Book of the Dead

coyotes.

“What’s that?” Karen asks Dr. Self.

“Whenever I have guests on my shows, they sign one of these. It simply gives me permission to have them on the air. To talk about them. No one can help you, Karen. That’s clear, isn’t it?”

“I feel a little better.”

“You always do. Because they program you. Just as they tried to program me. It’s a conspiracy. That’s why they made me listen to my mother.”

Karen takes the waiver from her, tries to read it. There’s not enough light.

“I’d like to share our wonderful conversations and the insights from them that might help my millions of viewers around the world. I need your permission. Unless you’d rather I use an alias.”

“Oh, no! I’d be very happy for you to talk about me and use my real name. And even be on your show, Marilyn! What conspiracy? Do you think it includes me?”

“You need to sign this.” She gives Karen the pen.

Karen signs it. “If you’ll let me know if you’re going to talk about me so I can watch. I mean, if you do. Do you think you really will?”

“If you’re still here.”

“What?”

“It can’t be my first show, Karen. My first one is about Frankenstein and shocking experiments. Being drugged against my will. Subjected to torment and humiliation in the magnet. Let me repeat, a huge magnet, while I listened to my mother, while they forced me to hear her voice lying about me, blaming me. It could be weeks before you’re on my show, you see. I hope you’re still here.”

“You mean the hospital? I’m leaving first thing in the morning.”

“I mean here.”

“Where?”

“Do you still want to be in this world, Karen? Or did you ever want to be in it? That’s really the question.”

Karen lights a cigarette with trembling hands.

“You saw my series on Drew Martin,” Dr. Self says.

“It’s so sad.”

“I should tell everyone the truth about her coach. I certainly tried to tell her.”

“What did he do?”

“Have you ever taken a look at my website?”

“No. I should have.” Karen sits hunched over on the cold stone step, smoking.

“How would you like to be on it? Until we can get you on my show?”

“Be on it? You mean, you tell my story on it?”

“Briefly. We have a section called Self Talk. People blog, tell their stories, and write to each other. Of course, some of them can’t write very well, and I have a team of people who edit, rewrite, take dictation, interview. Remember when we first met? I gave you my card?”

“I still have it.”

“I want you to send your story to the e-mail address on that card, and we’ll post it. What an inspiration you can be. Unlike poor Dr. Wesley’s niece.”

“Who?”

“She’s not really his niece. She has a brain tumor. Not even my tools can cure somebody of that.”

“Oh, my. That’s awful. I suppose a brain tumor could make somebody crazy, and there’s no help for them.”

“You can read all about her when you log on. You’ll see her story and all the blogs. You’d be astonished,” Dr. Self says from one step above her, the breeze in her favor, the smoke drifting the other way. “Your story? Quite a message it will send. How many times have you been hospitalized? At least ten. Why the failure?”

Dr. Self imagines herself asking her audience this as cameras move in tight on her face — one of the most recognizable faces on earth. She loves her name. Her name is part of her incredible destiny. Self. She’s always refused to give it up. She wouldn’t change her name for anyone, and she would never share it, and anybody who doesn’t want it is condemned because the unforgivable sin isn’t sex. It’s failure.

“I’ll be on your show anytime. Please call me. I can be there at a moment’s notice,” Karen keeps saying. “As long as I don’t have to talk about…I can’t say it.”

But even back then, when Dr. Self’s fantasies were the most vivid, when her thinking became magical and the premonitions began, she never dreamed of what would happen.

I’m Dr. Marilyn Self. Welcome to Self on Self. SOS. Do you need help? At the beginning of each show, to the wild applause from a live audience as millions watch from all over the world.

“You won’t make me tell it, will you? My family will never forgive me. It’s why I can’t stop drinking. I’ll tell you if you don’t make me say it on TV or on your website.” Karen is lost in her drivel.

Thank you, thank you. Sometimes Dr. Self can’t get the audience to stop clapping. I adore all of you, too.

“My Boston terrier, Bandit. I let her out late one night and forgot to let her back in because I was so drunk. It was wintertime.”

Applause that sounds like a hard rain, like a thousand hands clapping.

“And the next morning I found her dead by the back door, and the wood was all clawed up from her scratching on it. My poor little Bandit with her short little fur. Shivering, crying, and barking, I’m sure. Scratching to get back in because it was freezing cold.” Karen weeps. “And so I just kill off my brain so I don’t have to think. They said I have all these white areas and widening of…well, and the atrophy. Way to go, Karen, I say. You’re killing off your brain. You can see it. Plain as day, you can see I’m not normal.” She touches her temple. “It was right up there on the light box in the neurologist’s office, big as all outdoors, my abnormal brain. I’m never going to be normal. I’m almost sixty, and what’s done is done.”

“People are unforgiving about dogs,” Dr. Self says, lost in herself.

“I know I am. What can I do to get over it? Please tell me.”

“People with mental disease have peculiarities in the shape of their skulls. Lunatics have very contracted or deformed heads,” Dr. Self says. “Maniacs have soft brains. Such scientific insights gleaned from a study done in Paris in 1824, which concluded that out of one hundred idiots and imbeciles examined, only fourteen had normal heads.”

“Are you saying I’m an imbecile?”

“Sound all that different from what the doctors here have been telling you? That your head is somehow different, meaning you are somehow different?”

“I’m an imbecile? I killed my dog.”

“These superstitions and manipulations have been around for centuries. Measuring the skulls of people locked up in lunatic asylums and dissecting the brains of idiots and imbeciles.”

“I’m an imbecile?”

“Today, they put you in some magic tube — a magnet — and tell you your brain is deformed, and they make you listen to your mother.” Dr. Self stops talking as a tall figure walks toward them with purpose in the dark.

“Karen, if you don’t mind, I need to talk to Dr. Self,” Benton Wesley says.

“Am I an imbecile?” Karen says, getting up from the step.

“You’re not an imbecile,” Benton says kindly.

Karen says good-bye to him. “You were always nice to me,” she says to him. “I’m flying home and won’t be back,” she says to him.

Dr. Self invites Benton to sit next to her on the steps, but he won’t. She senses his anger, and it’s a triumph, yet one more.

“I’m feeling much better,” she says to him.

He’s transformed by shadows pushed back by lamps.

She’s never seen him in the dark, and the realization is fascinating.

“I wonder what Dr. Maroni would say right now. I wonder what Kay would say,” she says. “Reminds me of spring break at the beach. A young girl notices a glorious young man, and then? He notices her. They sit in the sand