“And who am I?”
A shrug.
“You don’t remember?”
He looked at her, an off-center look, dark eyes focusing on her cheek. He was a big heavy-set man, thick through the shoulders, with a blunt broad nose and a grayish tinge to his skin, not exactly the coppery hue his alleged race was supposed to have, but close enough. Since he had taken that swing at her a couple of weeks back he had never quite been able to look her in the eye. So far as anyone could tell, he had no recollection of having gone on a rampage, of having hit her and hurt her. But some vestige of it must remain, she suspected. When he was around her he looked rueful and embarrassed and also sullen, as though he felt guilty about something but wasn’t sure what and was a little angry with the person who made him feel that way.
“Professor,” he said. “Doctor. Something like that.”
She said, “Close enough. I’m here to help you feel better.”
“Yeah?” Flicker of interest, swiftly subsiding.
“You know what I want you to do, Nick? Get yourself up and off that bed and over to the gym. Dante Corelli’s got the rhythm-and-movement workshop going down there right now. You know who she is, Dante?”
“Dante. Yeah.” A little doubtfully.
“You know the gymnasium building?”
“Red roof, yeah.”
“Okay. You get down there and start dancing, and dance your ass off, you hear me, Nick? You dance until you hear your father’s voice telling you to stop. Or until lunch bell, whichever one comes first.”
He brightened a little at that. His father’s voice. Sense of tribal structure: did him good, thinking about his father’s voice.
“Yeah,” he said. In his heavy way he started to push himself up from the bed.
“Did you have any dreams last night?” she asked offhandedly.
“Dreams? What dreams, how? I got no way of knowing.”
He had dreamed Blue Giant, the harsh and piercing light: that was this morning’s pick-room report. He seemed sincere in not remembering that, though.
“All right,” Elszabet said. “You go dance now.” She grinned at him. “Make it a rain dance, maybe. This time of year, we could use a little rain.”
“Too soon,” he said. “Waste of time, dancing for rain now. Rains don’t come till October. Anyway, what makes you think dancing’ll bring rain? What brings rain, it’s the low-pressure systems out of the Gulf of Alaska, October.”
Elszabet laughed. So he’s not completely out of things yet, she thought. Good. Good. “You go dance anyway,” she told him. “It’ll make you feel better, guaranteed.” She kicked the switch to knock the privacy screen down and went over to Tomás Menendez’ side of the room. He was sitting just as he had been before, listening to his bonephones. When she activated his privacy screen she braced herself for another touch of the green fog, but this time it didn’t come. Just about every other day now she had a whiff of it, an eerie sensation, that hallucination circling her like a vulture waiting to land. It was getting so that she was afraid to go to sleep, wondering whether this would be the night when the Green World finally broke through to her consciousness. That continued to terrify her, the fear of crossing the line from healer to hallucinator.
“Tomás?” she said softly.
Menendez was one of the most interesting cases: forty years old, second-generation Mexican-American, strong hulking man with arms like a gorilla’s, but gentle, gentle, the gentlest man she had ever known, soft-spoken, sweet, warm. In his fashion he was a scholar and a poet, as profoundly involved in his own ethnic heritage as Nick Double Rainbow claimed to be with his, but Menendez seemed really to mean it. He had turned the area around his bed into a little museum of Mexican culture, holoprints of paintings by Orozco and Rivera and Guerrero Vasquez, a couple of grinning Day of the Dead skeletons, a bunch of lively brightly painted clay animals, dogs and lizards and birds.
The year before last, Menendez had strangled his wife in their pretty little living room down in San José. No one knew why, least of all Menendez, who had no memory of doing it, didn’t even know his wife was dead, kept expecting her to visit him next weekend or the one after that. That was one of the strangest manifestations of Gelbard’s syndrome, the motiveless murder of close relatives by people who didn’t seem likely to be capable of swatting flies. Tell Menendez that he had killed his wife and he would look at you as though you were speaking in Turkish or Babylonian: the words simply had no meaning for him.
“Tomás, it’s me, Elszabet. You can hear me through those phones, can’t you? I just want to know how you’re getting along.”
“I am quite well, gracias. ” Eyes still closed, shoulders jerking rhythmically.
“That’s good news. What are you playing?”
“It is the prayer to Maguali-ga.”
“I don’t know that. What is it, an ancient Aztec chant?”
He shook his head. He seemed to disappear for a moment, knees bobbing, fists banging lightly together. “Maguali-ga, Maguali-ga,” he sang. “Chungirá-He-Will-Come!” Elszabet leaned close, trying to hear what he was hearing, but the bonephones transmitted sounds only to their wearer. The jacket of the cube he was playing with lay beside him on the bed. She picked it up. It bore a crudely printed label that looked homemade, half a dozen lines of type in a language that she thought at first was Spanish; but she could read a little Spanish and she couldn’t read this. Portuguese? The label had a San Diego address on it. Tomás was always getting shipments of things from his friends in the Chicano community: music, poetry, prints. He was a much loved man. Sometimes she wondered if they ought to be screening all these cubes and cassettes that he received. They might deal with things that could impede his recovery, she thought. But of course whatever he played was picked from him the next day, anyway; and it obviously made him happy to be keeping up with his people’s cultural developments. “Maguali-ga is the opener of the gate,” he said in a firm lucid voice, as though the phrase would explain everything to her. Then he opened his eyes, just for a moment, and frowned. He seemed surprised to have company.
“You are Elszabet?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“You have a message from my wife? She is coming this weekend, Carmencita?”
“No, not this weekend, Tomás.” There was no use in explaining. “What was that, what you were playing?”
“It is from Paco Real, San Diego.” He looked a little evasive. “Paco sends me many interesting things.”
“Music?”
“Singing, chanting,” Menendez said. “Very beautiful, very strong. Tell me, did I dream last night of the other worlds?”
“No, not last night.”
“The night before, though?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
He smiled sadly. “The dreams are so beautiful. That is what I write down: the dreams are so beautiful. Even though I must lose them, the beauty is what stays. When will I be allowed to keep my dreams, Elszabet?”
“When you’re better. You’re improving all the time, but you aren’t there yet, Tomás.”
“No. I suppose not. So I must not know, when I dream of the worlds. Is it all right that I write down that the dreams are so beautiful? I know we are not supposed to write things to ourselves, either. But that is a small thing, to tell myself about my dream, though I do not tell myself the dream itself.” He looked at her eagerly. “Or could I write down the dreams too?”
“No, not the dreams. Not yet,” she said. “Do you mind if I hear the new cube?”
“No, no, of course, here. Here.” He put the bonephones to her cheeks, pressing them on lightly, with a tender, almost loving touch. He tapped the knob and she heard a deep male voice, so deep it sounded like the booming of a great bullfrog, or perhaps a crocodile, chanting something steady and repetitive and vaguely African-sounding, a little barbaric, very powerful and disturbing. She heard the words that Menendez had been murmuring: Maguali-ga, Chungirá. Then there was a lot of what might have been Portuguese, and the sound of drums and some high-pitched instrument, and the noises of a crowd repeating the chant.