Ripper

Indiana worked in Treatment Room 8 on the second floor of North Beach’s famous Holistic Clinic, in the heart of San Francisco’s Little Italy. The door to the surgery was painted indigo—the color of spirituality—and the walls were pale green, the color of health. A sign in copperplate script read INDIANA, HEALER, and beneath it was a list of the therapies she offered: intuitive massage, Reiki, magnet therapy, crystal therapy, aromatherapy. One wall of the tiny waiting room was decorated with a garish tapestry, bought from an Asian store, of the Hindu goddess Shakti as a sensual young woman with long raven hair, dressed all in red and adorned with golden jewels. In one hand she held a sword, in another a flower. The goddess was depicted as having many arms, and each hand held one of the symbols of her power—which ranged from a musical instrument to something that looked like a cell phone. Indiana was such a devout disciple of Shakti that she had once considered taking her name until her father, Blake Jackson, managed to convince her that a Hindu goddess’s name was not appropriate for a tall, voluptuous blond American with the looks of an inflatable doll.

Given the nature of his work and his background in the military, Ryan was a skeptic, yet he gratefully surrendered to Indiana’s tender ministrations. He left each session feeling weightless and euphoric—something that could be explained either as a placebo effect combined with his puppyish infatuation with the healer, as his friend Pedro Alarcón suggested, or, as Indiana insisted, by the fact that his chakras were now correctly aligned. This peaceful hour was the most pleasurable in his solitary existence, and Ryan experienced more intimacy in his healing sessions with Indiana than he did in his strenuous sexual gymnastics with Jennifer Yang, the most regular of his lovers. He was a tall, heavyset man with the neck and shoulders of a wrestler, arms as thick and stout as tree trunks, and the delicate hands of a pastry chef. He had dark, close-cropped hair streaked with gray, teeth that seemed too white to be natural, pale gray eyes, a broken nose, and thirteen visible scars, including his stump. Indiana suspected he had other scars, but she hadn’t seen him without his boxer shorts. Yet.

“How do you feel?” the healer asked.

“Great. I’m starving, though—that’s probably because I smell like dessert.”

“That’s orange essential oil. If you’re just going to make fun, I don’t know why you bother coming.”

“To see you, babe, why else?”

“In that case, my therapies aren’t right for you,” Indiana snapped.

“You know I’m just kidding, Indi.”

“Orange oil is a youthful and happy essence—two qualities you seem to lack, Ryan. And I’ll have you know that Reiki is so powerful that second-degree practitioners are capable of ‘distance healing’; they can work without the patient even being present—though I’d probably need to spend twenty years studying in Japan to get to level two.”

“Don’t even think about distance healing. Without you here, this would be a lousy deal.”

“Healing is not a deal!”

“Everyone’s got to make a living. You charge less than your colleagues at the Holistic Clinic. Do you know how much Yumiko charges for a single acupuncture session?”

“I’ve no idea, and it’s none of my business.”

“Nearly twice as much as you,” said Ryan. “Why don’t you let me pay you more?”

“You’re my friend. I’d rather you didn’t pay at all, but if I didn’t let you pay, you probably wouldn’t come back. You won’t allow yourself to be in anyone’s debt. Pride is your great sin.”

“Would you miss me?”

“No, because we’d still see each other as friends. But I bet you’d miss me. Come on, admit it, these sessions have really helped. Remember how much pain you were in when you first came? Next week, we’ll do a session of magnet therapy.”

“And a massage, please. You’ve got the hands of an angel.”

“Okay, and a massage. Now get your clothes on, I’ve got another client waiting.”

“Don’t you find it weird that almost all your clients are men?” asked Ryan, clambering down from the massage table.

“They’re not all men—I treat women too, as well as a few children. And one arthritic poodle.”

