Biting the heads off chickens? Who was this guy, a voodoo priest? After a long pause, he must have registered the confusion in my face. “She likes to join me on my . . . outings,” he went on. “We enjoy each other’s company, is all. We’re connected.”
I’d never been allowed to have a real pet because Mom was allergic to dander. But I sort of knew what this guy was getting at—every morning I brightened when I saw the lizard I called Seymour strut across my bedroom window screen in search of flies. And then there was our backyard population of chickens, a bonanza of feathery heads I was in charge of naming and feeding. Few sunrise pleasures could compete with letting Pollo Hermano eat grain from my hand.
I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I felt calm around this guy. I used to think I could read energy fields, the colors and auras that surrounded people. It was probably something that my old friend Kaya had suggested once, or maybe it was something I read about in a book a long time ago, but every now and then I still thought I saw lights around certain people. Or, if the person was really special, I heard music. And this man radiated a sort of soundtrack. Like, a violin concerto wrapped in a sixties rock show.
“I’m Jay,” he said, pausing the music but not the spell he’d cast on me.
“I’m Consuelo,” I said, suddenly dizzy. “Lo.” I stepped back and braced myself against the hood of my station wagon so I wouldn’t faint. Jay looked concerned but didn’t move.
“I don’t know if you saw,” I said, “but I almost hit . . . Dakota on the road just now. It was a really close call, actually. Kind of rattled me.” I felt like I was snitching on his animal buddy, but I needed Jay to know how close Dakota had come to dying. So he could maybe protect her in the future.
“Sorry about that,” Jay said, throwing me another charismatic smile. “Dakota isn’t great at formal introductions. She must have been pretty desperate to meet you.”
I liked the notion of a creature being so eager to make my acquaintance that she would hurl herself in front of my car. As long as there were no casualties, of course.
Dakota trotted up to us and presented her head to my hand. I hesitated. Dad always taught me that if a wild animal acts too friendly or fearless toward humans, it might have rabies.
“She seems to like you,” Jay said. “She wants to smell you and size you up.”
“As long as she doesn’t want to know what I taste like,” I said. I imagined that, right now, licking me would be like licking a tablet of Advil.
I felt the hot breath exhaling from the coyote’s nostrils, giving the tips of my fingers individual steam baths. Jay smiled down at her as a new mother might smile down at her newborn. I lightly ruffled the bristly hair between Dakota’s black-striped ears. I relaxed again.
“Why did the coyote cross the road?” Jay said, chuckling to himself as if he were about to unleash the king of corny dad jokes.
“I don’t know,” I said. “To get flattened by a used station wagon with a million ironic bumper stickers?”
Jay smiled. “To make a new friend. You should feel special. I had to woo old Dakota for weeks before she’d approach me, and she was just living in the cave next door.”
“You live in a cave?” I said.
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Not the last time I checked. Wait, are you Batman?” I was joking, but Jay would actually make a pretty good superhero. He seemed intensely moral, and he had an awesome sidekick. Why not?
“Not that I’m aware of,” Jay said, “but I have been inhaling a lot of bat guano lately. Of course, if that’s how superheroes got made, comic books would be a lot less popular.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Like Superman stepped in a radioactive cow pie and that’s how he got his X-ray vision. I think most teenage boys would pass.”
“How about you?” Jay said.
“Me?”
“What’s your superpower, Consuelo?”
Well, let’s see. I could dance alone in my room “Maniac”-style to the same song a hundred times in a row. Or at least I could last spring. I wondered if that still counted.
Suddenly, Dakota gave a sustained cry, shrill as chalkboard fingernails. I jerked my hand away. She barked gruffly and backed away from me.
“What happened?” I said, trembling with self-doubt. I thought Dakota liked me. “Did I do something wrong?”
Dakota growled and lowered herself into a menacing crouch. Was she getting ready to attack? Jay shook his head casually, as if to indicate, What can you do? Coyotes will be coyotes. Then he looked down at me, and his face went grim.
“What happened to your blood, dear?” he said.
“What . . . what do you mean?” I said. Could he actually see that I was suffering?
“You’re unwell,” he said. “You’re . . . afflicted. Is it your blood, sweetheart?”
“My blood? Of course not,” I said. But for some reason I felt Jay wasn’t going to let me beat around the bush. The morning’s doctor appointment came flooding back to me. For the first time, to the first person outside my family, I needed to confess what was going on with me. I felt that perhaps the secret of my Might-be-Sickness would be safe with him.
“It’s my brain,” I said.
It was actually a relief to unload.
“Yes,” Jay said, considering me, all of me, every neuron. “I see that now. I can see how your energy is tainted.” Dakota whimpered and looked inquisitively at Jay, as if she thought I was contagious and meant to suggest that they should both remove themselves from my presence, on the double. Then Jay laid his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t shy away as I usually did when strangers touched me. “You’re in pain,” he said.
I nodded. My pain had never felt so immeasurable.
“Pain is a funny thing,” Jay said. “It can control your entire environment. It can turn the sun to the moon. It can make the blue sky black.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. Even though it sounded melodramatic, lately it was like my entire world was filtered through pain goggles. The world just looked different to me now. Somehow . . . faded. Like all the colors had been put through the wash too many times.
