by Daniel Hecht
They walked along the edge of the athletic fields, not far from the foot of the mesa. The sky had turned dull white and featureless, dimming the sun. Tommy struggled to coordinate his legs and arms. He had a rising feeling of expectancy, as if there was another person coming, or maybe was already silently walking with them and was about to do something. A third person, listening, even more sneaky than the nurse.
"You know," Mrs. Pierce said, "sometimes it helps to talk about what frightens you. It can be therapeutic. Even if you have angry feelings, talking about them can be what we call cathartic."
"I know what 'cathartic' means!"
"Of course you do," she said soothingly. "You're a highly intelligent young man. You're smart enough to be nervous about all this medical business, aren't you? The technology can be intimidating. But everyone feels the same way, believe me."
He nodded. There was some small relief in hearing that.
"Like what?" she persisted. "What's the worst? The MRI?" She glanced over at him expectantly.
He still didn't want to answer. But her question had made him think of the magazine in the cranial diagnostics waiting room. He'd sat there in his hospital gown while they prepared the MRI and he'd picked it up, some kind of doctor's magazine, not anything they should've let a patient see. He'd opened it to find an article about lobotomies.
The first photo showed a woman with her head in a clamp, a doctor putting a long, thin blade into her nose. Other pictures illustrated how to hit the tool with a special hammer that drove the blade through the thin bones behind your sinus cavity, right into your brain. It cut the connections, so the sick part just sat there, probably still doing its crazy thing but not screwing up the rest of your mind. The article said the procedure had been mostly abandoned for twenty years but was now making a big comeback. Sometimes people couldn't walk or talk or recognize their family afterward, but it was worth it if their brain problems were really severe.
Whatever was the matter with him, he knew it was severe. So maybe that's what they'd end up doing to him.
Tommy felt panic coming and tried desperately to think of something reassuring. He told himself Dr. Tsosie and Mrs. McCarty would help, they were very smart, they acted like they really did care about him. And maybe that new psychologist could do something, she seemed like she understood things. But he hardly knew any of them, it was hard to trust them.
His back twisted, and though he willed himself straight it was like big invisible hands were wringing him, so hard he heard his own backbone crackle. From the way she looked over at him, the nurse must have heard it, too.
He knew what it meant: The other person, the controlling stranger, was getting closer.
He had to unkink and calm himself. Find some safe place in his mind. His thoughts kept fleeing back to the family homesite, the smell of the sheep pens, the familiar shape of the land, and most of all his grandparents.
Grandfather, particularly-he could do anything with his hands, he could make anything, he totally knew sheep and horses and cars, he remembered everything from long ago, he could tell stories really well. What Tommy admired most was how deeply he believed in helping people-he'd do anything for someone in need, give anything he owned. He'd never in his life complained about his responsibilities. But he was old-fashioned and stuck in his habits and getting tired and weak. He was negative about every change, even things like when they graded the county road, and was paranoid about white people, technology, the government. He and Grandmother believed the old myths about First Man and First Woman, the Hero Twins, and Spider Woman, they saw the world as full of mysterious things that required all this respect and doing things in very particular, pointless ways every time. They were down on Tommy's choice of music and clothes and friends, frowned whenever he talked about his career ambitions, asked suspiciously about the clan of any girl he mentioned. He loved them so much it hurt inside, and he knew how much he owed them. But they couldn't offer any safety or reassurance now. And they shouldn't have to, he was fifteen, he should be taking care of them.
Sometimes he thought maybe he should confide in Mr. Clah, his social studies teacher, he was smart and seemed to know how things worked. He wore khakis and carried a laptop computer, he did mountain biking and had a white lawyer girlfriend. He treated Tommy like an equal. But though Tommy mostly agreed with his opinions, too often they sounded like complaining, making excuses, and accusing. He wasn't strong the way Grandfather was. He'd never worked as hard as Grandfather, had never gotten his hands dirty, didn't know what it meant to sacrifice for anybody. In any case, he didn't care enough about Tommy to help him now.
