Lunatic's Game

by Margaret Lashley

  “Where’s he going?” Dr. Brown asked.

  I tried to shake free of my stupor. “Uh ... I have no idea. Am I going to be all right, doctor?”

  “Ms. Drex, I’m a doctor, not God. Only he knows for sure.”

  A flare of indignation helped thaw my frozen state. “Typical,” I muttered to myself. “Of course God has to be a man.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Dr. Brown, what will happen if this thing ... this twin ... gets bigger?”

  “If it begins to exert pressure on your brain, any manner of symptoms could occur.”

  “Like hallucinations?”

  “Well, yes. I suppose. Why? Have you had any?”

  “I ... uh ....”

  Grayson burst into the office. He shoved a receipt in front of Dr. Brown’s face. “Bill’s paid in full.” He grabbed the MRI and my file from the doctor’s desk and turned to face me. I was speechless.

  “Ready to go, dear fiancé?” he asked.

  I bolted to my feet like a conspirator in a prison break. “Uh ... yes.”

  “She should be under the care of a physician,” Dr. Brown said.

  “She will be,” Grayson said. “I’m a doctor.”

  Dr. Brown’s expression was as stunned as mine.

  “I’ll be sending for the rest of her records,” Grayson said. “In the meantime, thank you, Doctor, and have a good day.”

  Grayson locked his arm around mine and led me out the door. I was about to press him for details, but an orderly passed by pushing a patient on a gurney. The patient’s face was almost fully enveloped in a horrible, pinkish-purple tumor that was pulsing with veins. I cried out and nearly collapsed to my knees.

  “Drex!” Grayson grabbed me before I hit the floor. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t want that to happen to me!”

  “What?”

  “The patient who just went by. The one with the horrible tumor.”

  He settled me on my feet. “I think she was just pregnant.”

  “No, Grayson. Her face— It was hideous!”

  “Shhh! Lower your voice. She wasn’t that bad. I’ve seen worse on dating profiles.”

  “Her whole head was covered in a tumor. Didn’t you see it?”

  Grayson’s face went slack. “Oh. Wow. I think I know what’s going on here.”

  “What? It’s not that coup contraband thing, is it?”

  “You really should pay more attention, Drex. No. It’s not that.”

  “What, then?”

  “I’ll explain on the ride home.”

  “Will you have to erase my memory afterward?” I joked half-heartedly.

  Grayson kept his eyes ahead. “We’ll see. But at this rate, probably not. You don’t seem to be able to keep a straight thought in your head.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “THANK GOD I DIDN’T take Earl with me,” I said, sucking in a lungful of fresh air as we walked to the Mustang in the hospital parking lot. “He already thinks I’m half guy. Now I’ve got the gonad to prove it.”

  “Having a gonad doesn’t make you half a guy, Drex.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “No. It makes you a hermaphrodite.”

  I scowled. “If you’re trying to cheer me up, you should work on your bedside manner, Dr. Grayson. What kind of doctor are you, anyway? Or was that another lie?”

  Grayson looked offended. “What do you mean another lie?”

  “Are you a brain surgeon or what?”

  “I’m a certified holistic practitioner.”

  “Holistic medicine? Isn’t that curing people with rocks and crystals and psychic crapola?”

  “Don’t forget needles and potions and poultices,” Grayson said sourly.

  “Oh, great.”

  I fumbled for the keys.

  “I think I should drive, Drex. You’re in no shape to be behind the wheel. In your state, you might mistake a red light for a black hole.”

  After thinking that a woman’s face was a tumor, I didn’t bother to argue his point. I handed him the keys. Grayson opened the passenger door for me, waited until I was buckled in, and handed me my medical scans.

  As he closed the door and walked around to the driver’s seat, an odd numbness overtook me. I felt out of my element—as if I’d fallen down a hole and landed in someone else’s life ... in someone else’s reality.

  “Grayson, thank you. I’ll pay you—”

  “Forget it.” He closed the driver’s door and reached for the ignition. “That was a lot to take in. We should do an energy clearing on you when we get back to your place.”

