The Healer. Greg Hollingshead

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СКАЧАТЬ blindness and deception cultivated by that in him had muddied and compromised his nature, but then she realized that it was not him, at least not only him, but her own immediate state of intending to do something she wasn’t doing. Of knowing there was something but not knowing what it was. Like knowing something is there before you turn your head. Before you recognize it, it’s there as a husk, as the ghost of itself, waiting to be known. And then the sun had reached the cellophaned window, and the office did not get hotter, not yet, but the patch of bright amber light on the linoleum at the corner of her eye caused her, even as she continued to read, to think of heat, and that was how she remembered that she’d been meaning to plug in the fan, which she had unplugged when she went upstairs for lunch, right after the man had come in, and that’s what it was she wasn’t doing.

      Now it seemed to her there must be a way to act that would not, like this, like him, be confused, half hidden to yourself, half backward-turned, your timing always that little bit late. And she decided to see if it would be possible to know the right time to get up and go over and plug in the fan. She knew she could just do it. Decide to do it, then get down off her stool and walk over and do it. But it seemed to her that that would only be acting according to an idea of what she should do. Acting to fit an idea of acting. And she wondered if there could be some other way to do it. So she sat up straight and she waited, and before she knew it she was springing up to go and do it. But instead she sat down again, because it seemed to her that doing it that way, without thinking, was even more mechanical than doing it according to some idea. So she waited. Again she sprang up to do it, and again she sat down and waited.

      And then it happened. She saw when to get up and go and plug in the fan, and in the exact same action of seeing it she got down off the stool and walked over and she plugged in the fan. And this was another kind of action altogether, a third kind, completely different from the other two. It was a harmony, a grace of movement, and she wondered if a person’s whole life could be this way. And how this would be different from the other ways. How it might change how she was able to know. Whether she could live in order to act out of seeing and not according to an old reflex or the last idea. And she knew that it would be easy to think you were doing it when you were not, believing in it as an idea but not doing it. Or doing it in love with the person you wanted to be. But the thing was, she knew that she knew this, and she knew that she didn’t have to stop there, because she understood that knowing this was also part of what she could see, and all she had to do was to try to find out how far this thing was possible to be done.

      In this way, moment by moment, not gradually but all at once, at each moment, she would empty herself, if she could, she would empty herself of the slave.

      Ross Troyer leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door for his daughter Caroline, who climbed up and pulled hard at the door but not hard enough for the door to engage. It was an old truck.

      He raked his fingers through his hair, observing in the rearview the effect of doing so upon the lie of it.

      “Door’s not shut,” he said.

      She tried it again.

      “Who got in?” he murmured, his old joke. His eyes had left the rearview. She was clicking into her seat belt.

      His hand went lightly to the handle of the knife in the sheath at his left side, as it often did. Then his hand went to the ignition. “Better wind down that window.”

      She wound down the window.

      He eased the truck along the narrow alley, and when he reached the street he nosed out cautiously beyond the parked cars. They left the main street by the north bridge. Passed the Birches Motel (where Wakelin lay in his hot shack out back, watching TV) and next to the Birches the new six-unit white-brick plaza. Two more minutes and they were beyond the built-up area, into farmland. In the distance to the north and east the fairgrounds in their elevation. This was just after six in the evening. The sun was pale and it would not set for nearly three hours. It was only just summer, but there had already been more heat than rain, and the trees and the crops though green were not lush. Caroline Troyer sat with her hands loose in her lap and her head tilted slightly, the way her father often held his, but her expression betrayed none of his facetiousness, only the affliction that was often there too in his, her eyes downcast upon the toes of her boots set evenly upon the floor of the cab.

      This was farm country close to that part of the Shield where on three different occasions, over two billion years, alpine ranges had pushed up, all now eroded to fault escarpments and low domes of granite wrapped and separated by the forested sag and swell of the shreds of sedimentary gneisses. Where in this area the roots of those ranges lay exposed was a short distance to the north, beyond hills of clay and gravel and wooded outcrops and Precambrian erratics now ploughed around for oats and corn. Where the grade was steepest it was girdled by high faceted walls in olive and black and pink, for the roadway had been blasted out of the batholith for the pleasure men take in linearity achieved by the effective placement of dynamite. As the truck climbed toward this channel, Caroline Troyer’s eyes remained lowered.

      “You’re okay?” he said.

      She nodded. Not looking up, she added, “Why?”

      “You seem depressed.”

      “I was dry,” she said, and looked away out the window where a sign read, Rock Collecting Along this Highway Is Dangerous and Unlawful.

      “Dry,” he said.

      “Dry in my heart.”

      “Would this be why you’ve been hiding your light under a bushel? Or because?”

      She made no answer.

      The truck was losing speed with the steepness of the grade.

      “Why did you stop the healing, anyway?” he asked her. “Your mother could have sworn you had a good thing going there. I think she expected you’d take it on the road.”

      She looked at him.

      He smiled. “Tears of the world a constant quantity? Or its gratitude?”

      She looked away again. “I don’t like crowds.”

      “Me neither. But there’s money in them. As your mother has pointed out to you many times.” He put his face close to hers and said in a waggish voice, “But do you listen?”

      She didn’t say anything.

      “So what are you going to do?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “You don’t know. I don’t suppose you ever heard the expression, ‘When a woman has nothing to do she buys a pig’? Pig comes along looking for country property, she marries him. Gives her mother a nice city porker to sit on. Distributes the weight a little.”

      She was still looking away. After a while she said quietly, “What do I need with somebody else’s body to look after?”

      He laughed at this, pleased, a soft crowing, and pounded the heels of his hands lightly against the wheel. And then he said, “Healer sick of healing speaks.”

      “We’re not talking about healing.”

      “No.”

      After a pause he said, “Still, you could. What if marriage is the next thing to do, as you will know in your bones? The next thing’s enough for most people. They sit around on their ass until all other СКАЧАТЬ