And Dream that I am Home Again

by Lois RH Balzer

  "It's not new age," Harvey countered. "But if I suspect correctly, this problem is at least partially connected to shamanism. So this Incacha made Blair a shaman?"

  "Right here on his deathbed. He didn't teach him, or train him or anything, just grabbed his arm and muttered to him in his own language. Jim translated. Then Incacha died."

  "So Blair is an untrained shaman, late to his calling . . ." Harvey mulled that over as he ate, then looked up at his two attentive listeners, both staring at him with glazed expressions. "Uh, someone is either born a shaman due to genetics, or has something happen in their lives that makes them a shaman. The latter is said to produce the more powerful shamans." He cocked a sideways glance at Banks. "Question number two, could you tell me what happened when Blair died."

  Simon laughed shallowly. "The short version or the long version?"

  "Let's try the short version first. You found him floating in the fountain?"

  "Right. Face down. We tried CPR on him, but it didn't work. The paramedics arrived and took over for us, then finally declared him dead. We had to pry Jim from Blair's body and took him a short distance from it, trying to console him while we were waiting for the coroners' wagon. Jim pulled away from us and stared at Blair, then suddenly returned to his side and started CPR again, and brought him back."

  "Blair is declared dead, the paramedics have given up, everyone walks away from the body," Harvey repeated, tapping his chopsticks on the rim of his rice bowl. "Then why did he go back to Blair and try again?"

  "I think he just didn't want to believe Blair was dead. I guess he simply had to try again."

  "When we were in Seattle, you told us about Blair's remarkable ordeal coming back to life from drowning, and I remember you said that when Jim turned and looked back at Blair, you thought he was zoning for a few seconds."

  "Right."

  "So, look at this situation." Pushing his half-empty plate aside, Harvey got a piece of paper and began to write on it. "Let's divide this in two. What was happening with Blair, and what was happening with Jim at that particular moment. I think that all their current problems stem from that junction in time."

  "Sure - but eat something, Harvey, please. We can keep talking, but don't let this all go to waste. Madame Jung's food can't be beaten when it's hot, but it just doesn't reheat nicely."

  * * *

  Blair woke, shivering. It was evening now, the stars hidden far above the overgrowth of jungle trees and leaves and branches. Beside him, a small fire burned, the white flames tinged in blue, and beyond that, he could see Jim sitting silently, watching him. "Hi."

  Jim didn't move for a moment, then he nodded stiffly.

  "What's wrong?" Blair asked, shifting to sit upright. He really felt lousy. His body ached from being in one position on the ground.

  "You should sleep," Jim said, but his voice was empty of emotion, as though by stealing any depth from his tone would keep his own pain at distance.

  "I've been sleeping." Blair moved closer to the fire, seeking its warmth. "Have you gotten any sleep at all?"

  "A little," Jim admitted, looking away, as though this were some dark secret he was confessing to.

  "Why don't you get some shut eye right? I'm awake; I can keep watch."

  "You're sick, Chief."

  "Yeah, so? I've been not working at 100% for weeks now. It hasn't stopped us."

  "Well, maybe it should have."

  "What? What are you talking about?"

  Jim shook his head but wouldn't answer.

  "Come on, Jim. Just lie down here and have one of your famous power naps. I promise I'll wake you up if I feel any worse or get tired."

  "Eat first."

  "I'm not really hungry."

  "I am."

  "So you eat then. Don't fob it off on me."

  Ellison reached to take some more fruit from the stash he had gathered earlier. He hesitated over several different varieties before pulling his hand back empty.

  "What's wrong with them?"

  "Nothing," he said. "I just want something else."

  "What do you want?"

  Ellison shook his head, then stretched out on the far side of the fire, his body curled on his side as he stared into the flames, then slowly shut his eyes. With a clarity he could even smell, he dreamed of Madame Jung's Chinese food.

