The Touch

by F. Paul Wilson

  In other words, he wanted Charles to predigest it and spoon feed it to him.

  Well and good. Charles kept up on the field anyway. Small price to pay for the latitude he was given in his research at the Foundation.

  The conversation followed its usual course to its customary dead end, and Charles was preparing to make his exit when the senator shifted to a new topic.

  “What did you think of Dr. Alan Bulmer when you met him?” His voice was getting weaker and raspier as the afternoon wore on.

  “Who?” Charles drew a complete blank on the name for a second.

  McCready prompted him: “You met him at that Nash woman’s party last month.”

  “Oh, the family doctor! I don’t—” And then it occurred to Charles: “How did you know I met him?”

  “There’s been some talk about him.”

  “What kind of talk? This wouldn’t have anything to do with his testimony before the committee, would it?” Charles knew that it was not good to get on the bad side of Senator James McCready.

  “Not at all, not at all. That’s over and done with, gone and forgotten. This talk has to do with healings. Cures. That sort of thing.”

  Charles groaned mentally. Here we go again: another try for a bloody miracle cure.

  McCready smiled. The expression seemed to take a lot of effort. “Now, now, my esteemed Dr. Axford—don’t get that cynical look on your face. You know I like to investigate every one of these faith healers. One of these days—”

  “Bulmer’s no faith healer. He’s a bloody ordinary family practitioner. And I stress the word ordinary. You’re going to drive us both dotty if you keep looking for a miracle!”

  McCready laughed. “I could listen to you talk all day, Charles. I wish I had a British accent.”

  It never failed to impress Charles how easily Americans were impressed by a British accent. It always sounded “classy” to them. But he knew that back in London his accent would have been recognized immediately as Paddington and his class identified as working.

  “Still,” the senator said, hanging on to the subject, “there’s talk.”

  “What do you mean by ‘talk’?”

  “You know how things get around. Comments dropped here and there in laundromats and supermarket checkout lines eventually get around to a stringer or a reporter who works for one of my papers. Then it gets to me.”

  “Fine. But talk about what?”

  “About people with long-term illnesses, chronic conditions, progressive disorders, acute illnesses—all sorts of things—cured after he touches them in a certain way.”

  “That’s bloody foolishness!”

  McCready smiled again. “‘Bloody.’ How apropos. I was just going to ask you about a very bloody wound sustained by a certain Mr. Cunningham last month.”

  “Jesus bloody Christ—!”

  “There’s that word again.”

  “—did you have a spy at that party?”

  “Of course not. But it would be rather silly of me to own a string of newspapers and have all those editors and reporters at my command and not avail myself of their talents when the need arose, don’t you think?”

  Charles nodded silently. He didn’t like the idea of anyone snooping into his off-hours, but he didn’t see any point in protesting.

  McCready seemed to read his mind. “Don’t worry, Charles. You weren’t the object of investigation. I was just having someone look into the incident between my esteemed colleague, Congressman Switzer, and the MTA chief of this fair city. I’ve found one can deal more effectively with one’s colleagues if one is up to date on their improprieties and indiscretions.”

  Charles nodded again. Looking for dirt on Switzer, he thought. But he said: “Works that way in research foundations too.”

  “Right. Unfortunately, the only impropriety on the congressman’s part was not turning the other cheek, but rather giving as good—or perhaps better—than he got from Cunningham in the physical abuse department. And to many of his constituents, that would seem a virtue rather than a fault. So the inquiry was dropped.”

  He paused for a moment. The extended monologue was obviously tiring him.

  “But something serendipitously interesting was turned up. One of the guests who saw the struggle mentioned during her interview that she thought Cunningham had received a terrible gash to the back of the head. She spoke of blood spouting like…‘like a geyser,’ I believe she said. Yet after this unknown man—later identified as Dr. Alan Bulmer—put his hand over the wound, it stopped bleeding and closed itself up.”

  Charles laughed. “She was probably drunker than Cunningham!”

  “Possibly. That’s what this reporter thought. But not long ago, he heard some idle talk about ‘miracle cures’ at a Long Island doctor’s office. The name Bulmer clicked and he told his editor, who told me.” His eyes bored into Charles from under their half-closed lids. “You were there. What did you see?”

  Charles thought for a moment. There had been an awful lot of blood. He could see it now, spurting against the mantel and the wall. But when he’d seen the wound, it had only been a scratch. Could it—?

  “I saw a lot of blood, but that means nothing. Scalp wounds bleed far out of proportion to their length and depth. I’ve seen heads literally covered with blood from a shallow, two-centimeter laceration. Don’t waste your time looking for a miracle cure from Alan Bulmer.”

  “I never waste my time, Charles,” the senator said. “Never.”

  12

  The Senator

  Ah, Charles, McCready thought after Axford had gone. Doubting Charles.

  He leaned far back in his chair and, as he often did, thought about his chief pet doctor. And why not? Their lives were tightly entwined, and would remain so as long as he remained ill and alive.

