by Anise Eden
“Okay,” Ben said, sounding uncertain. “You sure you’re going to be all right? You’ve got everything you need?”
I rose up on my toes and kissed him on the cheek, then patted the messenger bag. “I’ve got everything, and I’ll be fine. Go on. I’ll let you know when we’re done.”
“I’ll be right outside.” Ben and Kai walked out and shut the door behind them.
I pulled a chair up to face Braz and Asa. Braz looked paler and somewhat jaundiced, and that awful contraption was holding his eyes open again. Asa sat with his hands on his knees, but instead of the peaceful, meditative expression I was expecting him to wear, his features were hard with worry. I gathered that Asa’s consciousness had already taken a backseat, and he was channeling Braz.
“Hi,” I said softly.
“Amada,” he said gravely. “No one else will give me a straight answer, so you must tell me the truth. Did my little plan put you in danger?”
I reached out to put my hand on Braz’s arm, but then remembered he had no sense of touch. “There’s nothing to worry about,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“The answer is yes, then,” he practically moaned. “I am so sorry, my sweet girl. I had no idea….”
“Of course you didn’t. It’s not your fault, Braz. You didn’t remember anything about the CIA being involved.”
“No. Skeet told me they suspected the CIA, but I thought that was too preposterous to be true. Oh! But to think I put you in any real danger, my dear, it torments me. You’re sure you’re all right?”
“I’m sure,” I said, trying to sound as soothing as possible. “Really. And Ben was looking out for me, so I was never in any real danger.”
“Thank God.” Asa’s expression eased a little.
I steered the conversation back to more positive news. “Ernesto said to tell you that Jennifer came looking for you on Sunday. She was worried about you.”
“Ah, so she is unharmed,” he said with profound relief.
“Ernesto also said, ‘Tell my brother that I love him.’”
Asa nodded and smiled. “Of course. We will be brothers always, even after death. It is like that with the people who share your ideals in life, especially in youth. Your souls are bonded forever.” His nose twitched. “Amada, did you do something wonderful?”
“What do you mean?”
“I smell a Derby. Did you bring a dying man a Derby?”
Smiling to myself, I said, “Yes, but I’m not going to light it and hold it up to your ventilator. I just thought you might like to smell one.”
“Ooooh.” Asa groaned with pleasure. “Yes, please, my dear. I love you more than life!”
I pulled the cigarette out of the messenger bag and held it near Braz’s nose. There were a few moans of ecstasy, followed by the plea, “Oh, take it away, I can’t stand anymore. It’s too wonderful!”
I put the cigarette away again and sat back down. Asa grinned broadly. “That was such a wonderful gift. You are truly a compassionate woman, Amada. I hope that Benjamin knows what he has in you.”
But I was less and less certain exactly what Ben did have in me. I decided to change the subject. “I’m glad you enjoyed it. I also brought a picture of Pedra, the one from your desk. I hope you don’t mind, I had to take it out of the frame.”
“That’s so lovely. Thank you. Please put her under my pillow. I want her close to me.”
I gently slid Pedra’s picture under his pillow. “There you go.”
“Thank you. But I can hear in your voice, there is something on your mind, something you’re not saying.”
“You’re right; there is. It’s something else I have to tell you about Jennifer.”
Asa’s expression became grim. “What is it?”
I tried to find a way to put the facts delicately. “We’re not sure what’s happened to her since Sunday.”
“Meaning? Please, I want to know everything.”
“Well, you know that Skeet left her voice and e-mail messages and she never returned them. He tried again with no luck, so he contacted the psychology department at Georgetown. They said she hasn’t been to classes since last week. Then he sent someone over to her apartment. Her roommates said they hadn’t seen or heard from her for about a week, but they just assumed she was with you.”
Scowling, Asa rubbed his chin.
“What is it, Braz?”
“That’s a bit concerning; it would not be like her to miss a class. As for her roommates not having seen her, Jenny has a key to my place. She came and went as she liked. I hope she hasn’t been staying there—not with those goons snooping around. Will you…?”
