The Touch

Alan

"You were Nhung Thi's doctor?" Chac said in thickly accented English after Ba had gone and the kettle had yet to boil.

"Yes. Not much I could do for her, I'm afraid." He worked to shut out the memory of her death agonies. A horrible way to go. He'd prefer almost any form of death to being eaten alive by lung cancer.

Alan distracted himself by studying Chac's grotesquely arthritic hands, noting the thickened and gnarled joints, the ulnar deviation of the wrists and fingers. How did this man manage to hand out his papers? How on earth did he make change?

He let his gaze wander around the tiny front room. The cracking plaster had been freshly painted; the furniture was old and rickety but waxed and dust free. A chubby plaster Buddha sat cross-legged on a corner table; a crucifix hung on the wall above it.

The child coughed again from the rear of the apartment. It carried a higher-pitched sound this time.

"Your son?" Alan asked. It seemed unlikely, but you never knew.

"Grandson!" Chac said, puffing himself up.

The coughing persisted, its bark becoming distinctly seal-like. But that wasn't what alarmed Alan. It was the whistling intake of breath, the increasingly labored stridor between coughing spasms that lifted him to his feet and drew him toward the sound.

That child was in trouble!

Chac, too, recognized the distress in the cough. He darted ahead of Alan and led the way. Halfway there, a thin woman of about Chac's age in a long, dark blue robe came out into the hall and joined the procession to the bedroom at the far end of the apartment.

Just before they reached the door, the cough shut off abruptly, as if a noose had been tightened around the throat. Chac turned on the light as they rushed into the room. Alan took one look at the black-haired boy with the mottled face and wide, panicky, black eyes, and knew there wasn't a second to spare.

Croup—with epiglottitis!

"Get a knife, small and sharp!" he said to Chac, shoving him back toward the kitchen.

He was going to have to try an emergency tracheotomy. He'd seen it done twice during his clinical training a dozen or so years ago, but had never yet been called upon to do one himself. He'd always prayed the situation would never arise. Cutting open someone's throat and then crunching through the cricothyroid membrane to form an airway without severing an artery or lacerating the thyroid was a difficult enough proposition on a still patient. On a squirming, bucking, fear-crazed child, it seemed madness to try. But this boy was going to die if he didn't get air soon.

Chac rushed back in and handed him a small knife with a sharp, two-inch blade. Alan would have preferred a narrower blade—would have loved the 14-gauge needle he'd kept in his black bag for a decade now just for an occurrence such as this. But his bag was in the trunk of his car.

The child was rolling and thrashing on the bed, arching his back and neck in a hopeless effort to pull air into his lungs.

"Hold him down," Alan told Chac and his wife.

The woman, whom Chac called Hai, looked at the blade with horror, but Chac shouted something to her in Vietnamese and she steadied her hands on either side of the child's face, now a dark blue. When Chac had situated himself across the boy's body, pinning his arms under him, Alan moved forward. With his heart pounding and the knife slipping around in his sweaty palm, he stretched the skin over the trachea.

Ecstatic voltage shot up his arm.

With a vortical wheeze, air rushed into the child's starved lungs, then out, then in again. Slowly his color returned to normal as he sobbed and clung to his grandmother.

Alan stared at his hand in wonder. How had that happened? He glanced at his watch: 10:45. Was the Hour of Power still on? What time had McCready said for high tide? He couldn't remember! Damn!

But did it matter? The important thing was that the little boy was alive and well and breathing normally.

Chac and his wife were staring at him in awe.

"Dat-tay-vao?" Chac said. "You Dat-tay-vao?"

Alan hesitated. For some strange reason he had a feeling he should say no. Had he been told to deny it? But why? These people knew about the Touch.

He nodded.

"Here?" Chac said, leaning closer and looking in his eyes. "Dat-tay-vao here in America?"

"So I'm told."

The Vietnamese couple laughed and wept and hugged their sobbing grandson, all the while babbling in Vietnamese. Then Chac came forward, holding out his deformed, arthritic hands, smiling timidly.

"Help me? Please?"

Another warning bell sounded in a distant corner of his mind. Hadn't Axford told him that the Touch was damaging his mind? But how could he say such a thing? Alan felt fine!

"Sure," he said. It was the least he could do for the man who was giving him shelter. Alan enclosed the gnarled fingers in his own and waited but nothing happened.

"The hour has passed," he told Chac.

The Vietnamese smiled and bowed. "It will come again. Oh, yes. It will come again. I can wait."

"I'm getting cabin fever," Alan told Sylvia.

He had spent a restless night and had been delighted to hear from her this morning. But talking on the phone was a far cry from being next to her and did little to ease his growing claustrophobia. The little apartment occupied the southeast corner of the building. Nice and warm in the winter, no doubt, but the sun had been blazing through the windows since 6:00 a.m. and the temperature of the soggy air here in the front room had to be pushing into triple figures already.

Hai, dressed in the classic loose white blouse and baggy black pajama pants of her people, bustled around the kitchen while her grandson munched on a cracker, both unmindful of the heat. It all came down to what you were used to.

"I've been cooped up for days—first in that glorified hospital room at the Foundation, now in an apartment so small you rub shoulders with somebody every time you move!"

