Shaman's Blues

by Amber Foxx

  “You’re not a disaster. You’re brilliant, too.” Even if he didn’t have his feet on the ground or his head on straight.

  “I wasn’t asking for that.” Jamie faced her, no longer fidgeting. “That wasn’t the point.”

  She got his point. It was the same as Hubert’s.

  Mae felt relieved when Jamie left after lunch, taking a few of his instruments and his business license to go make money in the Plaza. He had been kind and thoughtful and healing, yet even on his best behavior he wasn’t restful to be around. She took a couple of issues of IDEA Fitness Journal from her suitcase and lay on the bed, looking for escape into work. Her future. Her normal life. Some time alone.

  Almost alone. Pie mewed to be brought up onto the bed, and Mae couldn’t refuse her. She picked her up and lay back to read again. Articles about exercise programming should make her think about what she would study in school, but instead she found herself remembering her old job, the one at the wellness center in Cauwetska, North Carolina. Where Jen had been her boss.

  She dropped the journal onto the bed and sat up to look through the few books that sat on the bedroom bookshelf. There were guides to local sights for the visiting artist who was the typical tenant, and several novels by local authors. The largest book stuck out an inch from the shelf as if it had been put away carelessly, and had a torn piece of a junk-mail coupon flyer stuck in one of the front pages as a bookmark, like a big red tongue hanging out. Old Roots, New Branches: Indigenous Shamanism in Urban Cultures, Vol. I, Asia, by Stanley Ellerbee.

  Intrigued, Mae opened it and found it was inscribed “To Niall and Marty. Are you sure you wanted to read this? Sleep well, and don’t let it fall on you. Stan.”

  His humility and humor made her smile, but maybe the book would be sleep-inducing. The table of contents suggested a scholarly book, and not light reading in either the literal sense of its bulk or its subject matter. Nonetheless, Mae was curious to give a book by Jamie’s father a try, and lay back down with the heavy volume. She doubted that Niall or Marty, or whatever tenant had attempted the book, had gotten far. The bookmark was at the very beginning.

  Preface

  I grew up in a middle-class Anglo family in Santa Fe New, Mexico, aware of my otherness, surrounded as I was by Hispanic, Pueblo, Navajo and Apache cultures. My interest in how other people saw the world began at my first Pueblo corn dance and grew to take me around the world. I did my doctoral dissertation on the survival of traditional Aboriginal culture in urban settings in Australia, where I had the good fortune to meet my future wife, a Warlpiri woman who refused to be studied except over dinner.

  When our son was born, a traditional healer held my infant boy over a smoking pile of konkerberry leaves to cleanse and purify him, and start his ceremonial life. At the time, all I could think about was him breathing smoke. I was humoring my wife. Though I respected this ritual, I didn’t believe in it. The healer wanted to smoke me, too (as a “whitefella” with no ancient culture of my own, she thought I needed it), and I let her, for the same reason.

  To my surprise, I felt better in some inexplicable way. Not very scientific, a feeling, but it happened. These twenty seconds or so of silent immersion in the sweet smelling smoke was the beginning of a change of heart. Of questioning not only how other people saw the world, but how I did.

  When our son was three, he witnessed the accidental death of a friend’s son who was babysitting him. Our boy seemed strange afterwards, halfway in another world, but we thought he was too young to understand death, and would be all right if we loved him. He wasn’t. We finally had the sense to take him to a psychologist, a woman considered the best in her field with young children, but he was afraid of her because she “had a bad spot.” (I still don’t know what that was—her appearance was entirely pleasant and normal, but it was something he saw.)

  The next year when we went to Korea for my research into the practices of traditional mudangs, my key informant invited me to bring my whole family to a kut, a healing and divination ceremony. I agreed, since I knew it involved music and dance and colorful costumes, which my children loved. Sometimes the music was shrill or cacophonous, but the dancing was powerful and entrancing. My normally distractible son never lost interest, often trying to dance with the shamans. We had to sit him down. When they invoked the spirits of the cardinal directions, he seemed to watch things fly in. Even when the music became too intense for my daughter and she covered her ears, my son grew excited. He was afraid of many things, but not this. Not the shamans.

