The Touch Read online

  He sank into the couch across the room from her.

  How does she do it? he wondered for the thousandth time as he watched her smile and occasionally giggle as she paged through the book. How does she keep from going crazy?

  How much longer did this have to go on? Something had to break soon. He couldn’t see how she could put up with this for the rest of her life. It was living hell…

  …three hours on the machine three times a week. He always timed it as the last event of the day because it exhausted her. All those pills…the ones that didn’t nauseate her made her constipated. She had to measure every bloody ounce of fluid that passed her lips so as not to overload her vascular system. And the diet—rigidly restricted sodium, protein, and phosphorus, which meant no pizza, no milk shakes, no ice cream, no pickles, no cold cuts, or anything else that kids like. She was constantly anemic and tired, so she couldn’t get into any school activities that required exertion. That was no life for a kid.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. Typical of a kid on long-term hemodialysis, she wasn’t growing or developing at a normal rate. As they became teenagers, they didn’t…become teenagers. They stayed small; they didn’t develop much in the way of secondary sexual characteristics, and that took a terrible emotional toll after a while. Julie wasn’t to that stage as yet, but she would be before too long. And she was already small for her age.

  Charles studied Julie, with her big brown eyes and raven hair. So beautiful. Just like her mother. Lucky for her that was the only thing she had inherited from the bloody bitch. He felt his teeth grinding and banished his ex-wife from his mind. Every time he thought of her, or someone merely mentioned her name, he felt himself edge toward violence.

  She didn’t have to leave. It was hard living with a child in chronic renal failure, but lots of parents lived with lots worse. And Jesus, look at Sylvie—she’d gone out and adopted a bloody autistic boy! If only his ex had been like Sylvie—what a life they could have had.

  But no use gnawing on that subject. He’d chewed it to death over the years. He had more important concerns to deal with in the here and now.

  Like the call from Julie’s nephrologist just an hour ago. Her circulating levels of cytotoxic antibodies were still high, years after her body had rejected the kidney he’d donated to her. She hadn’t been a good transplant candidate in the first place, and until those antibody levels came down, she was no candidate at all.

  So she went on day by day, producing her ounce or so of urine per week, feeling tired most of the time, and getting her thrice weekly hemodialysis treatments here in this room. An unimaginable existence for Charles, but the only life Julie had ever known.

  He watched television for a while, and when he glanced her way at 8:30, she was asleep. He waited until her dialysis was done, then he disconnected her from the machine, bandaged up her arm, and carried her into her bedroom where he changed her into her pajamas and slipped her under the sheet.

  As he sat there for a moment stroking her hair and looking at that innocent little face, she stirred and raised her head.

  “I forgot to say my prayers.”

  “That’s okay, Love,” he said soothingly and she immediately went back to sleep.

  Nobody’s listening anyway.

  It never ceased to amaze him how people could believe in a provident God when so many children in this world suffered from the day they were born.

  There was no God for him. There was only Julie and this world and today. And, hopefully, tomorrow.

  He kissed her on the forehead and turned out the light.

  14

  Alan

  The patient was lying.

  A new patient. His file said he was Joe Metzger, age thirty-two, and he was complaining of chronic low back pain. He said he wanted a cure for his backache.

  The cure bit threw him. Alan had thought he’d had him pretty well pegged as a drug abuser looking for some Percodan or Oxycontin. He ran into his share of them—always a chronic painful condition, always “allergic” to NSAIDS and non-narcotic analgesics, always with a story about how “Nothing works except one kind of pill—I’m not sure what it’s called, but it’s yellow and has something like ‘Endo’ on it.”

  Yeah. Right.

  Perhaps Alan would have been less suspicious if he hadn’t happened to glance out the window at the parking lot and seen Joe Metzger of the terrible back pain limberly hop out of his little Fiat two-seater.

  “Just what do you mean by ‘cure’?” He had recounted an extensive work-up—myelogram, CT, MRI, and all—and consultations with big-shot orthopedists. “What do you expect from me that you haven’t been offered elsewhere?”

  Joe Metzger smiled. It was a mechanical expression, like something Alan would expect to see on a computer-generated face. His thin body was bared to the waist, with the belt to his jeans loosened. His bushy hair stuck out on all sides and a thick mustache drooped around each side of his mouth; wire-rimmed granny glasses completed the picture, making him look like a refugee from the sixties.

  “A healing. Like you did for Lucy Burns’ sciatica a couple of weeks ago.”

  Oh, shit! Alan thought. Now it starts. He couldn’t quite place the name Lucy Burns, but he’d known something like this would happen sooner or later. He couldn’t expect to go on working his little miracles without talk getting around.

  He hadn’t exactly caused the blind to see as yet—although old Miss Binghamton’s cataracts had cleared after he’d examined her—but he had caused the deaf to hear and performed many other…he could think of no better word than miracles.

