The Reluctant Healer

by Andrew D. Himmel

  This was met, improbably, by a temporary shift in my own view of Erica and of energy healing. The simplest way to describe this is to say that I began to relax. I enjoyed the sessions with Josh and Sondra, and I also looked forward to the various conferences and lectures and sessions we attended with the healers and mystic philosophers that Erica frequented. I was fascinated by all of them, because for all of their variations, they possessed many of the same qualities. They were at times ludicrous but almost always intelligent, intuitive, and articulate. And I found the relationship between Erica and me strengthening. If our bond could withstand the grant of legitimacy she bestowed upon the Great Harmonic Alignment, surely no movement admired by Erica could be too preposterous to sever our bond.

  21

  Scattered Pages

  I googled The Sacred Scroll, the alternative bookstore Erica visited on her meandering routes through the city. If she had never come across this bookstore, would she ever have chosen her current path? Would we have ever met?

  On a muggy August day, with the temperature intolerable in shade or sun, I walked over, with no plan or intention. There it was, still on Thirteenth Street near Sixth Avenue. Perhaps an aimless browsing of the titles would lead me by chance to some revelation. Or perhaps I had nothing better to do that day.

  The Sacred Scroll was defiantly musty, as if any overt act of scrubbing and cleaning would divest the store of its authenticity. I paced up and down the narrow rows on the ground floor, my footsteps dislodging dust caked on the book covers. Glints of light refracted through the overhead windows. I pulled books randomly from the shelves, flipped through the pages, then replaced them. On the second floor, where Erica spent much of her time reading through tomes on alternative approaches, I found an old upholstered chair nestled in a remote alcove with a stack of pamphlets and periodicals on the armrest. I collapsed into the chair and marveled at how comfortable it was, the old fabric gently scratching the contours of my body.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the rumble of the air conditioner, the occasional ruffling of papers, a distant sneeze, the dull clank of a door closing. I fell into a restful slumber and awoke with a start, certain that I had heard someone whisper my name. The periodicals on the armrest fell to the ground. I picked them up and listlessly thumbed through the pages. One of the magazines had its cover and introductory pages torn off, not neatly but rather as if the result of vandalism. On closer inspection, it seemed that pages from both the front and back of the journal were ripped out, leaving a few pages of what appeared to be the beginning of a short story. I was about to toss these pages onto the armrest, when I took note of the title of the story, in a green, bolded, italicized font: “La Cara de la Señorita Isabella Cortella.”

  I leaned back, stared upward, then glanced back down at the title. Cortella. I was no longer weary, and I began to read.

  In the town of El Centenario del Playa, the children were taught to fear the currents that swirled invisibly below the tranquil surface of the ocean. Many residents had experienced firsthand the sickening tug that would begin as a cold clasp on the ankle and end in a helpless plummet to the ocean floor. Some had speculated that the riptides were visited upon the village beaches due to a curse from La Familia Cortella, owing to the unfriendly treatment suffered at the hands of Señorita Isabella Cortella, who in 1883 became impregnated at the age of seventeen and refused to divulge the name of the father. She was hounded beyond the environs of the village, even her parents failing to come to her defense. When her body was discovered weeks later washed upon the shores of La Playa, there were those who observed a curious expression upon her face, neither frightened nor peaceful, but smiling and vengeful. And while historical records could neither confirm nor deny the existence of powerful riptides following her demise, the elder citizens knew. The riptides became known as Las Cortellas, and years later, in the early 1900s, even vacation guides for Mexico warned tourists about the overpowering currents.

  In 1913, Hernando Gutiérrez, a rambunctious child of twelve from the nearby city of Tapachula, was visiting relatives in El Centenario. He and his cousin Guillermo Ferreira awoke early to a sweltering, cloudless day, and the two of them ran to the beach, racing along the shore, their bare feet flicking clumps of sand in the air as they dodged the jagged rocks and jellyfish hidden just below the surface. Hernando’s feet suddenly flew out from under him, and for a moment, he was suspended in air, the length of his body parallel to the ground. He then landed hard on the wet sand, and the ocean’s wave swept over him. Guillermo laughed out loud, but Hernando was not amused. He had navigated these beaches from the moment he could walk and knew that he possessed a preternatural sense of the hazards beneath him. How could he have so clumsily lost his balance?

