CHAPTER 1 - HE'S PRETTY BEATEN UP. WHO IS HE?
Manhattan, June, 2016
Reese could hear first, before he could see anything, but it wasn't clear what it was-a high-pitched whine, loud and piercing, in his ears. He tried to think back to when that had happened before. Slowly, too slowly, it came to him as he tried to raise his head to see where he was. Something had gone off, had exploded nearby, and his ears were stunned from it, whining from the blast pressure. And it must be debris dropping down on him from overhead. The heavy cloud of choking dust made him cough. Reese tried to stifle the coughs-each one made his head hurt even more, each one like another explosion going off inside his head.
Reese was down on his side, covered in ceiling tiles, tangles of wiring, sheetrock and metal panels from the restaurant facade where he was standing when the blast went off. He had a sense that it had gone off behind him, inside the restaurant, and that the whole front had blown out, separating at the panels, pushing him, tumbling him, like a snowdrift in front of a plow blade.
He could already feel something wet and warm mixing with the dust on his head. He knew he was hurt. When he tried to move a little bit-it took his breath away-searing pain in his left shoulder. And now that he had tried to move it, it was stuck there in the wrong place, spasming in wave after wave of sharp, ripping pain. He tried to reach it with his other hand to put it back or at least stabilize the shoulder, but there was so much tangled debris over him that he couldn't reach.
And now his back was lighting up in pain, sharp stabs cross-ways over the lower ribs with each breath. All he could do was to lie there as quietly as he could, so nothing else moved the wrong way. In the blackness, he could hear himself moaning with each hard spasm. The sound kept him conscious, let him focus on something. He could work with the pain.
His earpiece had been thrown somewhere. Reese couldn't hear Harold's voice calling to him from across town. "John? What was that sound?" Harold asked, alarmed by the noise the earpiece had transmitted before everything stopped. There was only silence now.
Harold kept trying to call out to him-no answer. He tapped some commands at his computer to see if he could raise a signal from Reese that way, but nothing. Harold called Shaw next, and he could hear a racing car engine in the background, with screeching tire noises. She was in pursuit, but Harold didn't want to know more. Reese was the priority.
"Miss Shaw?"
"Bad time, Finch. I'll have to get back to you."
Then there was an incoming call from Detective Fusco. He had just heard the report from COM about an explosion downtown at a mall, inside a restaurant. Fusco remembered that Reese used that location for meetings with a particular informant. He thought he had overheard Reese saying he was going there today. Details from the scene were sketchy. There was nothing in yet about casualties.
"Hey, Finch, isn't that where Tall-Dark-and-Dangerous was going to meet his CI?" Fusco winced as soon as he said it – it had just popped out before he could stop himself. Maybe it was not the right time for cop-humor with Glasses. There was a long, chilly silence before Harold answered.
"All I know, Detective, is that Mr. Reese went to meet with his informant, and there was a loud noise that could have been an explosion. I can't reach him. I need you to go there now and see if you can locate him. Miss Shaw will meet you there and I'll be right along, as well. Keep me informed, Detective."
Harold stood up and limped to the coat rack for his case and the leash for Bear. As soon as Bear heard the sound of the leash, he was up, ears forward, waiting for Harold's command. Harold snapped the metal clip onto his collar and gave the command, in Dutch, to "heel" on his right side,"Rechts", away from the leg that swung awkwardly out to the left when he walked. Bear kept pace on his right and they made their way as quickly as Harold could limp to the car.
Outside the wrecked restaurant it was eerily quiet at the moment. There was bright sunshine, and a soft breeze blowing through the trees growing in the cutouts on the sidewalk. But down below, on street level, there was the start of a well-rehearsed response.
Sirens were wailing off in the distance. People on the streets were running, most away, but some toward the scene. Smoke was coming through the holes in the restaurant where the windows had been. There were people down on the sidewalk, thrown off their feet, bloodied, too stunned to cry out yet, aware that more devastation could be on its way.
Inside, the restaurant was ruined, black with soot and dust, tangled in a junk pile of shattered tables and chairs, exposed metal, sheet rock, picture frames, and wiring. The lights were gone. Deep inside, at the mall end of the restaurant, the worst of the damage was visible. The force of the blast had splintered the tables, blown the front wall open, and ripped the decorative tin ceiling to shreds up as high as the roof. A huge saltwater fish tank had ruptured and sat blackened and emptied of life. A highchair, nearly intact, lay on its side; and next to it, what was left of a stuffed animal, singed, shredded, and now unrecognizable.
Looking through the blast hole into the mall hallway, the devastation continued. A swath of glass and brick shards, twisted metal, and other shrapnel from inside the restaurant had funneled out in a cone-shape through the opening, peppering everything nearby. A pipe in the ceiling overhead had punctured and was raining water down onto the hallway floor.
Across the way, in front of the restaurant, the pile was deepest. Long metal panels from the facade poked up here and there. They had borne the brunt of the blast shrapnel and were studded with bits of rough, sharp, deadly fragments on their undersides.
Further along, there was a pile that had been plowed forward from the front of the restaurant by the metal panels sweeping everything ahead of them, nearly to the far wall. More debris from the opened ceiling kept sifting down, covering the pile in a uniform gray-white layer of dust. Reese's head was rapidly disappearing under the layer, camouflaged by the dust to look like the rest of the pile. He didn't move. He didn't hear the sirens or the voices of rescuers breaking through emergency exit doors on the street side of the restaurant. His eyes were slowly moving behind closed eyelids. They were watching a scene in a memory from long ago that was just now coming into his mind.
Colorado, August, 1990
The sun was hot today, and young Reese was bobbing up and down in the river, cooling off after hiking in from the road. There were plenty of other spots along the river that were easier to reach, and some parts ran right next to the road itself, but this spot was his favorite.
The water was always moving at just the right speed. It kept the water fresh and deep, swinging down from the rocky part above, to make this wider, deeper pool, before splitting further down around a giant boulder sticking up out of the earth, then reforming again into a single stream beyond the rock.
This part of the river was too much trouble for people to bother with dragging their canoes or rafts out at the rocky shallows above the pool, to portage around it, down below the giant rock, where they could put in again and carry on. So there was never anyone here when he came. He had it all to himself. What else could a 12-year-old boy need on a hot summer day?
He pulled himself up out of the river and onto a flat heavy rock that lay half-out at the edge of the deeper part, where he liked to sit with his feet in the water. After a little while, if he sat really still, minnows would often find his toes, their gray-green bodies swimming against the gentle current, moving closer and closer, until he could feel the tickle of their soft mouth-parts touching against his skin.
Manhattan, June,2016
Shaw checked in with Harold while he was driving across town, and he gave her the news. She had given up her pursuit, sensing something was wrong, but she was further away than the two of them, and would get there as soon as she could. She pushed down hard on the accelerator.
Fusco drove onto the end of a line of patrol cars parked in a stack where a command center was forming. He walked through the tangle of emergency vehicles and equipment that had rolled up on the street side of the restaurant, and only then could he see the damage. All the windows on the street side were blown out, and the emergency doors were wide open, looking into the blackness. Stretchers were rolling and the EMS workers were crunching over broken glass and debris everywhere on the sidewalk. There were quite a few people sitting or lying on the curb in front of the restaurant, with makeshift bandages and tissues wadded up, pressed against the wounds by passersby, until trained respondors could get there.
Fusco went closer to the doors of the restaurant and peered inside. What he saw made his blood run cold. If Reese was in there when the explosion happened, it would be a miracle if he had gotten out alive. Tables were splintered and thrown like sticks around what was left of the dining area. Ceiling tiles were blown down, and insulation and wiring were hanging out of the ceiling. Brick dividing walls were thrown over onto their sides. Gray dust filled the air, and there were no lights on, for as far as he could see. There were some white sheets draped over something bloody, deep inside where the worst of the damage appeared to be. Fusco called Harold, who was a few blocks away now, and Harold told him that he had brought Bear with him to help look for John.
"Do you have any idea where he was when the explosion went off?" Fusco asked.
"No, Detective. He only said he was at the restaurant and waiting for his informant to arrive. I tried to look for his cellphone signal before I left, but there was no signal. We will have to find him on our own. There is a roadblock ahead, and I think I am going to have to pull over. They aren't letting anyone pass. I am sending my position to you and Miss Shaw."
"I'm right behind you, Harold." Harold looked in the rear view mirror and Shaw's car was there. They pulled into a deserted public school parking lot and Shaw got out of her car. Bear stood up in the back seat, wagging his tail, and pacing back and forth as he caught sight of her approaching. She opened the back door and sat down next to him, rubbing his head, then scratching behind his ears, until he tipped over onto her lap to get his belly rubbed.
