The Touch

Alan

"And you say this man simply touched you?"

Ba nodded in response to the question.

Alan sat with Sylvia in the back of the Graham; it was the first time he had been in the car, and he marveled at its plush interior. Ba sat up front, half-turned toward them. The car was still parked in the cemetery.

Ba had told them of his freakish growth as a teenager and how his mother feared he would grow too tall to live among others. When the man who had what Ba called the Dat-tay-vao came to his village, his mother had brought him forward for healing.

"What did you feel?" Alan asked. He could barely suppress his excitement. The folky-mythical aspects of Ba's tale were hokey, but they didn't matter. Here was proof! Eyewitness corroboration that such a power existed!

"I felt a pain deep in my head and almost fell to the ground. But after that I grew no taller."

"That backs up the Vietnam connection. It all fits!"

"What's the Vietnam connection?" Sylvia asked.

Alan decided it was best to start at the beginning, so he told her about the derelict, Walter Erskine, and the incident in the emergency room.

"The healings started shortly after that. I've always been sure that bum passed on the power to me—how and why, I don't know, but I had my lawyer, Tony DeMarco, look into Erskine's past. Tony found out he was a medic in Vietnam. Came home crazy. Thought he could heal people. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by the V.A. Joined a faith-healing tent show in the South but got kicked off the tour because he wasn't healing anybody and was never sober."

"Alcohol puts the Dat-tay-vao to sleep," Ba said.

Alan wondered if that could be why Erskine became a drunk—to stifle the power. "Evidently he lived on the Bowery for years when for some reason he came out here to Monroe and found me, gave me some sort of electric shock, and died. Is that how the Dat-tay-vao is passed on?"

Ba said, "I'm sorry, Doctor, but I do not know. It is said that the Buddha himself brought the Dat-tay-vao to our land."

"But why me, Ba?" Alan desperately wanted to know the answer to that question.

"I cannot say, Doctor. But as the Song tells: 'It seeks the one who would touch, / Who would cut away pain and ill.' '

" 'Seeks'?" Alan was uneasy about the idea of being sought out by this power. He remembered the derelict's words: You! You're the one! "Why seek me?"

Ba spoke simply and with conviction. "You are a healer, Doctor. The Dat-tay-vao knows all healers."

Alan saw Sylvia shudder. "Do you still have that poem, Ba?" The driver handed her a folded sheet of paper and Sylvia passed it to Alan. "Here."

Alan read the poem. It was confusing and sounded more like a riddle than a song. He found one line particularly disturbing. He said, "I'm not too keen on this part about the balance. What's that mean?"

"I'm sorry, Doctor," Ba said. "I do not know. But I fear it might mean that there is a price to be paid."

"I don't like the sound of that!" Sylvia said.

"Neither do I," Alan said, his uneasiness growing. "But so far I've kept my health. And I haven't got any rotting portrait in the attic. So I think I'll just keep on doing what I've been doing—only a little more discreetly."

"A lot more discreetly, I hope," Sylvia said. "But just what have you been doing?"

Alan glanced at his watch. He still had a good hour and a half until his first patient showed up. And there was something very important he wanted to discuss with Sylvia.

"I'll tell you over breakfast."

Sylvia smiled. "Deal."