  He was still unable to control the power and doubted he ever would. But he had learned a lot about it in the preceding weeks. He had the power twice a day for approximately one hour. Those hours were approximately twelve hours apart, but not exactly. He possessed the power at a different time each day, anywhere from forty to seventy minutes later than he had the day before. Day by day, the “Hour of Power,” as he now called it, slowly edged its way around the clock. It occurred in conjunction with no biorhythm known to medical science. He had given up trying to explain it—he simply used it.

  He had been judicious with the power, not only for reasons of discretion, but for safety as well. For instance, he could not try a cure on an insulin-dependent diabetic without informing the patient of the cure, otherwise the patient would take the usual insulin dose the next morning and wind up in hypoglycemic shock. He had never promised results when he used the power, never even hinted that he possessed it. He did everything he could to make the cure appear purely coincidental, purely happen-stance, brushing off any cause-effect relationship to him.

  He didn’t know what would happen if word got around about his little miracles, and he didn’t want to find out.

  But if this Joe Metzger sitting here before him had heard something, so had others. Which meant it was time to lay low, hold back from using the power until the rumors died out. It would be such a shame, though, to waste all the healing he could do in those hours. The power had come suddenly and without warning—it might leave the same way.

  But for now, he’d do what he’d planned to do: stonewall it.

  Today the Hour of Power was scheduled to begin around 5:00 p.m., three hours away.

  Not that it mattered to Joe Metzger, if indeed that was his real name.

  “Mr. Metzger, I’ll do what I can for you, but I can’t make any promises—certainly not of a ‘cure’ of any sort. Now let’s check you out and see what’s what.”

  Alan went through the routine of checking the range of motion in the spine, but then stopped. He was annoyed that this phony, for what ever reason, was taking up his time. He was also tired. And, to be frank with himself, he couldn’t think of the next step in the routine low-back examination.

  This was happening a lot lately. He wasn’t sleeping well, and therefore he wasn’t thinking well. This power, or what ever it was, had turned all his beliefs on their heads. It was blatantly impossib
le. It went against everything he had learned in life, med school, and a decade of practice. Yet it worked. There was no getting around the reality of that, so he’d surrendered and accepted it.

  “What would a cure cost me?” Metzger asked.

  “If I could perform a ‘cure,’ it would be the same as a usual office visit. But I can’t: Your back’s in better shape than mine.”

  Joe Metzger’s eyes widened behind his granny glasses. “How can you say that? I have a—”

  “What do you really want?” Alan said, deciding on a hard-line approach. “I’ve got better things to do than waste my time with clowns looking for drugs for non ex is tent problems.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the door. “Take off.”

  As Alan reached for the doorknob, Joe Metzger reached into his pocket. “Dr. Bulmer—wait!” He pulled a card from his wallet and extended it toward Alan. “I’m a reporter.”

  Oh, God.

  “I’m from The Light.”

  Alan looked at the card. A photo of Metzger’s face looked back at him. His name really was Joe Metzger and he did indeed work for the infamous scandal sheet. “The Light? You mean you actually admit that?”

  “It’s not such a bad paper.” He had retrieved his shirt from behind him and was putting it on.

  “I’ve heard otherwise.”

  “Only from people with something to hide—dishonest politicians and celebrities who like the spotlight but don’t like anyone to know what they did to get there. Have you ever read an issue, Doctor, or does your low opinion come secondhand?”

  Alan shook his head. “Patients bring in copies all the time. They show me articles about DMSO, Laetril, curing psoriasis with B-12, preventing cancer with lettuce, or losing ten pounds a week eating chocolate cake.”

  “Looks like the tables are turned, Dr. Bulmer,” Metzger said with his marionnette smile. “Lately your patients have been coming to us with stories about you.”

  Alan had a sinking feeling inside. He had never imagined things getting this far out of hand so soon.

  “And what stories!” Metzger continued. “Miracle cures! Instant healings! If you’ll pardon the cliché: What’s up, Doc?”

  Alan kept his expression bland. “What’s up? I haven’t the faintest. Probably a few coincidences. Maybe some placebo effect.”

  “Then you deny that you’ve had anything to do with any of these cures your patients are talking about?”

  “I think you’ve wasted enough of my time already today.” Alan held the door open for the reporter. “If you can’t remember the way out, I’ll gladly show you.”

  Metzger’s expression became grim as he hopped off the table and walked past Alan.

  “You know, I came here figuring I’d find either a quack who’d jump at the chance for some publicity, or maybe a small time charlatan ripping off gullible sick old ladies.”

  Alan put a hand on Metzger’s back and gently propelled him toward the rear of the building.

  “Instead, I find someone who denies any power and who wasn’t going to ask for extra even if he could cure me.”

  “Right,” Alan said. “You found nothing.”

  Metzger turned at the back door and faced him. “Not quite. I found something I want to look into. If I can produce evidence of genuine cures, I may have found the real thing.”

  The sinking sensation deepened in Alan. “Aren’t you worried about ruining that real thing if it exists?”

  “If someone can do what I’ve heard, everyone should know about it. It should be spread around like a natural resource.” He flashed that mechanical smile again. “Besides—it would be the story of the century.”

