“Well, then we should go, right? Let’s go, hon.”
“I can’t do that, Simon.”
“Yes, you can. It’s easy: turn around, leave, don’t come back.”
“Miss, he might be right,” Safie chimed in.
“I can’t,” I repeated.
“Oh,” Sidlo said softly, at almost the same time; together, we turned to find him staring at us—me—with his supposedly useless eyes wide, an odd sort of yearning in every line of him. Smiling and trembling at the same time, as something wet spilled down his cheeks: rheum, maybe. Or tears.
“Oh,” he said, again, re-angling his head to stare up over my shoulder, where nothing should have been except empty air. “It is you, after all. After all this time.”
Yes, something replied from deep inside me, seemingly as glad to be recognized as he was to recognize it. That’s right, Vasek; you always did know me. Oh, my poor, dear boy.
(Yes, it is.)
“Mister Sidlo,” Simon began. “We’re, uh . . .”
Sidlo nodded, eyes still on “me,” or whatever stood behind me.
“I know what you’re here for,” he replied.
There’s a VHS tape in the Freihoeven Institute’s library that none of us would get to see until long after all this was over, and watching it can be an oddly wrenching experience, especially for those who happen to have met its subject in person first. Dated March 16, 1975, it’s of an interview conducted by Dr. Guilden Abbott, now the Institute’s acting director, who was then an intern working for its founders, the married parapsychologists Doctor and Mrs. Doctor Jay: Vasek Sidlo being put through his paces, asked to demonstrate whether or not his classic party trick would translate to a whole new type of technology—and what do you know, it actually does, with genuinely unsettling results.
The forty-years-younger Sidlo is still a gaunt old man, soft-spoken, with the same childlike intensity in his large blind eyes, though much thicker iron-grey hair, an upright posture, and wire-muscled forearms. The camera is focused on him, with Dr. Abbott nothing more than the half-seen back of a head and a pleasant voice whose clinical professionalism only barely hides his earnest enthusiasm. By contrast, Sidlo seems ill at ease—part annoyed, part bored. When I watched it, later, it took me a while to realize why his affect comes off so strangely: on the tape, Sidlo doesn’t maintain the steady open-air stare you see in most blind people—instead, he casts his head around in small, constant jerks, like he’s desperately trying to identify a noise he can’t quite make out. Yet despite all this movement his eyes never once fall upon the camera lens itself; he seems, in fact, to avoid it reflexively, like he knows exactly where it is. Like he’s afraid of . . . well, not of seeing it (being, you know, blind), but afraid of what might see him through it.
The transcript, which comes attached, runs like this:
DR. ABBOTT: Mister Sidlo, I’d like to begin by saying it’s truly wonderful to meet you, on a personal level. I’ve been a great admirer of yours for years now, ever since the Institute began researching Kate-Mary des Esseintes’ Ontario Spiritualist enclave.
SIDLO: Oh yes, the Mysteraeia.
DR. ABBOTT: I’m sorry?
SIDLO: That’s what she called it, what she preferred to. In reference to the Delphic Mysteries, but also the Orphean Mystery cults. The descent into the Underworld.
DR. ABBOTT: . . . I see.
SIDLO: It sounds silly, I realize. But Kate-Mary was a firm believer in what she called Old Truths, which is why she used to give everything around her these . . . ridiculous sort of pseudo-Greek names. That cabinet of hers, for example, where she met with her spirit guide . . .
DR. ABBOTT: The Thanatoscopeon, yes. We’ve been trying to track that down, actually.
SIDLO: Her husband sold most of her things away, after. “Fripperies,” he called them. And worse.
DR. ABBOTT: Very sad, of course, Miss des Esseintes’ death; so young. The child died as well, if I remember correctly. [Sidlo nods] But you’d left her group—the Mysteraeia—by then, I believe, hadn’t you? You were—
SIDLO: Staying with Iris—Mrs. Whitcomb, I mean—in Quarry Argent; she’d seen me at the meetings, asked me to consult on a project she was contemplating. When I agreed, she made all the provisions for my travel and upkeep. She brought me from home, put me on staff, and gave me a room on the ground floor of her house. Mrs. Whitcomb was . . . very kind.
DR. ABBOTT: Consultation. On a psychic matter?
SIDLO: She had something she wanted removed, but preserved. From her mind.
DR. ABBOTT: An image?
SIDLO: A memory.
DR. ABBOTT: Of her son, no doubt.