  As he sat on the beach with the waves washing over him, Hernando found the culprit: a smooth, slippery piece of slightly curved flat rock lodged in the sand, oval in shape, with lines etched across its surface. Hernando grabbed the rock, perhaps four inches in length, and was about to hurl it across the surface of the ocean when he looked more closely at the concave side. Without too much effort, he could discern the outline of a face, feminine, alluring, full of intention, almost alive.

  Guillermo was standing over Hernando now, no longer laughing, but transfixed by La Cara de la Roca. “She’s beautiful,” Guillermo said. Hernando agreed, and the two walked back slowly to Guillermo’s home, barely looking up as they continued to stare at the face that stared back at them. The boys agreed that they would share possession of La Roca, and for the time being, buried the stone in a hiding place on the perimeter of Guillermo’s property.

  They forgot about La Roca for the remainder of the day, consumed as they were with the antics of children. And anyway, how long could one stare at a rock, even one that captured the visage of a beautiful woman? The following day, they ran along the beach again, imagining that they were pirates being chased by the armada of a great power. Guillermo suddenly stopped, and Hernando saw an opportunity. He bent down, grabbed a clump of wet sand, clenched it down to the shape of a hard, small ball, and hurled it at Guillermo, striking him square on his cheek.

  Hernando could hardly believe his luck and collapsed in laughter. Tears flooded his face, and he could not see. Then, it occurred to him that the sound of impact was considerable, and he ran toward Guillermo out of some concern. But Guillermo was still standing, his face streaked with mud, but his attention elsewhere. It seemed to Hernando that Guillermo was hardly aware of being struck. Instead, Guillermo was staring down at the sand. “Why did you throw La Roca away?” Guillermo asked. Hernando was confused until Guillermo pointed down toward the sand. Nestled near their feet was La Roca, the same shape, the same lines, the same alluring beauty.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Hernando said. “I never touched it since we buried it yesterday.”

  Guillermo grabbed the stone from the sand, and the two of them raced back to the hiding place, scraping away the dirt, and finding La Roca from the day before just where they left it. They brought both stones inside Guillermo’s house and placed them on a wooden table, side by side. The stones were identical—not only the etched lines but the shape of the rocks themselves, as if they were produced by some machine in an artisan’s workshop.

  The boys then heard a gasp from behind, quiet, almost muffled, but thick with fear. “Isabella Cortella,” they heard Guillermo’s mother say from behind them. She grabbed both stones and ran to an adjourning room, retrieving from a high shelf an old scrapbook consisting of loose pages of penciled drawings. As Guillermo and Hernando looked on, Señora Ferreira thrashed through the pages until she found what she was looking for. She placed a frayed parchment, the edges crumbling with time, in between the two stones. Without looking up, she spoke to the boys. “My grandmother knew Isabella Cortella,” she said. “ Years ago, before the disappearance, she drew this portrait.”

  The boys stood over the shoulder of Señora Ferreira and stared down at the stones and parchment.
Neither Guillermo nor Hernando were possessed of artistic talent, but they could see the similarity between the drawing and the two stones. The strands of hair lay on the bare shoulders in the same erratic fashion. The left side of the face was shadowed, with the darkened skin reaching to precisely the same point under the lower curvature of the eye.

  Guillermo’s mother provided her son and Hernando with a detailed history of the Cortella legend—probably an unwise decision, as a deep and abiding tremor sank into the young boys’ bones. The mother realized her error and lightened the story with amusing anecdotes about silly reactions to the Cortella legend, but the fear had already settled in.