Fusco was half a block away, walking toward them, and they got out to meet him. He stopped to talk with the officers at the roadblock, and they all looked over at Harold and Shaw as Fusco was pointing their way. He waved them over, and Shaw started to leave with Bear. Harold didn't follow. Shaw turned around, with a questioning look.
"I'll just slow you down, Miss Shaw. Take Bear, and go with Detective Fusco. Find John. This should help. It's the shirt John was wearing when you were taking care of him the last time. Bear needs his scent. And I need to understand why the Machine didn't warn us that this was about to happen." Shaw nodded and turned away, walking quickly toward Fusco as Harold got back into his car to return to the office.
"How bad is it?" she asked when she got to his side.
"Bad. If he was in there when it went off–" he trailed off, shaking his head.
"The man is indestructible, Lionel. We'll find him. Let's go." They went back to the Mall, but swung around to another side to see if they could get in at a better spot. They were walking past a line of ambulances staged at the back, and the last one in the line had its back door ajar. Shaw gave Bear's leash to Fusco for a moment, while she looked inside and climbed into the back of the empty ambulance. She knew her way around them from her days as a medical resident, and started picking through the supply cabinets, pulling out what she wanted to bring in with her, and dumping the pile into a pillowcase she stripped off the pillow on the stretcher. She slung the bag over her shoulder and jumped down off the back of the ambulance deck.
"Jeez, Shaw, why don't you just help yourself?" Fusco said.
"I would do the same for you, too, Lionel – I think." They walked through an open emergency exit door at the back of a discount clothing store. Not a soul was in view, and they made their way along the aisles to the front. Shaw pointed to some vending machines with bottles of water in them.
"Grab a couple of water bottles, Lionel. We may need them in there. You can pay for them if it'll make you feel any better." Fusco frowned and went over to the machines, feeding in dollar bills until he could get two bottles of water to drop. Shaw put them into the pillowcase bag with the rest, and they kept walking, making a left into a long hallway inside the Mall that led back to the area where the restaurant was located. No one was on this side of the restaurant approach yet.
The closer they got, the more damage they started to see. Shaw stepped onto some glass from some of the windows that had blown out and she realized that Bear would be cut if he walked over the broken glass and other sharp debris.
"Wait a minute, Lionel." Shaw stopped and pulled out a thick roll of stretchy ace-wrap, EMT shears, and some silk surgical tape from the pillowcase. She knelt down next to Bear, wrapping layers of the bandage around each foot, like thick socks, cutting and taping the ends. Bear didn't know what to make of it at first, but Shaw distracted him with the shirt that Harold had given her to use as scent. She let him sniff it, and gave him the command "Zoek". Bear went forward, tracking.
They were getting closer and there was more and more glass, mixed in with parts of ceiling tiles, bricks, wiring, drywall, and metal of every description. The emergency lights were off ahead, and it would be pitch black very soon. They could hear voices, loud, but far off, and the sounds of saws and generators running.
Bear was tracking, but it was getting harder and harder for him to find a path through the destruction. And the uneven, unstable footing made it hard for Shaw and Fusco to stay on their feet as well. Pieces of metal sticking up from the piles caught their clothing and every once in a while Bear would whimper from something sticking him. But he wasn't giving up, and went on.
Then they came to the area that must have been the restaurant. There was a huge hole opened up in the front wall, and they could see flashlights swinging in the darkness inside. Some bright lights on poles above heavy diesel generators were being positioned inside the building for the recovery and investigation.
Bear started barking and they heard the command "Heir" in a weak voice. Reese was calling "here" to Bear, who was trying to climb through tangled wiring and large metal panels to get to him. Shaw called him back to her, so they could pick the best way to start moving toward Reese without making the pile crush down on top of him.
"John, can you hear us?" There was a weak reply, but they could definitely hear him under the pile. Now they knew where they had to dig to get to him. Just as Shaw started picking her way up through the pile, a flashlight beam swung in from behind them and a Rescue fireman poked his head through the blast hole in the front of the restaurant. Shaw turned back to him.
"We have a male victim trapped under debris, responding to voice commands. I need you to get your equipment in here now!" Shaw barked out, and he stood up a little straighter, nodded, and put a call out to his team on the street side of the restaurant. He gave a list of the equipment he needed and soon a line of firemen carrying rescue equipment and lights were climbing through the blast opening.
Shaw had been working her way through the rubble pile back to where she thought Reese would be. She swung her light back and forth through the pile, but she didn't see him. She called his name again, softly. Then she nearly jumped out of her skin, when his voice was right next to her. There was so much dust over everything that it all looked the same. It was only when he spoke that she could see his features. She told him to stay still and keep his eyes and mouth closed, while she wiped the thick layer of fine powder off him.
She reached into the pillowcase bag and brought out some small clean towels, and started wiping the layer off Reese's head. She tried to keep any more of it from going into his eyes or nose. As she wiped, Shaw could see heavy clots of dried blood caked with the dust on his scalp and face. Once his skin was clear of the loose, choking dust, she told him she was going to douse the remaining powder with one of the bottles of water from the bag.
She twisted it open and warned Reese before squeezing the water sideways across his eyelids, in a forceful stream. More powder and dirty water washed off his eyelids, down into the pile, and Shaw used the last of the water to wipe the rest of it clear from his eyes and face. Two rescue workers were setting up lights nearby and they were now able to see how Reese was encased in the pile. Shaw told Reese he could open his eyes now, and he looked at her, confused.
"How did you find me?"
"Bear did – now shut up and listen to me. Can you move your fingers and toes, John?"
"I think so, Shaw. It's hard to tell – there's not a lot of space."
"We're going to cut you out of here, John. So just do what they say, okay?" He was not responding. Shaw reached in near his face, and could feel his breath on her hand. And she could just get a fingertip onto his carotid under the jaw. The pulse was strong enough there. She had no idea what they were going to find under the pile, though, once they moved it off him.
Bear was next to her all of a sudden, and he was whimpering and trying to paw Reese free, but Shaw stopped him, so he didn't shred his paws on the sharp edges. His booties had come off his feet in the debris pile. He shifted from foot to foot, anxious, trying to get to him, then crouched down and stretched out to Reese, licking his face. Reese stirred for a moment and praised him, saying "good" to him in Dutch: "Braaf."
The rescue workers were ready to start pulling the pile off, and they asked Shaw to step back to give them access. Slowly, they started raising the metal panels, and cutting the wires and insulation free. Layer by layer, they worked the tangled pieces away from him.
Shaw called Harold with the news that they had found Reese, and she could hear the strain in his voice from his fear of the worst. When she told him that they were working to free him from a pile of debris, and that he was responding to her voice, she could hear the relief. She told him they would get Reese to a hospital to check for any internal injuries, broken bones, or head trauma. Once she had an update she would call him back.
Fusco had gone to help the Fire and Rescue workers look for other victims, but he had come back quickly. The number of casualties was actually quite small. Apparently, a desperate, agitated man was trying to take his own life, but had sent all the restaurant workers and patrons out before he blew himself up with gas from the line of stoves in the restaurant. Most of the injuries were from flying glass outside on the street when the windows shattered. A few others were injured when they were trying to run away in the mall after the explosion. The piles of debris where Reese was lying might hold other victims as well, unlucky like Reese, passing by when the blast had gone off. More rescues could be needed after his.
The workers were down to the last layer and they were cutting through an enormous nest of wiring that had acted like a cushion from the crush of materials on top of Reese. The nest had compressed under the load and was taking much of the weight in its coils.
The firemen pulled back the wiring and Reese was free. There were no obvious wounds on the side that they could see, but he was wearing a dark suit that was saturated with something that could be blood. His extremities seemed intact. The workers teamed up and one applied traction on Reese's neck while the other swung a brace around it and closed the stiff, hard plastic with hook-and-loop tape.
More men were coming up the pile with a bright orange backboard. Another was doing a trauma survey on Reese, feeling for anything unstable or potentially fractured along his spine, clavicles, ribs, pelvis and the long bones in his extremities. They felt underneath him as best they could. Someone else was getting vital signs. He was trying to talk with Reese, to check his mental status for his report, but Reese was not answering again.
Colorado, August, 1990
Reese had gone swimming for most of the afternoon in the deep pool there in the river and then had climbed out to rest in the filtered sunlight on the flat rock for lazy hours, until the sun had gone behind the trees. It was getting cooler now, down at the water's edge, beneath the heavy canopy of trees.
