The Touch

Alan

Alan spent all day Sunday aching to get to the office to see if he could make the power work again. Finally, morning came and he was chafing to get started.

It was 8:00 a.m. He was going to be scientific about this— get all the data down as it happened: dates, times, names, places, diagnoses. He had fresh batteries in his microcassette recorder. He was ready for his first patient and his first miracle of the day.

No such luck.

His first three patients consisted of an elderly couple, each with stable hypertension, and a woman with mild, diet-controlled, type II diabetes. There was no ready means of confirming a cure with these diagnoses. He wouldn't feel right telling the first two to stop their medications, nor could he tell the third to throw away her 1500-calorie diet and rush down to Carvel's for a hot fudge sundae.

He needed an acute illness or injury. It came with the fourth patient.

Six-year-old Chris Bolland was home from school because of a sore throat and a fever of 101.6 degrees. Alan looked in the child's throat and saw a white exudate coating both tonsils: tonsilitis.

"Again?" said Mrs. Bolland. "Why don't we take them out?"

Alan glanced back through the chart. "This is only his third episode in the past year. Not enough to warrant that. But let's try something."

He swung around behind Chris and placed his fingertips lightly over the swollen glands below the angles of the jaw. He concentrated—on what, exactly, he did not know; but he tried thinking of a nice, pink, healthy throat with normal-sized tonsils; tried willing that ideal throat into little Chris.

There was no outcry from Chris, no tingle in Alan's fingers and arms. Nothing.

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the mother looking at him strangely. He cleared his throat, adjusted the earpieces of his stethoscope, and began listening to Chris' lungs, hiding the frustration that welled up in him.

Failure! Why was this power, if it really existed, so damn capricious? What made it work?

He didn't know, but he dutifully dictated a brief, whispered account of the failure into his hand-held recorder.

His next patient was an unscheduled emergency. Maria Springer—a new patient, twenty-three years old, brought in by a neighbor who had been coming to Alan for a long time— had cut her right hand earlier this morning. After half an hour of applying ice and direct pressure, the wound was still bleeding. Denise placed her in an empty examining room immediately.

Alan examined Maria's hand and found a crescent-shaped laceration, an inch from end to end, on the fleshy edge of the palm below the fifth finger. Blood was oozing slowly but steadily from under the flap of cut skin. He noticed the hand was cold. He looked at the woman and saw the pallor of her face, her tight features, her lower lip trapped between her teeth.

"Hurt much, Maria?"

She Shook her head. "No. But it won't stop bleeding!"

"Sure it will—as soon as I get through with it." He could feel some of the tension go out of her as she realized she wasn't about to bleed to death. Now to use a little razzle-dazzle to get her confidence. "And maybe you can use this as an excuse to talk your husband into getting you a dishwasher. Or if not that, at least a sponge with a handle."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, this is what you get for trying to get the bottom of the glass spotless."

Her eyes widened. "How did you know?"

Alan winked at her. "Karnak knows all, sees all."

What he didn't say was that he had seen dozens of similar wounds over the years, all from the same cause: a bit too much vigor in washing out the inside of a waterglass, causing it to shatter and cut either the index finger or the edge of the palm.

As he had her lie back and relax, Alan realized that he had been presented with a perfect opportunity to test the power. It had worked on a much larger laceration Saturday night; there should be no problem with a little cut like this. He glanced at his watch: 9:36 a.m. He wanted to document everything as accurately as possible.

He pressed the flap of skin tightly closed and wished-hoped-prayed for the wound to heal. He held it there for a good twenty seconds, but felt no shock, no rush of ecstasy. He released the pressure and examined the wound.

The edges of the cut were closed together in a thin crimson line with no sign of further bleeding. Alan felt exultation swell toward bursting within him—

—and then the wound edges gapped and fresh blood began to flow again.

He'd done nothing.

"Are you going to use a needle to numb it up?" Maria Springer asked.

"Getting ready to do just that," Alan said, swallowing the bitter disappointment as he reached for the Xylocaine bottle next to the suturing set.

Another failure.

But he wasn't giving up. As soon as he finished here, he would go into his consultation room, dictate the failure, and move on to the next patient.