A bolt of nerve lightning shot down my leg, and I grimaced.
“I’m sorry that you’re suffering,” Jay said with deep compassion.
I felt validated that Jay had grasped what I was going through in a heartbeat, there with the hot canine breath on my hand. He saw my pain, but he didn’t try to identify it to show me how smart he was or to make me feel uncomfortable. He simply acknowledged it while reserving all judgment. I somehow felt secure there in the little triangle we made of strange Tinderbox hippie and moody coyote. I felt that I could stand there forever and be healed.
“You know, dear,” Jay said, “your essential well-being is much deeper than the burden your body carries. You do not have to be tyrannized by your disease.”
I smiled. That sounded reassuring. But I wasn’t sure it was true.
“Do you believe in souls?” he said.
I looked intently into his eyes and saw something radiant there. Something almost . . . nuclear. Which wouldn’t exactly be surprising considering the proximity of Los Alamos. Who knows what’s in our water supply? “Unknown environmental insults” are another possible cause of MS.
“Of course,” I said. I’d always assumed that souls were the deepest, most profound part of us, the core part that couldn’t be undone or dissolved. My soul was what fueled my need to hula-hoop for hours or to hug my parents or to leave a nice note in someone’s locker. A soul wasn’t necessarily divine, though at times I’d felt it stir when Mom dragged me to St. Francis for Sunday Mass. It responded to the candles and the stained glass and the low hum of love that filled the cathedral. But that all sounded too cheesy to discuss with my friends.
“Good,” Jay said. “Then you’ll believe me when I tell you that you
rs is in jeopardy.”
“What?” That was a bold statement. “How do you figure?”
Jay smiled in his saintly way.
“Something is ailing you,” he said. “Something is targeting your body, and you’re letting it penetrate your soul, little by little. You need to stop it in its destructive path before it’s too late. Build a line of defense around your soul so it will stay intact, no matter what threatens it.”
But I might be diagnosed with a disease that was attacking my body on multiple fronts. How could I be expected not to think about that, worry about that, obsess about that? How could I prevent it from getting to me? But, in a way, what he said felt . . . true.
“It’s changing me,” I said, on the verge of breaking down and burying my face in the coyote’s fur. “I feel it. I experience things . . . differently now. There’s, like, a dark shine on everything. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know how to get better.”
“Your soul knows how to get better, if you would only listen to it.”
I wondered what that involved. Tarot card readings and séances, like Kaya and I used to do during our “mystical” phase? Bible study? Stream-of-consciousness journaling? I was at a total loss. And then the pain picked that exact moment to return with a vengeance. I cradled my arm in front of my chest as if it were a baby. A baby that was being poked with a thousand sharp needles.
“I . . . don’t know how,” I said, and began crying, stupidly. Maybe that could be my superpower: filling up infinite empty bottles with tears. This was all too much. The pain, the coyote, this mysterious man, the way the near-accident had made me put the brakes not just on my car but on my whole life.
“You know more than you think,” Jay said. “I can tell. Dakota and I have mingled with a lot of souls over the years. Yours is powerful. And highly reactive.”
I wanted to tell Jay to repeat that to my muscles and my neurons on the off chance they’d listen.
“But,” he continued, “it is also entirely exposed right now. It’s vulnerable. And you’re in danger of compromising it.”
I nodded, overwhelmed.
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“I have something for you,” Jay said.
He drew a small object from his pocket and held it out to me. It was a horse figurine carved from crystal the color of turquoise, and it was beautiful.
“For me?” I said.
“Yes, dear. A symbol of your journey.”
“Why?” I said, ignoring the “symbol” aspect. “A present? You don’t even know me.”
“It’s not forever,” he said, tenderly placing the horse in my hand. “You’ll give it back when you’re done with it. After your energy is healed.”
“How do you know I’m going to be healed?” I said. Maybe he knew of magical herbs and potions that could mend my body and allow me to start over fresh. What was this unfamiliar feeling? Hope? Why did it have its locus in a total stranger? But the man no longer seemed like a stranger. He seemed like a friend. Like an uncle, perhaps.
Jay merely smiled. “We can all be healed,” he said. “At any moment. You just have to change your perspective. You’ll learn. You’ll see.” He placed his hand on the coyote’s head. Dakota seemed much calmer now. “Your pain. My pain,” Jay said. Dakota whimpered again. “Her pain. The mountain’s pain when it’s burning. The caterpillar’s pain when it’s transforming. It’s all connected. It’s all one. And transparent. You just have to see it clearly.”
I didn’t know what to say. See pain clearly? Wasn’t feeling it clearly bad enough? Plus, if I did have MS, one of the first things to go would be twenty/twenty vision.
“I was meant to meet you today,” Jay said, once again disarming me with his beatific smile. He was like the pope of the desert. “You need my help. You need to feel the universe’s larger plan for you.”
“A plan? For me?” Lately it felt as if the universe only cared about me as far as it could throw me. Suddenly I was afraid that Jay was going to recruit me for Teen Bible Study.
