Infinite Dreams (25 page)

Last March John’s tax accountant had suggested that he could contribute $4000 to any legitimate charity, and actually make a few hundred bucks in the process, by dropping into a lower tax bracket. Not one to do things the easy or obvious way, John made various inquiries and, after a certain amount of bureaucratic tedium, founded the Young Gypsy Assimilation Council—with matching funds from federal, state and city governments, and a continuing Ford Foundation scholarship grant.

The YGAC was actually just a one-room office in a West Village brownstone, manned by volunteer help. It was filled with various pamphlets and broadsides, mostly written by John, explaining how young Gypsies could legitimately take advantage of American society. By becoming part of it, which was the part that old-line Gypsies didn’t care for. Jobs, scholarships, work-study programs, these things are for the
gadjos
. Poison to a Gypsy’s spirit.

In November a volunteer had opened the office in the morning to find a crude fire bomb, using a candle as a delayed-action fuse for five gallons of gasoline. The candle was guttering a fraction of an inch away from the line of powder that would have ignited the gas. In January it had been buckets of chicken entrails, poured into filing cabinets
and flung over the walls. So John found a tough young man who would sleep on the cot in the office at night; sleep like a cat with a shotgun beside him. There was no more trouble of that sort. Only old men and women who would file in silently staring, to take handfuls of pamphlets which they would drop in the hall and scuff into uselessness, or defile in a more basic way. But paper was cheap.

John threw the bolt on his door and hung his coat in the closet. He put the gun in a drawer in his writing desk and sat down to open the mail.

The shortest one yet: “Tonight, John Zold.
Armaja das.”
Lots of luck, he thought. Won’t even be home tonight; heavy date. Stay at her place, Gramercy Park. Lay a curse on me there? At the show or Sardi’s?

He opened two more letters, bills, and there was a knock at the door.

Not announced from downstairs. Maybe a neighbor. Guy next door was always borrowing something. Still. Feeling a little foolish, he put the gun back in his waistband. Put his coat back on in case it was just a neighbor.

The peephole didn’t show anything, bad. He drew the pistol and held it just out of sight, by the doorjamb, threw the bolt and eased open the door. It bumped into the Gypsy woman, too short to have been visible through the peephole. She backed away and said “John Zold.” He stared at her. “What do you want,
púridaia
? He could only remember a hundred or so words of Romani, but “grandmother” was one of them. What was the word for witch?

“I have a gift for you.” From her bag she took a dark green booklet, bent and with frayed edges, and gave it to him. It was a much-used Canadian passport, belonging to a William Belini. But the picture inside the front cover was one of John Zold.

Inside, there was an airline ticket in a Qantas envelope. John didn’t open it. He snapped the passport shut and handed it back. The old lady wouldn’t accept it.

“An impressive job. It’s flattering that someone thinks I’m so important.”

“Take it and leave forever, John Zold. Or I will have to do the second thing.”

He slipped the ticket envelope out of the booklet. “This, I will take. I can get your refund on it. The money will buy lots of posters and pamphlets.” He tried to toss the passport into her bag, but missed. “What is your second thing?”

She toed the passport back to him. “Pick that up.” She was trying to sound imperious, but it came out a thin, petulant quaver.

“Sorry, I don’t have any use for it. What is—”

“The second thing is your death, John Zold.” She reached into her bag.

He produced the pistol and aimed it down at her forehead. “No, I don’t think so.”

She ignored the gun, pulling out a handful of white chicken feathers. She threw the feathers over his threshold.
“Armaja das,”
she said, and then droned on in Romani, scattering feathers at regular intervals. John recognized
joovi
and
kari
, the words for woman and penis, and several other words he might have picked up if she’d pronounced them more clearly.

He put the gun back into its holster and waited until she was through. “Do you really think—”

“Armaja das”
she said again, and started a new litany. He recognized a word in the middle as meaning corruption or infection, and the last word was quite clear: death.
Méripen
.

“This nonsense isn’t going to …” But he was talking to the back of her head. He forced a laugh and watched her
walk past the elevator and turn the corner that led to the staircase.

