Valley of Bones

Sixteen

Paz was having another nightmare, only this time he knew, in the peculiar way of lucid dreams, that he was having one and wished to get out of it. He was at a crime scene, some horrible crime, the atmosphere of horror hung in the air, all the worse for being unnamed. He was interviewing two little girls, both about seven. They were on the street, twirling a jump rope between them. He wanted them to stop twirling, but the thought came to him, as it does in nightmares, that they would tell him more if he started jumping himself, and so he did, faster and faster, the little girls smiling now, their eyes empty of joy, and he noticed that one of them wore a dress of wool, the other of cotton….

He opened his eyes and discovered where he was: in Lorna Wise’s bed, with the AC chilling the room enough to make it cozy under her duvet. He recalled the previous night. Very nice, and now he was awake, unless, of course…the thought rippled his belly and broke sweat from every pore. He turned his head slowly. The blond locks of Lorna were on the pillow next to his. He could hear the gentle sighing of her breath. He brought his nose close to her head and sniffed. Herbal shampoo. He sniffed lower down, at the warm wafts from beneath the quilt. Essence of girl, the world’s most entrancing fragrance. Had to be real, dreams don’t have smells, he recalled hearing that somewhere; on the other hand he could be off the charts in some way, and that neat little head could now turn around in an unnatural fashion and exhibit a grinning skull or a dog’s muzzle saying “Surprise!” He could feel his heart knocking in his chest and then he thought to himself, just in passing, no, if this wasn’t real he would go to his mother, let her do what she had to do, and if that failed he’d check out of the job, let the shrinks play with his head, because he couldn’t stand it anymore. He sincerely believed that people who carry weapons ought to have a firm grip on reality.

Such were Paz’s thoughts as he breathed in Lorna Wise as if sucking oxygen from a mask. Minutes went by. She murmured, stretched, and rolled over. It was, he observed with vast relief, her regular face. He thought he had never seen such a beautiful face, although he had actually seen plenty, and in just such situations. He sat on the side of the bed and stared at her for some time until his eye beams stirred her awake. She opened her eyes, saw him, started to smile, and then, observing his expression with a trained eye, she knitted her brow and said, “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Something. Did you have a nightmare?”

“Yes, a strange one with characters out of a poem. I thought I was still in it. Did you ever have one of those, when you wake up and you’re still in it?”

“No, I never have bad dreams. And as your personal therapist I have to tell you that there’s only one sure cure known to medical science.”

“And what would that be, Doctor?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to lie on top of a naked woman for a certain period of time.”

“No, no, not that!” cried Paz, although he began the therapy immediately. “How long do I have to?” he asked after the necessary slippery adjustments had been accomplished.

“Until the naked woman says to get off,” said Lorna.

Lorna is now floating in the most pleasant phase of post-coital hypnopompic semisleep. She is awake enough to realize that she is not lying in the dreaded wet spot for a change, and not awake enough to start obsessing about the future of her relationship with Jimmy Paz, a nearly perfect combo, promoting cosmic well-being. He is not in bed just now, but that’s all right too. She slips back into dreamland, surfacing only when the sound of clinking crockery and silver intrudes. Paz is entering the room with a tray, upon which is the container of her Krups coffee machine filled with sloshing blackness, assorted jugs, mugs, napery, and utensils. The delightful smell of coffee and fresh baking arises from the tray. Paz places it on the side of the bed. He is naked except for a pair of slight black Hugo Boss underpants.

“What is that?” she says, sliding herself up to a sitting position and pointing.

“It’s a plate of magdalenas,” says Paz, taking one. “You didn’t have rum so I had to use cognac. They’re not bad, though.”

“Oh, well, the hell with it, then. You expect me to eat magdalenas without rum? What kind of girl do you think I am? God, this is beyond delicious.”

“Are you thinking of your great-aunt’s house in Combray yet?” asks Paz.

“Oh, he reads Proust too? Or is that something you picked up from one of the many?”

“From Willa Shaftel, as a matter of fact. We were watching a rerun of a Monty Python, the summarizing Proust contest? And afterward she actually summarized Proust for me during the rest of the weekend.”

