Shaman's Blues

by Amber Foxx

  Was he fantasizing growing old together? She couldn’t even figure if she wanted to grow old with anyone, let alone him. Once again at a loss what to say to him, Mae knelt to get eye to eye with a glass killer whale face. Its intense yet emotionless expression, an essence of some life force, stared back at her.

  “Speaking of old,” Jamie seemed incapable of not talking, “wait ’til you see the next gallery. Great pictures of old people. Amazing what this bloke does with hair. Like it’s sacred, old Indians’ white hair.”

  He offered Mae his hand. She hesitated to take it, aware of how ridiculously stuck she was. His soul mate declaration of the night before had put her into a kind of wall-less, disorienting space in which she didn’t know how to move. Every word or touch felt like it could be misunderstood. Was this a romantic gesture or not?

  “Jeezus.” Jamie flung both hands out. “I didn’t hand you my fucking donger.” His outrage turned into a laugh, and he shook his head, regarding her as if she were the strangest person on earth. “Don’t be such a wowser.”

  “I’m sorry.” She stood. “I’m scared to say or do things to hurt you, but I’m scared to make you think I’m more than a friend. I reckon everything is gonna come out wrong until we’re on the same page with that. I thought you understood.”

  He said nothing, but Mae could see the tension in his body as they left the gallery. Outdoors in the blazing blue light, he spun a half turn as if to meet her in a dance, but instead walked backwards toward wherever he was taking her next. “I’m it. You won’t let yourself see it. I’m your soul mate.”

  “Please. You said I didn’t need to hammer it to you.”

  “Changed my mind. I’m the one that needs to hammer it to you. If you turn me down, you’ll—dunno—have to be born back again as someone who’ll love me next time, and I’ll have to come back as the person who’ll love you next time—or something. We can’t get out of this.”

  “Where’d you get that idea?”

  His hands flew up in a flustered grasp at the air, and he stopped with a little jump. “Fuck, I made it up. Where d’you think? Jeezus.” Another small hop. “I’m trying to get your attention.” She looked away, hiding a smile, not sure if he’d meant to be funny, and resumed walking. He fell in step beside her, shoulder to shoulder, barely an inch away, and added, “And it’s true—even if I lied.”

  A hard point to argue, since it made no sense.

  In the next gallery, which included the portraits of Native elders that Jamie had praised, Mae attempted to focus on the art, but was also aware of Jamie, restlessly moving to look from varied angles and distances, almost speaking to her, and then silencing himself.

  He moved off and began to chat with the gallery staff in another room. In his absence, Mae felt the bubble of tension around her skin ease into a relief that let her breathe. But it also felt like a kind of ordinariness, as if an energy essence had been subtracted.

  As she stood transfixed by the sculpture of a bronze shamanic creature, half-deer, half-human, she felt the return of tightness and vibration in the air, the sense of Jamie looking at her, and turned to him. His eyes were full of a strange light.

  Intense and awed, he said, “You get it.”

  The sense of the extraordinary, the merging of the natural with the supernatural—yes, she got it. Very few people she’d known fully grasped how entirely she could move into another world, how reality was not what it seemed. After her encounter with Dusty’s ghost, that other reality was even stranger and deeper. This artist might understand. She nodded, and looked back at the sculpture.

  Jamie stepped closer, looking up at the deer-headed being’s raised arms, its human hands holding a circle and a moon. “Lisa—my fiancée—never liked this kind of thing. She’s a scientist.”

  “Seems like a scientist could still like it as art.”

  “Nah. She hated it when people got all mystical, especially about quantum physics. Didn’t believe in mysteries or spirits.”

  “But you do.”

  Jamie fidgeted with the ends of his sleeves, tugging them toward his wrists with opposite hands. He inhaled, stopped, looked at Mae, at the sculpture, and at his feet. “Grew up with that stuff, y’know? Dad’s an anthropologist, studied shamans around the world. Healers, magic, music, dancing, visions ...” He seemed to struggle for words. Mae wondered if he was talking about a spiritual experience, or if it was more about the connection he was trying to establish with her. “I’ve been to a lot of ceremonies, and ...” He stopped, sighed, reaching toward her as if handing her some large, invisible offering. “This is hard to explain.”

