Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

“So what’s going on?” inquired Holly, as she helped him hang his book bag crossways, around his neck and athwart his chest.

“I heard you talkin’ with Dawson about the Machete Man yesterday morning.”

Shit. “Did you tell Dawn?”

“No. But we got to get a gun. I tried Special Agent Pender’s last night, an’ I can do it, Auntie, I can shoot it.”

“I see.” Holly bent her forehead to his; they looked into each other’s eyes and breathed each other’s breath-this was the Honi, a ritual Hawaiian gesture she’d learned at Esalen. Marley had obviously failed to brush after breakfast-she could smell cereal and hot chocolate on his breath-but now didn’t seem like the right time to mention it. (Timing and forbearance: two niceties some parents, Holly’s own mother included, never learned.)

“I’ll ask around,” she said. “And in the meantime, I’m also going to ask around, see if anybody on the island teaches kickboxing. Just to tide you over.”

“You’re the best, Auntie.” He kissed her on the cheek, hopped out of the bus, executed a karate kick with one bare foot, then the other. “Pow,” he said. “Take dot, Machete Mon-right in the tessicals.”

GPM, thought Holly. Good Parenting Move. She told herself she was starting to get the hang of this thing. Of course, Marley hadn’t reached puberty yet. Tek pride was the St. Luke term: he ain’ tek pride yet. That’s when the going really got tough, everybody said. She could only hope she’d be ready when the time came.

It was snowing in Lewis’s dream. Gray snow. Thick gray snow falling silently from a darkened daytime sky. A voice called come inside before ya burn ya feet off. That’s when he realized it wasn’t snow, it was ash. The volcano had blown. He ran for the house, a wooden shack painted flesh pink, its roof already obscured. But he couldn’t make headway-the ashes were up to his shins. Skin sloughed from his feet, flesh melted from his calves…he could see white bone through the ash…he slogged toward the shack…peculiar how there was no pain…now he was teetering, tiptoeing on the stumps of his ankles like a ballerina en pointe…he wasn’t going to make it…the ash was high, higher, choking him….

“Mistah Lewis.”

He opened his eyes. He was in his own bedroom, on his own island. No volcano, no eruption. “Whazzit?”

“Dr. Vogler is waiting downstairs, sah.” Johnny shoved the bedroom door open with his hip, backed in holding a silver breakfast tray with a glass of rum-spiked tomato juice and a bottle of aspirin. Indispensable-the man was indispensable.

“What time is it?”

“Half past eleven.” Johnny set the tray down next to the bed.

“Fuck me,” Lewis moaned as he sat up. Valium and white rum: a potent combination.

“Looks like ya already took cyare a dot, Mistah Lewis,” said Johnny, stooping to pick something up from the floor.

“Hunh?”

“Lucky t’ing you ain’ smuddered.” Johnny handed him the brassiere that had been lying next to the bed. It was an enormous black underwire job-44, double E cup. Lewis moaned again as it all came back to him, unspooling in fast reverse. The more recent memories were the most sporadic-retinal flashes of Emily Epp squatting atop him, nude, eyes closed, pale watermelon breasts swaying. But he remembered the lime grove all too starkly. Those earlier images were seared in, sights, sounds, smells, even the touch of the Montserrat girl’s lips was-

Montserrat. The volcano. His dream. Could he somehow…? No! Ten t’ousand times no. He’d felt nothing, he told himself firmly. The idea that you could take in another human being’s soul or spirit with their dying breath was absurd. Beyond absurd-it was insane. He’d dreamed of Montserrat because he knew that was the whore’s island.

Lewis took a sip of the Bloody Mary Ann, belched tomato juice. “Take Dr. Vogler out to the patio, bring him some coffee, tell him I’ll be right-”

“Mistah Lewis.”

“-out. What?”

Johnny nodded toward the bedroom window. The sky was nearly as dark as it had been in Lewis’s dream.

“Little late in the season for a storm, isn’t it?” said Lewis. There was a rhyme every St. Luke kid learned as a toddler: June, too soon; July, stan’ by; Au-gus’, it’s a mus’; Septembah, remembah; but Octobah, it’s ahl ovah.

“It’s still early in the mont’, sah. Dey ahlso say the Octobah storm, she ain’ blow so fierce, but she piss lak hell.”

“Put Vogler in the drawing room,” said Lewis. “I’ll be right down.”

Blue seersucker two-button sport coat, blue-and-white butterfly-patterned bow tie. “I’m afraid we’re going to be having another truncated session,” said Vogler, glancing pointedly at his watch.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Lewis. “I don’t really want to do this anymore anyway. I should have called you to cancel, but it slipped my mind, what with the funeral arrangements and all.”

The psychiatrist blinked a few times behind the thick lenses of his reddish-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses. “I have to tell you, Lewis, I think that’s a bad idea. You-”

Lewis cut him off. “If so, it’s not my first, and it certainly won’t be my last. End of discussion.”

Vogler shrugged. “Your decision.” He glanced at his watch again-he was taking this better than Lewis had expected. “You still have a few minutes on the clock-anything you’d like to talk about? As long as you’re paying for it.”

“Come to think of it, there is something I wanted to ask you. I was thinking things over last night. You know, thinking about Hokey, how easily it can all be taken from us, realizing how precious every day is. And the upshot was, I decided to quit dicking around and get started on that novel I’ve been telling myself I was going to write since…since prep school anyway.”

“That’s encouraging,” murmured Vogler.

“The thing is, I have this character, he-I mean she-She’s totally nuts, but I’m not sure what to call it specifically.”

“What are her symptoms?” Vogler was still reserving opinion as to whether the query was genuine, or a more elaborate version of Doctor, I have this friend…

“That’s the thing-she doesn’t really have any. Except she believes something totally crazy…oh, I don’t know, say she thinks she’s a vampire or she believes in ghosts or something like that-don’t worry, I’ll think of something more original. But say she really believes something that couldn’t be true, and it makes her do bad things, but other than that she acts perfectly normal.”

“Does she have hallucinations?”

“I don’t think so.”

Vogler decided the query was genuine. “Sounds like what you’re describing is Delusional Disorder. We don’t see it in a clinical setting very often. It’s a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia, but unlike schizophrenia, hallucinations are rarely present, psychosocial functioning is generally unimpaired, and the behavior is generally well within normal parameters, except where the specific delusion is directly concerned. And whereas with schizophrenia, the delusions tend to be what we refer to as bizarre-i.e., clearly implausible and not derived from ordinary life experiences-for a diagnosis of Delusional Disorder, they have to be nonbizarre.

“That’s where the diagnosis gets tricky, though. All sorts of cross-cultural factors come into play, especially where the delusion is of a religious or spiritual nature.”

“How about something like…I read somewhere there are societies where they believe the soul leaves the body with the last breath?”

“The Ibo,” said Vogler promptly. “I did an undergraduate paper on them. It’s a perfect example of the problem I was just telling you about. The Ibo belief, for instance, that every human has two souls, the Maw and the Nkpuruk-Obi, both of which leave the body with the last exhalation-that would be considered nonbizarre if held by an Ibo in Nigeria, but bizarre if held by a Catholic in Cleveland.