Fate takes a hand next day.
One of the parents, a weak-minded single mom named Virginia with a very strong-minded little seven-year-old named Breck, comes to see me as the boys are putting on their jackets and packing up their lunch pails.
“Ms. Nagazy, I need a huge favor,” she says. She’s very young to be a mother, and completely incapable of dealing with the genetic sport she’s been given for a son. Breck is one of my peppiest boys. He’s beginning to take to my energy management training program. But he still finds himself bowling over smaller kids and making too much noise and doing outrageous things with his body before he realizes, Oops, time to get quieted down, and then he comes to me to be drained of the excess.
Breck is tearing around the classroom, playing soccer with an apple from someone’s kicked-over lunchbox.
I catch the apple as it whizzes past my ankles and reach out a hand to touch Javon, the other soccer player, on the shoulder. Instantly Javon quiets, as well he might, since I’ve just sapped his energy level about sixteen percent. I see the “Oops” look on his face, and he slows and goes back into the cloakroom. I suppress, instinctively, the rush of pleasure and happiness and satisfaction I feel at this jolt of the only food that really nourishes me.
Breck sees this happen and he gets a mischievous look and slaloms off in a new direction so that he won’t come past me. He goes into the cloakroom. I hear shouts from the cloakroom.
“I really have to go in there,” I say.
Virginia leans close to me and talks quickly. “I found this doctor, he might be able to help, I don’t know how, but I have to try it, I have to try something!” she says, her voice rising as the shouts from the cloakroom become screams. “Will you help me take him in to the doctor’s office? I’ll pay you,” she adds desperately, and I consider it, because I figure she can afford it. Her ex-husband will give her anything except his time and help with the boy. “Tomorrow?”
I groan inwardly. The noise in the cloakroom sounds worse. “I have practice in the evening,” I say.
She says quickly, “We can go after school. I need your help. He won’t go to doctors’ offices anymore.”
Oh great. Now I’m standing between a kid and medical treatment. Virginia may be a wimp, but she’s got the guilt-trip thing down.
She must see me weakening. “His appointment is for five, but if that doesn’t work for you, I can call Dr. Katterfelto and ask to reschedule,” she says desperately.
I freeze in mid-escape.
This is too weird.
Or too easy.
A metal lunch bucket comes flying out of the cloakroom, clearly punted. More screams.
“All right, all right,” I say, and give her my super-secret cell number. “Call me.” I sprint for the cloakroom.
o0o
Friday afternoon, I meet Breck’s mother after school and we spend a good five minutes negotiating with Breck about whether he will ride with me, or ride with his mother, or if I must ride in the car with him and his mother. On and on and on. I’d like to think that her ex-husband is better with the boy than she is, but I doubt it.
Why do these women reproduce? I may be a soul-sucking fiend from hell, but I do not create little sports of my ecologically unsound genotype and then fail to manage them.
Finally I settle it that if Breck wants me there to support him through the torment of another doctor’s appointment, he will ride with his mother and like it.
Also, I take a hit off him while he is throwing himself on me and screaming and begging for mercy. This quiets him down. I tell myself that he needs it, that now he will behave better in his mother’s car while I am following in my elk-slayer-size hybrid Tahoe SUV.
Dr. Katterfelto proves to be much shorter in person than I imagined him, reading his website. He’s roly-poly and bustling. Often, he slips disturbingly into a fakey Germanic accent.
But he is, above all, upbeat. And I know from upbeat. He and Ma between them could run a Dale Carnegie course in a suicide ward.
He charms Breck immediately. “So, little man, you have energy to burn, ja? Everyone is so slow, and they do not understand you when you speak. You are not selfish. You are a practical person and you have no time to waste, am I right?”
He chatters Breck down the hall and into a room with a mongo complicated machine and a big white wall that glows. Breck starts to lose it when he sees the machine.
“No! I don’t like it! I’m scared!” Breck pulls back and goes behind his mother, who looks at me imploringly.
Like I can do anything.
Dr. Katterfelto flips a bunch of switches, making everything hum. “That’s too bad, you are frightened, because, if you are brave, then you could make rainbows with me. Have you never made rainbows at a childrens’ museum before?”
The white wall lights up much brighter, sending a blast of blinding light toward us. Breck screams.
Dr. Katterfelto steps briskly away and walks across the white wall, and all of a sudden he is a rainbow silhouette against the brightness. A swirl of rainbow colors shoots off in all directions around his shape on the wall.
Breck stops screaming.
“Now the mother will show us how her colors look,” the doctor says, beckoning to her. But Virginia shrinks back, the dip.
I walk forward. “No, it’s my turn now!” I make as if I’m shoving my way in front of Virginia to get to the wall first. The light is blinding. I can barely sense the shifting, swirling rainbow around my shape on the wall. I prance back and forth, making monkey gestures. Breck giggles.
“Hmmm,” Dr. Katterfelto says. “All right. Let me see the boy.”
Breck dashes forward and tackles me, and I take another hit off him, very carefully, so that he submits to being held.
“Profile?” the doctor says.
I turn Breck to face me and we hold hands, raising them up and lowering them as if making London Bridge rise and fall and rise again. The machine clicks and hums.
“Full face?”
I turn, lifting up on my tiptoes. and Breck does the same. We take a bow, ending on a big flourish, each holding the other’s hand, and our free hands out-flung.
“Hold that, please,” says Dr. Katterfelto. The machine clicks again. Somewhere I can hear a printer clunking and cranking. We hold that pose, and then he says, “Vonderful! Thank you, you may relax.”
I take another little hit of prana off Breck, and he runs to his mother, who follows Katterfelto to some chairs. The boy crawls into Virginia’s lap and sucks his thumb. I sit with her.