  Later that evening, Guillermo could not sleep, and he walked out to the table where the two rocks and portrait had been left. But now, he saw only one rock, and no penciled drawing, as if the three had merged into a unitary depiction of the woman. Guillermo searched in vain for the second rock and the drawing. Turning his attention to the remaining stone, he observed that the etching marks were visible, and there was still a stubborn freeze upon the facial expression, but the clarity of the face had been enhanced.

  He remembered his mother’s warning, and he thought of the terror Señorita Cortella wrought upon the nearby villages. And yet her visage etched in the rock was peaceful and benign. “Are you really evil, Señorita Cortella?” he asked.

  Slashing rain pelted the rotted wood frame of Guillermo’s dilapidated house. Guillermo stood at the window and watched rivulets carve tiny capillaries into the craggy earth. He turned back toward the rock, which was now softly glowing, not as a reflection, but in a pulsing manner. Guillermo slowly approached the rock and searched for the possible cause of the light. He bent down and lifted the rock with both hands.

  “It is true you are only a child, but you are a chosen child, Guillermo, chosen by forces you may never understand.”

  Guillermo whirled around to locate the source of this unfamiliar voice, but he already knew that the voice came from the rock. He pressed his eyes shut to reset his sanity, then opened them and stared hard at the rock, daring it to contact him again in the cold glare of the waning light.

  “But take note: Knowledge is less important than purpose. Don’t seek to understand. Instead, accept your purpose.”

  Guillermo stumbled backward and lost his grip on the rock, which fell into the soft folds of the blankets on top of Guillermo’s thatched bed.

  “What is my purpose?” Guillermo asked. The rain stopped, and silence filled the house, silence that pushed against the frail walls and swarmed through Guillermo’s head. Moments passed, and Guillermo felt that the sanctity of his world had shifted. He tried standing, but his legs wobbled.

  “Even in death, anger consumed me,” the voice said. “And I have damaged innocent people. I have caused disease, misfortune, grief, misery. And these misfortunes have endured through the generations. I must rectify my sins.”

  At this, the walls to the house appeared to fade, and disconnected wisps of fog appeared before Guillermo, slowly reshaping into the visage of the face, the same face etched on the rock. An unfelt wind gently pushed the lines of the face to and fro.

  “And you will be my instrument, Guillermo. You will heal those who have felt my wrath, whether you want to or not, whether you recognize your gifts or not. Surrender yourself to your gifts. The act of submission will free you. Your life will change. Your childhood will end years before those of your friends.”

  The rain resumed, or perhaps it had never stopped. The rock ceased pulsating and lay inert and dull upon Guillermo’s bed. The wisps of fog vanished. Guillermo lifted the rock and shook it, trying to extract some further explanation. Had he imagined the entire conversation? A bright light then flashed from outside, and shafts of sunshine burst through the night. Guillermo could not say why, but he was sure that he was being beckoned . . .

  The page ended abruptly. I fumbled through the other papers that had fallen to the floor to see whether I could find the continuation of the story. I stood up and pushed my hands underneath the cushions of the chair to see whether any pages had slipped through. The fluorescent light overhead flickered, and I felt faint.

  Cortella. Guillermo.

  I raced downstairs, where a line had formed in front of the cashier. I pushed toward the front. “Where is this from?” I asked.

  A chorus of indignation rang forth from the line. I whirled around and faced them, sweat covering my face. “I’m so sorry, and I’ll only take a minute, but this is important.”

  They quieted down, and I faced the cashier. “How can I find out where these pages are from?”

  The cashier seemed alarmed and pointed toward the back of the floor. “Bookstore manager,” she said.

  I went quickly toward the back of the store and found a disheveled man in his early forties, stroking his faint goatee with one hand as he refiled books from a rickety cart onto the shelves with the other.

  “You’re the manager?” I asked. He stepped back, as if startled by an unfamiliar stench.

  “How can I . . .”

  “These pages. I found them . . . upstairs, on the arm of a chair . . .”