“Of course,” I said quickly, “I’ll have Skeet check into it.”
“Thank you.” Worry lined Asa’s face. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ll be of much help to you today. I’ve been flogging my brain, but I can’t remember any more than I’ve already told you. You can try to submerge into me again, but I strongly suspect that my brain will not let you back in—not after the way it kicked you out last time.”
The last thing I wanted was to cause Braz any further discomfort—emotional, mental, or otherwise. Then, all at once, I felt like a cartoon character with a light bulb over her head. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? “There might be one more thing we can try,” I said. “It’s not intrusive at all. It’s a Reiki technique called the Talking Symbol. Would you allow me? You don’t have to do anything….” I stopped and silently reproached myself as I realized what I had been about to say.
“Don’t do anything, just lie here?” After finishing my thought, Asa broke into hearty laughter. “Oh, Amada, thank you. I needed a laugh after all of that heavy conversation.”
Braz’s reaction was so unexpected that I couldn’t help smiling as well. “No problem.”
“Yes, please, go ahead and try whatever it is you were going to try. I do believe we are at that point where, as they say, we have nothing to lose. Are we not?”
I was amazed by his lightheartedness under the circumstances. “Okay, let’s give it a shot. I’ll try to communicate directly with your subconscious. If I get anything interesting, I’ll tell you afterwards. But first I have to figure out how to put my hands on your head.”
“Just climb on top of me. Don’t mind the tubes and machines.”
“Very funny. You know that’s exactly the moment when someone would walk in.”
“Better yet!” Asa grinned. “You are still a free woman who can do what she pleases.”
“That’s what you think,” I muttered.
“Meaning?”
“Nothing; never mind.” I was glad that no one had told Braz about my prisoner status. “Please just behave yourself and don’t say anything for a couple of minutes, okay?”
“Ah, Amada, you are a harsh taskmaster,” he murmured. “Okay, go ahead.”
I lowered the rail on the side of his bed and sat on the mattress next to Braz’s shoulder. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the procedure Asa had taught me the previous week during our Reiki training session. Pete had volunteered to let me practice on him. Using the Talking Symbol technique, I’d been able to have a conversation with the subconscious portion of Pete’s mind—a conversation that only I remembered afterwards.
I touched the clasp of the chain that held my pendant and hesitated. Kai had made the necklace to shield me from other people’s energy and ordered me to never take it off. Not unless I had to remove it to perform certain rituals, that was—Reiki rituals being among them.
I pushed my uncertainty aside and told myself it would be fine. After all, during my training, Asa had given me no reason to believe that using the Talking Symbol technique would be risky or dangerous in any way. Trust your own clinical judgment for once, I told myself. You have to take the training wheels off sometime. Besides, with Braz’s condition deteriorating, I knew it might be my last chance to find out what we needed to know. I unfastened the pendant and put it on the bedside table.
Taking
a deep cleansing breath, I mentally summoned the Reiki healing energy Asa had said would always be with me, waiting to be called upon. Next, I drew the appropriate Reiki symbol in the air near the top of Braz’s pillow, followed by another over his forehead. Then, with a bit of twisting and reaching, I was able to slide my hands beneath the frame of the tear-dropping device and place them on either side of Braz’s head. It wasn’t identical to the hand placement Asa had taught me, but I hoped it was close enough. I felt a catch in my throat as I noticed that someone had been meticulously caring for Braz, washing his hair and keeping his face shaved.
Then I closed my eyes and tried to direct my thoughts at Braz. Braz, this is Cate. Is there anything that I can help you heal today?
But all I heard was music—some instrument I didn’t recognize that was both haunting and soothing at the same time. I repeated the question. Still nothing but music.
Music spoke to the subconscious; I hoped that meant that I was in the right neighborhood, at least. Then I realized that to a lesser extent, poetry also spoke the language of the subconscious. I decided to use the Lima poem Braz had been thinking about so much recently. Maybe it would create some kind of opening.
