Sullivan had fast-forwarded the microfilm to the November 2 issue. The story was still on the front page—now Dr. Elizalde had been arrested and charged with manslaughter. Several of the survivors of her Wednesday-night group-therapy session had told police that Elizalde had been conducting a séance when the disaster had struck, and that hideous apparitions had materialized in the air; and they claimed that one of the patients, a man named Frank Rocha, had spontaneously burst into flames. Fire investigators noted that Rocha’s body had been incinerated. Police theorized that Elizalde had installed machinery to simulate the appearance of ghosts, and that this machinery had exploded during the fraudulent psychic performance…though they admitted that no traces of any such machinery had been found.
The November 3 issue had moved the story to the front page of the second section, where it eclipsed the “Cotton Club” murder trial, which had apparently been hot news in 1990. Elizalde had raised her $50,000 bail, and then had apparently disappeared.
The descriptions of the Halloween-night séance were fuller now, and more lurid—the surviving patients claimed that ropes of ectoplasm had burst from the bodies of many present, and that spirits of eviscerated babies, and of screaming women and babbling old men, had then formed in the air over their heads; and Frank Rocha had exploded into white-hot flames. It was now revealed that several of the patients who had had to be hospitalized were in fact confined in psychiatric wards with acute psychotic reactions.
In the issue of November 4 it was confirmed that Elizalde had disappeared; police sources commented that until her arraignment they would not issue a bench warrant. Included in the article were quotes from an interview that the L.A. Weekly had done with Elizalde two months previous to what was now being referred to as the Día del Muerte Séance. “I find it effective,” she was quoted as having said, “to use the trappings of the so-called ‘occult’ in eliciting responses from credulous patients. It has no more intrinsic value than the psychiatrist’s cliché couch or the stained-glass windows in a church—it’s simply conducive:’ Police were still speculating that she had decided to enhance the effect by somehow staging dangerous, faked supernatural phenomena.
Sullivan had tucked the microfilm spool back into its box and returned it to the drawer, and then located the cited issue of L.A. Weekly—an actual paper copy, not microfilm—and turned the pages to the interview.
There had been a photograph of Dr. Elizalde in her consulting room, and, looking at it in the library this morning, Sullivan had winced. She was strikingly good-looking, with long black hair and big dark eyes, but she looked more like a gypsy fortune-teller than a psychiatrist: the photographer had caught her smilingly underlit over a glowing crystal ball the size of a melon, and behind her he could see saint-candles and all kinds of primitive little statues on shelves, and a framed print of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The interview itself had not been so bad. He had made notes of some of her statements:
On ghosts: “Well, of course when a person dies, actually that person is gone; a TV set that was used only to view PBS is no different from one that never showed anything but Sunday morning televangelists, once the two sets have been disassembled—they’re both equal in their total absence now. But all of us who are still around have hooks in the memories of these dead people, unresolved resentments and guilts, and these things don’t stop being true, and being motivational, just because the person that caused them is dead, has stopped existing. By having my patients strongly pretend—oh hell, briefly believe—that they can communicate with the dead collaborators in their pasts, I let them forgive, or ask for forgiveness—‘give the pain to God’—and achieve peace. My patients don’t forget the old wrongs endured or committed, but the memories of them stop being actively, cripplingly poisonous. My methods facilitate this by letting the patients literalize the old ghosts. [ans. to quest.:] No, I don’t believe in ghosts at all. I’m a rational materialist atheist. By the charged term ‘God’ I mean objectivity. [ans. to quest.:] My patients are free to. I don’t preach.
On men in her life: “No, I—(laughter) physician heal thyself!—I think I’m still reacting against the machismo image of my father and my brothers. My father drank—I was thirteen when I figured out that his drinking was worst around February and March, when he’d get his vacation pay and his tax refunds—and he’d beat up my mother, and even on the farm out in Norco he always had to have steak and salad and a baked potato and a couple of glasses of wine at dinner, and silverware, while the rest of the family got rice and beans. And my brothers and their friends were…oh, you know, khaki pants, polished black shoes, Pendleton shirts buttoned only at the top button with white T-shirts underneath, hairnets with the gather point in the middle of the forehead like a black spidery caste mark. Tough—all the firstborn boys are Something-Junior, and the fathers always had them out on the front lawn in a boxing ring made with a garden hose, sparring like fighting-cocks. And the boys and girls were supposed to get married and have kids as soon as possible. I’ve reacted against the whole establishment I was raised in, there—I’m not Catholic, I don’t drink, and I don’t seem to be attracted much to men. Oh—and not to women at all!—let me add. (Laughter.)”
On why the crystal ball (if she’s materialistic): “The stasis of the clarity, the clarity of the stasis—people look deeply for ghosts in pools where the agitation has passed. Tide pools seem to be the best, actually, literally, in eliciting the meditation that brings the old spirits to the surface; the sea is the sink of ghosts…that is, in the superstitious mind, mind you. Seriously, patients seem to find their ghosts more accessible in the shallow depths of actual ocean water. It’s been worth field trips. Eventually I’d like to move my clinic to some location on the beach—not to where there’s surf you see, but pools of ordered, quieted seawater.”
In the City College library, Sullivan had leaned back in his plastic chair and imagined the statements of a psychiatrist in some bucolic culture about a thousand years from now, when guns had survived as nothing but inert, storied relics: Because of the legends still adhering to the objects known as “Smith and Wessons,” I find that valuable shocks can be administered by pressing the “muzzle” of one such object against a patient’s temple, and then ritualistically pulling the “trigger.” I have here a specimen that has been perfectly preserved through the millennia…now, watch the patient…
BOOM.
Boom indeed, he thought now two hours later in the Miceli’s parking lot, as he finished his beer and dropped the cigarette butt inside the can. Well she’s learned better. One of her patients must have been a ghost-connected person who acted as a primer, the charge being Halloween night and the hollow-point slug being a whole shitload of actual, angry, idiot ghosts. And the main target seemed to have been one of her patients who had died but hadn’t realized it yet, so that he threw posthumous shock-shells when his lifeline collapsed, igniting his overdue-for-the-grave body. And then two others died of heart attacks or something, and everybody else just plain went crazy.