  * * *

  Harvey leaned to one side over his plate to stuff some more chow mein into his mouth, then looked back at the paper in front of him. "Let's look at Jim first. I suspect, from the brief conversations I had with Blair and from what I've read previously, that Jim's sensory abilities are most closely linked to his emotions. Up until now, I suspect that Jim hasn't really shown any extrasensory or unusual healing powers, such as he displayed this last week. Is that correct?"

  "That's right," Simon agreed.

  "Generally, how would you describe his emotions?"

  "Jim's?" The Cascade captain shrugged. "Before Blair came along, Jim tended to be on the non-emotional side, I guess. He was work-based, tended to put in long hours and shifts at Major Crimes. Few friends, never really smiled much. Most labeled him 'not a very nice person'. Oh, we were friends still, but it was limited to discussing the last Jag's game or sometimes going to the sports bar after a shift. He did have a few close friends, I found out later, but I don't think even they knew how much they meant to Jim until after they were gone."

  "That fits, though. Before having a guide to help him, Jim would probably have suppressed his emotions, his feelings and most painful memories. Doing so would have helped him suppress his senses, over which he would've had little control, without a guide."

  "That's when he met Blair. He thought he was losing his mind. He senses suddenly appeared, and he had no control over them."

  Harvey shook his head. "I'm looking at this all a little differently. My theory is that Jim actually does have superlative control over his senses, even to the extent of suppressing them when he needed to. It was only when he lost that control, that they turned on him. As a young child, I suspect he used them quite easily and without pain. But continued psychological conditioning by society would cause him to suppress his abilities in an unhealthy fashion that eventually caught up to him."

  A case they were involved with a year before surfaced to Simon's thoughts. "There was an incident in his childhood where his father accused him of being a freak because he heard something he shouldn't have been able to. Blair said he felt that Jim stopped using his senses at that point."

  "That reinforces my opinion then. He would have taken control of his senses and suppressed them because they were a danger to him."

  Simon frowned. "Last year, Jim accidently shot a night security guard at a mall department store. He wouldn't have made the shot without his senses, so he blamed them for the incident -- the man survived, by the way. He was wearing a flak vest. -- Anyway, Jim ended up without his extra abilities for a few days. But it was beyond his control; he said he just woke up and they were gone. It was nothing he had thought about or actively wished for. He just lost them."

  "Lost them? Once again, I believe Jim chose to suppress them. It all fits. It may not be a conscious decision to suppress them, but he is controlling them, one way or another. In the hospital in Seattle, Blair told me a bit about Jim's time in Peru. As I recall, Jim was on his own for eighteen months before he was rescued, wasn't he? Blair said he was thrust into survival mode, and as a survival tool, his senses kicked back in again to help him cope."

  "That's where he met Incacha," Simon added. "Incacha helped him out with his senses originally, doing basically what Sandburg does, I guess."

  Harvey nodded. "Jim was fortunate that faced with his situation, abandoned in Peru, he hooked up with a tribe whose shamanistic tradition valued people with Jim's non-standard abilities. His senses were considered normal, were quietly encouraged without him being aware of it, and he had no need to hide them once they emerged. In his somewhat confused state, he reunited with his exceptional
hearing, sight, etc., much as he would have carried on as a child. With the tribe's shaman, he would have ended up receiving the sort of guidance that someone in Jim's condition wouldn't have received in Cascade, where his abilities would more likely have been viewed as deluded symptoms of mental illness."

  Simon got up and poured himself another cup of coffee, bringing the pot over to refill Nash's cup. "What I don't get is when Jim returned to North America, why did his senses disappear again once he was reunited with them? Once he was rescued, he doesn't remember having them anymore, and they were no longer in evidence."

  "We're back to the first problem, Simon. When Jim was eventually rescued and hit civilization, those abilities were once again a freakish eccentricity and he automatically, expertly, suppressed them again, and as a consequence, the memories that went with them."

  "Right. He had no control of them."

  "I disagree," Harvey said, tapping his pen on the table once more. "This doesn't suggest to me that Jim had no control. I'd say the opposite, actually. It suggests quite superlative control of his senses, including the absolute control to block their input completely. But it came with an emotional price tag -- the cold, emotionless man you described, for -- consciously or subconsciously -- in suppressing so much input, he has to keep an exceedingly tight rein on himself.."

