The Cold Smell Of Sacred Stone

unresponsive. When I had talked myself out, I simply sat on the side of the bed and held his hand.

Tommy Carling came in around six o'clock, bringing me a tray of food and a small thermos filled with hot coffee. He was off duty and on his way home, but Slycke had authorized him to tell me that in two or three days Garth might be put on small doses of Halidol, an antipsychotic drug of choice for catatonics, along with other drugs he would be given to counteract some of the nastier side effects of Halidol. The chemotherapy was fine with me; as far as I was concerned, nothing could be worse than Garth's present vegetative state.

Thoroughly depressed by now, the exhilaration I had experienced during the day completely drained from me, I sat with Garth until a little after ten, then went back to my apartment in Building 18. I downed two stiff drinks, then went to bed and slept fitfully.

6.

I got up early to clean my wound, which was healing nicely, and put on a fresh bandage. Once again I arrived at the children's hospital ninety minutes early in order to check my class lists against patient records, and review the teacher's lesson plans.

The cottage sheets were interesting. Two older adolescent boys had been up most of the night arguing-and finally exchanging blows-over the question of which one was really Jesus. A cottage worker had found a young girl sitting on the edge of her bed and talking in the darkness to Satan and two lesser demons. The worker reported that the girl had gone back to bed and slept peacefully after being given some crackers and a glass of milk; the report didn't say whether the girl had shared.

The files indicated that one of the older adolescent girls in my third period class, Kim Trainor, was extremely bright and gregarious, but suicidal. As a baby, Kim had been in her grandmother's arms when the lady died; three years later, both Kim's parents had died; four years later, her aunt and uncle, who had taken Kim in, had been killed in an automobile accident. Kim had grown up with the people she loved all dying around her, dropping like flies, and she blamed herself. On an intellectual level, Kim claimed to understand that the deaths were not her fault, but on a much deeper emotional level she considered herself a pariah, a bringer of death, who did not deserve to live. The staff psychiatrists considered her prognosis good.

During the day I had a talk with Chris Yardley, a schizophrenic whose prognosis was not so good, one of the boys who'd been arguing over who was Jesus. I suggested to Chris that it was all right to think he was Jesus, and positively commendable to behave like Jesus, but that he had to learn to function on the outside, to work at a steady job and support himself; I suggested to Chris that if he wanted to get out of the mental hospital he had to stop telling people he was Jesus. Then he would be left alone, and he could go about normal business. Chris indicated that he could see my point, but that God had commanded him to tell people he was Jesus.

So much for the sly intellectual approach with psychotics.

My classes all went well. I'd apparently made a lasting impression the day before, and the kids were eager to come to my class. I kept them entertained with jokes, and I was presumptuous enough to think I might even have taught something to a few of them.

Dane Potter wasn't in any of my classes, but I saw him in the hall and he waved. He was walking alone, which meant he had been taken off his level. I was pleased.

I got through to the end of my second day in the school at the children's hospital without having to do a single back handspring.

After school I took a bus to a large shopping mall in the nearby town of Nanuet, where there was a Music World outlet which I hoped would have what I wanted. They did. I purchased the boxed set of tapes, a hefty supply of A A batteries, and a Sony Walkman. I also picked up a roomy shoulder bag from a leather goods store, then headed back to the hospital.

In a day or two, Garth would be put on psychotropic drugs; before that happened, before whatever perceptions he might still enjoy in his silent world were altered, there was something I wanted to try. I had a few therapeutic notions of my own.

Toward the end of the insane nightmare that had been the Valhalla Project, Garth and I had been captured by Siegmund Loge and imprisoned in a vast underground complex in Greenland. There, for his own twisted reasons, Loge had attempted to explain and justify to us why he'd done what he had done-acts that had caused the deaths of many innocent people, the murders of my teenage nephew and a friend of his. The vehicle for this 'explanation' had been a kind of bizarre sound and light show which he had spent most of his life putting together, an epic, sixteen-hour-long film comprised of cascading images-photographs, paintings, movie stills, sketches-depicting humankind's apparently intractable stupidity and cruelty unto itself, from prehistoric times to the present. These horrifying images, hundreds of thousands of them, had been masterfully edited to correspond to the rhythms and melodies of Richard Wagner's titanic masterpiece, Der Ring des Nibelungen: Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung. The images had been carried to the depths of our souls and branded there by the music; it was an experience neither of us would ever forget, as much as we might want to.

It was hard for me to imagine how Garth's mind could be damaged more than it already was, and Tommy Carling had said there was no way of knowing what Garth heard or didn't hear. If there was a sound he would respond to, anything at all that could reach into the dark silence in his mind and touch some part of him that was undamaged and could fight back, it was Der Ring des Nibelungen.

The four operas making up Wagner's Ring cycle comprised a pretty bulky package of tapes, which was why I had purchased the shoulder bag; I didn't care to get into explanations of my idea of music therapy. I put the tapes, the Walkman, and the batteries into the bag, covered them with books and magazines in case anyone was inquisitive, then went over to the D.I.A. clinic. Slycke was off duty, but I reported my presence to the indifferent psychiatrist in charge before going to Garth's room. Tommy Carling was there, checking Garth's pulse and other vital signs. I chatted with the ponytailed male nurse until he had finished.

Five minutes after Carling had left I glanced out into the corridor, saw no one. I took the Walkman out of the bag, put the player next to Garth's shoulder, under the sheet. I placed the earphones on his head, the connecting metal band behind his neck so that only the tiny earplugs showed. I snapped Act I of Das Rheingold into the cassette player, reached over to turn it on-and hesitated as I felt a chill, a distinct sense of foreboding, run through me. I took the phones out of his ears and took a few minutes to talk at his vacant face, explaining what it was I was going to do, and why. Then I replaced the earplugs, took a deep breath, and turned on the player. Very faintly, I could hear the long, E-flat passage that opened the epic cycle flowing through the plugs into Garth's ears, perhaps his mind and soul.

'He looks different.'

I had been so intent on peering into Garth's face, looking for some response, that I hadn't heard Tommy Carling come into the room. Startled, I jumped, then turned to my left to find the male nurse standing at the foot of the bed. I wondered how long he had been there.

'Uh. . hi, Tommy.'

'Hi, Mongo,' Carling replied somewhat absently. He had crossed his arms over his chest and seemed to be studying Garth intently.

'What did you say?'

'I said that Garth looks a bit different to me. I actually think there's more expressiveness in his face.'

Garth didn't look any different to me, and I said so.

The male nurse absently tugged at his earring, said: 'Maybe it's my imagination, but his eyes don't seem quite so vacant.' He paused, shrugged his broad shoulders. 'Then again, maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see. Well, it's time to change his colostomy and urine bag.'

'Tommy. .?'

Carling paused on his way to the other side of the bed, looked at me quizzically. 'What is it, Mongo?'

'Nothing,' I said, and shook my head.

Carling pulled back the sheet, immediately saw the Walkman and the earphones on Garth's head. He looked at me again, raised his eyebrows slightly. 'What are you playing for him?'

'I've got Das Rheingold in now. You might say Garth has a thing for the Ring.'

'Really?' Carling said, and pursed his lips slightly. 'Pretty heavy stuff.'