I took my hands off of his head just long enough to retrieve the poem from my bag. Skeet had found it online and printed it out for me. I laid the paper on the bed where I could see it. The first two stanzas described the images that I had encountered while submerging into Braz: the stream in the desert, the hands untying knots, the lovers’ embrace. I directed another thought at Braz, the next line in the poem: We were forged together, a double helix, as inseparable as the building blocks of life….
The music stopped, and there was silence. I wondered if I had broken some kind of spell and ruined everything. I wished Asa were “awake” to guide me. But then, as though from a great distance, I heard Braz’s voice in my head, continuing the poem like a call-and-response: Tumbling and roaring through the city, then sleeping in the dream we made.
I felt a jolt of excitement and continued the thought: So bitter it is to dream.
Braz’s voice echoed: Better to be blank and empty, sleepwalking through each day, than to know the foul taste of dreams torn away by the same lovers who gave them life. A searing pain flowed from him into me.
Who tore your dreams away? I thought at him. For whom is the “The Desolate Kiss?”
For Jenny.
I gasped. I had expected him to say Pedra. I’d assumed the poem referred to the dream of their life together being torn away when she died. I hadn’t heard of him speak of any sadness Jennifer had caused him. Why for Jenny?
Because she is the one who betrayed me, his thoughts rang out. She has killed me.
My hands flew from Braz’s head to cover my mouth. Jennifer had poisoned him? Could Jennifer be CIA? Perhaps she was the poisonous female my mother had warned about in my dream days before. “Oh Braz….”
“What is it, Amada? Did it work? Did you find something?”
There was a dull ache in my chest. I knew that Braz would have no memory of the exchange I’d had with his subconscious mind, just as Pete hadn’t after my session with him. Jenny’s betrayal had been so traumatic for Braz that his brain had blocked it out completely. I wrestled with whether to tell him.
As though we’d switched roles and Braz was reading my thoughts, he said, “My dear, whatever you have seen, please bring it out. All my life I have sought truth, and I do not want to hide from it in my last hours. Please.”
I had to respect his courage and his wishes. I looked into his eyes and held his hand, even though I knew he couldn’t see or feel me. “You said the ‘The Desolate Kiss’ is in your head for Jennifer.”
“Really? Not for Pedra?” So he was surprised as well. “I thought I was thinking of that poem so much lately because I have been so desolate without my wife, and we are soon to be reunited.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” I said carefully, “so I went a little deeper, and Braz—I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Go on, my dear. Say it out.”
I squeezed his hand. “You said that Jennifer betrayed you, that she killed you.”
“Oh,” he said on a long exhale. “Oh no, Amada.”
“What is it?”
“I am remembering something.”
Every molecule of air in the room stilled. “What is it?”
Tears began to stream down Asa’s cheeks. “I don’t know if I can speak it,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “It’s unthinkable.”
Doubt felt like a weight on my chest. Maybe I shouldn’t have told him after all. I stepped over to Asa and dried his tears. “I’m here, Braz. You can tell me as much or as little as you like.”
“All right, Amada, I will try.” There was a long pause, followed by a labored sigh. Then he again began to speak. “Jenny was over at my place one afternoon last week. I think Tuesday.”
I sat back down next to the bed, pulled out the notebook and pen Ben had given me, and began to take notes.
His speech was halting at first, but gained strength and momentum as he told the story. “We had a beautiful session of lovemaking. I was usually the first one to fall asleep afterwards, but this time, she drifted off. I was fully awake, so I went to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. I tried to get online to check the news in Brazil, but my damned computer was doing some kind of update, and it was taking forever. I didn’t think Jenny would mind if I used hers. It was sitting open on the coffee table. It was password protected, but it only took me a few tries to guess hers. It was a variation on Lewin Lima’s name.”
