My sisters found me, disconsolate, like that. Not able to calm me, they took me back to our house. My sister carried me, and I still recall her singing a little song to me. I think I was, by this time, already delirious and sick, as I remember vomiting on her smock and being chided for it. I remember distinctly my mother’s face, full of concern. Perhaps I had eaten a mushroom? Some berries? Hadn’t they been watching me, stupid girls? That sort of thing, the normal concerns of a mother with a child taken suddenly ill.
I was laid on my little pallet in the corner of the house (you would call it a hut), and left to sleep with the little wooden bowl my father had made me full of water by my side.
When I awoke, everything was different. I felt sickly still. My family eyed me warily and listened to my story, such as I could tell it. We didn’t have the words for this, you understand, for words like pearl or silver or pulse. I’m sure they gleaned that I had found something like an egg by the river, eaten it, and gotten ill. I had apparently been comatose for several days, surely doomed in their eyes. And when I had risen from my bed, my skin had been badly blistered all over my body, and my eyes fused shut with rheumy goo as if I were a newborn. I think I remember being bathed by my mother in the river, but it’s very vague, except for the distinct sense of relief I could feel radiating from her.
But that, too, shifted. I was different. Changed. I spoke to them, at length, in words they didn’t know. I spoke also, sometimes, of things no child my age could have known. I don’t recall much of this, but I do recall talking with my father about his grandfather and knowing, with a deep certainty, that his name had been Toran, and that he had taught him how to fish and tie a net, and that our family used the red ribbons on the net a certain way to show they were our nets, in case we lost one to the river and it was carried off and found by another local family. And that he, my father, had been beaten as a child for watching his grandfather with another woman, a local man’s daughter. He had hidden behind a tree and watched them playing together. Yes, you know, that way. Anyway, I remember telling him this and watching his eyes go round and his face go all gray and pale. Pale like the snow. I had laughed, to see the look on his face, not understanding.
After this, my sisters said I was a witch, and that I had died and went to where the dead went and came back as a witch or a devil. There were demons and devils all around us, then. In the dreamtime it is always that way. Different now, maybe. It was quite horrible, let me tell you. Not simply because I was a child hearing this, which was bad enough. But because I had loved my sisters and now they didn’t love me. They feared me, and this fear grew to hatred in a very short time. All bad things became my fault. Because I was a witch, the fish did not swim into our nets. Because I was a witch, our gardens did not thrive. My goat, which my father had given me, died, and there was a foul blackness inside him. Men from local families came to visit, made signs at me with their hands, signs to ward off evil. They talked at length with my father.
The thing is, I was changed. I was different. Sometimes I was quite the same. But sometimes I did things which frightened them. I spoke strange words, often at length. I knew things, somehow, which I had no business knowing. I had strange dreams. I would not sleep, or sleep too long. I would stare at things. I would stare closely at a stone in my palm, a patch of wildflowers, or an anthill for hours. I would sit outside the hut late into the night, and whisper to myself while watching the stars wheeling slowly in the heavens until the sun came up. I dreamt of great fish in a great river singing an endless song for each other. I did not eat, or I ate the wrong things, like twigs or inedible leaves. I frightened them, surely. It seemed as if I lived partly inside a dream, and partly in the real world. I would help my mother, I remember this, wanting to help her. She kept me close, but I could tell she was wary.
One day a woman came to our camp by the riverbank. She was old. Old people were rare to us, as not many of them lived so long, though I chuckle at her age now. She was probably sixty, and was bent, blind in one eye. Murta, her name was. She lived alone in a cave a day’s walk from us, she said. She had heard our tale of the strange, fey girl I had become, and was here to help us. A witch for sure, to us, although probably more midwife if you ask me. I certainly never saw her do any magic, although I did see her deliver children and help women who came to her. A medicine woman you would say, I think. Yes, you have such things, or know of them.
