“She knows what it means.”

“If our enemies capture you . . .”

“She knows what that means. She can’t hallucinate her way out of that!”

“Sent without food or drink . . .”

“Or clothing?”

“Oh, let her have the stuff; it’s bark cloth anyway.”

“Let her have the stuff; bark cloth anyway.”

I rest beneath a traveler’s tree.

“This the whole dream?” Catherine asks, approaching.

“Yes, this is the whole dream.”

“And what happens after the traveler’s tree part?” she asked, peering down at me, her finger stuck up her nose.

“I never get beyond the traveler’s tree.”

“Do you know what I keep expecting?” asks Catherine, leaning against the tree.

“What?”

“I keep expecting this traveler’s tree to open up and take you in. Make a new home for you.”

“Things don’t happen that way.”

“In dreams they do,” says Catherine.

“Not in my dreams they don’t.”

“This must be some pretty pedestrian dream, girl,” she says.

“My dreams are wild; anything can happen. Anything is possible.”

“Is that possible?”

“What that?”

“Is it possible, Catherine?” I badger.

She leans her cheek against the tree. “I don’t like this dream.

How did you get me into it anyway? I want out.”

I shrug. “When a dream takes over, what can you do, kid?”

“If I were a traveler’s tree, do you know what I’d do?”

“What? You’d open up for me?”

“Sure,” she says, smiling. “I’d open up and eat you!”

62

Ernest and I sat across from each other in the peacock chairs.

“Your book on Bahian healers is quite nice,” he said. “I liked your dedication too: for the healers.”

“That means for you too.”

“I haven’t healed anyone.”

“Well, you try.”

“Everyone tries.”

“No, everyone doesn’t try either. Not at all.”

He said nothing for a moment. He scratched his moustache. Had a smell like lavender and mint. He was wearing a dress shirt, but blue jeans.

“I like this a lot better than your fiction actually. It reads like fiction though. I mean the style is fictional, but there seems a lot more range. It’s amusing and serious, almost surreal in places. And the healers are very interesting, as personalities. One seems almost mythical; his section read like a sort of fable.” He shook his head. “I liked it a lot. And it’s intelligent. I mean you can tell an intelligent woman wrote it.”

“And not just a horny one?

He frowned, stared out the window.

“That’s what an article called me, a group of us. It was meant to be a joke.”

“What, the article?”

“No, my saying that just now.”

I felt embarrassed.

He said, “It’s sort of in my area of interest, though it’s not exactly what you’d call a science. But that psychokinetic stuff isn’t really a science either. Borderline. Lasers in medicine, that’s the future. But there are all sorts of forms of medicine that aren’t official but that work. Still, it’s healing with light; who’d have thought that? Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if it were easier for us.”