Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

"I guess you don't know," she whispered. "And of course you don't know what it does when you're asleep."

At that, he couldn't help but look at her, horrified.

A little smile stayed glued to her mouth as she made a gesture with her own hand, as if she was rubbing something small between finger and thumb. Then more gestures, her hand gripping, then beckoning. When the miming hand touched his face, he jerked away.

Once when he'd been almost drowsing he'd looked over to see something groping stealthily around the edge of the bedside table. It was like suddenly finding a tarantula right next to his head. The scariest part was that it had stopped immediately, as if it didn't want him to see.

So it did things while he was asleep, too.

He slid off the examining table, wanting to run out of the room. But he was still hooked up to the blood pressure machine. Without two hands there was no way to take it off himself.

"We're not done with our examination, Tommy!" the nurse said commandingly.

He stopped tugging at the tubes, frightened by her tone, and stood as she released the rest of the pressure and ripped the Velcro loose. Once she'd put it away, she clamped his wrist in her hard fingers and timed his pulse. Her eyebrows rose as if his racing heart alarmed her.

She gazed at him for a long moment, then checked her clipboard.

"Okay. So, let's weigh you. Then let's go for a nice, long walk. Exercise will help you get your appetite back, we can't have you losing so much weight. Would you like that?"

"Yes," he said readily. She'd probably ask him weird questions about his parents or about what supernatural stuff the other kids talked about, like last time, almost as if she wanted to scare him. But being outside would be better than being in here alone with her.

They walked along the edge of the athletic fields, not far from the foot of the mesa. The sky had turned dull white and featureless, dimming the sun. Tommy struggled to coordinate his legs and arms. He had a rising feeling of expectancy, as if there was another person coming, or maybe was already silently walking with them and was about to do something. A third person, listening, even more sneaky than the nurse.

"You know," Mrs. Pierce said, "sometimes it helps to talk about what frightens you. It can be therapeutic. Even if you have angry feelings, talking about them can be what we call cathartic."

"I know what 'cathartic' means!"

"Of course you do," she said soothingly. "You're a highly intelligent young man. You're smart enough to be nervous about all this medical business, aren't you? The technology can be intimidating. But everyone feels the same way, believe me."

He nodded. There was some small relief in hearing that.

"Like what?" she persisted. "What's the worst? The MRI?" She glanced over at him expectantly.

He still didn't want to answer. But her question had made him think of the magazine in the cranial diagnostics waiting room. He'd sat there in his hospital gown while they prepared the MRI and he'd picked it up, some kind of doctor's magazine, not anything they should've let a patient see. He'd opened it to find an article about lobotomies.

The first photo showed a woman with her head in a clamp, a doctor putting a long, thin blade into her nose. Other pictures illustrated how to hit the tool with a special hammer that drove the blade through the thin bones behind your sinus cavity, right into your brain. It cut the connections, so the sick part just sat there, probably still doing its crazy thing but not screwing up the rest of your mind. The article said the procedure had been mostly abandoned for twenty years but was now making a big comeback. Sometimes people couldn't walk or talk or recognize their family afterward, but it was worth it if their brain problems were really severe.

Whatever was the matter with him, he knew it was severe. So maybe that's what they'd end up doing to him.

Tommy felt panic coming and tried desperately to think of something reassuring. He told himself Dr. Tsosie and Mrs. McCarty would help, they were very smart, they acted like they really did care about him. And maybe that new psychologist could do something, she seemed like she understood things. But he hardly knew any of them, it was hard to trust them.

His back twisted, and though he willed himself straight it was like big invisible hands were wringing him, so hard he heard his own backbone crackle. From the way she looked over at him, the nurse must have heard it, too.

He knew what it meant: The other person, the controlling stranger, was getting closer.

He had to unkink and calm himself. Find some safe place in his mind. His thoughts kept fleeing back to the family homesite, the smell of the sheep pens, the familiar shape of the land, and most of all his grandparents.

Grandfather, particularly-he could do anything with his hands, he could make anything, he totally knew sheep and horses and cars, he remembered everything from long ago, he could tell stories really well. What Tommy admired most was how deeply he believed in helping people-he'd do anything for someone in need, give anything he owned. He'd never in his life complained about his responsibilities. But he was old-fashioned and stuck in his habits and getting tired and weak. He was negative about every change, even things like when they graded the county road, and was paranoid about white people, technology, the government. He and Grandmother believed the old myths about First Man and First Woman, the Hero Twins, and Spider Woman, they saw the world as full of mysterious things that required all this respect and doing things in very particular, pointless ways every time. They were down on Tommy's choice of music and clothes and friends, frowned whenever he talked about his career ambitions, asked suspiciously about the clan of any girl he mentioned. He loved them so much it hurt inside, and he knew how much he owed them. But they couldn't offer any safety or reassurance now. And they shouldn't have to, he was fifteen, he should be taking care of them.

Sometimes he thought maybe he should confide in Mr. Clah, his social studies teacher, he was smart and seemed to know how things worked. He wore khakis and carried a laptop computer, he did mountain biking and had a white lawyer girlfriend. He treated Tommy like an equal. But though Tommy mostly agreed with his opinions, too often they sounded like complaining, making excuses, and accusing. He wasn't strong the way Grandfather was. He'd never worked as hard as Grandfather, had never gotten his hands dirty, didn't know what it meant to sacrifice for anybody. In any case, he didn't care enough about Tommy to help him now.

As always, his thoughts spiraled back to his parents. If they were alive, maybe they'd know how to help. Maybe they'd figured something out about how to live. They put up with Grandfather's Dine heritage stuff but weren't particularly into it. Some nights Tommy missed them, crying secretly into his pillow, but the more he missed them, the more he hated them for getting themselves killed. They had no right to do that to him and the family! Once when he was obsessing about it last year, he'd gone to the library and looked at some psychology books. He'd discovered that his attitude was typical: adolescent kid loving but resenting dead parents, searching around for role models. Cliche or not, it was true: You had to know something about your people or you couldn't know who you were. Especially right now, knowing who they were would help him sort out what he was going through. But all he had was a collection of mental snapshots: roiling on the ground and wrestling with Father when he was five or six, feeling safe against his strong chest, laughing at the silly way he pretended to fight. Mother teaching him how to fry an egg when he was maybe four, proudly showing Aunt Ellen and everybody how incredibly big a mess he made of the stove. Beyond that, all he knew was they liked country-and-western music, they fought a lot and drank too much. What he remembered wasn't enough to help him figure out anything.