Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  The days go by, and they take no notice of you. Not one bit. You might lie in bed for three weeks, dead to the world, but the days go on and roll by anyhow. So by the time I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes, and felt like I was waking out of a dream, the monsoon was over and the sun was here to stay.

  I told you some parts from when I was lying there dead, but all of that is unclear in my mind. The first thing I recall with any surety, I opened my eyes one morning, there in my open-air bedroom, and I saw the pope, in the desert, dancing. I was lying on my side, and it did not escape my attention that there was a whole bunch of people standing there in my bedroom too. They was just off the porch, but when your bedroom includes the whole of Arizona it’s kinda dumb to split hairs. There was Mona, of course, and Bly, and Mary, and Finch. And there was a lady I hadn’t met before. But they weren’t looking at me; they were looking the other way at a two-inch-high plastic pope, dancing from side to side. I found out later he was solar-powered, so he would never stop jiggling till the monsoon came back, or nighttime, whichever was first.

  All five of ’em, Mona and everyone, they was all standing with their hands on their hips, shaking their heads, and chuckling, like they’d never seen the pope dancing before. Because who has? He could swing his plastic hips, though, that’s for sure.

  I sat up. I didn’t feel right, but I felt a whole lot better than I had. I swung my legs out, without checking for rattlers since I figured the pope would’ve scared ’em off anyhow, like Saint Pat did in Ireland, then Mona turned around and said, ‘Snowflake! You’re awake!’ and then they all turned to look at me, and they still had their hands on their hips.

  ‘How you feeling?’ said Bly, and he came and sat by me on the bed and put an arm around me and I knew he was the kindest stepbrother in the whole damn world. And what’s the step got to do with it, anyhow?

  Mona turned to the lady I didn’t know and said, ‘Jenny, this is Snowflake,’ and I was already opening my mouth to say, ‘My name’s Ash and I’m pleased to meet you.’

  Jenny smiled. She was a sweet lady, I could tell that. Gentle. She was about forty or fifty I guess and kinda pretty just because her eyes were always smiling. I mean, almost always. There was something about her that was way different from the others I’d met so far. Took me a few weeks to figure out what it was. When I did, it was three things. First thing was, she had money. Lots of it. Second thing was, she wasn’t sick. Which meant, the third thing was, she was the only darn one of ’em who actually wanted to live in the desert. Imagine that. She liked it. She said it was beautiful and peaceful.

  Jenny smiled at me with her eyes and she looked concerned and said, ‘You’re not well, so they tell me,’ and I guess I shrugged. I recall that I never shrugged much before I came to Snowflake. Just like Bly didn’t. Seemed it was catching, and maybe not the only thing.

  Then I tried to stand up but I didn’t do a whole great job of that, and Jenny said to Mona, ‘You’ve taken Ash to a doctor, haven’t you?’ and Mona stared through the air and shrugged. Then Jenny said, ‘Mona, you have to take this kid to see Dr. Behrens. This minute,’ and I didn’t really get it but it was like Jenny was kinda telling Mona off, even though Mona was twice her age. Not exactly, but you know what I mean. I found out about that later too. Jenny was a good woman, and if Mona had helped a zillion folks with EI, then Jenny had too, in a different way.

  Turned out she owned four or five houses in the Twenties, as well as her own in the Forties. Like, she owned Sally and Dolly’s houses. She’d had them built as safe for EI folks as can be, and she rented them out as cheap as cheap. And I’ll say this. She had money, but it took you a while to notice. Not like with some rich folks who wanted you to know it all the damn time. Building them houses, she said it was down to Mona, that Mona had talked her into helping the canaries. And Mona, to tell it right, Mona said it was all down to Jenny helping, with her money. They would both laugh it off, and they was gentle women, but I saw right there that when Jenny told Mona to take me to the doctor, then Mona took me to the doctor.

  Later that day we climbed into Mona’s Japanese circus car and she was real quiet as we headed on in. I didn’t know what I’d done. And maybe I hadn’t done nothing.

  ‘Jack, Bly’s dad?’ I said. ‘He used to have a little car too.’

