by Daniel Hecht
Again, Cree tried to compose her face and voice. "But he's been in boarding schools all his life. Why would he suddenly feel so much stress just now?"
"Ah. Two reasons. First, because he's been at run-of-the-mill schools where it's been easy to stand out, to wow everybody with his talents and intelligence. But at Oak Springs his peers are equally sharp. I think there's an implicit competition there, and Tommy is making it plain he doesn't feel up to it. I also understand he attended his first college-counseling session not long ago." Dr. Corcoran smiled modestly at his own insightfulness. "Suddenly the bigger world impinges. He wants to shine, to stand out, but now he discovers that as bright and talented as he is, he's just one of many. He's told just how competitive college admissions are going to be, how he's got to mind his p's and q's from here on in. Keep his 'cume' up, prepare for the SATs, and so on. The pressure can be especially hard on these rural kids."
"And the other reason?"
"Conditions at home. His grandparents are getting quite old. Tommy may claim he wants out, rejects rural life, and so on, but of course he cares for them, and seeing them in decline makes him feel even more insecure. After Oak Springs, on to college, probably moving far away. He knows his grandparents are approaching some major life passages, too—they can't hang on out there forever. The family home will never be the same, he'll never experience those old rhythms of life again. It scares him. He may also feel responsible, that he should be more help to the grandparents. Part of Tommy wants badly to get out of school, go back to the family hogan, be near his grandparents, care for them and be cared for. Postpone the big changes pending."
Cree nodded. It was all quite plausible. "Did you do any tests on him last night or today?"
"No cranial imaging. He's been through all that twice, no need to subject him to it again just yet. But we ran the EEG and another full blood spectrum. Normal in every respect."
"How about his reflexes? His proprioception? Sensation in his limbs?"
"The business with the right arm and spine? I'll admit it troubled me at first. My colleagues at the Indian Hospital say it always 'vanished' by the time they got a gander at him."
"Wouldn't that suggest that it's lasting longer? That the symptoms are progressing?"
"Oh, definitely." Dr. Corcoran smiled. "He's getting better at it. Practice makes perfect."
"And what about the self-injury yesterday?"
"The veritable cherry on top!" Dr. Corcoran said with satisfaction. "Kills two birds with one stone, you see. It fulfills his need to display another extreme and bizarre behavior, to 'prove' to us that something's badly the matter with him. And, symbolically, it's a reflection of his desire to punish himself—for not measuring up, for not taking care of his grandparents, and, paradoxically, for making all this fuss." He frowned, shook his head gravely. "None of which is intended to suggest this isn't very serious. A very serious situation."
Cree looked into his infuriatingly calm, self-possessed eyes. He was, she saw, one of that breed of psychologists who looked for a tidy, encompassing theory that wrapped the human psyche into a neat diagnostic bundle. The trailing ends, the parts that didn't fit, were to be ignored or cut to size. It was the outlook of a man accustomed to dealing with human problems in quantity: to treating an unending flow of short-term patients, managing their acute stages and referring them on, but never having to dig in for the long haul and the messy, irregular, and highly individual process of healing.
Dr. Corcoran coughed delicately into his fist and asked, "Have you, um, dealt with Native American patients before?"
"Rarely," Cree hedged.
He nodded deeply, wisely. "If I may say so, there are also cultural factors to consider."
"Oh?"
"Yes. As you know, Tommy is Navajo. There are certain beliefs—we might call them superstitions—prevalent among the Dinê. These ideas inform their way of thinking about illness. It often leads to a . . . how to put this? A dramatizing of the problem." He smiled at her and lowered his voice. "A supernatural approach to anything mysterious. Even with the most educated Navajo, it can be a surprisingly hard paradigm to displace." He raised his eyebrows meaningfully, confidingly: Just between us white folks.
"I'm speaking of, oh, spirits, witches, curses, ghosts of ancestors—that kind of thing."
Cree managed to avoid taking him by the shoulders and shaking him and instead just nodded thoughtfully. "Actually," she told him, deadpan, "I do have some experience in that area."
