Free Eating Memories by Patricia Anthony Page B

the look on Bobby’s face? On the monitor I could see it so clearly: The way the eyes narrowed, not from sleepiness but from pain; the way the mouth grimaced as if he had tasted something spoiled.
    “Frio,” he said.
    “What’s cold?”
    “Estou com frio.” Bobby’s oversized body was trembling in its oversized knit shirt. Ashamed of his belly, he hated clothes that fit him. An active ten year old, he hated long sleeves.
    “‘Would you like for me to turn the air conditioning down?”
    A cry came from him, wrenched from his beefy chest. “Ai. Jesus! Jesus! O ceu esta quebrada!”
    On the monitor my face showed alarm. I leaned forward, grasping his hand. He pulled away with such force that my arm recoiled like a spring. “What do you mean, ‘The ski is broken?’ Gilberto? What is it?”
    “O ceu. O ceu . . .”
    The sky.
    His voice went high, shattering like glass on the peak of his terror. “O ceu esta preto!”
    “The sky is black? Is it a storm, Gilberto? A bad storm?”
    Bobby’s eyes turned inward to the bleak landscape only he could see. “ O ceu esta preto e neve cai no mato.”
    “What?” I asked with disbelief. “What did you say?”
    “ O neve.” His eyes seemed blind. “ O neve cai no mato.”
    The tape ended.
    Carleton switched on the ceiling lights. Blinking, Moss and Stengler turned towards me, “What was it?” Stengler asked.
    I relaxed my grip on the aims of my chair. “Snow,” I said. My hands had cramped into claws. “Snow fell in the jungle.”
    * * *
    Bobby watched as I shaved his ankle. “I don’t want to,” he said.
    Taking up the Thanapeline pump, I attached it to his leg. “It’s something that they have to do, Bobby,” I explained without looking up. I knew his face too well. I knew what fear looked like in it.
    “Why do you always put it there?”
    I began to tape the pump to his leg before answering. “So you won’t snatch it out. The ankle is harder to get to. Sometimes things get pretty hectic, you know.”
    He knew.
    “It scares me to go back.”
    “I’m sorry.” Therapy, for Bobby, appeared to have backfired. He was eating more and eating faster, driven by urgency. At age fifty-three, Soares would die of starvation and be buried in the jungle’s white, cold tomb,
    “What you see when you go back is very important, Bobby, It’s something we don’t understand. Maybe if we understand it, we can prevent it from happening.”
    “But I’ll die, anyway,” he said.
    I looked at him then. He was somber as an adult. The Thanapeline’s residual effect confused sexes sometimes. Sometimes confused ages. I’d always considered that a side effect I could live with. Now I wasn’t so sure. “We all die,” I told him. “Past Life Therapy helps you deal with that.”
    “But I’m not remembering a past life, am I?”
    I busied myself with the tape. Over, under. Over, under. I ran my hand across the bulge of the pump to see that it was secure. “No. We don’t think you’re remembering a past life.”
    “I don’t like those men.”
    “I’ll be in there with you,” I said as I helped him up. “Just in case you need me.”
    He clung to me, a hot, fleshy bulk that was part child, part dying man. He was too heavy to carry. Taking my hand he walked down the long hall.
    * * *
    “Hello, Bobby,” Moss said. The researcher looked as if he wasn’t sure whether or not to shake hands. In the end he didn’t. Most adults have difficulties relating to children. Stengler was worse than Moss; and Moss at best was awkward. At last he motioned the boy to a chair, deftly wrapped a bit of rubber tubing on Bobby’s upper arm and tapped his forefinger on a likely vein.
    Bobby looked up at me, panicked.
    “I see no reason for you to stay, Dr. Patel,” Stengler said.
    He was calibrating a hand-held voice stress analyzer.
    “Bobby’s asked me to.”
    Stengler glanced at Moss. “Might mess up the data,” Stengler said. “Eye contact. Maybe some sort of gesture