drums grew louder and more instant and a dozen or so devotees gathered into a rough dance line. The healer stood before Rosa, chanting, and anointing her with white powder and several liquids, one of them from an old Prell squeeze-bottle. He lit a clay bowl of some vegetable material, which gave off a sweet smoke. I asked Des what it was and he shushed me. Ibekwe blew smoke at the girl, and chanted some more; the dancers leaped and twirled, the drums pounded. This went on. My attention was fixed on the splendid woman. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, the energy she radiated, her authority was so very intense and attractive.
Then Rosa let out a high yell and stiffened. Her eyes rolled back into her head, showing only whites, and her neck twisted stiffly to the right. The drums fell silent, the dancers froze. Ibekwe was hunched over her, chanting, his face inches from hers. She was drooling thick saliva, like a dog; one of the women holding her wiped her chin with a cloth. Then came a softer drumming. Ibekwe stopped chanting and backed away. Rosa’s feet were beating rapidly on the packed earth; her head snapped back, her body bowed; she was in seizure now and the two women were having difficulty holding on to her. Other women jumped forward to help and we lost sight of her for some time. When we could observe her again, she was back on her litter, limp. The drummers and dancers wandered around, chatting, like players after a softball game in the park.
I asked Greer if the operation had been a success, he told me it was just the first stage, she’ll be here for weeks, getting deeper into trance states, amp; letting the orisha inhabit her more deeply each time. Eventually she’ll be consecrated to Ogun, like Maro. Here he pointed to the beautiful woman who’d helped hold the patient. He said she’d been brought in with encephalitis, also a Christian, also a hospital reject. She was essentially dead, and look at her now. I did and as I did she looked at me and smiled and I felt a jolt of some?I don’t know, some sexual energy. Very disturbing. Greer wanted to know what was wrong, said I looked like I was about to faint. All the excitement, I said, and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast and it was blazing hot. He took me back into the house, where Ibekwe was sitting on a rope bed being cared for by some of his devotees, an old woman was bathing his face with a damp rag. Greer talked with him awhile and I stood around, feeling a little awkward as you do when attending a conversation between two people with a long history between them. The healer opened his eyes amp; looked at me amp; had conversation w/ Greer, clear they were talking about me. Des said, He says he’s got a busy schedule but as a favor to me he’ll try to fit you in. For what? He says you’re carrying a curse, Greer said. He says you’re cursed in your marriage bed.
Later in the car I tried to be all clinical about it, stupidly, really. What was really happening in the curing ceremony, talking about hysterical conversion and oh so interesting recent speculations about the connection between mental states and the immune system and Greer said, Yeah, I know all that, and the fact is, most traditional healers are charlatans, but Ibekwe isn’t, he really does it, and it’s outside the science zone, and so when I write about him, I’m going to have to fudge and do all that hand waving about the fucking immune system. Fact is, we know fuck-all about the immune system and its connection to the psyche. Ibekwe thinks he’s dealing on the psychic level, and we have no tools to study the psychic level because we don’t think it exists. We say weak effects, uncertain effects, no causality, small N, ergo not a fact. But it is a fact. Ibekwe turns a lot of people away, people he says he can’t help, and they mostly die, and the ones he helps get better.
Reflect later?a familiar experience, with that woman. I recall that jolt from somewhere?hair standing up on arms and neck, a tingling in the sexual parts, I thought my nipples were going to pop through my shirt. A dejr vu? I asked Greer who she was consecrated to and he said Oshun. The Yoruba Venus. Am a little frightened, also excited. Thinking of M. now, and Siberia, wishing I had more memory of what happened there, not just the events, but memory of the body.
