THE LINES
Chapter X
THE GODS OF GHOST RIVER
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
- Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Whirrr… TAP. TAP. TAP. TAP TAP…
POP! POP! POP!
Energy builds in the filaments of my tendons, that supercharged space that propels the flight response, nearly as mechanized as the tube of machine and radiation that incases me. Although, all I can see as the tapping circulates around my head is Dizzy’s form flex against the recoil of bullets. A false memory, I never saw him hit the ground, except through the eyes of his killer, likely another vision implanted by my deranged psyche.
“Riley, please try to stay calm,” Marta’s voice echoes through an intercom, “We’re nearly finished.”
I try to keep my breathing shallow, holding onto the stillness my mind reels from. Subconsciously, my frame consumes itself with minor internal tremors as the CT scanner rolls to a slow. Shit, did it get anything usable? In this moment, there’s nothing I dread more than having to do round two. The tack of the textured plastic table clings to me as I’m wheeled gently from the tiny tunnel of madness, trying to suppress the shakes.
“Riley!” donning deep plum scrubs, Marta saunters from a room behind glass, lifting me from my anxiety, “We got what we needed. You feeling up for the walk back?”
“Yeah, should be.”
She gives me that same considering stare her son surely mastered from her, discerning it would be best to let me lead the way, despite my wavering. At a steady pace, we pass numerous exam rooms, some with the doors closed, some open a crack, all of them bustling with the chatter of patients. Surprising, considering how quiet the clinic was just before my scan.
“Everyone wants to book their appointments for Monday,” Marta laughs as a couple of nursing staff briskly push past, “They notice all the weird stuff during the weekend and then call in. Technically, we have a few nurse practitioners who see patients on the weekends, but most folks want to see Dr. Navakkakin or me.”
She finds my old exam room, the last to be occupied, “Also, awesome news, I was able to get Dr. Navakkakin to talk you through your results. Honestly seemed best, given I know you personally and all of that.”
I wince as Marta beams at me. Familiarity is the medicine I crave, as far as I know Dr. Navakkakin is yet another giant unknown and I’ve had enough of the unknown to last at least two lifetimes. Hiding my ire, I signal my appreciation as White Fox - Physician’s Assistant, bounds out of the room, her title, like the world’s strangest comic book character. I somehow can’t unseat the idea of her flying around the rez with a deep purple cape dispensing pamphlets on the risks of heart disease.
“WAIT!” I call suddenly.
“What is it, hun?” Marta pokes her head back into the room, her expression so similar to her son’s for a fraction of a second.
“I forgot to give this back,” I shuffle over to my pile of clothes, still donning the cotton hospital gown. Pulling the necklace from the pocket of my new-ish jeans, I hold out Navan’yu’s silver visage of terror, contrasting starkly against the wall of ungodly beige.
“Thanks for remembering it. We’ll talk more about her next time I am by for dinner!” she smiles, accepting her lost item.
Her time spent, she leaves me somewhere between in peace and in pieces. Answers, I’m here for answers… push it all out of my mind until there’s something corporeal. Only thing to do now is find comfort in patience, letting things fall into place, as they should.
••••
Cold fresh air, light no longer filtered through the amber membrane, a world ablaze with color, my heart beating steady in my abdomen. I’m swallowed by triangular blackness and pain… too soon, it’s too soon.
Awaken. Sensations first, bustling warmth, driving hunger. Belly full, driving hunger. And so on it goes. My eyes open, my siblings so alike to me stare, disgust, mistrust. My legs, they’re funny, I flop about. They’d never have let me live, I come to terms with this as I tumble, that sharp crack the last of my recollection.
••••
THUTHUNK!
A knock at the door breaks my spinning head, allowing me to grasp these aberrant thoughts. A woman in her mid thirties in a pristine white lab coat emerges and nods at me, narrow black-rimmed designer glasses frame her striking cheekbones. Her umber hair tied in a loose bun, and a rose gold ring dangles on a chain around her neck, perhaps a wedding ring? Her tag reads, “Dr. Cheryl Navakkakin, M.D. Family Medicine”.
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“So, you must be Riley,” she peers at me over her glasses with the aggression of a devoted librarian, taking a quick moment to glance at her clipboard.
“Uhhh… yeah,” making my best effort to suppress the urge to shrink away.
“I have heard a little something about your situation, but I want you to tell me from your own mouth. Any detail you can give will be most helpful. Particularly about any pervasive symptoms, any spots that had acute injuries or blunt force trauma?” She glares at me with an intensity familiar to something lost to my recollection.
“Some of it’s a little fuzzy…” I trail off as I notice her fierce brows narrowing, “But I’ll do my best. If I forget anything, can I write it down and come back later?”
“Sure.”
She taps her pen against the clipboard impatiently awaiting my response. If bedside manner was some kind of requirement for graduating med school, it may not have been her strongest subject. Or possibly, extreme overwork day in and day out in this horribly bland office turned her hard.
“How long were you in the wilderness?”
“I’m not really sure… maybe, between two or three days… I think I’m seeing things… you know, stuff that isn’t there.”
The brass coated pen flits across the paperwork, in perfect pace as I speak, “What kind of things?”
“Dark shapes, kind of violent imagery that pops into my head and disappears…”
“Do you remember hitting your head or bruising anything?”
“No, as far as I know, I don’t think I hit my head.”
“Okay, that seems consistent with the CT images,” Dr. Navakkakin peers over her paperwork, “Would you like to see them?”
“Not really.”
“Okay, I will relay the results to the best of my ability. It is all good news from a neurology perspective, no apparent lesions or shadows, no physical damage that we can see. Your brain looks healthy, but our technology has limitations. There’s always the probability our scan missed something small. This is where your recollection of your symptoms becomes paramount. The other possibility is that we are dealing with an emerging psychological issue, which we will need to monitor,” she pauses to readjust her glasses, “Have you heard of the concept of ‘Intrusive Thoughts’?”