Tommy had been installed in a three-bed room with a single window that looked north to a view of Gallup and the vast land beyond. The middle bed was empty, but through a gap in the curtain Cree could see that the bed nearest the door was occupied by a boy of around ten, sleeping now. An older woman sat in a chair nearby, drowsing, a magazine forgotten on her lap.
"Ah, Mr. Keeday," Dr. Corcoran said heartily. "I've brought someone to see you!"
Tommy was sitting on his bed, facing the window. He turned, looking surprised to see Cree, dismayed to see Dr. Corcoran. He wore a thin terry robe over striped pajamas. His right arm lay inert on the bed, hand and wrist bandaged.
"Yaàtèeh," Cree said. And to her surprise she felt it immediately, now—felt it startle and quickly go quiet in him, as if hiding when it sensed her.
"I'm just dropping Dr. Black off," Dr. Corcoran reassured him. "You two have a good chat, and we'll all touch bases later." He smiled and left the room.
With her experience at the mesa still urgent in her memory, Cree had to resist the impulse to bombard him with questions. Instead, she went to stand at the end of his bed, looking out the window. Below the hospital, the land sloped downward to a residential district that a mile or so away yielded to the two- and three-story buildings of the old downtown. Beyond were the overpass of Interstate 40 and the freight railyard that cut Gallup in two. Somewhere far out in the emptiness on the other side would be the lonely sheep ranch where Tommy had grown up.
She didn't say anything. The thing stayed inert, camouflaging itself in his body's normal energies and auras, a dark chameleon.
"My grandparents and my aunt will be back soon," he said at last. "They went away for lunch."
"You must be glad to see them."
"No."
"Why not?"
Tommy thought about it. "I scare them. I don't like to see them scared."
"I can imagine. But I don't think you should worry about them."
"Why not?"
She had to think about how to say it. "Well, because they're brave, too, aren't they? I mean, even though they're scared, they want you to come home so they can take care of you. Fear is what makes us find our courage. If they want you home, it's because they believe courage will win out over fear."
The thought seemed to please him, but he didn't say anything.
Cree kept looking out the window. "That Dr. Corcoran, he's sure got you all figured out, doesn't he? You must be thrilled."
She glanced sideways at him and caught a flicker of a grin. It felt good to have conjured it in him. He was wary as a cornered animal now, but through the fear and the typical tangle of adolescent emotions she sensed the person that was so evident in his drawings: highly observant, burning with a desire to understand the big questions.
"Know what I did last night?" she asked.
"What."
"I went for a long walk. Out to the mesa, to that ravine about a mile north of the school. You know the one? The steepest one."
He frowned. "At night?"
"Well, darkness helps me think about things. Sometimes when you can't see very well, other parts of your mind get more active, and you can sense things or imagine things more easily. You went out there with your drawing class, right?"
"You were looking at my drawings?" Disapproval: Spying on me.
"Well, I'd wanted to talk to you Saturday night, but then you . . . they brought you here. So I figured I'd at least look at your work." She turned to him. "Tommy, I have to say, you absolutely blo
w me away! Your drawings open my eyes to things I'd never noticed. Even the most ordinary objects or scenes take on a . . . a magic, I guess you'd call it. I'm . . . I'm awed. Really."
The flattery pleased him, but his wandering eyes showed he was wary of condescension. She gave him time, but he didn't say anything. She thought the rightward bow of his body increased slightly in the interim.
"Tell me about the faces in the rocks," she said quietly. "The ones you drew."
"It just seemed like an interesting compositional idea. It's called 'personification.' 'Anthropomorphism.'"
"There's more to it than that. There had to be. You had an interpretive theme—you gave them all very different personalities, just like you did with those studies of your parents. Why?"
His expression suggested he resented her probing but that he was also impressed or pleased that she'd noticed. "I was thinking about Navajos in the old days. All you know is what you read or people tell you, you don't ever know what to believe. Sometimes I just want to know, that's all. Who they really were. I was trying to see which seemed right." From the way his eyes fled hers, she sensed he'd inadvertently revealed something very important to him. "And I liked the idea of putting them in stone, kind of a statement, like they're enduring but also frozen in time. Like stuck in their history."
