Greg Hollingshead - The Healer

After Wakelin finished talking there was a pause while Troyer fixed him with his pupils before he said, “You’re not going to find much for that kind of money.”

“Yeah,” Wakelin replied wearily. He had heard this many times.

“Of course, if you could see your way to coming in a little higher—” But Troyer was already shrugging, and in the tired casual voice of one advising a fool he added, “Drop by the office tomorrow. I can show you what I’ve got.” And he turned upon Wakelin a look that might have been intended to say he was sorry not to be able to be more encouraging, but what the look actually said was, Now you get the hell out of my sight.

Wakelin glanced across at the hairless man to see if he might offer some sort of foil for this sentiment, but everything about the look he received from that quarter made it clear that it was not for one such as Wakelin to know how it was inside that balaclava of flesh.

Wakelin walked down the echoing hall and out into the bright heat of the afternoon. He knew he could climb into his car and be back in the city by dinnertime. He knew he could just write off this whole gig. Flop down in front of the tube in time for the ten o’clock news. Wake up tomorrow and start on something quick and clean and over with by the end of the week. Something without all this northern history. This cast of the repressed.

Except that as he drove south, approaching Grant, with every conscious intention of passing through and keeping going, he turned in suddenly at a motel called the Birches. There the grass had been trimmed to the bases of the slender white trunks of those trees and made a green carpet to the river. There, owing to the fine summer weather, all the tired woman on the desk had available was a cabin out back. “Sounds good to me,” Wakelin said, and a few minutes later he was unlocking the door of a mock-log shack hardly big enough for a double bed, a small hot space smelling of mould spores, Pine-Sol, and cigarettes. Tens of thousands of cigarettes, from the decades when every holiday traveller smoked and the scenery when viewed at all was viewed asquint.

Wakelin was in the trance that goes with doing the opposite of what you’d intended, when everything has to be thought about because nothing now is going to be easier than to start making mistakes. You are off-track, which is to say you are divided against yourself, and who better qualified to fuck you up? For ventilation’s sake Wakelin left both the door and the one small window of his hot shack wide open, took off his shoes and socks, and shuffled down the carpet of grass to the river in its narrow channel.

Divided or not, he was not, it seemed, ready to give up on this story, and not because things were going so well. All he had for tomorrow was a pretext for reentering the Troyer Building. To learn what her father had to sell him. Mind you, given the general tenor of his welcome around here, this could be considered a significant achievement for one day. Tomorrow morning he’d be waiting out front when she opened for business, her father would still be upstairs shaving, and this time she would talk to him.

Not likely.

So why was he still here?

For a chance, like a believer, to touch the hem of her garment?

Wakelin looked to the water, sliding with a constant force. So swift, so black. Universal magnet for despair. He sat down. Not one for rash acts or anything like that, but a single move could undo that favourite little idea about himself forever.

Something not kosher between the father and the daughter. Not to this day, maybe, but once. He could feel it. Something.

Was this what was keeping him here? The story behind the story?

The shore opposite was talus at the foot of a height of black rock with the disshevelled appearance of igneous toothpaste squeezed a hundred feet out of the earth and fallen back on itself with a great weight. The cliff was barely in shadow, but the shadow was headed this way, across that spill of rock. Wakelin lay down on the grass where he sat, an arm over his eyes. He was hardly sleeping these days. Compensated by being half asleep most of the day and dozing at any time. There on the grass he fell asleep and dreamed that he was back in the city, in the summer night. At that small hour when the commotion stumbles to rest, when the roar of human commerce subsides to a broken peace, when at any moment you are liable to be jolted upright by a muffler-less acceleration, by a window slammed shut against a drunk bellowing in the street, by cats yowling and hissing in the grey backyards of the morning.

In the city Wakelin slept with a pillow over his ear, a feather buffer, but for some reason the pillow made the fear worse, and most nights he woke afraid, sometimes with a cry or a shout, sometimes crouched by the bed, toes gripping the fibre mat, no idea why, no particular memory of a particular dream, just the fear. This had been going on so long and was so familiar and at the same time so fresh a condition that Wakelin had all but forgotten it had been no different when Jane was alive, that it had not started with losing her. With Jane, when he bolted up in terror, he had trained himself to pass straight into the follow-through, pillow in hand, a comforter pulled from the hall closet as he passed, and he was on the futon in the living room, already working at getting back to sleep, rocking his hips in a steady rhythm, something he could not do in the same bed with Jane, who felt every shift, heard every sound. If so much as the pattern of Wakelin’s breathing changed, she was wide awake. What’s wrong? she would whisper, and she would be talking to him.

Nothing, Love. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.

What was wrong? He blamed the city, he still blamed the city, but he knew the city was not it. Not really. Sometimes when Wakelin slept it was as if the sweet flow of his dreaming were a supersaturated solution the faintest ping could crystallize to terror. As he slept, his mind would pass out through the pillow pressed against his ear, and it would range across the ambient field until when the moment was ripe it would pluck one sound and swell it to a chime. Ping! Time for your fear, Tim! This was how it happened on the riverbank behind the Birches. In the distance somewhere, all but beyond auditory range, probably, the slam of a screen door exploded like a gunshot inside his head, and it was a detonation of sorrow, a bullet of fear and longing. He sat up on the grass in the shadow of the black cliff, and the blue sky above him was perhaps not cold but it looked cold. He got to his feet shivering, the arm lately over his eyes now numb and useless, brushing himself off with the other, and walked stiffly back to his mock shack, which had retained the heat of the day with the same shabby tenacity it had retained the cigarette smoke of its occupants and the spores of the mould in the carpet and the cheap curtains, and he curled up on the warm bed with a gentle rocking of his hips, and he was grateful for that warmth now.

Caroline Troyer was sitting behind Crooked Hand’s counter. She was reading. Something was bothering her, and as she went on reading she half-thought it must be the man who had just been in looking for property (so he said), how his half-turn to the past and the habits of blindness and deception cultivated by that in him had muddied and compromised his nature, but then she realized that it was not him, at least not only him, but her own immediate state of intending to do something she wasn’t doing. Of knowing there was something but not knowing what it was. Like knowing something is there before you turn your head. Before you recognize it, it’s there as a husk, as the ghost of itself, waiting to be known. And then the sun had reached the cellophaned window, and the office did not get hotter, not yet, but the patch of bright amber light on the linoleum at the corner of her eye caused her, even as she continued to read, to think of heat, and that was how she remembered that she’d been meaning to plug in the fan, which she had unplugged when she went upstairs for lunch, right after the man had come in, and that’s what it was she wasn’t doing.