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Mae and the twins had departed for Truth or Consequences, and their absence left Jamie drained and empty. He couldn’t lie down and give in to his fatigue, though, because he had to take his pets for their outing. It was hard for the parrots to fly much in the apartment, especially Bouquet, with her four-foot wingspan, and Gasser was unlikely to exercise at all unless Jamie walked him.
He got each animal ready, birds in flight harnesses and Gasser in a little red walking harness. With a parrot perched on each shoulder, he managed to kneel and lift Gasser, since the cat declined to move. Holding three leashes in one hand, Jamie opened the door and nearly tripped on a suitcase. A pudgy pre-teen Indian boy stood gazing up at him, one hand raised to knock. Ezra Yahnaki.
“Ma-a-a-ate. What are you doing here?”
“Did you forget?”
Ezra turned and waved to someone in a small black car. The driver, his godmother Bernadette Pena, waved back and drove off, as if they had this all figured out. Then Jamie realized they did. They’d planned it so many days ago he’d forgotten. “Almost.”
“Can I come in?” Ezra asked.
“Uh, yeah. Yeah. Sorry.” Jamie stepped aside to admit his guest.
Ezra was spending a month with his godmother, who lived just outside of Santa Fe. She and her significant other were faculty colleagues of Jamie’s father, Stan Ellerbee; Ezra’s grandmother, a Mescalero Apache medicine woman, was a key informant in Stan’s anthropological studies of indigenous religions. Through this series of connections, Jamie and Ezra had developed a strong bond, and Ezra stayed with Jamie whenever Bernadette and Alan wanted a romantic night together during his visit.
“You’re covered with animals,” the boy said
“Yeah. Heading out to walk Gasser and let the parrots practice flying.”
“They have to practice?” Ezra frowned at the birds. “They don’t look like babies.”
“Nah. They’re about a year old. Had their flight feathers trimmed in the bird store, though, and they’re still growing out.”
They walked across Don Diego and down a short residential street to Orlando Fernandez Park. The cat waddled alongside them, frequently stopping to sit. Ezra didn’t talk unless prodded. It was like trying to make Gasser keep moving. Jamie did his best to pump a conversation out of the boy, but his questions about Ezra’s schoolwork, friends and family earned nothing but one-word answers.
In a few minutes, they arrived at the park, a green rectangle in a quiet neighborhood. Adobe towers with benches built into their curved walls stood on each corner. Jamie gave the parrots and Ezra time to get reacquainted, reminding the boy how to hold them on his wrist and forearm, then asked Ezra to help with exercising the birds. Jamie stayed in place while Ezra moved the length of the parrots’ harness lines away, and they set up a volley, in which each parrot completed a lap and then rested while the other flew back and forth. Gasser flopped in the grass. Jamie made one last effort to get Ezra to open up, then said, “Guess you’ll have to hear about my weekend, then.”
After telling Ezra about meeting Mae’s stepdaughters, Jamie sent Bouquet on her next flight and started describing the workshop. Ezra remained silent but deeply attentive. At twelve, the Apache boy was in the early stages of his training to be a medicine man. He had a gift of dreaming the future, as well as other signs of his calling: a steady temperament and a thoughtful turn of mind.
“Met this weird woman there. Calls herself Sierra Mu. She’s got this idea that we make ourselves sick through our karma, things we did in the past, even in other lives.”
“Grandma says if you’re out of balance spiritually, that can make you sick.”
“Not on purpose, though. Sierra thinks we do it to act out something.”
Ezra paused to focus on his bird-catching duties, then said, “That’s kind of how my sisters got diabetes. They did it to themselves.”
“You saying that you believe this?” Jamie had expected Ezra to dismiss it.
“Kind of. Everybody knows if you do certain stuff, you could end up with diabetes, and they do it anyway. It runs in our family, but I’m the only person that runs in our family.”
