Valley of Bones (26 page)

“Yeah, they have,” Paz agreed. “They were real neat about it, though. How could you tell?”

“There’re no personal papers in that office aside from a folder full of paid bills. No address book, no files, no Rolodex, no personal mail. No diaries with an entry that says ‘I’m scared shitless that
X
is gonna get me.’ He’s got a big wooden desk with two file drawers, both practically empty, but you can see from the dust marks that they were full of file folders at one time. There’s a fancy digital phone that can store twenty numbers, but they’ve all been cleared, and you can see where he had a little list, maybe about which buttons called which
people, taped to the desktop, the wood is unfaded and there are tape marks. Someone took the trouble to rip it off.”

“Very good, very interesting,” said Paz. “It goes with the rest of the picture. Someone is clipping connections, the connections that lead up from Jack Wilson to whoever was running him. There’s something strange here too. First of all, the clothes in the drawers were all jumbled around. Someone had been through them because the rest of the house suggests neat, and they weren’t neat. So that confirms that they were searching for some physical object or objects. What is the most interesting absent physical object in this case?”

“Muwalid’s cell phone.”

“Right. I’d bet that’s what they were looking for. The other thing is that.” He pointed to the statue. “You know what that is?”

“A religious statue?”

“It’s a Santería cult figure, Santa Barbara, aka Shango, the
orisha
of thunder and violence. That’s not supposed to be in a regular straight-up white guy’s house.”

“I don’t know, people collect all kinds of weird shit.”

“True. But he’s also got this.” Here Paz held up a double-bladed axe made of wood, painted red and yellow, from which depended a string of red and white beads. “This little axe is an
oshé,
the symbol of Shango, and the bracelet is an
eleke
. You only get an
eleke
at an initiation, when you’re made to an
orisha
. Also, you notice that sweet smell? That’s
omiero
. They smear it on objects and people during ceremonies. No, this isn’t a tourist item. It’s a working shrine. Wilson, or someone he knew real well, was involved in Santería.”

“You know about this stuff?”

“More than I would like,” said Paz, putting down the axe. Suddenly there was too much spit in his mouth. He said, “Are you hungry, by the way? I only had some cookies for breakfast.”

A little startled by this change of subject, Morales replied, “I could eat, yeah.”

“We’ll swing by the restaurant,” said Paz. “My mom’ll make us something.”

LORNA DRIVES TO
the hospital and wonders yet again if she is in love. No, that’s crazy, the man is delightful, sure, but also a completely unreliable womanizer, he has the whole act down, the charm, the showing off the new sweetie and so forth, the mom even, but even as she thinks this she knows she is making it up and feels hollow and helpless, as if caught up in a current. Circling the drain, she thinks cynically and laughs.

Speaking of circling the drain: the first person she meets when she passes through the locked ward is her old boyfriend Howie Kasdan, M.D. As always when he leaves his office and ventures into the clinical world, Dr. Kasdan is wearing a long white coat, from the pocket of which peeks a stethoscope, although to Lorna’s knowledge Dr. Howie has not checked for heart sounds in a long while. He has his foot propped up on a chair and is writing on a clipboard braced against his knee, but he notices Lorna despite her usual camo costuming and flashes his caps at her.

“Lorna! Hey, you look great. You look like you dropped some weight.”

“Thank you, Howie,” says Lorna coolly. “What brings you into actual patient contact?”

“Oh, one of my drug test subjects, paranoid schiz, just went into a complete remission. It could be a real breakthrough. I mean this guy is like
normal
? He wants to know what he’s doing in a loony bin. I mean he only chopped two of his spouses into wife stroganoff—”

“Wait a minute, this isn’t Horace Masefield?”

“That’s the guy. A friend of yours?” More caps.

“I was there when he went ballistic. I actually saw him remiss. What kind of drug is this?”

“It’s called traxomonide. It’s a completely new approach to brain chemistry, operates directly on the SEF2-1 mutation, which shows
increased allele frequency in schizos. It codes for a helix-loop-helix protein that we think may have a significant role in—”

“How big is your N, Howie?” Lorna asks.

Kasdan frowns; he is not often interrupted in his expositions. “A hundred ten. They’re here, and in Chatahootchee, and in a couple of other sites.”

“Have there been any other remissions like this?”

“Not that I know of, but we just started the study, the drug’s barely reached therapeutic levels. I wanted to get Masefield scanned as soon as possible, and I know we’re going to see changes. I’m totally pumped about this.”

