She paused, sitting back in her chair. "Do you see?"
Dennison nodded slowly. "I see the connection in what you're saying, but not with what Debra was trying to tell me. It was so vague— all this talk about positive energy."
"But the energy we produce is very powerful medicine," Dorothy said. "It can work great good or ill."
"You make it sound like voodoo."
She frowned for a moment as though she needed to think that through.
"Perhaps it is," she said. "From the little I know of it, voudoun is a very basic application of the use of one's will. The results one gains from its medicine become positive or negative only depending upon one's intention."
"You're saying we make bad things happen to ourselves?"
Dorothy nodded. "And to our sacred trust, the earth."
"I still don't see how a person can be so sure he's really making a difference."
"What if the child you save grows up to be the scientist who will cure AIDS?"
"What if the child I don't get to in time was supposed to be that scientist, and so she never gets the chance to find the cure?"
Dorothy lifted her hand and tapped it against his chest. "You carry so much pain in here. It wasn't always so, was it?"
Dennison thought about how he'd been when he first got into social work. He'd been like Debra then, so sure he knew exactly what to do. He'd believed utterly in his ability to save the world. That had changed. Not because of Ronnie Egan, but slowly, over the years. He'd had to make compromises, his trust had been abused not once, or twice, but almost every day. What had happened to Ronnie had forced him to see that he fought a losing battle.
Perhaps it was worse than that. What he felt now was that the battle had been lost long ago and he was only just now realizing the futility of continuing to man the frontlines.
"If you were to see what I have to work with every day," he said, "you'd get depressed, too."
Dorothy shook her head. "That is not our way."
"So what is your way?"
"You must learn to let it go. The wheel must always turn. If you take upon yourself the sadness and despair from those you would help, you must also learn how to let it go. Otherwise it will settle inside you like a cancer."
"I don't know if I can anymore."
She nodded slowly. "That is something that only you can decide. But remember this: You have given a great deal of yourself. You have no reason to feel ashamed if you must now turn away."
She had just put her finger on what was making the decision so hard for him. Futile though he'd come to realize his efforts were, he still felt guilty at the idea of turning his back on those who needed his help. It wasn't like what Debra had been saying: The difference he made didn't have far-reaching effects. It didn't change what was happening in the Amazon, or make the hole in the ozone layer any smaller. All it did was make one or two persons' misery a little easier to bear, but only in the short term. It seemed cruel to give them hope when it would just be taken away from them again.
If only there really were something to Debra's domino theory. While the people he helped wouldn't go on to save the environment, or find that cure for AIDS, they might help somebody else a little worse off than themselves. That seemed worthwhile, except what do you do when you've reached inside yourself and you can't find anything left to give?
Dorothy was watching him with her dark gaze. Oddly enough, her steady regard didn't make him feel serf-conscious. She had such a strong personality that he could feel its warmth as though he was holding his hands out to a fire. It made him yearn to find something to fill the cold that had lodged inside him since he'd looked down at Ronnie Egan's corpse.
"Maybe I should get into environmental work instead," he said. "You know, how they say that a change is as good as a rest?"
"Who says you aren't already doing environmental work?" Dorothy asked.
"What do you mean?"
"What if the dying trees of the rainforest are being reborn as unwanted children?" she asked.
"C'mon. You can't expect me to believe—"
"Why not? If a spirit is taken from its wheel before its time, it must go somewhere."
Dennison had a sudden vision of a tenement building filled with green-skinned children, each of them struggling to reach the roof of the building to get their nourishment from the sun, except when they finally got up there, the smog cover was so thick that there was nothing for them, They got a paler and paler green until finally they just withered away. Died like so many weeds.
"Imagine living in a world with no more trees," Dorothy said.
Dennison had been in a clear-cut forest once. It was while he was visiting a friend in Oregon. He'd stood there on a hilltop and for as far as the eye could see, there were only tree stumps. It was a heartbreaking sight.
His friend had become an environmentalist after a trip to China. "There are almost no trees left there at all now," he'd told Dennison. "They've just used them all up. Trees clean the environment by absorbing the toxins from carbon dioxide and acid rain. Without them, the water and air become too toxic and people start to die off from liver cancer. China has an incredibly high mortality rate due to liver cancer.
"That's going to happen here, Chris. That's what's going to happen in the Amazon. It's going to happen all over the world."
Dennison had felt bad, enough so that he contributed some money to a couple of relevant causes, but his concern hadn't lasted. His work with Social Services took too much out of him to leave much energy for other concerns, no matter how worthy.
As though reading his mind, Dorothy said, "And now imagine a world with no more children."
Dennison thought they might be halfway there. So many of the children he dealt with were more like miniature adults than the kids he remembered growing up with. But then he and his peers hadn't had to try to survive on the streets, foraging out of trash cans, maybe taking care of a junkie parent.
"I have a great concern for Mother Earth," Dorothy said. "We have gravely mistreated her. But when we speak of the environment and the depletion of resources, we sometimes forget that our greatest resource is our children.
"My people have a word to describe the moment when all is in harmony— we call it Beauty. But Beauty can find no foothold in despair. If we mean to reclaim our Mother Earth from the ills that plague her, we must not forget our own children. We must work on many levels, walk many wheels, that lives may be spared— the lives of people, and the lives of all those other species with whom we share the world. Our contributions, no matter how small they might appear, carry an equal importance, for they will all contribute to the harmony that allows the world to walk the wheel of Beauty."
She closed her eyes and fell silent. Dennison sat quietly beside her for a time.
"What... what advice would you give me?" he asked finally.
Dorothy shrugged. Her eyes remained closed.
"You must do what you believe is right," she said. "We have inside of each of us a spirit, and that spirit alone knows what it is that we should or should not do."
"I've got to think about all of this," Dennison said.
"That would be a good thing," Dorothy told him. She opened her eyes suddenly, piercing him with her gaze. "But hold onto your feelings of foolishness," she added. "Wisdom never comes to those who believe they have nothing left to learn."
***
Dennison found an empty bench when he left City Hall. He sat down and cradled his face in his hands. His headache had returned, but that wasn't what was disturbing him. He'd found himself agreeing with the Kickaha elder. He also thought he understood what Debra had been telling him. The concepts weren't suspect— only the part he had to play in them.