“We’ll stop the eye movements from time to time and sample whatever is in your awareness. Then we’ll focus on that and resume the eye movements.”
“So how will that help?”
“The eye movements help to reorganize how your brain processes and interprets the memory. Usually the end result is that the pain diminishes or goes away altogether.”
“And the memory?”
“May persist, but without the same emotional intensity, or it can fade,” said the doctor.
“What if I don’t want it to fade away? What if I need the pain? It’s defined me for most of my life. Maybe I’m not supposed to forget.”
“Perhaps. But the process tends to respect your inner wisdom. If part of you needs to remember, then you will. And if part of you still needs to suffer...well, then, that may still go on as well. You’ll need to have faith that it will unfold however it’s supposed to.”
“OK. What happens now?”
“I want you to imagine the scene you described last time and identify the worst part of it.”
“That’s easy. Being held back by the fireman and seeing her charred body being wheeled out.”
“What emotion is most connected with that image?” asked the doctor.
“Horror…utter horror.”
“Where in your body do you feel the horror?”
“In the back of my throat...and in the pit of my stomach.”
“And the intensity of the feeling on a scale from one to ten?”
“Twelve! It’s the worst feeling I’ve ever had.”
“OK. Now as you picture the scene and feel this emotion in the back of your throat and in the pit of your stomach, what present day belief about yourself is connected with it?”
“I’m a menace. I bring death wherever I go and I don’t deserve to live.”
“And if you could believe something else, however implausible it may seem at the moment, what would you like to believe instead?”
“That there’s a reason for me to be here...that I belong on the planet after all.”
“How true does that feel on a scale from one to seven?”
“Right now? One...no, zero.”
“OK, then. We’re ready to begin.”
The doctor moved a chair up just to the left of Ray’s so that her legs rested beside his body and his legs beside hers. She held her left hand eighteen inches in front of his face with the index and middle fingers extended.
“Is this distance comfortable?” she asked.
“It’s fine.”
“OK. Then bring up the scene, starting wherever makes sense. When you have it clearly in mind, nod your head and we’ll begin.”
Ray nodded and the doctor began moving her hand back and forth at a moderate pace. After twenty to thirty seconds, she stopped, had him take a deep breath and asked what came to mind.
“I’m on my bike at an intersection and hear the sirens coming toward me from the right.”
“Go with that,” said the doctor and began moving her hand again. “How about now?” she asked when her hand had stopped.
“The engine has passed and is speeding down the street. I’m following it, but it turns and is out of sight.”
After several more sets, Ray had arrived in front of his house. His breathing had become rapid and sweat was pouring off his brow. His hands had the arms of the chair in a death grip.
The doctor performed the next set of eye movements in slow motion. Toward the end of the set, his arms began to relax and his breathing became regular.
“How about now?” she asked.
“I can see her body, but it’s like looking through a fog. It feels as if I’m in a dream...no, more like watching a movie. It doesn’t feel real.” His expression had changed from shock to perplexity.
“Go with that,” said the doctor and sped up the tracking again. When she saw a few involuntary beats as his eyes shifted direction, she stopped and cued his response.
“The sun is high,” Ray said, “and I realized that when I’d left the house for school, it was still low in the sky.”
By the end of the next set of eye movements, his expression was relaxed.
“A lot of time had passed. Seven or eight hours. Mom would have been out for the morning on her shift. If I’d left the burner on and caused the fire, it would have burned the house down while she was out. So it must have started since she got back that afternoon.”
“Rate your distress right now on a scale of ten.”
“About a three.”
“Go with that.”
At the end of the next set, Ray was shaking his head. A faint smile began to break across his lips.
“So it couldn’t have been my fault...well, it would have been very unlikely. I’d have had to turn the gas almost all the way off so the flame went out. She could have come home, turned on the burner, and caused an explosion.” Some of the tension returned to his face. He drew in a sharp breath.
“Go with that,” is all the doctor said as she began again moving her hand.