There was a sound of small rocks and soil sliding down a hill, and he looked up to see a white-tailed doe with two spotted fawns following behind. She slowly advanced down the soft bank, ears flicking, nose twitching as she looked for any signs of danger. Reese was sitting up, and didn't move. He wanted to see what they would do. The doe made her way to the water's edge and Reese could see little waves spreading out on the still surface, as her tongue lapped the water. The fawns made their way up on either side of her, and the three silently sipped from the stream. The doe kept raising her head to look about.
She looked over at the flat rock and saw Reese sitting there. Her tail swiveled, flashing white fur, but her face was tranquil. She kept her eyes on him, and he was transfixed. She was so delicate, so different than the powerful bucks they brought back from hunting late in the year. Her eyes were dark and large and she seemed unafraid. Then he saw her lower her head slightly toward him, as though acknowledging his presence. He lowered his head very slowly back to her. She regarded him a little longer with her large, exquisite eyes, and he felt like she was trying to tell him something but he didn't know how to understand her. Then she backed away from the water, and slowly ascended the bank to the edge of the trees. He hoped she would turn back to look at him again before she disappeared, but she walked into the shadows and he couldn't see her any longer.
Manhattan, June, 2016
The stretcher was rolling down the hallway and Reese was aware of the overhead lights as he passed below each bank. His eyes were closed but he could see the bright and dark pattern as the stretcher moved down the long hallway. He could hear one of the EMTs say "trauma one" to the other as they swung the stretcher around a corner.
Inside the trauma bay, the EMTs and two aides unbuckled the belts holding Reese on the stretcher. They pulled off the white hospital sheet under the belts, revealing his long frame belted onto the hard orange backboard. Four of them lifted the board, on the count of three, from the stretcher to an ER gurney. Once there, the EMTs backed away, leaving the ER staff to their work.
A nurse walked over to ask them what they had just transported, and the three men stood together for a few minutes as the EMTs signed out the case, reviewing vitals, and pertinent history. Then the nurse pulled the curtain around Reese's gurney. He and one of the aides got busy cutting along the seams of Reese's suit with sharp, angled shears until they could lift it off him. They made short work of his shirt, and the rest, covering him with a hospital gown.
The nurse wrapped a blood pressure cuff around one arm and clipped on an oxygen sensor to display on the monitor overhead. He took a full set of vitals, and charted them on a rolling computer monitor. One of the techs was pulling tubes of blood and labeling them with "John Doe" labels for now. An ER attending peeked around the curtain and asked if they were ready for her. The nurse gave her the history from the EMTs, and the attending got to work examining Reese.
Outside, Shaw and Fusco were asking where Reese had been taken. Fusco showed his badge to the clerk at the desk when she started to balk at giving them any information, and then she told them Reese was in the trauma bay. Shaw started to walk toward the room, but the clerk said "you can't go in there, Miss."
Fusco put his hand on Shaw's arm and held her back. "Let me buy you some coffee. They're going to need some time to see what's up, right?" Shaw was looking at his hand on her arm, and for a minute, Fusco thought she might just reach out and try to break it. But, then her face softened, and she looked him in the eye. "Fine," she said, with her jaw set. They walked back past the desk and into a nearby hallway that led back to the lobby.
"This coffee isn't half'-bad," Shaw said. She had suddenly realized when they got to the cafeteria that she was starving, and she loaded up a tray with food. Fusco was watching her eat, and shaking his head.
"No wonder you looked like you were going to break my hand back there – you probably had low blood sugar." Shaw smiled a squinty smile at him, and continued eating.
"So, how is Glasses doing?" Fusco asked.
"Happy that Reese is alive. But he wants to know why the Machine didn't tell us this was going to happen." Shaw was spooning rice pudding from a plastic cup, scraping the sides and bottom to get every last morsel. She washed it down with more coffee, then unwrapped another hot roast beef sandwich. She offered some to Fusco, who said "I thought you'd never ask."
He took one of the plastic covers from food Shaw had already eaten, and scooped half the sandwich, dripping brown gravy, onto the up-turned cover. His mood started to improve considerably, too.
In a darkened room down the hall from the trauma bay, Reese was lying on a narrow table that carried him smoothly through the center of a large, donut-shaped machine. It sounded like hundreds of marbles were circling around him inside the walls of the donut, as it scanned him from head to pelvis. Behind the glass window, a technician and two doctors were sitting, watching the CT images form on the screen. A few minutes later, they had some answers. The radiologist reviewed his findings with the ER doctor, who had come over personally to review them with him.
"I have to go through the images more carefully, but the preliminary read is that there is no head bleed, the neck is just the usual degenerative stuff we all have, chest is okay. He has a small subcapsular hematoma on the spleen, and maybe a hint of a contusion to the kidney on that side as well. Nothing else in the abdomen or pelvis that I see right now. Oh, and by the way, the plain films we shot before showed a dislocation of the left shoulder, but it reduced itself when we were positioning for the xrays. We took some extra views, just to be sure, and it's back in normal position. There is no fracture associated with the dislocation. This guy has a lot of old, healed injuries; he's pretty beaten up. Who is he?"
A few days later:
It was dawn and gray light was just coming into his bedroom in his apartment. Reese was sitting up on the side of his bed, silhouetted with the soft morning light. He couldn't sleep. As he sat there, his eyes closed and his breathing gradually deepened like he was falling asleep, but as soon as he had tried to lay down, he popped awake each time. He couldn't find a comfortable position. His mind was racing. He still had a headache, days after the explosion. Reese couldn't remember a lot of it; just seeing Shaw's face, and he remembered Bear being there, but the rest was gone.
There was a sling on his left shoulder, with a wide matching swathe that circled around his chest and held his left arm close to his body. He had to keep it on when he slept, so his shoulder didn't dislocate again during his restless sleep. The nausea was back again, but he thought he would try to eat something more than soup today.
Reese gave up trying to sleep any longer for now and tipped forward off the edge of the bed, wincing as his sore muscles complained. He walked slowly, stiffly to the bathroom and the soft light flicked on as a sensor caught the movement. He walked closer to the mirror, and looked at his face. There was a purple bruise surrounding his left eye, slowly spreading further down his cheek each day, and the white part of the eye had turned dark red. The swelling was mostly gone now on the side of his head, but there were silver staples in his scalp and some dried blood still there in his hair. Under his shirt, and down on his legs, the skin was healing from dozens of puncture wounds all over him from glass and brick shrapnel that had missed embedding in the metal panels of the restaurant facade. He was glad he was unconscious when the doctor was digging it all out of him.
He pulled at the swathe, and the hook-and-loop tape separated with a long ripping sound. He lifted the padded strap of the sling up over his head with his right arm, and saw another dark purple bruise on the back of his uplifted arm in the mirror. He slid the sling downward and forward, off his left arm, and dropped the whole thing down onto the counter.
Then he used his right hand to pick up the tail of his tee-shirt, and slid it up over his head and down the left arm, so he didn't have to raise that side over his head. Every time he did that, it felt like his shoulder was going to dislocate again. He could see all the shrapnel wounds with the tee-shirt off, and more purple bruises, especially on his back over the lower ribs. At least the blood had stopped coloring his urine red from the bruise on his kidney.
In the soft, subdued light he surveyed himself once more in the mirror before he went to get showered: slowly, from his head down to his chest, his back and arms, his abdomen, and the legs below his shorts. Each scar and wound told a story. His body was a novel, a painful memoir of past adventures, successes and failures. But here he was, still alive.
CHAPTER 2 - SOUTH SUDAN COULD DO THAT TO PEOPLE
South of Pibor, South Sudan, September, 2016
Just outside the tent flaps, two men stood together in the heat, while an aide went off to find Jules. She was further down the dusty path, in a nearby tent, kneeling next to the cot where a tiny swaddled baby and her care-giver were seated. Jules had just examined the baby and was reading through the paper chart, checking for weight gain, number of feeds, wet diapers and more.
The woman holding the sleeping baby was one of the local women hired to come into camp each day, helping them care for the infants. Jules had seen her here for weeks, noticed that she often took on the sickest ones and sometimes, too, a young mother who arrived without family, struggling, separated from everything familiar. The woman's name was Ayen.
She was a dark-skinned, mature woman with high cheekbones, and large, almond-shaped eyes–haunting eyes, Jules thought–that had been witness to so much heartache in her land. Perhaps many would have bent under the weight, but instead, Jules could see a quiet grace in this woman's bearing; no wonder the younger women were drawn to her, like a mother.
Her face was striking–covered in raised swirls of parallel lines cut in an intricate design, the lines made from scarring her skin with a blade as a child, in the tradition of her Dinka tribe. To be scarified in this way, Jules knew she must be of high rank in her tribe.