  I crinkled my nose. “Couldn’t I get a chocolate milkshake instead? Now that I’m gonna die, who cares about my thighs?”

  “You’re not dying. Look, I know you don’t believe it, but alternative healing modalities have been around for thousands of years. Why would people keep using them if they didn’t work?”

  “Because they didn’t have real medicine back then?”

  “Oh. So sawing open your skull, digging out parts of it and hoping for the best is real medicine?”

  I shrunk back in my seat. This couldn’t be happening to me. The scans had to be wrong. My nose grew hot. I fought back tears. “You said you think you know what’s wrong with me. So, what is it?”

  “It’s just a theory. I need to run some tests on you first.”

  “Tests? What, are you going to do? Read my aura? Fix a hole in my psychic energy field?”

  “No.”

  “Come on. Have you ever seen any of that holistic crap work?”

  “Absolutely. I don’t know why you’re so skeptical, Drex. There’ve been at least a hundred scientifically run clinical trials demonstrating the effectiveness of all sorts of things that, according to Western medicine, shouldn’t work.”

  I sniffed back a tear. “Like what?”

  “Well, take the placebo effect, for one. In a lot of pharmaceutical trials, people given a sugar pill got results as good as those taking the actual medicine. Stuff like that drives doctors nuts. But it kind of proves the whole tenet behind the holistic approach.”

  “What? That everything’s a crapshoot?”

  “No. Just the opposite. Everything’s a placebo, Drex. If you believe whatever you’re doing will heal you, it will. Holistic medicine taps into our inner capacity to heal ourselves.”

  “So you think I can get rid of this twin thing by wishing it away?”

  “Maybe. But then again, why would you want to? You’re unique, Drex. And I think that’s why you’ve been seeing things.”

  I jerked my head around to face him. “Why?”

  “You heard the doctor. This vestigial twin thing is next to your pineal gland. The impact of the bullet must’ve dislodged it. Shaken it loose. Now it’s pushing up against your pineal gland.”

  “So? What’s that got to do with seeing ghosts?”

  “Ancient cultures called the pineal the ‘third eye.’ The spiritual eye. The seat of enlightenment. It’s what lets us see beyond. It’s the gateway to other worlds ... other dimensions, if you will.”

  “Bull crap, Grayson! We’ve all got pineal glands. If that were true, we’d all be seeing ghosts.”

  “Maybe we do—when we’re kids, before our pineal glands calcify over. Remember how you were as a small child? Carefree. Joyful. Full of imagination and wonder? Anything seemed possible—even creating your own special world?”

  “Sort of, I guess.”

  “That’s what it’s like to have a fully-functioning pineal gland.”

  “So what happens? Why does it quit working?”

  Grayson sighed. “Lots of reasons. Adulthood, mainly. Changes in our hormones and diet cause it to calcify. Most people lose function by the time they’re seven or eight. Getting it back is what the life work of most mystics and shamans is all about. Some say it’s the true goal of yogis, and why yoga was developed in the first place.”

  “I thought yoga was an exercise.”

/>   “Here in the States, maybe. Power yoga. Swing yoga. They’ve lost the whole point.”

  “If it’s not to fight flab, what is the point of yoga?”

  “To awaken the kundalini energy and experience cosmic consciousness and union with the divine. To reconnect with the life force that brings bliss.”

  “Well, I hate to break it to you, but my pineal gland must still be calcified. I’m not feeling anything even close to bliss.”

  Grayson laughed. “You’re either the luckiest person on Earth or the unluckiest. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Mind if we stop at that medical supply place over there?”

  “Why?”

  “I need some Ten20 conductive paste. I’d like to give you an electroencephalogram.”

  “Electric shock treatment? No way!”

  “No. An electroencephalogram. To measure your brain waves.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Not physically, no.”

  I bit my lip and weighed my options. I had none. And I owed Grayson big time for my hospital bill.

