Empathy

by John Richmond

  She let herself fall back into the conversation.

  Harlan was finally getting somewhere with Charlie. “So you can at least accept that this is true. I mean, even if you can’t figure out how or why it works, you can at least accept that scientists have actually done the polarity switcheroo in the lab?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Harlan sat back. “Good enough for government work. Okay, here’s why I think this might explain that coronal effect on the MRI.”

  Emily nodded. Maybe it was just the coffee, or relief at finding her empathy was still under control, but she was really digging this exchange. No one had ever offered her an explanation of her abilities. Her father had mumbled something about not knowing God’s plans when she was a kid, but never anything more than that.

  Charlie turned to Emily. “The reason the MRI was all screwed up is that your,” he wiggled his fingers, “thing that you can do causes some kind of electro-magnetic interference.”

  She looked at Harlan. “So the ‘thing’ I’m doing. Do you know exactly what’s going on?”

  “No, but I think that maybe you might be doing some kind of quantum state entanglement with the quarks in other people’s heads as far the emotion deal goes.”

  “So you think that I’m somehow, like, wirelessly tapping into the quantum activity in other people’s brains?”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I think.” He took a sip of his now stone cold coffee. He grimaced. Took another sip.

  “And the, uh, the other deal?” Emily gave the slightest nudge to her coffee mug without touching it.

  Harlan just stared for a second. “Well,” he said. “That one I’m not as sure of. That could be some kind of manipulation of gravity or magnetism on a quantum level.”

  Emily blew air through her lips. “Quantum gravity?”

  “You’re going to have to look that one up, toots. I’ve gotta’ get back to work. There are people who need their skin looked through.” Harlan drained his coffee mug and stood up. “Check out Hawking. He’s got some interesting theories on radiation and gravity.” He folded his bony arms across his chest and stared down at Charlie.

  “Charles?”

  “Harlan?”

  “Pay for my coffee.”

  * * *

  HARLAN’S 2:45 SCAN had just settled into the belly of the beast. He kind of hoped he would find something wrong with this guy, something he could sink his teeth into. Emily’s scan had been funky but impossible to read. The one after he’d gotten back from his prolonged coffee break had been normal. In fact, it had been something of a waste of time. African American male, forties, in good shape and without any trace of malady. You’d hope that the prescribing physician would keep the hypochondriacs off the slate for the day. Hell, maybe that was why he’d been slated in the first place, to debunk his own worries.

  Usually, an MRI was ordered by a treating physician, just like an X-ray, but his present appointment had ordered this one for himself. Harlan sat in his dim control room behind the MRI and toggled the microphone on.

  “Okay in there, Doctor?”

  “Proceed, please.”

  “Okay,” Harlan said and toggled off. He modulated his voice to mimic the scan’s basso molasses. “Proceed, please…to eat shit.” He ran his fingers over the keys, tagging the image file and ordering the MRI to begin its scan. He sat back and let the machine and his mind run.

  Could Emily have been for real? How could he reconcile what had happened with what he knew, or thought he knew about the way the world worked? His glasses had flown off his face. Twice. Without fishing line or anything. It hadn’t been a magic trick. You could do that kind of thing with a big crowd and a big stage to separate the big crowd from the bullshit you were really pulling at a distance. Fishing line. Misdirection. Bullshit. Charlie wouldn’t do that to him. Why would he? They went back. What would be the point of messing with him like that?

  There wasn’t one. Emily was for real. And for real, she was hot, too. Charlie had totally scored. Man, some dudes had all the luck. But to give him credit, Charlie had it going on with that whole Special Forces premature-balding-slash-crew-cut thing. And being a male nurse on top of all that? You couldn’t get much more Sensitive Male than that. Well, good for Charlie. Guy deserved it. He was solid all the way through. Charlie, who’d saved his ass when the morphine had become like a mean woman. He deserved someone like Emily.