  Mona said nothing.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t exactly the same as yours. His was called a Lada.’

  Mona stared through the windshield.

  ‘He used to say, “She may be little, but she’s a whole Lada fun.”’

  I slapped the dash and pulled a goofy face and that was me trying to make her laugh and what I got back was precisely nothing.

  ‘Yeah, it was a joke he had,’ I said. ‘Super funny. Bly and me, we laughed every time.’

  Mona blinked a couple times, so then I tried to get her to do the speaking instead, and I asked her what was with the wobbling pope and then she smiled a tiny bit and said it was something she’d promised Jenny. She’d ordered one for her and Jenny had come over to pick it up. Said it was to go with the rest of ’em, so I asked, ‘The rest of what?’ but then we were pulling up outside the doctor’s office in Snowflake.

  Now, you will recall how I said I started to learn things when I started to read. And how I started to read when I started to get sick? Well, here’s one of the things I read about. It was in some book on Mona’s shelves, I mean, in Mona’s library, and I can’t tell you when I read it, but whenever it was, it reminded me of that afternoon when we rode into town to see the doctor for the first time.

  So there’s this thing called the Hawthorne effect, and what this says is that when you go to the doctor, you feel better before you’ve even seen her. Just the idea of seeing her makes you feel better. You’ve heard of the placebo effect, well, it’s kinda like that. Just the thought that you’re gonna have someone look after you and take care of you is enough to make you feel better for real.

  And I did, riding there in Mona’s car, that afternoon. I felt ill, but I felt better than I had in three weeks; I even wondered whether I actually needed to go see the doctor. Another week, I figured, and I’d be fine.

  But the funny thing was that Mona seemed as sick as I’d ever seen her. I mean, she was okay, she was driving, but she was real quiet, and she wore a mask, and she looked real tired.

  When we got outside the doctor’s office she said, ‘Ash, you’re gonna have to go in by yourself,’ and I said, ‘Okay, sure,’ and so I went in alone. And waited.

  And I waited. And what happened then, well, it sure weren’t the Hawthorne effect. First thing was, I felt my headache coming back, and I started to feel muzzy again. You know the smell of lilies? Those big white lilies with the huge orange stalks covered in pollen. You know how they make some people react, like it gets hard to breathe, and your nose starts running, and your eyes start watering. Well, it was like that for me in the waiting room, only there weren’t no lilies. There was just me, the ‘and-how-will-you-be-paying’ lady behind the desk who’d signed me in glaring at me from time to time though I did not know why. And the Book of Mormon. And all the time I was getting worse, feeling sicker and sicker, so by the time they called me in to meet Dr. Behrens, I was ready to meet my Maker instead.

  Dr. B did not smile much. I’ll guess she was around Mona’s age, and she had gray hair kinda like Mona’s but short, and that’s where the similarities ended. She had those little lines people get around their mouth from pursing their lips permanently since they was twelve. I started off by trying to tell her what was wrong with me and how I’d fallen sick, but she didn’t seem too interested in any of that. What did seem to interest her was who I was living with, and where I had lived before, and how often I had been to the doctor.

  Then she asked me if there was a history of mental illness in my family. She did that just like this: ‘Is there a history of mental illness in your family?’ she said, pursing her lips, so I thought about Mom and the fluoxetine and then I tho
ught about how my dad might’ve been Germany’s craziest export for all I knew, so obviously what I did was I shrugged.

  Things got worse after that. I kept trying to say, well, yeah but I feel real sick and maybe it’s something I caught on Greyhound Lines, Incorporated, but she didn’t wanna know. Before about six minutes was up, she held up a hand, and blinked at me, and pursed some more, and said, ‘What would you say if I told you there is nothing wrong with you?’

  That sure stopped me good. Because I was thinking what do you mean there’s nothing wrong with me? I’m dying right in front of you, so I did not understand what she meant. And then I did, because she said, ‘What would you say if I told you this is all in your head?’