  When we left for a break for lunch, I was advised not to bring the children back into the main hall for some time afterwards. It was good advice.

  An animal offering, the skinned carcass of a cow, was brought in for the second half of the kut, and one of the younger mudangs bit raw severed bovine testicles and liver to impress the spirits with her courage and strength. I watched this violent segment without my family. When the bloody-faced shaman had left the room and the raw meat had been taken to the kitchen, Addie brought the children back in for more music, dancing, bright clothing, banners waving, and bursts of divination.

  At the end of the kut we were invited outside to a yard with carvings much like totem poles, and one of the mudangs, Ms. Kim, the one who’d bitten the bull testicles, showed her powers by walking barefoot on enormous sharp blades, and other acts to frighten away evil spirits with her superior strength. Had I been one, I would have run from her. She drew a sharp knife across her tongue and remained unharmed, though I was close enough to see that it should have drawn blood. I wished I’d been warned of this to spare my children the sight.

  After the ceremony, Ms. Kim approached me. I had an interview scheduled with her teacher, the elder shaman who had conducted central parts of the kut, so I didn’t expect more than goodbye, but she said she wanted to see my son.

  I had him in my arms. He was four years old and in need of a nap, so cranky and miserable that I felt like the worst father in the world for bringing him, even though he’d loved it. It was too long, and too strange.

  He looked at Ms. Kim suddenly with wide, wild eyes, as if he was seeing something even more extraordinary than her dancing or her feats with knives. In her stilted English, she said, “Too soon. Close off,” and placed her hand on top of his head. He looked puzzled and even sad for a moment, and then rested his head against me to fall asleep. “Watch out for him,” the mudang said. “The spirits want him.”

  “Which spirits?”

  “Good, bad. All of them.”

  I don’t know what she did. She declined an interview. I don’t know what he saw, but after that he no longer appeared to see it. His musical gifts emerged soon after, as if the spirits had found a new route through him. He is twelve years old at the time of this writing, and he says that sometimes he can’t remember what he used to see before the mudang touched his head, and that other times it’s so strange he feels like he must have made it up.

  The scientist and skeptic say that people believe in spirits, they don’t actually see them, and that shamanism works with expectation and emotion. The magic is the magic of the placebo. I can only say that this episode, which belongs not to me but to my son, opened my mind’s window and let something in which will not leave. I have tried to write this book as an unbiased observer, and I hope that as an anthropologist I have succeeded. As a father, though, I will always wonder. I hope that as a reader of the studies in this book, you will open up and wonder as well. How do other people see the world? What is out there that we might be missing?

  Stanley Ellerbee, Perth, Western Australia.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Mae set the book down and stared at the ceiling and its unlit star lights. Jamie hadn’t spent his whole life seeing souls and spirits. Witnessing death when Dusty died must have broken the barrier between the worlds again. For all the years in between, the shaman had sealed it off.

  But she hadn’t healed him. The trauma of seeing death was still in him; eve
ry trauma of his life was still in him. He had been raised with love, blessed at birth, and yet he’d tried repeatedly to kill himself. He’d been in mental hospitals. He’d had therapy again when he got his first job, but he was still troubled. Was he too broken to ever fully recover? Or was this somehow a sign of his calling? When she’d fought her psychic gift to keep peace in her family, Mae had been struck with bad luck. It had ceased when she accepted the spirit world’s call. The scope of her bad luck had been nothing compared to Jamie’s, though. Did that mean he had a stronger calling?

  Mae rose and closed the bedroom door. Jamie could come back in the house, but she needed more time alone before she talked to him. She lay back down beside his father’s book.

  Since the spirit vision came and went, she might not have seen Jamie under its full influence, unless that was part of what had struck him in Marisol’s, the restaurant where he’d taken her that first evening. Could someone as emotionally unstable as he was live with seeing souls? He seemed no more ready than when he’d been four years old, but ready or not, the spirits wanted him.