As always, his thoughts spiraled back to his parents. If they were alive, maybe they'd know how to help. Maybe they'd figured something out about how to live. They put up with Grandfather's Dine heritage stuff but weren't particularly into it. Some nights Tommy missed them, crying secretly into his pillow, but the more he missed them, the more he hated them for getting themselves killed. They had no right to do that to him and the family! Once when he was obsessing about it last year, he'd gone to the library and looked at some psychology books. He'd discovered that his attitude was typical: adolescent kid loving but resenting dead parents, searching around for role models. Cliche or not, it was true: You had to know something about your people or you couldn't know who you were. Especially right now, knowing who they were would help him sort out what he was going through. But all he had was a collection of mental snapshots: roiling on the ground and wrestling with Father when he was five or six, feeling safe against his strong chest, laughing at the silly way he pretended to fight. Mother teaching him how to fry an egg when he was maybe four, proudly showing Aunt Ellen and everybody how incredibly big a mess he made of the stove. Beyond that, all he knew was they liked country-and-western music, they fought a lot and drank too much. What he remembered wasn't enough to help him figure out anything.
Tommy heard his backbone crackle again, and he steered his thoughts away from the fading images of those faces. There wasn't any refuge there.
So then at some point he'd decided, Okay, I'll define myself. From his reading about great artists and from his own drawing, he'd figured that you were defined by your passions, by what you loved and believed in.
Sometimes he thought that might mean "doing something for the tribe." But what? The People didn't know what they wanted. If you believed the Navajo Times, every little businessman who opened up a Laundromat was "doing something for the tribe" by contributing to Navajo-owned enterprise and economic growth. When what it looked like to Tommy was just more greedy self-interest, like Mr. Clah said, just another form of colonialism, co-opting real Navajo culture with white American consumerism.
His art was the one thing. He loved looking at something until its hidden meaning came clear and then distilling the image and the meaning into something powerful. He could experiment with different ways of seeing the same thing, trying on definitions of himself, his parents, his friends, his surroundings, life, the past, until one seemed to capture something unarguably true. Just the physical act was almost ecstatic-moving the pencil on the page, not so much drawing as carving the blank white into three dimensions. There were moments when he could believe that in the way he saw things and drew things he was giving something back to the world. It had always been good, but it wasn't until he'd come to Oak Springs that he'd learned how much he could do, how much it could mean. It was so much better than the other schools. He'd learned so much in the few classes he'd had, Miss Chee and Mrs. McCarty had shown him how to put the way he saw and thought into his pictures. Made him feel that his work was important, that it was a way to figure things out, a way to a halfway decent future.
The thing at his side moved suddenly, the fingers clenching and then clawing the air like someone scratching a bug bite. Tommy grabbed it with his left hand and squeezed it hard, digging his nails into it, wanting to hurt it, feeling nothing.
His heart plummeted. It reminded him of another heartb
reaking fact of where he was at. Without a right arm he couldn't draw. If he didn't get better, he'd have to leave Oak Springs School. The one way through would be lost.
"You okay?" the nurse asked.
"Yeah." He realized he hadn't answered her earlier question.
"You want to tell me what you're feeling?"
He couldn't. Because as bad as the things with his body were, the feelings were worse-harder to describe and more frightening. Suddenly, he'd notice he'd been having something like a daydream, but the instant he'd realize it, it would go away, he couldn't remember what it was about. It was like the one time he'd gone to the multiplex theater in Gallup, watching one movie but hearing sounds and music from a different movie through the wall. It didn't make sense, a mood that had nothing to do with what he was doing. A feeling or an urge would come out of nowhere. He'd feel the need to hurry, like he had to go somewhere or do something very important. A couple of times he'd gotten sexually aroused, once even in the examining room when Mrs. McCarty was there and might have noticed. Or he'd feel this horrible fear and then fill with hate and want to hurt someone so much he could hardly hold himself back. Sometimes he wondered if it could be a witch or a ghost trying to kill him, maybe all the things the kids talked about in the dorm at night were true: the black humping shapes coming out of the desert at night, the strange noises in the wind, the unusual behavior of a crow on the roof. A shadow moving on the rocks with nothing making it. Maybe he had a chindi in him. Or maybe it was coming from his subconscious, wasn't this how schizophrenia worked? Maybe he was really a person full of fear and hate and violence.