I shake my head.
“In a nutshell, ‘Intrusive Thoughts’ are a phenomena most people experience, flashes of disturbing impulses, or disturbing visuals in your mind’s eye, that then quickly dissipate. Good news, your experience doesn’t seem to fit outside of the ‘norm’ as most folks can mentally sort that it is just their mind being ‘buggy’ and move on. Where ‘Intrusive Thoughts’ get tricky is for patients with anxiety conditions or OCD, they have difficulty dismissing them and often fixate on the disturbing nature of those thoughts. Are you following?”
“I think so…” my mind drifts to the absent, sponged out sections of my memory, ‘Intrusive Thoughts’ wouldn’t account for that.
“I am not a psychiatrist, and I am not qualified to give you a diagnosis. Therefore, I am referring you to a specialist based in Providence, that’s about an hour outside of Vermillion. Riley, you may not have head trauma, but what you went though is without a doubt a psychological trauma. I cannot urge you enough to follow up with him,” her eye-contact lingering a second or two beyond my comfort, before proceeding to scribble something onto a notepad obscured by her clipboard, “We will send your information over to him this afternoon and you will be able to schedule an appointment tomorrow.”
“Okay…”
“Follow up with me if anything changes,” Dr. Navakkakin instructs, handing me the piece of paper, leading me out of the room.
“Thanks. How do I…?”
“Through there to the waiting room, and then follow the hall to the lobby,” she interrupts.
•••
Flexing and contracting my fingertips, I observe the terrain of the skin on my hands, almost hexagonal around cavernous pores. A distraction from the referral to the psychiatrist tucked away in my pocket, paired with my new tribal card, still warm from the printer. The soft scent of summer sage wafts though Carl’s glinting window, yet another veil to obscure the results of my appointment.
“So how did it go?” Bobbi looks at me with piqued interest.
“Good news, my brain looks healthy!”
“Well that’s a relief, huh.”
“Yeah, hey can we make a stop in Old Town?” I push the topic elsewhere, hoping to throw him off of the stench of my lie through omission.
“Sure thing!”
In that moment, looking to the road ahead, I see it. An encounter, something beyond my years of comprehension… a silver thread snaking along our path. The gleaming string aglow before us, no, a part of us. A trail we’ve yet to tread, but visible seconds preceding our convergence upon it. No, not a part of us… a part of me, erupting from the core of my chest, projecting a road I never knew I’d travel, yet is laid out for me, the quantum expression of fate, burned into the fabric of the tangible universe.
Follow The Lines.
•••
Palm reading always struck me as bogus, just another creative way to part people from their well-earned cash, along with the other spiritual forms of fraud, lives controlled by the stars and pictures on a deck of cards. But in disbelief, I find myself compelled by this stream of light. In the approaching distance, Old Town rises from the base of the valley, peppered with adobe homes the hue of butternut squash. Coming to a stop against the warm stucco, I remain mute, car door half-cracked, attempting to grasp the odd luminous artery laid before me. As a warm breeze stirred by the convection of the summer sun tussles strands of my raven hair, an urge takes me. Seizing upon a moment to deviate from the course set ahead by the strange phenomenon, I leap zealously from the car in erratic skipping motions. Which, to my chagrin, I continuously fall into the path of the silver thread. Self-conscious, I turn to my old friend to see him giving his best impression of a disdainful teen girl when the most awkward of situations drop. I overplayed my hand... Saving face, I pull the goofiest grin I can muster, unwillingly drawing the muscles from that permanent scowl I hide behind.
“All that radiation get to your head or something? Or are you just excited to be here?” Bobbi jeers.
“Shut up.”
“Dumbass,” he takes a light punch to my shoulder, payment for his unanswered questions.
Old Town sits in a strange sort of stasis, preserved as though a hundred years ago, emaciated mutts scuttle between the buildings and dry rotted timber. Most of the structures house small galleries for the on-rez artists and their studios. But, the majority of its denizens live across the valley in modern trailer communities, removed from the romanticism of traditional Aolu’yi ways. The sun-cracked adobe feels naked without the presence of Nana, a spirit as akin as any other to this place, in the wastes of the painted desert.
“So what did you want to see?” Bobbi calls between the slowing, syrupy constancy of my thoughts, “Riley… Riley?!”
That line of mercury beckons me down a course as mysterious as it is dangerous, but obediently I follow, bound to a destiny beyond my mastery. Like the flow of a river, it leads me crisscrossing through the many textures of the village, past the wet eager nose of a lean sandy hound, thirsting for affection. Through a gate of desiccated ashen wooden posts, south, away from Old Town into the shadow of the great singular peak standing dark and brooding on the horizon.
“Riley, can you just slow down?” the wheezing cry of Bobbi reverberates in the back of my skull.
My legs carry me with purpose, the string of light protruding from my chest reabsorbing into my being with each step. The graveyard emerging in the distance, the last resting place of the ancestors, generations upon generations of experience laid to slumber in the thick red clay. The Aolu’yi don’t release their deceased to the sky like folks do to the east, for my people are people of the earth returning their essence to the sediments that bore them before the time of conscious thought. The ember of silver guides me to a ring of stones emblazoned with a wooden etched sign, painted in garish colors.
Elenora Se’nya
July 6, 1938 to March 11, 2004
May her spirit return to Prairie Mother
Nana, amongst the dead, no doubt as I too should’ve been, a burial that sits as surreal in my mind as any distant dream. I’m empty, just a ghost amongst the living, the only breath within me kept stirring by the vague shape blotted in the shadows of my memory. It calls to me across the vast wilderness… She calls to me.