New York City Calling

NEW YORK CITY CALLING

I sit at my solid oak writing desk with my journal open in front of me as I stare out at the missing Twin Towers from my New York City apartment. I can’t move my eyes from the sun-kissed empty sky that now takes their place. Tears run down my cheeks, but I make no effort to wipe them away. It was nine months ago when this city fully captured my heart, my mind, and my spirit. I couldn’t bear to revive the memories of what happened that day until now, but it still pains me to do so. I realize that I must face those painful images before I can help anyone else here overcome suffering and sadness. I have to overcome the grief that has burned as a torch within me. Because I have waited so long to write this, I must relive my life-altering experiences that prompted me to come to this great city.

When I opened my eyes that morning, the usual joy and happiness that filled me was replaced with the cold gloom of despair and loneliness. I stared at the blank digital alarm clock, which I had unplugged before I had attempted to fall asleep so many hours ago. My tears had soaked into the puffy pockets under my bloodshot eyes. I could cry no longer. I snuggled in the clean white sheets, buried my face in the soft cotton pillow and let out a muffled scream. “Why can’t other people see what I see? I feel alone although I know that you are with me, Lord. Why does this have to happen?” I cried out in prayer, my voice quivering with fear. I wasn’t powerful enough to stop the destruction. I was in Germany, an ocean away from the impending devastation, but I felt it as close as ever.

I had told my agent that there would be no photo shoots, no signing autographs, and no runway show bookings for me this morning. I had just finished a runway show in Berlin and direly needed a break. He had asked me if something was wrong, but I couldn’t give him an answer that he would understand. I told him it was my birthday and that I just wanted to be left alone. I had done my best to keep the paparazzi off my tail too, but there would still be one of those spies lurking about somewhere in small-town Germany, trying to get a picture of me. I thought they would be sick of seeing my face gracing covers of so many fashion magazines, but they just wouldn’t let me be. The one time Europe had listened to me was when I agreed to a televised interview and revealed my religious beliefs on French television. I spoke French mostly, but I answered a call-in from an interested centerfold editor offering me 300,000 French Francs to pose nude in his magazine, and I told him in several different languages that I would rather fry in hell than pose nude for a centerfold rag, hoping that it would curb future questions of that sort. The statement, unfortunately, was taken as a challenge to get such a photo of me. One poor photographer in London had fallen out of a tree trying to peek into my hotel window late at night.

I didn’t mean to cause such a stir while in Europe. I had just flown to Paris to participate in an ice skating competition a couple months ago, and an Italian designer approached me and told me I would be a perfect replacement for a model that fell ill. I had never modeled before, but the tour kept me far away from New York, for my home in Michigan wasn’t far enough. I knew I had to go back to America soon, though, no matter what happened during this attack.



This day meant so much more to me in 1988, when, at five years old, I awoke from a coma I had been in for six months. I had been electrocuted by a downed power-line after a thunderstorm. The storm had called me out with its roaring thunder and streaks of light ripping through the sky. The neighbors had been watching me while my parents were away celebrating their sixth wedding anniversary, but when everything went pitch black in the house, I had wandered out to the only light I could see. The thunder shook the ground right before the flash of light struck it and I was thrown away from the power line to the wet, muddy ground after the jolt.

The doctors were shocked that I hadn’t died instantly, but they still had little hope I would survive, at least that’s what I heard them tell my parents. I could hear everything around me, but couldn’t open my eyes. When the doctors told my mother and father that I wouldn’t be getting better anytime soon, they knew and didn’t agonize over it because I couldn’t be much worse off than before. What could be worse than an autistic child who couldn’t speak? At least in the coma I didn’t have any loud fits brought on by just about anything and everything. I couldn’t embarrass my father any longer.

My mother said a prayer, standing next to my bedside each day, placing her hand, damp from tears, on mine. In my mind, I was kneeling upon a white cloud, listening to a deep voice that emanated from everywhere around me. I lifted my face briefly to look into the blazing eyes of fire. A white light glowed around His crystalline figure and I trembled, frozen in time, as I stared. He told me that He would open my fractured mind, so that I may help His children. I felt my injured body and mind twitch painfully back to life with surges of numbness and searing pain from head to toe. A calm, then, washed over me and all my senses were fully awakened again and I opened my new eyes to a world I could have never imagined. I stared into my mother’s watery eyes and repeated the prayer that she had said over and over again, in a voice I had always wanted her to hear, but could never use before. I felt her happiness and awe fill my heart.

