Death Omen Read online

  In a few minutes, they arrived at the park, a green rectangle in a quiet neighborhood. Adobe towers with benches built into their curved walls stood on each corner. Jamie gave the parrots and Ezra time to get reacquainted, reminding the boy how to hold them on his wrist and forearm, then asked Ezra to help with exercising the birds. Jamie stayed in place while Ezra moved the length of the parrots’ harness lines away, and they set up a volley, in which each parrot completed a lap and then rested while the other flew back and forth. Gasser flopped in the grass. Jamie made one last effort to get Ezra to open up, then said, “Guess you’ll have to hear about my weekend, then.”

  After telling Ezra about meeting Mae’s stepdaughters, Jamie sent Bouquet on her next flight and started describing the workshop. Ezra remained silent but deeply attentive. At twelve, the Apache boy was in the early stages of his training to be a medicine man. He had a gift of dreaming the future, as well as other signs of his calling: a steady temperament and a thoughtful turn of mind.

  “Met this weird woman there. Calls herself Sierra Mu. She’s got this idea that we make ourselves sick through our karma, things we did in the past, even in other lives.”

  “Grandma says if you’re out of balance spiritually, that can make you sick.”

  “Not on purpose, though. Sierra thinks we do it to act out something.”

  Ezra paused to focus on his bird-catching duties, then said, “That’s kind of how my sisters got diabetes. They did it to themselves.”

  “You saying that you believe this?” Jamie had expected Ezra to dismiss it.

  “Kind of. Everybody knows if you do certain stuff, you could end up with diabetes, and they do it anyway. It runs in our family, but I’m the only person that runs in our family.”

  Jamie snorted, then realized from the boy’s puzzled expression that Ezra didn’t realize he’d made a joke. “Nah. Your sisters are in denial, not making themselves sick on purpose. And anyway, Sierra’s talking about getting cancer and arthritis, stuff that’s plain bad luck, y’know? And she keeps dropping hints that everyone in her reincarnation soul group has some bloody awful disease, and I’m supposed to be a member of that group.”

  He thought of the creepy, half-hidden howling he’d heard when he tried to perceive his own hand and knee. The grayness. The static. And his fatigue. Was his serious disease, depression, coming back? If it was, he certainly hadn’t invited it.

  Through several rounds of parrot flight, Ezra said nothing. Jamie asked, “What are you thinking, mate?”

  Bouquet flew to Jamie. He gave Placido his flight command, but the smaller parrot landed in the grass this time. Tired. Jamie strolled to where he had landed, put Bouquet down to socialize with him, and praised and petted them, then gave Ezra a probing “Hmm?”

  “I’m not sure.” The boy looked down at the birds. “See, people don’t always believe that I can dream the future, but when it happens, then they know it’s true. And the things you were studying, a lot of people wouldn’t believe that was possible. But you healed me once, even if you didn’t mean to, so I know you can. I don’t believe in past lives, but maybe I had some and don’t remember, or maybe there are different things that happen to people based on what they believe. You think this lady sounds crazy, but what if she’s not?”

  This wasn’t what Jamie wanted to hear. Instead of closing the door on the possibility that Sierra was partially right, Ezra’s reaction only opened it wider.

  In the morning, Ezra insisted on cooking breakfast, making waffles from a recipe in one of Jamie’s cookbooks. The boy, who had scarcely spoken since waking up, served Jamie a plate of blueberry waffles with solemn formality. “I had a dream about you. I don’t know what it means. I’m not too good at interpreting them yet.”

  Jamie poured syrup on the slightly burned waffles and took a bite. “These are good, thanks. What’d you dream?”

  Ezra returned to the waffle iron and poured more batter in. “You’d lost weight. Maybe about fifteen pounds. And you were wearing pajama pants and no shirt, standing in this funny position.” Ezra faced him and posed, feet apart, both turned approximately the same way, arms out from his sides, staring straight ahead.

  “Weird. Thanks for telling me.”

