Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

“You start with an effigy,” Bill said. “Rag doll, wood. You concentrate on it. On the nothingness of it. You identify with the nothingness. Then you write the holy syllable and you sew it in with red thread. You recite the mantra: Om kurulle hrih! Vasam kuru hoh! Akarsaya hrih suaha! ”

The orderly jumped at the sudden wail of the mantra. Dr. Boltin stared, white with surprise.

“Jesus Christ!” he blurted.

“Of course,” Bill added, smiling, “you add in the name of your victim. You put your concentration into the effigy. The concentration on your victim. That’s what you sew up inside. You forget your senses, your imagination, until the vision of the victim comes. Do you understand? And then, Jah hum bam hoh! Jah hum bam hoh! over and over until you can’t breathe, until the walls swirl like a cloud of bees, and you summon, absorb, bind yourself, into the effigy! You cast off your ego! You grasp the ego of the victim!”

Dr. Boltin stared, transfixed. Dr. Geddes slowly, absently, dabbed at the perspiration at his neck.

“You start a fire,” Bill whispered. “The effigy melts! Slowly! Dripping slowly! You stamp on it, reciting! It takes hours. It seems like years. Until you have no more strength. Your hands are too tired to make the signs of revenge.”

Bill did not so much finish as wind down. Like a huge clock, unable to go on, he stared disconsolately at the two psychiatrists. Hoover mopped his forehead.

“Exactly what does this get you?” Dr. Boltin asked curiously.

“Power. I summoned Elliot Hoover.”

Bill smiled secretively, said nothing more. An ominous atmosphere built up in the stark chamber.

“These Tibetan rituals,” Hoover ventured. “They lead the laymen astray.”

“Nothing leads me astray, Hoover.”

“You don’t really believe all that, do you, Bill?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

Dr. Boltin, short of air, walked into the corridor. He found a water fountain, drank copiously, even splashed some onto his face. Vague arguments between Hoover and Bill reached him, all incomprehensible. Dr. Boltin looked at his watch, sighed, and went back inside.

“There is no duality!” Hoover shouted. “No subject! No object! It’s — it’s ridiculous! The Atman! The Absolute! Why, it’s a-dvaita, just like in the Vedas!”

“Bullshit!” Bill yelled back. “Even you have to concede that the essence of the subject — the tat tvam asi — never returns. Never!”

“Listen to reason, Bill,” Hoover insisted, poking him in the shoulder. “A liberated self cannot appear to itself! Isn’t that obvious?”

Dr. Boltin leaned over to Dr. Geddes.

“Have you been, uh, following any of this?” he asked.

“Not a word. But look at Bill. I’ve never seen him so articulate. He’s reasoning!”

“Are you sure this is reason?”

Elliot Hoover and Bill were both shouting now, a dialectic of polemics, each trying to crush the other, oblivious of the psychiatrists.

“Your illusions of individuality,” Hoover yelled, “are totally unfounded!”

“You live in a perverted dream, Hoover,” Bill sneered. “Without power, without development, you can achieve nothing. Nothing! The soul, I tell you, is a creator!”

The verbal flow rose and fell, a strange current of attack and counterattack that seemed to belong on the far side of the earth.

“They seem to be slowing down,” Dr. Geddes observed.

“It’s been almost an hour.”

Elliot Hoover had removed his coat and tie, and he vigorously mopped his throat through the unbuttoned shirt. Bill, exhausted, slumped on the edge of the iron bed.

“Well?” Dr. Boltin demanded, irritated. “What’s the verdict?”

Hoover looked up wearily. Slowly he rolled down his shirt sleeves and buttoned them again. His face betrayed an agony of weariness, even a kind of fear, no triumph at all, only a sensation of having survived something terrible.

“He’s willing to meet the child,” Hoover said quietly.

Bill groaned softly.

“If she — is — Ivy,” he murmured, “her soul — will— speak — to me.”

The orderlies unlocked the door. Inside, Bill suddenly looked up, saw Dr. Geddes put a restraining arm in front of Hoover.

“I want Mrs. Templeton to take Jennie in. Just the two of them.”

Hoover nodded. Janice quickly smoothed down Jennie’s hair. Janice felt she was on the threshold of something worse than an asylum room: it was the threshold of the last chance they would ever have. She nervously straightened Jennie’s red jumper and stared into the quiet, lovely, mysterious face.

“Don’t be frightened, Janice,” Hoover whispered. “Have faith.”

Janice smiled, pressed his hand, and then cautiously led Jennie into Bill’s room.

The door closed behind her. Jennie shuffled her feet. Bill looked absently at Janice. Then slowly he focused on the child. Curious, nothing more.

“This is Jennie, Bill,” Janice said softly.

Bill observed the red jumper, the new sneakers. The black hair surprised him. He softened when he realized how frail she was, how slender her limbs really were. But he said nothing.

“Jennie,” Janice said. “Jennie doesn’t talk.”

“I know. They told me.”

Jennie let go of Janice’s fingers. A complicity of awkwardness and silence surrounded the girl. She walked in her mincing, teetering steps, across the tile floor, away from Bill.

Jennie looked down at her sneakers. A loose shoelace obsessed her. She bent down, completely absorbed in the mystery of the string. Her tiny fingers smoothed it, her foot jerked away with it. Then she broke away from it and walked against one of the orderlies, taking no more notice of him than if he had been made of stone.

Bill’s eyes followed her in growing curiosity.

As she walked to the edge of his desk something bothered her. Slowly her head turned in the direction of Bill. He was staring at her with an intensity she did not like. She ran her fingers through her hair, violently shook her head, and slumped down to play dead.

The orderlies looked at each other. One felt impelled to rescue the girl, but the other gestured for him to remain at his post. Janice watched Jennie roll over slowly, then look back to see if Bill was still watching.

For a stony eternity their eyes locked. Again Jennie shook her head as though a swarm of bees attacked her. She grew still, then rose and stood in the center of the room. Her arms moved ritualistically at her sides, pumping up and down, then froze. She stared at Bill’s right arm.

Slowly Bill’s right hand opened, beckoned her closer.

Jennie, startled, looked back at the man’s face. An almost deranged intensity poured out of her small eyes. She was frightened, rooted to the spot.

Bill licked his lips.

“Ivy…” he whispered.

Jennie suddenly tilted her head, looking at the ceiling, tossed her arms over her head, and stomped noisily around the room. She marched like an insane drum majorette, over the toes of the second orderly, then stopped in front of Janice, oblivious to Bill.

“Ivy!” Bill called desperately, in vain.

A horrific chill swept through Janice, and she turned, looking for Hoover beyond the orderlies at the opened door.

Jennie shook her limbs in a mindless parody of an African dance, then paused and quietly surveyed the room as though she had never seen it.

“Ivy!” Bill whispered urgently.

A strange look appeared on Jennie’s face. Her eyes locked with Bill’s face, now streaming with tears.

“Ivy…” he said, barely audible, the final whisper of his tortured need.

Janice remained rooted to the floor as the girl’s smile grew softer, a steady signal of muted love, and legs carried her without awkwardness, carried her toward Bill. Like a soft fawn she fell forward, gently onto his chest, and his cheek, glistening wet, pressed down on her hair.