The Link (18 page)

As she leaves, she blows him a kiss, Peter sees it and he and Robert exchange a look.

Then Robert returns to Westheimer’s speech. Sighing wearily as Westheimer says, “—been clearly established that claims of health improvement after so-called healings are directly proportional to the patients’ lack of education.”

Later. Close to lunch. Robert returns from the water fountain to find Peter introducing a middle-aged woman, thin, blonde, slightly garish looking.

“Animal experiments with healers can be most useful,” he begins.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Westheimer makes no attempt to muffle his voice. Saying something to Stafford, he lurches to his feet and makes a show of his exit, Peter’s disapproving look lost on him.

“Animals being incapable of faking or imagining non-existent ailments,” Peter continues, “the results of their exposure to healers provide evidence unclouded by possibilities of psychological involvement.”

The woman—BRENDA TURNER—speaks. Technically, she tells them, she is not a healer. It is just that, since childhood, she has had this ability to communicate with animals; to “hear” in her head what they’re thinking.

“They tell me what’s wrong with them,” she says. “The healing, if it takes place, does so through customary medical means.”

CUT.

A STABLE at Belmont Park race track. A trainer takes Brenda to the stall of an ailing racehorse.

“We don’t know what’s wrong with her,” he says. “She hasn’t been ill for almost a year but she just won’t run.”

They reach the stall. The horse is looking out and Brenda moves to it. She doesn’t speak, just puts her face close to the horse’s head as though listening.

An eerie scene. The horse’s eyes move to her and hold. It stands immobile. Moments.

Brenda shakes her head. “She has sores on her lungs and trouble with her intestines.”

The trainer gapes at her. He has told her nothing. As a matter of fact, the horse had pneumonia when it was two and the previous year it had almost died of an intestinal virus.

Back to the seminar. “I first realized that I could know what animals were thinking when I was twelve,” Brenda says.

CUT.

Young Brenda Turner is walking home from school when a dog comes bounding off the porch of its house and runs at her.

Startled at first, she becomes intrigued when the dog stops in its tracks in front of her and looks at her intently.

“I knew what that dog was thinking,” her voice continues. “I just knew it.”

Brenda walks up to the house and knocks on the door. A woman opens it.

“Your dog has a great big foxtail stuck inside his right leg and it hurts him,” she says.

Back to seminar. “I never found out if those people took their dog to the vet. I do know that was what the dog was suffering from.”

Her main work is in horse racing circles, she explains, but she does work with all kinds of animals.

Robert sits staring at her.

Wondering.

Peter can’t have lunch with Robert; he has to attend a meeting.

“Do be back at two though,” he says. “I have a little surprise for you.”

Robert is starting out by himself when he runs into Teddie at the elevators. Teddie has had it for the day. “These tests are boring me into a state of stupefaction,” he says.

Robert gets an idea and asks if he can take Teddie to lunch. Teddie says no, he never eats out. “Every restaurant in this town is a potential source of death by ptomaine,” he observes.

If Robert would like to come back to his apartment, Carla will feed them both. It isn’t far away.

Robert accepts and they walk to Teddie’s apartment, chatting as they go.

Robert tells him that Carla seems to be a lovely girl. She must make Teddie happy.

“Nonsense,” Teddie answers. “I would not demean myself with happiness.”

He looks at Christmas decorations being put up in the stores they pass. “I am, on the other hand, usually happy around Christmas thinking of all the lovely presents I am not going to give people I hate.”

Robert smiles and tells the older man that he and Cathy have decided that Teddie isn’t quite as dark a personality as he makes out.

“What a terrible thing to say to me,” says Teddie, straight-faced. Robert asks him when he first found out he was psychic.

“When did
you
first find out?” Teddie counters.

“I asked first,” says Robert.

“Still denying it?” asks Teddie, looking at him.

“Not exactly.”

“Still denying something,” Teddie tells him. “I look inside your head and see a wall.”

He turns back to the front. “To answer your impolite and thoroughly uncalled for question, I had an accident when I was seventeen, a skull concussion.” He thought that a consequent period of ESP was far behind him when that “damn woman” came to see him perform.

In the days between what happened in the nightclub and his reluctant agreement to be tested at ESPA, “I went through seventeen varieties of hell trying to deny what had taken place.”

Robert will save himself at least ten of these varieties by accepting his ability and getting on with it.

They reach Teddie’s apartment where Carla gets disturbed because she didn’t know Robert was coming and looks “a sight”. She is in the bathroom almost as soon as they enter.

“You are bewitching enough! I’m ravenous!” Teddie shouts.

She curses at him in German.

“What am I, an aging Semite doing with this Nazi bitch?” Teddie says without apparent rancor.

Robert pays appreciative attention to the mass of books in Teddie’s living room all non-fiction: philosophy, psychology and history predominating.

“I have come to the conclusion, after all my reading,” Teddie says, “that Sanai of Afghanistan reduced everything to its appropriate level when he wrote ‘Humanity is asleep, concerned only with what is useless, living in a wrong world’.”

He sits, lights a cigar. “All right, what is it you want?” he asks.

Robert is taken back, then realizes that there is no point in denying that he had a reason for inviting Teddie to lunch.

Can Teddie “do his thing” and travel to the house in Brooklyn? The address at any rate; for all he knows the house may have been demolished years before to make way for an apartment house, an office building, a bowling alley.