  She thought of the effects of Jamie’s touch when he’d held her head and stroked her ears. It wasn’t the same as simply being comforted. It was literally as if he’d taken her pain and soaked it up into him, almost the opposite of the way she worked as a healer. She sent something into people, moving energies and giving stuck places a nudge. Mae looked at Pie, curled and peaceful against her leg. If Jamie’s healing of the cat had been like his healing of her, he’d soaked up fear and trauma the way he’d taken her grief. How many people had he done this for? What did he do with it when he took in the pain? He already had no room for his own.

  Mae scarcely had any teaching in how to work as a psychic and healer. Jamie, although he’d been around shamans his whole life, had no training at all. No preparation. The gift had been buried beneath the surface for twenty-four years. He didn’t seem happy to have it re-emerge. He’d called himself the Death Man, and said he sometimes had to hide from the blinding brightness and frightening darkness of what he saw. He had enough to do to get his music career on track and take care of his mental and financial health, both of which looked precarious.

  Was there anything Mae could do for him? She’d thought that getting him in touch with Wendy was enough. But if he had fallen off the edge emotionally and professionally because of an unbearable spiritual experience, a manager for his career wouldn’t fix that.

  Other than opening and closing the front door, Jamie made no sound when he entered the house. Unready to face him, still gnawing at her questions, Mae sat up and tried to think more, but Jamie’s prolonged silence became its own kind of noise, making her wonder what he was doing.

  She came out into the living room and met him coming from the laundry room, buttoning up his pink shirt, probably imagining himself well dressed, though he looked disarrayed, his hair even wilder than usual, windblown and tangled, topped off with the disintegrating braids. She’d need to remind him to get himself looking right before they went to the opening. No. It’s not my job to make him presentable.

  “Get a good audience?” she asked.

  A few twisting and twirling gestures of his hands, a crooked half-smile, and he sat on the floor near the coffee table, rearranging his flutes on it, lining them up and gently touching them as if putting them to bed.

  Mae sat on the couch. “Did you play? Did you make any money?”

  “Fuck. I don’t want to talk about it, all right? It was bad.”

  Had he had a panic attack? Seen someone with a bad spot, whatever that was?

  “Sometimes things get better when you talk about them.”

  Sulky, bordering on pouting, he rolled the bamboo flute back and forth. “You should have come with me.”

  “I was reading some of my fitness journals. I need to keep up for my work—”

  “But I couldn’t play.” He ran a finger along a flute case, leaned his elbows on the coffee table, and rubbed his eyes. “Fuck. I’m fucking brain-dead.”

  He reminded Mae of the cranky and miserable four-year-old in his father’s preface, the child who’d missed his nap and been seeing spirits. Jamie had been awake for over twenty-four hours, and from the way he described his challenges living alone, he probably hadn’t had adequate sleep for months. For what felt like the tenth time that day, she said, “You need to take a nap.”

  He shook his head. “Leaving for the bloody Ruth Smyth thing soon.”

  “We’ve got two hours, sugar. You can sleep.” No response. Only his curled-over back and the chaos of his hair. She waited. No panic, just fidgeting. “Your head looks like a hoo-rah’s nest. You need to either redo or undo your braids.”

  “Scares me. Been putting it off.” He reached up and pulled off the threads that tied the ends of the braids, wincing, and began to unbraid. “Ow! Fuck, it hurts.”

  “It can’t be that painful.”

  “It is. I’ve got bad hair.” This sounded like another diagnosis, the way he said it. With an anxious frown, he made another attempt, yanking the braid apart and letting go abruptly, smacking the table with his fists. “I need some scissors.”

  “Stop that. You can’t have a tantrum over your hair.”

  “Sorry.” He sighed and lay back on the floor. “It’s better if someone grooms me. I get mad and start tearing at it. Cut the braids off once and had little nubs on my head.” His eyes met hers, strangely unashamed of his childish behavior. She realized he trusted her so fully now he would share every bit of his weirdness, every neurotic eccentricity, with an open heart. It was touching—and troubling. “Haven’t done myself up for a year after that. Two. Dunno. Scared I’d cut ’em off again.”

