A Taste of You Read online

  “Hmmm,” Dr. Katterfelto says. “All right. Let me see the boy.”

  Breck dashes forward and tackles me, and I take another hit off him, very carefully, so that he submits to being held.

  “Profile?” the doctor says.

  I turn Breck to face me and we hold hands, raising them up and lowering them as if making London Bridge rise and fall and rise again. The machine clicks and hums.

  “Full face?”

  I turn, lifting up on my tiptoes. and Breck does the same. We take a bow, ending on a big flourish, each holding the other’s hand, and our free hands out-flung.

  “Hold that, please,” says Dr. Katterfelto. The machine clicks again. Somewhere I can hear a printer clunking and cranking. We hold that pose, and then he says, “Vonderful! Thank you, you may relax.”

  I take another little hit of prana off Breck, and he runs to his mother, who follows Katterfelto to some chairs. The boy crawls into Virginia’s lap and sucks his thumb. I sit with her.

  “Hm. Very interesting. Now, Mrs. Hibble, I show you how ve use colorimetry to diagnose the boy’s condition. You see?” He brings a printout around his desk and stands between us, holding it so we can see. “In a boy like this, I see them often, ve haff reversal of the fourth chakra, the heart chakra. Very painful for him. He is a brave little boy, who can live vit this pain and frustration, ja?”

  “His other doctors didn’t say anything about pain,” Virginia says, both truculent and alarmed. “He would tell me if he was in pain.”

  “It is pain of the soul.” Katterfelto touches the left breast of his lab coat. “Behold. The chi, he rises from the base of the spine and circles counterclockwise around the first chakra.” His finger traces a serpentine line up the center of the boy-sized form printed in blazing color on the page. “So. Unt now it comes around and engages with the second chakra,” his German accent slips a little, “and goes around the next bend clockwise, you see? Like pinball. Like ivy climbing a tree.”

  “But the energy changes direction,” I say, watching his finger. I’m familiar with the chakra system. “It switches direction every time it hits a chakra.”

  “Indeed it does. And so on to the third chakra, home of the will. What a strong will our boy has! See how yellow and pulsing and strong! Counterclockwise, you observe. And then to the heart chakra — but what do we see here? Oh no! The wheel of the chakra — chakra means wheel, did you know that? — he is turned the wrong way! He is also going counterclockwise. Now ve see what a problem this makes.”

  “Huh,” Virginia says, as if pretending she understands.

  Katterfelto draws a little table between our two chairs so that he can lay the printout down. “The next chakra is in the throat, counterclockwise also. Our poor young friend here cannot move energy from his will through his heart into his voice. How frustrating! How he is thwarted! This is most unfair.”

  Breck stops squirming on his mother’s lap. He’s looking at the printout, fascinated.

  “So.” I’m beginning to see method in this madness. I put my finger on the will chakra. “He wants to express what’s in his heart.” I move my finger on the heart chakra. “But it gets all turned around, and when it comes into his throat—” I touch the next spot. “It doesn’t come out right.”

  Then I get it. This explains ninety percent of Breck to me. He always seems to be struggling with language, although his English is perfect and he knows plenty of words.

  Dr. Katterfelto is looking at me with interest and approval. “Precisely. How well you put it. He cannot express his love, for it has gotten tangled up like this.” Dr. Katterfelto’s two fingers walk across the printout, twiddle together, and fall over. “A terrible affliction.”

  He turns to Breck, in his mother’s lap, and I look, too.

  Breck is sitting quietly, staring at the printout with silent tears running down his face.

  Virginia goes off like a bomb. “Oh my God! Breck honey! Are you all right?”

  But the doctor holds his hand out to Breck. “Shall I give you some little physical therapy exercise for this affliction? They will be difficult at first. But if you can keep them up, you will correct this. I promise you.”

  “Um,” I say.

  Virginia says, “Oh, I don’t think he can handle that.”

  Breck puts his hand out and takes Dr. Katterfelto’s and says nothing. Tears keep running down his face.