  Alan closed the door behind the reporter and sagged against it. This was bad.

  He heard his phone ringing in his office and went to pick it up.

  “Mr. DeMarco on ninety-two,” Connie said.

  He punched the button.

  “Alan!” Tony said. “Still interested in Walter Erskine?”

  “Who?”

  “The bum in the ER you wanted me to check out.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right.” Now he remembered. “Sure.”

  “Well, I know all about him. Want to hear?”

  Alan glanced at his schedule. He wanted to run next door right now, but he had three more patients to see.

  “Be over at five-thirty,” he said.

  At last!

  15

  Ba

  “What on earth did you feed that new peach tree, Ba?” the Missus said as she looked out the library window. “It’s growing like crazy!”

  The Missus had been quizzing him on the material for his Naturalization test. He had filed the forms. After they were reviewed, he would hear from an examiner if he qualified for citizenship. They were taking a break now.

  The Missus was disturbed. Ba could tell. She was hiding her troubles with small talk.

  Over the years Ba had come to recognize the signs—the way she held her shoulders high, the stiffness of her back, and her pacing. On those rare occasions when the Missus gave the slightest hint of a disturbed inner face, she always paced. And smoked. It was the only time she smoked. She puffed on the cigarette as she slapped a folded newspaper against her thigh. The afternoon sun was slanting through the high windows of the two-story library, illuminating the haze from her cigarette, silhouetting her as she passed back and forth through the light.

  “Is there something Ba can do, Missus?”

  “No…yes.” She threw the newspaper onto the coffee table. “You can tell me why people spend money on garbage like this!”

  Ba picked up the newspaper. The Light. He had seen it often at the supermarket checkout aisle. This issue was folded open to an article on a Long Island doctor named Alan Bulmer whose patients were claiming miracle cures at his hands.

  Ba had seen the MIRACLE CURES ON LONG ISLAND banner on the front page yesterday and had bought the issue. He knew the Missus would eventually learn of it and would be disturbed. He had wanted to be ready to help her, so he had gone to the New York Public Library and found Arthur Keitzer’s book, The Sea Is in Us. He had remembered the author passing through his village during the war, asking many questions. He remembered that the author had written down the song of the Dat-tay-vao. To Ba’s immense relief, he found that Keitzer had included a translation in his book. Ba would not have trusted his own translation. He had photocopied the page and returned to Monroe.

  “Do you know what’s going to happen now?” the Missus was saying, still puffing and pacing. “Every kook from here to Kalamazoo will be knocking on his door, looking for a miracle! I can’t believe someone’s printing a story like this about him! I mean, if there was ever a more conservative, cautious, touch-all-bases kind of doctor, it’s Alan. I don’t get it! Where do they dig up this nonsense?”

  “Perhaps it is true, Missus.”

  The Missus whirled and stared up at him. “Why on earth do you say that?”

  “I saw.”

  “When? Where?”

  “At the party.”

  “You must have been sampling too much of the champagne.”

  Ba did not flinch, although the words cut like a knife. But if the Missus wished to speak to him so, he would allow her. But only her.

  The Missus stepped closer and touched his arm. “Sorry, Ba. That was as cruel as it was untrue. It’s just that…” She tapped a finger against the paper he still held in his hand. “This infuriates me.”

  Ba said nothing more.

  Finally the Missus sat on the sofa and indicated the chair across from her. “Sit and tell me what you saw.”

  Ba remained standing, speaking slowly as he reran the scene in his head.

  “The man, Mr. Cunningham, was bleeding terrible. I saw when I turned him over for the Doctor.” He spread his thumb and index finger two inches. “The cut was that long”—he reduced the span to half an inch—“and that wide. The Doctor put his hand over the cut and suddenly the bleeding stopped and the man woke up. When
I looked again the wound was closed.”

  The Missus crushed out her cigarette and looked away for a long moment.

  “You know I trust your word, Ba,” she said without looking at him. “But I can’t believe that. You must be mistaken.”

  “I have seen it before.”

  Her head snapped around. “What?”

  “At home. When I was a boy, a man came to our village and stayed for a while. He could do what Dr. Bulmer can do. He could lay his hand on a sick baby or on a person with a growth or an old sore that wouldn’t heal or an infected tooth and make them well. He had what we call Dat-tay-vao…the Touch.” He handed her the photocopied sheet from the Keitzer book. “Here are the words to a song about the Dat-tay-vao.”

  The Missus took it and read out loud:

  “It seeks but will not be sought.

  It finds but will not be found.

  It holds the one who would touch,

  Who would cut away pain and ill.

  But its blade cuts two ways

  And will not be turned.

  If you value your well-being,

  Impede not its way.

  Treat the Toucher doubly well,

  For he bears the weight

  Of the balance that must be struck.”

  “It sounds much better in my village tongue,” Ba told her.

  “Sounds like a folktale, Ba.”

  “I had always thought so, too. Until I saw. And I saw it again at the party.”

  “I’m sorry, Ba. I just can’t believe that something like that can happen.”

  “The article lists many of his patients who say it has.”