“If the gas had been on all that time,” said Ray at the end of this set, “she would certainly have smelled it when she entered the house. She was smart and perceptive. How could she miss that? No, it couldn’t have happened that way.” His body had again relaxed.
“Now pull up the image of your mother being wheeled out of the house.” When he signaled that the image was in mind, she began again moving her hand.
“I can see her,” said Ray when the doctor’s hand had stopped moving, “but now it’s just a memory. And it seems so long, long ago. I feel sad, but the horror is gone. And so is the guilt. It wasn’t my fault. Thank God it wasn’t my fault. I’ve suffered for so many years believing it was.” Tears welled in his eyes, tears that seemed now to wash away the pain. Dr. Jensen’s own eyes moistened as she witnessed his relief.
“One more step,” said the doctor. “I want you now to visualize the scene along with the words ‘I belong in this world. I have a place here.’”
When the doctor’s hand had stopped moving, Ray nodded and smiled. “There’s still HibernaTurf,” he said. “I’m no saint. But maybe I’m not the devil either.”
“Validity on a scale of seven?” asked the doctor.
“Four or five. There are still things you don’t know about me...things I can’t even tell you, that keep me from ever getting to seven. But you’ve helped me more than I imagined possible. Thanks.” Ray realized that this was probably the last time he’d see Dr. Jensen. This was as far as she could take him. There were some places he could only go alone.
When Ray left Dr. Jensen’s office that day, he felt grateful for being relieved of the burden of thinking he’d been responsible for ending his mother’s life. He was suddenly more aware, however, of the responsibility he bore for eventually ending the life of the stranger whose body he would someday occupy. He might deserve his place on the planet, after all, but did he deserve it more than the unknown stranger? With that quandary he was all alone.
19
MARCUS SAT ALONE
in the balcony of the Church of the Double Helix as the music swelled from the massive pipe organ to fill every crevice of the building. The procession below moved deliberately down the center aisle toward the stage and fanned out on either side of the altar. When the last people had reached the front and the aisle was empty, the music paused, then resumed in a lower key and a stately beat as all eyes turned toward the back of the church.
The bride cleared the edge of the balcony and came into view, her right hand in the crook of the arm of the tall man beside her with the gleaming head. Marcus spotted Corinne in the front row by the aisle, a tear trickling down her cheek as she watched the bride approach. Why was he watching from a distance and not by Corinne’s side? And who was the child beside her, a boy of five or six, on whose shoulder Corinne’s right hand rested.
When the bride reached the end of the aisle, she turned briefly toward Corinne, who lifted her veil to kiss her.
“Natasha,” Marcus mouthed silently. “My daughter.”
Now Natasha turned toward the man who had walked her down the aisle. He lifted her veil, turned and bent to bestow a
fatherly kiss, giving Marcus his first glimpse of him in profile. He had Marcus’s body, but the face of a stranger. A wave of nausea washed over Marcus as he watched the strange man kiss his daughter. His vision blurred momentarily, then cleared in time to see Natasha ascend the steps to the pulpit and take her place beside her groom.
The minister entered from the side and emerged from the shadows into the brilliant light that illuminated the hooded silver robe. From the figure’s gait, he could tell it was a woman. When she reached the pulpit, she turned to face the congregation, and Marcus saw a fringe of flaming red hair outlining her hood. Then she looked directly at him and he stared into the familiar green eyes that shone brilliantly even from across the church’s span.
“Terra!” he shouted aloud, gasping for breath. The hood fell away and her flowing hair cascaded in slow motion to her shoulders.
Corinne shook him by the shoulders until his eyes finally opened. She stared into the unseeing eyes, the pupils dilated so wide that they nearly obliterated the irises. His whole body shuddered.
“Marcus, Marc!” She shook him harder. He sighed deeply and blinked.
“You’ve been having a nightmare,” she said when he’d finally come around. “You were shouting.”
His eyes filled with tears as their colored irises reclaimed terrain from the dwindling pupils. He reached up to touch her face and gave silent thanks that the future he’d just seen wasn’t real, at least not yet.
“What was I shouting?” he asked later while Corinne was pouring coffee in the kitchen.
