“Muwalid’s cell phone.”
“Right. I’d bet that’s what they were looking for. The other thing is that.” He pointed to the statue. “You know what that is?”
“A religious statue?”
“It’s a Santeria cult figure, Santa Barbara, aka Shango, theorisha of thunder and violence. That’s not supposed to be in a regular straight-up white guy’s house.”
“I don’t know, people collect all kinds of weird shit.”
“True. But he’s also got this.” Here Paz held up a double-bladed axe made of wood, painted red and yellow, from which depended a string of red and white beads. “This little axe is anoshe, the symbol of Shango, and the bracelet is aneleke. You only get aneleke at an initiation, when you’re made to anorisha. Also, you notice that sweet smell? That’somiero. They smear it on objects and people during ceremonies. No, this isn’t a tourist item. It’s a working shrine. Wilson, or someone he knew real well, was involved in Santeria.”
“You know about this stuff?”
“More than I would like,” said Paz, putting down the axe. Suddenly there was too much spit in his mouth. He said, “Are you hungry, by the way? I only had some cookies for breakfast.”
A little startled by this change of subject, Morales replied, “I could eat, yeah.”
“We’ll swing by the restaurant,” said Paz. “My mom’ll make us something.”
Lorna drives to the hospital and wonders yet again if she is in love. No, that’s crazy, the man is delightful, sure, but also a completely unreliable womanizer, he has the whole act down, the charm, the showing off the new sweetie and so forth, the mom even, but even as she thinks this she knows she is making it up and feels hollow and helpless, as if caught up in a current. Circling the drain, she thinks cynically and laughs.
Speaking of circling the drain: the first person she meets when she passes through the locked ward is her old boyfriend Howie Kasdan, M.D. As always when he leaves his office and ventures into the clinical world, Dr. Kasdan is wearing a long white coat, from the pocket of which peeks a stethoscope, although to Lorna’s knowledge Dr. Howie has not checked for heart sounds in a long while. He has his foot propped up on a chair and is writing on a clipboard braced against his knee, but he notices Lorna despite her usual camo costuming and flashes his caps at her.
“Lorna! Hey, you look great. You look like you dropped some weight.”
“Thank you, Howie,” says Lorna coolly. “What brings you into actual patient contact?”
“Oh, one of my drug test subjects, paranoid schiz, just went into a complete remission. It could be a real breakthrough. I mean this guy is likenormal? He wants to know what he’s doing in a loony bin. I mean he only chopped two of his spouses into wife stroganoff?”
“Wait a minute, this isn’t Horace Masefield?”
“That’s the guy. A friend of yours?” More caps.
“I was there when he went ballistic. I actually saw him remiss. What kind of drug is this?”
“It’s called traxomonide. It’s a completely new approach to brain chemistry, operates directly on the SEF2-1 mutation, which shows increased allele frequency in schizos. It codes for a helix-loop-helix protein that we think may have a significant role in?”
“How big is your N, Howie?” Lorna asks.
Kasdan frowns; he is not often interrupted in his expositions. “A hundred ten. They’re here, and in Chatahootchee, and in a couple of other sites.”
“Have there been any other remissions like this?”
“Not that I know of, but we just started the study, the drug’s barely reached therapeutic levels. I wanted to get Masefield scanned as soon as possible, and I know we’re going to see changes. I’m totally pumped about this.”
Previously, Lorna would have been pumped herself at the prospect of fame and fortune represented by a new mental health drug even at one remove, but not anymore. It isn’t just that she no longer cares for Kasdan, nor that she has less faith in the chemical model than formerly. No, it is learning that what she had witnessed had probably been an artifact of some new dope and not…what? Something rich and strange. It is like learning that Mom and Dad were really Santa Claus. It makes her sad, and she knows it has something to do, in a confusing way, with what is going on with Jimmy Paz.
“Lorna?”
“Hmm?”
“Something wrong?”
“No. Why?”
“You looked like you were zoning out there. Are you still on medication?”
“No.”
At that moment Lorna feels a rush of weakness pass through her body, so that she nearly staggers and has to touch the wall for balance. Sweat oozes on her brow and lip. “I have to check on a patient,” she says. “Nice seeing you!” And she hurries off on wobbly knees.
What wasthat all about? she wonders as she inspects herself in the staff bathroom mirror a moment later. She looks pale, and more than that, she feels fragile. The nice oily-in-the-limbs feeling from this morning has quite vanished, and she recalls that blast of pain at the kitchen sink. And now this. Could it have been long-suppressed repugnance of Howie? Unlikely. A return of the panic syndrome, from which she had been remarkably free of late? Possibly. She sits on a plastic chair and takes deep breaths. She palps the lymph nodes in her neck. Are they larger, more rubbery? She can’t tell. She washes her face and reapplies makeup. Something is still not right.
On her way to Emmylou’s room she passes a doctor’s scale. Lorna has never weighed herself in public before, but now she steps on it and shoves the little sliding weights around. She has dropped seven pounds. She tries to convince herself that it is the exercise kicking in and fails. A little knot of fear starts spinning in her belly. She thinks of the old cliche, even paranoids have enemies, and there’s one for hypochondriacs too. She leans against the wall and uses her cell phone to dial Dr. Mona Greenspan, but when the secretary answers she breaks the connection. This has to stop, she tells herself, there is nothing wrong with me, I am not a crock, I do not have cancer.
Emmylou Dideroff is sitting up in bed reading her Bible. She looks up when Lorna enters and smiles. Lorna says, “Haven’t you finished that book yet?”
“I keep hoping it’ll turn out different. Ever read it?”
“In college. As literature. How are you feeling?”
“Everyone asks me that and I tell them I wish they’d stop making me take all these pills. I can’t stand being this dopey.”
“It’s the Dilantin, probably. They don’t want you to have another seizure.”
“It wasn’t a seizure. I’m not epileptic.”
“I was there when you had it. It looked like a seizure to me.”
“Everyone in a Santa Claus suit ain’t Santa, as my daddy used to say. He uses our bodies. I mean God does. What elseis there? People don’t understand that, they think it’s all airy-fairy special effects, but we’re meat; notjust meat, but mainly so.”
“So what doyou think happened, Emmylou?”
“It just seemed like the right thing to do, to touch him. And the demon came out of him. It wasn’t me, of course, but the Holy Spirit. In professional exorcisms, they use teams, half a dozen people sometimes and it can take days. You don’t know about this? Well, the church keeps it dark for obvious reasons, but you can still get an exorcism done. Anyway, God decided that Horace Masefield had been crazy long enough and I was going to be the instrument of liberation. Nearly broke me doing it, but it wouldn’t’ve been the first time.” She smiles and taps on the Bible. “I guess y’all can sure tell me apart from the Son of Man when it comes to the exorcist business. You don’t believe a word of this, do you?” She seemed pleased with that for some reason.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t. It turns out that Mr. Masefield was taking an experimental antipsychotic drug. It just happened to take effect at that time.”