Lies That Kill
Kaimana Gallant purported herself to be a priestly woman who could cure all kinds of maladies, even cancer. With her long flowy dresses and a house full of potions she’d dreamed up as superior to none, she certainly looked the part of a skilled healer. But her whole life, down to her real name, was a total fabrication. She had everyone fooled, so it came as a shock when two unlikely individuals, a woman dying of cancer and Kaimana’s own unemployed live-in boyfriend, were the ones to expose her as the fraud she was.
This story is fictional. Any resemblance to living people is coincidental.
homeopathic potions
Kaimana Gallant, who favored long white filmy dresses, saw herself as a priestly person who could heal even the worst of maladies with unguents and potions she’d dreamed up as surefire cures. In her house she claimed to have an international pharmacy of homeopathic medicines superior to none – and perhaps that was true, but people who knew her also knew she was a complete phony. Of course her name, Kaimana, which was Hawaian in origin and meant “Power of the Sea” (and also “Diamond”), was made up; her real parent-given name was Cathy Finkel, but she didn’t like the sound of that (ugly, too ordinary) so she changed it as soon as she could, using several different names until she came up with Kaimana Gallant (which was also made up). She had a story that her mother had given birth to her under a tree somewhere in the Sierra Nevada, but that wasn’t true either – she’d been born at Cedars-Sinai in an ordinary hospital bed. From this, one could deduce that her whole life was a fabrication – the long white dresses, the long blond hair, even the mouth, which was thin and fading so that she had to apply and reapply lipstick all day long to plump it up. No secret that the main driver in her life was money. Everyone she met was a potential client, and if she came across someone with a rash or pimple, she’d pull a vial of Pulsatilla or Natrum Muriaticum or Kali Bromatum from her bag and say, “Here. Use this. It will clear your skin up completely.” And then she would add, “That will cost you seventy-five dollars,” and the person would have to pay it because she’d already dabbed the liquid on their skin.
Kaimana’s first husband was a man named Harold who was a stockbroker. After Harold, she married a man named Vincent who owned a landscaping business, and after Vincent she stopped marrying and just had a string of boyfriends. In the mornings, for good health, she’d force herself to sit in a bucket of ice water. Then she’d check her bank balance and then, for an hour, she’d meditate, which, in her case, meant sitting still on a couch on her back porch and thinking of as little as possible. On this day, she was thinking of her current boyfriend, Ethan, who was several years younger and had a head of tightly-woven curly red hair. Ethan practiced the art of body suspension – hanging in the air from metal hooks inserted into his skin. Kaimana had gone to witness this spectacle and it had made her feel so sick that she’d gathered the skirts of her white dress and run from the sketchy gym where the event was being held. Really, she thought, as a healer she should be able to stomach such perversity, which after all had originated as an initiation rite from early Indian tribes, but even for her the display – hanging from hooks! – was too much to bear.
And yet, she was too fascinated by Ethan and his strange pastime to give him up.
At about this time, she reeled in a new client, a middle aged woman named Julie Winters who had lymphoma. Julie was terrified of chemo, and wanted to go a more alternative route.
Kaimana had met her at ecstatic dance, a group of a hundred people or more who, on Sunday mornings, liked to move their bodies to heart-pounding music, working up a sweat that would relieve them of worry or anxiety and, by the end of the session, bring them joy. Kaimana participated most Sunday mornings (it was the best place to find clients). She’d whirl around in her white dress, almost a saintly figure with her hair streaming out behind her, and people who didn’t know about her and her propensities would stop and watch. At the end of the two hour session, everyone would sit down in a circle to say their names and make announcements. One Sunday, a thin young woman raised her hand and in an emotional voice announced that she had cancer. Kaimana’s ears pricked up immediately. The woman introduced herself as Julie and, weeping a little, said she was terrified. Kaimana made an instant decision to waylay her out in the foyer. In fact, she left a few moments early to position herself. When Julie appeared, Kaimana rushed up to her and said, “I think I can help you.”
Julie’s red-rimmed eyes blinked rapidly. “Really? How?” Up close, she looked older than on the dance floor.
“I’m a licensed healer. I work with people who have cancer all the time.”
“And you’re successful?”
“Always.”
