“Of?”
“Psychologically Induced Pain Syndrome. PIPS, for short.”
“PIPS? I’ve got PIPS? Boy, won’t Gladys Knight be jealous!”
“Psychological pain syndromes are defense mechanisms created by your subconscious mind to cover up unresolved emotional issues. In short, whatever your body was doing the day of the chest pains, your mind wanted no part of it. Your mind fought back the only way it could: by creating pain.”
“Are you being serious?” I said.
“Completely. Your mind creates an intense pain to try to force you to stop doing whatever it is you’re doing. It forces you to focus on the pain. If you don’t, the pain gets worse. Your mind is determined to make you stop doing whatever it is that is so distasteful. If you don’t come to grips with it, it can shut you down altogether.”
I thought about that for a minute. “Is this a common thing?”
“It is, but it typically manifests in back pain.”
“Then why the heart this time?”
“Look at you,” she said. “You’re strong as an ox. I’m guessing you’ve never had the slightest back pain, am I right?”
“You are.”
“So your mind knows you wouldn’t believe a back pain. The subconscious mind is very clever. It won’t create a pain that can be ignored or put off . It takes advantage of you by creating something so convincing, you have to focus on it. In your case I’m going to go out on a limb and guess your father, or someone close to you, died of a heart attack.”
I could feel her looking at me, hoping for a reaction.
“So you’re saying the pain is only a smokescreen, something my subconscious mind created to distract me from what I was doing at the time.”
“That’s correct. Be glad it wasn’t colitis.”
“Colitis?”
“That’s the worst of the psychosomatic pains.”
“Worse than the heart?”
“Far worse.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “But as we discussed, what I was doing at the time is something I’ve done many times before.”
“Think it through, Donovan. I’ll bet there was something different about that particular time.”
So she was saying that my mind didn’t want me to kill the Peterson sisters. No, it was more than that. My mind tried to prevent me from killing them. But why? I’d killed dozens—okay, more than a hundred—people before. What made the Petersons different? It couldn’t be that they were women. I’ve killed women before, with no pains or afterthoughts. It couldn’t be that I’m going soft, because I’d recently killed Ned Denhollen without the first sign of chest pains.
So what made the Peterson sisters different from all the rest?
The answer was somewhere in the back of my mind, hiding in a place I couldn’t quite access. I was probably trying too hard to make sense of something my mind was trying to repress. Best thing to do was put it on hold and come back to it later. I stood.
She stood.
We shook hands.
“Will you come back?” she said.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
“You need this,” she said.
“I’ll let you know.”
For a moment it seemed as though she wanted to say something else. The thought seemed to flit about her face like a scrap of paper caught on a wind current. In the end, she chose not to say it, whatever it was, and I was left to wonder what it could have been.
And realized that’s probably how she gets her patients to return.
Chapter 18
Sensory Resources had a Gulfstream in a hangar in Trenton that needed to get back to LA, so Callie and I caught it as far west as Vegas. With a ride like that, you grab while you can. In a perfect world it would have been a round-tripper, but hey, I couldn’t complain. I’d just have to charter something on my own dime to get us back home Thursday. I’d keep it Thursday night and use it to fly Kathleen and me to Charlie’s funeral on Friday.
In a G4, Trenton to Vegas runs about four hours. A lot of time to chat, but we were quiet most of the trip. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Dr. Crouch had said about the psychological pain. Until I got a handle on its cause, I’d be susceptible to severe chest pains at the worst possible times. That type of physical disability could prove deadly in my line of work.
“Cirque du Soleil,” I said.
Callie looked up at me. “What about it?”
“I didn’t know you were such a big fan of performance art.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” she said.
True, I thought. And a lot I did know.
This is how you get to be Callie: you’re eight years old, you watch TV, you play in the yard, you go to school, and you’ve got the brightest smile and bubbliest laugh in town. Except that one day you’re playing outside at your friend’s house and the sky has gotten dark and you decide if you run you can beat the rain, because it’s only a couple of blocks.
So you start running and you get about half-way home before the rain comes hard and you do something that changes your life.
You hesitate.
You stop running and wonder what to do. Should you keep heading home, or go back to your friend’s house and call your mom to pick you up.
At that precise moment of indecision, you’re tackled, punched, and dragged into the bushes.
The man is large and powerfully built. He smells of garlic and moldy cheese. He’s got you face down in the mud and he doesn’t have to hit you in the back of the head, but he does, and he hits you again and again. And each time he hits you, you start to black out, and you wish you could scream, but when you try, nothing comes out but a hiss.
The smelly man pulls your panties down to your ankles and hits you again. He starts touching you in a certain way—you know the word: inappropriately. At first you don’t worry so much because what you wanted more than anything was for him to stop punching the back of your head. But then, when he starts talking to you with a love voice, and calls you his sexy little girl you want to vomit. When his words turn really dirty and he starts calling you names, you start wishing he’d stop saying those things and go back to hitting you.
Then, just when you think it can’t get any worse, it gets much worse. The pain is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced, or ever imagined. It numbs you and your mind can’t tolerate it, so it just shuts down.
The man leaves you lying there to die, face down in a muddy field. You nearly drown in the muck but someone finds you and brings you home and for the next six months you’re in and out of hospitals and you can’t speak, can’t feel, can’t think. You sit in a chair facing a window and everyone thinks you’re looking out the window, but you’re actually staring at the window, and your mind is trying to work out the way the wooden pieces intersect, the slats that hold the window panes. Something about how they intersect. If you can figure that out, well, it’s not much, but it’s something to hold on to; a place from which to reclaim your sanity.
And then one day it’s fall and the wind is blowing the leaves off the trees and one errant leaf snags on the window pane next to the wooden slats and when it does, you focus on the leaf. For the first time in months, you see there’s something on the other side of the window, and if there’s something beyond that window, then maybe it’s something big enough to live for.
You begin the process of building your life from scratch. But you’re not building the life you were meant to live, you’re building something else altogether.
You realize you’re alive and not dead or dreaming. But you also realize that while you’re alive on the outside, on the inside you’re dead. A few months pass and they send you back to school, but something’s different. All the kids know what happened to you. They taunt you, hit you, but when they do, you feel no pain. That’s because none of them can hit you like the man hit you. And yet, you want to be hit, so you taunt them back. They hit you and you laugh. They hit you some more and you laugh harder. You love the feel of your own blood in your mouth. The taste and texture makes you feel almost alive.