“Uh-huh. You know, bringing up previous girlfriends all the time can get old real fast.”

“As can needling me a little every time I say something you figure is beyond the normal range of a dumb cop.”

“Oh, are we having our first fight now?”

“Yes, and now it’s over. Have another magdalena.”

She did and said, “This is well worth seventeen additional hours on the StairMaster. Where did you get them?”

“I made them.” As he pours coffee.

“Wha…youmade them? Inmy kitchen? You carry a madeleine pan around with you?”

“No, I used yours. It was in the back of the closet outside the kitchen. It was still in the box. It must have been a present.”

“It was. From my brother, in whose fantasies I am ever a baker of cookies.”

“Well, I broke it in for you. I hope you don’t mind.”

“I certainly do mind! Neverever break in a madeleine pan in my house again! Christ, this is strong coffee!”

“Weak,” says Paz. “It barely sticks to the spoon.”

Lorna eats another madeleine and falls back against the pillows with a sigh. She feels, to be honest, a faint nausea, but otherwise so good that she decides not to pay any attention to it. “I really wish something interesting would happen to me. Having terrific sex and then being brought breakfast in bed by beautiful naked men morning after morning, I mean, sometimes I want to scream with the tedium of it all.”

“Humor me,” says Paz.

“You’re really gay, right? That’s the catch.”

“I’m afraid so. I have to pretend to love women so the guys down at the police station don’t make fun of me.” They laugh, but in the midst of it Lorna feels the first twinges of real life. The devil speaks into her inner ear: Yeah, this is great, but you know you’ll go out another couple of times, fuck like minks, have fun, conversations, and then he won’t call for a day, three days, a week, and then, desperate to know what’s happening, you’ll call him and leave a half-dozen increasingly irritated messages and then he’ll call and it’ll be, what? As from a stranger.

Paz senses the change. He says, “I’ll clean this up,” and picks up the tray.

“No, leave it,” she says. “I’ll do it.”

Lorna is nearly overwhelmed with the urge to say something nasty and disruptive of this thing that seems to be developing, far too nice for the likes of her. As she fights against it, there is a beeping from Paz’s jacket where it hangs on a chair: the first bars of “Guantanamera.” Thank God, she thinks, something tacky at last.

Paz answers the phone. There is a lot of listening interspersed with gnomic utterances from Paz. Lorna rises, slips into a light robe, takes the tray to the kitchen. It is spotless and smells of coffee and sweet bakings. As she rinses the dishes she feels tears well in her eyes and recalls feeling the same way when she was with him on the beach at Bear Cut. No, she thinks, this is too cruel, my heart won’t take this. As if her body agrees, she feels a bolt of sharp pain through her middle, a kind of pain she does not recall ever having before. Sweat breaks out on her face and back. It passes, and for the first time in a while the old fear returns. Something wrong, something wronginside. Again she suppresses the thought.

She goes back to the bedroom and hears the shower going, so she drops the robe and joins him. After some fooling around with soapy skin surfaces, he sighs and says, “I have to go to work.”

“The phone call.”

“Yeah, my partner. The autopsy on Jack Wilson found a blood alcohol level of point three six.”

“My God, that’s paralytic.”

“Yes, and they also found traces of Nembutal. Plus an empty bottle of cheap vodka in the car. The feds are treating it as an accident, and Broward County is going along. We were lucky to get as much as we did out of them.”

Paz turns the shower off. She senses he is somewhere else already.

They dress in silence, he much faster than she. Paz is in her study, looking at her books and possessions with his consuming policeman’s eye when she emerges from the bedroom in one of her bland suits.

He says, “Listen, are you going to see Emmylou today?”

“Yes, I want to check on her condition. Why?”

“Could you ask her something for me?”

Lorna hestitates. “A police question, you mean.”

“Not really. I just want to know who connected her with David Packer.”

“Jimmy, I really can’t help you in your investigation. It’s unethical.”

“Okay, no problem. You going to find out if she did the cure on what’s-his-name?”

“That’s not very likely, is it?”

