“You want to lie there, fine by me,” I said, and started back along the shore.
He called to me, but I kept walking.
“Know what I see in your future, Small Time?” he shouted as I passed into the trees. “I see lilies and a cardboard casket. I see a black dog taking a piss on your grave.”
What he said didn’t trouble me, but I was troubled nonetheless. When I had reached for his arm, I had brushed the fingers of his right hand, the same hand that he’d been holding above the water. I wouldn’t have sworn to it, but it seemed that his fingertips had been hot. Not just warm. Burning hot. As if they’d been dipped into a bowl of fire.
If pressed to do so, I might have acknowledged Jo’s right to value her duties, but I was unreasonably angry at her. Angry and petulant. I kept to my room for a day and a half after that night on the beach, lying around in my boxers and doing some serious drinking, contemplating the notion that I was involved in a romantic triangle with a member of the undead. On the morning of the second day, I realized that I was only hurting myself and had a shower, changed my shorts. Still a little drunk, I was debating whether or not to see what was up in the rest of the house, when someone knocked on my door. Without thinking, I said, “Yeah, come in,” and Jo walked into the room. I thought about making a grab for my trousers, but I was unsteady on my feet and feared that I’d stumble and fall on my ass; so I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to act nonchalant.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Peachy,” I said.
She hesitated, then shut the door and took a seat in a carved wooden chair that likely had been some dead king’s throne. “You don’t look peachy,” she said.
I’d cracked the drapes to check on the weather and light fell directly on her—she was the only bright thing in a room full of shadow. “I had a few drinks,” I told her. “Drowning my sorrows. But I’m pulling it together.”
She nodded, familiar with the condition.
“How come you didn’t tell me your boy could do tricks?” I asked.
“Josey? What are you talking about?”
I told her what Pellerin had been doing with the ocean water and she said she hadn’t realized he had reached that stage. She hopped up from the chair, saying she had to talk to him.
“Stay,” I said. “Come on. You got all day to do with him. Just stay a while, okay?”
Reluctantly, she sat back down.
“So,” I said. “You want to tell me what that is he was doing.”
“My previous patient developed the ability to manipulate electromagnetic fields. He did some remarkable things. It sounds as if Josey’s doing the same.”
“You keep saying that. Remarkable how? Give me an example.”
“He cured the sick, for one.”
“Did he, now?”
“I swear, it’s the truth. There was a man with terminal cancer. He cured him. It took him three days and cost him a lot of effort, but afterward the man was cancer-free.”
“He cured a guy of cancer by… what? Working his electromagnetic fields?”
“I think so. I don’t know for sure. Whatever he did, it produced a lot of heat.” She crossed her legs, yielding up a sigh. “I wish it had stopped with that.”
I asked what had happened.
“It’s too long a story to tell, but the upshot was, he built a veve.… Do you know what a veve is?”
“The things they draw on the floors of voodoo temples? Little patterns?”
“That’s them. They relate to the voodoo gods, the loas.” She flicked a speck of something off her knee. “Donnell… my patient. He built the veve of Ogoun Badagris out of copper. Several tons of copper. It was immense. He said it enabled him to focus energy. He used to walk around on top of it and… one day there was an explosion.” She made a helpless gesture. “I don’t understand what happened.”
Neither did I understand. I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea that Pellerin might be some kind of green-eyed Jesus; yet I didn’t believe she was lying.
“What do youthink was going on with him?” I asked. “With Pellerin. I mean, what’s your theory? You must have a theory.”
“You want to hear? I’ve been told it’s pretty out there.”
“Yeah, and nothing about this is out there, so your theory’s got to be way off base.”
She laughed. “Okay. The bacteria we injected into Josey was the same strain we used at Tulane. All the slow-burners have reproduced those designs in one way or another. It’s as if they’re expressing the various aspects of Ogoun. Doctor Crain’s theory was that because the bacteria eventually infested the entire brain, the patients used more of their brains than normal people—this resulted in what seemed to be miraculous powers. And since the bacterial strain was the same, it prevailed upon the host brain to acquire similar characteristics. That makes a certain amount of sense as far as it goes, but Crain was trying to explain voodoo in terms of science, and some of it can’t be explained except in voodoo terms.”
She paused, as if to gather her thoughts. “Someday we may discover a biochemical factor that makes the patients prone to seeing the veve patterns. But we’ll never be able to explain away all the mystery surrounding Ezawa’s work. I think he discovered the microbiological analogue of possession. In a voodoo ceremony, a possession occurs quickly. The god takes over your body while you’re dancing or having a drink. You jerk around as the god acclimates to the flesh, and then you begin acting like that god. With the bacteria, it takes longer and the transition’s smoother. You notice a growing awareness in the patients that they’re different. Not just because they’ve come back from the dead. The real difference lies in the things they see and feel. They sense there’s something qualitatively different about themselves. They recognize that they have their own agendas. They grow beyond their life stories the way Jesus and Buddha outgrew the parameters of their lives. Things Donnell said… they led me to believe that the bacteria allowed them to access their gro bon ange. Do you know the term? The immortal portion of the soul? According to voodoo, anyway. And that in turn opened them to the divine. As the bacterial infestation increased, they became more open. The slow-burners all demonstrated behavioral arcs that fit the theory. I guess it sounds crazy, but no one’s come up with anything better.”
She seemed to be waiting for me to speak.
“You’re right,” I said. “That’s out there.”
“Donnell was seeing these peculiar shadows before he died. I think he was seeing people’s souls. I can’t come close to proving it, of course, but there were things he told me…” She sighed in exasperation. “I begged Crain to let me work with Josey my way. I thought if I started from a position of intimacy, we could forge a bond strong enough to endure until the end. We’d see the maturation of the new personality. If my theory’s right, we’d have a captive god fully integrated with a human personality. Whatever a god is. That might be something we could determine. Who knows what’s possible?” The energy drained from her voice and her tone softened. “As things stand I doubt we’ll ever get any further than I got with Donnell. He should have been given the space to evolve, but all they did was harass him.”
“I’m getting you liked this Donnell,” I said.
Her face sharpened. “Yes.”
“How about Pellerin?”
“He’s not very likeable. Part of it is, he’s afraid of everything. Confused. He doesn’t know yet who or what he is. He may never know. So he tends to be angry at everyone. That said, he’s coarse, he’s truculent and difficult to be around.” She made a sad face and pushed up from her throne. “I wish I didn’t have to go, but I should get back to him.”