“You were right about me living in two houses at the same time,” he tells the older man. “Mentally, I seem to be.”

Teddie closes his eyes and, in a short while, “travels” to Brooklyn.

“It’s still there,” he says. “No one’s living in it but it’s there.”

Robert swallows dryly.

“I’ll go up on the porch,” says Teddie. “I’m looking in the window. Can’t see much. White curtains in the way. At least they were white once upon a time.”

Robert shivers, a QUICK SHOT of the rain on the window, the white curtain, crossing his mind.

“You want me to go in?” asks Teddie.

Robert draws in shaking breath. “Yes, please,” he murmurs.

“All right.” Teddie blows out smoke, his eyes still shut. “I’m in the living room. Still furnished. Old stuff. Archway to the dining room, a doorway to the kitchen. Very gloomy here. Can’t say I like it. Is it haunted?”

Robert shivers again, answers mutedly, “I don’t know.”

“Nothing in the dining room. Smells old. Look at that stove, it’s an antique. I see the backyard through the window. Barely, the glass is so dirty. Very barren out there.”

“All right, let’s go upstairs.”

Silence. Robert stares at him, his heartbeat thudding. Seconds tick by.

“Oh,” says Teddie suddenly. He opens his eyes and looks at Robert.

“Something up there,” he says. He whistles softly. “Waiting; waiting.

“I’d stay away from there if I were you.”

When Robert returns to ESPA, Stafford is completing a speech. Robert takes a seat and tries to pay attention but what Teddie has told him preys on his mind.

“—would involve, of course, an energy of some sort transmitted from the so-called healer to the patient, said energy perhaps taking the form of an electromagnetic wave emitted by the so-called healer in some manner as yet unknown, a wave which could be a very long radio wave, a much shorter radio or television wave or one with a wavelength of mere centimeters, similar to a microwave radiation.”

Hearing only fragments of Stafford’s address, Robert’s attention is drawn to a woman sitting next to Peter in the front row. She looks familiar.

He tries to see who she is as Stafford bumbles on about scientific groups presenting evidence that non-thermal effects do arise when low-level microwaves are directed at living systems.

He can’t see who the woman is. Or he suspects who she is and hopes to God he’s wrong.

“Alternatively,” Stafford finishes, “the so-called healer might modify an imbalance of electrical potential between various parts of the body, an action for which there is some minor evidence but, of course, a total absence of detailed mechanism.”

Peter rises as Stafford sits to a polite smattering of applause.

“Our next speaker is a psychic healer who functions under the aegis of a Spiritualist church,” he begins.

Robert doesn’t hear the rest, realizing that it’s Ruth. “Oh, no,” he murmurs.

Peter sees him and sits beside him as Ruth moves onto the speaker’s platform. “Surprised?” he whispers.

“You might say that,” Robert replies.

Seeing his expression, Peter asks him what’s wrong. Robert tells him that Ruth is his sister, much to Peter’s startlement. He’d picked her because of her last name, that was the surprise. He never dreamed that she might be related to Robert, much less his sister.

“I apologize if this is awkward for you in any way,” he says.

While they are whispering, Ruth is reciting, to the gathering, a prayer she uses for spiritual healing.

She does not get to the end of it before Westheimer complains.

“I assumed this seminar to be grounded in
science
,” he says wearily.

“We’re trying to examine the subject from all points of view,” Peter reminds him.

“Yes, of course,” mutters Westheimer, loud enough for all to hear.

Ruth sees Robert and reacts with a faint smile and gesture, Westheimer turning to see whom she is greeting. Robert’s flat expression gives nothing away.

Ruth then begins describing auras as she sees them.

“The physical aura is located next to the body, of course,” she says.

“Of course,” says Westheimer. Robert glares at him.

We see an illustration of Ruth’s following words.

“Next to it is the mental aura which represents all thinking in the individual.

“On the outside is the spiritual aura.

“If you have seen the prisms of a chandelier penetrated by light rays,” she goes on, “you know the colors which exist in the aura. These colors are always changing in a variety of subtle ways.

“Anger, for instance, can cause a tremendous blood-colored radiation to suffuse the aura. Distress can cause what might be called a
wobbling
of the aura, especially over the head. Depression can cause a grayness to pervade the aura.

“Generally speaking, blue means trust, calm, peace. Green means humanitarianism. Brown is earthy. Black ranges from sophistication to self-destruction and murder.”

Westheimer shifts noisily on his chair.

“If we recall,” Ruth continues, “Jesus, on occasion, only gestured at the ailing, indicating that it was enough for his aura to make connection with them. And, when a woman with an issue of blood touched the hem of his robe, he said that he perceived that virtue ‘had gone out of him’ indicating—”

“Must we listen to this?” asks Westheimer, twisting around to look at Peter.

“No, you can leave,” snaps Robert. “No one’s tied you to your chair.”

Westheimer regards him icily.

“Would you come up here, Robert?” Ruth asks pleasantly.

The trace of a smirk plays at the corners of Westheimer’s lips as Robert goes up to the platform. When she introduces Robert as her brother, the smirk manifests fully and Westheimer leans back on his chair, arms crossed, regarding Robert with amusement.

“Perhaps it might be of interest for me to tell you what I see in my brother’s aural envelope,” Ruth says.