The Touch

Alan

So this is what it's like to be a patient.

Alan was into his second full day of testing and he didn't like it.

Starting at 6:00 a.m. yesterday, they had stuck leads to his scalp and attached a box to his belt for a twenty-four-hour EEG by telemetry. They had punctured him and poked at him for the rest of the day. And all without a word of explanation. This morning had started off with hour after hour of written psychological tests.

At least he knew what was going on. But how must a patient feel when everything around him was strange and mysterious and vaguely threatening?

And he was lonely. He missed Sylvia desperately. Just a few days with her and he felt like a new man. To be away from her now was an almost physical pain. But he was doing this as much for her as for himself. If their relationship was to have any sort of future, he had to know what he was getting her into.

And so he would be a patient for a while. And like any patient he was afraid of what these tests would show. It might be just another routine work-up to Axford, but there was nothing routine about the ordeal to Alan. He was seriously concerned about his erratic memory, the gaps that had seemingly been cut out of his life, especially his recent life. That suggested a diagnosis too awful to consider.

Better to have a brain tumor than Alzheimer's disease. He knew he was out of the usual age range, but the signs were there.

He was now lying on a hard-surfaced table in the Foundation's radiology department, waiting to be rolled into the maw of a machine that looked like a CT scanner. A young technician wearing a good four pounds of eye makeup approached with a syringe.

"This place even runs full blast on Saturdays?" he said as she swabbed his arm with alcohol.

"Every day," she said around a big wad of chewing gum.

"By the way, I had a CAT scan a few weeks ago." He remembered the rush of warmth when the contrast material had been infused into his veins.

"This is similar but different," the girl said nonchalantly. "This here's a PET scan."

"Ah, yes," he said, putting on a pedantic tone. "Positron Emission Tomography." He was pleased that he had remembered the meaning of the acronym. Maybe his memory wasn't so bad after all.

The technician cocked her head as she looked at him. "Hey. Pretty good. How'd you know that?"

"Read about it in Newsweek. What's that you're going to inject into me?"

"Just sugar."

More than just sugar, Alan knew. FDG—radioactive sugar that would show the most active and least active areas of his brain. He remembered a few articles he'd read in the journals had said that PET scans had demonstrated abnormalities in the brain metabolism of schizophrenics. Is that what Axford was after—proof that he was a grade-four tweety bird?

"Dr. Axford wants you to walk around for a while before you're scanned," she said as she withdrew the needle from his vein.

Evidently Axford wanted to see the overall activity of his brain.

And what if he found a schizophrenic pattern on the PET? What if everything Alan had seen and done lately had never happened? What if it were all part of an elaborate delusional system?

No, he wasn't going to fall into that trap. I'm NOT crazy, he thought, and then realized that they all say that, don't they?

The tests were finally finished and he was sitting in his bare little room on the seventh floor when there came a knock on the door.

It was Mr. K. Alan didn't recognize him at first—his color was so much better. A suitcase rested on the floor beside him.

"Just came to say good-bye," he said, thrusting out his hand.

Alan shook it. "Leaving?"

"Yep. Goin' out for a Saturday afternoon walk and I ain't coming back. Said they can't use me anymore 'cause I'm not sick anymore."

"Did they tell you how your cancer cleared up?" He was curious how Axford & Co. would explain that.

"Said it cleared up by itself. Nocturnal emission or something like that," he said with a grin and a wink. "But I know what it was and so do you."

"What?"

He poked a finger at Alan's chest. "It was you. You did it. I don't know how, but you did it. Only explanation I can think of is you're an angel or something sent down by God to give me another chance. Well, I'm taking it! I screwed up the first time around, but I ain't screwin' up again!"

There were suddenly tears in Mr. K's eyes. Obviously embarrassed, he pulled something from his pocket and thrust it into Alan's hand. It crinkled.

"Here. Take these. I won't be needing them."

Thinking it was money, Alan began to protest. Then he saw that it was a half-empty pack of Camels.

"Good-bye," said Mr. K, averting his face as he picked up his suitcase and hurried off.

Alan went to throw the cigarettes into the wastebasket, but stopped in midstride and stared at the crumpled pack. He decided to keep it. Every time he had his doubts about the reality of what he was experiencing, he'd take it out and use it as a reminder of Mr. K's "nocturnal emission."