Tom O'Bedlam Part 10

The chilly stare told him he had made a bad mistake.

Jaspin said, "Sometimes I don't know whether you understand my words. I'm sorry. An anthropologist. Years of training. Even if I wasn't a professor, I still thought of myself like one." Color was flooding to his cheeks. Go on, just tell him the real stuff, he thought. He's got your number anyway. "So I wanted to study you. Your movement. To understand what this tumbonde thing really was."

"Ah. The truth. It feels good, the truth?"

Jaspin smiled, nodded. The relief was enormous. Senhor Papamacer said, "You write books?"

"I was planning to do one."

"You no write one yet?"

"Shorter pieces. Essays, reviews. For anthropological journals. I haven't written my book yet."

"You write a book on tumbonde?"

"No," he said. "Not now. I thought perhaps I might, but I wouldn't do it now."

"Why not?"

"Because I've seen Chungira-He-Will-Come," Jaspin said.

"Ah. Ah. That is truth too." A long silence again, but not a cold one. Jaspin felt totally at this strange little man's mercy. He was wholly terrifying, this Senhor Papamacer. At length he said, as though from a great distance, "Chungira-He-Will-Come, he will come."

Jaspin made the ritual response. "Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga."

Anger flashed in the obsidian eyes. "No, now I mean something other!He will come, I am saying. Soon. We will march north. It will be almost any day, we leave. Ten, fifty thousand of us, I don't know, a hundred thousand. I will give the word. It is the time of the Seventh Place, Jaspeen. We will go north, California, Oregon, Washington, Canada.

To the North Pole. Are you ready?"

"Yes. Truth."

"Truth, yes." Senhor Papamacer leaned forward. His eyes were ablaze. "I tell you what you do. You march with me, with Senhora Aglaibahi, with the Inner Host. You write the book of the march. You have the words; you have the learning. Someone must tell the story for those who come after, how it was Papamacer who opened the way for Maguali-ga, who opened the way for Chungira-He-Will-Come. That is what I want, that you should march beside me and tell what we have achieved. You, Jaspeen. You! We saw you on the hill. We saw the G.o.d coming into you. And you have the words, you have the head. You are a professor and also you are of tumbonde. It is the truth. You are our man."

Jaspin stared.

"Say what you will do," said Senhor Papamacer. "You refuse?"

"No. No. No. No. I'll do it. I've been committed to the march since July. Truly. You know I'll be there. You know I'll write what you want." Quietly Senhor Papamacer said, in a voice rich with dark mysteries beyond Jaspin's comprehension, "I have walked with the true G.o.ds, Jaspeen. I know the seven galaxies.

These G.o.ds are true G.o.ds. I close my eyes and they come to me, and now not even when they are closed. You will tell that, the truth."

"Yes."

"You have seen the G.o.ds yourself?"

"I have seen Chungira-He-Will-Come. The horns, the block of white stone."

"In the sky, is what?"

"A red sun from here to here. And over here, a blue sun."

"It is the truth. You have seen. Not the others?"

"Not the others, no."

"You will. You will see them all, Jaspeen. As we march, you will see everything, the seven galaxies. And you will write the story." Senhor Papamacer smiled. "You will tell only the truth. It will be very bad for you if you do not, you understand that? The truth, only the truth. Or else when the gate is open, Jaspeen, I will give you to the G.o.ds who serve Chungira-He-Will-Come, and I will tell them what you have done. You know, not all the G.o.ds are kind. You write not truth, I will give you to G.o.ds who are not kind. You know that, Jaspeen? You know that? I say it to you: Not all the G.o.ds are kind."

3.

MORNINGrounds, one of the regular ch.o.r.es. Routine was important, a key structural thing, for them and sometimes even for her. Right now especially for her. Go through the dorms, room by room, check all the patients out, see how well they were doing as their minds returned from their morning pick. Cheer them up if she could. Get them to smile a little. It would help their recovery if they'd smile more. Smiling was a known cure for a lot of things: it triggered the outflow of soothing hormones, that little twitch of the facial muscles did, sending all sorts of beneficial stuff shooting into the weary bloodstream.

You ought to smile more often yourself, Elszabet thought.

Room Seven: Ferguson, Menendez, Double Rainbow. She knocked. "May I come in?

It's Dr. Lewis."

She hovered, waiting. Quiet inside. This time of morning they often didn't have a lot to say. Well, no one had said she couldn't come in, right? She put her hand to the plate.

