He drains his beer and pops another. “Want one?” he asks, offering. I drink a sip. I can feel it trickle all the way down into what feels like an empty fifty-five-gallon drum. Paz is fingering my journal. He says, “Would there be a part here that explains how a bunch of highly trained cops got into a gunfight with people who weren’t there and then started shooting one another?” He shudders. “And how somebody else, some fucking Ku Klux Klan bastard, is living in my partner’s body? In small words.”
“Small words? You’ve seen a grel. That makes it easier. Sorry, grel? greletis the plural. Mind demons. The Chenka call them ogga. Okay, the short version: One, the psyche is real, like metal and electricity. It’s its own thing. Psyches live in complex brains like ours, but they’re not strictly speaking products of our brains. And they can live outside of brains too.” I tell him in plain language what the Olo make of the mental phenomena that still baffle Western science?manic-depression, schizophrenia, mass hysteria, intuition, sexual attraction …
“I thought that was all chemicals?the mental disease business,” he says.
“Yes, right. But that view of the mind ignores tens of thousands of personal accounts of psychic experiences?falling in love with unsuitable people, premonitions, significant dreams, spirit possession, ghostly apparitions, religious ecstasies. Inexplicable behavior, we like to call it. The regular joe who every so often just has to rape and strangle a little girl. Afterward, he feels better. Of course he feels better; his grel is well fed, like a leopard after a nice haunch of antelope. Or the well-brought-up kid with no obvious symptoms who one day murders his parents and starts shooting everyone in school, or on a slightly grander scale, the fact that the most civilized and technically advanced nation in Europe once decided to put itself totally in the hands of an uneducated wacko with a funny mustache and a hypnotic stare. Yeah, it’s all so-called chemistry, but since we don’t know squat about how it works, calling it chemistry is just another kind of incantation. It’s not science.”
And more of this. I haven’t talked with anyone for longer than necessary for a couple of years and so it comes out in a rush, all of Marcel’s theorizing, the stuff even he was nervous about placing before the scientific community, my own compulsive thoughts about the stuff I’d experienced, plus a good deal of speculative ontology, what I used to keep myself sane among the Olo, assuming for the moment that I succeeded in that. He listens, hardly interrupting, for which I am grateful. Detective Paz is a good listener; perhaps it is a professional requirement. Perhaps, also, he is exhausted into passivity, psychically spent, and, as his fourth tallboy goes down the hatch, a little drunk.
“So let’s for the moment accept the reality of psychic entities,” I say, “and that they are natural beings whose existence lies outside the scope of modern physics, not necessarily and forever outside the scope, because we can conceive, if only with difficulty, of a psychophysics that includes the phenomenology of consciousness and disembodied psyches. Like I said, physics has expanded to cover stuff like action at a distance, radio waves, radioactivity, quantum weirdness. The point is, there’s no supernatural. It is all part of the universe, although the universe is queerer than we suppose. Now, the grelet, the ogga, are destructive psychic particles. They’re everywhere, like bacteria. Why are they destructive? Because they feed on the psychic breakdown products of a collapsing human psyche. They eat anguish and pain and heartbreak, and so they attempt to control their hosts so as to cause these states. Naturally, like any parasitic entity, they camouflage themselves as natives of the psychic ecology. You say your partner was never foulmouthed or racist before this?”
“Never. And he comes from a long line of nasty racists. He’s a hard-rock born-again Christian.”
“But inside him was all the shit he heard when he was a kid, suppressed, under control. I take it he’s a tightly wrapped guy?”
“Very.”
“Right, so Witt releases an aerosol that stuns what’s his name’s …”
“Barlow. Cletis Barlow.”
“Yes, it stuns Barlow’s consciousness. That consciousness is asleep, or helpless. Into the driver’s seat comes something wearing the sensory experience of his childhood, the material put there by his father. We all carry powerful bits of our parents’ psyches in us, what the Jungians call introjects. That’s how our psyches are formed in the first place, but even when we’re adults, there’s a little Mom and a little Dad still sitting in there, and God knows, even in so-called normal people, what we see in daily behavior is largely those introjects in action.”
That was interesting, that flicker of pain at the line about parental psyches. Could this be the ally? I am dying to know about this guy’s daddy. But I have to be careful, or he’ll bolt. “What happened to your partner happens all the time in other cultures. It’s a regular thing in Southeast Asia, like headache or the flu. They call it amok or matagalp. And dreams?these other psyches really boogie out in dreamland. The Olo believe that’s why we sleep in the first place?so we can listen to and deal with the other folks who’re living in our heads. That’s one reason why extreme sleep deprivation leads invariably to psychosis.”
Yes, Jane, and look who’s talking. He gets up, paces in silence to the end of the room, and comes back again. “Say I buy all this. What’s the fix? What do we do?”
A wail comes from upstairs. I am up the ladder in a flash. She’s sitting up in bed, crying. I hold her, I rock her; she calms after a while, and I ask her what’s wrong. Monsters. My heart freezes. But I don’t smell anything, and the charm is still in place over her bed. Just a regular nightmare, then, thank God, just wonderful ordinary hideous childhood terrors. We talk about monsters a little. Your regular mom can tell her child that monsters are imaginary and can’t hurt you. This is, however, not an option for me. I indicate the tetechinte over her bed, I explain what it is for and that it will keep the monsters from getting in.
Something heavy lands on the roof and makes a scratching sound, like long claws drawing over shingles. Luz shrieks again, and buries her face in my bathrobe. I say it’s trying to get in and it can’t, and in fact, it can’t. She does not, however, want to sleep alone, she wants to sleep in the big hammock, with me. I think that’s a reasonable request. I say, “Listen, honey, you remember that policeman who was here today, this morning?” She nods. “Well, he’s downstairs. Mommy is helping him catch the bad people.”
“Can I help, too?”
“Of course,” I say. She doesn’t want to be left out of anything, even death. “We’ll all help together.”
I grasp her hot, damp little hand and we go to the ladder together. Suddenly, she gives a little shriek. “I forgot. I have a note.”
She runs back to her book bag and trots back with a square of paper. It says Dear Ms. Tuoey: Luz needs her decorations attached to her costume. Everything is in the bag. Use your imagination!! It’s signed Sheila Lomax. “What is it?” Luz asks.
“I’m supposed to fix your costume for the Noah’s ark play.”
“My Mary Mary all contrary costume. It has fluffy things, and little shiny things like little tiny mirrors.”
“Sequins.”
“Uh-huh. I have a lot and a lot of them.”
Oh, good! Thank you, Miss Lomax!
We descend. Detective Paz is crouching in firing position between the refrigerator and the bathroom door. He has the grace to blush, and shoves his pistol hurriedly back into its holster, like a man caught pissing, zipping it away.
Something has changed in the atmosphere, a lightening of pressure, in the last few seconds, like a fresh breeze through your window on a sultry night. My wall clock says midnight. I go to the window. The shapes in the garden are gone. Detective Paz stands next to me.