Лоуренс Блок - Random Walk - A Novel for a New Age

“That’s all?”

“Just about.”

Jody considered this. “That’s in miles,” he said at length. “Aside from that, I figure we’re halfway. The hell, hoss, from here on it’s all downhill.”

From Dillon, in the southwest corner of the state, Guthrie plotted their route north on 41, skirting Butte on the east. Then north on 287 to Townsend and all the way across the state on 12. All the way to Miles City, anyway, and from there he would decide whether to hold to 12 and continue due east or follow the Pumpkin River south toward Broadus and pick up US 212 into South Dakota. Both routes stood out equally when he looked at his new map of Montana, but there was no need to hurry his decision. Miles City was a full four hundred miles away.

He wasn’t sure when they’d get there. Originally he’d set out to cover twenty miles a day, occasionally pushing a little ways further. In Idaho, over much more difficult terrain than they’d covered previously, they had still managed to log twenty miles each day. Now, with the last few ranges of the Rockies before them, soon to give way to the Great Plains, it seemed likely that they could increase their mileage without spending more hours on the march.

It stood to reason, but he was beginning to realize that reason wasn’t operating too effectively on this trek of theirs. Maybe whatever was guiding them had firm ideas about how much ground they should cover. He’d find out soon enough.

The group was growing. That should have slowed things down, it seemed to him, but it didn’t work that way. There were forty-two of them the last time he’d counted, and folks were joining up faster than he could learn their names, let alone get much sense of who they were. At night, camped alongside the road, there would always be six or eight people stretched out and breathing, with someone sitting beside each of them and helping them stay with the breath, bringing them out of it if they went unconscious, talking them through it if they ran into fear or pain or an inability to breathe.

And, while this was going on, more often than not there was someone having hysterics in a corner, or off to one side screaming, or forgiving themselves and their parents and God and their obstetricians, or discovering some hitherto unknown talent within themselves, or in a circle around Jody, learning how to heal pain with their hands.

“I put a foot wrong and my ankle went out on me,” Jody had explained, “and I could walk on it but it hurt me some, and when Martha did that the day before I put energy on it for her, so I thought to do the same thing for myself.”

“Physician, heal thyself,” Guthrie had said.

“Yeah, well, the thing is you can’t. It doesn’t work that way. I didn’t think it would, but I tried, and of course it didn’t. And I thought somebody else ought to be able to do it for me, because the thought came to me that if I could do this, anybody could do it. I had a feeling Martha could learn, and I taught her, and she fixed my ankle. And that purely amazed me. I was used to the idea of taking away somebody else’s pain, but when somebody took away my pain it felt like a total miracle. A small one, anyway.”

“Sara says there aren’t any little miracles.”

“One size fits all, huh? Could be. Anyway, I got to thinking, and the next thing that came to me was if anybody could do it, shit, everybody could do it. So I taught Sue Anne and Thom, and word got around and people started coming up to me and asking me to teach ’em. And you know how that made me feel?”

“Pretty good, I’ll bet.”

“Hell it did. Made me feel like homemade shit. Because if everybody could pull off this little magic trick, what was so damn special about Joseph David Ledbetter?”

“Oh, right. I see how that could happen. What did you do?”

“What do we all do when we start going nuts? I went to Sara.”

“What did she say?”

“She said to get that I could be perfect without being special, and I could be wonderful without being special, and I could even be special without being special.”

“Sounds like Sara.”

“And she also said to keep on teaching people whether I got all that or not, because all of us were letting go of crap we’d had stored away since birth, and a lot of people were getting headaches during the process of cleaning out all that crud. In other words, we needed a good supply of psychic anesthetists for all the emotional surgery that was going on.”

“Just because you think you’re a chicken doesn’t mean you are a chicken, and it’s safe to know that you’re not really a chicken, and you can love yourself even if you are a chicken, or even if you think you are. But in the meantime we can use the eggs.”

“Something like that. Thing is, I learned something by teaching people. Sue Anne told me she got a little headache herself every time she healed somebody, and I realized that you have to protect yourself against picking up other people’s pain. I was doing that myself, not realizing it because it always stayed at a low level. And somebody said that massage therapists have that problem; some of them get sick all the time because they’re releasing shit for other people and getting caught in the backwash.”

“So what do you do?”

“A shower’s good. Cleans your aura. That’s a little tricky to arrange around here, so I came up with this.” He demonstrated. “You put your hand at the inside of your elbow and just sweep it down the arm and see yourself brushing the negative energy off and discharging it through your fingertips. And then you do the same with the other arm.”

“And it works?”

“Seems to. Hey, what do I know, Guthrie? I’m just a guy who was driving up to Bend and strayed a little ways off the track.”

As the group grew, as it covered distance and increased in number, it seemed to be growing as well in its magnetic power. More and more as they crossed Montana they tended to find people waiting at a crossroads, people who had traveled dozens of miles to cut their route. Sometimes these new recruits were already equipped with a backpack and canteen or water jug, as if the same force that drew them let them know what they ought to bring. Others brought only themselves and the clothes they were wearing. Some of the new people were in a sort of fog, falling in with the group without knowing what was going on or why they were becoming a part of it. Others had had inner visions of one sort or another, or had heard voices, and when the group came into view on the western horizon they were either gratified that their vision was being validated or (and this was especially true of those with some sort of drug history) half convinced that the walkers were just another part of an ongoing hallucination.

Two couples got caught in the group’s magnetic field while they were in the middle of a scheduled week at Yellowstone, photographing bears and geysers before returning to Silicon Valley. One said it was time to go up into Montana, and the other three dutifully joined him in their camper, and away they went, heading north on 89. They parked and waited eight miles south of White Sulphur Springs, and when the group reached them they joined in, leaving the camper at the side of the road.

One of the women wasn’t sure she wanted to be with the group. Her friends jollied her out of it. “Aggie, you never want to be anywhere, and then once you’re there it’s fine. You probably didn’t want to be in the world in the first place.”

That night Aggie was one of several people who went into hyper-ventilation. Kate and Jamie monitored her breathing, and in the course of it she had a vivid memory of herself as a disembodied spirit, hovering on another plane of existence while two people had a loud drunken argument below her. The argument turned violent, and then the two made a sort of peace and began making love, but the love they made was fueled by their anger.