On a Beam of Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

item. I got a call from Dr. Flynn last night. “
    “Oh, yes. I was going to ask you to call him. “
    “I guess he couldn’t wait. Anyway, I arranged for him to meet with prot. “
    “Just don’t let him take too much of prot’s time. He won’t be the last caller you’ll have. “
    “I know. I’ve already heard from a cetologist and an anthropologist. “
    “Maybe that’s enough for now…. “
    “We’ll see. ” She skipped away, leaving me alone with Jackie, a thirty-two-year-old “child, ” who was sitting on the damp ground (the lawn had been watered during the lunch hour) near the outer wall, digging a hole and ecstatically smelling each spoonful of the soft earth before squeezing it into a ball and carefully stacking it on top of the others. She had a mustache of soil, but I wasn’t about to stop her and suggest she wash her dirty face.
    Like many of our patients, Jackie has a tragic history. She was raised on a sheep farm in Vermont and spent most of her time out-of-doors. Home-schooled and isolated from close contact with other children, she developed an early interest in nature in all its color and variety. Unfortunately, Jackie’s parents were killed in an automobile accident when she was nine, and she was compelled to live with an aunt in Brooklyn. Almost immediately after that, on the playground of her new school, she was accidentally shot in the stomach by a ten-year-old boy trying to avenge the murder of an older brother. When she came out of the hospital she was mute, and she hasn’t spoken a word, nor mentally aged a day, since that time. In fact, one of the nurses still puts her hair up in pigtails, as her mother used to do when she was a girl.
    Though she suffered no brain damage, nothing we have tried has proven successful in bringing her out of her dream world, the childhood she loved so much. She appears to live in a hypnotic state of her own making, from which we cannot arouse her.
    But how she enjoys that world! When she plays with a toy or one of the cats she throws her entire being into it, focusing her concentration to the point of ignoring all outside stimuli, much like our autists. She takes in a sunset, or the sparrows flocking in the ginkgo trees, with rapture and serenity. It is a pleasure to watch her eat, her eyes closed and her mouth making little smacking noises.
    It was patients like Jackie, and Michael, and others at the hospital that I vaguely hoped prot, before he disappeared again, might be able to help. God knows we weren’t doing much for them. Already he was instrumental in getting Robert to come out for a moment, if only to say he was sorry. But about what? Perhaps that he wasn’t going to be able to go through with it, to cooperate in his treatment. Or maybe it was, in fact, what it appeared to be: a hopeful sign, an attempt to communicate, a small beginning.
    That afternoon, as I was hurrying to get to a committee meeting, I spotted prot in the rec room talking with two of our most pathetic patients. One of these is a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican-American male who is obsessed with the notion that he can fly if he simply puts his mind to it. His favorite author, of course, is Gabriel Garcia Mar-quez. No amount of medication or psychotherapy can convince him that only birds, bats, and insects can take to the air, and he spends most of his waking hours flapping back and forth across the lawn, never rising more than a foot or two above the ground.
    How did this sorry condition come about? Manuel was the fourteenth of fourteen children. As such, he was the last into the bathtub, never got his share of the limited food, never had any new clothes, not even underwear or socks. On top of that, he was the “runt” of the bunch, barely making five feet in height. As a result he grew up with almost no self-esteem, and considered himself a failure before his life had even begun.
    For reasons known only to himself he set an impossible goal: to fly. If he could accomplish