He could call the guard. Make sure she didn’t get out the back way. Illegal entry. He suspected that she knew he wouldn’t want to go to the trouble, and it annoyed him slightly. He walked halfway to the phone, checked his watch and went back to the door. Scooped up the feathers and dropped them in the disposal. Just enough time. Fresh shave, shower, best clothes. Limousine to the station, train to the city, cab from Grand Central to her apartment.

The show was pure delight, a sexy revival of
Lysistrata:
Sardi’s was as ego-bracing as ever; she was a soft-hard woman with style and sparkle, who all but dragged him back to her apartment, where he was for the first time in his life impotent.

The psychiatrist had no use for the traditional props: no soft couch or bookcases lined with obviously expensive volumes. No carpet, no paneling, no numbered prints; not even the notebook or the expression of slightly disinterested compassion. Instead, she had a hidden recorder and an analytical scowl; plain stucco walls surrounding a functional desk and two hard chairs, period.

“You know exactly what the problem is,” she said.

John nodded. “I suppose. Some … residue from my early upbringing; I accept her as an authority figure. From the few words I could understand of what she said, I took, it was …”

“From the words
penis
and
woman
, you built your own curse. And you’re using it, probably to punish yourself for surviving the disaster that killed the rest of your family.”

“That’s pretty old-fashioned. And farfetched. I’ve had almost forty years to punish myself for that, if I felt responsible. And I don’t.”

“Still, it’s a working hypothesis.” She shifted in her
chair and studied the pattern of teak grain on the bare top of her desk. “Perhaps if we can keep it simple, the cure can also be simple.”

“All right with me,” John said. At $125 per hour, the quicker, the better.

“If you can see it, feel it, in this context, then the key to your cure is transference.” She leaned forward, elbows on the table, and John watched her breasts shifting with detached interest, the only kind of interest he’d had in women for more than a week. “If you can see
me
as an authority figure instead,” she continued, “then eventually I’ll be able to reach the child inside; convince him that there was no curse. Only a case of mistaken identity … nothing but an old woman who scared him. With careful hypnosis, it shouldn’t be too difficult.”

“Seems reasonable,” John said slowly. Accept this young
Geyri
as more powerful than the old witch? As a grown man, he could. If there was a frightened Gypsy boy hiding inside him, though, he wasn’t sure.

“523 784 00926/ /Hello, machine,” John typed. “Who is the best dermatologist within a 10-short-block radius?”

GOOD MORNING, JOHN. WITHIN STATED DISTANCE AND USING AS SOLE PARAMETER THEIR HOURLY FEE, THE MAXIMUM FEE IS $95/IIR, AND THIS IS CHARGED BY TWO DERMATOLOGISTS. DR. BRYAN DILL, 245 W. 45TII ST., SPECIALIZES IN COSMETIC DERMATOLOGY. DR. ARTHUR MAAS, 198 W. 44TH ST., SPECIALIZES IN SERIOUS DISEASES OF THE SKIN.

“Will Dr. Maas treat diseases of psychological origin?”

CERTAINLY. MOST DERMATOSIS IS.

Don’t get cocky, machine. “Make me an appointment with Dr. Maas, within the next two days.”

YOUR APPOINTMENT IS AT 1:45 TOMORROW, FOR ONE HOUR. THIS WILL LEAVE YOU 45 MINUTES TO GET TO LUCHOW’S FOR YOUR APPOINTMENT WITH THE AMCSE GROUP. I HOPE IT IS NOTHING SERIOUS, JOHN.

“I trust it isn’t.” Creepy empathy circuits. “Have you arranged for a remote terminal at Luchow’s?”

THIS WAS NOT NECESSARY. I WILL PATCH THROUGH CONED/GENERAL. LEASING THEIR LUCHOW’S FACILITY WILL COST ONLY.588 THE PROJECTED COST OF TRANSPORTATION AND SETUP LABOR FOR A REMOTE TERMINAL.

That’s my machine, always thinking. “Very good, machine. Keep this station live for the time being.”

THANK YOU, JOHN. The letters faded but the ready light stayed on.

He shouldn’t complain about the empathy circuits; they were his baby, and the main reason Bellcomm paid such a bloated salary, to keep him. The copyright on the empathy package was good for another 12 years, and they were making a fortune, timesharing it out. Virtually every large computer in the world was hooked up to it, from the ConEd/General that ran New York, to Geneva and Akademia Nauk, which together ran half of the world.