  “Is it something that happened with a shaman, or about—” She didn’t want to say us. “About what you think we have in common?”

  “Kind of both. Maybe. If you get the gift, it’s who you are.” He looked up at the deer-man sculpture. “A shaman.”

  A woman behind them said to her companion, “That statue looks like Bullwinkle.”

  Jamie startled out of his reverie. Fizzing with stifled laughter, he rushed from the gallery. His ear-blasting hah-snort-hah exploded as soon as he reached the sidewalk. Mae followed him, breaking into a fit of giggles on top of her lingering curiosity over where their conversation might have led.

  While Jamie laughed so hard that passersby stared at him, some bordering on catching the hilarity themselves, Mae looked at the outdoor version of the same sculptural theme, another towering deer shaman. This one held an arrow. A raven perched on his other upstretched hand. It was so powerful. Like Dusty’s hawk form, in a way. Half-deer, half-human. Who could see that as Bullwinkle?

  “Jesus, that’s almost as good as sex, y’know? Having a good laugh.” Jamie pulled himself together, taking his hat off, shaking his hair, and put the hat back on. He nodded in the direction of the next gallery, and they started walking. “We’ll try again.”

  “Try again at what?”

  He answered with the one-two shrug and mimed juggling balls.

  They crossed the street, walked another block, and Jamie held the door of the chosen gallery open for her. Inside, Mae let her mind and senses adjust to the images: intricately carved and painted pottery, more glass art, and huge canvases with spirit beings in vivid colors. Jamie had again chosen well. “You’re a good tour guide,” she said.

  A weak bit of praise, considering how much more he wanted, but he accepted it with a smile. “Thanks.”

  They walked around the perimeter of the room first, silently absorbed in the paintings, and then came to the center display of works in glass. The most striking among them showed a small, birdlike human in pale blue opaque glass emerging from the crown of a man’s split-open head.

  “You have stuff like this happen to you?” Jamie asked as they stood in front it.

  “Not usually.” Only once. Dusty’s ghost.

  “Yeah, you’re pretty down-to-earth for a healer type. Like a traditional shaman. Keeps you from getting lost in the spirit world.”

  One of her first mentors in healing and psychic work had said something similar, and the insight surprised her, coming from Jamie. “Sometimes I see more than I want to, but it’s not spirits or anything. It’s more like stuff about people’s lives.”

  “Crap.” Jamie stared at the spirit bird. “How much of my past did you see?”

  The question made her deeply uncomfortable. “A lot.”

  “Like?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yeah. See what I can still lie about.” A brief flash of The Smile, followed by a return to shadows. “Nah. Just trying to figure out,” he did his right-left shoulder, truth-dodging dance, “how well you know me.”

  “Better than I’ve got a right to, and I’m sorry.”

  “Jesus.” His eyes grew wide. “That much?”

  “Sometimes I have visions I can’t control. I might fall asleep touching something that someone else used a lot, and if I’ve been wondering about that person, I’ll see something about them.
I don’t mean to, but if I’m really tired I can’t help it.”

  “So what was it?”

  She owed him the truth, but in case he became emotional or panicked, she didn’t want to be in the gallery. “Let’s go outside.”

  The nearest place to sit was the wall around a street corner garden that grew a few stalks of corn. It made Mae think of her corn mother fetish. Maybe this was meant to be a sacred garden, symbolic of the same things. Traffic poked along in front of them, and music floated from a passing car, while crowds of pedestrians passed at varying speeds.

  Jamie’s voice held an edge of anxiety under forced humor. “Making me sit down for it—fuck, how bad is this? You sure it was my life?”

  With growing unease, Mae told him about falling asleep in his sweatshirt and seeing the fight with Lisa over buying knives, and his early trauma with the older boy’s death. Jamie kept his gaze fixed on the rooftops across the street, yet she could feel his attention. His only words when she finished were, “What else?”

  “You sure you want to know?”

  “I have to. Yeah. Everything.”

