City of Masks (11 page)

"Might as well call me Fitz. Everybody else does."

"I noticed. I take it you have social contact with the Beaufortes?"

"Some. I'm not real close - friend of the family, I guess you could say. My father was a lifelong friend of Richard, that's Lila's father, and Charmian. But we're all in the same krewe, travel in some of the same circles - old families, you know. When this all blew up and they were looking for some . . . advice . . . on Lila, they came to me. She was amenable."

" 'The same crew'?"

"Krewe, spelled with a
k
and an extra
e
at the end. It's a club, or maybe you could call it a fraternal organization. All we really do is plan our Mardi Gras parade and festivities. Probably sounds silly to an out of towner, but around here it's a pretty big thing." He grinned as he looked at her to gauge her reaction, but after they'd walked on a few more steps, he sobered. "I didn't join the mob because it became obvious to me that you have Lila's best interests at heart, and because she seems to trust you She has a hard time talking to me - there's a lot of denial there, and a lot of shame. She's a damned Beauforte, and Beaufortes don't
have
weaknesses or breakdowns. But I could see you two had established good rapport. And she needs an ally now, very badly."

Cree nodded.
Rapport
was hardly a sufficient term, though; rather, an inexplicably deep sympathetic resonance. At its core was the feeling that they had something crucial in common. Both were deeply shaken by an unexpected, undesired, undecipherable revelation that necessitated reinterpreting the laws of nature and reassessing the meaning of personhood. Caught between an absolutely convincing experience that was utterly at odds with normal life and the beliefs of a skeptical world. Prone to shattering vulnerability, yet determined to find the strength to confront it and master it.

They passed a couple of kids playing on the lake side of the levee, two boys about the same age as Zoe and Hyacinth, the low sun burnishing their black skin with gold highlights. Wide grins and lots of fidget and goofus, a dog barking at them from below. They each had a square of cardboard ripped from some box, and were sliding on it down the grass of the embankment - sledding, Cree realized, in a land that had never known snow. It took a lot of paddling and kicking get to the bottom. Their cheerful abandon felt sparkling to Cree, effervescent.

"I was also too curious to lynch you outright," Fitzpatrick went on. "I looked you up in the American Psychological Association roster. Ph. D.from Duke, master's from Harvard, won the prestigious Haverford Fellowship. Which, I have to tell you, turned me green - I applied for that bastard but was deemed unworthy. Fact is, I'm dying to know how you got into parapsychology. From your resume, I wouldn't think you were the type."

"I don't think there is a 'type.' I had a paranormal experience nine years ago that changed my outlook dramatically. My life has been something of a . . . a n ongoing field study to understand it ever since."Cree stopped, surprised at herself. Ordinarily, she didn't go anywhere near her own upheaval. Fitzpatrick must be a great psychoanalyst, she decided, his sincerity and unjudgmental interest easily drawing out his patients.

"You going to tell me what it was?"

"It's complex," Cree said lightly. "Maybe some other time."

Fitzpatrick nodded, the good shrink knowing when not to push further.

They had come to a street that cut through the levee. The grassy mound was capped by a cement wall of the same height, mounted with two massive steel doors that were open now but could obviously be slid shut on their steel tracks. Fitzpatrick led her down the slope to the flat lawn, then along the street to a road that ran close to the shore. A steady stream of cars and pickups rolled by, people driving with windows open, music racketing.

"Saturday evening, good weather," Fitzpatrick told her, "this is the place to see and be seen. Cruise along here, go back around Robert E.Lee Boulevard, and do it again."

They turned left to continue along the shore road and soon came to a bridge over a little river. All along the bridge, people of all ages and colors stood trailing strings into the water, lounging against the railing, laughing and chatting, listening to music from boom boxes.

