Part Three. Oz Circle

Santa Monica, California-September 1989

Now we can cross the Shifting Sands. -L. Frank Baum's last words, May 6, 1919. The Shifting Sands border the East of Oz. Baum was seeing himself traveling westward toward it.

Years later, Jonathan was sitting in Bill Davison's office looking at photographs of athletes on the wall, and thinking of horror movies.

Jonathan starred in horror movies. The fear they generated seemed small and mean now, next to the real thing. You could only enjoy horror movies, Jonathan thought, when you were young and well and your fears had no name. Jonathan had a name for his terror now. He was dying.

The athletes in the photographs beamed at him, football players framed by a hunch of padding, hockey stars with missing teeth. They looked like gods of wholeness, gods of health.

Except that each of them had needed a psychiatrist. Bill Davison had made a fortune counseling athletes.

Football players who developed a terror of falling on Astroturf; baseball players who kept throwing out a knee, a knee that was medically perfect; rookies who developed such stage fright of crowds that they could not play. The photographs were signed with thanks.

Outside Bill Davison's office, Los Angeles gleamed. It was blue and white, blue with sky and smog, white with sunshine, white as bone. Both Jonathan and Bill were a long way from home.

Bill Davison was leaning back in his chair and regarding Jonathan with narrowed eyes. It was toward the end of their session.

"Right," he said. He rubbed the palm of his hand across his face. "Jonathan, I want you to try something new."

Bill Davison was nearly fifty, still handsome and broad-shouldered, though his face was creased and puffy and his chest sagged. His crewcut had been modified to suit later fashions. He wore a blue Lacoste shirt, casual and short-sleeved, that showed his football-player arms. Jonathan was rather in love with him. Counselor Bill, Jonathan called him, as if the whole sad business were a summer camp. It was appropriate. Jonathan had always hated summer camp. And loved his counselors.

Counselor Bill leaned forward on his desk and steepled his fingers. "I want you," he said, "to think of the place where you were happiest."

Jonathan did not try very hard. "I can't think of a place," he replied.

"Okay. Just think of something that you like, and try to remember where it happened."

Jonathan's thinking came slowly these days. Part depression and part drugs and part disease.

"I'm sorry, I just can't," he said.

"Where's home?" Bill Davison asked. His face looked very serious.

"Canada, I guess."

"Okay, Canada. Were you happy there?"

In school? As a little boy tearing up sheets? "How is this going to help the AIDS?" Jonathan asked.

"Maybe it won't help the AIDS, but it could help you."

Bill Davison had a direct approach. There was no time in the business of sports for psychoanalysis. In sports, with contracts worth thousands of dollars at stake, you had to intervene. Jonathan had read articles about Bill Davison. Bill would say to black tennis players who felt themselves adrift in a white man's world, "This is your game. This court here is your neighborhood. Think of it as your own street."

To football players who had suddenly grown angry at the ball, he would say, "Think of it as a woman. Imagine that it's the sweetest, kindest woman you ever met. Think of someone you knew. If it ended badly, then make it up to her this time. Catch the ball gently."

It worked. He had been criticized for merely treating symptoms.

"I can read The Power of Positive Thinking myself without Dr. Davison"; help," one psychiatrist had said. It turned out that Bill Davison was using visualization techniques fifteen years before anyone else. When the chemical pathway between conscious thought and the triggering of immune response was traced, it became, as they say, a whole different ball game.

Jonathan looked at Bill Davison and thought: You've been happy everywhere. What do you know?

"I don't know, on stage maybe, when I'm performing." Jonathan thought of the last play he had been in. "Oz," he said. "I was happy in Oz."

"Go there a lot?" Bill Davison asked, beginning to smile.

Jonathan remembered. "I used to. When I was a kid. Used to take my summer holidays there."

"Okay. I want you to pretend to yourself that you're in Oz."

"You're kidding," said Jonathan.

"No, I'm not kidding. I want you to think of yourself in Oz, all the time. You step out of here, and you're in Oz."

Jonathan closed his eyes and gave a weak little laugh. Jonathan and Bill had a contract: to do whatever Bill asked.

"We're fighting, remember?" Bill said.

"Yeah," said Jonathan. He had thrown up breakfast. He had thrown up lunch. "What's the point of doing this, Bill?"

"I think it could help you feel more at home," said Bill, shrugging as if it were obvious. "You're not. At home."

"I'm in Los Angeles," said Jonathan.

It was time to go. Bill would have another client waiting. Jonathan stood up. His good behavior ran on automatic pilot.

Bill shook his hand. Bill always did that to show Jonathan he didn't think of him as being different from anyone else. It was like the visualizations: Jonathan was aware of everything that Bill Davison was doing. He was still surprised when it worked. He was still surprised by the softness of Bill Davison's hands.

He was surprised by the face; swollen by age, with hatchet marks around the eyes. The teeth grinned out at Jonathan, part of the skull peeking out. Hi, there, the skull seemed to say from underneath its temporary flesh. I won't go away.

"Anyway, see you later tonight," Bill was saying, still alive.

Jonathan's mind went blank. He still saw the skull.

"You're coming to our place for dinner, remember?" It was yet another way in which Bill Davison was unconventional. He was a psychiatrist who invited his clients home.

Jonathan stepped out into the hot white vastness of Wilshire Boulevard. He felt exposed and alone. The traffic roared past, impersonal, as if the cars carried no people in them. There was no one else on the sidewalk, all the way down from Barrington to Bundy. The lights changed; Jonathan began to cross and the traffic still advanced toward him, crawling to a stop, like bulls with their heads down. Jonathan found himself scurrying to get out of their way, even though the lights were still with him.