Land of Echoes

22

Cree awoke with a shriek, sitting up convulsively and knocking her clock and notebook off the bedside table. The faces in the rocks! They had been writhing and moaning in her dreams, opening wide, devouring mouths and rolling blind eyes. Anger and fear, awful struggle, transformation. For several minutes she sat breathing hard, trying to master her fright. It seemed she could still feel them out there, only a few hundred yards away, invisible but radiating their torment into the night. A wind had picked up outside, making whispers around the infirmary building, a white noise against which her ears strained.

She lay down again, snugged the blankets close, but found she was too wired to sleep. The images wouldn't leave her. They cried their outrage like a curse or a pledge or a warning. Dreaming the same thing two nights in a row: For any psychologist, it would suggest significant subconscious turmoil. For an empathic parapsychologist, it meant much more. Some echo of human experience lingered out there. Some presence.

She'd have to go to the mesa, and soon.

She sat up against the headboard, very aware of the new stiffness of her thighs and the itching ache in her forehead. Listening to the night, she tried to calm her jumpy nerves and thought about Julieta's heartbreaking confessions and her terrifying desperation. A woman so needing comforting yet so unwilling to accept it.

The thought brought her back to the question of Julieta and Joseph. Joseph would comfort her if she'd let him. Did she not see his affection for her, or did she not reciprocate? Had they tried as lovers at some point and decided against it for some reason?

No, she knew intuitively. The longing between them had not been expressed, wasn't the species of desire that former lovers showed. The real answer was simpler: Peter. Though Julieta denied it, she lived with long-gone Peter Yellowhorse always inside her, a phantom of memory. Julieta was "possessed," too, by a young lover from the distant past, transformed with the passage of years from a flesh-and-blood, humanly flawed reality to an unapproachable ideal of passion and potential that no living man could match. Leaving her incapable of finding it with anyone else. Not with the occasional lovers over the years, not even with a handsome, sexy, intelligent, attentive, and patient man like Joseph Tsosie.

Her restlessness grew as her thoughts of Julieta echoed with uneasy resonances in her own life. Her forehead itched, the jacket bunched around her armpits, one leg was falling asleep. She stood up and paced through the ward room in the dim green light, swinging her arms. One forty-three in the morning. She desperately needed sleep, she'd be a wreck tomorrow, but it was impossible while somewhere in Gallup a boy lay with some being inside him, deforming him, damaging him. She needed to get to work. There was no guarantee she'd ever have access to Tommy again, but if she did, she should be better prepared for the encounter. Sleep obviously wasn't going to come tonight, she might as well get on with what she'd planned to do.

Seize the day, she thought. The thought made her chuckle blackly. Or, rather, the night. The ghost hunter's credo.

She put on her jacket, zipped it, and snapped the collar snug around her throat. She found the master key that Julieta had given her earlier, then realized she should probably have a flashlight better than the tiny LED on her key ring. She slipped quietly down the hall and into the nurse's office, where she pulled the rechargeable from the wall and tested it briefly. Not great, but it would do. She left the building by the front door and hurried toward the boys' dorm.

The night was black, an opaque darkness clotted by the haze that had crept in toward sunset, and the sharp light of the security lamps scattered through the campus only served to blind her. The wind blew strongly from the northwest, stirring the dry leaves of the cottonwood trees and drawing a faint, plaintive song from the old bronze bell in its little tower. Not far beyond the mercury-gilt gym building, she knew, the mesa hunkered in the dark. In her mind, its rock faces were alive: She could still feel them there, twisting and swarming, thrusting hopelessly at their mineral barrier.

The lock on the dorm's north door gave her trouble, but she wiggled and jammed the key and at last it turned. She stepped inside and eased the door shut.

A long corridor stretched the length of the building, lit by ankle-high night-lights every fifteen feet. Doorways lined both sides. With the handful of weekenders gone on their field trip, Julieta had let the new residence staffer take a couple of nights off. The building was empty and almost completely dark, just as Cree wanted it.

Julieta had told her that Tommy's room was the second from the north end, on the right. Cree hesitated at the doorway, peering into a darkness lit only by the red eyes of emergency lighting system batteries high on the wall. A long, narrow room the size of a small classroom, six beds and dressers against the west wall, six desks against the inner wall. The scent of pubescent boys-sweat, deodorant, the rubbery perfume of athletic shoes. On the walls, posters, photos, artwork, awards, stolen highway signs, miscellany.

Cree stepped inside, still avoiding using the flashlight, wanting to remain as long as possible in the hyperalert state darkness always induced. Her antennae were buzzing with a nervous electricity that made her jumpy but also seemed to extend the reach of her subtler senses. In the dim red glow, the room had a secret, enclosed feel, like the interior of a photo darkroom. The wind probed at the windows with soft, persistent fingers.

There was no question which bed was Tommy's. No athletic posters here: The wall above was covered with drawings. Reluctantly, she brought out the flashlight and turned it on. When her eyes recovered from the glare, she panned the circle of light from one drawing to the other, increasingly impressed.

There was a portrait of some rap star with a credibly aloof gangsta face, and a savage scene of a group of white policemen shooting an AfricanAmerican man-the Diallo shooting? There were two interior still lifes: a stove with pots and pans and utensils hung on the wall above it, a stark windowsill with a lonely-looking book open on it. Cree's eyes devoured each one in turn.

