Falling Idols

“If your doctors do you no good,” says Stavros, gritting that mouthful of brownish ivory, “then maybe you should go to another kind of doctor.”

“A second opinion,” you murmur. You’re reminded of an old joke. You want a second opinion? Okay: You’re ugly, too. “I don’t know any other kinds of doctors.”

And from the way Stavros smiles, you know he’s about to make one of his stranger pronouncements.

*

You’re not the type who would ordinarily frequent those who don’t hang M.D. shingles from their walls, but, relieved of your office duties, you have all this extra time. And Stavros speaks so glowingly of her, and she does live in his building, so you don’t have much of an excuse.

Ellen Medicine Crow is her name. Her father, Stavros told you, as a boy was given tutelage by the legendary Black Elk, although you’re not sure if you believe this. Quacks never stop seeking ways to boost their own stock.

“A shaman,” you say upon first encountering her. The irony isn’t lost on you. If your rationalist friends could see you now.

“I prefer healer,” she tells you. “It doesn’t sound quite as presumptuous. Or as intimidating.”

Intimidating. She’s that already, this Lakota woman. She must be near fifty, if not past it, but carries herself tall and strong and supple in a way that’s agelessly youthful. The only giveaway is the crinkles around her eyes. Her hair reaches her waist, black but threaded with strands of gray. Ellen Medicine Crow inspires your first sexual thoughts since she died, which frighten you with their suddenness, their power.

It’s no easier when you learn she wants to come stay with you for a few days. There’s so much she has to learn about you before she can help — if she can, she adds, which is the main reason you give in. You rather like the honesty of this kind of medicine, of someone who, unlike your usual physician, may be perfectly willing to declare your case a lost cause.

It feels strange having a woman around again, although her presence is hardly like that of a roommate; rather, a bird or some other creature that watches you with bright, all-seeing eyes. At night she sleeps by your side, although there’s no touching but for accidental brushes. You turn away whenever an erection raises, yet feel sure she must know what you’re thinking; too, she surely notices your shame over such traitorous skin, but has the grace to pretend she doesn’t.

You distract yourself some of the time with the photo albums that accumulated before the hurled brick changed everything. Page after page of memories, some fresh, some seasoned by years, all of them capable of bringing you to tears if you look at them just right.

Ellen Medicine Crow lingers behind you as you bow your head at the table, weeping, and you feel her bend lower. Feel the light touch of her hands on your shoulders, the press of her forehead at the back of your neck. She’s just sharing in your grief, but you drink in her touch with a terrible fear you’ll never know anything so tender again.

Perhaps she knows this too, and this is why she mourns.

“Why did you decide to become a healer?” you ask her later, with a drier face.

Hair shimmers as she shakes her head. “I didn’t decide. I had nothing to do with it. It decided for me. The most I ever did was choose not to fight it.”

“Suppose you wanted something else, that this wasn’t what you wanted to do. Wouldn’t you have fought it then?”

She’s patient with your honest skepticism, has undoubtedly encountered it before. “But how could I? The universe creates what it needs. All I had to do was grow. There’s no reason to make it all so difficult.”

You laugh, not cruelly. Mostly you wonder why you had to turn out so enlightened. “I just can’t buy into that,” you say, but no more. This hardly seems the time to get yourself into a reasoned argument against determinism.

Although you can see the appeal: The illusion of hands moving behind the scenes; accountability; someone or something to blame for the wretched turns life takes in this fucked-over world…

And you’re angrier than you have any right to be, aren’t you?

On the third day Ellen sends you out on an errand, something you must do by yourself. Go find a rock and bring it back, these are her instructions. At least the size of your fist, a rock you feel compelled to pick up more than any other rock.

You’ve never given rocks much thought before, wanting only to duck them when they’re thrown, but she’s the healer. You find one a few blocks away — it’s a tougher order to fill in the city than you might think — half-buried in a nest of weeds beside a stagnant ditch. It passes Ellen’s approval and she has the two of you sit on the floor, facing each other. Her face is serious, clouded even, her focus upon you total. You are the world. And you are in trouble.

“It’s more than just your skin,” she says. “It’s everything, everyone you lose and everything that breaks for you. You wonder why. Why it happens to you. Don’t you?”

You shake your head. “I already told you, I don’t believe— “

“Lie to yourself if you want, but don’t lie to me.”

Your head lowers a bit. And you suppose, possibly, you may at least entertain the sometimes notion of believing in reasons, that coincidence stretches only so far. You nod miserably, wondering if Galileo felt this way, forced to recant.

“Then ask the rock.”

You stare at her. “Ask … the rock?”

“Ask the rock, then stare at it. Stare into it, so that you see more than just its surface. Wait until you see the patterns and the shapes it shows you. When you see something … tell me what it is.” She takes pity on your failure to grasp any purpose here whatsoever. “The rock will tell you what you already know, but cannot or will not admit to yourself yet.”

So you feel like a fool, holding this flattened slab in your hand. Talking to it. Staring at it as if it’s going to talk