  I put a finger on his shoulder, just tasting, and feel extraordinary peace radiating off that little boy. He’s a furnace of heat and happiness and relief and joy.

  His mouth hangs open. I see disbelief and hope in his eyes.

  Poor little lost boy. He wants to tell his love to the world, but it won’t come out. All that comes out is screaming and hitting.

  I feel tears starting in my own eyes and I look at Virginia. “You might give it a chance. Since we brought him all this way.”

  Virginia is clasping Breck to her body, looking suspicious. “What will it cost?”

  “For you,” Dr. Katterfelto says absently, scribbling on a little teeny pad of paper he has taken out of his lab coat pocket, “nothing, unless and until we see improvement. First we see if it will respond to a little gentle nudging from these exercises.”

  His English has improved. His energy is sweet and bright. Dr. Katterfelto loves his job.

  I’m envious. I mean, my job’s okay, if stressful sometimes, and I get peed on more than I would like. Maybe he’s just a happy guy.

  “Now, my man,” Dr. Katterfelto says, handing the paper to the kid. “Can you read my chicken scratches?”

  Breck looks solemnly at the paper.

  The doctor says, “Hold a ball in front of your chest with both hands. Turn it to the left four turns. Now turn it to the right four turns. While you are doing this, you are saying, ‘Straighten up and fly right.’ Can you say this?”

  Breck’s lips move. He says, “Straighten up an fly right.”

  “Say it while you turn your ball.” Dr. Katterfelto picks up a plastic baseball off the floor and hands it to Breck. “Come. Show me.”

  They practice the move. Breck brightens noticeably as he does it. Soon he’s chanting, “Straighten up an fly right! Straighten up an fly right!”

  “Good. Do the turns maybe twenty or thirty times a day. Not all at once. Any time you happen to have a ball in your hands. If you are in class, just imagine the ball, and let your lips move. When you become accustomed to thinking the words, you may not need to move your lips. Feel the words form in your throat. This will help to pull your energy around your heart, up around your throat chakra, in a regular manner.”

  Breck’s eyes are shining. He folds the paper even smaller and puts it into his shorts pocket. He looks serious. To Virginia he says, “Let’s go home.”

  Virginia makes the appropriate mother-at-the-pediatrician noises, repeating everything the doctor has said about six times. Dr. Katterfelto hands her the printout. I pick up my purse, thinking, Hm.

  “Don’t go yet, please,” Dr. Katterfelto says to me. Virginia is talking her way out the door in order to convince herself that she has had a role in this transaction.

  “Oh, I won’t,” I say. I want to hug Breck. Not to breathe up all his prana or anything. Just to be near him. Because he is so happy.

  I keep my hands to myself.

  Chapter Eight

  Dr. Katterfelto bustles back from showing Breck and his mother to the door. I’m sitting beside the rainbow machine, holding my hand up to it and watching the image of my arm move on the screen, shooting colors in all directions.

  It’s a nice special effect. I wonder if it means anything at all.

  “So,” he says, rubbing his hands together, “you are interested in addicts?” He fiddles with the machine’s keyboard and smiles at me over his shoulder, looking like a short Santa rummaging in his big red bag for a toy.

  I freeze. “Why addicts?”

  “Such a person as our young friend here often becomes an addict
in later life. The inevitable concomitant of being unable to allow the love to flow freely.”

  For some reason this makes me catch my breath, and I panic. “Can that exercise really work? For Breck?”

  “He is a child. He has powerful desire to master the world, and much hope, in addition to the extreme energies of youth. If faith and a little knowledge of anatomy can help, he will do it.”

  “You’re a faith healer,” I say, disappointed. All these bells and whistles. I look at the machine with disfavor.

  “It is the safest way. He is unlikely to do himself harm if he knows precisely what he wants and channels his energy through the lens of his desire.” Dr. Katterfelto’s accent is slipping again. He radiates calm, gentleness, and happiness. “I would like to ask a favor of you now.”

  “Oh?”

  “Would you stand for me at the psychespectrometer? I want to show you something.”