  “If I let you do this, do you promise you won’t tell Earl a word about it?”

  Grayson raised his hand in a Boy Scout pledge. “As your physician, it’s my sworn pledge to maintain your confidentiality. Your medical records are on a need-to-know basis.”

  I grimaced. “That’s what scares me about you, Grayson. Who do you think needs to know?”

  WHILE GRAYSON WAS IN the store, I had just enough time to increase my paranoia to psychosis level. Why had he paid my bill? What was in it for him? What was really going on here?

  Grayson returned to the car carrying a paper bag. “Have electrode paste, will travel,” he quipped.

  “So what am I? Some new experiment for you?”

  He smiled and climbed in. “I have to admit, your case is most intriguing.”

  “What if I don’t want to take your electro-polygraph thing?”

  “Electroencephalogram. Come on. Like I said, it won’t hurt. I do it to myself all the time.”

  “Wait. Is that why your head’s shaved, and you had those tentacle marks all over your skull?”

  “Yep.” Grayson turned to me and smiled. “Good deduction, by the way. And, seeing as how your head is already shaved, now’s the perfect opportunity to get an electroencephalogram of your alpha brain waves. We’ll need a baseline for comparison. You see, with your pineal gland reactivation you—”

  “Sorry, Grayson. I’m not so sure about this. Things with you keep getting weirder and weirder. Enough with this baloney!”

  “It’s not baloney, Drex. You have a unique opportunity here. I don’t want to see you waste it.”

  “An opportunity? For what? Seeing ghosts? Going crazy?”

  “No. For seeing ghosts and not going crazy.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  THE MUSTANG FLEW PAST the pinewoods and wide-open pasturelands between Gainesville and Waldo. An early autumn frost had turned the wiry grasses an endless shade of gray that echoed my mood precisely.

  “So how’s this electro whatever-agram going to keep me from going crazy?” I asked Grayson as he swerved to miss an already flattened armadillo.

  “It’s not. It’s simply a measuring tool. An EEG displays your alpha brainwave activity. The more alpha waves you’re producing, the more relaxed your nervous system is.”

  “Will this thing tell if I’m seeing ghosts?”

  “No.”

  “Will it help me to not see them anymore?”

  “Highly doubtful.”

  “Then what’s in it for me?”

  “A chance to learn to control your body’s reaction with your mind. Think about it, Drex. If you can train yourself to consciously control your nervous system reactions, you may be able to see these hallucinations and beings without totally freaking out.”

  “Geez. That’s not exactly what I’d call an ideal solution to my problem.”

  “I understand,” Grayson said. “But you’re probably going to continue to see them whether you want to or not. The question is, do you want to be scared out of your wits every time, or do you want to learn to control your reaction?”

  “Are those my only two options?”

  “’Fraid so. What do you say? Let me run an EEG on you?” Grayson shot me a boyish grin. “It comes with free tacos from El Molino.”

  I sneered. “And a chocolate shake?”

  “You drive a hard bargain, but deal.”

  “YOU COULD BE SITTING on a mountaintop that yogis work their entire lives to climb,” Grayson said, then bit into a tortilla chip. We were back in the same greasy booth at El Molino.

  “What are you talking about?” I dawdled with the corn chip in my hand, unable to commit to a bite.

  “Yogis practice for decades, and do all kinds of strange things to stimulate their pineal glands. But you did it with one shot.”

  I crinkled my nose. “Why would they want to stimulate their pineal glands anyway?”

  “For enlightenment. For bliss. Take the Khechari Mudra.”

  “The ketchup what?” I dredged the tortilla chip in salsa and thought about my skull being cut open.

  “The Khechari Mudra. It’s a special technique master yogis use. They train their tongues to be flexible enough to access their nasal passages from inside their mouths.”

  “Picking their noses from inside with their tongues?” I looked at my salsa-covered chip. “Gross!”

  “No. The pineal gland is located—”

  “Listen, Grayson. I’m trying to eat here. Could we stop with all this for right now?”

  “Sure. You’re not into bliss. I get it.”