Ryan was convinced that if Indiana’s other male clients were anything like him, they paid simply to be near her, not because they had any faith in her healing methods. This was what had first brought him to Treatment Room 8, something he admitted to Indiana during their third session so there would be no misunderstandings, and also because his initial attraction had blossomed into friendship. Indiana had burst out laughing—she was well used to come-ons—and made a bet with him that after two or three weeks, when he felt the results, he would change his mind. Ryan accepted the bet, suggesting dinner at his favorite restaurant. “If you can cure me, I’ll pick up the tab, otherwise dinner is on you,” he said, hoping to spend time with her somewhere more conducive to conversation than these two cramped cubicles, watched over by the omniscient Shakti.

Ryan and Indiana had met in 2009, on one of the trails that wound through Samuel P. Taylor State Park among thousand-year-old, three-hundred-foot-high trees. Indiana had taken her bicycle on the ferry across San Francisco Bay, and once in Marin County cycled the twenty or so miles to the park as part of her training for a long bike ride to Los Angeles she planned to make a few weeks later. As a rule, Indiana thought sports were pointless, and she had no particular interest in keeping fit; but her daughter, Amanda, was determined to take part in a charity bike ride for AIDS, and Indiana was not about to let her go alone.

She had just stopped the bike to take a drink from her water bottle, one foot on the ground, when Ryan raced past with Attila on a leash. She didn’t see the dog until it was practically on top of her; the shock sent her flying, and she ended up tangled in the bike frame. Ryan apologized, helped her to her feet, and tried to straighten the buckled wheel while Indiana dusted herself off. She was more concerned about Attila than with her own bumps and bruises. She’d never before seen such a disfigured animal: the dog had scars everywhere, bald patches on its belly, and two metallic fangs worthy of Dracula in an otherwise toothless maw; one of its ears was missing, as though hacked off with scissors. She stroked the animal’s head gently and leaned down to kiss its snout, but Ryan quickly jerked her away.

“Don’t get your face too close! Attila’s a war dog.”

“What breed is he?”

“Purebred Belgian Malinois. They’re smarter and stronger than German shepherds, and they keep their backs straight, so they don’t suffer from hip problems.”

“What on earth happened to the poor thing?”

“He survived a land-mine explosion,” Ryan said, dipping his handkerchief in the cold water of the river, where a week earlier he’d watched salmon leaping against the current in their arduous swim upstream to spawn. Miller handed Indiana the wet handkerchief to dab the grazes on her legs. He was wearing track pants, a sweatshirt, and something that looked like a bulletproof jacket—it weighed forty-five pounds, he explained, making it perfect for training because when he took it off to race, he felt like he was flying. They sat among the thick, tangled roots of a tree and talked, watched over by Attila, who studied Ryan’s every move as though waiting for an order and from time to time nuzzled Indiana and discreetly sniffed her. The warm afternoon, heady with the scent of pine needles and dead leaves, was lit by shafts of sunlight that pierced the treetops like spears; the air quivered with birdsong, the hum of mosquitoes, the lapping of the creek, and the wind in the leaves; it was the perfect setting for a meeting in a romantic novel.

Ryan had been a Navy SEAL—a former member of SEAL Team Six, the unit that in May 2011 launched the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. In fact, one of Ryan’s former teammates would be the one to kill the Al-Qaeda leader. When he and Indiana met, however, Ryan could not have known this would happen two years later; no one could, except perhaps Celeste Roko, by studying the movement of the planets. Ryan was granted an honorable discharge in 2007 after he lost a leg in combat—an injury that didn’t stop him continuing to compete as a triathlete, as he told Indiana. Up to this point she had scarcely looked at Ryan, focused as she was on the dog, but now she noticed that he wore only one shoe; his other leg ended in a curved blade.

“It’s called a Flex-Foot Cheetah—they model it on the way big cats run in the wild,” he explained, showing her the prosthesis.

“How does it fit?”

He hiked up the leg of his pants, and she studied the contraption fastened to the stump.