Previously, Lorna would have been pumped herself at the prospect of fame and fortune represented by a new mental health drug even at one remove, but not anymore. It isn’t just that she no longer cares for Kasdan, nor that she has less faith in the chemical model than formerly. No, it is learning that what she had witnessed had probably been an artifact of some new dope and not…what? Something rich and strange. It is like learning that Mom and Dad were really Santa Claus. It makes her sad, and she knows it has something to do, in a confusing way, with what is going on with Jimmy Paz.

“Lorna?”

“Hmm?”

“Something wrong?”

“No. Why?”

“You looked like you were zoning out there. Are you still on medication?”

“No.”

At that moment Lorna feels a rush of weakness pass through her body, so that she nearly staggers and has to touch the wall for balance. Sweat oozes on her brow and lip. “I have to check on a patient,” she says. “Nice seeing you!” And she hurries off on wobbly knees.

What was
that
all about? she wonders as she inspects herself in the staff bathroom mirror a moment later. She looks pale, and more
than that, she feels fragile. The nice oily-in-the-limbs feeling from this morning has quite vanished, and she recalls that blast of pain at the kitchen sink. And now this. Could it have been long-suppressed repugnance of Howie? Unlikely. A return of the panic syndrome, from which she had been remarkably free of late? Possibly. She sits on a plastic chair and takes deep breaths. She palps the lymph nodes in her neck. Are they larger, more rubbery? She can’t tell. She washes her face and reapplies makeup. Something is still not right.

On her way to Emmylou’s room she passes a doctor’s scale. Lorna has never weighed herself in public before, but now she steps on it and shoves the little sliding weights around. She has dropped seven pounds. She tries to convince herself that it is the exercise kicking in and fails. A little knot of fear starts spinning in her belly. She thinks of the old cliché, even paranoids have enemies, and there’s one for hypochondriacs too. She leans against the wall and uses her cell phone to dial Dr. Mona Greenspan, but when the secretary answers she breaks the connection. This has to stop, she tells herself, there is nothing wrong with me, I am not a crock, I do not have cancer.

Emmylou Dideroff is sitting up in bed reading her Bible. She looks up when Lorna enters and smiles. Lorna says, “Haven’t you finished that book yet?”

“I keep hoping it’ll turn out different. Ever read it?”

“In college. As literature. How are you feeling?”

“Everyone asks me that and I tell them I wish they’d stop making me take all these pills. I can’t stand being this dopey.”

“It’s the Dilantin, probably. They don’t want you to have another seizure.”

“It wasn’t a seizure. I’m not epileptic.”

“I was there when you had it. It looked like a seizure to me.”

“Everyone in a Santa Claus suit ain’t Santa, as my daddy used to say. He uses our bodies. I mean God does. What else
is
there? People don’t understand that, they think it’s all airy-fairy special effects, but we’re meat; not
just
meat, but mainly so.”

“So what do
you
think happened, Emmylou?”

“It just seemed like the right thing to do, to touch him. And the demon came out of him. It wasn’t me, of course, but the Holy Spirit. In professional exorcisms, they use teams, half a dozen people sometimes and it can take days. You don’t know about this? Well, the church keeps it dark for obvious reasons, but you can still get an exorcism done. Anyway, God decided that Horace Masefield had been crazy long enough and I was going to be the instrument of liberation. Nearly broke me doing it, but it wouldn’t’ve been the first time.” She smiles and taps on the Bible. “I guess y’all can sure tell me apart from the Son of Man when it comes to the exorcist business. You don’t believe a word of this, do you?” She seemed pleased with that for some reason.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. It turns out that Mr. Masefield was taking an experimental antipsychotic drug. It just happened to take effect at that time.”

Emmylou is grinning at her. “And I just happened to throw an epileptic fit at that very moment, even though I never threw one before.”

“No, actually, you have a history of fainting spells. And anyway, coincidences happen.” Lorna feels the falseness in these words, even while she clings to their validity.

“Yes, they do,” the woman agrees. “Just some damn Eskimo again. There’s a whole Congregation at the Vatican devoted to distinguishing between the coincidental and the miraculous. Of course, you would say they’re all superstitious nuts.” She held up the Bible. “God speaks to us in Scripture, and through our inner voice, but he also speaks to us through a conspiracy of accidents. George Santayana said that, and he was at Harvard.” She stretched and yawned. “Mercy, but I’m tired of this place! And I don’t want any more drugs.”

“They’re supposed to help you,” says Lorna, wondering whether she’d heard correctly. Damn Eskimo?

“No, they help y’all. I don’t fit into your mold of what a person’s supposed to see and believe, so I’m crazy, and if crazy, I have to be drugged. But I’m not crazy, as you very well know.”

