“I don’t believe in believing. I either know or I don’t know. Right now I don’t know.”
“Fair enough, I guess.”
Charles hurried out.
It was late, but Charles made the calls anyway.
He had looked through Bulmer’s notes and couldn’t believe that the man would put all this down in black and white. He’d listed dates and times. He named names. He even listed other physicians caring for the patient. If he was a phony, he was either a very naive or a very stupid one. It would be so easy to trace these people and check out their medical records.
But, of course, if Bulmer was completely caught up in a delusional system, he could be expected to record his imagined data rigorously.
Charles couldn’t say exactly why he had looked through Bulmer’s manila envelope before sending it down to data processing, but now that he had, he was compelled to call at least one of the other doctors mentioned within the mess to check out a “cure” Bulmer described.
He picked one at random: Ruth Sanders. Acute lymphocytic leukemia. He called information, found the number of the hematologist Bulmer had listed, and dialed him. After blustering his way past the answering service, he got Dr. Nicholls on the line.
The hematologist was instantly suspicious and very guarded. Rightly so. He did not want to give out privileged information over the phone to a voice he didn’t know. Charles decided to lay his cards on the table.
“Look. I’m at the McCready Foundation. I’ve got someone here who says he cured Ruth Sanders’ leukemia three weeks ago. I’m looking for proof that he’s bonkers. I’ll hang up. You call me back here at the Foundation—that way you’ll know I’m really calling from here—and ask for Dr. Charles Axford. Then give me a few straight answers. I promise you they’ll go no further.”
Charles hung up and waited. The phone rang three minutes later. It was Dr. Nicholls.
“Ruth Sanders’ leukemia is in complete remission at this time,” he said immediately.
“What protocol were you using?”
“None. She had refused further treatment due to side effects.”
“And her peripheral smear is suddenly normal?”
“It happens.”
“What about her bone marrow?”
Dr. Nicholls hesitated. “Normal.”
Charles felt his throat go dry.
“How do you explain that?”
“Spontaneous remission.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
He hung up and pawed through the envelope for more “cures” that listed consultants. He found one that Bulmer apparently wasn’t sure about: a teenage girl with alopecia totalis—bald as a billiard ball when she came and left the office. He called her dermatologist. After going through a similar rigamarole with the consultant, he finally got the man to admit reluctantly:
“Yeah. Her hair’s growing back. Evenly. All over her scalp.”
“Did she tell you about a Dr. Bulmer?”
“She sure did. According to Laurie and her mother, that quack will be raising the dead next.”
“You think he’s a rip-off artist, then?”
“Of course he is! These guys make their reputations on placebo effect and spontaneous remissions. The only thing about this Bulmer character that doesn’t fit in with the usual pattern is his fee.”
“Oh, really?” Charles hadn’t thought about how Bulmer must be cleaning up on these “cures” of his. “What did he take them for?”
“His usual office fee: sixty-five bucks. I couldn’t believe it, but the mother swore that was all he charged. I think you’ve got a real kook on your hands. I think he may really believe he can effect these cures.”
“Could be,” Charles said, feeling very tired. “Thanks.”
With steadily growing alarm, he made five more calls which yielded three more contacts. The story was always the same: complete spontaneous remission.
Finally he could not bring himself to dial another number. Each doctor he had spoken to had had only one encounter with a “Bulmerized” patient and had easily written off the incident as a fluke. But Charles had a sheaf of names and addresses, and so far Bulmer was batting a thousand.
Charles fought off a sudden desire to throw the envelope into his wastepaper basket and follow it with a match. If what Bulmer had said about his failing memory was true, he wouldn’t be able to recall much of the data. It would be gone for good. And then Charles would feel safe.
He smirked at the thought of Charles Axford, the relentless researcher and pursuer of scientific truth, destroying data to save himself from facing the collapse of all his preconceptions, the repudiation of his precious weltanschauung.
A perfectly heinous idea, yet oh, so attractive.
For the events of the day—first Knopf and now these phone calls with the unbroken trail of “spontaneous remissions” they revealed—were making Charles physically ill. He was nauseous from the mental vertigo it caused him.
If he could destroy the data, he was sure he could make himself forget they had ever existed. And then he could once again return his mind to an even intellectual and philosophical keel.
Or maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he would never recover from what he had learned today.
In that case the only thing to do was follow it through.
He looked once more—longingly—at the wastebasket, then stuffed Bulmer’s papers back into the envelope. He was locking them in his office safe when his secretary popped her head in the door.
“Can I go now?”
“Sure, Marnie.” She looked as tired as he felt.
“Need anything before I leave?”
“Do you have any Mylanta?”
“Your stomach bothering you?” she said, her brows knitting together in concern. “You look kind of pale.”
“I’m fine. Something I ate. Crow never did agree with me.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing, Marnie. Go home. Thanks for staying.”
How could he tell her or anyone else how he felt? Like being the first astronaut in space looking down from orbit and seeing that the earth was flat.
