Free Angelica Lost and Found by Russell Hoban

by Olivia, Dr Levy. He was short, bald, wore very thick glasses and a Wyatt Earp moustache.
    ‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s the problem?’
    ‘I seem to be living in two kinds of reality,’ I said. ‘Two kinds of time. Do you know what a hippogriff is?’
    ‘Yes, it’s an imaginary animal.’
    ‘Well, I have a kind of relationship with one.’
    ‘Sexual?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Do you dream about him?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘What are you doing in the dream?’
    ‘Sitting on his back while we fly through a greyness.’
    ‘To where?’
    ‘Nowhere, I told him that we weren’t getting anywhere.’
    ‘Is your father alive?’
    ‘I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him for a long time and I don’t know where he is.’
    ‘Do you miss him?’
    ‘Sometimes.’
    ‘This hippogriff may very well be a displacement of sexual longings for your father. Have you read my comparative study of the Ghost Dance and the Cargo Cults?’
    He took a book with that title off his desk and thrust it into my hands. On the back cover was a large photograph of him dressed more or less like Wyatt Earp.
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘What have the Ghost Dance and the Cargo Cults to do with me?’
    ‘Imaginative displacement and believing that wishing will make it so.’
    He looked at his watch, wrote a prescription and gave it to me.
    ‘What’s this?’ I said.
    ‘It’s a placebo, extra-strength. Take two with water as required.’
    ‘But a placebo’s all in the mind. The word is the Latin for “I shall please”. If you think it’ll work, it will.’
    ‘There you go. Get my secretary to book a session for you for next week.’
    Is there a placebo effect, I wondered, for ‘Everything is OK’? So if you think it is, it is? I tried it but I didn’t really think it was and it wasn’t.

Chapter 22
    Volatore’s Ghost Dance
     
    What? Where? No, how? How is this that I am … what? A ghost? A revenant? I was Volatore, yes? So what am I now? The ghost of myself? No, this is really too much! To be the ghost of an imaginary self ! If indeed I am a ghost I am not one of those who clanks his chains, no! I dance with rage!

Chapter 23
    Isaiah’s Ghost Dance
     
    Dr Levy had compared my ‘imaginative displacement’ to the Ghost Dance of the Southwest Indians. My curiosity was piqued but instead of reading his book I went to Google, which took me to the massacre at Wounded Knee. I cry easily, and I wept as I read the words and images on my computer screen. To this small excitation of phosphors have the Sioux warriors of the plains come at last!
    I was still at the office computer when I saw two figures at the gallery doors. By their in-your-face humble posture I recognised them as Jehovah’s Witnesses and went to meet them. One was a young woman, the other a middle-aged man. The woman was modestly frumped-up but she was pretty in a way that made me think her name might have been Tiffany or Amber before she went into the witnessing business. The man had painfully sincere horn-rimmed glasses and grey hair.
    ‘Hello,’ said the woman. ‘My name is Ruth and this is my father Jonathan.’
    ‘How do you do,’ I said.
    We shook hands.
    ‘We’ve been going around,’ said Ruthany, ‘asking folks how they feel about the world today. Would you say you feel optimistic about it?’
    ‘Definitely pessimistic,’ I said.
    ‘Many people tell us that,’ she assured me without placing a hand on my arm, ‘and Scripture gives us an answer in Isaiah, Chapter 65, Verse 17.’ Her fast-draw Bible appeared open in her hands before my reply had cleared the holster.
    I read, ‘For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.’
    ‘But that’s imaginative displacement,’ I said, ‘and believing that wishing will make it so. It’s a Ghost Dance!’
    ‘Say what?’ said Ruthany.
    ‘Wovoka, the Paiute holy man from Nebraska, in 1888 had a vision during a solar eclipse, and he started the Ghost Dance