Jules nodded and told her the baby was doing well in her care, gaining weight each day. She asked if there were any problems, but the woman shook her head no, saying "good baby" in the local dialect. Jules squeezed her arm, thanking her for all of the work caring for this little one. Ayen's lined face erupted in a dazzling, toothy smile, and she hugged the baby close, singing softly to her.
"Chou-chou," a young voice called. Jules stood as the aide entered the tent from behind her. In French, the young woman explained that a reporter from the New York Times was in the main office, and Jules was needed to escort him around camp. Masud, their main surgeon, was going to take him, but had been called away to urgent surgery just now.
Jules nodded and the two women said goodbye to Ayen, then walked quickly back down the path to the office. As Jules approached, Masud's bearded face lit up with his smile. Everything about him was over-the-top, and it always delighted her: big laugh, big voice, big wide, deep chest, with mounds of graying chest hair popping out of the v-neck of his scrubs. As she approached he threw his arms out wide and greeted her with his deep, resonant voice.
"Ça va, Chou-chou," he said, kissing her on each cheek. He quickly repeated the same story, in French, then turned to introduce her to the reporter.
"Doctor Julia Pope, Mr. Nick Harris," he tried in English, with a heavy Egyptian accent, as he backed away, blowing a kiss to Jules, rushing off to the surgery.
"Doctor Pope, nice to meet you," Nick said, a grateful smile on his face. "I'm afraid my French is pretty rusty. Thanks for coming to show me around." Jules nodded. She stopped to look at him more closely. There was something about him that was drawing her attention. He had kind eyes, she thought; kind, but tired, or maybe weary, as though from seeing too much that was hard to see, and for too long. There was a sense of suffering around him–South Sudan could do that to people.
"My pleasure," Jules replied, and the two turned back down the dirt path together. He went on to explain that he was working on a story about the aftermath of South Sudan's independence. He already knew that their main medical site in Pibor had to be abandoned back in February due to heavy fighting nearby, and that their staff had fallen back to a U.N. site for protection.
Nick shared that he had stopped in Pibor on his way here, and he shook his head as he looked over to Jules, his eyes narrowed and serious. The clinic had been looted and wrecked. Their small hospital building and hundreds of tents had been torched. Everything else usable had been stripped out of the camp. Now it was just a few empty metal bed frames weathering in the open air, and the hill nearby stretching far off into the distance, that was a deserted graveyard. Jules nodded. She had seen it for herself a few weeks before, and seeing it like that had felt like a kick in the gut to all of the staff.
They had withdrawn with little time to pack out their supplies when the fighting had come too close to their position. So much had been left behind and lost to the fighters who overran the site. Medications, surgical supplies, equipment, safe extra water for making formula for the babies, all had been left behind and lost in the looting. Medical sites were supposed to be exempt from this kind of attack, by the rules of war, but all they could do afterward was to condemn the action in the media.
They had moved their facilities to a U.N. medical site on the other side of Pibor initially, but the vast number of refugees from the conflict had gone south, trying to escape the violence. When they finally stopped running, the medical groups had started going in, first with their mobile units.
Now, Jules' ground unit was here, struggling to establish a more permanent medical facility to serve the seven thousand families already here. Every day, more came in. They were sick, weak and malnourished, injured in the fighting, traumatized from fleeing it all over again. And soon the rainy season would be here, adding to their misery. The locals built homes shaped like gourds, the wide bases perched high off the ground on stilts, to protect them from the rain and mud. Here there were only tents on the bare earth.
With on-going fighting north of their position, the clinic had been having trouble getting re-supplied. The road to the camp was risky for truck convoys. They were trying to arrange an airdrop, by helicopter coming out of Juba, either later today or tomorrow. Otherwise, there was little to offer patients beyond the meager supplies they had been able to transport with them for the new camp. The busy graveyard here was testament to that.
The two stepped into the baby re-feeding tent, where Jules had been earlier. She explained to Nick that the severely malnourished babies could not tolerate restarting normal feeding, even breast milk, when they first arrived. There were ten steps that they followed here to help the baby recover from the profound metabolic changes and infection, before they could begin normal feeding. The babies in this tent had graduated through the ten steps, and some had been re-united with their mothers.
Jules watched the reporter kneel down next to a cot with a mother and baby resting there. He smiled and nodded to the woman, reaching out to touch the tiny hand at the edge of the blanket, softly stroking it with the pad of his pinky. The baby stirred and suckled briefly. Nick smiled and raised up again. Jules could see pain in his eyes that could not be covered by his smile. She had the urge to reach out and comfort him in some way, but restrained herself. He wouldn't know that she was aware of his suffering.
They walked further down the dirt path to another smaller tent. Inside was one person, a man, lying on his side, his right leg elevated on a pillow made from a folded-over tattered towel. On the inner leg, above the point of his bony ankle, was an ulcer crater about as wide as a thumbnail. There was a small piece of wood, a matchstick, lying across the ulcer with what looked like a thin white string coming out of the center and winding around the stick. Jules placed her hand on the man's shoulder, asking him if he was in any pain now. The man shook his head, no. Nick looked at Jules, grimacing.
"What is that?"
"He was infested with guinea worm larva, by drinking contaminated water about a year ago. The larva go through stages inside him over the year. This is a mature female worm that has made its way down his leg under the skin, and has broken out through the ulcer. He's winding the worm around the matchstick, slowly extracting it from his body." Nick closed his eyes and shuddered for a moment.
"My God, doesn't he feel that?"
"Yes, very much. The worm causes severe burning pain in the legs as it travels down inside. He can't stand, can't work, can't make food to feed himself. It can take up to two weeks to extract the worm, but the pain can last for months."
"Isn't there an antibiotic or something else to treat him?" Nick asked, averting his eyes from the ulcer.
"Unfortunately, there is no medication, no cure, and no vaccine to prevent it. The disease is almost eradicated in the rest of the world. If it weren't for the civil war here, it would be gone everywhere. This is the main treatment they have, " Jules said, motioning to the matchstick on the wound. Just then a woman and two children entered the tent with food for the man on the cot. The woman nodded in acknowledgment to Jules, and avoided eye contact with Nick.
They turned back to the opening in the tent, which flapped open and a young boy peered in shyly at them.
"Jou-jou, lé téléphone." She smiled and winked playfully at the small boy, and he disappeared back down the path before they could get to the tent flaps.
"I have a call back at the office. Let's go back there and then we can decide what else you want to see." They walked briskly back to the office and Jules lifted the phone, expecting one of the staff back in France who was helping to coordinate the airdrop.
"Allô," she said. Then her expression turned to smiles.
"Harold! What a surprise! How are you, chéri?" She listened while her long-time friend, Harold Finch, apologized for intruding into her day and went on to ask if she could get in touch with him regarding an important personal matter when she returned to the States. His voice sounded worried to her.
"Harold, are you alright?" She listened for a few minutes, and then looked relieved. After a little longer, she nodded.
"Yes, yes, I understand. There is someone you want me to see, a colleague of yours who is having some trouble. Well, we're leaving here at the end of the month. Do you think that is soon enough?" She listened while Harold explained a little more. "Uh-huh, I was going to fly into Calais and stop at the apartment, but I can just as easily fly through to New York directly from Paris. Why don't I call you when I get in. You can tell me what this is all about then, OK?" She listened and nodded again, then blew a kiss into the phone and told him she would see him soon.
Nick was standing some distance away, waiting for her but not wanting to eavesdrop on her private call. He caught her movement out of the corner of his eye as she walked back toward him.
"Would you like to stop for a few minutes and have something to drink?" Jules offered. He smiled and nodded. She led him to a nearby tent that served as their Mess. A few of the staff nurses were just finishing their break, sharing coffee and some of the popular local spongy bread.
On their way out, they stopped to say hello and Jules introduced them to Nick. His eyes opened wide as the two women both started speaking excitedly to him in French. He looked helplessly to Jules, who smiled and broke in, telling them he didn't speak French, that he was there doing a story for the New York Times and so on. They giggled and told him they were sorry they had been rude, but he insisted that he had enjoyed hearing their beautiful language. They giggled again and walked off together, waving goodbye.
"Ça va, Chou-chou," one called out, as they left the tent.
"What does that mean – chou-chou?" Nick asked as they went up to the small counter to serve themselves a drink.
"Ah, well, when I first started working with this group, there was a little boy who heard them call me Jules, but shortened it to jou-jou, French for a child's plaything, or stuffed toy. When my colleagues heard that, they started calling me chou-chou. It is a term of endearment in French."
"Does it have a meaning?" he asked. Jules smiled and nodded yes.