  New York was full of women with good shoulders and long legs. The health clubs squirted them out en masse, but Emily stuck out. It was the age in her, the experience. She’d said she was from somewhere truly banal, like Michigan or Ohio or somewhere. He’d been concentrating on her mouth when she was saying it. She hadn’t been wearing lipstick. Hadn’t needed it. She was from somewhere were you didn’t get that beat-down citified look, but she had it, or a version of it. A more pure version of it. She was…what?

  “Tested,” he said to himself.

  She’d asked him if he had a girlfriend like she knew something about him that he didn’t. His cheeks heated.

  Was she for real, the stuff she could do? The machine had read-out fine when he’d run the diagnostic program, and still that freaky coronal effect; the light spreading from where he her head should have been like what would happen if you dropped a balloon full of white paint off a building onto the sidewalk.

  His glasses. Twice.

  And all that shit he’d schpieled about quantum mechanics…it was old news; a theory he’d come up with after staying up too late watching Fire Starter and Scanners back to back. Cable television would either fix the world or destroy it utterly.

  The computer chimed at him. Harlan squinted as the finished scan burned into the monitor. He shook his head. Maybe the machine was fried after all. The damn thing was doing the same shit as before. He toggled the mic.

  “Doctor? You can come back and take a look now, but I’m not sure about the results.”

  “Meaning what? Never mind, I’ll come back.”

  Harlan toggled off and sat back. He pulled up the scan of the previous patient, the one after Emily, and split the screen. The images were nearly identical from the toes to the base of the neck. From there up, the “normal” laid out the twists and turns of a healthy brain. The new scan showed a spray of light, just like Emily’s, except instead of a light corona this one was like a photo negative, black on white. “Weird,” Harlan said.

  “What’s weird?”

  Harlan spun in his chair. A tall man with with pewter eyes stood in the door. Harlan grabbed his chest with his left hand. “Jesus, Doctor Fine, I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Scared you.”

  “Yeah,” Harlan said, holding contact with those eyes for a moment longer than would have been polite. He needed the time. Bullshit and misdirection while he tabbed over to the scan of the normal patient and selected it so it filled the screen.

  Drum caught the motion on the monitor. “That my scan? What’s weird?”

  “Nothing,” Harlan said and turned his back on Fine. What the hell was he doing? He could lose his license for something like this. “It’s just that I’m used to seeing problems, and your scan is perfect.”

  Drum’s face appeared over Harlan’s shoulder. He smelled like soap and something else. It wasn’t that he had bad breath, but the effect was the same. He was sour. “You don’t see any neural abnormalities?”

  “None, Doctor.”

  Drum stared at Harlan for a moment, and sniffed. “You’re certain? Nothing in the motor cortex or the hands?”

  Sweat prickled Harlan’s armpits. “I don’t see a thing on this scan.” He turned, his face a couple of inches from Drum’s. “You’re perfect.”

  Drum stared at this irritating nerd of an imaging tech for a hard moment and straightened. “Fine,” he said. “Just make sure you print out a copy of my scan. I’ll want to go over it in depth myself.”

  “Of course.”

  Drum left a few minutes later with a copy of
a scan that belonged to another man’s body. Harlan had swapped the names on the scans while Fine was waiting and dealing with the insurance. Long after Fine was gone, Harlan sat in his control room and watched his own hands shake. His symptoms, he was sure, were not from psychic ability. Fine had freaked him more than anything else in a long while. Harlan noticed that for the first time in a year, the delicate flesh on the inside of his left elbow itched.

  ~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 14

  AARON SAMUELS WAS really getting tired of waiting around to be declared fully healed by some wunderkind in a lab coat who was more interested in paying off his medical student loans than the humanity of his patients. He had been in the cardiac unit, actually feeling his butt bond to the bed, for almost three days now. Flirting with the nurses and doing his best to remind his doctor that he in fact was more than the fleshy equivalent of a Chevy with a temperamental carburetor took up some of his time, but not enough. The place was incredibly second rate in any event. Twice, just to see what would happen, he’d disconnected the heart monitor electrode from his thatch of snowy chest hair. A harried nurse had materialized to silence the resulting alarm. When he’d done it again, she showed up, reset the machine, cursed and finally unplugged it.