FIFTEEN
For conventional pretty, Lisa Reilly was hard to beat, Paz thought, and she had the non-butter-melting look, too. Demure. She drove a red Saab 900 convertible, which made sense if you knew her the way Paz did. He glanced over at her from the driver’s seat of his Impala. She was excited, her cheeks colored, her eyes bright. Riding in a cop car at last, helping the cops on a murder case. Reilly was a cop buff, but of a more select sort than the types that hung around cop bars. The way he met her, she had been a witness in a case. The suspect, Earl Bumpers, had been raping his two daughters for years and pounding on them, too, and he had eventually killed the older one, which brought him to the attention of Paz. The younger daughter, a nine-year-old named Cassie, was the chief witness, and Reilly had therapized away her terror and prepped her for the trial, and the guy went down for it, death, and the two of them, Paz and Reilly, had gotten a little play in the press. He had spotted her in the witness bullpen, and been attracted, the big frank china blues, the golden hair in a staid little knot at the back, the thin, tight body, and he had struck up a conversation. Later, he had spotted her in the Friday six o’clock meat market at the Taurus in the Grove with all the other single women, which surprised him. He’d moved on her in his usual respectful way, and they’d started in. Six or so months, maybe once a week. She was married but separated, no problem there.
She had a practice in the Gables, a nice paneled office, with the dolls and toys, but she dealt mainly with the eating problems of teenage girls. Getting a terrified murder witness to talk was a little out of her line, although she had done it that once and was clearly hot to do it again. Paz was stretching his authority way past the gray area, providing a private shrink for a potential witness, a minor. He had not mentioned it to Barlow, never mind his shift commander, and he was a little nervous. Excited too; both of them nervous and excited.
They were going to do it in the Meagher apartment, Paz’s suggestion, a nod toward the color of legality in his mind. Just a cop who felt sorry for a scared kid, a welfare kid, too, and was bringing a personal friend by to give a little counseling. Should some constructive evidence happen to emerge, why there was nothing wrong with using it, just like you would use a piece of evidence lying in plain sight. Paz figured he could work out a plausible story if anything popped right, which was why he had not told anyone. He wanted to present this to Barlow all tied up, as a coup, as something to make up for the boner about Youghans.
Mrs. Meagher offered sugary iced tea and butter cookies, the tea in tall glasses set in raffia sleeves, with a long spoon in each. They sat around in the tatty, spotless living room, in which the smell of lemon furniture polish fought bravely the base stink of the building and neighborhood. The boy was impatient and resentful of being denied either release to the streets or TV, the girl her usual silent and sullen self. The small talk did not take off. Reilly shot Paz a look: this isn’t working. She changed her approach, asked to speak to the grandmother alone. They went into the kitchen. Paz could hear low talking. Randolph got up and turned on the television, a sitcom, canned laughter. Paz saw no reason to object. After ten minutes or so, Reilly came back with the grandmother. Reilly’s face wore her courtroom expression of neutral goodwill. She approached the girl.
“Tanzi, your grandmother and I have been talking, and we’ve agreed that, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to try hypnosis with you. Do you understand what that means?”
The girl nodded. Randolph said, excitedly, “Yeah! I saw this show where the guy went into his past lives and shit.” Mrs. Meagher said, “Hush your mouth, boy!”
They shut off the television and moved a straight chair in front of the girl, and turned down the lights. Reilly sat in the straight chair and began to speak in the traditional low, insinuating tone. She had tried to do it with Paz once, but it hadn’t worked. It worked with Tanzi Franklin, though?she went off like the television in less than three minutes: head sunk to her chest, eyes closed, breathing with the deep and regular pace of slumber.
“All right, Tanzi,” said Reilly. “It’s last Saturday, around eleven-thirty at night. Do you know where you are?”
“My room.” The girl’s speech was slow, and muffled, as if coming through a blanket.
“Okay, I want you to look out the window of your room and tell me what you see.”
“Roofs. Windows. I was looking for Amy, but she ain’t home. I see them. Theys fighting. The pregnant lady and her boyfriend. He starts in busting up stuff and she be trying to stop him. He hit her on the head. She fall down and he yell at her some more. Then he leaves. She gets up. She’s crying.”
Stopped. A few words of encouragement put the needle back in the groove.
“She’s trying to pick up stuff off the floor. She’s on the couch. He’s talking to her.”
Reilly glanced at Paz and said, immediately and carefully, to Tanzi, “Who’s talking to her, Tanzi? The boyfriend came back?”
“No,” she said. “Not the boyfriend. Him.”
