Overheard in a Dream (13 page)

“No real illness, Just a minor grumbling, but my stomach wants a rest from eating.”

The Seer came over and leaned down very close to Torgon to scrutinize her face. She looked back at him, studying his watery old man’s eyes, as it would be unseemly not to meet them. Clasping her head firmly between his hands, he probed her jawline with his fingers. “We shall burn the cleansing oils tonight,” he said. “I can feel evil building in your bones.”

’
I’m all right, truly,” she managed to say, as he kept his grip on her face
.

“Then you’ll come into the dining room as usual. The soup is thin so will sit easily enough in your stomach.”

Torgon said, “I have no hunger and fear feeling worse, if I should eat. Send an acolyte with a bowl of soup here to my cell and if I am well enough, I shall eat it.”

“You
will
eat it,” he declared
.

“If I feel well enough.”

“You will
eat
it. You have gone too thin since you’ve come here and I fear you’re full of worms. So it is of no matter if you bring the soup back up. Better if you do, in fact, for then I shall have the chance to see which worm infests you.”

It was Loki who came. She unlatched the door and then backed into the room, carefully carrying the wooden bowl, trying not to let the thin broth spill
.

“You have forgotten yet again to knock,” Torgon said gently
.

“Oh!” the girl cried in despair. “I beg your pardon.” Her shoulders sagged. “It’s just there are so many rules here and I am not yet used to them. Shall I go back out and knock?”

“No,”’ Torgon said. “But, yet again, please try harder to remember. You’ll get a nasty cuff about the ears if a holy woman catches you not waiting for permission.”

“Why do you not cuff me?”

Torgon managed a smile. “Perhaps I shall when I am feeling better.”

The girl smiled back. “I think not. I think you care not for cuffing, for I’ve never seen you do it.”

Nausea swept over Torgon again, and she took a deep breath to quell it
.

“You look most unwell, holy benna,” Loki said and set the bowl of soup down on the small table near the window. “I had the retching illness once,” she added cheerfully. “I brought up my stomach twelve times in just one night. And then each of my brothers took it. I have four brothers.”

“You have a large family. Your parents are much blessed.”

“My father is a mighty warrior of the
benita
band and pleased to have so many sons.”

“He’ll be pleased to have you too, for it is the nature of fathers to love their daughters well. And your mother will be grateful for your help in caring for so many men.”

Loki smiled
.

“You must miss your family now that you are here,” Torgon said
.

“Yes, a little,” she said, then glanced up nervously. “Is that wrong of me to say?”

“No. It is natural, because you love them. I missed my family too when I first came to the compound. Indeed, it often made me cry at night.”

“It
did?”
Loki said, shocked. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to? Did she not say it would shame your father if you cried?”

“My father is a worker. He does not shame that easily.”

“Truth be said, holy benna, I do find a little water in my own eyes sometimes. I didn’t say for fear you would be angry with me.” A pause. “Truth be said, holy benna, you are much different than I thought you’d be.”

“For one thing, you thought I’d have no legs!”

Loki laughed. “It’s just I thought you’d be even more frightening than the Seer is, since you are holier than he. I thought you’d have no wish to speak with little children.”

“Not so. Indeed, I find your talk makes me feel rather better.”

“Truly?” Loki asked with a surprised smile. Then her small face brightened. “You know what you should do? Ask holy Dwr to make it so you won’t fall ill. That would be good, not so?”

“Except I couldn’t,” Torgon replied
.

“Why not? You’re godly. And to my mind it isn’t a very godly thing to bring your stomach up.”

Torgon smiled. “But I am not a god.”

“The laws say you are ‘god-made-flesh’. That’s why we must do obeisance to you.”

“Aye, but god-made-flesh means I am the same as any other person.”

Loki’s brow furrowed. “How can that be so?”

“What point is there in being flesh, if a god does not experience all of what being flesh entails? That includes falling ill. And
bringing up one’s supper. So, you see, it wouldn’t be right to ask Dwr to spare me this, for this is how Dwr wants me.”

Unconvinced, Loki pondered
.

“Besides, illness isn’t Dwr’s domain. Dwr governs the realm of consciousness, of choice and good and evil. All else is in Nature’s great realm and even holy Dwr can not change the laws that Nature’s given.”

“But is not illness a kind of evil?” Loki asked, “for otherwise why do we call in the wise woman to frighten off bad spirits? Are they not evil? Would that then not make it part of Dwr’s domain? And therefore should we not fight against it and try to change it to make the world a better place?”

Torgon raised an eyebrow. “Be careful with your speech, little one.”

Loki ducked her head. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “Have I said something wrong again? It is a fault of mine. There is so much to learn here. So very many rules. I’m not good at it. I fear that I must not be very clever.”

“It is not that you are not clever, child. Your real problem is that you are.”

“How old were you when you wrote that story?” James asked at the start of Laura’s next session.

“I can’t remember now exactly,” Laura said. “I didn’t start putting the stories down on paper until in my mid-teens, but I remember very clearly how old I was when I first experienced it. Eleven. I even remember the day. It was a Saturday morning in the fall and that afternoon Dena and I got together to go to the park. I remember us perched right up at the very top of the monkey bars, sitting there like a couple of sailors in a crows’ nest, just talking. Adolescence was very much on
Dena’s mind by that point. She was telling me how she had been counting her pubic hairs and then asking me if I had any starting to grow. As Dena was talking, I remember gazing off across the park at the trees flickering gold in the sunshine. Torgon wasn’t with me at that moment, but for no particular reason the glinting sun on the coloured leaves made me think of her.

“I said, ‘I feel like I’m going to explode sometimes.’

