Nutmeg Discovers Her Healing Ability

Nutmeg’s discovery of her healing ability begins not as a deliberate search for a new vocation but as an instinctive response to another person’s distress. While touching the temple of a woman who has supported her career, she senses an animate presence beneath the surface; recalling the empty zoo in Hsin-ching, the happiest place in her childhood, accompanies the woman’s relief. A later, more deliberate encounter confirms the pattern. Nutmeg comes to understand that her memories can serve as a means of working on what she finds within other people, and the unexpected practice becomes her work.

The First Encounter

After a year in which her life had become nearly blank and quiet, Nutmeg discovered an ability she had not known she possessed. She wondered whether it had welled up in the place left by her lost passion for design. The capacity was not something she had sought, but it would become a new profession.

The first person she helped was the wife of a department-store owner, a former opera singer who had recognized Nutmeg’s talent before her rise as a designer and watched over her career. Because of that history, Nutmeg had agreed to help the woman and her daughter coordinate clothes for the daughter’s wedding. While they waited for the fitting, the woman suddenly pressed her hands to her head and knelt unsteadily. Nutmeg caught her and, without pausing to consider what she was doing, began stroking her right temple.

The contact brought a new kind of perception. Nutmeg felt “a certain something” as if she were touching an object concealed inside a cloth bag. Its presence was not simply an idea about the woman’s condition: it seemed to have a shape, though Nutmeg could not yet explain what she had encountered. Her response began through touch, before she had a method or an account of the ability.

The Zoo Memory and Its Effect

As Nutmeg tried to concentrate, her attention turned to the zoo in Hsin-ching, which she had been allowed to visit alone as the chief veterinarian’s daughter. She remembered it as the happiest time in her life: an empty zoo in autumn, a clear sky, birds moving among the trees, and the sense of being protected and loved. The memory supplied a place to which her consciousness could return while she attended to the unfamiliar presence under her hand.

When the woman stood again, she was still disoriented but said that her headache seemed to have gone. Nutmeg did not have a technical explanation for the change. Some days later, the woman sent her much more money than Nutmeg had expected for the clothing work, a first indication that the episode had meant more to the woman than an incidental kindness.

About a month later, the woman invited Nutmeg to lunch and then asked her to place a hand on her temple again so she could check what had happened. Nutmeg felt the same presence, but this time she focused on it more deliberately. Its form seemed to twist and change; she realized it was alive, and felt fear. She closed her eyes and returned to the Hsin-ching zoo, drawing on the story and scenes she had previously described to Cinnamon. Her consciousness seemed to leave her body, move between memory and story, and return. When she regained awareness, the woman thanked her. Nutmeg felt tired and had a light film of sweat on her forehead, but asked no questions; the woman offered no explanation either. Nutmeg refused the money offered for this second visit, saying, “This is not my job,” and that she had already been paid too much.

From Unplanned Gift to Work

The first woman later introduced Nutmeg to another client, a small, sharply observant woman in her mid-forties whose clothing was exceptionally fine and whose presence suggested unusual standing. The intermediary urged Nutmeg not to refuse and advised her to accept payment, describing the work as something that would matter in the long run both to Nutmeg and to herself. The referral turned a private, unexplained incident into a possible practice.

With this second woman, Nutmeg encountered a different presence, stronger and more rapid in its movements than the first. She placed her palm on the woman’s temple, held her breath, and tried to still what she felt. Rather than relying on the same memory in the same way, she pursued her recollections more intensely, burrowing into their smallest folds and sending the warmth of those memories toward the presence. The account presents the work as an interaction between bodily contact and an inner landscape made from remembered experience, not as a procedure Nutmeg had planned or fully understood.

Nutmeg later described herself as having been enfolded by a great flow: before she knew it, this had become her work. When Cinnamon grew up, he became his mother’s assistant. The ability therefore changed more than Nutmeg’s daily occupation; it also established the work that mother and son would undertake together.

Memory, Story, and the Ability’s Significance

The Hsin-ching zoo is both a remembered childhood refuge and the material Nutmeg repeatedly brings into her encounters. Its importance lies in the specific quality of the memory: she associates the empty zoo with protection, love, and reassurance, and recalls its light, season, birds, and open spaces. In the later session, she can return to it through scenes she has already narrated to Cinnamon. Memory thus operates not only as private recollection but as something shaped into story and available for renewed use.

The ability remains unexplained in these scenes. The women do not identify what Nutmeg senses, and Nutmeg does not claim to know what it is or how her memories affect it. The account instead follows the sequence of touch, perception, recollection, and response, leaving the nature of the presence unresolved. This uncertainty makes the discovery a threshold: a lost passion for design gives way to work that depends on attention to other people and on the strange, active resources of Nutmeg’s own past.