The sight of Ben's body disappearing into the Hobart made Tommy break out into a sweat.
The big dishwasher was on the blink, but Ben said he knew how to fix it, no need to call in the maintenance guys. Tommy had gladly volunteered to help and Ben had let him tag along when the softball game broke up.
The Hobart was seven feet long and had doors on both ends, just like a casket-sized car wash. The dishes went in dirty at one end and came out the other clean and so hot they steamed dry in seconds. Ben lay on his back on the counter, arranged a flashlight and some tools on his chest, and then shoved himself into the open maw until only his bottom half emerged from between the strips of the spray curtain.
It reminded Tommy of the times he'd been fed into the MRI machine during the last couple of weeks: the claustrophobic panic of being strapped to the plastic shelf and sliding inch by inch into the huge, roaring white doughnut.
Ben grunted and made clanking noises inside the housing. His legs bent and scissored, as if he were struggling to get out, and Tommy had to look away. Still, he'd rather be here in the kitchen instead of walking around with the nurse. She creeped him out, always hovering near him, prying at him. Even now, she was just the other side of the swinging doors, waiting at one of the cafeteria tables.
"Just don't turn it on while I'm in here, huh?" Ben joked. From inside the stainless steel housing, his voice had a metallic ring.
"Why not? You look like you could use it."
"Hey, I took a shower just last month!" Ben chuckled. "Wouldn't help, anyway. Even this thing won't clean a dirty mind."
Tommy couldn't laugh. That hit too close to the mark: The worst part of the MRI had been the fear of what it might see in his head.
"So, what's the matter with you, anyway? Not going on the field trip. Sick last week, too, right?"
"Cooties. Bad case of cooties."
Ben chuckled again. His legs braced and pushed, as if he were being eaten by the machine and was fighting it. In another moment, his hand emerged with some kind of a valve. Tommy took it and set it on the counter.
"So," Ben said, "the good-looking bilagaana-what, she's a doctor or something?"
Tommy didn't want to answer, couldn't stand to turn their talk serious.
This was good-just hanging with someone, like he was a regular person and not some kind of specimen or freak. And if Ben knew the truth, he wouldn't let Tommy anywhere near him. Ignoring the question, Tommy quickly inspected the industrial meat grinder bolted to the opposite counter and turned back to slap the housing of the Hobart.
"What's this red button for?" he asked innocently.
"Don't touch that!"
Tommy reached over and flipped the toggle on the grinder, and he could see from the sudden tensing of Ben's legs that the loud, grating whine had caught him off guard. He let it run for a few seconds, then hit the switch and let the motor wind down.
Ben's legs were shaking as he laughed. "Just about peed myself] Gonna feed you into that thing when I get out of here! Hey, see my toolbox? Want to hand me the half-inch box wrench?"
Tommy found the wrench, but before he could give it to Ben it slipped from his fingers and bounced under the counter. His right hand wasn't working. He felt a growing confusion about it: The waistband of his jeans pressed against him in back, and if he shut his eyes he could swear it was something tightening on his wrist.
The feeling was coming on him again, slowly but remorselessly.
He was on his knees, reaching under the counter for the wrench, when a long, thin, jointed thing darted in toward it from the right side. He reared away so hard he smashed his head on the counter supports. His own right hand! It had come so quickly and purposefully, like some awful animal that lived under the counter. He felt, he knew, his real arm was back behind him, stretched along his spine. It took him a moment to catch his breath and stop shaking. He got the wrench with his left hand, extricated himself from under the counter, and put it into Ben's waiting palm.
"Butterfingers," Ben complained good-naturedly. "You think I want to be in here all day?"
Tommy felt tears in his eyes. He moved away from the feed opening to make sure Ben couldn't see his face. "What'd you say this red button was for?" he asked.
"Couldn't we skip it?
Please? I'm fine now." He couldn't stand the thought of another examination, Mrs. Pierce's flecked eyes narrowing as they inspected him.
"Sorry, Tommy. Doctor's orders. I'm supposed to track your vital signs."