  After a minute under his soft yet unrelenting gaze, Mae surrendered and fetched a brush from the bedroom.

  “Sit in a chair, sugar.”

  With sudden, silly eagerness, he obeyed, and Mae began the slow process of undoing each minute plait, grateful that he hadn’t done more than five of them and that most of his hair still hung free, though it was badly knotted. Jamie wriggled happily against the back of the chair and closed his eyes.

  “You could learn to calm down, do it yourself without tearing at it,” she said. “My young’uns are learning that much, and they’re six.” The thought of brushing the girls’ lank dark hair mixed with the sensation of touching Jamie’s thick mane. Little things like this, taking care of them as a mother, would be so hard to lose. She pushed the sadness down. “You just want me to baby you.”

  “Nah. Not babying. We take care of each other. Haven’t I taken good care of you?”

  “You have. You’ve been real sweet.” His heart was in the right place, but his mind wasn’t. As she eased the brush though his hair, pausing to untangle knots, she couldn’t help thinking that the outside of his head reflected the inside, and wondered how much of the inner mess was mental health, and how much the intrusion of other layers of reality. Touching the crown of his head as she brushed, she imagined the mudang touching him, and wondered again about closing that door, the opening to other worlds. “Can I talk about something I read?”

  “If it’s not about weight lifting. I hate fucking weight lifting.”

  “No. I looked at some of the books Daddy and Niall keep here. I read a little in one of your father’s books, long title—starts with Old Roots, New Branches.”

  “Jesus. Almost as boring as weight lifting.”

  “I don’t think so. Do you remember a Korean woman in a fancy costume, a shaman, laying her hand on your head, when you were little?”

  “That’s an old edition. He took that out of the new ones. I didn’t want it out there anymore, y’know? Didn’t care when I was twelve, but it embarrassed me later.”

  “I asked if you remember, though. Do you remember her? And what happened?”

  His head moved in a rapid, tight-necked nod beneath her hands. Seeing the hint of distress, she slowed down her work on his hair and found a smooth area she could
brush a while. It worked. Jamie sighed and wriggled again.

  Mae kept brushing gently. “I’m gonna tell you what I think happened, and you tell me if I’m wrong. I won’t make you talk about it, but can you listen to me and just give me a yes or no?”

  Another affirmative head movement, and his hand slid up to briefly clasp hers.

  “When you were real young and saw your friend Pat die, some kind of door opened, like he didn’t close it behind him when he went out. You spent a whole year seeing things, like your family’s souls, your psychologist’s soul, and any spirits that were running around. You saw the spirits those Korean shamans brought into this ceremony. This shaman lady could tell, and she thought you were too little to be seeing that stuff, and she closed the door. Then when Dusty died, the door got stuck open again.”

  Jamie’s hand reached up to hers again and gripped her.

  “Do you need me to stop talking?”

  He shook his head. “Just do my hair.”

  Mae undid a knot, and brushed until he seemed steadier. “I was wondering—do you want to learn to work with it, or do you want it closed again? I think I might be able to help.”

  A layer of his energy softened. “That’s why I marked that page.”

  The level of planning surprised her. He might have noticed the book while they were cleaning and come back to mark the page with a scrap from the recycling when he sneaked in to get Pie in the morning. He wasn’t a hundred percent chaotic. There were lines of strategizing going on within the crossed wires and jumbled jigsaw puzzles of his mind. “You could have just told me. What if I didn’t read it?”

  “Then ... it’d mean I’m supposed to keep the ...” He made a gesture across his eyes with taut, spread hands, a substitute for saying some unnamable thing. Mae realized he hadn’t been so much strategizing as superstitious. He said, “I don’t know if I can, though. You have to tell me.”

  “Sugar, you could have a calling. This is big. I can’t decide that for you.”