“I may not look the part,” he said, flicking his ponytail, “but I know some things that might be useful to you if you’re willing to open your soul to them. I perform rituals. Ancient, time-honored rituals, born in these deserts by their native inhabitants. And one of these rituals can release you from your burden.”
My eyes must have widened a bit too much because Jay immediately altered his tone.
“But be warned. I’m offering you powerful medicine, and power can easily swing between positive and negative. If you give it a chance, however—if you embrace it with a full heart—the ritual can eliminate your pain and disease and teach you to accept everything fate throws your way. With joy.”
Okay, so maybe he was talking about something more like a hippie support group. I could get on board with that. In New Mexico everyone is familiar with the mumbo-jumbo vocabulary of spirituality, but that’s different from actually believing in sacred healing and medicine men and stuff. Still, I couldn’t help picturing Jay waving a turkey feather over my head and pronouncing me cured. I imagined him banging on a painted drum until the evil spirits were expunged. Clearly I didn’t know anything, really, about shamans or rituals.
“But is that . . . allowed?” I said soberly, to be respectful. Jay looked at me curiously. “For me to be included? Even though I’m not . . . ? I just thought those rituals were sort of trademarked by the Native Americans.”
Jay smiled indulgently. “The spirit world is for everyone, Consuelo. We’re all related. Our underlying energies are one. Remember? Speaking of which, when I perform the ceremony, you must have four friends with you, four friends who are similarly suffering and who also aim to safeguard their souls.”
I slipped the turquoise horse into the pocket of my hoodie.
Four? Four friends who’d be willing to do an ancient Indian ritual with me? When one of our favorite pastimes was belting out rap songs from the back of a pickup truck while we drove from pool to pool? I knew Jay’s cure seemed too good to be true.
“I can see you’re wary,” he said. “But it would benefit you to trust me. I may not be Batman, but I know how to channel the superpowers. Think it over. If you decide to participate, meet me at Pecos Park on Camino de las Madres on Saturday evening. Sunset. I’ll lead you to the pueblo ruins where we will make our magic. Remember, there must be five of you. A full star. That’s essential. You have nothing to lose but your burdens.”
He gave a little whistle, and Dakota stood at attention, then the two of them turned to walk back into the Tinderbox.
Back in my car, I lost track of how long I sat in thought. What kind of madness was I entertaining here? No matter how kind and trustworthy Jay’s eyes were, it didn’t change the fact that he was a New Agey witch doctor who’d come out of the woods with a freaking pet coyote, and now he was headed back there as if he were on some kind of twenty-first-century, dope-driven vision quest. There was still a chance that modern medicine would save me. Or that I didn’t have MS after all. It was only Minor Silliness. Mañana Sadness.
And there was another major hindrance to following his instructions. I didn’t have four friends with problems.
4
IN THE FRONT OF THE classroom, Indians were being massacred. A movie screen had dropped from the blackboard to show an all-too-realistic reenactment of the 1864 “Battle” of Sand Creek, the ruthless murder of more than a hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho people—mostly women and children—by American soldiers at a peaceful encampment in Colorado. The film was part of our section on the history of Native Americans in the West. Gun and cannon fire lit up the screen, terrified women shrieked words I didn’t understand, teepees burned to the ground, wounded old men were mutilated as they begged for mercy, and then someone dimmed the lights. I saw the flashing explosions. . . .
And
then I saw nothing. The room went completely dark. I lifted my hand to my face. Nothing. I was blind.
Though I’d already been frightened by the scene in front of me, somehow not being able to see it was a thousand times worse. The military gunfire continued to blast into unarmed Indians. The detonations and the screaming were all amplified now that I couldn’t temper the horrible sounds with images. For a second it felt as if the mayhem was actually in my body. But no, it was just a movie. I couldn’t lose my mind along with my sight. Not now. My eyes were intact—just completely blinded.
Again.
This had happened once before. The last time I went dark was right after someone switched on a strobe light during a Justin Timberlake song at a Weekends on Wednesdays party. But then, my vision had come back in seconds.
This time was different.
This time, it wasn’t going away. And the longer I waited, the worse the feeling got. I sat very still in my seat and listened to the kaleidoscopic sounds of gunfire and screaming. I knew I had friends on either side of me, but that almost made things worse—to be surrounded by people I cared about but couldn’t see. I felt like I had disappeared. Like I was a black hole. Soulless.
The bell rang, and the movie cut out. What would I do now? The room filled with the sounds of shuffled papers and hitched-up backpacks as everyone prepared to file out to their next class.
“Aren’t you coming, Lo?”
“No,” I said, looking in the direction of Alex’s voice and her violet-scented body spray. I knew that the room would be empty next period. “Not right now, anyway. I feel pretty nauseated—same thing as yesterday, you know? I’m just going to chill here for a few minutes.”
“Do you want me to stay with you? Or take you to the nurse’s office?”
I could hear her voice, but did she even exist? Did I?
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“No thanks,” I said. “I just want to be alone, I think, until it passes.” I didn’t ask if Mrs. Laramie was still in the room because I didn’t want to betray my blind condition, but judging by the quiet, Alex and I were the only two people still there.
The Way We Bared Our Souls Page 3