Treasure Island!!!

how another client smelled burnt tapioca all over the room when Bev checked her energy fields; another woman gasped as an umber aura shuddered down her torso; a third client swore she heard frogs. I hadn’t sensed anything yet, but today might be different, I thought as I closed my eyes; given Bev’s urgency, today might be the day I . . .
    I fell asleep.
    When I woke up, the rice paper screen had been moved and Bev was arranging a tea tray. She gestured for me to join her and folded her hands in her lap.
    “How am I?” I asked after a moment.
    “Your anchor has been dropped,” Bev said. “The boat is going nowhere. I realigned your energy fields but I’m concerned you’re not progressing.” She poured the tea, which was deep yellow and smelled of grass. “The book,” she began.
    Bev had a strong streak of renunciation. The last session she had pressed me to give up coffee, sugar, and wheat. I pushed back my chair.
    “I won’t give it up.”
    “I wouldn’t ask you to. I just want you to imagine that you’re obsessed, not with a book—but with a man. You wouldn’t tense to enjoy him; you would soften.” Bev tipped her head back and offered her neck to an imaginary lover. It was disturbing since I’d never seen her in any remotely sexual posture. Usually we talked about the spirit in nautical terms.
    “A man? Oh, no. No, no . . . ”
    “I once read
Treasure Island
. This didn’t seem relevant to your healing when you first came in. In fact, it was years ago, I was reading it to my son. Well, there are many things about me . . . ” She waved her hand, as if to disperse information she had momentarily thought of sharing. “Back then he was a boy, and like you, very interested in pirates.”
    I suppressed a flicker of irritation.
    “Did he like it?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    “And you liked it?”
    “Yes.”
    I pulled my chair closer in.
    “But I don’t remember the Johns Hopkins you focus on in your meditations.”
    “Jim Hawkins.”
    “I don’t remember a bold, resolute, independent boy.”
    “ HORN-BLOWING. I wrote this down for you. The fourth one is HORN-BLOWING .”
    “Who is the charismatic sea cook, the great betrayer, the guy with a wooden leg?”
    I spoke dully: “Long John Silver?”
    “Yes! Now there’s the center of your novel. Charismatic personality, repellent morally speaking, and it’s amazing how he gets around on that one leg. Remember? Jim knows he should be wary of Silver, but he’s drawn to him for good reasons.”
    “Lars is all right,” I said after a pause. “He’s got no prosthetics and there’s nothing
deadly
attractive about him. I always wish he’d pluck those nose hairs.”
    Bev exhaled and looked like a glass that somebody had picked up and drained. I wanted to ask her more, but knew my cue to go. We hugged; she was a spiritual mother, only thinner and better smelling than I ever expected a spiritual mother to be. But as I walked home, her remarks about
Treasure Island
hung like a dark cloud over my mind. I have never cared at all for Long John Silver; to me he is like the annoying uncle at a family party to whom one talks for a few minutes and then, if one has any sense, claps one’s eye on Aunt Boothie in the middle distance and squeezes past. Could Bev really think
Treasure Island
was about
him
? It was because I liked Bev so much that I wanted us to agree. Also because I was paying her a hunk of money for the healings.
    I lay on the sofa and gloomed.
    What if I was paying the wrong person to heal me? Surely it was wrong to let a person enamored with Long John Silver realign my energy fields when Jim Hawkins was the one who carried the mother-lode. The day wore on and in my mind’s dispassionate eye I saw myself on the massage table, wrestling Beverly Flowers for control of my soul. For weeks I had gloated about the power of her touch, the dignity of her bearing, the feminine fit of her suede shirt—and now I thought, I am a fool, a fool, to sail unwittingly into such a dangerous cove. If Beverly Flowers bent my spirit out of whack, how would I even know it? I can’t check my energy fields any more than I can check the fuse box in Lars’s apartment.
    “Don’t worry,” Lars said when the lights went out. “Though that’s the third time this month.”
    “Did you pay the bill?”
    “Of course I paid the bill. It’s just the fuse.”
    Darkness fell like a shroud on the apartment. If Beverly Flowers and my visions were incompatible,