This of course wasn’t true. Kaimana had perhaps lessened the effects of certain cancers with her potions, but had never had the ability to cure them completely. To her, that was unimportant. It was the appearance of things that mattered and Kaimana made a great show of examining and questioning clients before doling out remedies. She invited Julie to her house in deep south Austin where she had a brightly lit room reminiscent of a doctor’s office that served as a place to meet with patients. In Julie’s case, she did a little muscle testing and then held vials of various substances over the woman’s stomach to see how her body would react. (If there was a reaction, Julie was unaware of it, though Kaimana insisted there’d been a few revealing twitches that told her she was on the right track.)
After the examination, Kaimana sat Julie down across from her at a sleek metal desk to go over the details of the case. “I can definitely cure you,” she said.
Julie pointed at her groin where there was a pronounced lump under her clothing. “You could get rid of that?” she asked.
“Oh yes. I have remedies that successfully remove tumors. The only problem is that it’s expensive.”
“How much?” asked Julie.
“Five thousand dollars,” Kaimana said as nonchalantly as if she were talking about a bag of groceries.
Julie’s face blanched. She didn’t have much money. In fact, it was uncanny that Kaimana had come up with that amount since five thousand dollars was about all Julie had to her name.
“The reason it’s so expensive,” Kaimana continued, “is that you’d have to buy an infra-red box. That’s essential to your being cured of the disease. I can get you one for, hmm, forty-five hundred dollars. The rest would be for my own expenses.”
“I can’t really afford that,” said Julie.
“Well, it’s up to you. Infra-red is one hundred percent sure to work and is the only guaranteed cure I know of.”
“Besides chemo?”
“Oh no! You don’t want to put that poison in your body.”
Julie was a massage therapist and phlebotomist who, most recently, had worked as a technician at a ketamine clinic. She was historically short of cash and always seemed to have problems – her dog ran away, her adult son wasn’t speaking to her, her rent had gone up and she was in danger of being evicted. Right now, she felt ill and weary all the time. Her color was bad and she was extremely frail and thin. It was hard for her to get out of bed in the morning and she had red itchy rashes that looked like eczema on her buttocks and thighs. To make things worse, she seemed to constantly run a low grade fever and felt unable to work, which was disastrous since she didn’t have enough money to tide her over.
If she agreed to become Kaimana’s patient, she’d go completely broke and Kaimana knew that, but wouldn’t back down. Julie had to pay the full amount or forgo treatment.
“What if I paid in installments?” she asked.
Kaimana shook her head. “In my experience, treatments work better if they’re fully paid for. It’s a psychological thing – very important for healing.”
Julie looked uncertain. She sucked in her lower lip and bit down on it hard to keep from bursting into tears.
“If you want to get better …” Kaimana's voice was commanding and she let the words hang so their significance would sink in.
What choice did Julie have? Up till now she hadn’t been able to afford health insurance, but her new job at the ketamine clinic would provide it after a month and a half of employment. Six weeks was too long to wait, especially since Julie wasn’t even sure she’d be able to drag herself out of bed and go to work each morning. More importantly, the idea of chemo was anathema to her. All her life, she’d been told chemo was horrible and dangerous, and Kaimana, who was extremely seductive, convinced her those thoughts were true. “I cannot tell you,” she said, “how badly chemo would fuck with your system. Your brain will kind of wilt. You’ll lose your hair and all your good cells will be destroyed, leaving you weak and nauseous. Whereas, if you follow my protocols, you’ll never be sick a minute and your disease will disappear.”
She was incredibly persuasive. Her eyes, as she looked at Julie, were filled with compassion. Julie felt the healer’s kindness wrap around her like the filmy white dress she was wearing, and in that moment her body relaxed. She pulled a checkbook from the droopy brocaded tote she always carried, and wrote a check for five thousand dollars. After that, her remaining balance would be three-hundred-and-fifty dollars, but she told herself not to worry. Somehow the universe would provide.
In the meanwhile, Kaimana’s love for her current boyfriend, Ethan, was overwhelming. It was hard for her to watch the spectacle of his large body suspended from a beam with hooks inserted in his flesh, but she enjoyed the afterwards part – when she could sit with him and cleanse his wounds, applying special unguents to remove pain from breaks in the skin and make the lesions heal more quickly. Ethan, she discovered, was a tough and selfish guy with a shell that was hard to crack. By profession, he was a physical therapist, but he’d had many different jobs: dog walker, security guard, grocery store manager, inventory clerk. Kaimana initially met him at a carwash when they were both in the waiting area and Kaimana noticed blood seeping through the back of his shirt. “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed. “What happened to you?”
