by Daniel Hecht
Still she stood in the doorway, unwilling to move yet unable to ask him one last favor.
He couldn't meet her eyes, but his voice was gruffly compassionate when he spoke again: "I know, Julieta. I won't tell anyone what I saw. This place'd be empty by sunset."
When Julieta put her head into Lynn Pierce's examining room, the nurse looked up with a start, and the pencil she'd been writing with snapped in her fingers.
"Any word from Joseph?" Julieta asked.
"He'll get here around eleven."
"How's Tommy?" The blinds over the window to the ward room were half slatted; all she could see was a mound of twisted bedclothes.
Lynn's eyes darted to the window, and she bit her lips. She gestured at the patient voice monitor on her desk. Through the soft hiss pouring from the speaker, Julieta could make out gentle snoring.
"Sleeping now. But it was worse this time. It lasted longer."
"His spine again? The right arm?"
A tiny nod.
"Why didn't you call me, Lynn? I would have-"
"Joseph told me I should let you rest. Unless it was a crisis. Yazzie and I were able to keep him from hurting himself. By the time I could get free to call you, he'd stabilized."
"Is there any point in my going in with him?" All Julieta could think of was to hold him.
"No. Wait until Joseph gets here."
The thought of Joseph's earnest face and skilled, strong hands soothed Julieta a little. It helped that he knew how much this meant to her. That there was someone who knew it all. Surely he'd have some solution, he'd think of the next step.
"Have you talked to his teachers?" Julieta asked.
"I sent out my usual absence notice. I didn't go into details, just said he wasn't feeling well."
"Who else has seen him? Is anybody talking about it yet?"
Lynn would know this was the school administrator turning to damage control, the need to contain superstitious gossip. The nurse was one of the few non-Navajo staff at the school, a solidly built woman in her midfifties with silver hair pulled back into a thick braid that hung down to her waist. She had dazzling blue eyes made more startling by an iridescent bronze fleck in her left iris that was distracting and sometimes made her expression hard to read. She had come to the rez as a VISTA volunteer in the 1970s and had married a Navajo man from the Nakaibito area. Childless, her husband now dead, she seemed to have taken the stream of student patients here as her family. Somehow Julieta hadn't really gotten close to Lynn in her three years here, but right now she took comfort in the fact that the nurse shared her concern and distress.
"Nobody's called me for details," Lynn said, "so if Sam doesn't talk, it'll probably be all right for a few days. Sam says the other boys don't remember anything, but I wouldn't count on that-I don't know what kind of gossip they might be spreading. The teachers will inquire if he doesn't show up in class soon, and his grandparents will need to be informed… " Lynn finished with a gesture: And soon everyone will know.
Julieta shut the examining room door and leaned against it. "Lynn," she whispered. "What is this? Be honest with me. Have you ever encountered anything like this?"
Lynn toyed with the snapped pencil, her fingers drawn again and again to the jagged break. "The brain is a wilderness, the strangest things can happen. All I can guess is that this is a profound neurological aberration. But I can't square that with what Sam says-the way it affected the other boys."
They thought about it for a moment, listening to the deceptively serene noise of breathing coming through the monitor.
"What're we going to do?" Julieta whispered at last. "Where do we go from here?"
Lynn shook her head, and she looked at Julieta with her lopsided, startling gaze, her eyes now moist, nested in wrinkles of worry, and very guarded. "I have no idea."
2
Cree glanced up to see that a shape had materialized at the rear of the auditorium. Backlit by the ceiling lights near the entry, at this distance, it was no more than a dark silhouette: no face or features, just the outline of heavy shoulders and a large head so low above the body that it seemed the being had no neck. It loomed low behind the last row of seats like someone crouching or stooping, both menacing and disturbingly familiar.
In the instant it took to place the profile, Cree lost her train of thought. The last echoes of her words rang out over the speakers, and she wished she could somehow retrieve them and discern what she had said only an instant before.
Mason Ambrose. Here in Albuquerque. It had to be.