Fitzpatrick saw her curious look. "Mudbug season," he explained."Crawfish. Regional delicacy. Just tie a turkey neck to a piece of string. Crawfish latches on, you just pull him up and toss him in your bucket. Or you can put down a little wire cage. After a couple of hours, you've got enough o f ' em to go over there and steam up a pile and eat 'em fresh."He gestured to the wide sward of grass ahead, where several families sat around grills mounted with big pots. Cree caught a whiff of swampy smell in the charcoal scent.

Once they had crossed the bridge, Fitzpatrick led her right to the water's edge, where a seemingly endless concrete breakwater went down in steps to the waves six feet below. Scattered along it, people sat with their lines in the water. Down close to the waves and mostly out of view of the general melee, lovers cuddled discreetly in the slanted sunlight.

Fitzpatrick had dug his hands deep into his pockets again. "So you want to tell me about Lila's experience?"

Cree told him the story, starting with the shoe tip and ending with the attack by the boar-headed man. She didn't interject any of her own opinions.

"Holy shit." Fitzpatrick looked shaken. "Damn! That poor woman."

"That wasn't all of it. Lila ended her narrative very abruptly. She's still keeping something to herself."

"Do you have any idea what?"

Cree did - Lila's body language and her sudden compassion for Jack suggested what came next. But she'd wait until she heard it from Lila before jumping to conclusions or sharing assumptions. Cree just shook her head. Instead, she told him about the polygraph scroll and how it corroborated Lila's trauma.

Fitzpatrick was staring at the lake's western horizon, his forehead troubled, his hands still in his pockets. "Got to get those brain scans," he said. "Soon." He shot a sideways glance at Cree. "So —don't take this the wrong way — how do you explain ghosts that are seen by just one person and no one else? Without explaining it as a psychopathology?"

"Most ghosts
are
seen by just one person. It's just a matter of variations in sensitivity. Not so different from other senses — any audiologist will tell you that some people hear higher sound frequencies than others. Wine tasters have verifiably more acute senses of taste and smell."

"But, I mean . . . a boar-headed man, a talking
wolf?
Are those typical denizens of the otherworld?"

"There's only one world - this one. It's just bigger and stranger than we know."

Fitzpatrick nodded, accepting the point.

"And the answer to your question is, I've never encountered creatures like Lila's. I'm not sure what to think. Except that, as I'm sure you know, reality and psychology mix and recombine in an endless number of ways." Cree went on to explain the idea of epiphenomenal manifestations.

Again Fitzpatrick nodded, but his brows knit in doubt or puzzlement."I don't have any background in your field. Zero. I've never had a paranormal experience. I haven't any idea what your diagnostic methodology is, or what your models of psychology are. I'm coming at this from a strictly psychiatric paradigm, and from here the whole thing of ghosts doesn't make sense."

"What exactly doesn't make sense?"

Fitzpatrick took his hands out of his pockets long enough to grapple the air as if trying to wring the right words from it. "Any of it! I mean, what
is
a ghost?"

"It's a loose and imprecise term for a set of phenomena we don't understand well. There are many forms of ghost, and they probably manifest through many different mechanisms. But most are not so much beings as they are experiences. Essentially, you might say, most ghosts are mental constructs."

"Mental constructs! So, really, you're saying that ghosts are psychological in origin." Fitzpatrick sounded relieved at being back on more familiar turf. "Meaning you're basically a . . . a practicing psychiatrist who specializes in patients who think they're seeing ghosts!"

"Not at all! Ghosts are completely and objectively real. I mean that in the sense that life and self and the world are also mental constructs. There's a hidden link between material reality and consciousness, a link between mind and world. And that's what I'm most motivated to explore."

He looked at her with keen appreciation. " 'A hidden link between material reality and consciousness' - God, I love it!" Then sobered and turned thoughtful. "That's really the . . . crux, isn't it? The place where philosophy, psychology, medicine, and religion converge. Even physics, nowadays . . ."

Cree nodded. Fitzpatrick caught on fast.