Whichever, it was happening right now.
Mrs. Pierce was watching him and he realized that once more he hadn't answered her question, he'd been lost in the feeling and the effort to fight it. He quickly let go of the arm thing and hoped she didn't notice the blood where he'd dug in his nails. He looked over at her, and abruptly he wanted to spring at her, tear her to pieces. Afraid he couldn't stop it this time, he picked up his speed so he got ahead of her, got her out of his sight.
From behind, Mrs. Pierce called in her phony cheerful voice, "Never mind. I'm sure you'd rather talk about something else. Of course you would. We'll just walk along and just be good buddies for a while. Just good buds out for a walk."
20
By the time they'd made it back to the corral and cared for the horses, it was nearing sunset. Cree's head was throbbing, and she knew she was too exhausted to try another session with Tommy right away. She absolutely had to be clearheaded and strong enough to take a peek inside his skull. Anyway, Lynn had left a note, letting her know that she'd taken him for a walk and then planned to go to the cafeteria for some dinner.
Cree seized the moment of comparative calm. She felt herself spiraling in on her bed, drawn irresistibly into its field of gravity, but first there was some business to attend to. Ten minutes on the phone, then a nap. She'd spend time with Tommy later in the evening.
It was late Saturday afternoon in Seattle, a good time to catch Joyce and Edgar before the evening's entertainments took them out for the night. She commandeered the phone in Lynn's office to make the calls.
When Ed answered, she could barely hear his hello over the stereo blasting in the background: the Gypsy Kings, belting out songs of unrequited passion.
Ed quickly brought the volume down. "Hey, Cree. Good timing. I was about to go out."
"I can call back later if-"
"No, this is fine. I won't be home later-going out to dinner. Now I'm just going to run some errands. What's up?"
"What're you going to bring, Ed?"
"Hm. Sounds like you have some recommendations."
"The lights flickered last time. Did I tell you? Very pronounced flicker phenomenon."
"So we'll need to rule out electrical system problems. I'll bring the kit for that, no problem there. But-"
"Yeah. We're getting into some EVP possibilities. Then there's the DNS issue."
It felt good to speak in the private vernacular they shared, to talk with someone who didn't need explanations or justifications. Nice to pretend there was any kind of conceptual map to this territory. But the idea brought them both up short as they thought it through.
EVP stood for electronic voice phenomena, a paranormal manifestation that had become evident only in the age of electronic media. In some cases, voices or sounds not audible to the human ear could be picked up by electronic recording equipment placed in haunted environments. Rarer still, telephones or radios sometimes produced sounds without a discernible signal source. The implication was that some unknown energies or entities were directly affecting the wires and chips and magnetic media of electronic equipment, creating patterns of electricity that ultimately emerged as audible noises or voices. Because it was an easily faked medium, Ed had been highly skeptical of EVP evidence until, despite every safeguard against hoax or error, he'd recorded a voice in an abandoned house in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
EVP was all the more complex because it tied in with a whole body of paranormal theory called DNS, direct neural stimulus. The idea here was that the energies of paranormal entities might create only the experience of images, sounds, or sensations: They didn't actually create light, vibrations in the air, or tangible bodily contact but directly activated the human brain and nervous system. Someone witnessing a phantom figure might not actually be seeing-receiving light through her eyes, which a camera would also record-at all. Rather, she might be having her optic nerve or visual cortex directly stimulated by some other form of energy.