She shut the examining room door. As if there was anyone going to come in. He wished she'd leave it open.
"You'll have to take off your shirt," Mrs. Pierce said.
Tommy wasn't sure he could. He was too twisted. He knew the thing at his side had to be his arm, but it felt like he was standing in a packed crowd so that someone else's arm was pressed against his body. No, it was worse: It was as if there was someone invisible overlapping him on the right side. He couldn't even think about the arm completely. When he lifted his T-shirt with his left hand, the right arm thing just hung there. He got stuck with the shirt over his head, tangled and disoriented. Mrs. Pierce had to help him. When they got it off, he felt uncomfortable, standing half naked in the room with her looking at him.
She put on her stethoscope and listened to his chest and back, cold rings against his skin. Her eyes had an excited, curious look, like on some level she enjoyed this. When she was done, she guided him by his shoulders to sit on the crinkly paper of the examining table, then wrapped the blood pressure cuff around his left arm. She pumped it up and let the air out slowly, listening with the stethoscope, watching the gauge. She jotted something on her clipboard, but she didn't remove the cuff. Instead, she lifted the strange thing to his right.
"Tommy, what's this I'm holding?"
"My arm," he muttered. He didn't look at it. If he looked at it, he knew it would seem like a huge thing emerging inexplicably from the side of his face, near the hinge of his jaw.
"Is it? So, tell me about your arm."
"What do you mean?"
"Tell me more about it. How it feels. What it does."
"You've already asked me so many times!"
"I mean, what it does when nobody's looking."
He felt nausea surge in his stomach. He refused to answer or to look at the awful thing she held.
"I guess you don't know," she whispered. "And of course you don't know what it does when you're asleep."
At that, he couldn't help but look at her, horrified.
A little smile stayed glued to her mouth as she made a gesture with her own hand, as if she was rubbing something small between finger and thumb. Then more gestures, her hand gripping, then beckoning. When the miming hand touched his face, he jerked away.
Once when he'd been almost drowsing he'd looked over to see something groping stealthily around the edge of the bedside table. It was like suddenly finding a tarantula right next to his head. The scariest part was that it had stopped immediately, as if it didn't want him to see.
So it did things while he was asleep, too.
He slid off the examining table, wanting to run out of the room. But he was still hooked up to the blood pressure machine. Without two hands there was no way to take it off himself.
"We're not done with our examination, Tommy!" the nurse said commandingly.
He stopped tugging at the tubes, frightened by her tone, and stood as she released the rest of the pressure and ripped the Velcro loose. Once she'd put it away, she clamped his wrist in her hard fingers and timed his pulse. Her eyebrows rose as if his racing heart alarmed her.
She gazed at him for a long moment, then checked her clipboard.
"Okay. So, let's weigh you. Then let's go for a nice, long walk. Exercise will help you get your appetite back, we can't have you losing so much weight. Would you like that?"
"Yes," he said readily. She'd probably ask him weird questions about his parents or about what supernatural stuff the other kids talked about, like last time, almost as if she wanted to scare him. But being outside would be better than being in here alone with her.
They walked along the edge of the athletic fields, not far from the foot of the mesa. The sky had turned dull white and featureless, dimming the sun. Tommy struggled to coordinate his legs and arms. He had a rising feeling of expectancy, as if there was another person coming, or maybe was already silently walking with them and was about to do something. A third person, listening, even more sneaky than the nurse.
"You know," Mrs. Pierce said, "sometimes it helps to talk about what frightens you. It can be therapeutic. Even if you have angry feelings, talking about them can be what we call cathartic."
"I know what 'cathartic' means!"
"Of course you do," she said soothingly. "You're a highly intelligent young man. You're smart enough to be nervous about all this medical business, aren't you? The technology can be intimidating. But everyone feels the same way, believe me."
He nodded. There was some small relief in hearing that.
"Like what?" she persisted. "What's the worst? The MRI?" She glanced over at him expectantly.