Jamie snorted, then realized from the boy’s puzzled expression that Ezra didn’t realize he’d made a joke. “Nah. Your sisters are in denial, not making themselves sick on purpose. And anyway, Sierra’s talking about getting cancer and arthritis, stuff that’s plain bad luck, y’know? And she keeps dropping hints that everyone in her reincarnation soul group has some bloody awful disease, and I’m supposed to be a member of that group.”
He thought of the creepy, half-hidden howling he’d heard when he tried to perceive his own hand and knee. The grayness. The static. And his fatigue. Was his serious disease, depression, coming back? If it was, he certainly hadn’t invited it.
Through several rounds of parrot flight, Ezra said nothing. Jamie asked, “What are you thinking, mate?”
Bouquet flew to Jamie. He gave Placido his flight command, but the smaller parrot landed in the grass this time. Tired. Jamie strolled to where he had landed, put Bouquet down to socialize with him, and praised and petted them, then gave Ezra a probing “Hmm?”
“I’m not sure.” The boy looked down at the birds. “See, people don’t always believe that I can dream the future, but when it happens, then they know it’s true. And the things you were studying, a lot of people wouldn’t believe that was possible. But you healed me once, even if you didn’t mean to, so I know you can. I don’t believe in past lives, but maybe I had some and don’t remember, or maybe there are different things that happen to people based on what they believe. You think this lady sounds crazy, but what if she’s not?”
This wasn’t what Jamie wanted to hear. Instead of closing the door on the possibility that Sierra was partially right, Ezra’s reaction only opened it wider.
––––––––
In the morning, Ezra insisted on cooking breakfast, making waffles from a recipe in one of Jamie’s cookbooks. The boy, who had scarcely spoken since waking up, served Jamie a plate of blueberry waffles with solemn formality. “I had a dream about you. I don’t know what it means. I’m not too good at interpreting them yet.”
Jamie poured syrup on the slightly burned waffles and took a bite. “These are good, thanks. What’d you dream?”
Ezra returned to the waffle iron and poured more batter in. “You’d lost weight. Maybe about fifteen pounds. And you were wearing pajama pants and no shirt, standing in this funny position.” Ezra faced him and posed, feet apart, both turned approximately the same way, arms out from his sides, staring straight ahead.
“Weird. Thanks for telling me.”
The position looked familiar. Ezra came out of it and gave his attention to the waffle iron. What did that pose look like? Jamie could see it in his mind’s eye. An old, old drawing. Naked bloke standing that way inside both a circle and a square. “You dreamed I was the Vitruvian man.”
“What does that mean?”
“Um ... inspired by Vitruvius, whoever he was. It’s a DaVinci drawing. Think it’s about measurement or balance or proportions, something like that. It’s probably philosophical or mathematical, but it could be symbolic, in your dream.”
“Or not. Sometimes I dream symbols, but sometimes what I dream really happens.”
Losing weight? If Jamie saw his doctor, which he wasn’t going to, she’d say he needed to lose more than fifteen pounds. He’d done it before, gotten down to perfect-one-seventy-five, but it had been hard to achieve and even harder to maintain. Maybe he was slimmer in the dream because the Vitruvian man had a leaner body. Ezra had probably blended Jamie with an unconscious impression of the famous artwork. But the dream could be about perfect proportions in another way, balance in his heart and mind. “Figured it out, mate. Means I’m going to get my act together.”
“But you’re already working on that, and I don’t dream messages for people about things they already know and do.”
“All right, then your dream’s telling me I can go in two directions. Like the bloke being in two positions in the circle and the square. He has extra arms and legs in that picture, y’know. Four of each.”
Ezra sat down and said a prayer under his breath before he ate. After a few bites, he asked, “Eight limbs? Is he like a spider?”
Jamie choked on his coffee, laughing. “Jeezus. Renaissance Spiderman. If the image had anything to do with me, it had nothing to do with a spider.”
The boy shook his head. “Spiders are good people. And my dreams are serious. I don’t always know what they mean, but I can tell when they’re important. This one was important.”
––––––––
Bernadette arrived to collect Ezra, and he went upstairs to get his belongings. Jamie offered her coffee. She accepted, sat at the table, and he filled a mug for her. “You and Alan have a good evening?”