He looks at her without answering for a while, then crosses the room and embraces her. “You have any plans for Sunday evening?”

She did not. “We’ll go have dinner at the restaurant. You should meet my mother.”

“Uh-oh.”

“No, she’s a charming woman,” says Paz. “Everybody loves Margarita.”

Frank Wilson lived in a condo, a modern eight-story building off Le Jeune in the Gables. When Wilson let them in, Paz could see that he had been crying. His eyes were red and his face seemed to have fallen away from the bone, gone spongy. He kept dabbing at his nose with a wad of tissues. Paz thought it was a strange reaction, but then he’d never lost a sibling, or had one. Wilson collapsed onto a leather couch. He neglected to offer the two detectives seats, but they took them anyway. Both pulled forth notebooks. The tan meshwork drapes on the big picture windows were tightly drawn, and Wilson hadn’t switched on any lights. The room was consequently dim, which made it hard to observe their informant’s face.

“It’s like a kick in the gut, this is,” Wilson said. “I still can’t believe it. It’s just so not Jack.”

“What isn’t, sir?” asked Paz.

“Oh, drinking, driving…” The voice trailed off.

Morales asked, “He drink much vodka, Mr. Wilson?”

“Couldn’t stand the stuff,” said the brother. “He thought it tasted and smelled like rubbing alcohol.”

The two detectives considered this for a moment and then Paz asked, “How would you describe your brother, Mr. Wilson? What kind of man was he?”

Wilson sat up a little and stared at Paz. “What kind of…I don’t understand. This is a traffic death in Broward. I mean why does a Miami cop want to know that?”

“Well, sir, as I guess you know, Jack was peripherally involved in another case and we’re just trying to tie up the pieces on that. Also…we think your brother’s death might stand further investigation. You say your brother had no head for liquor and hated vodka, so, ah, you could ask what he was doing with a point three six blood alcohol and an empty vodka bottle in the car.”

Wilson goggled at him. “What…you think someone killed him? They forced him to drink all that vodka?”

“That or they knocked him out with Nembutal and ran a naso-gastric tube into him.”

Wilson gaped and stammered, “But that’s crazy! Who would do something like that?”

This was of course the very question that now engaged Paz and Morales. They were driving to Jack Wilson’s domicile, having obtained the keys from the brother, along with a description of the late Jack’s character. A little wild, bored with the business, a ladies’ man, a good conscientious mechanic, if a little too ready to party after hours. On the assumption that Jack Wilson had been murdered and that no one was going to let them near the case, not the tribe, and not the FBI, then the whole thing had come to more or less a dead end. Wilson had been the last thread that led from al-Muwalid’s murder. Whoever had arranged that killing knew how to cover their tracks. Paz shared with his partner the observation that Cletis Barlow had made, that the point of all this was not the Sudanese but Emmylou Dideroff, and that all this bloodshed was designed to draw from her something that she knew.

Morales said that it sounded far-fetched, but what didhe know, Cletis Barlow was the great detective. Paz detected a little envy here but let it go. He might have agreed with Morales about far-fetched, had he himself not traveled personally over even farther fetches, but he declined to mention this now. They arrived at the Wilson house, a small, tile-roofed Spanish colonial over Coral Way not far from the Palmetto Expressway. Jack Wilson had fancied a nautical theme: signal flag upholstery, marine landscapes on the walls, captain’s chairs around a hatch-cover table in the dining room, ship models in a glass display case. “Everything looks shipshape,” said Paz. They laughed, but everything actually did. Wilson was something of a neat freak, in his home if not his personal appearance. He liked Peg-Board, and where the pots and kitchen implements hung on one of these, he had painted a silhouette of each implement under its hook, lest one be hung out of place.

They tossed the place rapidly, Paz with the skill of long practice, Morales learning as he went. Paz took the master bedroom and got a little shock off what he found there; Morales searched another bedroom fitted out as a den or home office and was intrigued by what he didn’t find. His partner called out to him, and he walked into the master bedroom, where he found Paz staring at a brightly painted statue. It was nearly two feet high and depicted a haloed woman in a gold dress and a red cloak holding a sword and a chalice, which rested upon a vertical cannon.

