She recognized the face. It was Frank Rocha, one of the patients who had died during that last group-therapy session at Elizalde’s clinic on Halloween night two years ago.
Then the blur of the picture’s mouth coalesced into clarity like solid curds forming in vinegared milk—and the mouth opened, and began moving. It was of course silent, and Elizalde couldn’t read lips, but she convulsively slapped her hand across the ash image, nearly hard enough to break the glass.
Her expression when she looked up at the two women must have been wild for they backed up against the pay telephone on the back wall.
Elizalde dropped the cigarette onto the linoleum floor and ground it out with the toe of her sneaker. “Yo volveré,” she said, “quando usted no está tan ocupado.” I’ll be back when you’re not so busy.
She turned and strode out of the botánica onto the Soto Street sidewalk. The morning air was cold in her open, panting mouth, but she could feel a trickle of sweat run down her left-side ribs.
That really was Frank Rocha’s face, she thought. God!
Her own face was as cold as if she had been caught in some horrifying crime, and she wanted to hide from this street, from this city, from the very sky.
She still had the letter from Frank Rocha in her wallet, in the hip pocket of these very jeans. She wanted to throw it away, throw the whole wallet away, every bit of ID.
One of them was finally for real, she insisted to herself even as she was furiously shaking her head and nearly sprinting away from the incriminating counter in the botánica. That last…séance, two years ago, actually fucking worked. It did! Dr. Alden, drunken old asshole, was right to make me resign. I should have listened to him, listened to the damned nurses, even though they were all wrong in their reasons for criticizing me. I killed those three patients who died in that clinic conference room, and I’m responsible for the ones who were injured, and the ones who are probably still in one or another of the state mental hospitals.
Angelica Elizalde vividly remembered the two times she had been called in to Dr. Alden’s office.
“COME IN,” he had told her when she had walked down the hall to his ostentatiously book-lined cubicle. “Do please close the door, Dr. Elizalde, and sit down.”
Alden had been the chief of the attending staff at the county hospital on Santa Fe in Huntington Park; he was a political appointee with unkempt hair and cigarette-stained fingers, and drunk half the time. Elizalde had been thirty-two years old, a psychiatrist with the title of “Director of Medical Education for Psychiatric Training.” She had been at the county hospital for two years at that time, and in ‘90 was making $65,000 a year.
And she had felt that she earned it. After her internship she had stayed on at the county hospital for genuinely altruistic reasons, not just because it was the path of least resistance—the third-world-like situation provided experience that a more gentrified area couldn’t give her, and she had wanted to help the sort of people who ordinarily wouldn’t have access to psychiatric care.
Alden had reached across his cluttered desk to hand her a folded letter. “The charge nurse charged in here this morning with this,” he said, smiling awkwardly. “You’d better read it.”
The letter from the charge nurse to Alden had been a denunciation of Elizalde and her techniques; it concluded with, “Nurses and staff have lost confidence in Dr. Elizalde and would not feel comfortable carrying out her orders in the future.”
Elizalde had known that every hospital is virtually run by the nurses, and that no chief of staff could afford to displease them; but she had looked up at Alden defiantly. “My patients get better. Ask the nurses themselves how my patients do, compared with those of the other doctors.”
Alden’s mouth was still kinked in a forced smile, but he was frowning now. “No. I don’t need to ask them. You must know as well as I do that your methods have no place in a modern hospital. Voodoo dolls! Ouija boards! And how many of those candles have you got on your shelves in there, the tall ones with…saints, and, and God, and the Virgin Mary painted on them? It’s not helpful to—a white-bearded God, Caucasian, a man, leaning out of the clouds and holding a scepter! And Rastafari paraphernalia, Santeria stuff! Your office smells like a church, and looks like some kind of ignorant Mexican fortune-teller’s tent!”
Abruptly Elizalde wondered if she should have brought along a witness. In an even voice she said, “These methods are no more—”
“Voodoo dolls, Dr. Elizalde! I can’t believe you credit such—”
“I don’t credit them, any more than I credit Rorschach blots as really being pictures of monsters!” She had made herself take a deep breath then. “Really. Listen. By having patients do readings with cards and planchettes I get them to be unself-consciously objective—about themselves, their spouses, parents, children. The readings let me see, without the patients having to tell me, the problems that deeply concern them, traumas that they subconsciously know should be exposed. A lot of people can’t do the abstraction needed to see things in blots, or—or see motivations in situational sketches that look like old storyboards from ‘Leave It to Beaver.’ But if they’ve grown up with these symbols, they—”
“The subject is closed,” Alden said tremulously. “I order you to resume the standard psychiatric routines.”
Elizalde knew what that meant—see each patient for ten minutes at a visit, during which time she would be expected to do nothing more than look at the patient’s chart, ask the patient how he or she was doing, assess the medications and perhaps tweak the prescription a little; nothing more than maintenance, generally by means of Thorazine.
She had left his office without another word, but she had not obeyed him. While the other psychiatrists’ offices had all looked alike—the metal desk, the announcements taped to the walls, the particleboard bookcase, the toys in the corner for patients’ children—Elizalde’s office had gone on looking like a bruja’s den, with the religious veladoro candles on the shelves, pictures of Jesus and Mary and filthy old St. Lazar on the walls, and Ouija boards and crystal balls holding down the papers on the desk. She had even had, and frequently used to good effect, one of those giant black 8-bails, in the little window at the base of which messages like Good Luck and True Love would float to the surface when the thing was turned upside down. A simple “What do you think that’s referring to, for you?”—with any of these admittedly morbid toys—had often unlocked important fears and resentments.
Some of the other members of the psychiatric team had frequently talked about raising “spiritual awareness” in their patients, and had liked to use the blurry jargon of New Age mysticism, but even they found Elizalde’s use of spiritualism vulgar and demeaningly utilitarian—especially since Elizalde insisted that there was not a particle of intrinsic truth behind any sort of spiritualism.
Too, she had not been inclined to come up with the trendy sorts of diagnoses. It had been popular among psychiatrists then to uncover hitherto-unsuspected childhood memories of sexual abuse, just as ten years earlier all the patients had been diagnosed as having “anger” that needed to “be worked through.” Elizalde was sure that guilt and shame were the next emotions that patients would be encouraged to rid themselves of.