Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

She stood, and as she looked up the ravine she saw the shadows moving. Humped, furtive shapes leaping and alighting, side to side, closer and closer. Her heart wanted to burst at the sight. Panicked, she brayed at them like a crazed, wounded animal, warding them back. But they didn't stop. Suddenly she was rushing back toward Edgar, hurtling between the crazy angles of the cliffs, stumbling over rocks, catching herself, tearing her fingers on the stone, blinded by fear.

"Ed!" she called. The rumble was all around him, the evil had swarmed off the desert to the opening of the ravine. Big movements, manifold movements, a huge thing that she knew was the evil that ate people, took them away to nowhere. She couldn't see him, he was already taken by it, he was consumed in its blue mouth. "Edgar!" she shrieked. "Ed, they're coming! Run! Run!"

She tore toward the boulder where he'd been and suddenly it was moving and a shadow reared out of it and it was a man.

"Cree!" the shape shouted. The horizons swallowed its cry.

"Run, Ed!"

"Cree! Are you all right? What is it?" He was coming toward her, holding his staff, a watchful shepherd attending to an alarm.

There was pain in the air. Pain and piercing loss and every regret. She swore a curse upon it with rage torn from her bowels, her bones. It was monstrous and evil beyond reckoning, and the voices and rumble and jingle, the exploding fear and heartsickness and outrage all merged into one thing, a whole world that gathered into the sound of a cymbal clashed and ringing and then damped and fading and silent.

And there was no one there but Ed, alone beneath the sky on the vast empty desert.

She fell between worlds. She tumbled against him and his arms were around her and his body rocked hers as she tried to catch her breath. Her pounding heartbeat shook her. He wasn't very real and then he was.

"It's okay, Cree! You're okay! What happened? What's up there?"

It wasn't up there, she wanted to tell him, it was out here, she had rushed to warn him. Save him. But that didn't make sense. What she had wanted so urgently was evaporating from her mind. She grasped at the knowledge of it but it slipped away, mist between her fingers.

All that she could conjure of it was the thing she'd had to tell him, so urgent, but when it came to her lips it had shrunk to a single word that surprised her and was utterly without meaning: "Goats!" she panted. "The goats!"

The Chief of psychiatry at Ketteridge Hospital was a dignified-looking, white-haired man, tall but carrying himself with a stoop that brought his face level with Cree's. He met Cree in the visitors' lounge on the juvenile floor, shook her hand, and took a seat in the chair across from her. The little room was empty and quiet but for the burble of an aquarium against one wall, where three dazed-looking goldfish hovered.

"We think the world of Dr. Tsosie here," Dr. Corcoran told her. "A good man-the best. And Joseph tells me wonderful things about you."

Cree tried to mask her surprise. "Thank you. And thank you for letting me see Tommy."

He put his palms up, the least I could do, and smiled. "It's a very troubling case. If you've established good rapport with him, as Dr. Tsosie says you have, perhaps you can make some progress. He talks to me only with great reluctance."

"Why, do you suppose?"

"I'm just an old white guy! What the hell do I know?" Dr. Corcoran chuckled indulgently, then made a sterner face. "Poor kid- little does he know that if he keeps this up he's going to be talking to old white geezers like me for a long, long time." He shook his head and sighed. "Seriously, his reticence ties in with the whole complex. Here's a boy who's very stressed by his new school experience and is seeking a way to retreat from that which frightens and overwhelms him. It has opened up his repressed grief at the death of his parents, the sense of rejection and abandonment. As for why he won't talk to me, it's because, first of all, he's at the stage where he resents all Anglos for their historic and continuing sins against the Dine. But, more important, because he doesn't want the problem to go away. He needs the problem. If I helped solve it, he'd have no excuse! Part of him is also very ashamed of himself too-of how excessive all this is. Of how obvious and, frankly, thin it is."

Again, Cree tried to compose her face and voice. "But he's been in boarding schools all his life. Why would he suddenly feel so much stress just now?"

"Ah. Two reasons. First, because he's been at run-of-the-mill schools where it's been easy to stand out, to wow everybody with his talents and intelligence. But at Oak Springs his peers are equally sharp. I think there's an implicit competition there, and Tommy is making it plain he doesn't feel up to it. I also understand he attended his first college-counseling session not long ago." Dr. Corcoran smiled modestly at his own insightfulness. "Suddenly the bigger world impinges. He wants to shine, to stand out, but now he discovers that as bright and talented as he is, he's just one of many. He's told just how competitive college admissions are going to be, how he's got to mind his p's and q's from here on in. Keep his 'cume' up, prepare for the SATs, and so on. The pressure can be especially hard on these rural kids."

"And the other reason?"

"Conditions at home. His grandparents are getting quite old. Tommy may claim he wants out, rejects rural life, and so on, but of course he cares for them, and seeing them in decline makes him feel even more insecure. After Oak Springs, on to college, probably moving far away. He knows his grandparents are approaching some major life passages, too-they can't hang on out there forever. The family home will never be the same, he'll never experience those old rhythms of life again. It scares him. He may also feel responsible, that he should be more help to the grandparents. Part of Tommy wants badly to get out of school, go back to the family hogan, be near his grandparents, care for them and be cared for. Postpone the big changes pending."

Cree nodded. It was all quite plausible. "Did you do any tests on him last night or today?"

"No cranial imaging. He's been through all that twice, no need to subject him to it again just yet. But we ran the EEG and another full blood spectrum. Normal in every respect."

"How about his reflexes? His proprioception? Sensation in his limbs?"

"The business with the right arm and spine? I'll admit it troubled me at first. My colleagues at the Indian Hospital say it always 'vanished' by the time they got a gander at him."

"Wouldn't that suggest that it's lasting longer? That the symptoms are progressing?"

"Oh, definitely." Dr. Corcoran smiled. "He's getting better at it. Practice makes perfect."

"And what about the self-injury yesterday?"

"The veritable cherry on top!" Dr. Corcoran said with satisfaction. "Kills two birds with one stone, you see. It fulfills his need to display another extreme and bizarre behavior, to 'prove' to us that something's badly the matter with him. And, symbolically, it's a reflection of his desire to punish himself-for not measuring up, for not taking care of his grandparents, and, paradoxically, for making all this fuss." He frowned, shook his head gravely. "None of which is intended to suggest this isn't very serious. A very serious situation."

Cree looked into his infuriatingly calm, self-possessed eyes. He was, she saw, one of that breed of psychologists who looked for a tidy, encompassing theory that wrapped the human psyche into a neat diagnostic bundle. The trailing ends, the parts that didn't fit, were to be ignored or cut to size. It was the outlook of a man accustomed to dealing with human problems in quantity: to treating an unending flow of short-term patients, managing their acute stages and referring them on, but never having to dig in for the long haul and the messy, irregular, and highly individual process of healing.