"It doesn't translate so well into English, but it means "my little cabbages"." The two laughed and made their way back to a table with their coffees and sponge bread.
CHAPTER 3 - WITH YOUR PERMISSION
Upstate New York, October, 2016
The two of them were seated together in her kitchen, her favorite–and least threatening–place in the house, yet she could see how Reese held himself at the ready, scanning the room, checking for exits, searching for any threats, she imagined. All the while, though, he believed he had made himself appear at ease, blank and unreadable to the casual observer.
Jules was not the casual observer. She was a physician, with long years of honing her skills. Day after day, her practiced eye fell naturally on the subtlest details of a patient's appearance. Reese couldn't guess that it was an automatic reflex, then, for her to do the same with him, sitting across the table at an ideal vantage point. Afternoon sun through the kitchen window illuminated his features for her.
She noticed how the small muscles along his jawline were taut. Up at the opening of his collar, his neck and chest skin stretched too tightly over his frame; the pulse at the base of his throat rocked too rapidly, too forcefully, beneath the skin–all signs broadcasting to her a heightened inner tension and alerted state.
He was too thin, his skin was pale and there were dark circles under his eyes. Reese had not been sleeping well, she thought. And perhaps the rest were from pushing himself, missing meals, ignoring his body's signals to stop, eat, sleep. Jules was aware of his restless eyes studying her features for any clue of what was to come, more evidence of his discomfort. Reese broke the silence first.
"Why am I here, Doc?" His voice was so very soft, nearly a whisper. It had the odd effect of making him seem controlled, not calm. One could feel paradoxically threatened by it, wary from this too-soft voice. It made one strain a bit too much to hear it.
She made him wait before answering. She saw that he made his eyes seem friendly but his mouth and face had hardly moved as he spoke–and there was no real expression in the eyes, no easy movement in the body, just the peculiarly soft voice from the blank-eyed face.
On his part, Reese could see how unhurried she was. He knew of course that she was a doctor, Julia Pope, "Jules" to her colleagues, and probably used to being taken seriously. She carried herself with an unmistakable air of authority. Something about her told Reese not to underestimate her.
Jules sensed that they were about to play a little mental game of hide-and-seek. He would expect her to press him, to seek information and more. And he would divert her away from it, protecting the soft underbelly he hid so well from scrutiny. She decided to be direct with him.
"I know a little bit about you, Mr. Reese. I know you don't want to be exposed, opened up, inspected –" like some carcass on the side of the road, she thought. She could feel the strain of it; perhaps he was picturing someone poking, lifting up the layers and looking deeper where the real damage would be. Reese didn't show anything–nothing to confirm it.
"You should know I'm not here to interrogate you. You are free to be here or not. Nothing is preventing you from leaving any time you want to." Still nothing. She sat forward, emphasizing her next words.
" I want you to feel free to go anywhere, look at anything, do whatever you need to do to assure yourself it's safe to be here, if you decide to stay. If we do work together, I won't be asking you your life's story. There's hardly any talking at all." She stopped speaking for a moment to let her words sink in. She thought she saw a tiny flash of relief, surprise, curiosity in his expression. Perhaps he was trying to visualize what it would be like, then, if they worked together. She gave him some time to think about it.
Unseen by Reese, Jules weighed assessing another stream of data that could have been informing her at that moment. She knew that just beyond her immediate attention there was a gathering of data that Reese couldn't prevent radiating out toward her. Over the years, she had tuned herself, learned to sense and make sense of it. She just had to make a tiny change in the direction of her attention, and it would be there, waiting for her. It would scratch that itch that was so familiar to her on the first meeting with any new patient.
She described it as an internal "knowing", a delicate Flow of information that came to her in the presence of her patient. It didn't come to her on one of the known sensory pathways. It was neither visual, auditory, touch, olfactory, nor taste. She didn't know how she knew it; it just appeared in a place behind her eyes, in her deep brain, present. It had taken years for her to learn to trust it.
Jules used it to flesh out her patient more thoroughly in her mind, in a way that talking couldn't fully do. But today, with Reese, she decided not to sample it. She let it go, preserving that piece of his privacy for now, while he was deciding whether or not he would work with her. If not, there was no need to go any deeper. And better for her, too. Once sampled, it was harder to let it go. It would linger on afterwards and disturb her peace, especially if he were badly wounded, but still chose to leave.
Reese could sense her preoccupation with something, but she had recovered and now seemed poised to go on. He had also noticed that when she spoke, it was with a slight European accent, French he thought. He tucked that away, to explore later.
"What is it that you do, exactly?" he said in that same soft, barely audible voice.
"I've worked with many people over the years. Our mutual friend, Harold, knows my work and he asked me to meet with you. Harold seems concerned for your–safety." She had hesitated just for a second, to find an appropriate word, watching for any reaction from him.
"Harold trusts me to help people, just like he trusts you to help people. We do the same thing–different techniques." She felt a slight lessening of the tension in his body. Ah, good. He responded to Harold's name in a positive way.
"How do you know Harold?" His eyes had softened a bit as he asked, though his voice remained too quiet. Jules smiled as she thought about Harold, her eyes shifting away, recalling her first meeting with him and their long, close collaboration since.
"Harold and I met at a lecture I was giving years ago. We found that we have many of the same interests. Whenever I am in the States, we try to get together. Harold is a trusted friend." She was still smiling when her eyes returned to Reese. She caught him enjoying her expression. Good. This was starting to look like it could land on it's feet. She decided to build further on Reese's relationship with Harold.
"I can tell that Harold cares about you. He wants you to consider working with me for a bit. I am going to be in the States for awhile–six or nine months this time, so we could set up some time to meet. I like to work here, in my house, but Harold also offered us a space in Manhattan if it's more convenient."
"What exactly would we be doing if we worked together?" Reese asked, still trying to get some kind of footing in the situation. She smiled warmly toward him, aware of his need for clarity. His face remained expressionless; his eyes searched her, again, and she knew he had so many questions. She felt ready to throw him a curve and see how he handled it.
"It's easier if I show you, rather than trying to talk about it. I'm not much for talking. So–with your permission–? " She looked to him expectantly. There was no hint in her expression what she had in mind. He didn't know how to respond. She kept her eyes on him and smiled–waiting for anything recognizable: a small frown, hesitancy.
"I am unarmed– " She raised her open hands and arms in the air where he could see them.
"I doubt that," he said, just audibly. He did not meet her eyes, but automatically adjusted himself on his chair to move quickly if necessary. She went on, undaunted.
"You're all covered up in your suit, so let's use my arm." She slid her sleeve up above her right elbow, baring her skin, and extended her arm on the flat surface toward him. Then, raising her eyes to his, she said "let me show you what I do. Lay your hand across my forearm." The expression on his face was unreadable; she leaned toward him, inviting him to follow her instructions.
He reached forward slowly, scanning her arm before placing his hand gingerly across it. His palm was cool and a little clammy. His long fingers extended out onto the table top. For a brief moment, a small amount of the data from that initial touch registered. He watched her eyelids close as she took in the sensation.
There was something else, but it happened too quickly. For a second he felt alarmed– something about this triggered an old memory that had ended badly. Reflexively, instantly, he was standing up, scanning the room around him, reaching under his jacket for his weapon.
Nothing happened. Moments passed. He looked back at her and saw something he didn't expect in her eyes. Jules wasn't frightened or alarmed. Her eyes were clear, full of–compassion?–pity? –he was not certain what.
Reese sat down again, lowering his eyes to the table, clasping his hands together between the two of them. He looked pale and exhausted. He needed a deeper breath to reset himself; clearly, he looked uncomfortable to Jules. To respond, she gently leaned forward, and extended her own two hands, above and nearly touching his: "may I?" she asked. Her eyes were steady on him, with no hint of emotion to sidetrack this exchange.
Reese lifted his head and for a moment he didn't hide everything. He let her see some of the fatigue, the dead cold inside him. She held steady, and left her hands poised above his. Then, at his nod, she wrapped her hands firmly over his, leaning toward him across the table.
With soft, gray-blue eyes she spoke to him. The sound of her voice and the warmth of her hands on his began to drain off the feeling. What was it? It was sliding away from him. He couldn't get back to it. He felt himself pulled in, going back to a memory from long ago.
CHAPTER 4 - THE RIVER AND THE OLD CANOE
Colorado, 1990
Reese was out in his father's old canoe, as a young man. He saw himself leaning back and letting the river carry him slowly along, as he had done so many times. He could hear the wet lapping against the sides of the canoe, could feel the bright sunshine filtered through overhead boughs, playing over his skin. The canoe took him in and out of deep shadows, alternating between hot sun and chilly darkness. Even with just the memory of it, the skin of his arms reacted to the chill – prickling from goose flesh.