  Samuels combed a liver-spotted hand over his scalp, sculpting a spiky wave of frozen white. He glanced up at the darkened TV bolted to the wall and caught his warped reflection in the glass. Looked like a stuffed cockatiel, poorly preserved and in need of dusting. He considered replacing his image with one of chunky Latinas, but decided he had watched enough Spanish Channel to last him the rest of his life. Matter of fact, the more he watched the shorter he wished that life would be.

  Samuels swung his legs off the side of the bed and announced to the blank TV screen, “As my dear departed wife used to utter with great eloquence and even greater frequency: Fuck this noise.”

  He flicked off the heart monitor and hopped off the bed. Black television snow swam into his peripheral vision. Samuels clutched the heart monitor he’d just killed for support. A moment later, his vision returned to normal. He straightened and asked, “All right, Aaron?” He paused, head cocked just like Emily her first night in the hotel room, waiting for the hammer. When none fell, he shuffled to the door.

  Samuels stuck his head into the hall. An invisible mist of urine and disinfectant hung above the linoleum, but no nurses, and thank God, no Doogie Howsers. The cardiac unit was kept quiet for a reason: the staff relied on the beeping vigil of machines and monitors. There was a nurse on the unit somewhere, most likely behind the desk running over files or some such medical busy work. Something Emily’s new beau would know about. Seemed a nice fellow, even if he was a nurse.

  Samuels shuffled down the hall, the floor tiles dry-slick and cold under his feet. He smiled and slid along, an old man in a bathrobe ice skating on a frozen creek. Halfway down the hall he stopped and read the chart hanging outside a patient suite. Michael McCafferty. Young man. Coma.

  What was he doing on a cardiac unit? He scanned further down, squinting without his glasses. Ah, heart attack. Just like Samuels, but this man had obviously been hit a hell of a lot harder. Samuels glanced up and down the hall—a kid ready to steal a candy bar—and slipped into the room.

  Michael McCafferty was a bio-mechanical flower: muscled torso and neck, arms, sprouting with a radiance of tubing and wires. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell. The machines pumped and hissed, pumped and hissed, pumped and hissed. This was the kid Emily had told him about, the faggel who wore dresses.

  Samuels flinched as the door snicked shut behind him. Go on, old fellah, walk on over and introduce yourself. He couldn’t move. The hydraulic wheeze of those external lungs pounded out a force field, pressing his boney shoulders against the door. The wood was even colder than the floor.

  Where were the cops? Emily had said this boy showed up in a cab with a corpse for company before keeling over. Shouldn’t they have a two-man guard posted outside the door, a couple of sleepy boyznblew slumping in folding metal chairs just like on the television? Samuels reached up and touched the skin at his own throat, his fingers trembled against his collar bone. The trembling did it.

  Of for the love of Jehovah, old man, get over it. He was having a conniption like some parody of himself, standing there fluttering because he was faced with what could have been him. But this was not his death. This was Michael McCafferty’s death. He straightened. “You got nothing to be afraid of, old fellah.”

  Samuels walked over to the window and grabbed the twist rod for the venetians. He looked over his shoulder, “You want some light, kid?” Samuels stared at Michael’s face. His eyelids were dark, the lashes long. “You look like you could use some light.” He twisted the rod and stripes of white glowed across Michael’s chest. A metal fitting on an electrode pad flared in rhythm with the machine breaths, a robotic nipple, light then dull and light again. Samuels pulled a chair up next to the bed and sat down.