Same as with your parents, Cree thought. "Were you thinking of any ancestor in particular?" She held her breath: The answer could be crucial.
But abruptly the boy in the other bed woke with a cry and a long moan that ended in coughing. The old woman gently shushed him and muttered reassurances in Spanish.
Tommy half turned to look toward the drawn curtain and whispered, "I think he's dying or something. He's been in here a long time, like six weeks, I heard his parents talking about it."
"Tommy, stay with me on this for a moment. Did anything happen when you were out at the cliffs that day? Did you see anything different or unusual? You wrote the date on your drawings—September ninth."
"If they think they can keep me that long, no way. I'd rather be dead. I'll get out somehow."
Cree thought back to Dr. Corcoran's casual comment, He'll be talking to old white geezers like me for a long, long time, and felt a terrible resolve blossom in her, just what Julieta must feel. "They won't have to. You're going to be better. But you have to help me now."
Tommy swiveled his head back to look at her, and the way he did it gave her a little shiver. Something robotic about it, too smooth and controlled.
"How did you know?" he asked. "Did Mrs. McCarty tell you?"
"Know what? Tell me what?"
"That day. When I went up the ravine. I was sick of drawing the same rocks, I thought there'd be something more dramatic up there."
"How far up did you go?" Cree tried to conceal her excitement.
"Not far. It just goes up and divides into two little washes that dwindle away at the top. I shouldn't have spent so much time in there. I got too hot."
"Oh?"
"Not too bad. I was sitting on some boulders and trying to draw the ravine, but it didn't work out. Too much glare from the rocks. I just got dizzy."
"So what'd you do?"
Shrug. "Went back down. Drank some water. It went away."
"Your drawings have been changing since then."
"Yeah, Mrs. McCarty and Miss Chee, they're great teachers."
A nurse came in, checked on them briefly, then went to confer in hushed tones with the other boy and the old woman. Cree was thinking about the ravine, the shadow beings skipping down, and the awful thing that she'd feared would devour Edgar. And more and more she felt the thing crouching in Tommy: tense, balled up as if hiding or as if gathering itself to spring. But she didn't feel she could ask him more specific questions without risking programming his responses, giving him ideas. Or scaring him to death.
But she had to make progress. She had to jolt Tommy, or his parasite, off the dime. Provoke a response that would give her something to go on.
She took a deep breath and drew as much calm from it as she could. Then she sat at the head of the bed next to Tommy. The arm lay lifeless on the blanket, bandages crossing the upturned palm and disappearing into the sleeve of his robe.
"Tommy, what's this?" She touched the curled fingers gently. He looked down at it, dismayed. "It's my hand," he said immediately. "My arm." But the question frightened him.
"That's what you've learned to say, isn't it? That's what Dr. Corcoran wants you to say."
"It's my arm! It looks like an arm, what else could it be!" He sidled away from her. Or from it—the slack appendage dragged across the blanket after him and for an instant she saw it as he must, a foreign thing pursuing him, a snake in the bed.
"If you drew a picture of yourself right now, your whole body, what would it look like?"
He glanced back at the doorway as if hoping someone would interrupt. But the nurse had withdrawn again, and the curtained third bed was silent. He refused to answer.
"If it's not an arm, what is it?" Cree persisted.
"I don't know!"
"Okay, so it's a thing of some kind," Cree said. "An unknown thing, yeah?" She touched the bandaged palm, and then, overcoming her revulsion of it, picked up the hand and held it in both of her own. The deadweight was surprisingly heavy.
"Hello, thing," she said to it.
Tommy looked at her, wide-eyed and appalled. "You're crazy," he whispered.