Jules talked on, softly, gently, but he didn't hear her exact words, only their sound. He wanted to stop and figure out why he was only hearing the sounds, but he couldn't focus on it. He was rocking, moving on the river, letting it carry him along.
There were some birds calling out, then answers from some others. They began to chat. A bullfrog interrupted. Then he became aware of clicking. He knew this sound from his boyhood. Dragonflies were darting back and forth at the river's edge, their cellophane wings clicking as they swooped and banked in tight turns above the muddy shore. He could smell the heavy muck heated by the long day's sun overhead.
The air was alive with buzzing insects, bird calls, the sounds of fish jumping in the river. Under him, river water swirled around the submerged rocks, forming eddies at the surface and tipping the canoe as it found its way through. It pushed the canoe on further downstream, in the faster current now, covering distance quickly. Trees thinned out on the river banks, and soon were replaced with low shrubs crowding up to the edge.
The light began to dim as he drifted. The heat gave way to a welcome cooling breeze, stirring the cattail stands. Heavy brown heads jutted up from thick green stalks and thudded against one another in the breeze. He saw himself lying in the canoe, drowsy, drifting, smiling. It was as though he had never left.
Further down, the river gurgled and he could hear the throaty sound of smooth round rocks disturbed, lifted up and then tumbling against one another in the deeper water of the channel under him. The same current pushed his canoe closer toward the shore as it rounded a curve, sending him off into calmer waters. He could hear the wind's breath softly sighing in the long-needle pines on the hill, hypnotic. All was as it should be.
It seemed as though he had drifted for hours when he heard a sound from the bottom of the canoe, felt it rise up and slide over smooth rock. He looked over the side and in the clear water saw mossy mounds of river rock that lay just below the surface. He was slowing down now and then he stopped, sliding up onto the rocks in shallow water.
CHAPTER 5 - HE WAS ALLOWING IT
Upstate New York, October, 2016
Before he opened his eyes, Reese took stock. The light was indeed dim. Music was playing around him–an instrumental with soothing deep bass tones, with piano, oboe, and guitar weaving the soft melodic tones on top. He felt the music gently vibrating in his chest. The air felt warm on him. There was no breeze, just some comforting kitchen smells of brewed coffee, lemons, onions, some herbs.
He was still sitting in the chair, with his hands enfolded by hers. Jules had stopped talking and sat with eyes half-closed, as though meditating. She heard Reese take a different breath and it stirred her from her own quiet place. When she looked up at his face, it was transformed, at least around the eyes. The lines had softened and relaxed. He looked drowsy now, almost reachable.
Encouraged, she asked "how do you feel?" He side-stepped the question and asked how long they had been sitting there.
"Maybe a half-hour," she said, but he protested that it was evening now and they must have been there for hours. She reached out for a slender black case with colorful tiny buttons on one end. At her touch, shades lifted and daylight flooded in. The music volume quieted a bit.
She brought her hand back slowly, in a small test, gently re-wrapping his as before. He had seen her move, but Reese had not pulled his hands away when he had the chance. He had left them there, enfolded by her own. This was good, she thought. He was allowing it.
Looking around him at the room, he asked "what happens now?"
"Nothing needs to happen. I recommend that you give yourself some time – try and stay in this state as long as you can. It is actually a healing state. Rest, and let the body adjust. We can talk later if you like. I want to answer whatever questions you have."
There was something unusual about her voice, he thought. It had a certain quality that he couldn't quite describe at the moment, but when she was talking before it had made him feel more at ease, calmer inside. Even so, he didn't like to stay in one place for too long. It was his habit to keep moving.
Jules could see the conflict in him; part of him wanted to bolt, just get away; another was pulling for staying–to find out more, to get answers. She pressed Reese to stay a little longer.
"Harold gave you these next three days off. You don't have to go back tonight. He wants you to take care of yourself, to hear what I have to say. Then you can decide for yourself. I hope you'll give it a chance. Feel free to look around. Go anywhere, look at anything. I want you to do whatever you need to do to feel safe here." She lifted her hands from his.
"I am going to go take a shower and then finish dinner. Love to cook– hope you decide to stay." She rose and walked off deeper into the house while he stood up and stretched. He heard her accent a little more clearly now, definitely French.
CHAPTER 6 - SECOND WIND
Reese searched through the house, except for the room where Jules was showering. In her bedroom, under the cover of a small, simple carved wooden box on the top of her dresser he found two items, like small treasures. There was a tattered rough blue cloth and on top of that was a necklace with a small metal heart engraved with the words "Pour Aluel". Reese noticed the box was kept separately from her other belongings, as though it had some special significance.
There were other small pieces of sculpture, carvings, and woven fabrics from all over the world scattered throughout her house. The design of the house itself felt Asian, but it was furnished with Scandinavian teak, leather, glass and fabrics. She liked hand-made pieces by the look of it.
In one room, down the hall from her kitchen, there was a heavy oak padded treatment table set up in the middle, and the walls around it held sets of colored bowls: clear, blue, milky white, rose pink. Some were just seven or eight inches in diameter, and others closer to 30 inches. They looked a little like some form of glass, but he wasn't sure what they were made from. They sat on sturdy shelves, with what looked like long tubular mallets covered in suede next to the bowls. Another shelf held simple, unadorned brass bowls with wooden mallets. Reese flicked his finger on the edge of one of the largest milky white bowls, and a deep musical note rang out into the house, reverberating long after. It made a surprisingly powerful vibration inside the room, and he could even feel it in his chest.
Further along on his rounds, he noticed a spot where the afternoon sun flooded in onto a stone wall outside. An outdoor shower was tucked inside the bend of the wall and it caught his attention. It had been hot all day today, a sunny, spectacular Indian Summer day, but Reese was tired and sticky from the long drive up. He had had little sleep last night before getting into his car this morning. A shower would help him get his second wind. He went outside to check, and the shower was working perfectly.
It had been years since he had showered outdoors; it felt better than he remembered. He stood for a long time in the private nook at the bend in the wall, letting the soapy water slide over his skin. Bright sunshine sparkled in the spray. The air was warm and still outside, a little humid.
It brought back the feeling of his dream earlier. He could get back to the feeling of it–the canoe, drifting downriver, the birds, the dragonflies. He heard the cattails and the sighing sound of the breeze in the trees; then, the rocks under the metal canoe, lifting it to a stop.
The dream had left him in an unfamiliar state. He felt clear inside, calm, and he couldn't help but notice a remarkable absence of his own internal dialogue. It was a comfortably empty state, where he felt reset on some level. But beneath that, Reese sensed the outlines of a deep well of dark heavy thoughts, wrapped around with a thick layer of exhaustion. He backed away from that.
After the long shower, he went back to his room and pulled out fresh clothing from his duffle bag, dressing more casually, leaving his weapon in his bag this time. Down the hall, past his room, then up a flight of steps, he found a chair looking out through a bank of tall windows at the back acreage. The chair was all black leather, steel, and heavy teak wood, and it leaned back like a recliner on its base. He was soon floating again with the late afternoon sun slanting across his body. Cooking smells drifted up from the kitchen.
Again he felt the afterglow of his earlier dream. He seemed to be able to get back into it at will. Jules had been right. He had the sense of resting. There was an unaccustomed quiet in his thoughts. He felt well-supported on a long thick pad of warm leather. Its smell filled his nose, and the warm skin reminded him of her hands on his. It was reassuring, somehow. Reese let himself sink into this feeling and closed his eyes. He thought about staying.
CHAPTER 7 - HANDS ON
Jules had prepared a dinner featuring a roasted chicken with many small dishes of freshly-made sides, full of taste, that she served smorgasbord-style. The simple roasted chicken had an herb paste spread across the meat, beneath the deeply browned skin, that had infused it with intense flavor. They filled their plates, returning again and again, sampling from this bowl and that tray, trying the various tastes, and sharing friendly small-talk and a little French wine.
After dinner, they moved over to a room with a large fireplace. She asked him if he wanted to get a fire going and he set to it, though he only had to light it. Soon a trace smell of well-seasoned oak and cherry hardwoods drifted into the room as the fireplace crackled. She poured some tea for them and they finally sat down facing one another on a large L-shaped couch. Jules spoke first.
"I want to answer the questions you must have. Did Harold tell you anything before you left? I can't picture you agreeing to come here without some explanation." She studied his face. His eyes were averted, looking over at the fire.
"Harold said this is some kind of a gift. He wanted to do something for me."
"He told me you saved his life again–stepped in front of a bullet, he said, to save his life." Reese just stared at the fire.