  Mixed thoughts and feelings crash around inside me. I remember my mission. I think of Nick Jones and his arrogance and his hostility toward the doctor. I remember the hope and dawning joy in Breck’s eyes. I chant “four hundred thousand dollars” in my head.

  I move into the zone of blazing light. I try to peek over my shoulder at the colors, but the light’s too bright, too close.

  “Look over here,” says the doctor, and I turn my head. “What you see on the monitor is what I see on the larger screen. And now I print. So.”

  Now he’s handing me another color printout. “I will show you the wheels.”

  “Chakras,” I say.

  He beams at me. “A student of invisible anatomy! I salute you!” He bustles over to the table, and we sit. “Behold young Breck’s scan.” He pulls a ballpoint pen out of his pocket protector and starts drawing a long snaky curve up the spine of the rainbow boy on the printout.

  When he looks at me again, he is beaming. “Observe the direction of the wheels. Bottom to top, right to left to right, and so on.”

  “Okay,” I say guardedly.

  Now he picks up his pen and draws on the rainbow woman. “On this set of wheels, however, we begin on the other side. Left to right to left, and so on.” He draws the S curve on the woman in the printout.

  I feel really weird. “What are you saying? I’m wired backwards?”

  “Precisely!” He throws himself back in his chair, smiling with delight, and watches me.

  I feel totally rabbit-in-headlights. Three thoughts are chasing around in my head. One, Nick wants me to infiltrate this guy. Two, Ma can’t pay her hospital bills, and neither can I, and Nick will pay me. Three, Breck thinks he gets what the doctor is talking about.

  Oh, and four, I love this guy’s energy. Love it. I’ve never met anyone who was in this good a mood. Even better than my mother.

  “Tell me about chakra reversal and addicts,” I say.

  Dr. Katterfelto beams. He starts talking again. The neep flows over me and I kind of get it. It’s hard to concentrate, because I feel my hunger like a Doberman pinscher straining against the chain, jaws agape, saliva dripping, and it’s all I can do not to whimper when he reaches out and touches my hand with one finger.

  “—You must know an addict, I am sure, who seems to be unaware of their effect on the world, yet they throw off sparks—” He takes the finger away and makes gestures like sparks flying everywhere. “Such a person becomes like a vampire in her life.” My ears sharpen. Maybe my eyes bug out. “A person taking, taking, taking, even though she also gives. This is not her fault. Her chakra runs backward.” His fingertip makes circles in the air.

  “My mother,” I hear my voice murmur. I can’t take any of his energy. Not any of it. If I take a sip, I’ll want it all. “Wait, she’s like a what?” Now I’m paying attention. My nerves twang. “Because her heart chakra is turned around?”

  “It could be any one of the seven,” Katterfelto says, shrugging.

  “And you can fix that.”

  “Oh, I treat addicts. But I cannot always cure. If the root chakra is reversed, there is no changing them. The hunger is too deep a part of them, too fundamental to their being. Their incarnation is fixed. Rigid.”

  My head is whirling. Ma, the alcoholic in my life, the central fact that has determined everything I am and do. Is he saying she’s some kind of vampire?

  I see Svengooli in his straggly beard talking with relish and awe about Barbara Steele as a vampiress — how he admires and fears her!

  I see seventeen-year-old Hel trudging home from school, feeling darkness close around her as she nears her apartment, darker than any winter afternoon, turning on the TV. Young Hel is wishing she could be feared instead of fearing, desired instead of wanting and empty, pursued instead of lonely, taking instead of giving, giving, giving. Young Hel watches TV late into the night, until Jilly comes home from her cocktail waitress gig.

  And while Ma is asleep in the next room, Hel rummages in her tip apron every night, taking only a dollar, no more. Not enough, really. Never enough. Stealing it because she can’t bring herself by the light of day to ask her mother to give it to her, because Jilly works so hard, and her feet are so tired, and the customers are unkind, and she has to be happy and friendly no matter what, or they won’t give her what she needs.

  I’m like her. Living on crumbs and pleading with the world to let me clean up after them.

  And I’m a vampire.

  Now he tells me that Ma is a vampire, too.