She spoke to me, an urgent whisper, telling me that I had walked in the land of the dead, and now I needed to come with her and live with her, to learn her spells and help her in her work. Her breath was bad, and her chin had thin hairs on it, like a wispy beard. It was not safe for me with my family anymore, she said. They would blame me, and eventually they would, to keep peace with their neighbors, cast me out or kill me. It was true, she said. All true. She had seen such things before. She frightened me, but so did my family. I frightened myself, being just a child and not understanding.
It is now, perhaps, shocking to hear such things. But then, people were simpler, maybe. Demons haunted the world back then, certainly they haunted people’s minds. The thing to remember about the dreamtime is it’s a dreamtime. Nobody knows anything, and the available store of wisdom, what we would call knowledge, is very small. Only what you can teach a child, basically. Women were always mistreated by men, it’s how things were, although it usually started with older girls. My father loved me, and didn’t want to hurt me, but I’m old enough now to see the truth of it.
My sisters watched me go with anger and hatred in their eyes. My parents wept, but made no move to stop Murta from taking me, her old hand like a claw around my skinny arm. I had walked with the dead, you see, and bad things were happening because of me. My family had loved me, but now they could not, because I had died and was not who I was before. That is my last view of them, my mother wailing and my father holding her tightly. My sisters glaring at me, glad to see me go, yet frightened. Begone, demon. Trouble us no more. Begone.
This memory, speaking it, seems whole and clear, but it is not, has not been clear to me for many years. These memories are…old, but they still have bite. They are sorrow, for me, for that girl, my mother and my father and sisters. Maybe they were happier afterward. I hope so. These memories are fragments, pieces of some puzzle of no set shape or size, some of which were lost to me for long spans, but which washed ashore on the river of my recollections like pearls, wedged slightly between two rocks.
I have remembered that I remembered, and all of my story rests on fragments like this. Some of it may come from my dreams. Almost certainly. Who can say?
Chapter Five
Jessica wanted to throw the phone. Her editor, Michael, was still talking, so she didn’t. Plus, the phone was expensive and she needed it. She had to make a conscious effort to unclench her jaw. She slowed her breathing. He was still talking.
“Yes,” she interrupted, finally. “I will go talk to them.” She didn’t want to, but she would. They had called three times, and were offering to send a car for her now.
“Okay, okay, okay…” Michael’s voice stuttered a bit with digital, hiccuping static. Was that surveillance? As she understood it, in the old days when phones were analog, weird noise on the line could mean people listening in. Now? Who knew? Not her. She just assumed they were anyway, and tried to ignore it. Michael was still dithering. “…what if she is a suspect in the murder? She could be…she could be crazy. I can’t find anything on her, and they don’t list their journalists on the New Dehli Times website. She could be lying.”
Lying. He said it like it was a crime in and of itself. Of course she could be lying. Jessica rolled her eyes and tapped her foot. She was outside the coffee shop in East Palo Alto. “Look, Michael, I will go talk to them, and then we’ll see. Maybe something good will come of it. Something to flesh out the story. Maybe the feds do think she’s involved. We’ll find out.”
“We should get a lawyer,” Michael stated flatly, “to go with you.”
Yes, Mic
hael, you should have a lawyer. You should also have an office and not do this out of your parents’ basement. You’re twenty-eight years old. I should get a real job, with a real newspaper. If I can. She took a deep breath. The phone beeped. She glanced at it. Another call. “Hold on, it’s them, going to take it.” She pushed the Hold and Accept button.
“Jessica here,” she said.
There was silence on the line for a moment. “Ms. Powell, this is Special Agent Chomsky with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’re sending a car for you. It’s an Uber. ETA, five minutes.”
“Okay, I’m at…” she hesitated. “You know where I am?”
“We know where you are,” Chomsky said. “Part of the job,” he added.
“Okayyy,” she said. “I guess I’ll meet you there.”
“Sounds good, see you in…about an hour.” He hung up.
Michael came back on the line. “Hey, I’m back,” she said. “They’re sending an Uber.”