I was truly born again, as I would never again be the mute, sick child. Many doctors said that the tests conclusively showed that I was still sick with autism, but my mother refused to believe that I wouldn’t overcome it after she heard me speak. My father was frightened by what he saw and didn’t know what to make of my transformation. The truth was that I was a different little girl than the one everyone knew. My mousy brown hair turned light blonde and let off a faint white glow. My eyes turned from smoldering hazel to piercing blue. Although my senses still irritated me with their unpredictability, my spirit was strong enough to deal with it. I didn’t have to scream or bang my head against the wall to get them straight anymore. Most of the doctors soon got bored with my stability and left me alone after my parents told them I wasn’t a genius anymore: that I couldn’t memorize long passages of Biblical text, in English and other foreign languages, and write them out from scratch in perfect form any longer. I supposedly couldn’t translate the text from one language to another either.

My mother hid the whole truth from the doctors who still came lurking around, giving ignorant diagnoses of a disorder they would never understand. The truth was that memories, thoughts, dreams, and nightmares flooded from every person’s eyes and into my mind. I shared in the lessons they had learned in their lives and all the knowledge and wisdom they had sought after. I felt their pains, their weaknesses, their happiness, and their anger. My eyes locked me into all of their personal traumas, whether I wanted to know about them or not. Sometimes I could help them with their troubles, other times I had to know my place and leave them to God’s mercy.

I went from not being able to communicate with anyone, to being able to communicate with everyone and everything. In anger, I gave into the nagging force in my mind to move and break objects, but then I learned to control my temper and use the gift as I was instructed. God spoke guidance into my heart, for He had already renewed my mind. I knew about events I’d never experienced and about people I’d never met, as if they were a part of my very being. Using telepathy, I showed images of the nightmares that terrorized me to people which could change the courses of their lives, should they take the messages as truth.



Father Cohen, a priest from New York City visited the Catholic school I attended when I was seven, and I showed him on September 11th of that year, what would happen in the Big Apple eleven years down the road. He had taught a lesson from the book of Revelation when the images of the collapsing towers and a woman, resembling him in his tanned round face and small dark eyes, struck my mind with such great force that I had to release them. I never saw him again, as I was released from the school shortly thereafter for asking spiritual questions that the priests and nuns didn’t want to answer. They had told me that the vision I saw while in the coma wasn’t true and that God couldn’t possibly be talking to me. My mother knew I wasn’t delusional, but my father’s Catholic blood boiled over my unwillingness to accept those lies.

The time that I had several nightmares about, and had shown Father Cohen, was drawing near. Neither my agent, nor anyone, but a couple close friends and family members knew of these gifts that I claimed, at times, as curses and other times as blessings.



I couldn’t stay here in this beautiful room, filled with pastel colors that normally delighted my senses. This small bed and breakfast was a nice change from the big chain hotels I had been staying in throughout Europe for the past couple months. This change didn’t suit me any longer, though, for I needed to go someplace where I could make someone understand what was within me: my message. Pulses of cold, dead darkness hit my mind and turned my stomach in knots. I grabbed my Rolex and squinted at the dainty gold hands. It was almost two thirty in the afternoon and my sight was getting hazy. I had to go somewhere safe, to prepare for the attack. It was coming for me, but I didn’t know exactly how.

I looked out of the large wood-framed window and down onto the cobblestone street of the busy pedestrian center of town. There was a cathedral across from the outdoor café, where people peacefully sipped on their cappuccinos and watched the children play on the small playground. The rays of sunlight dancing over the cathedral’s majestic stained-glass windows and softening the rigid structure of the towering walls called me to it.

I stepped outside and a lone photographer came running toward me and brought a camera to his face. My eyes darted to the lens and I pushed an unusually weak surge from my mind and it shattered, leaving him grumbling in confusion and anger. Nothing or no one was going to stop me from getting to that cathedral. I went inside, walked down the long center aisle to the front pew and sat down.

The cross with the image of Jesus hanging on it made me nauseous, for I had seen Him in all His terrifying glory, His very words rumbling over my ears like a bubbling brook over stones. I laid down on the cold, hard wooden bench. The glorious artwork of angels, Mary and the ascended Jesus on the ceiling and into the dome, was trimmed with gold. My muscles relaxed totally, giving up the fight to hold me up. There were voices murmuring near me, but I couldn’t hear what direction they came from or what was being said. My ears picked up nothing but static mingled with the voices.

