"I know your methods. They can't be free of danger." Adrienne drew her composure and fingertips together in one calm movement. "If you harm him in any way … I'll have you up for review."
Kendra nodded once more, and Adrienne had to give her this: You could not ruffle this woman. "You'll do what you must."
Clay stirred in his chair. "Adrienne, how old am I?"
She started, not expecting this. "Twenty-five."
"An adult, right? Now let me get this straight: Back in Tempe, you told a group of researchers that I was sane, that I was competent to make my own decisions, and that you'd testify to it in court, if it came to that. Is that right?"
Her mouth was going dry. "Yes."
"Then butt out."
It was so brusque, Adrienne wasn't even sure she'd heard him correctly, until Kendra spoke up, an unlikely ally.
"Clay," she said sharply, sternly, eyes piqued with a hint of what must have been a fierce demeanor underlying her calm grace. "This woman is concerned enough about you to accompany you more than halfway across the country. If she and I have a professional disagreement, that's fine, I'm accustomed to them. But I would appreciate your respect for her concern. She's earned that."
Well, blow me down, Adrienne thought, fairly astounded. She watched Clay lower his gaze, chastised. He turned to her, a crease showing between his eyes.
"Sorry," he said softly. "But this is important to me. So trust me. I want to do this. I have to."
Adrienne nodded, resigned. It did not imply her blessings.
Kendra had him swallow a pair of tablets — psilocybin derived from Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms, she explained, one of nature's numerous keys to unlocking psychological doors. In general, her best results had come from using psilocybin, although some subjects seemed to react more favorably to mescaline.
She sent him to the bathroom to sheathe his penis in a Texas catheter. The tube coiled out of his jeans, down to a urine bag that he hung from a special hook on the chair. This would be no brief hypnosis, she cautioned, and subjects often voided their bladders — sometimes from simple prolonged need, other times from loss of sphincter control while plunging deep into more turbulent regions.
Blinds drawn, the room was dimmed until the masks seemed to float around them like ancient nobles peering through the dusk. Clay sat in his chair, a voyager breathing deeply to calm himself. Kendra set before him a small portable table, on which stood a pyramid of black plastic and metal, as tall as a hardback book tented spine-up. When she toggled a switch recessed into its back, a socket in front began to pulse with soft light. Adrienne could not see the bulb itself — probably a good thing — only the languid strobing across Clay's face, shadow/light/shadow/light, his impassive features in continual alternation.
"I want you to stare into the light, Clay, the center of the light." Kendra's voice was cultivated and practiced, as smooth as a perfect lullaby. "There's only the light … and the sound of my voice…"
For minutes she lulled him onward, the set of Clay's eyes — frequently so hard and wary — softening with glazed surrender. Don't go, Adrienne almost said, an inexplicable sorrow coursing through her, as if he were leaving the room, the country, the year, with a risk that he might never return whole.
Kendra gradually took him through his life in reverse, leapfrogging a year or two at a time. "Where are you now?" she would ask, and he would answer in small, soft syllables: at home … at school … looking at my baby sister who forgot how to breathe. Days of pain and sorrow, yet they rarely disturbed the serenity of his countenance. He knew peace in this inner realm.
Adrienne felt an elbow nudging her side; Sarah nodded toward the door, the hallway, a question in her eyes. They stepped out as quietly as possible, pulling the door closed.
"I know you're here as a prisoner of circumstances," Sarah said, "but can you at least entertain a slightly open mind?"
"I don't know. I'm … I am trying." She tried to step away for a moment, gather her thoughts. "It's easy to be seduced by the novelty of it … but I don't know." She spun on her heel to plant herself before Sarah again. "Don't you think I want to believe in what she says she can achieve? I do. I do. But I'm concerned about what it could do to Clay. And a part of me still thinks no, this is too simplistic. The collective unconscious? There isn't even agreement that there is such a thing."
"But you believe it exists."
"Yes."
"And you believe it can emerge in dreams, right?"
Again she agreed, recalling what had, above all, convinced her. A case documented by Jung in Man and His Symbols, in which a fellow psychiatrist had brought him a booklet handwritten by the man's daughter, given to her father as a Christmas present. She was but ten, the vignettes she had written a series of a dozen dreams she'd had while eight years old. The dreams were filled with imagery and symbolism she could never have been aware of on any level but intuitive: dreams of death and regeneration, of beasts devouring creation, of dancing pagans storming heaven. She had dreamt the myths of the world.
A year after committing them to paper, she had died. In her dreams, so unlike those of a child, it was as if some hidden cleft of her mind had known what was imminent.
"Yes," said Adrienne. "I believe it does."
"Then it's there. For you, it's there." Sarah clasped both of Adrienne's hands between her own, rubbing. "And if it emerges in dreams, it's because it has a need to. And if that need is there, well … who's to say it might not flow toward another outlet if it's made available?"
"Maybe you're right. I want you to be right." She stepped forward, into the safer harbor of Sarah's waiting arms. I want you to be right, I want it there, waiting for us on the other side of consciousness, saying, I was here all along — you just never asked me until now.
Perhaps she was not nearly so opposed to Kendra Madigan and her techniques as she was to the idea of turning Clay over to someone who could offer him something she could not. It could have been anyone and she would have found a reason. We healers, what a territorial breed we are. Like the missionaries of different faiths who vie for the privilege of being first to convert the savages.
"Let's go back in," Sarah said, then gave Adrienne's hands a kiss and, holding firm, led the way.
The regression continued, Kendra Madigan taking Clay back to a loose and liquid awareness of prenatal existence, for which he seemed to have few words, although body language spoke with its own eloquence. He folded into a fetal position while scooting deeper into the curve of the chair, gently rocking himself back and forth, as if cresting the buoyant waves of a warm ocean.
"Now I want you to go back even farther, Clay," Kendra said, "back before there ever was a Clay. You'll remember if you let yourself. But you can't go straight back, because there's only so far you can go in that direction … only so much Clay can remember on his own because there wasn't always a Clay. But you're part of something much older. So you have to find a new thread to follow. You still have to keep going back … but sideways this time. Do you understand what I mean by that?"
His head raised a fraction. "Yes…"
"That's glorious, Clay, that's wonderful. Now … I'm going to leave you for a while, but I'll be back. I'm going to leave you to find your own way. I want you to follow the paths that open up, and listen to the drums. Go where the drums lead. Deeper, and deeper … and deeper…"
Kendra pulled away and reached for a remote control. With a few pecks of her finger there came from hidden speakers a low and steady rhythm, hypnotic in its own right. It thumped like echoes off a canopy of green, woven with the brown of ancient boughs. Adrienne found herself drifting with it, a timeless resonance taking root in heart, in bones, in soul.