37
Sylvia
“What’s the matter, Jeffy?”
Sylvia had heard him whimpering in his sleep. As she looked in, she saw him raking at his pajamas and neck. She went over to investigate. He had never shown tendencies toward self-destruction or self-mutilation, but she had read of autistic children who developed them. With the way he was regressing, she feared every change was for the worse.
She pulled his hands away and saw the rising welts on the skin of his neck. Lifting his pajama top, she saw more on his back.
Hives.
There had been nothing new in his diet, and she hadn’t changed her detergent or fabric softener. She could think of only one thing that had been recently added to his intake—his new medicine from the Foundation.
Sylvia slumped on the bed next to Jeffy. She wanted to cry.
Wasn’t anything going to help this child? Jeffy was slowly fading away and there seemed to be nothing she could do other than sit and watch him vanish. She felt so damned helpless! So impotent! It was like being paralyzed. She wanted to do something, anything but cry.
She took a deep breath and settled herself. Crying never solved anything—she’d learned that after Greg’s death.
She phoned Charles at home. His house keeper said he hadn’t returned from the Foundation yet. She called him there.
“You’ll have to stop the medication,” he told her. “Were you seeing any results?”
“No. Too soon to see any change, wouldn’t you think?”
“I suppose. But it’s a moot point now. He could have a more severe reaction with the next dose, so pour the rest down the toilet. And have you got some Benadryl around?”
She ran a mental inventory of the medicine cabinet. “I think so. The liquid.”
“Good. Give him two teaspoons. It’ll stop the itching.”
“Thank you, C
harles. Will do.” She paused, then: “How’s Alan?”
His voice sharpened. “Your precious Dr. Bulmer is doing fine. Better than I, for that matter.”
Something odd about his voice…strained…Charles almost never showed emotion. It made her uneasy.
“Something wrong?”
“No.” A tired sigh. “Everything’s fine. We start testing him in the a.m.”
“You won’t hurt him, will you?”
“Jesus, Sylvie, he’ll be fine. Just don’t ask bloody stupid questions, okay?”
“Okay. Pardon me for asking.”
“Sorry, Love. I’m a bit rushed here. I’ll ring you up later to see how the boy’s doing.”
He made some excuse about checking reports and said good-bye, leaving Sylvia standing there, holding the phone. Charles was upset about something and that wasn’t good. But Charles also sounded indecisive…almost unsure of himself. That was unsettling.
She hung up and went to get the Benadryl. The house seemed so empty as she walked down the hall to the medicine cabinet. Alan had been here only three days and nights, but he had filled Toad Hall for her in a way that she had not known since buying the old place. It seemed all the emptier now for his leaving.
After all these years it was so strange to miss somebody.
She had just spooned the antihistamine into Jeffy when the phone rang. Her heart tripped a few beats when she recognized the voice.
“A lonely froggy calling Mrs. Toad.”
“Alan!”
He told her about Mr. K and how he had cured the man, and how Charles had reacted.
“No wonder Charles was acting so strangely!”
“You don’t sound quite yourself tonight, either.”
She didn’t want to burden him with her own problems, but she had to tell him.
“It’s Jeffy. He’s allergic to that new drug.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. But look,” he said, and she could hear his voice brighten, “when I get out of here we’ll know all about the Touch. Then will you let me try it on Jeffy?”
She felt every muscle in her body suddenly tighten of its own accord. Was it possible?
“Alan—will it work?”
“I don’t know. Seems to work on everything else. Why not autism?”
God, if I could believe for just a minute, for just a second.
“Sylvia? You still there?”
She took a breath. “Yes, Alan. Still here. Hurry home, will you? Please?”
“I’m on my way!”
She laughed, and that relaxed her a bit. “Wait till they’re finished with you.”
“Good night, Mrs. Toad.”
“Good night, Alan.”
She hung up the phone and went over to Jeffy. She gathered him up in her arms and hugged him close, ignoring his struggles to get free, struggles that were as impersonal as someone in a deep sleep trying to untangle himself from his sheets.
“Oh, Jeffy. Everything’s going to be all right. I can feel it coming.”
And she could. The bitter discouragement of a few moments ago was gone. She wouldn’t let herself get carried away, but she felt that somewhere up around the bend she might catch sight of the light that was supposed to wait at the end of every tunnel.
38
Alan
So this is what it’s like to be a patient.
Alan was into his second full day of testing and he didn’t like it.
Starting at 6:00 a.m. yesterday they had stuck leads to his scalp and attached a box to his belt for a twenty-four-hour EEG by telemetry. They had punctured him and poked at him for the rest of the day. And all without a word of explanation. This morning had started off with hour after hour of written psychological tests.
At least he knew what was going on. But how must a patient feel when everything around him was strange and mysterious and vaguely threatening?
And he was lonely. He missed Sylvia desperately. Just a few days with her and he felt like a new man. To be away from her now was an almost physical pain. But he was doing this as much for her as for himself. If their relationship was to have any sort of future, he had to know what he was getting her into.
