look, it's a perfectly harmless ceremony, nothing to get excited about. it'll be over in a few minutes anyway. mr. blacktree is a shaman who gets his power from the thunder, and it's imperative he conclude his rituals while the storm is still going on.
all that's going on in there, doctor, is a simple apache prayer for my father's recovery.
the markings he's made on my father's arms are from the pollen of the tule plant. the twigs have no significance other than they've been struck by lightning and are consequently appeals to the spirit of lightning. it's all entirely harmless, a religious ceremony, not a medical one.
on the other hand, it won't kill him, doctor.
thank you.
yes. i still have to arrange an ambulance service. is there a phone around i could use?
thank you.
hello. i'd like to arrange an ambulance for one-thirty tomorrow afternoon.  thank you.
drummond, first name, barbara. i'll pay cash.
no, you're to pick up my father, drummond, edward, at the manhattan medical center, holly pavilion, room eight-o-six. it's a stretcher case. i presume you provide the stretcher.
he's to be taken to american airlines, yes.  no.  kennedy airport, flight seven-two-nine to yuma, arizona. i'll accompany the patient.  yes, thank you.
i believe in everything, doctor.
yes.
my father, you should know, was a very successful doctor in boston, a member of the harvard medical faculty. he was a widower, and i was his only child. he was not an especially religious man, a sober methodist. one evening, seven years ago, he attended a pentecostal meeting in the commons rooms at harvard and suddenly found himself speaking in tongues. that is to say, he suddenly sank to his knees at the back of the room and began to talk fluently in a language which no one had ever heard before. this sort of thing happens frequently at pentecostal meetings, and they began to happen regularly to my father. it was not unusual to walk into our home and find my father sitting in his office, utterly serene and happily speaking to the air in this strange foreign tongue. i was, at that time twenty years old and having my obligatory affair with a minority group, in my case a hopi indian, a post-graduate fellow at harvard doing his doctorate in the aboriginal languages of the southwest. one day, i brought the indian boy home just as my father was sinking to his knees in the entrance foyer in one of his trances. the indian wheeled in his tracks and said, "well, i'll be a sonofabitch." you see, my father was speaking an apache dialect, an obscure dialect at that, spoken only by a ragged band of unreconstructed indians who had rejected the reservation and were living in total isolation in the sierra madre mountains of northern mexico. well! what do you say to that, dr. bock?
no, no, you miss the point, doctor. not my father's conversion -- mine. you see, i had been hitting the acid pretty regularly at that time. i had achieved a few minor sensory deformities, some suicidal despairs, but nothing as wild as fluency in an obscure apache dialect. i mean, like wow, man! i mean, here was living afflatus right before my eyes! within a week, my father had closed his beacon hill practice and set out to start a mission in the mexican mountains. and i turned in my s.d.s. card and my crash helmet and followed him. it was a disaster, at least for me. my father had received the revelation, not i. he stood gaunt on a mountain slope and preached the apocalypse to solemnly amused indians. i masturbated a great deal. we lived in a grass wickiup and ate raw rabbit and crushed pion nuts. it was hideous. within two months, i was back in boston, a hollow shell and dizzy with dengue, disenchanted with everything. i turned to austerity, combed my hair tight and entered nursing school. i became haggard, driven and had shamelessly incestuous dreams about my father. i took up with some of the senior staff at the hospital. one of them, a portly psychiatrist, explained i was generated by an unresolved lust for my father. i apparently cracked up. one day, they found me walking to work naked and screaming obscenities. there was talk of institutionalizing me, so i packed a bag and went back to my father in the sierra madre mountains. i've been there ever since. that's three years. my father is, of course, mad as a hatter. i watch over him and have been curiously content. you see, doctor, i believe in everything.
i thought i was obvious as hell. i'm trying to tell you i have a thing for middle-aged men.
you've been admiring a lot more than that.
rubbish.
right on.
of course, i do.
yes, of course.
sounds to me like a familiar case of morbid menopause.
well, it's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, doctor. you obviously enjoy it so much.
twenty-seven.