Sure enough, as she hesitated, another figure took up a post above the man in the wheelchair: Lupe. The ceiling spot haloed her gray hair and gave exaggerated dimension to the sockets of her eyes, her gaunt cheekbones, her thorn of a nose. Lupe, thin as a bone and as hard, not so much Ambrose's eternal personal assistant as his familiar, the sorcerer's mysterious creature companion.
Covering her surprise, Cree cleared her throat and took a sip of water from the glass on the podium.
"Excuse me!" she apologized. She scanned the nearer rows of the audience, located the earnest face of the woman who had spoken, smiled, and found her thought again. "It's hard to explain, but I've been asked that question before and I've given quite a bit of thought to how to answer it. I think I can convey the sensation to you if you'll follow along with me."
Moving to the side of the podium so that everyone could see her clearly, she raised her voice. "Put your index and middle fingers together and place them just under your right ear, where your jawbone meets the muscle that comes up the side of your neck. Got it? Now move the fingers forward, just under the jaw, until you feel them slide into the notch there. About halfway to your chin." Cree tipped her head and tossed her hair back as she demonstrated. There. Most of the audience were obligingly putting their hands to their throats, wondering where she was going with this.
"You might have to push fairly hard. But you should be able to feel your carotid artery there-a rubbery cord about as big around as a pencil? You can feel it stiffen and soften with every heartbeat."
She gave them a moment just to feel it.
"You're putting your finger right on your physical life. That throb-it's always been with you. Your heart's keeping you alive without your conscious thought-it's living inside you almost as if it's a separate creature alive in your chest. It does its job day in, day out. Most people don't like feeling it. We don't like to be reminded that there's an automatic part of ourselves, going about its business without our conscious supervision. It's a little creepy, isn't it? Vital, insistent, sort of foreign somehow? Yet of course it's deeply intimate, that pulse-deeply familiar, right?"
The audience was silent; most of them had their heads tilted, hands at throats. Some serious expressions, a few uncomfortable grins. Two hundred people feeling the secret pulsing inside.
"So, to answer your question, that's how it feels. That's how.. intimate it feels. That's how real it feels, how disconcerting it feels, to experience a ghost. Both physically and psychologically, that's the closest analogy I can come up with. That's the way experiencing a ghost reminds you of what you really are."
And if you don't like that, Mason, if that's too "spiritual" for you, she thought defiantly, screw you.
At the rear, the silhouettes of Lupe and Mason Ambrose hovered, motionless as a trompe l'oeil painted on the back wall.
The woman who had asked the question was clearly among those who were uncomfortable with touching that pulsing serpent. She nodded seriously, two fingers still held against her neck.
There was another moment of quiet, and then Dr. Zentcy, the conference's coordinator, moved from the wings and took over the microphone. He was a pleasant-faced man who struck Cree as rather too young and too informally dressed to be an academic of any kind, let alone head of the psychology department of a major university.
"And I think that should be our last question for Dr. Black today. Thank you, Lucretia, for a provocative talk, and for taking so many
questions. You've given us a great deal to think about. And thank you all for coming. Dr. Black's lecture is the final event today, but I hope we'll see you all here tomorrow for the final presentations in this year's Horizons in Psychology seminar."
The wash of applause was genuine, but as the room lights came up Cree didn't feel the gratifying release of tension that typically came after she'd delivered a lecture. Mason Ambrose didn't just casually show up at conferences, and his presence disturbed her. She hadn't seen him in four years, hadn't even spoken to him in perhaps two. If he was here, he had a reason. She realized that her body had something of a Pavlovian aversion to him, derived from the two years she'd spent working and studying with him. It wasn't just his grotesque physical appearance, or that he seemed to relish the more gruesome aspects of paranormal research: Mason Ambrose liked to push you into a learning curve so steep it could give you a nosebleed.
Dr. Zentcy had turned to Cree with a puzzled, pleased frown. He tipped his head slightly toward the back of the hall and asked under his breath, "Is that… that isn't by any chance-"
"Why, yes," Cree said, pretending she hadn't noticed earlier. "Mason Ambrose. I believe it is." Internationally renowned neuropsychiatrist and expert on abnormal psychology, internationally controversial scholar of parapsychology. My mentor.