He gave her an unfriendly look. “Nothing you’d understand,” he said.
“Try me,” said Kaimana. In her white dress, with her Lady Godiva hair, she looked like some kind of goddess. Probably Ethan had never seen anyone like her before.
“I do body suspension work. Know what that is?”
“Something to do with auto repair?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” laughed Ethan. “It’s when you’re suspended in the air with metal hooks stuck in your skin and you have to hang there a while.”
Kaimana crinkled her nose in horror. “Yuk!” she gasped. “Why would you do that?”
“It’s an ancient spiritual practice working on the theory that pain brings enlightenment.”
Kaimana studied him with the beginning of respect forming in her eyes. “It sounds very masochistic, but I sort of understand it.” She squinted at the spots of blood oozing through his shirt. “Those wounds look bad, though. You should have them treated.”
Ehan shrugged. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m used to it.”
Kaimana raised her hand and gingerly touched the wounds with her fingers. “I can fix these so there’s no danger of infection.”
“What are you? Some kind of doctor? You don’t look like one.”
“I’m a healer,” announced Kaimana.
“Oh, one of those. I don’t really believe in that.”
“Well, you ought to,” said Kaimana. “I’m very good at what I do and I can definitely save you from a lot of trouble.”
With the front of her mind, Kaimana thought: This guy’s crazy, while with the back of it she thought; But oh my god, is he good-looking! He was quite tall with alabaster skin that might have looked dorky on someone else, but on Ethan looked as if he had been carved from a single (and very smooth) piece of marble. His red hair was as gorgeous and lively as a flame, while the face beneath it was stubborn and determined. Kaimana couldn’t take her eyes off him. Without thinking – and before Ethan could object – she lifted his pale blue T-shirt and gazed at the oozing lesions. “I think I’ve got something right here,” she murmured, reaching into her soft leather bag and pulling out a tube of calendula.
With extreme gentleness, she applied the unguent to Ethan’s broken skin, waiting as his body relaxed and went still beneath the light pressure of her fingers. After a moment, he sighed and turned to smile at her. “I don’t know who you are,” he said, “but I think you’re a keeper.”
At the time Kaimana met the ailing Julie Winters, she already had Ethan in her life and was reasonably happy. She had just turned sixty, but with all the special lotions and potions she applied to her skin, looked considerably younger. Ethan was only forty-five. He had no idea how old Kaimana really was (she claimed chronological age was unimportant; it was the robustness of the spirit that mattered). Since Ethan was between jobs and houses the day Kaimana chanced upon him at the carwash, she invited him to pack his bags and come and stay with her at her house, situated in a private, wooded area of the city. To be clear, she liked the feeling of power it gave her to have someone of lesser means sharing her life, liked being able to boss them around, tell them what to do. Ethan, however, didn’t welcome the challenge of a woman dominating him. He moved into Kalmana’s spacious house, but despite the excellent sex they had each night (they became lovers right away), refused to accede to any of her wishes. “You can’t have a dog here,” she said, but Ethan brought a stray home anyway, claiming it would help with his anxiety. (Kaimana made the dog stay outside.) He cooked fatty foods, grease flying everywhere from bacon and heavy burgers, and this was a thing that drove Kaimana crazy.
“Why can’t you eat healthy foods?” she asked.
He glared at her, eyes that were a brilliant blue, clouding. “Back off!” he growled. “I eat what I want.”
“Not in this house,” said Kaimana. “I don’t want to see crappy stuff in my kitchen.”
“Well, too bad,” replied Ethan. “If you want me to stay here, you can’t tell me what to put in my body.”
Kaimana left it at that. She badly wished for him to stay with her, even though she cringed at the thought of the terrible foods he ingested. At the moment, as far as she could tell, Ethan had no job. Kaimana refused to give him any money and wasn’t sure what he was using to get by on. He’d say he was employed as a physical therapist on a freelance basis, but he rarely seemed to leave the house, spending most of the day lying around dozing or playing games on his phone. If Kaimana asked him to please wash her car, he’d oblige, as he also would when she asked him to peel vegetables or mow the lawn. He did these things willingly, but rarely undertook any actions without her asking first. He preferred to be left alone, whiling away his time with as little exertion as possible.