“We did. Thank you.” She took a sip. “This is excellent. And thanks for taking care of Ezra.”
Jamie refilled his mug and leaned against the counter. After having Mae with him and then Ezra, he wasn’t ready to be alone yet and hoped Bernadette would hang out for a while. Though the pets helped, his transition to solitude was never easy. “Love having him. Except he gets up so early. It’s not natural. He’s as bad as Mae.”
“He’s being a traditional Apache. A morning run is spiritual.”
“You do it?”
“No.” She smiled. “I’m a somewhat less traditional Apache. I prefer an afternoon yoga class.” Bernadette, a slender woman in her late forties with strong features and long, dark, gray-streaked hair, had effortlessly perfect posture that reflected her years of yoga. Jamie had been in a class with her once and her flexibility had struck him as more impossible than a morning run. She asked, “How was the workshop?”
Jamie rolled his shoulders, right then left, plucking at the crust of burned waffle in the iron until it popped loose. “Not bad. Energy healing went all right, mostly. Mae was great at the medical intuition. Hoped I could use it on my pets, but I wasn’t any good at it. Even this crazy woman who thinks I’m part of her soul group was better at it than I was.”
“Her soul group? What’s that?”
“Her reincarnation cohort. Class of 2000 BCE, something like that. Having a reunion.”
“That’s an odd claim. How can she tell you’re part of it?”
He began cleaning the waffle iron, drinking coffee between efforts, and described Sierra’s behavior and then her support group.
“Past lives and chronic illness,” Bernadette mused. “That would be hard to study or verify.”
Jamie turned to look at her. “You still working on that verification for healers and seers?” Though she taught health promotion courses at the nearby tribal college, Bernadette’s research area was alternative medicine.
“It’s going slowly, but yes. It should be easier to verify psychics, especially those who are medical intuitives. There are clear external measures for success. Healing is fuzzier. So many factors affect mental and physical health. If this woman claims past lives have anything to do with chronic illness, she’s practically guaranteeing that her hypothesis is untestable.”
Ezra scuffed in and set his bag down. “I’m ready.”
“Relax, sit down,” Bernadette said. “Jamie and I are into something interesting.”
Interesting? Disturbing was more like it. He’d wanted her to linger and chat, but not about Sierra.
Gasser emerged from the laundry room with a loud mewling complaint, shaking his paws one by one. Ezra sat beside Bernadette and watched the cat with concern, asking, “Is he all right?
“Yeah, just fussy. Trained the parrots to use the litterbox.” Gasser had been doing this picky, whining dance ever since. “He gets stressed about sharing his bathroom.” So did Jamie, but he stopped short of saying so. There were anxieties one didn’t tell guests about. “He’ll quit in a minute.” Gasser continued his performance. Embarrassed, Jamie bent down and pressed a hand to the cat’s back. “Hush, mate.”
“We were talking about a seer and healer named Sierra Mu,” Bernadette explained. “How she can’t be tested for being right or wrong.”
Moo. Jamie resumed scrubbing the waffle iron as inner laughter welled up. When he heard the name, he kept seeing the faces Mae’s kids had made as they said “Mrs. Moo” and mooed.
“Do you think reincarnation is possible?” Ezra asked.
Bernadette paused before answering. “I can’t bring myself to believe in it, but I’ve read a book by a professor at the University of Virginia who researched children who appeared to recall past lives, and his evidence is presented convincingly. Still, they could be psychic, picking up information from the past in general, not recalling a personal past. There’s a lot of well-established evidence for psi phenomena.”
Jamie finished the waffle iron and dried his hands, telling Ezra, “That’s professor-ese for psychic stuff.” After checking to see if Bernadette wanted more coffee, which she didn’t, he topped off his mug and drank. It was his fourth refill and he was barely starting to feel human.
Bernadette asked, “How does Sierra identify her soul group?”
“Says she can see past lives, just looking at you. And she says they all have serious illnesses.”
“But you’re healthy.”
“Physically, yeah. But my mental health, that’s another story.”