  The position looked familiar. Ezra came out of it and gave his attention to the waffle iron. What did that pose look like? Jamie could see it in his mind’s eye. An old, old drawing. Naked bloke standing that way inside both a circle and a square. “You dreamed I was the Vitruvian man.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Um ... inspired by Vitruvius, whoever he was. It’s a DaVinci drawing. Think it’s about measurement or balance or proportions, something like that. It’s probably philosophical or mathematical, but it could be symbolic, in your dream.”

  “Or not. Sometimes I dream symbols, but sometimes what I dream really happens.”

  Losing weight? If Jamie saw his doctor, which he wasn’t going to, she’d say he needed to lose more than fifteen pounds. He’d done it before, gotten down to perfect-one-seventy-five, but it had been hard to achieve and even harder to maintain. Maybe he was slimmer in the dream because the Vitruvian man had a leaner body. Ezra had probably blended Jamie with an unconscious impression of the famous artwork. But the dream could be about perfect proportions in another way, balance in his heart and mind. “Figured it out, mate. Means I’m going to get my act together.”

  “But you’re already working on that, and I don’t dream messages for people about things they already know and do.”

  “All right, then your dream’s telling me I can go in two directions. Like the bloke being in two positions in the circle and the square. He has extra arms and legs in that picture, y’know. Four of each.”

  Ezra sat down and said a prayer under his breath before he ate. After a few bites, he asked, “Eight limbs? Is he like a spider?”

  Jamie choked on his coffee, laughing. “Jeezus. Renaissance Spiderman. If the image had anything to do with me, it had nothing to do with a spider.”

  The boy shook his head. “Spiders are good people. And my dreams are serious. I don’t always know what they mean, but I can tell when they’re important. This one was important.”

  Bernadette arrived to collect Ezra, and he went upstairs to get his belongings. Jamie offered her coffee. She accepted, sat at the table, and he filled a mug for her. “You and Alan have a good evening?”

  “We did. Thank you.” She took a sip. “This is excellent. And thanks for taking care of Ezra.”

  Jamie refilled his mug and leaned against the counter. After having Mae with him and then Ezra, he wasn’t ready to be alone yet and hoped Bernadette would hang out for a while. Though the pets helped, his transition to solitude was never easy. “Love having him. Except he gets up so early. It’s not natural. He’s as bad as Mae.”

  “He’s being a traditional Apache. A morning run is spiritual.”

  “You do it?”

  “No.” She smiled. “I’m a somewhat less traditional Apache. I prefer an afternoon yoga class.” Bernadette, a slender woman in her late forties with strong features and long, dark, gray-streaked hair, had effortlessly perfect posture that reflected her years of yoga. Jamie had been in a class with her once and her flexibility had struck him as more impossible than a morning run. She asked, “How was the workshop?”

  Jamie rolled his shoulders, right then left, plucking at the crust of burned waffle in the iron until it popped loose. “Not bad. Energy healing went all right, mostly. Mae was great at the medical intuition. Hoped I could use it on my pets, but I wasn’t any good at it. Even this crazy woman who thinks I’m part of her soul group was better at it than I was.”

  “Her soul group? What’s that?”

  “Her reincarnation cohort. Class of 2000 BCE, something like that. Having a reunion.”

  “That’s an odd claim. How can she tell you’re part of it?”

  He began cleaning the waffle iron, drinking coffee between efforts, and described Sie
rra’s behavior and then her support group.

  “Past lives and chronic illness,” Bernadette mused. “That would be hard to study or verify.”

  Jamie turned to look at her. “You still working on that verification for healers and seers?” Though she taught health promotion courses at the nearby tribal college, Bernadette’s research area was alternative medicine.

  “It’s going slowly, but yes. It should be easier to verify psychics, especially those who are medical intuitives. There are clear external measures for success. Healing is fuzzier. So many factors affect mental and physical health. If this woman claims past lives have anything to do with chronic illness, she’s practically guaranteeing that her hypothesis is untestable.”

  Ezra scuffed in and set his bag down. “I’m ready.”

  “Relax, sit down,” Bernadette said. “Jamie and I are into something interesting.”

  Interesting? Disturbing was more like it. He’d wanted her to linger and chat, but not about Sierra.