  Despite the fact that Charles was a doctor and an arrogant bastard to boot, McCready privately admitted to a soft spot in his head for his chief of research. Perhaps that was because there was no pretense about Charles. He made no bones about being a devout atheist and confirmed materialist who was constitutionally unable to accept anything that did not yield to the scientific method. If he couldn’t observe it, qualify and quantify it, it didn’t exist. Refreshingly free of bullshit, his Charles. Humans were nothing more than a conglomeration of cells and biochemical reactions to him. He had once told McCready that his dream was to reduce the human mind to its basic neurochemical reactions.

  All fine and well when you had your health. But when you didn’t, and when modern medicine failed you…then you looked for something more. You prayed, even when you didn’t believe in prayer. You investigated faith healers even when you had no faith. The sneers and the derogatory remarks no longer came so easily. You looked under every rock and followed every trail to its inevitable phony end. And then sniffed out another one to follow.

  Hopelessness was a bitch.

  He had given up hope on current research into neuromuscular diseases—he couldn’t trust it to go in the direction he needed. Thus the Foundation was born, with Charles Axford as its core. He had made Axford chief because he felt he owed him something.

  Because the day he met Axford was the most traumatic day of his life. It had altered the course of his life, altered his perception of life, the world, the future. Because Charles Axford had been the first to know what was wrong with him.

  All the other doctors before Charles had been wrong. To a man they had blamed his episodic fatigue on “overwork” and “stress.” That was the favorite fall-back catchword in medicine: If you can’t figure it out, it’s stress.

  McCready had bought that for a while. He had been working hard—he’d always worked hard—but he’d never felt so tired. He would get up in the morning a ball of fire and by mid afternoon he was useless. He had stopped eating steak because it was too much work to chew it. His arm tired while shaving. Overwork and stress. He’d gone along with the diagnosis because time and again his physical examination, reflexes, blood tests, X
-rays, and cardio grams had come out completely normal. “You’re the picture of health!” a respected internist had told him.

  His first episode of double vision had sent him in a panic to the nearest neurologist who would give him the earliest appointment. That had been Charles Axford. He later learned that Axford had not squeezed him into that day’s schedule out of doctorly concern for a patient in distress, but because his afternoon appointment book had been virtually bare.

  McCready had found himself seated before a cool, aloof, thickly accented Britisher in a white coat who chain-smoked cigarettes in his chair on the far side of an old desk as he listened to McCready’s symptoms. He asked a few questions, then said:

  “You’ve got myasthenia gravis, a rapidly progressive case, and your life is going to be hell.”

  McCready still remembered the slow wave of shock that had passed through him by inches, front to back, like a storm front. All he could see was Aristotle Onassis fading away month after month, year after year.

  He’d managed to say, “Aren’t you even going to examine me?”

  “You mean tap your knees and shine lights in your eyes and all that rubbish? Not if I can bloody help it!”

  “I insist! I’m paying for an examination and I demand one!”

  Axford had sighed. “Very well.” He came around and sat on the front edge of the desk. Holding out both his hands to McCready, he said, “Squeeze. Hard.” After McCready had gripped them and squeezed, Axford said, “Again!” And then, “Again!”

  And with each successive squeeze, McCready felt his grip grow weaker and weaker.

  “Now rest up a bit,” Axford had said. After smoking half another cigarette and further fouling the office air, he stuck out his hands again. “Once more now.”

  McCready squeezed with all he had, and, with no little satisfaction, saw Axford wince. After a brief rest his strength had returned.

  “See,” Axford said, wiping his hands on his lab coat. “Myasthenia gravis. But just to be absolutely sure, we’ll do an EMG.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nerve conduction study. Which in your case will show the classic decremental pattern.”

  “Where do I get this done?” He was suddenly desperate to have the diagnosis confirmed or denied.

  “Lots of places. But my rig here in this office affords the most nutritional value.”

  McCready was baffled by this Brit. “I don’t understand.”

  “The fee I’ll charge you,” Axford said with the barest hint of a smile, “will help keep food on my table.”

  McCready fled Axford’s office, fully convinced that the man was a lunatic. But second and third opinions, along with exhaustive testing, proved the Brit right. Senator James McCready had a particularly virulent case of myasthenia gravis, an incurable neuromuscular disease caused by a deficiency of acetylcholine, the substance that transmits messages from nerve cells to muscle cells at their junction.

  Out of a sense of loyalty, he returned to Axford for therapy. And, as he had long ago learned about such supposedly noble impulses, it was a wrong move. Axford’s bedside manner embodied all the concern and personal warmth of the average cinder block. Axford didn’t seem to care how the medications were affecting his patient—the muscle cramps, the twitching, the anxiety, and insomnia. He cared only about how they improved the responses on his damned EMG machine.

  And McCready went the route—the whole route. He had his thymus removed, he was juiced up with drugs like neostigmine and Mestinon, then bloated up with cortisone. He went through plasmapheresis. All to no avail. His case progressed slowly but relentlessly no matter what Axford or anyone else did.

  But he had never fully accepted his illness, not even to this day. He had fought it from the beginning and would keep on fighting it. He had plans for his life and his career that went beyond the Senate. Myasthenia gravis threatened to stop him. It wouldn’t. He would find a way—over it, around it, or through it.