Most compelling were the portraits. One was of a very old man with a face deeply cut by seams of worry and determination, rendered with meticulous care that captured the subject's weary dignity and strength. Tommy's grandfather? Cree was no interpretive expert, but this level of attention to detail had to derive from considerable affection for the subject. Another was a series of studies of a Navajo man and woman, side by side, drawn repeatedly on the big page. His parents? Again the level of detail was astonishing. Looking more closely, Cree found that each of the six sketches characterized the subjects differently: In one, their faces looked bland and ordinary; in the next, unmistakably shifty or sleazy; the others portrayed them as rather heroic, cruel, pathetic, kindly. The third portrait featured the same couple, drawn twice-astonishingly, one rendered them as decidedly "Indian," with feathers in their hair and traditional robes, while the other as completely Caucasian, with pale skin and tidy, suburban, casual clothes. When she peeled loose the tape that held it to the wall, she found the date scrawled on the back: July 2002. She lifted corners of the other drawings and found that all were from the spring or summer, just before he'd come to Oak Springs School.

A noise from the hall made her heart leap. She straightened quickly and shut off the flashlight, listening, hands tingling with alarm. The wind buffeted the windows, and as she listened she heard the sound again: a repetitive click and chunk. Relieved, she realized it was just the outer door at the end of the hall, rocking against its latch-she must not have shut it fully behind her.

She turned on the flashlight again and moved to the bedside dresser. Its top was cluttered: a bunch of pencils bound together with a rubber band, a couple of kneaded erasers, a half-consumed package of chewing gum, a pile of photocopied handouts from a math class; coins, CD cases, a calculator. A framed photo showed a man and woman who were clearly the subjects of the portrait studies. As the camera had caught them, they were a thirty-something Navajo couple with the slightly stilted smiles you often saw in studio shots. She scrutinized their faces for the qualities Tommy had emphasized in his studies. On the back, someone had written Thomas and Bernice Keeday, 1996. Tommy's adoptive parents.

Comparing the photo to the portraits, Cree had to acknowledge that Tommy was a hugely talented kid. Also, as Joseph said, a kid with deep ambivalence about the people he'd known as his parents. Or maybe simply a kid trying to figure out who they were, experimenting with different conceptions of them. The thought made her heart ache.

She put the photo down and went through the drawers, feeling like a burglar, apologizing to Tommy in her mind. But she found nothing revealing: just baggy jeans, shirts, underpants, sweatshirts. She knelt to look under the bed, where a pair of well-worn cleated athletic shoes kept company with a shabby suitcase and a shoe box full of cassettes and CDs. Tommy's preference in music reinforced her sense of his identification with angry, urban black rebellion. She thought about Tommy's cultural uncertainties and wondered what he'd feel if he knew that eleven-year-old Seattle white girls like Zoe also ate up the gangsta style. What banner of rebellion would remain for him to carry?

The suitcase was empty and told her nothing.

The outside hall door clicked again, loud enough to startle Cree. She panned the light at the door of the room and into the hall, and decided she'd better shut the damned thing, not waste heat. But as she was heading to the hall, her eyes went to the inner wall, and what she saw drew her immediately to Tommy's desk. On the desktop lay a couple of large, spiral-bound artist's sketchbooks. More drawings had been taped to the wall behind it.

The flashlight was dimming, but it cast enough light to tell that these had been drawn since he'd arrived at Oak Springs. In one, Cree recognized the central campus road, looking north with the hogan just to the left, a delivery truck off to the right, Julieta's once and future house distant in the center. Tommy had compressed the buildings at the bottom of the page, a horizontal band of detail beneath a huge, featureless sky. The radical vertical asymmetry struck Cree as a strong compositional experiment, suggesting that Tommy was growing rapidly as an artist. Another drawing showed a group of fellow students seated in the mottled shade of a trellis. Tommy had done a beautiful job of capturing the boys and girls in their various postures, then had heightened the intensity of the scene by exaggerating the shadows. The hard chiaroscuro was fascinating but a little jarring, cutting the space into two very different dimensions.

The third one really grabbed Cree's eye: a self-portrait. The face was well rendered, instantly recognizable as Tommy's despite the powerful artifice he'd chosen to portray himself with. The face was divided by a line down the middle. He'd rendered the left half in the conventional manner with black lines on the white page, the right half in the negative, white lines on black.

It screamed from all of the newer drawings: two dimensions, two layers, two visions. Two Tommys. Pulse racing, she ignored the pestering wind noise and the puffs of chill creeping along the floor from the hall. She moved aside a tin box full of charcoal and pencils to open one of the sketchbooks.

Holding the feeble flashlight close, she opened the book and saw that these drawings continued the theme of division or doubleness. The first few looked like the mesa near the school: the steep sandstone cliffs, the tumbled boulders and dry gullies. In one, he'd included fellow members of his drawing class, sitting on rocks with sketch pads propped against knees. Again, he'd used shadow and composition to divide every scene into different dimensions.

It was a drawing several pages farther that stopped her cold.

Another pencil sketch of weatherworn cliffs, the angle of the shadows suggesting midday. In this one, Tommy had subtly morphed the features of the rocks into human faces. A halfdozen huge faces, deftly rendered in the shadows and highlights of rock shapes and fissures. Agonized stone faces pressed against their interface with the air. Pushing, swarming, silently clamoring.

Just like the ones in her dreams.

Cree felt suddenly weak, and her stomach tightened in a deep, sick clench. She flipped the page and found another drawing similar to the first: faces emerging from patterns of light and shadow. On closer inspection, she saw again the deliberate variation of character: One seemed noble, one brutish, others cruel, cowering, pathetic, wise. The only affect that ran through all of them was suffering.

Cree dropped the book, feeling utterly out of her depth. Her head ached with each pounding heartbeat. Everything was going around, dizzying, her thoughts hyperanimated and chaotic. And she'd been so engrossed that she'd ignored something crucial: The noise in the hall wasn't right. There was a shifting sound now, the quiet sound of cloth moving against cloth.

She switched off the flashlight and inched toward the door, afraid to look into the hall, afraid to stay where she was. Afraid to breathe. She forced herself to the doorway, made herself push her face around the edge of the frame.