  Gasser emerged from the laundry room with a loud mewling complaint, shaking his paws one by one. Ezra sat beside Bernadette and watched the cat with concern, asking, “Is he all right?

  “Yeah, just fussy. Trained the parrots to use the litterbox.” Gasser had been doing this picky, whining dance ever since. “He gets stressed about sharing his bathroom.” So did Jamie, but he stopped short of saying so. There were anxieties one didn’t tell guests about. “He’ll quit in a minute.” Gasser continued his performance. Embarrassed, Jamie bent down and pressed a hand to the cat’s back. “Hush, mate.”

  “We were talking about a seer and healer named Sierra Mu,” Bernadette explained. “How she can’t be tested for being right or wrong.”

  Moo. Jamie resumed scrubbing the waffle iron as inner laughter welled up. When he heard the name, he kept seeing the faces Mae’s kids had made as they said “Mrs. Moo” and mooed.

  “Do you think reincarnation is possible?” Ezra asked.

  Bernadette paused before answering. “I can’t bring myself to believe in it, but I’ve read a book by a professor at the University of Virginia who researched children who appeared to recall past lives, and his evidence is presented convincingly. Still, they could be psychic, picking up information from the past in general, not recalling a personal past. There’s a lot of well-established evidence for psi phenomena.”

  Jamie finished the waffle iron and dried his hands, telling Ezra, “That’s professor-ese for psychic stuff.” After checking to see if Bernadette wanted more coffee, which she didn’t, he topped off his mug and drank. It was his fourth refill and he was barely starting to feel human.

  Bernadette asked, “How does Sierra identify her soul group?”

  “Says she can see past lives, just looking at you. And she says they all have serious illnesses.”

  “But you’re healthy.”

  “Physically, yeah. But my mental health, that’s another story.”

  “Maybe she recruits people she knows have a bad diagnosis and that’s her criteria for inventing a past life with them. You talked quite openly about depression when you performed at Spirit World Fair.”

  “Yeah, my mental illness coming-out. Or she could have chosen me after she found out I had all these injuries and chronic pain. Wonder if she goes up to people in her doctor’s waiting room and says, ‘I was your abbot in Lindisfarne’ if they look feeble or start coughing their lungs up.”

  “She doesn’t have to. All she has to do is advertise her support group for chronic illness and sick people will show up.”

  “Can’t all be in her soul group, though.”

  “True. I’d like to know how she operates, especially if she charges money. I haven’t reviewed a questionable healer for a while.”

  “Does that mean you want to?” Jamie was a regular reader of Bernadette’s column in The Reporter reviewing mind-body studios and healing practitioners. He liked the idea of her skewering Sierra.

  “Yes and no. I’m glad every place I’ve visited lately has been good, but I’d be interested in exposing her if she’s exploiting people.”

  Ezra spoke quietly, watching Gasser struggle to lick himself. “You’re so sure she’s making it up. What if she’s not?”

  Bernadette nodded. “That’s a good point. I should keep an open mind. Thank you. But I will look into it. Maybe Jamie should go to her group.”

  “No way. I’d scream. I’d run out like I did in the bug museum.”

  “All right. I’ll go about it some other way.”

  After Bernadette and Ezra left, Jamie searched for Dr. Don’s business card and found it in the heap of pocket detritus on his dresser. There was one thing he could check into without going to Sierra’s group. The doctor’s receptionist took the message that Jamie wanted to ask Dr. Gross for a recommendation. It was close enough to the truth.

  Dr. Don didn’t return the call until late evening, as Jamie was getting home from a rehearsal at his band mate Mwizenge Chomba’s house. Jamie had just unloaded the last of his instruments from his van, propping the didgeridoo in its stand in the spare room upstairs.

  “Decided to get that checkup on your sparkles?” Don asked.

  “Nah, think those were just my usual problems.” Jamie sat on the futon. “Need to find that past life hypnotist you went to.”

  “Last time I talked with you, you didn’t believe in reincarnation, and you were worried about this pattern people found in you. Thinking of getting it checked out with a doctor.”

  “Changed my mind.”

