Greg Hollingshead - The Healer

To go to that place is to wake from thoughts inspired by the dream of freedom that are not freedom.

She is not free now, only remembering her secret place on the ridge as she drives her father’s truck through the dusk listening to a man so reactive to himself, so blind, that a properly intuitive choice such as where he will spend his solitude is perplexed, impulsive, in the end will be the result practically of chance; that the nature of his relationship with a woman he lost nearly two years ago is no less complicated a mystery for him tonight than it was on the day he lost her, his suffering hardly diminished, his life snagged, twisting on that loss. And five minutes after she has delivered this lost soul to his car, she will stand before another baffled devious sufferer, her father, whose pain instead of a maundering aggrieved soliloquy will issue in old rage, because he is the one who long ago laid claim to the unpredictable, and how dare she by similar behaviour presume?

She should phone. Where on this stretch has she seen a phone?

Her passenger rambles on. First they sell you their version, done out in the way they imagine resembles your own, and then they sell you what they have come to sell you. This is why to hear him you would almost think his disappointment was a small huddled sadness and not a wail of self-pity and flailing rage at the one lost.

One of her headaches is starting. She attends to the pain as to distant thunder, and then she attends to herself thinking about her father’s rage, and that is when she notices a cast to this thinking, a cast familiar yet difficult to discern because obscured by its subject, or rather by his nature, by his own cast. And that is when she understands that these thoughts, although hers, although old catches in old succession, are kinetic with other energy that is not simply her own old emotion. And she understands that this other energy is not her own anticipation arising out of past experience. And she knows that it is another’s, that it derives from some other site that is finding repercussion here.

And that site is the rage of her father.

And that site is active and it is active now.

“Did you get them?” Wakelin asked when Caroline Troyer returned to the truck. He knew she hadn’t because the whole time she was in the phone booth he had watched her lips.

“There’s no answer.”

“So they’re out. Aren’t we almost there?” Why was she shaking?

“Forty minutes.”

“And there you’ll be. Large as life. Obviously they’re not worried.”

Half an hour before she pulled over to call he had started telling her about Jane. The feeling he had as he did this, indulged himself shamelessly, was similar to the one on those occasions, always with women, he would lay himself wide open. Sometimes in arousal, sometimes in sorrow. Like a dog on its back, lolling, thighs splayed. A guttural freedom. Here I am, grovelling in my display. Rub or scratch as you will, only be careful. I bite. He had got talking about silence, and the next thing he knew he was talking about Jane.

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