He still didn't want to answer. But her question had made him think of the magazine in the cranial diagnostics waiting room. He'd sat there in his hospital gown while they prepared the MRI and he'd picked it up, some kind of doctor's magazine, not anything they should've let a patient see. He'd opened it to find an article about lobotomies.
The first photo showed a woman with her head in a clamp, a doctor putting a long, thin blade into her nose. Other pictures illustrated how to hit the tool with a special hammer that drove the blade through the thin bones behind your sinus cavity, right into your brain. It cut the connections, so the sick part just sat there, probably still doing its crazy thing but not screwing up the rest of your mind. The article said the procedure had been mostly abandoned for twenty years but was now making a big comeback. Sometimes people couldn't walk or talk or recognize their family afterward, but it was worth it if their brain problems were really severe.
Whatever was the matter with him, he knew it was severe. So maybe that's what they'd end up doing to him.
Tommy felt panic coming and tried desperately to think of something reassuring. He told himself Dr. Tsosie and Mrs. McCarty would help, they were very smart, they acted like they really did care about him. And maybe that new psychologist could do something, she seemed like she understood things. But he hardly knew any of them, it was hard to trust them.
His back twisted, and though he willed himself straight it was like big invisible hands were wringing him, so hard he heard his own backbone crackle. From the way she looked over at him, the nurse must have heard it, too.
He knew what it meant: The other person, the controlling stranger, was getting closer.
He had to unkink and calm himself. Find some safe place in his mind. His thoughts kept fleeing back to the family homesite, the smell of the sheep pens, the familiar shape of the land, and most of all his grandparents.
Grandfather, particularly-he could do anything with his hands, he could make anything, he totally knew sheep and horses and cars, he remembered everything from long ago, he could tell stories really well. What Tommy admired most was how deeply he believed in helping people-he'd do anything for someone in need, give anything he owned. He'd never in his life complained about his responsibilities. But he was old-fashioned and stuck in his habits and getting tired and weak. He was negative about every change, even things like when they graded the county road, and was paranoid about white people, technology, the government. He and Grandmother believed the old myths about First Man and First Woman, the Hero Twins, and Spider Woman, they saw the world as full of mysterious things that required all this respect and doing things in very particular, pointless ways every time. They were down on Tommy's choice of music and clothes and friends, frowned whenever he talked about his career ambitions, asked suspiciously about the clan of any girl he mentioned. He loved them so much it hurt inside, and he knew how much he owed them. But they couldn't offer any safety or reassurance now. And they shouldn't have to, he was fifteen, he should be taking care of them.
Sometimes he thought maybe he should confide in Mr. Clah, his social studies teacher, he was smart and seemed to know how things worked. He wore khakis and carried a laptop computer, he did mountain biking and had a white lawyer girlfriend. He treated Tommy like an equal. But though Tommy mostly agreed with his opinions, too often they sounded like complaining, making excuses, and accusing. He wasn't strong the way Grandfather was. He'd never worked as hard as Grandfather, had never gotten his hands dirty, didn't know what it meant to sacrifice for anybody. In any case, he didn't care enough about Tommy to help him now.
As always, his thoughts spiraled back to his parents. If they were alive, maybe they'd know how to help. Maybe they'd figured something out about how to live. They put up with Grandfather's Dine heritage stuff but weren't particularly into it. Some nights Tommy missed them, crying secretly into his pillow, but the more he missed them, the more he hated them for getting themselves killed. They had no right to do that to him and the family! Once when he was obsessing about it last year, he'd gone to the library and looked at some psychology books. He'd discovered that his attitude was typical: adolescent kid loving but resenting dead parents, searching around for role models. Cliche or not, it was true: You had to know something about your people or you couldn't know who you were. Especially right now, knowing who they were would help him sort out what he was going through. But all he had was a collection of mental snapshots: roiling on the ground and wrestling with Father when he was five or six, feeling safe against his strong chest, laughing at the silly way he pretended to fight. Mother teaching him how to fry an egg when he was maybe four, proudly showing Aunt Ellen and everybody how incredibly big a mess he made of the stove. Beyond that, all he knew was they liked country-and-western music, they fought a lot and drank too much. What he remembered wasn't enough to help him figure out anything.