"I owe him a debt I can't repay." He looked her directly in the eyes as he said it, and she could see something fierce well up behind his eyes. She held his look without reacting to the emotion.
"I understand. We have been friends for years. I was in private practice at the time we met and doing some teaching on the side. He came to a lecture I gave and introduced himself. Harold turned out to be the best man I have ever known." She saw him nod his head. They were quiet for a time, deep in their own thoughts.
"Is it alright if I turn down the lights? I love the firelight." Reese nodded and Jules reached over to the table lamp to turn off the light. For a little while they sat quietly in the dancing light from the fireplace.
"You said you were in private practice when you met Harold –" She nodded and explained.
"I was a doctor for years, but I wanted to work in a different way, so I left private practice. Now, I divide my time working overseas and here, teaching."
"What kind of a doctor?"
"I trained originally as an internist and pediatrician. I did primary care for nearly twenty years."
"What was all that with your arm?"
"Part of my training was to treat musculoskeletal problems–muscles, joints, soft tissues, spine. It's something I love to do. I expanded my original training over the years. The work I do now is far more complex than what I learned in medical school." He nodded and then leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
"What happened to me today?"
"Tell me what you saw in your dream." At first, he hesitated to say it out loud. But somehow the dim light and the gentle warmth of the fire made it seem easier to talk.
"When you had your hands over mine, something happened and I couldn't hear what you were saying. I mean, I could hear the sound, but not the words themselves." His eyes were questioning.
"Umm," she nodded as if to encourage him on.
"Something made me remember the old canoe my father had at the lake when I was a kid. I saw myself in the canoe going down a river."
"Did you know this place?"
"I spent a lot of time there when I was young."
"How did it make you feel?" He fidgeted, looking for the words.
"Quiet inside–I guess. The voice in my head stopped."
"Umm," She let the quiet take over again. It was a comfortable silence. She enjoyed watching him settle into the corner of the leather couch. The leather was old and soft to touch, with a nubby surface that could still be appreciated even though it had thinned and smoothed as it aged over the years. The leather, warmed by their bodies and by the fire, gave off a comforting aroma that enveloped them. The air was full of cherry and oak wood and leather. Such a comfort. She sipped some tea.
"I believe that your dream was allowing you to enter a different state than the usual one. I consider it a healing state. Most of us run around every day multi-tasking, analyzing, consumed with the busy-ness of our lives, and it's hard to stop: too many intrusive gadgets, too many interruptions. We are constantly going, without any true down-time. This healing state is a break from the complexity in our daily lives. It is something we all need, to stay balanced and healthy. That feeling you had was how the alpha state feels."
He didn't say anything. She couldn't see his face. The fire was burning down and the light was dimmer now. She got up and poked the logs, and threw a few fresh ones on top. The logs sizzled and popped in the fireplace, showers of flaming embers exploding out of the hot wood behind her as she returned to the couch.
Jules sat down again, this time moving close to Reese and sitting cross-legged on the near end, facing him, close to crowding his personal space. She saw where his collar was open, that his neck and chest were relaxed. The pulse at the base of his throat was slow and regular. He looked deeply into her face, and she could sense his energy holding, a subtle pressure back toward her presence, so close to him; this time he was different, calmer inside, and more receptive.
"Will you try it with me again?" she asked as she raised her sleeve above her elbow. "Put your hand on my arm, here, and tell me what you feel." This time he didn't hesitate. She smiled to herself as he gently laid his hand across her arm. She paid no attention to the incoming sensation, but turned to him. "What do you notice?" He concentrated for a moment and nodded.
"The heat of your skin. It is smooth and very–soft." She nodded.
"Stay on that top level of the skin. Do you notice anything else?" He was silent as he tried to feel anything else.
"No, I don't think so–"
"Do you notice the hairs on the back of the arm, and none on the inside of the arm?" He changed his grip and she could feel the soft pressure of his fingers testing the surface of her forearm.
"Yes," he said. The firelight bathed the room in an orange glow, but the light was friendly, not glaring. Her voice was steady and reassuring.
"Now bring your attention to the next layer. Can you feel the thickness of the skin?" He couldn't at first until he tried to move the skin. Then he pulled it into traction, lifted it up between his fingers, and nodded.
"Yes." He lightly pushed and pulled her skin with his fingers as he studied its depth at different parts of her forearm.
"Do you feel the texture?" He nodded right away. He lifted it and felt it snap back when he released it.
"Now try to feel the muscle layer, below the top layer. How does that feel?" She purposely left the muscles relaxed so he could sense their outlines, feel the fullness of the relaxed muscle bellies, sense the amount of give when he pushed on them.
"Long, curved smooth surface. Thicker in the middle than at the ends. Springs back if you press on it." She nodded at each point.
"Can you tell how the fibers run in the muscle?" He ran his fingers over her lower forearm, then higher up near her elbow until finally he explored a thicker muscle adjacent to the inner elbow.
"I feel the fibers here. They run from the elbow down to–here." He marked the spot with his thumb.
"Now try again and see if the fibers feel the same through the whole muscle." She tightened the muscles directly under his fingertips by extending her wrist backwards with some force. He looked up and she knew he had felt the tensing.
"This is the change I look for in the muscle when I treat patients. The fibers tense and feel tight instead of soft and relaxed. I work with that spasmed muscle, releasing the tension by putting the body part into a position of comfort. When the muscle has slack in it, at just the right angle, with just the right small forces applied, the muscle structure can reset itself in a minute and a half. My job is to scan for changes in the tissues, then treat what I find. It is a very gentle technique that I can use on a newborn or a very frail elderly person, or anyone in between." She smiled and he nodded.
"Now one last piece to try for fun. Bring your attention to the space where the skin ends and the muscle layer starts. I am going to exaggerate my breathing and I want you to see if you can feel the change in the muscle layer when I breathe deeper."
Jules leaned back and closed her eyes, taking in a long slow deep breath. Her chest rose and the muscles of her ribcage and shoulder stretched, pulling tighter as her ribcage lifted. A slight sliding motion could be perceived just under the skin layer as the muscles stretched. It was a subtle change for the fingertips to perceive. Then when she exhaled her long slow breath, the muscles softly recoiled, sliding back the other way, resuming their fuller, softer shape at rest.
He tried for several minutes to sense anything happening, but he drew a blank.
"I don't know what I'm supposed to feel," he said.
"Don't worry. It's an acquired skill," she replied, smiling warmly.
She launched into a detailed explanation of what he was feeling and her face lit up with the pleasure of the explanation. Reese recalled that she was a teacher for many years.
"Think of all of the main structures in your body–bones, muscles, organs, nerves, blood vessels –each one covered in a thin layer of dense tissue called fascia. Every organ, all of your insides, are tightly coated with this layer. It is very strong if you stretch it lengthwise, but if you poke it perpendicularly, your finger goes right through it. It has high tensile strength–" She looked up to see if he understood so far.
"Think of having this layer of tissue everywhere and that if you then subtracted all of the structures inside the fascia, you would have an exact replica of your insides, in fascia. Now just like a spider web, if I pull on one part of the web, the force distributes out along the whole web and stretches it–" She gestured with her fingers spreading out in the air in front of her.
"The same thing happens in the body. If a force is applied, the fascia distributes it out away from the source, through all of the fascia. When the fascia stretches, the muscles wrapped inside it will stretch and thin out, too. You can feel them sliding a little bit under the layer of skin above them.
"When I take a deep breath, you can feel the muscles sliding, from the shoulder, to the elbow and down to the wrist and hand. You can even pick up the changes in breathing down on the thigh or the foot. You can feel it anywhere, really. It's just a matter of training the hands what to attend to."
She smiled triumphantly as she finished her explanation. His eyes smiled and he said something about it being geek to him, but she chuckled and said she was sure he got it. She stayed silent and waited for him to speak. After a long while his face became serious again.
"What is all of this about? I still don't know why I am here." She nodded and turned her body to face him. She took his hand and held it gently between her palms.
"I want you to understand that I want you to trust in me. I love to do this work. It is deep and personal. It requires trust to be successful, and I suspect that in your line of work it is dangerous to trust people.
"Harold sent you here to me because he is hoping you will let me help you find balance in your life." She watched him start to shake his head no. She expected it. She stopped him from speaking.
"You have seen and done a lot of painful things over the years. Your superiors expected you to carry out orders that you had to learn to live with. All of that changes you. But it doesn't have to destroy you." He lifted his hands to protest, and she cut him off again.