Most of the customers gave the empathy package a name, usually female. John called it “machine” in a not-too-successful attempt to keep from thinking of it as human.

He made a conscious effort to restrain himself from picking at the carbuncles on the back of his neck. He should have gone to the doctor when they first appeared, but the psychiatrist had been sure she could cure them; the “corruption” of the second curse. She’d had no more success with that than with the impotence. And this morning, boils had broken out on his chest and groin and shoulderblades,
and there were sore spots on his nose and cheekbone. He had some opiates, but would stick to aspirin until after work.

Dr. Maas called it impetigo; gave him a special kind of soap and some antibiotic ointment. He told John to make another appointment in two weeks, ten days. If there was no improvement they would take stronger measures. He seemed young for a doctor, and John couldn’t bring himself to say anything about the curse. But he already had a doctor for that end of it, he rationalized.

Three days later he was back in Dr. Maas’s office. There was scarcely a square inch of his body where some sort of lesion hadn’t appeared. He had a temperature of 101.4°. The doctor gave him systemic antibiotics and told him to take a couple of days’ bed rest. John told him about the curse, finally, and the doctor gave him a booklet about psychosomatic illness. It told John nothing he didn’t already know.

By the next morning, in spite of strong antipyretics, his fever had risen to over 102°. Groggy with fever and pain-killers, John crawled out of bed and travelled down to the West Village, to the YGAC office. Fred Gorgio, the man who guarded the place at night, was still on duty.

“Mr. Zold!” When John came through the door, Gorgio jumped up from the desk and took his arm. John winced from the contact, but allowed himself to be led to a chair. “What’s happened?” John by this time looked like a person with terminal smallpox.

For a long minute John sat motionlessly, staring at the inflamed boils that crowded the backs of his hands. “I need a healer,” he said, talking with slow awkwardness because of the crusted lesions on his lips.

“A
chóvihánni?”
John looked at him uncomprehendingly. “A witch?”

“No.” He moved his head from side to side. “An herb. doctor. Perhaps a white witch.”

“Have you gone to the
gadjo
doctor?”

“Two. A Gypsy did this to me; a Gypsy has to cure it.”

“It’s in your head, then?”

“The
gadjo
doctors say so. It can still kill me.”

Gorgio picked up the phone, punched a local number, and rattled off a fast stream of a patois that used as much Romani and Italian as English. “That was my cousin,” he said, hanging up. “His mother heals, and has a good reputation. If he finds her at home, she can be here in less than an hour.”

John mumbled his appreciation. Gorgio led him to the couch.

The healer woman was early, bustling in with a wicker bag full of things that rattled. She glanced once at John and Gorgio, and began clearing the pamphlets off a side table. She appeared to be somewhere between fifty and sixty years old, tight bun of silver hair bouncing as she moved around the room, setting up a hot-plate and filling two small pots with water. She wore a black dress only a few years old, and sensible shoes. The only lines on her face were laugh lines.

She stood over John and said something in gentle, rapid Italian, then took a heavy silver crucifix from around her neck and pressed it between his hands. “Tell her to speak English … or Hungarian,” John said.

Gorgio translated. “She says that you should not be so affected by the old superstitions. You should be a modern man, and not believe in fairy tales for children and old people.”

John stared at the crucifix, turning it slowly between his fingers. “One old superstition is much like another.” But he didn’t offer to give the crucifix back.

The smaller pot was starting to steam and she dropped
a handful of herbs into it. Then she returned to John and carefully undressed him.

When the herb infusion was boiling, she emptied a package of powdered arrowroot into the cold water in the other pot, and stirred it vigorously. Then she poured the hot solution into the cold and stirred some more. Through Gorgio, she told John she wasn’t sure whether the herb treatment would cure him. But it would make him more comfortable.

The liquid jelled and she tested the temperature with her fingers. When it was cool enough, she started to pat it gently on John’s face. Then the door creaked open, and she gasped. It was the old crone who had put the curse on John in the first place.

The witch said something in Romani, obviously a command, and the woman stepped away from John.

“Are you still a skeptic, John Zold?” She surveyed her handiwork. “You called this nonsense.”

John glared at her but didn’t say anything. “I heard that you had asked for a healer,” she said, and addressed the other woman in a low tone.