“It’s carbon fiber,” Ryan explained. “It’s so light and perfect that officials tried to stop Oscar Pistorius, a South African double amputee, from competing in the Olympics because they said his prostheses gave him an unfair advantage over other runners. This model is designed for running,” he went on, explaining with a certain pride that this was cutting-edge technology. “I’ve got other prosthetics for walking and cycling.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Sometimes. But there’s other stuff that hurts more.”

“Like what?”

“Things from my past. But that’s enough about me—tell me about you.”

“Sorry, but I haven’t got anything as interesting as a bionic leg,” Indiana confessed, “and I’ve only got one scar, which I’m not going to show you. As a kid, I fell on my butt on some barbed wire.”

Indiana and Ryan sat in the park, chatting about this and that under the watchful eye of Attila. She introduced herself—half joking, half serious—by telling him she was a Pisces, her ruling planet was Neptune, her lucky number 8, her element water, and her birthstones, silver-gray moonstone, which nurtures intuitive power, and aquamarine, which encourages visions, opens the mind, and promotes happiness. Indiana had no intention of seducing Ryan; for the past four years she had been in love with a man named Alan Keller and had chosen the path of fidelity. Had she wanted to seduce him, she would have talked about Shakti, goddess of beauty, sex, and fertility, since the mere mention of these attributes was enough to overcome the scruples of any man—Indiana was heterosexual—if her voluptuous body were not enough. Indiana never mentioned that Shakti was also the divine mother, the primordial life force, the sacred feminine—as these roles tended to put men off.

Usually Indiana didn’t tell men that she was a healer by profession; she had met her fair share of cynics who listened to her talk about cosmic energy with a condescending smirk while they stared at her breasts. But somehow she sensed she could trust this Navy SEAL, so she gave him a brief account of her methods, though when put into words they sounded less than convincing even to her ears. To Ryan it sounded more like voodoo than medicine, but he pretended to be interested—the information gave him a perfect excuse to see her again. He told her about the cramps he suffered at night, the spasms that could sometimes bring him to a standstill in the middle of a race. Indiana prescribed a course of therapeutic massage and a diet of banana and kiwifruit smoothies.

They were so caught up in the moment that the sun had already begun to set when Indiana realized that she was going to miss the ferry back to San Francisco. She jumped to her feet and said good-bye, but Ryan, explaining that his van was just outside the park, offered to give her a ride—after all, they lived in the same city. The van had a souped-up engine, oversize wheels, a roof rack, a bicycle rack, and a tasseled pink velvet cushion for Attila that neither Ryan nor his dog had chosen—Ryan’s girlfriend Jennifer Yang had given it to him in a fit of Chinese humor.

Three days later, unable to get Indiana out of his mind, Ryan turned up at the Holistic Clinic just to see the woman with the bicycle. She was the polar opposite of the usual subjects of his fantasies: he preferred slim Asian women like Jennifer Yang, who besides having perfect features—ivory skin, silken hair, and a bone structure to die for—was also a high-powered banker. Indiana, on the other hand, was a big-boned, curvaceous, good-hearted typical American girl of the type that usually bored him. Yet for some inexplicable reason he found her irresistible. “Creamy and delicious” was how he described her to Pedro Alarcón, adjectives more appropriate to high-cholesterol food, as his friend pointed out. Shortly after Ryan introduced them, Alarcón commented that Indiana, with her ample diva’s bosom, her blond mane, her sinuous curves and long lashes, had the larger-than-life sexiness of a gangster’s moll from a 1970s movie, but Ryan didn’t know anything about the goddesses who’d graced the silver screen before he was born.