  Simon blinked, surprised to realize that he was following what Harvey was saying. "So then Blair Sandburg came along and encouraged him to accept his senses, and he didn't treat Jim's abilities as freakish at all, but perfectly normal."

  "Blair said that he immediately had to figure out little ideas and tools and theories to help Jim learn to control his senses, but Jim seemed to catch on awfully quick. It was like he knew what to do, he just needed permission to do it. Blair's presence gave him that permission. To recap for my notes here, my theory, then, is that Jim actually has had all along exceptional abilities as a Sentinel, which he actually rarely used. These abilities are affected or dampened most dramatically by emotional and physiochemical episodes."

  Simon chuckled suddenly, and both men turned to him. "Ah, there've been a few times where, uh, chemical stimuli has caused a few interesting problems."

  "Pheromones?" Harvey asked, grinning.

  Simon grinned back, shaking his head in remembered horror. "Yes. You catch on quick. It took us awhile to figure what was going on. Sandburg had a hell of a time trying to convince Jim that he was smelling the woman's pheromones and losing control.."

  "What about emotional stimuli? Something tragic that affects Jim. A loss of a friend?"

  "In one case, a cop died, a close friend of Jim's, and his senses went wild. They would cut in and out, causing him a lot of problems."

  "I'm sure sometimes they either heightened Jim's senses off the scale or he ended up shutting them down completely." Harvey nodded again. "So tell me -- very briefly -- about this female sentinel. How was Jim affected?"

  "Sandburg described it as territorial. It made Jim crazy that there was another sentinel on his turf."

  "And emotionally?"

  Simon rubbed at his chin, trying to find the correct words, then shrugging his defeat. "I've no idea how to say this nicely, so to put it bluntly, Jim had an almost animal-like desire to mate with her. I don't remember Blair ever mentioning pheromones, so I don't think that was the problem. He didn't seem to have any control over it, even when he saw her again after she had tried to drown Blair."

  "So I think it's safe to say that for all the traumatic experiences Jim has been through this last year, his history of suppressing his emotions, his history of his senses getting out of control and spiking under stress, the territorial and emotional problems he faced with this female sentinel in May, plus Blair's apparent 'death' right before his eyes -- at that moment, it would have kicked Jim into absolute overdrive. Somehow, he was able to tap into some sort of power or ability that he had never been able to grasp before."

  Simon seemed reluctant to commit himself. "I'm not sure what to say here. I really don't claim to understand what makes Jim tick, or even whether he was the one responsible for bringing Blair back to life. Maybe it was just a coincidence. I'm not sure I'm ready to believe that Jim 'healed' his partner."

  "Hasn't he done that several times this week already?"

  "What?"

  "In the hospital? Again in the motel room in Bellevue?" Harvey looked up from the notes he had written about Ellison. "Okay, let's put Jim aside then and look at what was happening with Blair. I think I can safely assume that from what I've heard about that day, that Blair was in a highly receptive state as a shaman."

  "Define what you mean by 'highly receptive state'," Simon challenged. "And I don't think he's a shaman."

  "I disagree. I think he more than meets the criteria. For Blair, as a fledgling shaman, he needed to reach a higher state of awareness and vision to accomplish his part of his journey back to life. For a shaman, these are usually obtained by several methods, all medically significant in this case."

  He wrote each down quickly. "Disease. Fasting. Exertion. Lack of sleep. Blood loss. Artificial psychoactive agents or natural psychoactive agents (endorphin). Stress/pain response (adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin). Episodes of mental 'illness'. Dream states. Special breathing. Hypoxia."