“We should get a lawyer to go with you,” Michael said again.
“Uh, okay, Michael, how do you propose to do that?” She felt the annoyance creep into her voice. He was still her boss, despite him being in way over his head. She closed her eyes.
“Okay, well, you’re right. We’re in the moment here…just…” he paused. “Just go in with your eyes open and mouth shut. Don’t do anything but answer their questions. Name, rank, serial number. Got it?”
Name, rank, serial number. Like she was still in the service, or like he ever had been. She winced. “Sure thing, Michael. Will call you as soon as I am out.” She hung up.
Behind her, the door to the coffee shop opened. The waitress who had served them their coffee stepped outside, carrying her phone. Jessica nodded to her, and the girl nodded back, settling herself on the low wall, looking at her phone and vaping, Jessica saw, on a flat black cartridge. Jessica turned away, scanning the street for the Uber that the FBI office had sent.
“They had prostitutes, the Mayans,” the girl said. “In their temples. Like, sacred ones.” She waggled her phone. It was an old phone, an Android of some sort. The screen was cracked. She must have looked up the Mayans on Wikipedia or something. “That must have been a weird life, being a whore in a temple.”
Jessica looked at her. “Did they really?”
The girl nodded, taking a puff on her vape pen. She had big brown eyes. “Right here, like your friend said.”
“Not friends,” Jessica said. “Just somebody I met.”
“She said you were friends,” the girl said. A shrug. “Some people are like that.”
Jessica smiled back at her. “Anything else interesting?”
The girl shook her head. “They drank chocolate with chili. And knew about tobacco. Shit like that.” She smiled. “Oh, and human sacrifice, skulls and shit. My ancestors were weird like that.”
“She ever come here before?” Jessica asked.
“Man, told you I never saw her before today. My mom said she looked familiar is all.” She puffed, thinking. “Mom’s been running this place a long time, since my grandfather died. But her memory…” she trailed off, with a gesture of her fingers near her temple, a soft fist opening, fingers spread wide like an explosion. “She forgets stuff, or gets confused about what year it is.”
“Sorry,” Jessica said. The girl was, what, eighteen tops. “That’s rough.”
“Early onset dementia. She seems happy though,” the girl said. “So I bring her to work and she putters around. She likes that.”
“You think the woman I was with might have come in a few years ago? You said your mom thought she remembered her,” Jessica said, unable to stop herself. I’m a reporter, pumping people for information is what I do, she told herself.
The girl regarded her. “I mean, I could ask her, but she probably won’t remember. She thinks it’s like 1980-something half the time. I doubt she would remember who I was talking about if I went back in there right now. You a cop?” The girl puffed. Not worried, just mildly interested.
“Reporter,” Jessica said. “Sorry about the questions.”
“You writing a story about her? That woman?” The girl smiled, putting her phone in her apron pocket. “She looked stylish.”
“Stylish?” Jessica cocked her head.
“You know…rich, like out of a magazine. Her clothes, her hair. Her nails. She looked good.” The girl shrugged. “She ditch you?”
Jessica frowned. “I guess she did, yeah.”
“Shitty thing to do,” the girl said idly. “You waiting for a ride?”
Jessica nodded. There was a pause, long and awkward, the conversation exhausted. The girl pulled out her phone again.
“Saw on the news that guy got shot this morning,” the girl said. “Techie CEO. Not far from here.”
Jessica nodded. “I was there.”
“For reals?” The girl looked at her. “Like, there there?”
“There there,” Jessica confirmed. “Twenty feet away.”
The girl pursed her lips. “The other chick too?”
She nodded. “She was. Sat next to me.”
The girl looked thoughtful. “She seemed pretty chill about it,” she said. “Like, cheerful and shit.”
“She did, didn’t she?” Jessica said, more to herself than to the girl.
“You too, you seem pretty chill about it,” the girl said. “Like, I’d be freaking out.”
“I guess so,” Jessica said. “I saw a lot of stuff like that in Iraq, so…” she trailed off.