  Michael was a beautiful kid, one of those boys who would have taken a lot of hits in Samuels’s old neighborhood. In Samuels’s day a boy like this might have graduated from self-loathing (if he made it that far) to self-denial, taking on the mantle of husband and father, leaving himself in the closet and nailing shut the door. Kids today had it better, he mused. Had more of chance to be themselves, or at least to go looking for who that self might be.

  Samuels let his eyes walk over the tubes and wires, where they contacted Michael’s skin. The flesh in the corner of his mouth was angry where the respirator hose rubbed, greasy where the nurses had applied Vaseline. A thin plastic tube with a faint yellow cast snaked out of the sheets and up to who knew where. Maybe kids today didn’t have it all that good after all.

  Samuels leaned forward and whispered, “You in there, kid?”

  The machines breathed for Michael.

  Aaron Samuels breathed for himself. “What’d you see?”

  The afternoon passed. Samuels sat sentinel as the bars of light scanned slow as the tide over the room, climbing the wall and turning the color of dandelion petals. When the door opened, he raised his head and gave a tired smile to the duty nurse.

  “Mr. Samuels?” she said, her chin doubling. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Just sitting with Michael.” He looked back at McCafferty. “My bet he’s lonely in there.”

  The nurse, fortyish with broad hips and a large mole at the corner of her mouth, padded into the room to check Michael’s connections. She scowled at the wires and the information they siphoned from his body. “You shouldn’t be in here, Mr. Samuels.” Her voice was nasal, Queens at the beginning of her life perhaps, but Jersey suburbs for at least the last decade. “I could get canned.”

  Samuels sat back in his chair, his lower back grinding its gears. “You think he’ll be all right?”

  “I think you’ll be in hot water if you don’t get back to your room.”

  She stopped fussing—a little roughly—with an IV hook-up and looked at Samuels. There was something there that kept her from being really rude and forceful.

  “What’s he like?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your father.”

  She reddened and turned around, busying herself with the wiring on the back of the respirator. Her underwear showed through her white slacks.

  “Nurse?”

  Her back stiffened. “Mr. Samuels, I would really appreciate it if you would just—”

  “Nurse!”

  She whirled around. The old man stared down at the bed. She tracked his gaze down his arm where Michael McCafferty held his hand in a weak but definite grip. She looked back at Samuels’s face, but he was looking in another direction, a warm smile on his face. Michael McCafferty looked at the old man whose hand he held. A tear welled slow and burst over the rim of his right eye. It rolled down his cheek and pooled against the respirator tube. Michael blinked. His chest rose and fell.

  Samuels blinked back a te
ar of his own. “Good morning, son.”

  ~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 15

  CHARLIE COUNTED THE bars of light reflected in Emily’s eyes. He could make out five of them floating around in those complicated irises. There were more bars of light, he could see them running along the walls of Emily’s hotel room, but her eyes bent them, losing them at the edges. He could dig that. He felt that way when she looked at him: the core of who he was crystallized sharp as a shard of ceramic, the outlines blurred-out and merging with his environs.

  This was more than being in love. Maybe it was what she could do with her mind, the specialness of her somehow bleeding over into him, changing him, making him more of who he already was while spreading him at the same time. Could she infect him with her talents? Would his hand start to shake?

  A drop of sweat peeked at the edge of Emily’s hair line. The five bars of light found it, weighted it, and pulled it down her temple. Charlie reached out and caught it with the tip of his finger. He brought it to his lips: salt and just her. Charlie blinked as the realization hit him. He sat up in bed.

  Emily looked him over. The sweat from their love-making slicking him, detailing his sinews, the notch at the base of his throat. Her skin was liquid and she solitary within it. The white noise kept THEM! out and she knew nothing but him and her. She was in heat, a cat, a burning girl of fifteen. Languid, she drew a menthol line with her finger from her belly button to between her breasts. What was best was this wasn’t just sex. This was sex with Charlie. This was her alone in her head, next to the man she loved. Her breath caught for a second. That was the first time Emily had articulated it to herself. She sat up in bed.

  “What is it?” Charlie asked.