mr. blacktree disapproves of my miniskirt, but it was the only thing i had to come to the city with. back at the tribe, i wear ankle-length buckskin.
potassium. you take enough of this stuff, it'll kill you, doc. it occurred to me that i might have read you wrong, that you really were suicidal. so i came back.
what time is it?
talk to me about what?
is this your way of saying you'd like me to stay in town a few more days?
i expect you can call me barbara, considering you ravished me three times last night.
oh, look at him, pretending he didn't count. you were as puffed up as a toad about it. punched a couple of holes in your crusade for universal impotence, didn't it? i think we're on a first name basis by now. i'll call you herb.
no, i don't want my father in this hospital. i had a dream about this hospital. i dreamt this enormous starched white tile building suddenly erupted like a volcano, and all the patients, doctors, nurses, attendants, orderlies, the whole line staff, the food service people, the aged, the lame -- and you right in the middle -- were stampeding in one hideous screaming suicidal mass into the sea. i'm taking my father out of here -- and as quickly as i can.
well, let me put it this way. i love you. i fancied you from the first moment you came lumbering down that hallway upstairs. i said to mr. blacktree, "who's that hulking bear of a man?" the apaches are reverential about bears. they won't eat bear meat; they never skin bears. bear is thought of as both benign and evil, but very strong power. men with bear power are highly respected and are frequently said to be great healers.
i said to mr. blacktree, "that man gets his power from the bear."
all right, let me put it this way, herb. my father and i accept the implacability of death. if he dies, he dies, but i'm taking him out of here and back to mexico about one o'clock this afternoon. i want you to come with us, because i love you and want children.
we could use you down there, you know. there's a curiously high incidence of t.b. and you'd be a doctor again, herb. you'd be necessary again. if you love me, i don't see what other choice you have.
oh, for heaven's sake, herb, i ought to know if a man loves me or not. you must have told me half a hundred times last night you loved me. you murmured it, shouted it; one time, you opened the window and bellowed it out into the street.
gratitude for what?
well, my god, what do you think love is?
it's up to ten days now.
no. i've had these prophetic dreams for seven nights. seven is a sinister number. the meaning of these dreams is very clear, seven times as clear. i am to get my father and you out of this hospital before we are all destroyed.
yeah?
so how come, eight hours ago, you were trying to kill yourself with an overdose of potassium?
my hotel. i have to check out. mr. blacktree doesn't speak any english.
of course. i have to settle the bill here and pack my father. and i think you need a few hours alone to make your decisions.
you're a very tired and very damaged man. you've had a hideous marriage and i assume a few tacky affairs along the way. you're understandably reluctant to get involved again. and, on top of that, here i am with the preposterous idea you throw everything up and go off with me to some barren mountains of mexico. it sounds utterly mad, i know. on the other hand, you obviously find this world as desolate as i do. you did try to kill yourself last night. so that's it, herb. either me and the mountains or the bottle of potassium. i'll be back in an hour or so. i'll be in my father's room.
i can't make it here, herb. i'll crack up. i cracked up once already. one week here, and i'd be running naked through the streets screaming again. i can retain my sanity only in a simple society.
i am being sensible. what is it you're so afraid of leaving here? your plastic home? your conditioned air? your synthetic clothes? your instant food? i'm offering you green silence and solitude, the natural order of things. mostly, i'm offering me. i think we're beautiful, herb.
i don't know why you even hesitate. what's holding you here? is it your wife?
herb, don't ask me to stay here with you, because i love you, and i will. and we'll both be destroyed.
i've got the bill here to pay yet.
i'll go pay the bill.
we all thought you were at death's door! what're you doing out of bed?
what happened? did he say anything to you?
what do you mean he killed two doctors and a nurse?
god, what do we do now? let me take him back to mexico. it's a simple world there. if you turn him in, they'll just cage him in the rockland state hospital for the criminally insane. let me take him back, herb.
oh dear, he's having another revelation.
the ambulance is here.
we have an emergency here.
give him an ambu bag and an airway.
what do we do now?
we have to hurry, dad.