  And toward that end, he began investigating Charles Axford years ago. He learned he’d been born into a working class family in London. He proved brilliant in his studies, graduating from medical school in England at the top of his class; he was considered equally brilliant by anyone who knew him during his neurology residency here in Manhattan—admired by all but considered far too abrasive for anyone’s comfort. After countless bids for research grants and fellowships had been turned down, he’d reluctantly opened up a private practice, where he was quietly starving. Brilliant though he was in the science of medicine, he was virtually an idiot in the art of dealing with people.

  To add to his problems, his wife had run off to “find” herself, leaving him with a chronically ill daughter.

  Charles, of course, had never mentioned a word of his personal problems to the senator. McCready had ferreted them out through his publishing empire.

  It became evident to McCready that the two men were made for each other: Axford was a whiz in neurology and McCready had a neuromuscular disease that was considered incurable at medicine’s present state of knowledge; Axford was looking for a research post and McCready had more money than he knew what to do with—at last count his personal fortune had totaled somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars.

  Two ideas were born then. The first was the seed of the Medical Guidelines bill. Doctors had explained to him over and over that myasthenia gravis was subtle and difficult to diagnose in the early stages. He didn’t care. It should have been discovered years before he went to Axford. These doctors needed a lesson or two in humility. If they wouldn’t do their jobs right, he’d show them how.

  The second idea became reality sooner than the legislation: The McCready Foundation for Medical Research was begun, with Charles Axford, M.D., as its director. The setup was tax-advantaged and allowed McCready to direct the course of all research done. Axford seemed delighted—he was well paid and could follow his interests without having to deal too much with patients.

  McCready too found the situation delightful: He had his first pet doctor.

  With an influx of grants and donations, the Foundation grew until it presently provided inpatient as well as outpatient services in its own building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, a former office building raised in the thirties that looked like a smaller version of Rockefeller Center. McCready had started off with one pet doctor; now he owned a whole stable of them. That was the only way to keep doctors in line: Own them. Make them dependent on you for their daily bread and they soon lost their maverick ways. They learned to toe the line like anybody else.

  Axford still showed a lot of maverick tendencies, but McCready laid that off to the fact that he gave his research chief plenty of room. Someday he would yank a few strings and see how the Brit danced. But not yet. Not while he needed Axford’s research know-how.

  That might not be much longer, though. Not if one tenth of what he had heard about this Bulmer character were true. After years of false leads, it was almost too much to hope for. But those stories…

  His mouth went dry. If those stories were even half true…

  And to think that Bulmer had been in his committee room only last month. He hadn’t come across as a nut case—anything but.

  Was it possible he had been sitting a few yards away from a cure and not known it?

  He had to find out. He had to know! He didn’t have much time!

  13

  Charles

  “C’mon, Daddy,” Julie said, her voice a shade away from a whine. “Tonight’s a dialysis night.” She stood there in her cut off jeans and long-sleeved Opus the Penguin T-shirt, holding the glass out to him. “Let me have some more. I’m thirsty.”

  “How many ounces have you had already?” Charles asked.

  “Six.”

  “Only two more.”

  “Four! Please!” She hung her tongue out of her mouth and made a choking sound.

  “All right! All right!”

  He filled her eight-ounce tumbler halfway to the top,
but restrained her arm as she lifted the glass.

  “Use it to wash down your last three Amphojels.”

  She made a face but popped them in her mouth and began chewing. Of the twenty-eight pills Julie had to take a day—the calcium, the activated vitamin D, the iron, the water-soluble vitamins—she hated her aluminum hydroxide tablets the most.

  When she had finished gulping down the juice, he pointed toward the back end of the apartment.

  Julie slumped her shoulders and pouted. “Can’t it wait?”

  “Toddle on, and no more lolly-gagging. It’s after six already.”

  He followed her into the back room where she plopped herself into the recliner, rolled up her sleeve, and placed her bared forearm on the arm of the chair.

  Charles had the dialyzer all warmed up and ready to go. He seated himself next to his daughter and inspected her forearm. The fistula was still in excellent shape after five years. The thickened, ropy veins, about as big around as his little finger, bulged under her skin. A few years ago one of the kids at school had seen her fistula and given her the name “wormy arms.” Julie had worn long sleeves ever since—even in summer.

  After cleaning the area with Betadine and alcohol, he made the skin punctures and cannulated the arterial and venous ends. He hooked her up to the dialyzer and watched the blood begin to flow toward the machine.

  “You want the telly?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe later. I want to read this first.” She held up the latest Mutts collection. The comic strip was her current favorite; she loved Mooch the cat.

  Charles placed the remote control for the TV next to her on the seat, then stood over the dialyzer—which came up to his chest—and watched it do its thing, drawing the red blood and the clear dialysate past each other on different sides of the membrane, then sending the freshened blood, relieved of most of its toxins, back to Julie’s vein while it stored away the tainted dialysate. Charles was happy with this particular model. There was seldom trouble with the transmembrane pressures, and Julie had got shocky only twice so far this year—a pretty good record.