“Somebody’s been through the place,” said Morales.

“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 thatX 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 Santeria cult figure, Santa Barbara, aka Shango, theorisha 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 anoshe, the symbol of Shango, and the bracelet is aneleke. You only get aneleke at an initiation, when you’re made to anorisha. Also, you notice that sweet smell? That’somiero. 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 Santeria.”

“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 likenormal? 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 wasthat 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 cliche, 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 elseis there? People don’t understand that, they think it’s all airy-fairy special effects, but we’re meat; notjust meat, but mainly so.”

“So what doyou 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 withAn 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 toavoid 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 alot 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 supernaturaluse 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 itmalheur, 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.”

Only some of this got through to Lorna. She had been trained to discount the content of what the insane had to say, and to examine their speech only for the evidences of pathology or to find some entry for the insertion of a therapeutic remark. She now does so.

“Well, if suffering is so great why did you devote your life to a nursing order? I mean, why relieve suffering at all, if suffering brings you close to God?”

“Because it’s a commandment. It’s also a paradox, but if you’re impatient with paradoxes you need to stay away from Christianity. Atheism is so beautifully simple, like a kid’s drawing. I can see why you’re reluctant to let it go. I certainly was when I was at St. Catherine’s.”

“Which is what?”

“It’s a priory of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. It’s in the Blue Ridge, the Virginia panhandle, right close to where I was staying. You’ll read about it in the notebook I gave you, my first sight of it. What all happened there is in the next one, and all the stuff about Africa.”

Dideroff falls back against the pillows and closes her eyes. “I’m sorry, it’s the dope. Have you cured me enough today? I really need to drift off.”

Lorna puts her notebook and recorder away in her canvas attache case, making agreeable noises to hide her distress. She has never had a session like this with a patient; yes, occasionally you draw a therapeutic blank, but this one was completely out of control, almost as if the patient were therapizing her!

Dideroff opens her eyes and smiles. “Sorry for the two-minute theology, it’s a bad habit of mine. St. John of the Cross warns against it as an impediment to spiritual progress. Don’t forget the notebook. I just finished another one. I never thought it would take so many pages. But one more ought to do it.” Dideroff indicates a school notebook on her nightstand; Lorna picks it up and starts to leave. She pauses at the door, feeling a certain resentment now, a need to exert control. She says, “Emmylou, do you want me to do anything about your houseboat? I’d be glad to go talk to your landlord if you want to keep it.”

“Oh, thanks, but I don’t think it’ll be necessary,” says Dideroff.

“I’d like to live on a boat sometime. How did you manage to find it?”

“It was offered, and the price was right. I didn’t hardly have a dime when I got here, and Mr. Packer said a good tenant was valuable to him and he’d let me stay there until I got on my feet. He got me the job at Wilson’s too.”

“So he was, like, an old friend?”

“Oh, no, a Samaritan. I just happened to run into him in the airport lounge. I’d never seen him before in my life. And it turned out we had some mutual friends.”

Feeling a little slimy, Lorna checks through ward security and takes the elevator to the lobby. There, instead of descending to the parking garage, she goes to the staff cafeteria, where she orders an iced tea. She sits alone at a table and reads the notebook rapidly, taking no notes. She calls Paz to tell him about it and arrange its delivery into his safekeeping, but his cell phone is busy. She leaves a voice mail message. She feels better than she did a little earlier, although her hand ever rises to caress the lymph nodes under her jaw. Rubbery. She tells herself it is a mild infection she is fighting off. On the elevator, she becomes aware of a mild itching on arms, back, and thigh. That was it: the other night out in the Glades, mosquitoes bit her and she is having a small reaction to their bites. It’s happened before. Stop worrying, she tells herself, but her heart still pounds so.

She walks toward her car. She is nervous in parking garages and holds her case under one arm and her keys ready in the other hand. Just as she reaches her car, a man steps out from behind a pillar. He is wearing a plastic Porky Pig mask and carrying a large hunting knife. She hands over her bag without giving him any trouble.