  His words took me aback. “I didn’t say that. It’s just ... well, it’s a bit too much to ask for, isn’t it? I mean, what is ‘bliss’ anyway?”

  “Yogis describe the feeling as being like the climax point of orgasm.”

  I nearly choked on my chip. “Excuse me?”

  Grayson laughed. “For people stuck in lower consciousness, when it comes to bliss, the best they can hope for is the fleeting climax of orgasm. That’s why sex is such a big deal to people trapped in mundane states of existence. They can only get a tiny, transitory glimpse of the never-ending cosmic bliss attained by some yogis.”

  “A mundane existence doesn’t sound so bad to me,” I said, coughing from choking on my tortilla chip. “Sorry, but I don’t think I could stand being in a never-ending state of orgasm.”

  Grayson stifled a grin and looked me in the eyes. “Me either. But once in a while wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

  I looked down at the bowl of salsa, avoiding his gaze. “No, I suppose it wouldn’t.”

  Chapter Thirty

  “I HOPE YOU ENJOY THIS particular selection from my whine cellar,” Grayson quipped in an attempt to lessen my nervousness. He waggled his eyebrows and said, “I call this one Nightmare on Overwh’Elm Street. Get it?”

  I made a sour face and laid back on my bed. I chewed my lip as Grayson adeptly fiddled with the controls on some weird-looking monitoring machine he’d dragged out of the RV.

  The sticky electrodes pasted all over my skull itched and tugged at my scalp. I shook my head softly, chiding myself.

  What the hell have I gotten myself into? My attending physician is either a quack or a genius, and I’m either a guinea pig or a fool. Will I be able to deduce the truth before it’s too late?

  “Relax and breathe,” Grayson said. He’d taken off his fedora and rolled up his sleeves—acts that had done nothing to enhance his credibility. He looked like a bald politician running for county pallbearer.

  “I’ve established your resting alpha wave pattern, see?” Grayson pointed at a graph on the machine.

  I gave him a tentative nod.

  “Now I’m going to show you some pictures.” He set his open laptop on a TV tray at the side of my bed. “Watch the blue screen.”

  I did as instructed and smiled at the basket of basset hound puppies that popped onto the
display. I nodded at the field of daisies. I nearly swallowed my tongue at the pile of mangled corpses and zombies.

  “What the hell, Grayson! No wonder you keep this crap in a padlocked cabinet.”

  “Very good,” Grayson said, keeping his eyes on the machine. He pointed to the graph displayed on the monitor. “See how your activity changed here?”

  “Whose wouldn’t? Where did you get pictures like that, anyway?”

  “Lie back, breathe. A picture can’t harm you, and neither can a ghost.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, theoretically, ectoplasmic anomalies—”

  “Never mind. I know what this really is. It’s desensitization training.”

  Grayson’s eyebrow shot up. “Yes, in a way, you’re right. A person can get used to anything after a while. Even bombs dropping in warzones. But when it comes to other-worldly and other-dimensional beings, it requires a conscious effort to remain centered, even for seasoned professionals.”

  “That’s bull, Grayson.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  I chewed back a sigh. I wanted to believe Grayson could help me. But if I was going to survive these hallucinations, according to him, I needed to believe.

  I locked eyes with him. “Can you? You know, control your own reactions?”

  “Now, yes. But I couldn’t at first.”

  “Really?”

  “There’s some truly scary crap out there, Drex. I want you to look at each image and breathe. You control how you feel about each one. Remember, they have no power other than what you give them.”

  I breathed in deeply. My alpha waves increased. “Hey, I’m doing it,” I said, surprised.

  Grayson’s smile took a subtle slant toward the sadistic as a new image popped on the screen. A greenish, pus-bloated face screamed at me from the black, rotten hole that used to be its mouth. Maggots tumbled out.

  My alpha waves crashed. “Holy crap!”

  “Breathe,” Grayson coaxed. “You’re in control. Find your safe space. Your grounding center.”

  “Like what?”