"I didn't know…" Zentcy tried, "I mean, I had no idea he was actually…"
"Still alive? Good point." Cree leaned toward him with a bogus paranoid face and whispered, "What makes you so sure he is?"
For an instant, Zentcy's eyes widened, and Cree regretted teasing him-it was an indication of her own uneasiness. Zentcy was a good guy who deserved kudos for putting Cree and her radical ideas on the agenda here. The academic world was simply not ready for the idea that ghosts were real, and that the experience of death-and living people's relationships with the dead-must be central to any theory of psychology. His open mindedness had no doubt earned him some scorn from his colleagues here at the University of New Mexico, yet he'd treated her with only respect and consideration.
"I'm kidding," she reassured him. "But I know what you mean. With Dr. Ambrose you're never quite certain. I'll introduce you, if you like." Zentcy nodded with equivocal enthusiasm.
A dozen audience members had assembled at the front of the room, waiting to speak with her: students with theoretical questions, professors with bones to pick, even a few local residents with personal tales of ghosts and hauntings. By the time the last of them left, the figures at the back of the room had vanished.
Cree left the building feeling a mix of disappointment and relief at Mason's disappearance. Why would he have taken the time to attend her talk if he didn't want to meet with her? Just playing Mr. Mysterious, she decided; she'd hear from him again before she left Albuquerque. She drove back to her hotel to find a faxed note that confirmed her hunch: Take the Sandia Peak tramway at 5:00. See you at the top. Ambrose.
3
The aerial car started toward the peak, swinging up the slope and quickly leaving the embrace of the lower tramway station. Cree gripped a pole as she looked out over the heads of the kids who had pressed themselves against the windows. Ahead stretched a steep rocky incline almost bare of vegetation; below, beyond the concrete planes and angles of the station, the flat valley and the streets of suburban Albuquerque began to open and fall away. The southern slopes of the Sandia range came into view, tinged pink by the westering sun, their rocky turrets set against hard shadows.
Space. Light. Rock. Sky.
A grand land, Cree realized. A place of heroic proportion. There were fifteen other excited sightseers standing with her in the car, but their chattering stopped as the ground dropped away and a gulf of air opened beneath their feet. Everyone was experiencing the same awe. For a long moment there was a collective suspension of breath broken only by the hum of the drive machinery. Then the kids' excitement boiled over in exclamations of astonishment, and people started talking again.
The views mesmerized Cree, but she couldn't suppress her apprehension. Drama aside, Mason would have some reason for meeting her on Sandia Peak when any coffeehouse or hotel lobby would have been sufficient. He always had a reason. It no doubt had to do with "instructional value," but Mason's motives were mysterious and would remain so until he revealed them. And then he'd stick it to you hard and enjoy watching you squirm. There was a sadistic quality to Mason and his methods.
So why take the effort to see him?
Actually, the answer was simple. Whatever he had in mind, it would be something eye-opening. Mason Ambrose was a genius, a pioneer in psychology in Cree's estimation as important as Freud or Jung. He was also a brilliant teacher, infinitely giving and subtle and patient despite what could seem a purely self-absorbed and confrontational style. In Cree's case, he'd served as guide, guru, and therapist as much as teacher. He'd had the insight to accept her as his research assistant seven years ago, even though he'd seen her for the damaged merchandise she was. When she'd applied for the internship advertised in the Harvard grad school bulletin, she had been a widow for almost three years, still deeply wounded by the loss of her husband, crazy and sick with it. The grief alone would have undone her, but the way she'd found out about Mike's death-his appearance in Philadelphia at his dying moment, three thousand miles from the Los Angeles car wreck that killed him-had upset all her beliefs about the world. About life. When she'd come to Mason, she'd been lost and frightened, a spiritual seeker floundering and flailing in her quest to find answers to life's mysteries. A swimmer about to go under.