“Maybe she recruits people she knows have a bad diagnosis and that’s her criteria for inventing a past life with them. You talked quite openly about depression when you performed at Spirit World Fair.”
“Yeah, my mental illness coming-out. Or she could have chosen me after she found out I had all these injuries and chronic pain. Wonder if she goes up to people in her doctor’s waiting room and says, ‘I was your abbot in Lindisfarne’ if they look feeble or start coughing their lungs up.”
“She doesn’t have to. All she has to do is advertise her support group for chronic illness and sick people will show up.”
“Can’t all be in her soul group, though.”
“True. I’d like to know how she operates, especially if she charges money. I haven’t reviewed a questionable healer for a while.”
“Does that mean you want to?” Jamie was a regular reader of Bernadette’s column in The Reporter reviewing mind-body studios and healing practitioners. He liked the idea of her skewering Sierra.
“Yes and no. I’m glad every place I’ve visited lately has been good, but I’d be interested in exposing her if she’s exploiting people.”
Ezra spoke quietly, watching Gasser struggle to lick himself. “You’re so sure she’s making it up. What if she’s not?”
Bernadette nodded. “That’s a good point. I should keep an open mind. Thank you. But I will look into it. Maybe Jamie should go to her group.”
“No way. I’d scream. I’d run out like I did in the bug museum.”
“All right. I’ll go about it some other way.”
After Bernadette and Ezra left, Jamie searched for Dr. Don’s business card and found it in the heap of pocket detritus on his dresser. There was one thing he could check into without going to Sierra’s group. The doctor’s receptionist took the message that Jamie wanted to ask Dr. Gross for a recommendation. It was close enough to the truth.
Dr. Don didn’t return the call until late evening, as Jamie was getting home from a rehearsal at his band mate Mwizenge Chomba’s house. Jamie had just unloaded the last of his instruments from his van, propping the didgeridoo in its stand in the spare room upstairs.
“Decided to get that checkup on your sparkles?” Don asked.
“Nah, think those were just my usual problems.” Jamie sat on the futon. “Need to find that past life hypnotist you went to.”
“Last time I talked with you, you didn’t believe in reincarnation, and you were worried about this pattern people found in you. Thinking of getting it checked out with a doctor.”
“Changed my mind.”
“Why? What did your intuition tell you about those sparkles?”
Jamie thought back to his first reaction. A brief flash of paralyzing terror. “Nothing useful. Being scared doesn’t mean great intuition, not from me. I’m a fucking fear machine. Anyway, I called about that other thing. Don’t want to waste your time on the sparkles. Must be keeping you up.”
“You’re not. Do you think everyone over sixty goes to bed early?”
“Sorry. Dunno where that came from. My parents stay up late. Want to go for a drink? Where are you in town?”
“On Don Diego, closer to Cerrillos than Cordova.”
“Fuck me dead, we’re neighbors. I’m on the crappy end, right near Cerrillos.” A few houses towards Cordova, the neighborhood became nicer, more middle class, though not palatial except for a few homes. Some were small and humble, though Jamie couldn’t picture a doctor nearing retirement having a small, humble place. Maybe he owned the one with the fancy gate and the high wall. “The ugly duplex with the gray stucco.”
“I’m on the same side. Bungalow with the Tibetan prayer flags on the porch.”
Jamie had biked past it often. The flags were recent additions and so were the crowds of disorderly potted plants and the hammock. “Looks like a hippie house, doc.”
“Delayed midlife crisis.”
“Come over for a coldie here, then? Skip the bar. I’ve got a good stock of local brews.”
Don said he’d be over shortly. Jamie hastily cleaned the living room of fur and feathers and set out bowls of green chile pistachios and red chile blue corn chips, and some bean-and-corn salsa he’d made the day before.
When Jamie let Don in, the doctor took his shoes off without being asked, leaving them with Jamie’s collection of sandals near the door, and padded across the room to look at the parrots, who perched together in a kind of snuggle. Placido said hello, and Dr. Don returned the greeting. “Have you practiced healing and medical intuition on them?”