“It sounded like ‘terror,’” she replied. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not right now. I’d prefer to let it just fade away on its own. It was only a dream.” Marcus was grateful for the ambiguity of his exclamation. It was more than just a dream, but he wasn’t about to let Corinne into this corner of his mind.
The dream didn’t fade from Marcus’s awareness as he’d hoped. The images lodged deep within his being and threatened to crush his spirit. Corinne watched him sit, sometimes for hours, lost in thought, his shoulders slumped and his face impassive. Something was terribly wrong, but he’d shut her off completely from whatever it was.
Corinne felt no more shut out than at night when they were alone together in the bedroom. Until now desire had always glowed in his eyes when he gazed upon her body as she undressed or when she wore one of the diaphanous pieces of lingerie that veiled the contours of her body just enough to tease and arouse him. Now he barely noticed her and showed no interest at all in making love. Even when she’d reach over in bed to touch him, he’d roll over with his back to her and pretend to sleep.
Perhaps the real problem, Corinne thought, was that he’d fallen out of love with her. When she looked closely in the mirror, she saw tiny lines radiating from the corners of her eyes and a deepening of the folds around her mouth. Her breasts were still round and firm, but she saw hints of creases beneath them as time and gravity began to take their toll.
Corinne began to wonder whether her husband’s obsession with the Transformation had been more about his need to preserve youthful appearance than about longevity. And when she watched him sleep, she looked for the same hallmarks of aging that she saw in herself, but saw none. As haggard as he appeared in the throes of melancholy, the contours of his face in sleep were as smooth and unblemished as a twenty-year-old. Could she be leaving him behind? And could
his love for her be so shallow that these differences would matter?
What Corinne found most unsettling was the change in his emotional response to Natasha. His daughter had always been the light of his life and had never failed to bring a smile to his face. Now her presence seemed to bring him only pain. He’d gaze at her from across the room, then turn away so that she might not see his stifled sobs. The changes in her father weren’t lost on Natasha either, who shared her mother’s perceptiveness and intuition. She wondered what she could have done to cause him such torment and what she could do to make things right between them again.
Natasha had just turned ten and was brushing against the edges of adolescence. While many of her peers were turning gangly and awkward, Natasha was already developing the grace and beauty that had first attracted Marcus to Corinne. She was in a growth spurt that brought her up to Corinne’s nose. Not visible to the casual observer, however, was the maturation of her tissues, the cellular building blocks of her body and the chromosomes in their nuclei, half of which bore telomeres that would never diminish in length.
“Come watch me ride,” Natasha implored one afternoon, tugging at her father’s arm. “You won’t believe what we can do.”
Marcus mustered a smile and accompanied her to the paddock where Cinnamon was grazing. The horse came running to greet her and stood patiently while Natasha saddled her. The girl was atop the horse in minutes, cantering around the perimeter of the corral. Marcus leaned against the fence and watched her put Cinnamon through her paces. They moved to the center of the ring and the horse began prancing in place, first to the right, then to the left, and finally stretching out her forelegs and bowing her head.
“See, Daddy, I’ve taught her to dance.” Natasha beamed. Marcus laughed. The spontaneity of the emotion took him by surprise. It was his first moment of peace since the nightmare.
His pleasure was short-lived, however, interrupted by the appearance of a man by the fence on the opposite side of the paddock, who was also watching Natasha. The man appeared in his mid-twenties, rugged and handsome, with a shock of wavy blond hair and blue eyes that studied her with such intensity that they threatened to pierce her body. Marcus had never seen him before. Beyond the man was a white car with the driver’s door ajar. With the sun reflecting off the windshield, Marcus could barely make out the outline of a second figure sitting in the passenger’s seat.
A shiver ran up Marcus’s spine. Why would a strange man show such interest in his adolescent daughter? The image flashed through his mind of the stranger in the dream kissing the adult Natasha at the altar, and he tasted vomit rising in the back of his throat. She seemed so vulnerable, still smiling at him from atop her palomino, and at the same time innocent of the forces that could at any moment rip her life apart.