  The manager adjusted his glasses. “Why would you tear these pages . . .”

  “This is exactly how I found them.” He took another step back. “Please,” I said. “Please, look at these pages. Someone ripped them out of a book, or magazine, and it’s important that I find out where they’re from.”

  I handed him the pages, which he slowly took from me. He then alternated his gaze from me to the pages a few times, before he focused on the material. He spent a few minutes reading carefully. I kept quiet and moved a few paces back.

  “I don’t recognize this,” he said. “If I had to guess, I’d say this was a translation, given how stilted the words are, like the language doesn’t really flow, although you could imagine that in the original language, Spanish, I would imagine, the rhythm was probably more natural.”

  “How can I find where this is from?”

  The manager flipped through the pages, looking for some clue of origin.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Unfortunately, customers occasionally rip out pages they like and leave other pages behind. It doesn’t happen too often, but every now and then, we find loose pages torn from our books or magazines. We hold on to them in storage, just in case . . .”

  I nodded and grabbed the pages out of his hand. “Can I keep these pages?”

  “That’s not something we really encourage. We try to reunite torn pages with their home.”

  “Okay, I’ll bring them back upstairs.”

  “That’s okay, sir. You can just hand them to me. I’ll take care of it.”

  I backed away and turned toward the exit. “Really, it’s not a problem at all.”

  I walked away then and heard the manager closely behind me.

  “Sir, please, just simply give me the pages. That would be helpful.”

  He was older than I was and probably governed by a reserved dignity that would prevent him from chasing me through a crowded bookstore. I bolted, tripping over myself as I reached the exit. The streets were crowded now, and I raced down the sidewalk toward the subway entrance at Sixth Avenue. I clambered down the steps to the platform and hurdled the turnstile, aghast but determined not to be overtaken by . . . what? . . . The Sacred Scroll Security Department? A train was about to pull out of the station, but then, the doors opened slightly, allowing me to plunge toward the narrowing crevice as the doors reclosed. I slinked my body onto the last car of the train, but the doors closed on my left hand, dislodging the papers from my grasp.

  “No,” I exclaimed, but softly, as the conspicuous finality of events quickly settled in. As the train pulled away, I watched the pages scatter onto the platform and the tracks, floating gently as they spiraled downward into oblivion.

  I made some frantic attempts to find the source of the story online, choosing every keyword and search term I could imagine. La Cara. Short stor
y about a magical rock. Mexican fable about Isabella Cortella. I found nothing. Perhaps what I read was so insignificant that the story never registered in literary circles. Perhaps it was a translation of a minor story in a minor collection of Spanish works. Whatever the reason, I found nothing to point me to the source.

  I considered, and did not dismiss, the possibility of coincidence. True, Vanja had advised me that I would encounter a force or entity identifiable as “Cortella.” But in the universe of coincidences, would this register as among the most remarkable? Probably not. Strange things happen, and we discuss them among our friends and family with a sly nod to the supernatural but then step back from an explicit pronouncement. Let the happenstance linger in the imagination. Why not? It’s fun, and just before we are compelled to assess the logic, we can laugh it off and change the subject.

  I could do this, I told myself. I could write the entire episode off as an amusing synchronicity of fact and magic. But I had to tell Erica, right? Some code of relationships required that I not withhold this information. But I was afraid, fearful of the onslaught of her suffocating enthusiasm, fearful of the imbalance it would inject into our relationship, of the tilt toward a demand that I now, finally, accept what experience and phenomenon would no longer allow as rejection.

  In the end, I did not share the episode with Erica. Instead, I bargained skillfully with myself. I would reserve the right to disclose the events should I believe that such disclosure would be in the best interests of our relationship. So, you see, this was not hiding, nor did it constitute a failure of communication. Instead, the bargain adhered to an unwritten but fair identification of reasonable terms. And in the meantime, I would liberate myself from the enveloping nonsense. My liberation would absolve me from the duty to disclose.