  She shared what she’d seen of the events leading up to his suicide attempt, and his whole history with Dusty, including his panic at the boy’s death. Jamie watched passing feet on the sidewalk, his expression inward and foggy, and stayed silent when she was done.

  “I’m sorry, sugar. Really. I don’t know what I’m doing sometimes.”

  His eyes met hers, and for a second she sensed all the past Jamies from her visions, their eyes on her as well. He sighed and looked out into the street, hugging himself, rubbing his forearms.

  Mae listened to make sure his breath stayed steady, no sounds of panic. After what felt like an eternity, he placed his hot moist hand over hers on the stucco wall, his fingers worming back and forth. He took a deep breath. “I see things I don’t mean to, too.”

  The surprise was too much to process, and she felt her reaction trailing behind her words. “You do?”

  “I see souls.”

  He closed his eyes and tilted his face to the sky. “Yours is ...” He swayed, picking her hand up and rubbing it with both of his. “I can’t describe it ... Beautiful.”

  Was this possible? Or was he crazier than she’d ever realized? He seemed far from sane at the moment. Unsure whether she should ask for more, she waited.

  His hands tightened on hers, and he squeezed his eyes shut tighter. “I ... I feel it first. Like, this ... terror.”

  “When you see a soul?”

  He shook his head with a confused urgency. Mae sensed that he couldn’t quite come out of his inner world to answer her. “Like you’ve never been so frightened in your life, like—” He looked at her, suddenly normal. “Jeezus, that was stupid. Of course you’ve never been so frightened in your life, it’s your fucking death.” He dropped his gaze to their hands and spoke just over a whisper. “It’s huge, y’know? Blinding. Bigger than God.”

  She began to follow him. That was his vision she’d picked up at the bridge—Dusty as hawk-man. No wonder it had been so alien and mysterious to her. Jamie saw souls, and he saw them leave. “You see death?”

  “It stops. The light stops.” He let go of her and slowly pressed his hands into a prayer position in front of his eyes, like closing an aperture. “Then something leaves. Jesus, it fucking explodes, like something under pressure, y’know? And what’s left, it’s like,” he parted his hands, and then cupped them and brought his wrists together like a hinge slowly closing its two sides, “it’s like the inside of a little marry-me jewelry box. Dark. Black. Velvet. Without the ring.”

  Jamie shuddered, let the box dissolve, and leaned against Mae, his head on her shoulder, his hat falling back into the corn. He was hot, but still breathing steadily. No longer worried that he might misread her touch, she wrapped an arm around him and held him. This was too much for him to contain. He needed her.

  “When they’re scared,” he reached out into the empty space in front of him, “this thing tries to push out of me, this ... this ...” He extended his fingers, and his hand shook as if a kind of frustrated force were trying to reach through him. “This power I don’t have. Like that little buzz you sent into me. I’m blinded with them, in that fucking light that’s bigger than God. And then they die.”

  He let his arm drop and rested against her, drained and still.

  “You saw all this when you were a little kid? When that older boy died?”

  Jamie sat up, reached back for his hat and put it on. “Yeah.”

  “That’s a lot for a kid to see. I didn’t start to have visions ’til I was thirteen. And then I shut it off again until I was twenty-six.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re called as healer, y’know? The gift waits for you to be ready. Fuck, I’m the opposite of a healer. I’m called ... I dunno ... to see death.”

  “But you’ve seen my soul, too, and I’m alive.”

  Jamie fidgeted, kicked the wall a few times with his heels, let out a long, loud vocalized breath. “Yeah. Dunno what’s with that. Go for hours, sometimes days without it and then—Jesus. I have to hide. Can’t look at people. It’s like ... like ...” He turned to her, took her sunglasses off her face. She squinted in the blazing light. He fitted the glasses back on her, brushed her hair back behind her ears. “Like that.”

  “Too bright?”

  “Some people. Yeah. Some are too dark. Got shapes to ’em ...” He stared into space, holding his breath. “Can’t believe I told you all that. Jeezus. That took it out of me, y’know?” Another few kicks of the wall, another noisy sigh. “I could use some chocolate. And coffee.” Bouncing to his feet, he gave her The Smile. “Got any of that cake left?”