Every doorplate in the building was set to accept her print, Bill Waldstein's, Dan Robinson's. The door slid back. Menendez was sitting on the edge of his bed with his eyes closed. There were bonephones glued to his cheeks, and he was moving his head sharply from side to side as if he were listening to some strongly rhythmic music. Across the room, Nick Double Rainbow lay stretched out belly-down on his vivid red Indian blanket, staring at nothing, chin propped up on fists and elbows. Elszabet went over to him, pausing by his bed to activate the privacy screen around it. A crackle of blurry pink light leaped up and turned Double Rainbow's corner of the room into a private cubicle.

In that moment, just as the screen went shooting up around them, Elszabet felt her mind invaded by a green tendril of fog. Almost as if the energy of the screen had allowed the greenness to get in. Surprise, fear, shock, anger. Something rising out of the floor to skewer her. She caught her breath. Her spine tightened.

No, she thought fiercely. Get the h.e.l.l out of there. Get.Get. The vagrant greenness went away. Once it was gone Elszabet found it hard to believe that it had been in her just a moment ago, even for an instant. She let her breath out, commanded her back and shoulders to ease up. The Indian didn't seem to have noticed a thing. Still belly-down, still staring.

"Nick?" she said.

He went on ignoring her.

"Nick, it's Dr. Lewis." She touched his shoulder lightly. He jerked as if a hornet had stung him. "Elszabet Lewis. You know me."

"Yeah," he said, not looking at her.

"Rough morning?"

Tonelessly he said, "It's all gone. The whole thing."

"What is, Nick?"

"The people. The thing that we had. G.o.dd.a.m.n, you know we had a thing and it was taken away. Why should that have happened? What the h.e.l.l reason was there for that?"

So he was on his Vanishing Redman kick again. He was lost in contemplation of the supreme unfairness of it all. You could pick and pick and pick, and somehow you could never pick down far enough to get that stuff out of him. Which was what had dumped him into the Center in the first place: he had come here suffering from deep and abiding despair, the thing that Kierkegaard had termed the sickness unto death, which Kierkegaard said was worse than death itself, and which nowadays was called Gelbard's syndrome. Gelbard's syndrome sounded more scientific. Double Rainbow had lost faith in the universe. He thought the whole d.a.m.n thing was useless and pointless if not actually malevolent. And he wasn't getting better. There were holes in his memory all over the place now, sure, but the sickness unto death remained, and Elszabet suspected it didn't have a thing to do with his alleged American Indian heritage but only with the fact that he had been unlucky enough to have been born in the second half of the twenty-first century, when the whole world, exhausted by a hundred fifty years of dumb self-destructive ugliness, was beginning to be overwhelmed by this epidemic of all- purpose despair. Bill Waldstein might actually be right that Double Rainbow wasn't an Indian at all. It didn't matter. When you had the sickness unto death, any pretext was enough to drag you down into the pit.

"Nick, do you know who I am?"

"Dr. Lewis."

"My first name?"

"Elsa - Ezla -"

"Elszabet."

"That's it. Yeah."

"And who am I?"

A shrug.

"You don't remember?"

He looked at her, an off-center look, dark eyes focusing on her cheek. He was a big heavy-set man, thick through the shoulders, with a blunt broad nose and a grayish tinge to his skin, not exactly the coppery hue his alleged race was supposed to have, but close enough. Since he had taken that swing at her a couple of weeks back he had never quite been able to look her in the eye. So far as anyone could tell, he had no recollection of having gone on a rampage, of having hit her and hurt her. But some vestige of it must remain, she suspected. When he was around her he looked rueful and embarra.s.sed and also sullen, as though he felt guilty about something but wasn't sure what and was a little angry with the person who made him feel that way.

"Professor," he said. "Doctor. Something like that."

She said, "Close enough. I'm here to help you feel better."

"Yeah?" Flicker of interest, swiftly subsiding.

"You know what I want you to do, Nick? Get yourself up and off that bed and over to the gym. Dante Corelli's got the rhythm-and-movement workshop going down there right now. You know who she is, Dante?"

"Dante. Yeah." A little doubtfully.

"You know the gymnasium building?"

"Red roof, yeah." "Okay. You get down there and start dancing, and dance your a.s.s off, you hear me, Nick? You dance until you hear your father's voice telling you to stop. Or until lunch bell, whichever one comes first."

He brightened a little at that. His father's voice. Sense of tribal structure: did him good, thinking about his father's voice.

"Yeah," he said. In his heavy way he started to push himself up from the bed.

"Did you have any dreams last night?" she asked offhandedly.

"Dreams? What dreams, how? I got no way of knowing."

He had dreamed Blue Giant, the harsh and piercing light: that was this morning's pick- room report. He seemed sincere in not remembering that, though.