He paused and smiled wistfully. “Not a very strong password—at least not for someone who knows her as well as I do. Then again, maybe the better part of her secretly wanted me to find out what was she was up to. Of course I wasn’t intending to be nosy; I only wanted to look at the news. But when the screen came up, I recognized my own words—private notes I had written on my research, which she must have found and scanned in at some point. You know when you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach? That awful feeling?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Well, I had that feeling. So I looked around more. I couldn’t open all of the files, but I saw enough to know that she had stolen a great deal from me, and that she was working with other people, some government agency. I found their e-mails. It was quite juvenile, in truth. They had each taken a code name. Jenny was Blackdragon, of all things, and there were others—Lancet, Daggertooth, and one who seemed to be the boss, Anglerfish. I read enough to put together that they wanted to use my research for some nefarious purpose, something about trying to find a way to damage the conscience. Although I was in shock, I had the presence of mind to copy everything I could onto the flash drive I kept on my keychain. Then I heard Jenny stirring in the bedroom. As I slipped the drive into my pocket, all of the pieces started to come together in my mind. That was when she walked up behind me.”
My breath caught in my throat. “What happened then?”
“We argued, of course. At first she tried to sound innocent, asked what I was doing on her computer. Maybe she thought I hadn’t seen much. But I told her I had seen everything. I poured us two cups of coffee, sat her down, and I let her have it, as you say here in the States.”
Cold tendrils of fear crept up my arms. Having just found out that his girlfriend was a secret agent spying on him for the government, Braz had let her have it? And I thought I’d done some risky things. “What did you say to her?”
“I told her that I knew her heart, and that she had no business working for these goons.” The fire and indignation in his voice gave me a taste of what it must have been like in the room during their confrontation. “I told her that she didn’t have to live like that, so contrary to who she really was. I told her that Skeet could find her work at NIMH, that she could do psychology research there. Or if she was too afraid of whoever she was working for, we could go back to Brazil and start a new life.�
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I marveled at his generosity, his insistence on believing in and nurturing her best self in spite of what she’d done. I began to see why Skeet—and most everyone else, it seemed—had become so attached to Braz.
“She tried to push me away, of course,” he said in a softer voice. “She told me that I was a naïve, silly old man. Did she think a beautiful younger woman like her would sleep with me without an ulterior motive? Cheap shots like that. But I know her well enough to know that she is not cold. She is not evil like the e-mails I was reading. And there was a true connection between us—maybe not love, but a spiritual kinship. I kept insisting that she leave those criminals, maybe turn them in if she could safely do so.”
There was another long pause. Then, in a raw voice, he recited the last stanza of the poem: “This beaten dog’s pure and hopeless hope is kept alive by my subversive heart: somewhere in your mansion of black rooms there is one devoted to me, and to regret. Like a mystic, I sicken and die with this faith.”
Hot tears stung my eyes. I wanted to give Braz my comfort, my condolences. Instead, I waited for him to continue.
“I think that’s what got to her,” he reflected. “It was the fact that I knew her heart, and that no matter what she said, I would never believe she was really one of them. So she had to prove it to me somehow, prove it to herself. That was when she pulled out the pen.”
“The pen?”
“Yes. She was so angry but crying at the same time. She said, ‘I’ll show you who I really am.’ Then she came at me and pressed the point of the pen into my neck—not very hard, just behind my ear. She moved so fast, I didn’t even have a moment to defend myself. That was the poison, I guess. I felt a slight sting, but I assumed it was a regular pen and that she was making a clumsy attempt at a dramatic, symbolic gesture—going for my jugular, so to speak. With everything we had between us, all that we had shared and felt for one another…. In retrospect, I suppose I was a naïve fool, but it never even entered my mind that she would actually try to harm me. As soon as she pulled away, the look of regret on her face told me that I had been right; she hadn’t really wanted to hurt me. She quickly gathered her things and ran out of the apartment. I was yelling at her the whole time to come back, to give up all of that nonsense and come with me to Rio.”