"You promised to stay one day."

"And I will," he said, looking at the clock. It was 9:00. "In just a little over twelve hours I'm walking out of here. I don't care who's looking for me—McCready or the Mafia— I'm gone."

"I don't think the senator will be doing much looking. He's in a coma in Columbia Presbyterian."

"You're kidding!"

"Of course not! You sound surprised."

"Shouldn't I be?"

"Well, didn't you tell me last night that he went into some sort of convulsion when he tried to make you heal him? What'd you call it—a myasthenic crisis?"

Alan groped for the memory. The story sounded familiar. It came back slowly, like a slide projection very gradually being brought into focus.

"Oh, yeah. Sure. They say anything else about him?"

"No. Just that he's critical."

Did I do that? Alan asked himself after he had said goodbye to Sylvia.

Had he wanted to harm the senator? Had that somehow influenced the Touch to worsen his illness rather than cure it? Or had McCready simply worked himself into such a state that he brought the crisis upon himself?

Why try to kid himself? He had felt an odd sensation in his arms before McCready collapsed. Not the usual electric pleasure. Something different. Had he brought that on or had the power itself initiated it?

He didn't know. And not knowing worried him.

He shifted in the chair, felt something crinkle in his pocket, and pulled out Mr. K's empty Camel pack. Smiling, he set it on the table. Mr. K… Alan wondered if he had really stopped smoking.

There came a click of a key in the lock of the apartment door and Chac came in, dressed in a blue work shirt and denim coveralls. He bowed to Alan, then embraced his wife. Hai brought tea for both of them. Alan accepted it with what he hoped was a gracious smile. He was swimming in tea.

He watched with amazement as Chac deftly lit an unfiltered cigarette with his deformed hands. As Alan tried to hold up his end of a halting conversation about the weather, he detected a growing murmur of voices in the hall outside the door. He was about to ask Chac about it when the Vietnamese slapped his hands on his thighs and said, "It is time!"

"Time for what?"

"Dat-tay-vao." He held out his hands to Alan. "Please?"

Was the Hour of Power on? And if so, how did Chac know? Alan shrugged. Only one way to find out.

He grasped the twisted fingers—

—and there it was again. That indescribable pleasure. Alan found something very comfortable in the Touch today. Maybe it was because Chac took its existence and effects for granted; there was no doubt to overcome, no preconceptions to butt against, no need to cover it up, just simple acceptance. And maybe it was because the Dat-tay-vao itself was back among the people who knew it best and revered it most. In a sense, the Touch had come home.

Chac raised his new hands and wrists before his eyes and flexed his slim, straight fingers. Tears began to roll down his cheeks. Speechless, he nodded his thanks to Alan, who placed an understanding hand on the older man's shoulder.

Chac stood and showed Hai, who embraced him, then went to the door and opened it.

The hall was filled with people. It looked like half of the city's Southeast Asian population was on the landing. They gasped in unison at the sight of Chac's normal, upraised hands, then broke into a babble of singsong voices, none of them speaking English.

Chac turned to him and dried his eyes. "I thank you. And I wonder if you would be so kind as to let the Dat-tay-vao heal others."

Alan didn't answer.

Why me? he wondered for the thousandth time. Why should he wind up with responsibility for the Dat-tay-vao? To decide whether to use it or not? He vaguely remembered being told that it was hurting him, that he paid a personal price every time he used it.

Do I want this?

He looked across the table at the happy little boy sitting with his grandmother, alive and well this morning instead of dead or on a respirator. He saw Chac flexing and extending his new fingers again and again. And he saw Mr. K's empty cigarette pack.

This was what it was all about: second chances. A chance to go back to when and where the illness had struck and start fresh again. Maybe that was the answer to Why me? He wanted to provide that second chance—give them all a second chance.

"Doctor?" Chac said, waiting.

"Bring them in," he told Chac. "Bring them all in."

Alan waited in anticipation as Chac went back to the door. This was going to be good. He could be up front about the Touch here. No worry about newspapers and hospital boards and conniving politicians. Just Alan, the patient, and the Dat-tay-vao.

He motioned to Chac to hurry. There would be no holding back today, no pussyfooting around. The Touch would recede in an hour and he wanted to treat as many as he could.

Chac brought the first forward: a middle-aged man with both arms locked at right angles in front of him.

"The Cong broke his elbows so that he would go through life unable to take food or drink by himself."

Alan wasted no time. He grabbed both elbows and felt the familiar shock. The man cried out as his arms straightened at the elbows for the first time in years, and then he began to swing them up and down. He fell to his knees, but Alan gently pushed him aside and motioned a limping boy forward.

On they came, in a steady stream. And as the Dat-tay-vao worked its magic on each one, Alan felt himself enveloped in an ever-deepening cloud of euphoria. The details of the room faded away. All that was left was a tunnel view of his hands and the person before him. A part of him was frightened, calling for a halt. Alan ignored it. He was at peace with himself, with his life. This was as it should be. This was what his life was about, this was what he had been born for.

He pressed on, literally pulling the people toward him and pushing them aside as soon as the pleasure flashed through him.

The haze grew thicker. And still the people came.