Mason had seen all that in his first glance. He'd spent two years redirecting her anger and fear, merging them with her hunger to learn and helping her focus them on her work. He'd goaded or finessed her into disciplining her talents. He'd helped her accept that her urgent fascination with the paranormal was not compulsion but passion, not useless but crucial. Most important, he'd believed in her and affirmed that the empathic techniques she used to commune with ghosts and those haunted by them were valid and necessary.
But his methods were, as he liked to put it, "rigorous." He'd plunged her into experiences of the paranormal that drove her nearly to insanity. One of the first, long before she was ready for such an encounter, had been the New Jersey motel ghost. She'd lived in the squalid, piss- and cigarette-stinking room for a week as she slowly got to know the revenant of a serial killer whose dying moments consisted of remembering his murders. Mason had seemed to relish every detail, including Cree's terror and distress.
Huge tubes of blue steel intruded suddenly across her field of vision, jolting her out of her recollections. Just as startled, the other passengers gasped and laughed uneasily. The tramcar had reached one of the support gantries partway up the mountain, and as it came to the peak of the first swoop of cables and changed incline it bounded gently, suspending gravity and leaving Cree's stomach hanging. The gargantuan tower's passing revealed how fast they were moving and how high they were.
Below, a vast space had opened between the car and the slope. To the west, the grid of Albuquerque's streets stretched out on a plain so flat it could have been pressed by some titan's rolling pin. Beyond lay a breathtaking sweep of desert, slightly hazy with distance, bounded at the far horizon by purple mountains.
Cree gawked like the rest of the passengers. What was it about the Southwest? Maybe the New Agers of Santa Fe and Taos had it right after all, and it was a magical land, a place of Earth energy convergence. She had spent only a week in Arizona, three years ago, and had never been to New Mexico, yet the place felt familiar, as ifthe size and smell and feel of it had been latent in her blood for a lifetime. The light was stronger, purer. The sun was more immediate and commanding. Here on the Sandia ridge, the mountains were carved with gullies and clefts as expressive as the lines of ancient faces. Between dense stands of pine, towers of rock thrust naked from the escarpment; you could feel the geology here, millions of years of tectonic and mineral processes exposed to the eye.
&nb
sp; That's what it was, she decided: Time itself was here. And time was big and there was lots of it. Good to remember.
Cree's ears popped for the fourth time. Another gantry loomed, and again the car did a hydraulic-suppressed lurch before beginning its final ascent. Three minutes later, they swung up into the arms of the receiving station, bumped softly, and eased to a stop. She stepped out with the other passengers onto a platform hung out over the nearly vertical slope. Just above was a small visitor center topped by the huge red wheels of the tram machinery, paused now; to the left lay a series of red-painted wooden decks, joined by stairs and ramps and cantilevered out over the mile-high cliff.
Below was the whole world.
The space and scope and light walloped Cree. She bellied up to the railing, feeling as if she'd stepped out on an airplane wing. When she fought off the vertigo and remembered to inhale, she found the air sweet and crisp and twenty degrees cooler than at the bottom.
The tourists had mostly dispersed by the time she pulled herself away from the rail and scanned the platforms for Mason and Lupe. She spotted thern on the farthest deck, past the restaurant, and began walking the meandering ramps toward them. Mason was staring outward at the grand view, but Lupe's round head swiveled as Cree approached. Wordlessly, she turned Mason's chair so he faced Cree.
He looked Cree up and down with eyes disconcertingly quick in his slack, fleshy face. After a long moment he tipped his head back toward Lupe. "I told you she'd ripen well! A fine, lush bit of woman flesh if there ever was one. I am always right in these things. Always." His voice had once been a rich and dignified baritone, but it hadn't survived the ruin of the rest of him.
Lupe regarded Cree disapprovingly, as if blaming her for Mason's lack of propriety.
"Hello, Lupe," Cree said. "Hello, Mason." Some physical contact seemed called for, but Lupe offered no opening, and the thought of touching Mason repelled her. When she put out her hand, Mason brought it briefly to his lips.
