Body Surfing

“Tuvan throat singers. Recorded three-quarters of a century ago on the Tibetan plateau. A single voice can produce as many as five notes at once. Knowing that fact gives the sound an added depth, don’t you think? An added resonance. There are only three men singing, yet they sound like a chorus of angels.”
    “Or demons,” Q. heard himself say, then fell silent again. Demons, like Anschluss, was not the sort of word he used—not in this manner anyway. Not before the accident.
    The doctor slipped a hand into a pocket, and the music disappeared.
    The movement caused the doctor’s jacket to open slightly, and Q. saw the glint of a chain dangling around his neck. The doctor noticed where Q. was looking and, almost as if he’d been waiting for an opportunity, pulled a surprisingly large pendant from beneath his vest. It was a good three inches around, a crudely wrought series of curlicues and crosses and upside down hearts encased within a circle.
    “It’s called a sigil. In the middle ages, they were considered protection against possession.”
    Parts of the ornament were shiny and parts were dark, as if it were an amalgam of silver and lead. The morning light traced its contours as if caught within the sigil’s curves.
    “Each sigil was proof against one specific demon. They were most commonly used by priests performing exorcisms, or by sorcerers summoning dark forces to aid them in foul play.”
    Q. wanted to ask the doctor which demon this sigil was designed for, but he couldn’t think of the words to do so. His eyes seemed to be caught like the light, following the track of the sigil’s loops and curves.
    A gust of wind rustled the pagoda trees. The shadows cast by their thin branches and budding foliage danced over the doctor’s angular face, but Q. didn’t notice.
    A bird called, another answered. There was the sound of flapping wings.
    Q. blinked. A relaxing, almost numbing feeling had settled over him, a sense of slight dislocation, as if his body had retreated a fraction of an inch from the skin covering it. The feeling was weird, but not unsettling. The doctor’s garden was so peaceful. What could possibly harm him here?
    The doctor’s eyes traced the outline of Q.’s body, as if measuring him, taking him in. He tucked the sigil back in his vest.
    “Tell me.”
    Q. tried to say the name, but the same reticence that had prevented him from telling Dr. Miller continued to hold his tongue. When he was able to speak, his voice sounded so distant it seemed to come from a tape recorder.
    “I’ve been having dreams.”
    The doctor didn’t move. His body looked as taut as a wire holding up a bridge, a whip or a snake stretched out to strike. Yet it wasn’t a sting Q. felt, a bite, but rather a coolness. The doctor’s voice washed over Q. like a breeze. Protecting him and coaxing him at the same time. Tell me , Q. heard the doctor say, though he didn’t see the man’s lips move.
    Q. wanted to tell him everything. But how to explain the dreams he’d been having? It wasn’t the accident he dreamed of. That would’ve made sense. But he could barely remember the accident. He remembered everything leading up to it and everything after the paramedics pulled him from the automobile, but the hour or so in between was a blur, punctuated by the sound of rattling breaths as Michaela’s blood-filled lungs struggled to fill with oxygen.
    But as horrifying as those memories were, the dreams were worse. They were as detailed as memories—more so in fact—but memories that couldn’t possibly have been his. The first was of a soldier in World War I, a Kievan peasant who’d taken Prussian bullets in the liver and the right temporal lobe at the Battle of Tannenburg in 1914. Either wound would have—should have—been fatal, and indeed the peasant had been buried in a limepit along with thirty thousand of his countrymen. The lime had eaten coin-sized holes in his skin even as, somehow, his brain and liver repaired themselves, until he was strong enough to mole through a dozen feet of decaying flesh to the surface. Q. even knew the soldier’s name, Boris Petrovich Alushkin, and he had the strangest feeling that the words he remembered were in Russian, although his conscious mind didn’t understand them at all.
    As weird as that was, however, the Quechua Indian who’d slaved in the silver mines of Mt. Potosí in seventeenth-century Peru was a hundred times more perplexing. Q. had never even heard of