At these last words she casts her gaze directly at Lorna, they lock eyes, and once more the pins that support Lorna’s view of the world and of her own place in it soften and bend. She is the one who breaks eye contact. She is sweating, her heart flutters. She struggles to fit this experience into a familiar box. Hypnotic elements. Her own physical condition, low energy, stress, prone to brief hypnagogic episodes, Emmylou’s the crazy one, not you, and so on, until she was again in possession of herself and is able to speak.

“Emmylou, even if you assume that, um, spiritual forces are involved here, it still doesn’t make sense. Why did God wait for just that moment to cure Horace. Why didn’t he cure him before he murdered two women? Why not before he hurt a couple of people right here on the ward?”

Dideroff waits a moment before answering, a peculiar look on her face, like a maiden aunt just asked by a child where babies come from. “Well, you know,
why
is not a question we like to ask of God. It opens the whole issue of theodicy, and you know Milton wrote a zillion-line poem about justifying the ways of God to man, and I’m not sure how successful he was except to make people admire Satan.” She taps the Bible again. “And there’s Job, of course. I’m sure you’re familiar with
An Answer to Job
by C. G. Jung. Have you thought at all about my dream with the giant Twinkies? It’s relevant, don’t you think?”

Lorna says, “Of course,” spontaneously, but she is thinking about Milton and Jung. She has heard the names, naturally, but has not read the referenced works. It almost never happens that psychologists working in the public sector meet as clients people smarter or better educated than they are. The thought passes through Lorna’s mind that this skinny woman on her loony bin bed, this high school dropout, is brighter than Lorna herself, and certainly more widely read in the Western canon. She realizes that she does not know what
theodicy
means. The woman is looking at her expectantly, but Lorna’s mind is completely blank.

Emmylou rescues her. “I think it was triggered by a line from Weil, actually. I mean the dream.”

“Vay?”

“Yes, Simone Weil. You know who she was, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure,” Lorna lies.

“Well, she says that the pure love of God means being exactly as grateful for your afflictions as you are for your blessings. It’s an interesting way of looking at the world, isn’t it?”

Lorna is recalling the dream interpretation she’d cocked up for Mickey Lopez. “Yes, if bad and good outcomes are the same, then you’re off the hook aren’t you?”

“Off the hook?”

“Yes. You can relinquish the unbearable responsibility for having done bad things. If bad things and good things are both randomly distributed by God, then there’s no need to grow, to take responsibility for your acts. I mean, wouldn’t that be another way of interpreting that image?”

“You think I’m trying to
avoid
responsibility?”

“On a certain level. I think you’re retreating from what you’ve done, from what’s happened to you. And I don’t blame you at all.”

Emmylou leans back and lets out a sigh. “
Ok anhier ok yin.
”

“Pardon?”

“Dinka. It means ‘I’m lucky to be with you.’ It was an illustration, meaning you don’t understand my language and I might as well be talking Dinka. I’m sorry, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a conversation with someone with no religious sensibility at all. Look…oh Lord, how can I express this so you’d understand? Okay, God is omnipotent, and good, but there’s evil in the world, bad things happen, and they sometimes happen to good people. How to explain this? Well, we’re advised in the strongest terms not to try, but putting that aside, and also putting aside pure materialist atheism for a second, how do you live in a world like that? Y’all can be like the
Buddhists and say it’s all an illusion, no good, no evil, break free of all attachments, and then if y’all make it, return as a bodhisattva and dispense compassion. There’s fatalism. You see it in Job, in the classical world, the Stoics, and it survives pretty well intact in Islam: God knows, we don’t, shut your trap and drive on, don’t whine, it’s ignoble, and so on. Not a stance that would appeal to us improving Americans, so what we do is to whine a
lot
while drugging ourselves into insensibility with work, sex, money, actual drugs of course, and the illusion that we can live forever. Most of us live terrified, desperate lives and die like dumb animals in places like this. On the other side, we have what Weil said about the greatness of Christianity being not that it provides a supernatural relief from suffering, but a supernatural
use
for it. Say you have every good thing. Then you thank God for the honor of being able to serve the poor and wretched. Now say everything is taken away from you, you’re crushed like a bug. Simone calls it
malheur,
the last extremity, nothing left of your personhood at all, sociology has failed, medicine, economics, politics, all the usual dodges are futile, but on the other hand you’re a tissue paper away from God. Lose everything, get everything and more, unimaginable graces. Blessed are the poor in spirit. You can’t lose.”