“A little. Mae had to do the medical thing. I don’t pick up anything useful. She said they’re fine. I practiced chakra work with ’em.” Jamie urged Placido to step up on his wrist, petted him, then touched him at the tail-spine juncture, the abdomen, the heart, the throat, and the crown of his head. “Five chakras. Closer to human than a cat. Cats have three. So I can do energy work with ’em, but the main reason I took the workshop was to get the medical intuition skills. Check up on my pets. And I can’t. You like a dark beer or an IPA?”
Don gazed intently at Bouquet and she stared back. “IPA. Thanks.”
With Placido riding on his shoulder, Jamie brought the drinks in and sat on the cushioned bench that served as a couch, while Don took one of the basket chairs. Gasser thudded laboriously downstairs, meowing, his belly dragging on the steps.
“Now that one needs healing,” Don said.
“I try. Keep working on him and he purrs and kind of glows, but he goes right back out of balance. Dunno why he doesn’t get better. I volunteer at the shelter and I help the cats there a lot. The ones that let me, anyway, y’know, cats being cats.”
Don sipped his beer and ate a single nut, then said, “You and Mae don’t work on each other. So why do you think you could heal your pet?”
“It’s not the same. Mae’s ... maternal, especially with her kids visiting now, she’s super-mum. Takes care of me more than I want her to. Don’t think she means to rub it in, but she’s healthy and I’m fucked up. It wouldn’t exactly improve our relationship, y’know? To have her heal me. Get even more into the roles, Mae-the-mum and Jamie-the-sick-person.”
Don frowned and nodded, watching Gasser slink into the kitchen. “I wasn’t thinking of that. After all, you could heal her and you wouldn’t be going into those roles. I was thinking about the needs we bring to our relationships. Such as not wanting our loved ones to change.”
“Jeezus, she’d love it if I changed. Not in a big way, but, like, if I slept better.” The silence made Jamie fidget. He drank, ate, and petted Placido. “Was that too much information?”
“No. Just thinking. My wife used to say she supported my exploring alternative medicine, but when I changed, not just my medical philosophy, she didn’t like it. We were very conventional when we got married thirty-five years ago. Country-club types. She didn’t change, I did. Now I’m divorced and live in my hippie house.”
“Sorry. That’s a long marriage to have break up.”
“It was a long divorce. So slow it was like evolution. One day you wake up on your own island and you’re a new species and can’t mate with the old one anymore.” He paused, as if listening to his own words to check what he’d just said. “My point was, when you try to heal someone you love, you send your attachments to them the way they are, and your resentments. I tried to heal my wife as we were breaking up, but I couldn’t step aside from my feelings about her. It drove us further part. I had the sense to send my children to another doctor in my practice, but I couldn’t see straight when it came to energy healing, until I realized why it wasn’t working.”
“Can’t blame you for trying, though. Jeezus. Thirty-five years.”
“Yes. I went through all that to be able to teach you why you can’t heal your cat.”
Both men laughed. Jamie said, “Yeah. Guess I’m too close to him. Love him too much the way he is. Think he suffers, though. Only times he’s really happy are when he’s eating or when he’s got me to himself. Going on tour next week, taking him, and boarding the parrots. He should be blissful for two months.”
“Leaving next week? For months?” Don consumed another single nut. “If I were you, I’d see my doctor. I know you don’t like her, but you were worried, and so were the people who practiced on you.”
“I’ve got an anxiety disorder. Of course I was worried. I’m worried right now.”
“About what?”
“Dunno. That’s why it’s an anxiety disorder.” Jamie started as Placido suddenly took off and flapped to the parrots’ play corner. Bouquet was half-dozing on their perch, and the green parrot had all the toys to himself. “Guess I could see my doc if I have to. She has walk-in hours once a week. Won’t be as pissed off waiting for her if I don’t have an appointment.”
“Good. Now that we’ve got that settled,” Don sat up straighter, “what’s this about reincarnation?”