"No! I just refuse to be frightened by things I don't understand." She lightly caressed the inert object, then looked directly into Tommy's face and mustered everything she had to break through to him: "Listen to me, Tommy!" she whispered forcefully. "I'm a scientist. One thing I've learned is, this is a strange world. Man, I have had one damned hard time with how strange it is! But you know the way you feel about being here with a sick kid in the next bed, and guys like Dr. Corcoran treating you like you're retarded, and thinking maybe you're going to be here forever? That feeling of being in a box? Well, just like you, I refuse to be in that box. Being afraid of stuff like this is a box. A cage. I won't stay in it."
She looked down at the hand again and said with all the calm and cordiality she could muster, "Hello, unknown thing."
Tommy made an expression of surprise, as if her words had penetrated him deeply and painfully. For an instant, he looked as if he were going to answer, but instead he made a moan, a shockingly deep voice emerging from his round mouth.
He was off balance now, and she sensed the thing in him moving, flushed from its cover. Cree seized the opening: "Who are you?" she hissed. "What do you want?" Is that you, Garrett McCarty? Or are you the one from the rocks?
Tommy looked paralyzed with fright. Abruptly, the hand twitched, and it turned to grip her hand, a quick hard clench as sudden and startling as an electric shock. In reflexive horror, she stood up and flung it away from her. The arm flopped limply back onto the bed, but for a few seconds the fingers clenched as if groping for her hand again, then curled and rolled like the legs of a dying spider. Tommy sidled away from it in terror and it dragged after him over the rumpled bedclothes.
Cree cursed herself. She made herself sit again and take the awful thing back, holding the hand gently and cautiously as if it were a wild animal. But Tommy's look of betrayal showed he wasn't buying it. No wonder! she thought. She'd shown him her hypocrisy: how close to the surface her fear and revulsion were, how marginal her own control. Worse, she had addressed the thing, he now knew how she was thinking of his problem. She'd confirmed what had to be his worst fears. And she might very well have programmed his future explanations and descriptions.
"That's why," Tommy said tremulously.
"Why what?" Cree managed.
"Why I stabbed it. It did that. It's doing it more and more. It scared me."
Oh, man, Cree thought. It's so obvious. They'd all assumed that the entity had made Tommy attack himself, and Cree's only concern had been whether the act suggested intentional malevolence. But they all h
ad it backward. Tommy had done the stabbing, attacking his persecutor in an effort to hurt it or drive it out. The full complexity of what she was up against struck her for the first time. With the thing progressively taking control, how long could they be sure who was Tommy and who the invader?
"Mrs. Pierce says it does other things. When I'm asleep." Tommy's rasping whisper sounded like the fear-awed voice of a much younger child. "Some of it was these ordinary gestures, things you do with your hands when you're talking to somebody or just sitting around." His voice dropped almost to inaudibility: "But some were like it was trying to figure out where it was. And some were like . . . it wanted to hurt somebody."
Cree met his round eyes and shared his horror. But they were getting close to something important. If she could frame her next questions just right, she might learn a great deal.
"Hel-lo, people!" The jovial voice startled them both. Cree turned to see Dr. Corcoran padding toward them, stooped like a white-coated vulture and wearing his biggest smile and best bedside manner. "How's the man of the hour, Mr. Keeday? Making any progress, Dr. Black?"
Cree wanted to kick him. But Tommy reflexively nodded and mustered a miserable grin for Dr. Corcoran. His first instinct was to please the man, treat him with respect. And, she suspected, by now he'd surely have guessed that acting normal was his only ticket out of the hospital.
28
DONNY MCCARTY spun away from his computer, surprised that the supposed parapsychologist's bona fides checked out. He had visited the Web site listed on her business card, and though it struck him as a pile of supernatural manure cloaked in psychobabble, it did at least seem like a genuine snake-oil stand, not a dummy site. To double-check, he'd done a Google search on her name and had come up with several hundred hits, some linking her with paranormal research topics and some with more mainstream, academic psychology. Just out of curiosity, he'd gone to the University of New Mexico site and brought up the events calendar, where, sure enough, she was listed as a speaker at some conference they'd just had. So she was what she claimed to be.