Tommy heard his backbone crackle again, and he steered his thoughts away from the fading images of those faces. There wasn't any refuge there.
So then at some point he'd decided, Okay, I'll define myself. From his reading about great artists and from his own drawing, he'd figured that you were defined by your passions, by what you loved and believed in.
Sometimes he thought that might mean "doing something for the tribe." But what? The People didn't know what they wanted. If you believed the Navajo Times, every little businessman who opened up a Laundromat was "doing something for the tribe" by contributing to Navajo-owned enterprise and economic growth. When what it looked like to Tommy was just more greedy self-interest, like Mr. Clah said, just another form of colonialism, co-opting real Navajo culture with white American consumerism.
His art was the one thing. He loved looking at something until its hidden meaning came clear and then distilling the image and the meaning into something powerful. He could experiment with different ways of seeing the same thing, trying on definitions of himself, his parents, his friends, his surroundings, life, the past, until one seemed to capture something unarguably true. Just the physical act was almost ecstatic-moving the pencil on the page, not so much drawing as carving the blank white into three dimensions. There were moments when he could believe that in the way he saw things and drew things he was giving something back to the world. It had always been good, but it wasn't until he'd come to Oak Springs that he'd learned how much he could do, how much it could mean. It was so much better than the other schools. He'd learned so much in the few classes he'd had, Miss Chee and Mrs. McCarty had shown him how to put the way he saw and thought into his pictures. Made him feel that his work was important, that it was a way to figure things out, a way to a halfway decent future.
The thing at his side moved suddenly, the fingers clenching and then clawing the air like someone scratching a bug bite. Tommy grabbed it with his left hand and squeezed it hard, digging his nails into it, wanting to hurt it, feeling nothing.
His heart plummeted. It reminded him of another heartbreaking fact of where he was at. Without a right arm he couldn't draw. If he didn't get better, he'd have to leave Oak Springs School. The one way through would be lost.
"You okay?" the nurse asked.
"Yeah." He realized he hadn't answered her earlier question.
"You want to tell me what you're feeling?"
He couldn't. Because as bad as the things with his body were, the feelings were worse-harder to describe and more frightening. Suddenly, he'd notice he'd been having something like a daydream, but the instant he'd realize it, it would go away, he couldn't remember what it was about. It was like the one time he'd gone to the multiplex theater in Gallup, watching one movie but hearing sounds and music from a different movie through the wall. It didn't make sense, a mood that had nothing to do with what he was doing. A feeling or an urge would come out of nowhere. He'd feel the need to hurry, like he had to go somewhere or do something very important. A couple of times he'd gotten sexually aroused, once even in the examining room when Mrs. McCarty was there and might have noticed. Or he'd feel this horrible fear and then fill with hate and want to hurt someone so much he could hardly hold himself back. Sometimes he wondered if it could be a witch or a ghost trying to kill him, maybe all the things the kids talked about in the dorm at night were true: the black humping shapes coming out of the desert at night, the strange noises in the wind, the unusual behavior of a crow on the roof. A shadow moving on the rocks with nothing making it. Maybe he had a chindi in him. Or maybe it was coming from his subconscious, wasn't this how schizophrenia worked? Maybe he was really a person full of fear and hate and violence.
Whichever, it was happening right now.
Mrs. Pierce was watching him and he realized that once more he hadn't answered her question, he'd been lost in the feeling and the effort to fight it. He quickly let go of the arm thing and hoped she didn't notice the blood where he'd dug in his nails. He looked over at her, and abruptly he wanted to spring at her, tear her to pieces. Afraid he couldn't stop it this time, he picked up his speed so he got ahead of her, got her out of his sight.
From behind, Mrs. Pierce called in her phony cheerful voice, "Never mind. I'm sure you'd rather talk about something else. Of course you would. We'll just walk along and just be good buddies for a while. Just good buds out for a walk."