"All right," Elszabet said. "You go dance now." She grinned at him. "Make it a rain dance, maybe. This time of year, we could use a little rain."

"Too soon," he said. "Waste of time, dancing for rain now. Rains don't come till October. Anyway, what makes you think dancing'll bring rain? What brings rain, it's the low-pressure systems out of the Gulf of Alaska, October."

Elszabet laughed. So he's not completely out of things yet, she thought. Good. Good.

"You go dance anyway," she told him. "It'll make you feel better, guaranteed." She kicked the switch to knock the privacy screen down and went over to Tomas Menendez'

side of the room. He was sitting just as he had been before, listening to his bonephones.

When she activated his privacy screen she braced herself for another touch of the green fog, but this time it didn't come. Just about every other day now she had a whiff of it, an eerie sensation, that hallucination circling her like a vulture waiting to land. It was getting so that she was afraid to go to sleep, wondering whether this would be the night when the Green World finally broke through to her consciousness. That continued to terrify her, the fear of crossing the line from healer to hallucinator.

"Tomas?" she said softly.

Menendez was one of the most interesting cases: forty years old, second-generation Mexican-American, strong hulking man with arms like a gorilla's, but gentle, gentle, the gentlest man she had ever known, soft-spoken, sweet, warm. In his fashion he was a scholar and a poet, as profoundly involved in his own ethnic heritage as Nick Double Rainbow claimed to be with his, but Menendez seemed really to mean it. He had turned the area around his bed into a little museum of Mexican culture, holoprints of paintings by Orozco and Rivera and Guerrero Vasquez, a couple of grinning Day of the Dead skeletons, a bunch of lively brightly painted clay animals, dogs and lizards and birds.

The year before last, Menendez had strangled his wife in their pretty little living room down in San Jose. No one knew why, least of all Menendez, who had no memory of doing it, didn't even know his wife was dead, kept expecting her to visit him next weekend or the one after that. That was one of the strangest manifestations of Gelbard's syndrome, the motiveless murder of close relatives by people who didn't seem likely to be capable of swatting flies. Tell Menendez that he had killed his wife and he would look at you as though you were speaking in Turkish or Babylonian: the words simply had no meaning for him.

"Tomas, it's me, Elszabet. You can hear me through those phones, can't you? I just want to know how you're getting along."

"I am quite well,gracias. " Eyes still closed, shoulders jerking rhythmically.

"That's good news. What are you playing?"

"It is the prayer to Maguali-ga."

"I don't know that. What is it, an ancient Aztec chant?"

He shook his head. He seemed to disappear for a moment, knees bobbing, fists banging lightly together. "Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga," he sang. "Chungira-He-Will-Come!"

Elszabet leaned close, trying to hear what he was hearing, but the bonephones transmitted sounds only to their wearer. The jacket of the cube he was playing with lay beside him on the bed. She picked it up. It bore a crudely printed label that looked homemade, half a dozen lines of type in a language that she thought at first was Spanish; but she could read a little Spanish and she couldn't read this. Portuguese? The label had a San Diego address on it. Tomas was always getting shipments of things from his friends in the Chicano community: music, poetry, prints. He was a much loved man. Sometimes she wondered if they ought to be screening all these cubes and ca.s.settes that he received. They might deal with things that could impede his recovery, she thought. But of course whatever he played was picked from him the next day, anyway; and it obviously made him happy to be keeping up with his people's cultural developments. "Maguali-ga is the opener of the gate," he said in a firm lucid voice, as though the phrase would explain everything to her. Then he opened his eyes, just for a moment, and frowned. He seemed surprised to have company.

"You are Elszabet?" he asked.

"That's right."

"You have a message from my wife? She is coming this weekend, Carmencita?"

"No, not this weekend, Tomas." There was no use in explaining. "What was that, what you were playing?"

"It is from Paco Real, San Diego." He looked a little evasive. "Paco sends me many interesting things."

"Music?"

"Singing, chanting," Menendez said. "Very beautiful, very strong. Tell me, did I dream last night of the other worlds?"

"No, not last night." "The night before, though?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

He smiled sadly. "The dreams are so beautiful. That is what I write down: the dreams are so beautiful. Even though I must lose them, the beauty is what stays. When will I be allowed to keep my dreams, Elszabet?"

"When you're better. You're improving all the time, but you aren't there yet, Tomas."

"No. I suppose not. So I must not know, when I dream of the worlds. Is it all right that I write down that the dreams are so beautiful? I know we are not supposed to write things to ourselves, either. But that is a small thing, to tell myselfabout my dream, though I do not tell myself the dream itself." He looked at her eagerly. "Or could I write down the dreams too?"