"You need to come out of this hyper-vigilant state even if it's saved your life many times before. It burns you up inside. You have to let your body re-balance, reset itself. If you don't, internally you wind tighter and tighter, get angry, distracted, full of pain and rage, until something bad happens."
He shook his head no, and in his quiet voice said, "I can handle things on my own. I don't need to come and talk about my past and my feelings to you or anyone else. That's not what people like me do. We don't expect to have a normal life like everyone else. We burn hot and go out. That's the way it is." His eyes were dark and intense, his face drawn.
"I understand how you can think that. But I would like to show you this next few days how it could be different, how you could get back some of the normal feelings you used to have. I'm not a shrink. I am not expecting you to spill your guts to me. You don't really have to talk at all when I treat you. I am working on a different level and we don't need to talk about it."
He looked concerned, unable to grasp how she could do that. Jules could feel him shrinking back and starting to shield himself.
"No, wait. I don't want to invade your privacy or your space. I'm not trained like you. I don't really know what you do. But I do know it's dangerous, it's lethal, and it is–necessary. That doesn't make it any easier to live with, though, does it? It is a heavy burden if you let it stay inside you this way. I want to teach you how to release that burden so you can be light on your feet again, clearer, like the warrior you intended to be." Reese thought that was an odd thing for her to say. He turned it over and over in his mind.
"I don't see what all this is supposed to do," he said at last. There was a sadness in his eyes, or maybe resignation, loss. She sensed that this was the right moment for a rescue attempt. She decided to push him harder.
"It's so much harder to talk about than to show you. Let me work on you right here. You can stretch out on the couch." She moved from the couch and before he could protest, pulled him from the corner onto the longer section, guiding him to lie on his back. She handled him, moved him around as she wanted, without thinking about how Reese would react to it. It was as though having him touch her first, in the way he had, had given tacit approval for her to do the same. Reese didn't fight it. Perhaps he was curious.
She folded an afghan into a thick roll and put it under his knees to lift them up and relax his lower back. Then she gently covered him with a soft cotton blanket she folded over for warmth. Often, people she treated became chilled during the sessions, and a blanket also served to provide a little privacy and security as well. She liked thick flannel sheets, doubled over, for her patients. The nap of the heavy cotton was comforting on the skin, and they smelled of cinnamon, a calming scent.
When he was settled just as she wanted, she moved to his head. She sat cross-legged on the couch with his head in her hands. He automatically took in a breath and let it go slowly. She could feel it in her hands, Reese giving himself over to her, little by little. She straightened her spine, relaxed her shoulders, and took a centering breath while she closed her eyes for a moment. Then she gave him instructions to put him at ease since this was his first time with her.
In a slow, quiet voice she said "I am going to move your head from side to side, slowly. I am not going to do anything sudden. Everything I do is slow and gentle. If I get you into a position that feels uncomfortable, just tell me and I'll stop. It is not meant to be painful." He noticed that her voice was having that same effect on him again; he felt more at ease and calmer inside.
She held his occiput in her palms and slowly rotated his head one way, then the other, noting to herself any resistance to motion. Then she lifted his head a bit from the couch and repeated the motion. She proceeded in similar fashion as she lifted his head further and further from the couch. At one point Jules felt him trying to hold his head up for her but she said to let his muscles relax and let her do the work without him helping: "you are using the muscles I want to test."
Next, she ran her fingers over the lower skull, pressing gently over specific points looking for small firm spots that called out for treatment. When she found a spot, she asked him if it felt tender when she pressed a little harder. He didn't answer.
"This spot feels like a tender point to me. They are small hard spots that feel like the eraser on a pencil. They can be exquisitely painful when they are pressed. I'll treat this spot and see if you notice a difference after I treat it." She tipped his head backwards while lightly monitoring the deeper tissues at the tender point. When she felt movement at her fingertip, she stopped moving his head backwards, but added a little side-bending and some rotation of his head position, until she got the tissues balanced just right below her fingertip. Then she held him in that position for another ninety seconds. As she held his head, she felt him relaxing into it. His breathing became deeper and slower.
She re-positioned his head back into neutral starting position without moving her monitoring fingertip from the original tender point position. When she pressed the point again, the hardness had dissolved away and she no longer felt tension there. She knew without asking that the point was now pain-free.
She moved downward onto his neck and he could feel the certainty in her movements. Her hands felt strong on him as she probed the muscle and bone between the base of his skull and the top of his back. Her fingertips worked into the small odd-shaped crevices, seeking minute disturbances in the tissues. He began to feel an intense heat in her hands on his bare skin. As she reached the base of his neck, one hand slid over his spine with her fingers extending downward toward his feet. He felt a chill from the heat of her palm on his cooler skin, and his body shuddered.
"How do you get your hands so hot?" he asked. She smiled and chuckled at this question she had heard so often.
"I tell people it's healing energy coming out through my hands." She was a little surprised that he was letting her touch him for so long. She half-expected that he would begin to protest and pull away. She decided to jump down to his shoulders while she had the chance and leave further work on his neck for later.
Jules moved from her position at the top of his head to his side, sitting on the edge of the wooden coffee table. She slid her right hand under Reese's right shoulder and with her left hand on top of his chest, pressed it downward toward the couch, continuing the steady force while her right hand explored the deeper tissues of his upper back and scapular area. She alternately pushed and released the downward pressure on his shoulder as her fingertips scanned layer after layer of muscle. As she expected, there was spasm in the upper back at the top of the shoulders, and between the spine and the shoulder blades on both sides. These were common areas for holding stress in the body.
Next, her fingers pressed more deeply into the muscles of his back to check the harder outlines of his ribs. Jules immediately felt three ribs that had sprung out of their normal position by just a few millimeters. Often, there was sharp, ice-pick pain at the site, when a rib was elevated like that. Reese winced a little as her hands moved further down. She felt the outlines of a rectangular bandage there.
Jules placed her right hand gently over the bandage and shifted her left hand down his chest wall until it rested directly above her right hand, with the bandaged area between them. She closed her eyes. The heat in her hands fired even higher as she imagined light passing between them, aiming it at the injured tissues.
She held her hands there for long minutes until she sensed change in the tissues. Then she gently palpated the area underneath the bandage. There was a hard lump there on top of a rib. It had been fractured and a bony callus had begun forming where the exuberant regrowth had started. She flattened her palm over the fracture without pressing the painful spot. She knew that each breath Reese took caused stabbing pain there, and the pressure of his body weight against it must have been excruciating when he tried to sleep.
She returned to the three ribs higher up his back that were out of normal position. For these, she slid her fingertips to the area where these ribs began to bend around his side under his arm. There was a small raised portion on each rib, shaped like a wedge just at the start of the bend. She gripped the wedges on his affected ribs, pulling on them obliquely, into traction, with moderate force.
"What I want you to do is to take a good deep breath and hold it at the top." She felt his ribs move apart slightly as his chest expanded. He held his breath, then at her signal he let the breath go. Timing her action with the exhalation, using fingertip pressure, she maneuvered each rib gently back to its proper setting as his ribcage recoiled. When she felt the ribs again after the treatment, they had shifted back into normal position. Finally, she treated the spasmed muscle at the top of the shoulder and around the scapula with another technique that targeted this area particularly well. She palpated the muscle after the treatment and was satisfied with the results.
Reese rested comfortably on the leather couch, feeling weightless after all the work she had done on him. This calm peacefulness was not his normal state. It felt strange to him, but he was letting it be. Something about all this felt comforting, like he was being looked after. Not for years had Reese felt this way. He now began to understand what she had meant earlier about the work being deep and personal. He opened his eyes and saw her moving up toward his head. She cupped his head in her hands. Reese felt their heat through his hair.
Gradually, there was a sense of what felt like slow pulses of energy moving from his head down his neck, into his chest and back, his abdomen and down his legs. He twitched a little with the strength of it. It captured his breathing and emptied him of all of his thoughts. His eyes closed. His physical sense of his body gradually faded as he relaxed into it.
CHAPTER 8 - LONE CANOE
Reese was a single point of light suspended in utter blackness, speeding through space. Ahead was a tiny glow that slowly expanded until he could see the horizon. It was sunrise and he could make out the outlines of a familiar profile of trees as he approached. As the light came up, the shoreline appeared and he heard the sound of small waves lapping against the cold sand. He flew out over the water, beyond the narrow shoreline through a light fog rising off the surface like steam. Out ahead, the lake was smooth. A slant of sunlight behind him burned down through the fog and sparkled up at him from the lake. Far ahead, he saw a lone canoe with a slim figure moving his arms from side to side, paddling quietly in the morning sun. There was a dark mound of land way off in the distance ahead. The canoe slid through the clear gray water toward it–in no great hurry.