Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

Tommy heard his backbone crackle again, and he steered his thoughts away from the fading images of those faces. There wasn't any refuge there.

So then at some point he'd decided, Okay, I'll define myself. From his reading about great artists and from his own drawing, he'd figured that you were defined by your passions, by what you loved and believed in.

Sometimes he thought that might mean "doing something for the tribe." But what? The People didn't know what they wanted. If you believed the Navajo Times, every little businessman who opened up a Laundromat was "doing something for the tribe" by contributing to Navajo-owned enterprise and economic growth. When what it looked like to Tommy was just more greedy self-interest, like Mr. Clah said, just another form of colonialism, co-opting real Navajo culture with white American consumerism.

His art was the one thing. He loved looking at something until its hidden meaning came clear and then distilling the image and the meaning into something powerful. He could experiment with different ways of seeing the same thing, trying on definitions of himself, his parents, his friends, his surroundings, life, the past, until one seemed to capture something unarguably true. Just the physical act was almost ecstatic-moving the pencil on the page, not so much drawing as carving the blank white into three dimensions. There were moments when he could believe that in the way he saw things and drew things he was giving something back to the world. It had always been good, but it wasn't until he'd come to Oak Springs that he'd learned how much he could do, how much it could mean. It was so much better than the other schools. He'd learned so much in the few classes he'd had, Miss Chee and Mrs. McCarty had shown him how to put the way he saw and thought into his pictures. Made him feel that his work was important, that it was a way to figure things out, a way to a halfway decent future.

The thing at his side moved suddenly, the fingers clenching and then clawing the air like someone scratching a bug bite. Tommy grabbed it with his left hand and squeezed it hard, digging his nails into it, wanting to hurt it, feeling nothing.

His heart plummeted. It reminded him of another heartbreaking fact of where he was at. Without a right arm he couldn't draw. If he didn't get better, he'd have to leave Oak Springs School. The one way through would be lost.

"You okay?" the nurse asked.

"Yeah." He realized he hadn't answered her earlier question.

"You want to tell me what you're feeling?"

He couldn't. Because as bad as the things with his body were, the feelings were worse-harder to describe and more frightening. Suddenly, he'd notice he'd been having something like a daydream, but the instant he'd realize it, it would go away, he couldn't remember what it was about. It was like the one time he'd gone to the multiplex theater in Gallup, watching one movie but hearing sounds and music from a different movie through the wall. It didn't make sense, a mood that had nothing to do with what he was doing. A feeling or an urge would come out of nowhere. He'd feel the need to hurry, like he had to go somewhere or do something very important. A couple of times he'd gotten sexually aroused, once even in the examining room when Mrs. McCarty was there and might have noticed. Or he'd feel this horrible fear and then fill with hate and want to hurt someone so much he could hardly hold himself back. Sometimes he wondered if it could be a witch or a ghost trying to kill him, maybe all the things the kids talked about in the dorm at night were true: the black humping shapes coming out of the desert at night, the strange noises in the wind, the unusual behavior of a crow on the roof. A shadow moving on the rocks with nothing making it. Maybe he had a chindi in him. Or maybe it was coming from his subconscious, wasn't this how schizophrenia worked? Maybe he was really a person full of fear and hate and violence.

Whichever, it was happening right now.

Mrs. Pierce was watching him and he realized that once more he hadn't answered her question, he'd been lost in the feeling and the effort to fight it. He quickly let go of the arm thing and hoped she didn't notice the blood where he'd dug in his nails. He looked over at her, and abruptly he wanted to spring at her, tear her to pieces. Afraid he couldn't stop it this time, he picked up his speed so he got ahead of her, got her out of his sight.

From behind, Mrs. Pierce called in her phony cheerful voice, "Never mind. I'm sure you'd rather talk about something else. Of course you would. We'll just walk along and just be good buddies for a while. Just good buds out for a walk."

By the time they'd made it back to the corral and cared for the horses, it was nearing sunset. Cree's head was throbbing, and she knew she was too exhausted to try another session with Tommy right away. She absolutely had to be clearheaded and strong enough to take a peek inside his skull. Anyway, Lynn had left a note, letting her know that she'd taken him for a walk and then planned to go to the cafeteria for some dinner.

Cree seized the moment of comparative calm. She felt herself spiraling in on her bed, drawn irresistibly into its field of gravity, but first there was some business to attend to. Ten minutes on the phone, then a nap. She'd spend time with Tommy later in the evening.

It was late Saturday afternoon in Seattle, a good time to catch Joyce and Edgar before the evening's entertainments took them out for the night. She commandeered the phone in Lynn's office to make the calls.

When Ed answered, she could barely hear his hello over the stereo blasting in the background: the Gypsy Kings, belting out songs of unrequited passion.

Ed quickly brought the volume down. "Hey, Cree. Good timing. I was about to go out."

"I can call back later if-"

"No, this is fine. I won't be home later-going out to dinner. Now I'm just going to run some errands. What's up?"

"What're you going to bring, Ed?"

"Hm. Sounds like you have some recommendations."

"The lights flickered last time. Did I tell you? Very pronounced flicker phenomenon."

"So we'll need to rule out electrical system problems. I'll bring the kit for that, no problem there. But-"

"Yeah. We're getting into some EVP possibilities. Then there's the DNS issue."

It felt good to speak in the private vernacular they shared, to talk with someone who didn't need explanations or justifications. Nice to pretend there was any kind of conceptual map to this territory. But the idea brought them both up short as they thought it through.

EVP stood for electronic voice phenomena, a paranormal manifestation that had become evident only in the age of electronic media. In some cases, voices or sounds not audible to the human ear could be picked up by electronic recording equipment placed in haunted environments. Rarer still, telephones or radios sometimes produced sounds without a discernible signal source. The implication was that some unknown energies or entities were directly affecting the wires and chips and magnetic media of electronic equipment, creating patterns of electricity that ultimately emerged as audible noises or voices. Because it was an easily faked medium, Ed had been highly skeptical of EVP evidence until, despite every safeguard against hoax or error, he'd recorded a voice in an abandoned house in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

EVP was all the more complex because it tied in with a whole body of paranormal theory called DNS, direct neural stimulus. The idea here was that the energies of paranormal entities might create only the experience of images, sounds, or sensations: They didn't actually create light, vibrations in the air, or tangible bodily contact but directly activated the human brain and nervous system. Someone witnessing a phantom figure might not actually be seeing-receiving light through her eyes, which a camera would also record-at all. Rather, she might be having her optic nerve or visual cortex directly stimulated by some other form of energy.