The static turned into the low roar of airplane engines drilling into my brain. There was screaming that sizzled my every nerve, and then there was a hush on board the planes as they were told of a change in plans of their destinations. Familiar dark-complected faces of the men from my many nightmares flashed before my eyes and their feelings of righteousness in the name of their god as they painstakingly rushed to their very deaths was as a knife stabbed into my heart. Their foreign words scorched my ears with confusion as they conspired with each other. Anxiety twisted within me.

My whole body was wet, but with what? I concentrated and painfully lifted my arm and my sight zoomed in and out, focusing on the dots of blood excreted from every pore. My arm fell to the pew as dizziness struck down my focus and my sight. Black, red, and white splotches danced before my eyes.

A booming crash shook my entire body in a convulsion. The voices in between the static and noise were louder now, but still incomprehensible to me. Black smoke stung my nose and sent me into a coughing frenzy. Shooting flames burned and rooted the despair into my heart, and bloodcurdling screams pierced into the lump that was building in my throat. Another crash sent me into a convulsion again. My heart was racing, feeling the building feverish panic in each and every soul.

Someone picked me up from the bench. I couldn’t pry my eyes open to see who it was. I could feel people pushing all around me as I saw the crowded hallways and stairwells filled with black smoke. My feet twitched as people gave up the stairs and leaped out of office windows. My muscles relaxed again. It was the eye of the storm.

I still heard screaming and murmuring around me, but I didn’t know which part of me was hearing what. I was laid down on a soft surface, the material tickling my tortured nerves. There were beeps and blurps added to the array of sounds shooting at me. A cover was draped over me, warming and soothing my body, reaching up to my shoulders.

A growing crack in hard stone echoed and rumbled in my ears and opened up the festering wound within me once more. The creaking of bending metal braces and the pop of their surrender to the caving concrete, gave way to the thunderous crash that reverberated within me. My teeth chattered and I shook into a cold sweat. I was falling down, down into a deep darkness of ash and smoke. Large stone and glass remnants bounded down after me. I could see them, and my telekinetic gifts were doing me no good to stop it. I hit the ground with a breathtaking thud. I went numb as the pressure of the stone pushed down on my chest, my every limb. I gasped for air and tried to scream, but I just coughed out the ash, blood, and dust that filled my lungs. Everything went dark and silent except for a distant whisper of “Let’s roll.” I mouthed those words until I could hear myself repeating it aloud.

The screaming and panic in the streets and around me started fighting those words, trying to pull me into the smoke and ash again. The weight of the toppled building increased on top of me as an explosion of earth-quaking magnitude signified the collapse of the second tower. I wheezed and gasped for air once more.

I said, “Let’s roll,” louder and louder until my eyes opened and blinked to the bright lights of the hospital room, in which I was lying. The beeping patterns and humming of the machines measuring my vital signs played its dull, syncopated music. I placed my trembling hand on the cold metal side railing of the bed to bring my senses to this new reality, and looked up into a stranger’s face. I could see clearly once more. He was wearing a black robe with a priest’s collar. He walked toward me, clutching his Bible tightly to his chest, grasping it with both hands. Worry deepened the creases in his pallid face. He stayed silent as his mind raced with questions of doubt and stuttered with fear. He stared into my eyes without looking away or blinking.

“Father, are you okay?” I asked, breaking the silence.

“I’ll be fine. I pray that you are okay.”

“Don’t worry about me. As you can see, I’m very much alive.”

“What happened in the cathedral? Why did it happen?”

“I don’t remember much about the cathedral itself because I was brought into the vision of what happened in New York City today. God is calling me to go there, but I’ve been reluctant to go.”

“God speaks to you? Just who are you, anyway?” he asked.

A tall, lanky man in an oversized white coat stepped into the room. “Angel, I’m Dr. Heil, how are you feeling?”

“Better than a few minutes ago. I prefer to be called Robyn though.”

“Doctor, how do you know her?”

“She’s a model and she’s been confusing the press with her religious statements. I had called her by her second name because it’s the only one I knew. So I can make sure that you are well, I’m going to have to run a few tests, Robyn. Here’s a warm cloth to clean the spots of blood from your face. I would’ve done it myself, but I didn’t know when you would have another convulsion or coughing attack,” the doctor said, handing me a damp, brown towel.

I wiped the blood from my face as the two men stared at me. “There will be no tests. There’s nothing wrong with me, not physical nor otherwise.”

“I have to run some tests. You were bleeding from your pores and you were coughing and wheezing like you were caught in some kind of inferno.”

“And there was neither a fire at the church, nor here,” Father Gottlieb added.