  He glanced up at Nash and Simon, making sure they were still following it all. "From a strictly medical perspective, blood letting or loss of blood, slowing one's rate of breathing, exertion at high altitudes and fasting all reduce the blood's oxygenation and permit hallucinatory episodes and the release of endorphins and altered levels of other natural psychoagents like adrenaline. Again, from a medical perspective, stress, disease, psychochemical imbalance and artificial psychoactives -- especially of the mescalin variety, like peyote or the ayahuasca vine -- all produce chemical changes in the body which can produce hallucinatory episodes and altered sensory states. The practice of what is called "lucid dreaming" and the rush of chemicals through the body during stress, pain, injury or death can also produce these altered states of awareness."

  "But Blair hadn't used any drugs."

  "He told me that prior to his drowning, he hadn't been eating or sleeping because of the problems with Jim -- he said he had even told Alex this. He was obviously highly stressed about it all. He was on an emotional roller-coaster and this would have produced all the usual chemical and physiological reactions in his body that I mentioned before. When Alex came to his office she said she was going to kill him. His heart would have been pumping and he was on an adrenaline, fear-induced high. To react to threats and stress, the body releases a series of enzymes called "monoamines" that increase our ability to think and react. In effect they turn down non-significant data and turn up critical data -- these are "dopomine", "adrenaline" and "serotonin". They also increase our ability to deal with a crisis by increasing our ability to process subconsciously -- because subconscious processing is fast and conscious processing is slow. Therefore, according to modern psychological medical theory, Blair was in state that was very emotionally and physically receptive to his subconscious. Does this make sense?"

  Simon shrugged. "I suppose it's one way of looking at it."

  "Okay, Blair had been injured and left face down in the fountain and had sucked up a lot of water. His body and brain went though an extremely heightened physiochemical episode -- his anxiety and loss of sleep and fasting -- and then, he was suddenly deprived of oxygen. Hypoxia and lowered heart rate produces all sorts of altered brainwave patterns that can be linked to investigations into lucid dreaming, hallucinogenic states and out of body experiences. He had no external sensory stimulus at all, leaving him to focus any consciousness on stimuli from within, his own subconscious."

  Harvey turned his paper around so he could see what he had jotted down. "All these physiological symptoms are the very same things that shamans all over the world use to achieve higher states of consciousness - lack of sleep, pain, stress, heightened levels of chemical enzymes in the body,
lack of oxygen." He gave them a moment to read the words and absorb what he was saying. "I can only suppose that with Blair in this highly receptive state and Jim in a highly emotional state - and therefore attuned to his greatest powers as a sentinel -- that their two states somehow combined to produce not only Blair's revival, but some sort of physical, spiritual, mental plane where they were able to meet. The vision they shared was their subconscious representation of what happened."

  "What vision?" Nash asked.

  "Simon?" Harvey prompted. "Can you tell him?"

  The Cascade captain cleared his throat, reluctantly. "Apparently they both had the same vision or dream that a black jaguar and a gray wolf started running towards each other and then jumped together in a flash of light. Blair's heart started beating then."

  "And that means what?" Nash Bridges asked.

  Simon looked to Harvey, who obliged.

  "The black jaguar is obviously a South American animal. Originally it was pulled from Jim's subconscious and from descriptions of his other dreams, it is clear that his understanding of himself and his abilities is seated in Peruvian mythos. The choice of a wolf for Blair, a North American symbol, may also have come from Jim's subconscious, remembering that the wolf appeared in a dream to Jim before the dual vision they shared."

  "Right," Simon said, nodding in remembrance. "A few days before all this happened, Jim dreamed that he shot a wolf and as it lay dying, it morphed into Blair."

  "Feeling guilty about something?" Nash asked.

  "He had been acting like a real ass for the previous few days, short-tempered - Blair says now that he was just sensing the other sentinel's presence."

  "So why a wolf?" Nash persisted. "If Jim thinks in Peruvian terms, a wolf doesn't sound appropriate. That's North American."

  Harvey finished his mug of tea, and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on again, still talking. "Assuming Jim made some subconscious choice of spirit animal for Blair, Jim might have associated the wolf symbol -- and you're right, Nash; it's not a South American spirit animal -- with Blair for a number of reasons--"