“‘How come? What’s the matter?’ she asked.

“‘Torgon and stuff. The way Torgon’s world sort of lays down over everything I see. It’s like a transparency. So that everything here has a kind of layer of that world over it.’

“‘You’re
still
playing that?’ Dena asked, surprised. Because she didn’t realize. The winds of change had long since blown through our relationship. By the time she was about nine, Dena was no longer interested in pretending, so, slowly it stopped being part of what we did together. I had to explain that yeah, I did still have it all in my head.

“I said, ‘It’s never gone away. I still hear them all the time, talking to each other. I hear everything Torgon says. Even what she thinks and doesn’t say aloud. I hear her thoughts. I feel what she feels.’

“‘Weird,’ Dena said. ‘How do you do it?’

“I shrugged. ‘I dunno. It just happens.’

“‘Know what?’ she said brightly, ‘I got this picture of your mind like one of them big radar dishes that they track satellites and alien spaceships and stuff with, kind of turning back and forth, picking up these weird voices.’

“‘No, it’s more ordinary than that,’ I said. ‘More like I’m just in the next room and can hear them talking through the walls, and then I can go in their room, if I want.’

“‘Okay, so do it now,’ Dena said. She wasn’t challenging me. She was just curious. She said, ‘Go where Torgon is now and let me see you do it.’

“Immediately I was in Forest. I didn’t even have to do anything. It just appeared before me. Torgon was in the altar room with the Seer. It was later on the same evening that she’d been talking to Loki but now she was busy with some part of the holy rituals. I looked back at Dena and said, ‘There.’

“She said, ‘Oh give over, Laurie. You didn’t do anything.’

“I said, ‘I did. You asked me if I could go where she was and I have.’

“‘Oh, give
over
, Laurie.’

“I was annoyed because I knew she thought I was just making it up. I said, ‘OK, so I’ll tell you the whole story about what was going on right from this morning. About how Torgon was in her room when this little girl named Loki came in and Torgon wasn’t feeling good. She felt sick to her stomach. And you know what, Dena? When she felt like that, it sort of made me feel sick to my stomach too. I could feel what she felt.’

“‘Did she puke?’ Dena asked. ‘Did you see her puke?’

“‘Dena, stop it. I’m trying to tell you something serious.’

“‘Yeah, well, so did she puke? That’s what
I
want to know.’

“‘In the end, yeah, but so what?’

“Dena’s eyes got wide. ‘Wow.
Weird
. You got somebody puking in your brain.’ She paused a moment, shaking her head. Then she looked over at me. ‘I got to tell you something,’ she said.

“‘What’s that?’

“‘Well, I don’t think you ought to go around talking to a lot of people about this. It’s okay with me. I understand you because I’m your best friend.’

“‘I don’t go around talking to a lot of people,’ I said. ‘Just you.’

“‘Yeah, well, the reason I’m saying this is that … I hate to say it, Laurie, but you
do
sound sort of nuts when you talk about this.’

“‘But I’m not. You know that.’

“‘Well, yeah, I know,’ she said, ‘but sometimes when you’re talking to me, I got to remind myself of it.’

“Then without even a pause Dena said, ‘Know what Keith Miller did in Miss MacKay’s class yesterday? He came up behind Sally and ran his hand right down her back to see if she was wearing a bra.’

“As Dena spoke, I remember watching the light through the leaves again, autumn gold against autumn green, fleeting, flickering colours, and wondering,
what is real
? What determines if something exists? And I remember I could still feel that faint, sickish feeling.”

A
t the end of his next session, Alan said “I want talk about the possibility of your seeing Morgana too. That was part of the package, wasn’t it? Part of how it works in here?”

James nodded.

“Good. Because like I said in that first session, Morgana is already starting to do stuff I don’t want her to get in the habit of.”

Alan paused. “Shit, isn’t it awful to hear me say that?” He grimaced. “To even consider the possibility that we’ve fucked up two beautiful, innocent kids? That’s not saying much for us as parents, is it?”

“Don’t think about it that way,” James replied. “It’s important not to focus on problems in terms of ownership. I know that’s a very popular attitude these days, but it’s narrow-sighted, because nothing happens in a vacuum. The family is a milieu and Morgana is part of the family. So it’s natural she’s both affecting and affected by what’s happening.”

“Okay.”

“This is the reason I find it so important to include parents and siblings in therapy when I work with a child.”

Alan said, “It’s also because I can see what you are doing is helping Conor and I want that for Morgana too.” He smiled. “I
am
beginning to notice changes. Just little things, but they’re there. Sometimes, for example, I can tell Conor’s listening to me. He’s not quite as much in a world of his own.”

“Conor’s doing well in here,” James said. “We’re moving slowly, but it’s steady. He’s definitely starting to be more responsive.”

“That is so great to hear,” Alan said with feeling. “It would just be the best moment of my life, if we can turn Conor around.”

At the start of the next session Conor went straight to the shelves and pulled the plastic road sheet out. He scanned it with the cat and then laid it on the floor upside down so that its plain white surface was uppermost. He ran his hand over it, smoothing it out flat. “Eh-eh-eh. Whirrrr. Brr-brr-brr.”

Pushing his hand underneath the sheet, Conor left it like that for several moments. Then he began to move it here and there, like a kitten under a blanket.

“Terria,” he murmured and lifted his hand out.

“Pardon?” James asked.

“The Taurus-Littrow landing,” he replied and smoothed the sheet out with his hand. “There is no grave here. Where’s the man?”

James wasn’t able to follow the boy’s train of thought at all. He jotted down “Taurus-Littrow” and a phonetic spelling of the word “terria” in his notebook.