The girl snapped her fingers. “I’ll bet she knows something about it.”
Jessica looked at her. “What makes you say that?”
The girl shrugged. “I dunno. Rich bitch in a fancy car, ditches a reporter she just met. Seems fishy to me, man.”
“You sure you’re not the reporter here?” Jessica laughed.
The girl puffed at her little vape pen again. “Nah, I’m just nosy. Got a nose for trouble. That one? She’s trouble, I think.”
“Maybe she is,” Jessica said. “Maybe not though. It’s all sort of confusing.”
The girl nodded. “The best stories start off that way.” She eased off the cinderblock planter wall she had been sitting on. A black car turned the corner, lit “Uber” sign on the dashboard. The girl nodded at the car. “This your ride?”
Jessica inspected it. “I think so.” She looked at the girl. “Nice talking with you.”
“You too.” The girl smiled, flashing white, straight teeth. “Where to?”
Why not? “The FBI, actually,” she said.
The girl frowned. “For reals?”
“For reals,” she said.
“About the murder?” The girl asked, her eyes wide.
“I think so,” Jessica said. “Must be, right?”
“Or that chick,” the girl said. “Told you she was trouble.”
“Could be that too,” Jessica said. “I dunno.”
“Good luck finding out what’s up,” the girl said, with a wave. Jessica watched her go inside. The car slowed and pulled up to the curb. Her phone buzzed. A text message from the driver, announcing his arrival.
Trouble? Was that it? Jessica looked inside at the driver. The man regarded her placidly. She glanced back at the coffee shop door. Find out what’s up, was that her plan? Maybe it was. She got in the car, a knot of reservations in her gut. There was something here, just out of her sight, like the buzz of a mosquito or a wasp somewhere in the room that she couldn’t see but only faintly hear. She closed the door and went to find out.
Find out what’s up, she told herself, glancing back at the restaurant, catching a glimpse of the girl’s face in the window, looking out, watching her as the car pulled into traffic. There was a story here. A murder, an unknown assailant with a grievance. Silver and now the FBI? Trouble for sure, like clouds on the horizon.
Chapter Six
Begin, at the beginning, we agreed. But where, which beginning? There are many, too many to even menti
on, or we would be here forever just talking about where things started and how the world began.
My story began by the river, with my family, as I have told you. After that, well, there are things I can tell you and things that I simply can’t. Most of it, I just don’t remember. I am, in a very real way, fragmented. Or at least my memories are. Broken, like shards of a pot. I can get the sense of the whole, but sometimes not much more than that.
Murta took me in. I remember this. I can still see her favored little cave, one of many she kept. She moved around, making a circuit of the area to ensure she was known to the various families and family groups who lived nearby. They fed her, food being her preferred form of payment for her services. She was a healer, and did what she could for the cases that were brought to her. Most of the sick we saw were far gone, or already dead by the time we got to them, Murta being old and slow to walk when summoned.
Murta would, on arriving at a sickbed, talk with the family members of the sickness and how it came about. Usually no one knew, unless it was a wound or other obvious injury, and we saw a fair bit of those, but they usually died quickly, or were, as I said, dead when we arrived. Infection, you see. Hard to stop.
She would crouch on her haunches beside the sick, burn her secret herbs which she taught me to gather and dry, and were simply onion grass, mint, and mustard leaves. These I would bind into bundles in the proportion she showed me, and dry them over a low, smoldering fire. While treating a patient, she would chant slowly, words I didn’t understand, and if I had to guess, held no meaning. At least none she ever taught me.
She was a charlatan, of course, knowing only the healing gained by long experience. She would give water, occasionally mix some horrible potion and force some unfortunate to drink it. But the usual routine was chanting, burning the herb bundles, and packing poultices onto wounds. Such things like soft moss, spiderwebs, and a white clay she favored. Many patients died, of course—she was no miracle worker. But occasionally we had successes, and these families and the patients themselves were always grateful and shared with us what they had.
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