"Okay," Fitzpatrick went on, "so ghosts
do
have an independent existence outside the minds of those who perceive them - "

"Yes and no." Cree smiled at his confounded expression. "Most ghosts appear to be residual, fragmentary elements of human consciousness - intense memories, traumas, feelings, or just drives — that continue to manifest independently of a living body. They may require a living human consciousness to manifest themselves."

"But not all ghosts?"

"Some are more fully integrated personalities, more complete beings. And I suspect there are other entities as well, I'm not sure what to call them. There's a possibility that some ghosts are rare forms of geomagnetic phenomena. Some might be manifestations of nonhuman entities —most cultures have at one time or another believed there were spirits of the earth, or of animals, or local gods of one kind or another. But I don't know."

"But you've . . . experienced . . . ghosts. The more human variety —you've
met
them?"

"Often."

"Oh, man." Fitzpatrick shook his head, frustrated but grinning. "So what's it like?"

"Different every time. It takes a while for me to get there. Usually, it starts with moods or vague feelings. I'm highly synesthetic, so the . . .impressions or sensations come across to me as sounds of a particular color, or tactile feelings of a specific odor, or, I don't know, maybe vertigo that's like citrus mixed with sadness — not easy to translate. Further along, I experience their specific thoughts, sensations, and emotions. In some cases, it can be just like a conversation."

That was it for Fitzpatrick. Abruptly he turned aside and threw himself down on a bench that faced the rippling expanse of water. At a picnic table forty feet behind him, a family was busy with a big pile of steamed orange crawfish, breaking the little lobsters apart and bickering noisily. Sprawling at one end of the bench, Fitzpatrick gestured for Cree to sit also, and then laughed at himself. "Okay. I'm out of my depth. I've run out of academic terminology. I have to go back to when I was a kid. Question: If ghosts are just these . . . pieces of a personality, sort of floating loose, how come they wear clothes? How come they even look like human beings?"

Cree chuckled with him. A childish question, and a good one. "They don't always. But if they do, it goes back to their being mental constructs. And for better or worse, our sense of ourselves is that we have human forms and wear clothes. How do you picture your mother - the way she looked when you were a kid?"

Fitzpatrick thought about it. "Yeah. I sure don't picture her without clothes."

"Now take it a step further — picture yourself back then."

"Yup. I'm a little freckly guy wearing blue corduroy overalls. Damn!" Fitzpatrick thought for a moment. "Okay, another question. How come they hang out in particular places? Why do they haunt particular houses? Why don't they just, I don't know . . . drift off into space?"

Again Cree laughed. Fitzpatrick had set this up nicely — being honest about his skepticism but truly trying to understand, easing it with good-natured self-deprecation. He'd set this up as a game of twenty questions, not an interrogation.

"Well, maybe a lot of them do just dissipate. But most ghosts are highly localized, haunting a specific place such as a house, or even just a specific
room
of a house, and nowhere else. My colleague Edgar Mayfield has a theory that localized haunts happen because the ghost came into existence in a particular geomagnetic field, a particular locale. He thinks an intense human experience can make an electromagnetic imprint on a local field, like a recording that can be played back only in that environment."

"You sound a little dubious about such a mechanistic explanation."

He
was
perceptive. "Yeah. I tend to think of it in existential terms. As a mental construct, especially one reenacting a specific experience, a ghost thinks of itself not only in terms of a body image — male or female, with a specific face and wearing specific clothes, for example - but also in terms of a particular physical environment. Usually it's the perimortem environment - the place the person was in at the moment of death, which is a very poignant moment. But often crucial memories replay at that moment, too, so it can be confusing for me. If you had died suddenly back at the Wan-ens' house, and your consciousness perseverated in some way, you would most likely manifest elements of their living room along with your own body image. A ghost is just an echo of a whole being's experience at a crucial moment, complete with an environment, smells, sounds, objects, thoughts, feelings. I experience the ghost's
world
as much as the ghost itself. That's because 'world' is in fact equally an artifact of consciousness."