Body Surfing

difficult for a hunter to sustain these exertions over long periods of time; the mental effort to regulate the body’s autonomous systems was simply too great. But, with a little luck and the element of surprise, it was possible for a hunter to overpower even a demon-inhabited body. And, of course, there were always guns, knives, other weapons. Nothing too James Bond, but even the hunters had one or two tricks up their sleeves.
    Alec had rubbed his watch here, but it had been several months before Ileana found that it could do more than tell time.

11
    L ike any child of his class, Q. had been to therapists before. Based on nothing more than his waiting room, Q. could tell Dr. Thomas was going to rank pretty high on the quackometer scale. Two large diamond-paned windows were set in the front wall, but they were shaded by a dense yew hedge whose net of dark needles filtered the interior light to an undersea green. The submerged feeling was reinforced by the room’s half Edwardian, half psychedelic wallpaper—burgundy flocking writhing across a muted silver background. But the weirdest thing had to be the deep-voiced singing that rose up out of the floor. It sounded a bit like babies gurgling at the bottom of a swimming pool, and Q. occasionally found himself holding his breath, as if he too were drowning.
    He was contemplating making a break for it when the double doors at the far side of the room swept open. The man who stood flanked by the seven-foot-tall mahogany doors appeared to be in his early forties, tall and almost impossibly thin, with narrow shoulders and even narrower hips, so that he seemed less a person than a stick figure whose flesh consisted primarily of his clothing: long black trousers woven in summerweight wool, a dapper gray jacket buttoned despite the warmth of the morning, a scarlet vest adorned with gold embroidery. A pair of piercing gray eyes twinkled behind silver wire-rimmed glasses. Q. found himself standing up involuntarily, a small,hopeful smile spreading across his lips. He stretched his hand out, but the doctor didn’t let go of the doorknobs.
    “Why don’t we talk in the garden?” the doctor said, as if he’d known Q. for years. “It’s such a beautiful day, and the pagoda trees are in bud.”
    “Um, okay,” Q. heard himself mutter. Pagoda trees? “Sure.”
    But the doctor had already turned, and Q. hurried through the shadowy office. Persian carpets on the floor, Turkish kilims on the wall, a marble-topped desk tucked in the darkest corner of the room. His eyes lingered over the couch: it was the kind that only has a single padded arm, with ornately carved feet balanced on brass casters and a gold-tasseled throw decorated with vigorous crewelwork. An odor hung in the air—pipe smoke, but Q. could almost believe it was opium. It was like he’d stepped through a timewarp into the office of a Viennese psychoanalyst in pre-Anschluss days.
    Q. pulled up short.
    Dr. Thomas turned and peered at him. “Tell me.”
    “It’s nothing—”
    The psychiatrist cut him off with a finger. “Don’t censor, edit, or contextualize. Just tell me .”
    “A word popped into my head. Anschluss.”
    The doctor pursed his lips. Waited.
    “It’s just, well, I don’t know how I know what it means. I don’t remember learning it.”
    The doctor stood motionless, considering. Then he nodded his stately, philosophical head. He extended his arm, indicating the open French doors and the large sunny garden. Somewhat hesitantly, Q. made his way to a weathered wooden bench.
    “If you’ll make yourself comfortable on the Lutyens,” the doctor said, settling into an equally worn slant-backed chair set across from it, “I’ll just have a seat in the Adirondack.”
    The doctor’s voice had lost its edge, and the fresh air cleared Q.’s head. Almost flippantly, he said, “Does all your furniture have a name?”
    The doctor did that thing psychiatrists do, pausing just long enough to make Q. fidget in his seat. Then:
    “Everything made by the hands of men has a name, and a history to go with it. Only Adam could name everything in his world, of course. We his children can learn but a fraction of these appellations, and deploy them like sandbags against the ever-encroaching tide of unknowing.”
    Q. winced. Ask a stupid question…
    “Take the music.” For the first time Q. noticed that the waiting room’s weird music—if you could really call it that—had been piped into the garden.