This writer over here,” says Jerry, tilting his chin in my direction, “he wants to write an article about you. But that is not the real reason he is here. He will be your protégé, Dr. Chow. You will teach him.” I flush with embarrassment and glance at Dr. Chow to gauge his reaction to this wild prognostication. He gazes at Jerry with Mandarin impassivity, and then slowly turns to me. 

“Sorry,” he says with apologetic firmness. “Too busy talk. Only have time for patient.” He pivots around -- head, torso, feet, in one stroke -- then glides to the door like a ballroom dancer.

“When can I speak to you?” I call out. “For an article.”

“Jerry answer all question,” he says over his shoulder.

And like a puff of smoke the doctor is gone. On turning back to the all-knowing Jerry, I discover the question period has come to an end. The psychic has shut his eyes and is breathing heavily. Only for a moment am I idle before Dr. Chow’s brother lopes back into the room. The next thing I know, I am standing outside the house with a piece of paper in my hand. The brother has slipped me the address of the new clinic, which is to open in a few weeks.

Youth is subject to wild enthusiasms that change from one week to the next. Two months after my visit to the clinic, I have completely forgotten about my desire to write an article about a modern-day wizard. Instead, with all the resourcefulness of the indigent, I have managed to scrape together enough money to buy a plane ticket to India to visit a friend. Because of visa irregularities -- meaning, I have no visa -- I have been placed under airport arrest in Bombay. For the next five days my movements are restricted to a small waiting room. Airport arrest is not jail, of course, but in Bombay these distinctions are trifling. Two years later, under very different circumstances, I will have the occasion once again to meet Jerry the psychic, but that is getting ahead of my story. 

Excerpted from Mysteries of the Life Force © Copyright 2012 by Peter Meech. Reprinted with permission by Sentient Publications. All rights reserved.