  And I said but there’s rashes on my arms! You can see ’em! But she said I had made ’em happen with my mind and did I know that it was known that those folk called stigmatics whose palms bleed like they’re Jesus on the cross could make it happen just by really wanting it to?

  To be fair, I do not recall the rest of that interview. I remember thinking about what Bly had said, about how no one wants to be sick. And not to let anyone tell you different.

  What I recall next is sitting in Mona’s car in a daze thinking what just happened? Mona was quiet as she drove me home, and when I said how I was feeling worse after sitting in the waiting room she mumbled something about the carpet they had in there and the glues that were used to make it and then she said something about finding me a mask, an old one, a good one, that had been off-gassed so it was safe to use. Then we were back in the Forties. And yes, I was a bright and eager kid back then, and yes, up to that point I knew nothing but what was in front of my eyes, but them things were set to change and though it’s a real long time ago now, I think I could already see that they was changing.

  I said before, how when I woke up from my three weeks in bed, I was waking out of a dream, and into real life. Hard part is knowing which was the dream. The three weeks, or the part that came before that.

  I

  I can’t cure you, so you

  must be mad

  ‘Dumb goat.’

  That’s what I heard Mona saying, one dry and sunny day. She was staring off in the desert and I figured Socrates must be out there, up to some noteworthy goat business.

  ‘He’s one handsome buck, but he’s sure not the smartest,’ she said, hands on her hips. Then I saw where she was looking and she wasn’t looking at the goat, she was looking at Bly. He was fixing a new fence around Mona’s yard, and sawing a piece off of a wooden rail he’d put up, only he was setting on the part he was sawing.

  ‘You got the brains in your family, huh?’ she said to me, and I said, ‘We ain’t blood related, he’s just my step,’ and then she looked at me funny.

  Real quiet she said, ‘We’re all related, Ash. Be better if some folks understood that.’

  I’ll explain.

  The night before, at what-did-you-learn-today time, she’d been talking about some tests she’d just had done. Genetic tests. What Mona said was, you spit in a tube, and put it in the US mail, and four to six weeks later you’d find out who you are. Everything, like medical stuff, as in, will you get Alzheimer’s early or are you at risk of being celiac or is it more likely you’ll have breast cancer (that one’s mostly for women, I guess). And then there was other stuff. Weird stuff. Like whether you sneeze when you walk out into bright sunshine and is your back going to be hairy (that one’s mostly for men, I guess) and whether you can smell asparagus or not. I am not funning you. God made a gene for that. Hardly seems worth Her time, don’t it, but there you are.

  And then there was the other stuff, that shows where you came from, like are you from Europe, or were you made in China, and how much of you is from where exactly, and it even tells you how much Neanderthal you got in you. So, the Neanderthals were these other people, like a whole other species of people, and once upon the time folks thought that we’d wiped them out. As in, Homo sapiens had wiped out the Neanderthals, because we’re still here (more or less) whereas those other guys stopped existing around 40,000 years back. Which even Mona would probably not call recently. But now we know what we did was this: we didn’t kill those guys, we had babies with them. It’s called interbreeding, and it sounds a whole lot more fun than killing people. So, this means they became part of the gang. And Mona was super excited because she was 2.8 percent Neanderthal, and they say that’s a heck of a lot. A heck of a lot.

  Anyway, and I am getting to the point now, because then she waved the printouts around and said, but look, we all came out of Africa anyway, and told us that there was this theory that everyone alive on Earth today was descended from just one woman. One woman, and she lived about 200,000 years ago. One mother for the whole human race. Like all the other possible branches of the human race got killed off and maybe we were real close to extinction, way back then, 200,000 years ago. Maybe we were all little fragile critters, and about to snuff, but somehow we stuck together and we made it through. Till there’s nigh on eight billion of us. But this one woman, they call her Eve for reasons I guess I don’t need to explain, well, her offspring survived. And here we all are, with just one mother for all of us. Imagine that. Seems kinda stupid to argue about wars and religion and gender and the color of your damn skin when you know that. Don’t it?

