by Joe Derkacht
Episode Twelve
Tight spaces never really bothered me. If someone had shoved me into a dark closet as a child and locked the door after me, I probably would have simply pulled a bunch of the clothes off the hangers and made a bed out of them for myself. Or maybe I would have kicked the door until it broke from its hinges. I certainly wouldn’t have cried or screamed from fright. Small places or dark places or small dark places, for that matter, just didn’t scare me. A white-belted jacket associated with a small room and padded white walls was a different story.
Fortunately, I couldn’t see any straitjackets or padded white walls. Not yet. Just the machine with its table and the odd, massively oversized donut hole they intended to slide me into for the test, awaited me. Maybe the whiteness of the walls, and the fact I’d seen the technician wore white, was what disturbed me.
“You aren’t claustrophobic, are you, John?”
His voice echoing tinnily, the technician standing beside me seemed to dwindle off into the distance. The world shifted, as if I were slipping sideways into an alternate reality. A dark, indefinable something approached, drawing steadily nearer. At first it appeared to be a hole I was about to tumble into: a second later, I realized I wasn’t tumbling at all. The hole was expanding, growing, spinning, coming for me like a beast hungry for prey.
“Mr. Raventhorst?”
An urgent sounding voice snapped me back. The technician was again at my side. In answer to his question, I slowly shook my head, a sort of stuttered physical response for the voiceless.
The machine took center stage again. Its “donut hole” reminded me of one large, orthopedic pillow. The obvious “machineness” of the device triggered thoughts of humming dynamos and flickering lights like those I’d seen on old Star Trek movies. All in all, it was vastly different from those rooms in which I’d been strapped to a table in years past, though something still felt and even smelled the same. Rational or otherwise, I knew I had to get out, to get out now!
“Mr. Raventhorst!”
I looked up into the technician’s eyes. He stared concernedly at me. He was bearded, with longish, neatly groomed hair. Had they selected him because they thought I might be more comfortable with someone at least superficially resembling me?
“Are you all right?” He asked.
Feeling anything other than all right, I still nodded. Instead of his face, I saw Zell’s and Doc Ray’s. Doc Ray was upset because he’d taken so much trouble to wangle a free MRI in Portland at OHSU for me. Zell was upset because I hadn’t told her about either Doc Ray’s suspicions or the test in the first place. Both faces were stern and demanding. Except for them, I wouldn’t be here.
I stared at the machine’s toroid again. From donut hole to orthopedic pillow standing on edge, it had turned into a giant toilet. My life was about to be flushed down the drain. Somewhere within it, or perhaps far beyond it yet somehow integrally linked to it, a far greater, darker, more sinister hole awaited my arrival.
“Mr. Raventhorst? John?”
I guess he wanted more than an unsure nod in response. This time I mumbled a yes. The same stern faces swam before my gaze, demanding I go through with the test.
It was my life, wasn’t it? Why should I always do what other people demanded of me? If I had cancer, so what? What business was it of theirs? I didn’t have to answer to them, did I?
“No straps?” I asked.
The technician looked confused for a moment, glancing toward the waiting MRI table and then back at me.
“Straps? Restraints, you mean? No.”
This time he accepted my simple nod as an okay to let him guide me to the table. I was closer to being swallowed up, with the sterile toroid cum white donut cum pillow cum toilet now the gaping maw of a great white shark. After a few interminably long moments, the technician’s voice reached me as a reassuring mumble from a hidden speaker, something about lying perfectly still. I was sliding noiselessly into the hole, my life advancing into…what? A flash of red blinded me. Was I already bleeding? When would those tough, sandpapery lips close around me?
It was all a mistake. I couldn’t have cancer, not when I’d quit the Copenhagen years before. No matter what Doc Ray said about what he saw in my mouth, I really hadn’t felt anything different, either. Or maybe with my Swiss cheese memory, I just didn’t know what my mouth should feel like? Had my use of tobacco killed off or reduced all normal sensitivity until I was incapable of recognizing the difference?
Could cancer strike years after I’d already quit using tobacco?
Clicking noises began, at first no louder than a power stapler. Before long, the stapler had begun to gallop, and shortly afterwards, thumping, clanging noises, like rocks cast at an empty metal garbage can, struck all around me, from right and left and directly overhead.
A shadow fell over me, advancing from within the well of the machine. I felt my body jerk in opposition, as the toroid began to spin. In an instant, it had thrown me, striking first one shoulder and then the other against its circular wall, battering me around the head, as it began to accelerate. Swallowed up in white noise, as if boulders were sliding and crashing around me, I screamed. Zell and Doc Ray disappeared, swallowed up by a black vortex.