Jamie hadn’t committed to the checkup, but he was satisfied that Dr. Don thought so. “Sierra doesn’t just go to a support group. She runs it. Can you picture her dumping her it’s-your-fault-you-got-cancer crap on people and calling it support? I forgot to tell Bernadette about that part. Told her about the soul group and their serious illnesses.”
“Bernadette Pena? Who does that column on alternative healing?”
“Yeah. We were talking about Sierra, and Bernadette’s curious if she could check it out, see if it’s a scam.”
“So she’s looking for someone who can confirm the past life stories?”
“I am, actually. She said it’s untestable.”
“It almost is.” Don sipped his beer. “Can you imagine how many past lives we all have? Even if we take time out in between, there have to be thousands. If you did a hypnotic regression, maybe you’d access two or three lives at most, but that wouldn’t prove the ones Sierra claims you share didn’t happen. Not unless you both looked at the most recent life before this one.”
“Any reason I couldn’t?”
“It’s unpredictable. I remember the one before this. I was a peasant from Hunan province during the Chinese revolution. I knew the details when I was a toddler, even some Chinese words—”
“Was mu one of them?”
“No. And what I was getting at—”
“Sorry. Interrupted you.”
“Yes. What I was getting at is that even though I had incredibly vivid memories that showed up in dreams, I wasn’t hypnotizable. Not everyone is. I have good concentration, but I still couldn’t go into a trance.”
“So, if I have ADHD, I couldn’t be hypnotized? I go into a kind of trance when I play didg.”
“You’d have to be tested for hypnotic susceptibility. Or we could do the eye roll test. Being able to roll your eyes up so only the whites show has a strong but inexplicable correlation.”
Memories of seers who could do this gave Jamie a chill. “Some of the shamans Dad studied did that. Old bloke in a village in India. Woman in Japan, too, when she had spirits in her. Sometimes Gaia Greene, my shaman teacher, her eyes do that.”
“Do yours?”
Jamie strained to look up. His eye muscles hurt. “Still seeing the ceiling. Guess my pupils didn't go up in my sockets.”
“Far from it. So, you have a short attention span and you don’t have the eye roll. Do you need to recall a past life and test Sierra? You’ll probably never see her again.”
Jamie didn’t want to admit he was considering that she might, just might, be right about something. It would feel better to try to prove she was wrong. He shifted the topic to something Bernadette had said. “If Sierra charges money, she might be taking advantage of sick people. Not just telling them she knew them, y’know? So I want Bernadette to debunk her.”
“That’s a worthy cause. I hope none of my patients are in the support group. Generally, they don’t hide unconventional therapies from me the way they would a lot of physicians, but Sierra’s wacky enough that they might.”
Gasser waddled in and mewed to be picked up. Jamie settled him in his lap. “Wonder who could find out who’s going. Can’t see how Bernadette could join the group. Quacks don’t normally like to have her visit. Bloke that ran a fake sweat lodge let her in, but he was taking all comers and that was her first column. She even e-mailed ahead and told him she planned to write about him and he let her in free. She said he got nervous when he realized she was Indian. Bloke was so ignorant he didn’t know they aren’t all named Star Eagle or something. He made such a stink about her column, I think anyone fraudulent would find some reason not to let her register now.”
“Unless she could convince Sierra she has a chronic illness.”
“Nah. Not a chance.” Bernadette couldn’t pass for mentally or physically unwell. Jamie considered everyone he knew that had a chronic health problem. There weren’t many. However, fortune teller Kate Radecsu, who ran Spirit World Fair, was paraplegic and a recovering alcoholic. Sierra might tell her she could walk again if she’d face her karma. Jamie couldn’t imagine Kate tolerating that crap, but maybe she could pretend long enough to scope things out. And Kate knew Bernadette. “Think I might be able to send a friend. It could get expensive, doing a past life regression for her, if she’s even hypnotizable, but at least she could hear what the message is, y’know? See if Sierra does any harm or if she’s just an idiot.”
“The best thing would be for you to go to the support group,” Don said. “Sierra already thinks you’re sick and that you’re part of her soul group.”
“Bloody hell.” Jamie took a swig of beer. “I’d rather drag my balls through broken glass.”