“Hm. Very interesting. Now, Mrs. Hibble, I show you how ve use colorimetry to diagnose the boy’s condition. You see?” He brings a printout around his desk and stands between us, holding it so we can see. “In a boy like this, I see them often, ve haff reversal of the fourth chakra, the heart chakra. Very painful for him. He is a brave little boy, who can live vit this pain and frustration, ja?”
“His other doctors didn’t say anything about pain,” Virginia says, both truculent and alarmed. “He would tell me if he was in pain.”
“It is pain of the soul.” Katterfelto touches the left breast of his lab coat. “Behold. The chi, he rises from the base of the spine and circles counterclockwise around the first chakra.” His finger traces a serpentine line up the center of the boy-sized form printed in blazing color on the page. “So. Unt now it comes around and engages with the second chakra,” his German accent slips a little, “and goes around the next bend clockwise, you see? Like pinball. Like ivy climbing a tree.”
“But the energy changes direction,” I say, watching his finger. I’m familiar with the chakra system. “It switches direction every time it hits a chakra.”
“Indeed it does. And so on to the third chakra, home of the will. What a strong will our boy has! See how yellow and pulsing and strong! Counterclockwise, you observe. And then to the heart chakra — but what do we see here? Oh no! The wheel of the chakra — chakra means wheel, did you know that? — he is turned the wrong way! He is also going counterclockwise. Now ve see what a problem this makes.”
“Huh,” Virginia says, as if pretending she understands.
Katterfelto draws a little table between our two chairs so that he can lay the printout down. “The next chakra is in the throat, counterclockwise also. Our poor young friend here cannot move energy from his will through his heart into his voice. How frustrating! How he is thwarted! This is most unfair.”
Breck stops squirming on his mother’s lap. He’s looking at the printout, fascinated.
“So.” I’m beginning to see method in this madness. I put my finger on the will chakra. “He wants to express what’s in his heart.” I move my finger on the heart chakra. “But it gets all turned around, and when it comes into his throat—” I touch the next spot. “It doesn’t come out right.”
Then I get it. This explains ninety percent of Breck to me. He always seems to be struggling with language, although his English is perfect and he knows plenty of words.
Dr. Katterfelto is looking at me with interest and approval. “Precisely. How well you put it. He cannot express his love, for it has gotten tangled up like this.” Dr. Katterfelto’s two fingers walk across the printout, twiddle together, and fall over. “A terrible affliction.”
He turns to Breck, in his mother’s lap, and I look, too.
Breck is sitting quietly, staring at the printout with silent tears running down his face.
Virginia goes off like a bomb. “Oh my God! Breck honey! Are you all right?”
But the doctor holds his hand out to Breck. “Shall I give you some little physical therapy exercise for this affliction? They will be difficult at first. But if you can keep them up, you will correct this. I promise you.”
“Um,” I say.
Virginia says, “Oh, I don’t think he can handle that.”
Breck puts his hand out and takes Dr. Katterfelto’s and says nothing. Tears keep running down his face.
I put a finger on his shoulder, just tasting, and feel extraordinary peace radiating off that little boy. He’s a furnace of heat and happiness and relief and joy.
His mouth hangs open. I see disbelief and hope in his eyes.
Poor little lost boy. He wants to tell his love to the world, but it won’t come out. All that comes out is screaming and hitting.
I feel tears starting in my own eyes and I look at Virginia. “You might give it a chance. Since we brought him all this way.”
Virginia is clasping Breck to her body, looking suspicious. “What will it cost?”
“For you,” Dr. Katterfelto says absently, scribbling on a little teeny pad of paper he has taken out of his lab coat pocket, “nothing, unless and until we see improvement. First we see if it will respond to a little gentle nudging from these exercises.”
His English has improved. His energy is sweet and bright. Dr. Katterfelto loves his job.
I’m envious. I mean, my job’s okay, if stressful sometimes, and I get peed on more than I would like. Maybe he’s just a happy guy.
“Now, my man,” Dr. Katterfelto says, handing the paper to the kid. “Can you read my chicken scratches?”
Breck looks solemnly at the paper.
The doctor says, “Hold a ball in front of your chest with both hands. Turn it to the left four turns. Now turn it to the right four turns. While you are doing this, you are saying, ‘Straighten up and fly right.’ Can you say this?”
Breck’s lips move. He says, “Straighten up an fly right.”
“Say it while you turn your ball.” Dr. Katterfelto picks up a plastic baseball off the floor and hands it to Breck. “Come. Show me.”
They practice the move. Breck brightens noticeably as he does it. Soon he’s chanting, “Straighten up an fly right! Straighten up an fly right!”
“Good. Do the turns maybe twenty or thirty times a day. Not all at once. Any time you happen to have a ball in your hands. If you are in class, just imagine the ball, and let your lips move. When you become accustomed to thinking the words, you may not need to move your lips. Feel the words form in your throat. This will help to pull your energy around your heart, up around your throat chakra, in a regular manner.”
Breck’s eyes are shining. He folds the paper even smaller and puts it into his shorts pocket. He looks serious. To Virginia he says, “Let’s go home.”
Virginia makes the appropriate mother-at-the-pediatrician noises, repeating everything the doctor has said about six times. Dr. Katterfelto hands her the printout. I pick up my purse, thinking, Hm.
“Don’t go yet, please,” Dr. Katterfelto says to me. Virginia is talking her way out the door in order to convince herself that she has had a role in this transaction.
“Oh, I won’t,” I say. I want to hug Breck. Not to breathe up all his prana or anything. Just to be near him. Because he is so happy.
I keep my hands to myself.