The DNS concept helped explain the difficulty of providing a physical record of a ghost's presence. It particularly appealed to Cree because it supported her conviction that ghosts were linked to witnesses and manifested only within particular psychosocial environments: People experienced ghosts when their mental and emotional states created neurological conditions that sensitized them to the emanations of noncorporeal entities.
In the case of the flicker phenomenon, the well-documented pulsing of lights in the vicinity of paranormal events could be related to either EVP or DNS. Some form of energy could be affecting the wiring of a house or the filaments of a lightbulb and cause currents to fluctuate. Or it could affect the soft, wet wiring of the brain, causing the visual sensing circuits to misbehave. Subjectively, the end result would be indistinguishable to a witness.
"So, for the DNS, you're thinking functional microelectroencephalogram?" Ed suggested.
FMEEG was a medical technology that monitored tiny variations in the brain's electrical activity. Beyond its use in detecting brain impairment or seizure activity, FMEEG could be used to map normal brain function, allowing researchers to watch which areas lit up when the subject felt a particular emotion or responded to a particular stimulus. It had several advantages over functional MRI, one of them being that the scalp-wiring harness was light and minimally intrusive, and could easily be employed at the sites of hauntings.
"Think you can get the stuff?"
"On a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning? What're the odds, Cree? Shit."
"Call Frank. Tell him we need the gear for a week, we'll Air Express it back if we have to."
"Yeah." Ed paused, no doubt jotting a note to call their skeptical but helpful friend Frank Markowitz. Frank worked at Cascades Neurological Research Institute, coordinating multisite research initiatives with other labs and clinics. He was occasionally willing to bend the definition of "lab" enough to rent equipment to PRA.
"Okay," Ed said. "So. Otherwise. How's it going? You sound, um, good-decisive. In charge, um-"
"Bossy?"
"Well, I wasn't going to-"
"Julieta McCarty has an assertive side, okay? It's her get-things-done mode."
"So, what's the other side?"
"I'm okay, Ed," she said defensively. The other side is grief and sorrow, she thought, fear and self-doubt. Spinning out of control into anger and regret and making huge mistakes by acting upon thos
e feelings. If only it were possible to screen out which aspects of a personality you absorbed. But of course it wasn't.
She repressed the urge to ask him where he was going tonight, wondering inappropriately if he was dating someone, at last moving past his attachment to Cree Black and her indecisions and complications. But she just thanked him. He urged her to take good care of herself, and they said good-bye.
After she hung up, Cree was left recalling the first time she'd heard the EVP recording Ed had made in Gloucester. They'd listened to it together in his tech studio in Seattle, and it had left them both badly shaken. Emerging from a mist of electronic noise, barely more coherent than static and hum, a plaintive human voice Jenny? Jen? Where are you? I'm so sorry. You must believe me. Where are you, Jenny?
Some person or fragment of a person, lost in a timeless electronic ether, searching for a companion and a world it once knew, unaware that neither existed anymore.
She would never forget the anguish of fear and sympathy she'd felt as she listened to it. In a way, it was far more frightening than the direct encounters she'd had. The fear was not one of danger in any ordinary sense-that the ghost could hurt you. It came from understanding with stark clarity how lost and alone that being was, and wondering, Is that what will happen to me?
She quickly packed the thought away, picked up the phone again, and pecked in Joyce's number. Busy.
Thinking to kill a few minutes and try again, she went back to the ward room to finally begin reading the materials Mason had provided her. This time she went straight to some of the older source material. She read it in fascinated horror.
She was struck by how many of Tommy's symptoms resembled the typical case: the intensifying cycles followed by relative normalcy, the convulsions and contortions. The often-reported breathing problems, she saw now, could easily result from the asynchronous breathing they'd observed in Tommy-obviously, the intruder and the host vying for control of basic bodily functions. A chilling idea.