I glanced around the room and looked up at the television. I looked back at them and concentrated on its location. It turned on without a push of a button and their attention turned to the news that blasted from it’s speakers. The scenes of destruction from the Twin Towers filled the screen. When Father Gottlieb looked back to me, I showed him the vision that had consumed me. “It’s still burning,” I told them.

Dr. Heil watched the news intently, shaking his head and voicing his denial over and over again. He, then, looked at me too. “You knew about this?” he asked.

“I’ve known about all of this since I could remember, but no one would listen or try to understand. God showed me this as a message. I saw, heard, felt, smelled, and touched everything that went on in those towers and it still haunts me deeply.”

“God wouldn’t do that,” Father Gottlieb said.

“God wanted me to know that I needed to stop worrying about how I was going to cope with going to the tortured city and just go there with the premise that He will guide me in faith and heal me as I heal them.”

“I don’t understand,” Dr. Heil said. “It is scientifically impossible for you to go through such things that you did and not be hurt. You were supposedly suffering in New York, but you were here in Germany the whole time. I can’t understand it.” In his mind, he categorized each injury I should’ve sustained.

“Doctors have been telling me that they can’t explain the way I am, all my life. My spiritual mind has overcome my physical body. No test is going to accurately give you my prognosis. They will only make you ask more questions. God has saved me from myself, this world, and whatever ailment the doctors would say that I have. Science can’t explain God, so it can’t explain me or my spiritual gifts either.”

Tears streamed down Father Gottlieb’s cheeks. “I’ve studied the Word many years and I still don’t know what to make of this,” he said, trying to hush his sobbing. Darkness and light were scattered in confusion within his mind. He tried to straighten out the logic behind my words, but he could find none. My words were derived from faith alone.

“You don’t know what I’ve suffered through in my life. I showed this vision in its entirety to a priest from New York City when I was seven years old. I showed him so that he could keep his sister from being in the towers when it collapsed. Although I felt the despair of many of the people who suffered in the towers, her desperation and experience stood to be the most compelling account. It was through her that my spirit writhed within me. Father Cohen knows the truth now, but it is too late. I couldn’t save her because of his blindness.”

“Perhaps he didn’t listen because it came from a child,” Father Gottlieb said.

“I’ve studied the Word also, and I believed that, because I was a child and had the undoubting faith of a child, that he would pay attention even more to the vision than if an adult, whose faith has been compromised, would have shown it to him.”

Dr. Heil’s eyes widened and he clasped his hands in front of him. “I haven’t studied the Word as much as the two of you, but I do understand, Robyn, where you are coming from. He should have paid attention.”

“In reality, I know he was afraid of what I showed him. He was afraid of me. I asked him questions that convicted him in his fear. He’s not the only one who is afraid of me, though. I don’t share the full capability of my spirit yet because God has said I’m not strong enough to handle people’s reactions yet. I have trouble staying in one church for a long time. It has nothing to do with hypocrisy, for God said that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but it has to do with the negative images I see in the churchgoers’ minds. Many feel that the Lord can’t overcome their illnesses and troubles. I can’t bring myself to believe that way after all that the Lord has shown me and has done for me. I believe that the children of God can overcome any obstacles of this world.”

“You are quite sure of the source of your salvation. What do you call yourself? What does God call you?” Father Gottlieb asked.

“He’s called me to be a powerful prophet. When I am strong enough, I will be able to stop events like the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.. I know that there is power in other spiritual realms, but my Lord has proven His strength in me to fight against them. I see visions in great detail and, through these visions I can stop tragedies before they happen without anyone else being the wiser. I will not claim that I am great, but that the power within me is great.”

“You can’t stop something if it is God’s will,” Father Gottlieb said.

“I believe that God heals and doesn’t want to see anyone of us hurting. He doesn’t want us to die. I know that He will defend the only nation ever to be founded on the name of God. I will defend the United States, but He has not limited me to one nation. I believe God’s reassurance in my true identity, not your failing faith.”

They looked at each other, then back to me. “How dare you question my faith!” the priest yelled.

“Father, I’m not picking you out in particular. Both of you have been questioning your faith as you’ve been here talking with me.”



I remember the angst I felt from their reluctance to speak their minds. I, so much, wanted to tell them everything I knew about the Lord’s light and the happiness He has filled me with in this dark world, but it was wise to listen to God in such matters and keep my words simple for them to understand. Smiling, I look away from the faded towers, take my pen in hand, and start filling the empty pages of my newest journal.



For more on Robyn see "Caring For A Suffering Soul"  and "There is No Love Without Pain" . For the upcoming novel about her, see "Robyn's Castle" .