  ‘I guess I’d kinda like to do that test,’ I told Mona and she said, ‘Good idea, Ash!’ and then she told me it was $99 so I forgot all about that.

  Then Mona said, ‘I guess I’ll go save your brother’s life,’ by which she meant she oughta tell Bly about the rail he was sawing, and she wandered off, and I thought, huh, he is one handsome goat, and maybe that was the first time I’d realized it, because up to then he was just my stepbrother. He was just Bly. The boy who wanted to be a police officer, more than anything in the world.

  This was a week or two after I got back from that first visit with Dr. Behrens. Truth is, I was kinda in shock after that visit. Two days later, I made Mona take me back into Snowflake again, because I still felt sicker’n hell and I knew it wasn’t all in my damn mind. I decided to get my shit together this time and have it out with Dr. B, but things did not work out as I intended. I made a big deal of it and kinda talked her into doing some tests, and she just told me I was wasting her time and my money, and truth is, I had precious little of that left. Not enough to waste on finding out whether I could smell asparagus, especially since I already knew that.

  So they did one or two tests on my blood and what-have-you and they found less than nothing, which is just what Mona said they would find because they really don’t have any clue about what’s going on with MCS.

  And then, one day, Dr. B tried to write me a script for some fluoxetine and I walked out and got in Mona’s car and we went home.

  Then I tried moaning some to see if it would help. It didn’t, but I did it anyhow, till I guess Mona’s ears must’ve quit working. Like I said to her, what the heck kinda doctor do you got in Snowflake, anyhow? Maybe there’s a better one down the road, in Show Low?

  Mona shook her head at that.

  ‘There surely ain’t,’ she said and when I said, ‘So where is there a good doctor?’ she said nothing. Then I said “is there a good doctor?” and she nodded and said, ‘Well, there’s this one guy helped a lot of us folks. Dr. Ray.’

  So I said, well, let’s go see him and Mona said, ‘Yeah, thing is, Ash, he’s in Texas,’ and since that may as well have been Mars, well, that was more or less that. But she told me how some MCS folks had been to see him, and how he was one of the few doctors who believed in MCS and EI and even had some theories as to its whys and what-have-yous. He was important, Mona said, because he had argued for a lot of people against their health insurance companies. Like these insurance people, they sure didn’t want to pay out on anything, never mind on some disease they don’t believe exists. But Dr. Ray went to bat for a few folks and that’s how they got their disability payout.

  ‘Without Dr. Ray
, some of us snowflakes would be living on the streets right now. Or maybe dying,’ Mona said, and when I asked who, she said, ‘Oh, Detlef, Finch, the Sick Birds. Most everyone...’ And then she jabbed a thumb at herself. ‘I told you before, Ash, we’re the lucky ones.’

  And I wondered if she included me in that ‘we.’ Because I still did not believe in this EI thing, not really. And even less did I believe that I’d done gone and got a dose of it too. And I believed even less that, just by coincidence, I had gotten the same thing my stepbrother had gotten. I said that to Mona and she just shrugged.

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first time,’ she said, which was something else she was real fond of saying. ‘And maybe you two shared the same house for a while, someplace near a source of contamination.’

  She drove along and I was left thinking about all the crummy houses we’d lived in and the pollution here and there and, well, everywhere. But still I didn’t buy it. There had to be something else the matter with me, and I wanted to know what the heck it was.

  Now all that took some thinking about, so I did.

  We trundled home and when we got there I asked Mona about something I didn’t yet know.

  ‘Mona,’ I said, and she said what?

  ‘What did you do before you got sick?’ And she told me how she’d been a teacher, and I asked what did she teach.

  She said, ‘Stuff. I taught stuff,’ and then she said how she’d loved it but how that life was over. Then she shut up.

  And I shut up too.

  Still, Dr. B had made me sorer than a goat what’d eaten somebody’s sneakers. Like I said, I couldn’t believe a doctor could be like that. Just tell you you’re crazy, and the more you try to tell her you ain’t crazy, the more she purses her lips and the higher her eyebrows raise and the more she stabs her fingers on her computer keyboard, right in front of you.