  As they headed back toward her house, Mae thought of the bird-emergence sculpture. Had Jamie planned the whole art-tour sequence to build to this revelation?

  The pain in his hip made his graceful, silent walk uneven, but so subtly a person would have to know him to notice and realize he was hiding something. Did he give any such signs of his secret inner life? Was there some way to tell when he was seeing souls? The first time she saw him, when he’d danced across the Plaza, coiled intensity in every muscle and a wild radiance in his smile, she’d sensed power in him. Zigzagging and misdirected, but a deep power. There was more to Jamie than she’d realized, and she didn’t know what to do with the discovery.

  Had he always seen souls and spirits? He made it sound unbearable, but he couldn’t have always been so fractured and erratic. He’d composed and recorded that extraordinary music. Held a job, and had a relationship that lasted a long time. Between his suicidal breakdowns in college and the state he was in today, he had to have had some fairly functional years. The man who had helped Dusty, while somewhat depressed, had been functional. Not wholly well, but not like this, not panicking every day, not mood-swinging every minute. Even little things like his language and his manners had to have been better before something slipped or snapped. What had done it? Was it one trauma, or the cumulative stresses of a hard year in his life? Or was it the burden of seeing souls? Had a gift become a curse?

  Seemingly unaware of her, Jamie started singing a song in Italian, tragic and yet transcendent. He didn’t take notice when drivers with open windows waved, or pedestrians slowed down and listened. The music flowed as if he couldn’t hold it in, swelled out in a voice so pure, strong, and sweet it was hard to believe he had room for it in him.

  Mae knew in her heart this singing was his truth, an answer to something about him, but she couldn’t explain it to herself. Something drove his music, something psychological or spiritual that was his like his bones—both damaged and strong, the bones of his soul, holding him together under the surface. This peculiar and complicated man was someone other than she had thought he was, someone she was still only starting to know.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  At the end of the song, Jamie slipped his arm around Mae’s waist and walked hip to hip with her in silence. No fl
irtation, no anxious chatter. It was like the way he’d leaned on her after telling her about seeing death, an anchoring. She could feel that without his having to say so, and let him hold on.

  When they reached the house, he left his shoes at the door and collapsed on the couch with Pie, setting her on his belly, one hand resting on the cat. Mae thought he looked like he could fall asleep, so she didn’t remind him he had come in search of chocolate and coffee.

  She stretched her legs, expecting Jamie to drift off. He blinked as if fighting sleep, fidgeted, and petted the cat. As she finished her third set of calf stretches, Mae said, “You need a nap, sugar.”

  “Nah. I’ll sleep when you’re gone. Don’t want to miss a minute.” His voice was drowsy, his speech mumbly. “Unless you’d lie down next to me.”

  “That’s a little too much, sorry. You know I can’t do that.”

  “Fuck.” Still half-asleep. “You mean you won’t. You bloody well can.” He turned on his side. Tipping Pie onto the cushions, he rubbed her and kissed the tip of her ear, and then reached out to hold an imaginary partner. “Just a cuddle. Innocent. Like those tiny little monkeys that sleep in heaps in trees.”

  “Like what?”

  “Pygmy marmosets. See ’em in zoos.” In his fatigue, he was beginning to sound drunk. “All piled up together. Sweet.”

  Mae sat on the floor near the couch. “How much sleep did you get last night?”

  “None.”

  “Were you seeing spirits?”

  “Nah. Not last night. Little aurora on you now, though.” He stroked the air around her as if she wore rays of light like the Virgin of Guadalupe. “Why’d you ask?”

  “I wondered if they kept you up at night.”

  He shook his head. “I’m alone. At night.” His eyes searched hers. “Did anything keep you up?”

  “Yeah, for a while.” She looked away. Best not to tell him one cause of her wakefulness—not when she didn’t understand it or know what to do with it. “I was thinking about the police not finding Dusty. It doesn’t make sense. It could have saved him if they’d gone right to him.”