When Julie scheduled a visit to confer with Kaimana about her condition, Ethan was already living in Kaimana’s house. One morning, after he’d been there for over two-and-a-half months, he heard shouting coming from Kaimana’s office and the sound of it disturbed him so greatly that he paused the game he was playing and crept down the hallway, positioning himself outside the office door to better hear what the women were saying.
“No!” screamed Julie. “It hasn’t done a fucking thing!”
What hadn’t done a fucking thing? Ethan wondered.
“I want my money back,” Julie snarled furiously.
“Not possible!” shrieked Kaimana.
“I’ll give you back the infrared box.”
“Not possible!” shrieked Kaimana again. “If the treatment hasn’t worked, it’s because you weren’t following the protocols properly.”
“That’s not true! I did everything you said I should.”
“Evidently not,” Kaimana said coldly. “If you had, you’d be cured.”
“Well, what about this!” yelled Julie. “It’s still here!’
“Tumors don’t disappear overnight. It takes time.”
“I don’t have time!” shouted Julie. “I’m sick and nothing you’ve done’s helped. If anything, I feel worse. You have to give me my money back!”
“No way!” shouted Kaimana.
“You have to! If you don’t, I’m calling a lawyer!”
“You don’t have money for a lawyer!”
“That’s because you took it all!”
There was a pause. Then: “Hey, it’s not my fault that you’re in such miserable financial shape. If you were smarter, you’d have planned for your future. But you’re not very smart, are you?”
Ethan heard the sound of a chair scraping on tile and then a scream and the thud of bodies. He threw open the door and was shocked at the sight of a thin, bedraggled woman with her hands wrapped around Kaimana’s throat. “Stop!” he yelled.
The woman, who was tiny, spun around to look at him. Her face was pinched and wretched. Kaimana’s face was creased with a mean smile. “This person cheated me!” yelled Julie. “She’s a liar!”
“Okay, okay,” said Ethan in the calmest voice he could muster. “I’m sure this can be discussed in a civilized manner.”
“There’s nothing civilized about this person,” shouted Julie. “She says she’s a healer, but she’s a fraud!”
Somehow Ethan managed to separate the two women. “I did everything I could to help her,” spluttered Kaimana, pushing his hand away.
“She didn’t do a goddamn thing,” gasped Julie, stamping her foot emphatically. “She took all the money I had, every penny, and I’m still sick. She has to give me my money back.”
To Ethan, the fury in Julie’s voice was genuine. She struck him as an honest and desperate person who’d been pushed to the very edge. Kaimana’s whole bearing, on the other hand, wore a rigid look of self-complacency. No one was ever going to tell her she was wrong. “Look, if someone complains, you have to listen,” Ethan said. “That’s only fair.”
Kaimana wheeled on him indignantly. “I didn’t hear you complaining when I cured those ugly wounds you got from sticking hooks in your body. What a stupid practice! Only a fool would do something like that to himself.”
So now they were both stupid. In that moment, Ethan’s heart went out to Julie. Suddenly he saw Kaimana, his landlady and mistress, for what she was: a disagreeable shrewish woman who cheated people and didn’t care. A real healer would heal by touch, something Kaimana didn’t seem able to do. “Where do you live?” he asked Julie.
“Cedar Park.”
Cedar Park was miles away, a northern suburb partly beyond Austin city limits..
“Do you live alone, or do you have someone to take care of you?”
“Why would you care?” snorted Kaimana, her face livid.
Ethan ignored her, attention focused on Julie who seemed to be unraveling before his eyes. “I live alone,” she muttered. “My boyfriend broke up with me around the time I got sick.”
“That’s terrible,” said Ethan.
“It’s predictable,” cried Kaimana. “She’s pathetic. I don’t blame any man for leaving her.”
“Now you listen to me,” snapped Ethan, swiveling around to glower at Kaimana. “I happen to know what your real name is. It’s Cathy Finkel, not Kaimana Gallant. You’re a complete phony.”
Two angry spots of color sprouted on Kaimana’s cheeks. “How do you know that?” she whispered. “You must have gone through my things!”