And so he would be a patient for a while. And like any patient he was afraid of what these tests would show. It might be just another routine work-up to Axford, but there was nothing routine about the ordeal to Alan. He was seriously concerned about his erratic memory, the gaps that had seemingly been cut out of his life, especially his recent life. That suggested a diagnosis too awful to consider.
Better to have a brain tumor than Alzheimer’s disease. He knew he was out of the usual age range, but the signs were there.
He was now lying on a hard-surfaced table in the Foundation’s radiology department, waiting to be rolled into the maw of a machine that looked like a CT scanner. A young technician wearing a good four pounds of eye makeup approached with a syringe.
“This place even runs full blast on Saturdays?” he said as she swabbed his arm with alcohol.
She spoke around a big wad of chewing gum. “Every day.”
“By the way, I had a CAT scan a few weeks ago.” He remembered the rush of warmth when the contrast material had been infused into his veins.
“This is similar but different,” the girl said nonchalantly. “This here’s a PET scan.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, putting on a pedantic tone. “Positron Emission Tomography.” He was pleased that he had remembered the meaning of the acronym. Maybe his memory wasn’t so bad after all. The technician cocked her head as she looked at him. “Hey. Pretty good. How’d you know that?”
“Read about it in Newsweek. What’s that you’re going to inject into me?”
“Just sugar.”
More than just sugar, Alan knew. FDG—radioactive sugar that would show the most active and least active areas of his brain. He remembered a few articles he’d read in the journals had said that PET scans had demonstrated abnormalities in the brain metabolism of schizophrenics. Is that what Axford was after—proof that he was a grade-four tweety bird?
“Dr. Axford wants you to walk around for a while before you’re scanned,” she said as she withdrew the needle from his vein.
Evidently Axford wanted to see the overall activity of his brain.
And what if he found a schizophrenic pattern on the PET? What if everything Alan had seen and done lately had never happened? What if it was all part of an elaborate delusional system?
No, he wasn’t going to fall into that trap. I’m NOT crazy, he thought. But they all say that, don’t they.
The tests were finally finished and he was sitting in his bare little room on the seventh floor when someone knocked on the door.
It was Mr. K. His color was so much better that Alan didn’t recognize him at first. A suitcase rested on the floor beside him.
“Just came to say good-bye,” he said, thrusting out his hand.
Alan shook it. “Leaving?”
“Yep. Goin’ out for a Saturday afternoon walk and I ain’t coming back. Said they can’t use me anymore ’cause I’m not sick anymore.”
“Did they tell you how your cancer cleared up?” He was curious how Axford & Co. would explain that.
“Said it cleared up by itself. Nocturnal emission or something like that,” he said with a grin and a wink. “But I know what it was and so do you.”
“What?”
He poked a finger at Alan’s chest. “It was you. You did it. I don’t know how, but you did it. Only explanation I can think of is you’re an angel or something sent down by God to give me another chance. Well, I’m taking it! I screwed up the first time around, but I ain’t screwin’ up again!”
Sudden tears flooded Mr. K’s eyes. Obviously embarrassed, he pulled something from his pocket and thrust it into Alan’s hand. It crinkled.
“Here. Take these. I won’t be needing them.”
Thinking it was money, Alan began to protest. Then he saw that it was a half-empty pack of Cam
els.
“Good-bye,” said Mr. K, averting his face as he picked up his suitcase and hurried off.
Alan went to throw the cigarettes into the wastebasket, but stopped in midstride and stared at the crumpled pack. He decided to keep it. Every time he had his doubts about the reality of what he was experiencing, he’d take it out and use it as a reminder of Mr. K’s “nocturnal emission.”
39
Charles
“This everything?”
Henly nodded as he placed the last printout on Charles’s desk. “Every last bit.”
“You’re sure?”
“We’re paid to be thorough.”
Charles had to admit that McCready’s two goons were extremely thorough. They had dogged Bulmer’s progress from department to department for the past two days, gathering up each scrap of data as it was produced and tucking it away for Charles’s eyes only.
For two days now he had suppressed the gnawing desire to scan each test result as it came in, afraid that he would prejudice himself by forming a hasty diagnosis. He wanted to see the whole picture at once.
“You waiting for something?” he asked Henly and Rossi as they stood across the desk from him.
“Yeah,” Rossi said. “We’re waiting for you to put that stuff in the safe.”
“I want to look at it.”
“Everything’s on the computer, Doc. Filed under your access code. We’re not supposed to leave until all that stuff’s locked away.”
“Forget it,” Charles said, his annoyance rising. “I like to see the originals.”
“Give us a break, Doc,” Henly said, agitatedly running a hand through his blond hair. “It’s Saturday night and the women are waitin’. Lock up the safe and we’re gone. What you do after that ain’t our problem.”
Charles sighed. “Anything to speed you on your way.”
He went to the wall safe, tapped in the code, and shoved all the papers inside. After slamming it shut and pressing the clear button, he turned back to the two security men.
The Touch Page 24