  I turn away from the table. “This is kind of intense,” I say. I want to leave. Just go, find a crowded bus full of commuters and sip, sip, sip until I am full. In the evening they are numb and depressed and angry, so angry inside, and normally I can’t stand to take more than a snack’s worth from them because they taste so bad.

  But they know they will get back on the bus tomorrow. So they use all their tricks on themselves to make it not hurt. They’re numb. Because if they could feel this feeling, really feel it, they’d never go back to work again.

  Tonight I will sip until I am full. Fill myself up with their misery and self-numbing rage.

  Then I’ll find a mean drunk in a bar and take him out in the alley and reduce him to dust. Then I can really hate myself.

  “There is one more interesting thing here,” Katterfelto says, and he taps my picture with his pen.

  I won’t ask. I can’t handle any more.

  “There are signs here that your chakras once ran the other way. If this has happened once, this so-interesting reversal, it can happen again.” He makes eye contact, and I feel trapped and resentful and panicky and just a tiny grain of hope. “What is done can be undone.”

  Never breaking eye contact, he takes a card out of his pocket protector and slips it into my slack, sweaty hand.

  I bolt.

  Chapter Nine

  I wake up in a muck sweat at three in the morning. I can’t remember my dream. The first thought in my head is, They’re at the door.

  A heavy weight lies across my chest.

  It’s the cat.

  There is something wrong with the world.

  I often have this feeling, usually when reading the newspaper, which I do as seldom as possible, or if I happen to be in the bar when the news is on. Three in the morning is a terrible time to have existential angst.

  My heart is pounding.

  Then the cat starts purring.

  It’s as if I’ve asked a question, and Mommy has answered.

  She’s no pit bull, but right now she’s all I’ve got. Her kneading paws and her purring tell me, We’re safe, it’s good, I love you.

  I lie back, relaxing slowly, as the cat purrs on my chest. I don’t touch her with my hand. We have a deal about that. She sleeps on me, or sits on me when I’m awake and not moving, and I don’t try to suck the life out of her tiny furry body. Right now I’m so grateful to her I could bawl out loud.

  o0o

  That night we bout in front of twelve hundred fans at the Cicero Stadium and I take out four skaters in a row as if they
were highway cones popping into the air under my fender, including the fearsome Dom-De-Dom-Dom, recently voted Rookie of the Year and League’s Most Intimidating. Dom looks at me in surprise from the floor, but she grins. I’ve been careful not to seek Most Intimidating status in the league. I need derby too much.

  During the second half, Dom asks me if I’ve got something on my mind.

  “I’m cool,” I lie. “Why, are you defending your title?”

  “You’ve got some go-juice tonight.”

  “Yeah. New vitamin.” It’s called fear.

  “Well, get ready for some vitamin J for jam-it-up-your-ass,” she says, and she parks her butt in my face at the jam line.

  Leaning Power of Lisa adjusts her star hat panty and hunkers down with a thousand-yard stare.

  The double-whistle goes and I streak away from the line as if last night’s unremembered nightmares are catching up to me. I hear the fans roar. I’m putting everything I’ve got into it, and when I look around I see that I’ve cleared the pack and am half the length of the track away already. It’s too late to slow down. I’ve blown my cover.

  I don’t want to slow down. I’m scared and angry, scared of Agent Nick Jones and angry at myself for lusting for him and scared for my Ma and angry at the world.

  Behind me, Leaning Power of Lisa clears the pack and I throw away caution. I pour it on. Within nine seconds I’m lapping the pack. Then I’m passing Lisa again for a grand slam, five points.

  Eventually Lisa catches up with the pack, and I call the jam off.

  Everybody thumps me on the back.

  “Mother fuck, Hélan Vittle, what the fuck is that vitamin? I gotta get me some of that,” says Pound of Venus, my glamazon archnemesis, the city anti-magic cop. I respond suitably, panting, because that was a great jam, and because praise from Venus is rare, and moreover there is extra prana in the air and I want to suck it up.

  I’m careful to act tuckered out on my next jam, even though my opponent is rookie jammer Blood is the New Pink.