Ryan was somewhat surprised by the Holistic Clinic—having expected a sort of Buddhist temple, he found himself standing in front of a hideous three-story building the color of guacamole. He didn’t know that it had been built in 1940 and for years attracted tourists who flocked to admire its art-deco style and its stained-glass windows, inspired by Gustav Klimt, but that in the earthquake of 1989 its magnificent facade had collapsed. Two of the windows had been smashed, and the remaining two had since been auctioned off, to be replaced with those tinted glass windows the color of chicken shit favored by button factories and military barracks. Meanwhile, during one of the building’s many misguided renovations, the geometric black-and-white-tiled floor had been replaced with linoleum, since it was easier to clean. The decorative green granite pillars imported from India and the tall lacquered double doors had been sold to a Thai restaurant. All that remained of the clinic’s former glory was the wrought-iron banister on the stairs and two period lamps that, if they had been genuine Lalique, would probably have suffered the same fate as the pillars and the doors. The doorman’s lodge had been bricked up, and twenty feet lopped off the once bright, spacious lobby to build windowless, cavelike offices. But as Ryan arrived that morning, the sun shimmered on the yellow-gold windows, and for a magical half hour the space seemed suspended in amber, the walls dripping caramel and the lobby fleetingly recovering some of its former splendor.

Ryan went up to Treatment Room 8, prepared to agree to any therapy, however bizarre. He half expected to see Indiana decked out like a priestess; instead she greeted him wearing a white coat and a pair of white clogs, her hair pulled back into a ponytail and tied with a scrunchie. There was nothing of the sorceress about her. She got him to fill out a detailed form, then took him back out into the corridor and had him walk up and down to study his gait. Only then did she tell him to strip down to his boxer shorts and lie on the massage table. Having examined him, she discovered that one of his hips was slightly higher than the other, and his spine had a minor curvature—unsurprising in a man with only one leg. In addition she diagnosed an energy blockage in the sacral chakra, knotted shoulder muscles, tension and stiffness in the neck, and an exaggerated startle reflex. In a word, he was still a Navy SEAL.

Indiana assured him that some of her therapies would be helpful, but that if he wanted them to be successful, he had to learn to relax. She recommended acupuncture sessions with Yumiko Sato, two doors down, and without waiting for him to agree, picked up the phone and made an appointment for him with a Qigong master in Chinatown, five blocks from the Holistic Clinic. It was only to humor her that Ryan agreed to these therapies, but in both cases he was pleasantly surprised.

Yumiko Sato, a person of indeterminate age and gender who had close-cropped hair like his own, thick glasses, a dancer’s delicate fingers, and a sepulchral serenity, took his pulse and arrived at the same diagnosis as Indiana. Ryan was advised that acupuncture could be used to treat his physical pain, but it would not heal the wounds in his mind. He flinched, thinking he had misheard. The phrase intrigued him, and some months later, after they had established a bond of trust, he asked Yumiko what she had meant. Yumiko Sato said simply that only fools have no mental wounds.

Ryan’s Qigong lessons with Master Xai—who was originally from Laos and had a beatific face and the belly of a Laughing Buddha—were a revelation: the perfect combination of balance, breathing, movement, and meditation. It was the ideal exercise for body and mind, and Ryan quickly incorporated it into his daily routine.

Indiana didn’t manage to cure the spasms within three weeks as promised, but Ryan lied so he could take her out and pay for dinner, since by then he’d realized that financially she was bordering on poverty. The bustling yet intimate restaurant, the French-influenced Vietnamese food, and the bottle of Flowers pinot noir all played a part in cementing a friendship that in time Ryan would come to think of as his greatest treasure. He had lived his life among men. The fifteen Navy SEALs he’d trained with when he was twenty were his true family; like him they were inured to rigorous physical exertion, to the terror and exhilaration of war, to the tedium of hours spent idle. Some of his comrades, he had not seen in years, others he had seen only a few months earlier, but he kept in touch with them all; they would always be his brothers.

Before he lost his left leg, the navy vet’s relationships with women had been uncomplicated: sexual, sporadic, and so brief that the features of these women blurred into a single face that looked not unlike Jennifer Yang’s. They were usually just flings, and when from time to time he did fall for someone, the relationship never lasted. His life—constantly on the move, constantly fighting to the death—did not lend itself to emotional attachments, much less to marriage and children. He fought a constant war against his enemies, some real, others imaginary; this was how he had spent his youth.