  “Why? What did your intuition tell you about those sparkles?”

  Jamie thought back to his first reaction. A brief flash of paralyzing terror. “Nothing useful. Being scared doesn’t mean great intuition, not from me. I’m a fucking fear machine. Anyway, I called about that other thing. Don’t want to waste your time on the sparkles. Must be keeping you up.”

  “You’re not. Do you think everyone over sixty goes to bed early?”

  “Sorry. Dunno where that came from. My parents stay up late. Want to go for a drink? Where are you in town?”

  “On Don Diego, closer to Cerrillos than Cordova.”

  “Fuck me dead, we’re neighbors. I’m on the crappy end, right near Cerrillos.” A few houses towards Cordova, the neighborhood became nicer, more middle class, though not palatial except for a few homes. Some were small and humble, though Jamie couldn’t picture a doctor nearing retirement having a small, humble place. Maybe he owned the one with the fancy gate and the high wall. “The ugly duplex with the gray stucco.”

  “I’m on the same side. Bungalow with the Tibetan prayer flags on the porch.”

  Jamie had biked past it often. The flags were recent additions and so were the crowds of disorderly potted plants and the hammock. “Looks like a hippie house, doc.”

  “Delayed midlife crisis.”

  “Come over for a coldie here, then? Skip the bar. I’ve got a good stock of local brews.”

  Don said he’d be over shortly. Jamie hastily cleaned the living room of fur and feathers and set out bowls of green chile pistachios and red chile blue corn chips, and some bean-and-corn salsa he’d made the day before.

  When Jamie let Don in, the doctor took his shoes off without being asked, leaving them with Jamie’s collection of sandals near the door, and padded across the room to look at the parrots, who perched together in a kind of snuggle. Placido said hello, and Dr. Don returned the greeting. “Have you practiced healing and medical intuition on them?”

  “A little. Mae had to do the medical thing. I don’t pick up anything useful. She said they’re fine. I practiced chakra work with ’em.” Jamie urged Placido to step up on his wrist, petted him, then touched him at the tail-spine juncture, the abdomen, the heart, the throat, and the crown of his head. “Five chakras. Closer to human than a cat. Cats have three. So I can do energy work with ’em, but the main reason I took the workshop was to get the medical intuition skills. Check up on my pets. And I can’t. You like a
dark beer or an IPA?”

  Don gazed intently at Bouquet and she stared back. “IPA. Thanks.”

  With Placido riding on his shoulder, Jamie brought the drinks in and sat on the cushioned bench that served as a couch, while Don took one of the basket chairs. Gasser thudded laboriously downstairs, meowing, his belly dragging on the steps.

  “Now that one needs healing,” Don said.

  “I try. Keep working on him and he purrs and kind of glows, but he goes right back out of balance. Dunno why he doesn’t get better. I volunteer at the shelter and I help the cats there a lot. The ones that let me, anyway, y’know, cats being cats.”

  Don sipped his beer and ate a single nut, then said, “You and Mae don’t work on each other. So why do you think you could heal your pet?”

  “It’s not the same. Mae’s ... maternal, especially with her kids visiting now, she’s super-mum. Takes care of me more than I want her to. Don’t think she means to rub it in, but she’s healthy and I’m fucked up. It wouldn’t exactly improve our relationship, y’know? To have her heal me. Get even more into the roles, Mae-the-mum and Jamie-the-sick-person.”

  Don frowned and nodded, watching Gasser slink into the kitchen. “I wasn’t thinking of that. After all, you could heal her and you wouldn’t be going into those roles. I was thinking about the needs we bring to our relationships. Such as not wanting our loved ones to change.”

  “Jeezus, she’d love it if I changed. Not in a big way, but, like, if I slept better.” The silence made Jamie fidget. He drank, ate, and petted Placido. “Was that too much information?”

  “No. Just thinking. My wife used to say she supported my exploring alternative medicine, but when I changed, not just my medical philosophy, she didn’t like it. We were very conventional when we got married thirty-five years ago. Country-club types. She didn’t change, I did. Now I’m divorced and live in my hippie house.”