Ethan smiled at her but didn’t say anything, lips turning up in what was almost a smirk of extreme self-satisfaction.
“I want you to get out of my house! Both of you! Now!” screamed Kaimana.
“No problemo,” said Ethan. He turned to Julie. “Wait for me out front while I get my stuff.”
It took him five minutes to pack up. Then he went out and whistled for his dog, Rudi, a German Shepherd mix who happily jumped into his truck. “I’ll follow you to your house,” he said to Julie, who was already sitting in her beat-up little Toyota. “Hope you don’t have an issue with dogs.”
Julie shook her head and flashed him a wan smile. Then she gunned her engine and took off.
Julie’s house was very ordinary, a small ranch surrounded by dried up-looking shrubbery. Inside, the furniture appeared to have been bought at yard sales. Ethan took a good look around and said, “You can’t be here alone. I’m going out to the truck to get my things.”
Apparently that was fine with Julie, who a few minutes later showed him to the guest room. For the next eighteen months, the two lived together peaceably. When Julie asked him what Kaimana had meant when she talked about his putting hooks in his body, he described body suspension to her in detail. To his surprise, Julie didn’t shrink in horror, but said; “Wow, that’s cool! I wanna come see.” (And eventually she did go see, but the spectacle made her sick to her stomach, and she had to go out and sit in the car till it was over.) In the beginning of the time Ethan lived with her, Julie was very sick, hardly leaving her bed for days. But then she started chemo, and while she was extremely ill and listless at the outset of treatment, she eventually got better and all signs of cancer disappeared.
“Imagine how it would have been if I’d continued with Kaimana,” she said to Ethan.
“You’d be dead,” he replied softly.
“So much for healers,” said Julie, her face, which was now round and healthy, beaming.
“Well, the phony ones,” said Ethan.
“In my opinion, one way or the other, they’re all phony. I’m never going near one again.”
“Not so fast,” countered Ethan. “I happen to know that in Peru they have shamans who can cure cancer by injecting venom from a toad under a person’s skin.”
Julie wrinkled her nose. “That sounds almost as weird as the hook thing you do.”
“Perhaps. But it’s supposed to work.”
“Then maybe I’ll save up some money and go.”
“We’ll go,” corrected Ethan. “I’ve committed to staying with you till you’re entirely well. You’re okay now, but what if the cancer comes back?”
“I’m praying it doesn’t,” said Julie. “I’m going to have to go on faith alone,”
“That’s reminiscent of Kaimana,” said Ethan.
“Well, I have to believe in something,” said Julie. “It’s best to have a positive outlook.”
But the chemo seemed to work and Julie remained clear of symptoms from that time forward. Perhaps it was the loving care she received from Ethan. They lived together in Julie’s house till, a year and a half later, Ethan found regular employment at a physical therapy clinic and took up with a serious girlfriend. After that, they rarely saw one another, but it was okay: Julie was talking to her son again and had herself met a new man, a good one with a steady job and a deep appreciation for the tiny little woman who’d fought a battle against a serious disease and won.
As for Kaimana, she was finally sued for malpractice and it cost her so much money – and she endured so much humiliation – that she sold her house and moved to New York City, figuring that there she could remain anonymous.
But her reputation followed her – “Aren’t you that bullshit woman who claimed she was a healer?” – and she had to give up her practice and go back to her original name, Cathy Finkel, so no one would hassle her. As Cathy Finkel, she began wearing smart black power suits and cut her long blond hair stylishly short, slicked back behind her (diamond-studded) ears. Through luck, she acquired a job in a public relations office, and that was where she remained for the rest of her working life, writing annual reports and taking clients to expensive galas and luncheons. She could no longer tout herself as someone with arcane powers, but she did have the gift of landing on her feet, and her new career lady job suited her perfectly. It has to be said, however, that she occasionally yearned for the mystery that had once surrounded her life. Now, despite her hard-edged elegance, she had become an ordinary person who lived by herself – no more boyfriends – in a one-bedroom apartment on East Fifty-third Street. She could have acquired a dog or a cat for company, but instead she bought an expensive David Hockney painting at auction, and this art piece was what she hung out with each night and weekend. When she thought about it, she was convinced she didn’t really need anything else.