"You might have to push fairly hard. But you should be able to feel your carotid artery there-a rubbery cord about as big around as a pencil? You can feel it stiffen and soften with every heartbeat."
She gave them a moment just to feel it.
"You're putting your finger right on your physical life. That throb-it's always been with you. Your heart's keeping you alive without your conscious thought-it's living inside you almost as if it's a separate creature alive in your chest. It does its job day in, day out. Most people don't like feeling it. We don't like to be reminded that there's an automatic part of ourselves, going about its business without our conscious supervision. It's a little creepy, isn't it? Vital, insistent, sort of foreign somehow? Yet of course it's deeply intimate, that pulse-deeply familiar, right?"
The audience was silent; most of them had their heads tilted, hands at throats. Some serious expressions, a few uncomfortable grins. Two hundred people feeling the secret pulsing inside.
"So, to answer your question, that's how it feels. That's how.. intimate it feels. That's how real it feels, how disconcerting it feels, to experience a ghost. Both physically and psychologically, that's the closest analogy I can come up with. That's the way experiencing a ghost reminds you of what you really are."
And if you don't like that, Mason, if that's too "spiritual" for you, she thought defiantly, screw you.
At the rear, the silhouettes of Lupe and Mason Ambrose hovered, motionless as a trompe l'oeil painted on the back wall.
The woman who had asked the question was clearly among those who were uncomfortable with touching that pulsing serpent. She nodded seriously, two fingers still held against her neck.
There was another moment of quiet, and then Dr. Zentcy, the conference's coordinator, moved from the wings and took over the microphone. He was a pleasant-faced man who struck Cree as rather too young and too informally dressed to be an academic of any kind, let alone head of the psychology department of a major university.
"And I think that should be our last question for Dr. Black today. Thank you, Lucretia, for a provocative talk, and for taking so many questions. You've given us a great deal to think about. And thank you all for coming. Dr. Black's lecture is the final event today, but I hope we'll see you all here tomorrow for the final presentations in this year's Horizons in Psychology seminar."
The wash of applause was genuine, but as the room lights came up Cree didn't feel the gratifying release of tension that typically came after she'd delivered a lecture. Mason Ambrose didn't just casually show up at conferences, and his presence disturbed her. She hadn't seen him in four years, hadn't even spoken to him in perhaps two. If he was here, he had a reason. She realized that her body had something of a Pavlovian aversion to him, derived from the two years she'd spent working and studying with him. It wasn't just his grotesque physical appearance, or that he seemed to relish the more gruesome aspects of paranormal research: Mason Ambrose liked to push you into a learning curve so steep it could give you a nosebleed.
Dr. Zentcy had turned to Cree with a puzzled, pleased frown. He tipped his head slightly toward the back of the hall and asked under his breath, "Is that… that isn't by any chance-"
"Why, yes," Cree said, pretending she hadn't noticed earlier. "Mason Ambrose. I believe it is." Internationally renowned neuropsychiatrist and expert on abnormal psychology, internationally controversial scholar of parapsychology. My mentor.
"I didn't know…" Zentcy tried, "I mean, I had no idea he was actually…"
"Still alive? Good point." Cree leaned toward him with a bogus paranoid face and whispered, "What makes you so sure he is?"
For an instant, Zentcy's eyes widened, and Cree regretted teasing him-it was an indication of her own uneasiness. Zentcy was a good guy who deserved kudos for putting Cree and her radical ideas on the agenda here. The academic world was simply not ready for the idea that ghosts were real, and that the experience of death-and living people's relationships with the dead-must be central to any theory of psychology. His open mindedness had no doubt earned him some scorn from his colleagues here at the University of New Mexico, yet he'd treated her with only respect and consideration.
"I'm kidding," she reassured him. "But I know what you mean. With Dr. Ambrose you're never quite certain. I'll introduce you, if you like." Zentcy nodded with equivocal enthusiasm.
A dozen audience members had assembled at the front of the room, waiting to speak with her: students with theoretical questions, professors with bones to pick, even a few local residents with personal tales of ghosts and hauntings. By the time the last of them left, the figures at the back of the room had vanished.
Cree left the building feeling a mix of disappointment and relief at Mason's disappearance. Why would he have taken the time to attend her talk if he didn't want to meet with her? Just playing Mr. Mysterious, she decided; she'd hear from him again before she left Albuquerque. She drove back to her hotel to find a faxed note that confirmed her hunch: Take the Sandia Peak tramway at 5:00. See you at the top. Ambrose.
3
The aerial car started toward the peak, swinging up the slope and quickly leaving the embrace of the lower tramway station. Cree gripped a pole as she looked out over the heads of the kids who had pressed themselves against the windows. Ahead stretched a steep rocky incline almost bare of vegetation; below, beyond the concrete planes and angles of the station, the flat valley and the streets of suburban Albuquerque began to open and fall away. The southern slopes of the Sandia range came into view, tinged pink by the westering sun, their rocky turrets set against hard shadows.
Space. Light. Rock. Sky.
A grand land, Cree realized. A place of heroic proportion. There were fifteen other excited sightseers standing with her in the car, but their chattering stopped as the ground dropped away and a gulf of air opened beneath their feet. Everyone was experiencing the same awe. For a long moment there was a collective suspension of breath broken only by the hum of the drive machinery. Then the kids' excitement boiled over in exclamations of astonishment, and people started talking again.
The views mesmerized Cree, but she couldn't suppress her apprehension. Drama aside, Mason would have some reason for meeting her on Sandia Peak when any coffeehouse or hotel lobby would have been sufficient. He always had a reason. It no doubt had to do with "instructional value," but Mason's motives were mysterious and would remain so until he revealed them. And then he'd stick it to you hard and enjoy watching you squirm. There was a sadistic quality to Mason and his methods.
So why take the effort to see him?
Actually, the answer was simple. Whatever he had in mind, it would be something eye-opening. Mason Ambrose was a genius, a pioneer in psychology in Cree's estimation as important as Freud or Jung. He was also a brilliant teacher, infinitely giving and subtle and patient despite what could seem a purely self-absorbed and confrontational style. In Cree's case, he'd served as guide, guru, and therapist as much as teacher. He'd had the insight to accept her as his research assistant seven years ago, even though he'd seen her for the damaged merchandise she was. When she'd applied for the internship advertised in the Harvard grad school bulletin, she had been a widow for almost three years, still deeply wounded by the loss of her husband, crazy and sick with it. The grief alone would have undone her, but the way she'd found out about Mike's death-his appearance in Philadelphia at his dying moment, three thousand miles from the Los Angeles car wreck that killed him-had upset all her beliefs about the world. About life. When she'd come to Mason, she'd been lost and frightened, a spiritual seeker floundering and flailing in her quest to find answers to life's mysteries. A swimmer about to go under.