The Touch

  “Yes, but…” A look of alarm crossed her face. “If it’s true—God, they’ll eat him alive!”

  “I think there might be another danger, Missus.” Ba was silent a moment, picturing the face of the man with the Dat-tay-vao as he remembered it from so many years ago: the vacant eyes, the confusion, the haunted look about him. “I once spoke to a Buddhist priest about the man with the Touch. He told me that it is hard to tell whether a man possesses the Dat-tay-vao, or the Dat-tay-vao possesses the man.”

  The Missus stood up. Ba could tell by her expression that she still did not believe. But she was deeply concerned.

  “Would you be willing to tell Dr. Bulmer what you told me?”

  “If you wish it, of course.”

  “Good.”

  She stepped over to the phone and punched in a number. “Yes. Is the doctor in? No, never mind. I’ll call him tomorrow. Thank you.”

  She turned to Ba again. “He’s left the office and I don’t want to disturb him at home. We’ll catch him tomorrow. He should know about this.” She shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe I’m buying this. I just don’t see how it can be true.”

  Lost in thought, she walked slowly from the room.

  It is true, Missus, Ba thought as he watched her leave. He knew beyond all doubt. For he had been touched by the Dat-tay-vao in his youth, and the awful growth that had stretched him so far above his fellow villagers was finally halted.

  16

  Alan

  Ginny met him at the door as he returned from the office.

  “Alan, what’s going on?”

  Her lips were slightly parted as they tended to be when she was annoyed, and she had taken her contacts out, leaving her eyes their natural blue. Tonight they were a very worried shade of blue.

  “I don’t know.” It had been a long day and he was tired. A game of Twenty Questions didn’t appeal to him. “You tell me.”

  She held up a newspaper. “Josie dropped this off.”

  Alan grabbed the paper and groaned when he saw the logo: The Light. Then he saw the banner across the top of the front page: MIRACLE CURES ON LONG ISLAND! (See Pg. 3).

  It was all there: five of his patients—Henrietta Westin, Lucy Burns, and others—all documenting their former chronic or incurable illnesses, now cured after a trip to Dr. Alan Bulmer. There was no malice in them. Quite the contrary. They sang Alan’s praises. Anyone reading their comments would come away convinced he walked on water as well.

  He looked up and found Ginny’s gaze fixed on him.

  “How did something like this get started?”

  Alan shrugged, barely able to hear her. He was too shaken to think straight. “I don’t know. People talk—”

  “But they’re talking about miracles here! Faith-healing stuff!”

  Alan scanned through the article again. It was worse the second time through.

  “That reporter says he spoke to you. He even quotes you. How can that be?”

  “He came by the office, posing as a patient. I threw him out.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me about it?”

  “It didn’t seem worth it,” Alan said. Actually, he had forgotten to tell Ginny. Perhaps he had simply blotted it out of his mind. “I thought that would be the end of it.”

  “Did he quote you right?” She pulled the paper away and read from the article. “‘Probably a few coincidences. Maybe some placebo effect’?”

  Alan nodded. “Yeah. I believe that’s about what I said.”

  “That’s all?” Her face was getting red. “How about something like ‘Bullshit!’? Or ‘You’re nuts!’?”

  “Come on, Ginny. You know he’d never print that. It would ruin the story.”

  “Maybe so,” she said. “But I can tell you one thing he is going to print, and that’s a retraction!”

  Alan felt a twinge of despair. “That would only magnify the problem and give the story more publicity, which is just what The Light would love. If we simply refuse to dignify it with a reply, interest will slowly die out.”

  “And what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Nothing?”

  “Easy, easy,” Alan said, rising and moving toward her.

  She was working herself up into one of her rages. He went to put his arms around her but she pushed him away.

  “No! I don’t want to be known as the wife of the local witch doctor! I want this junk straightened out and fast! You just tell me why—!”

  Her voice was reaching a screechy pitch that frazzled Alan’s nerves.

  “Ginny…”

  “You just tell me why you can’t call Tony and have him sue this rag for defamation of character or libel or what ever it’s called and print a retraction!”

  “Ginny…” Alan felt his own patience wearing thin.

  “You just tell me!”

  “Because it’s true, goddamnit!”

  Alan regretted the explosion immediately. He hadn’t wanted to say that.

  Ginny stepped back as if she’d been slapped in the face. Her voice was tiny when she spoke.

  “What?”

  “It’s true. I tried to tell you last month but I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”

  Ginny reached a shaking hand behind her, found a chair, and sat down.

  “Alan, you’ve got to be kidding!”

  He lowered himself onto the sofa across from her. “At times, Ginny, I almost wish I were. But it’s true. Those people aren’t lying and they aren’t crazy. They’ve really been cured. And I did it.”

  He saw her mouth form a question that found no voice. He asked it for her:

  “How? I don’t know.” He didn’t mention the incident with the derelict. This was all hard enough to believe without adding that and what Tony had recently told him about the man. “All I know is that at certain times of the day I can cure people of what ever ails them.”

  Ginny said nothing. Neither did Alan. Ginny watched her hands; Alan watched her.

  Finally she spoke, falteringly. “If it’s true—and I really can’t believe I’m sitting here talking about this—but if it’s true, then you’ve got to stop.”

  Alan sat in stunned silence. He couldn’t stop. Not permanently. He could cut back or hold off for a while, but he couldn’t stop.

  “It’s healing, Ginny,” he said, trying to catch her eyes. She wouldn’t look at him. “I don’t know how long I’ll have this power. But while I have it, I’ve got to use it. It’s what I’m about. How can I stop?”

  Ginny finally looked up. There were tears in her eyes. “It will destroy everything we’ve worked for. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “Ginny, you’ve got to understand—”

  She shot to her feet and turned away. “I see it doesn’t.”

  Alan gently turned her around and pulled her to him. She clung to him as if she were about to fall. They stood there in silence, arms wrapped around each other.

  “What’s happened to us?” he finally asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ginny said. “But I don’t like the way things are going.”

  “Neither do I.”

  As they held the embrace, Alan thought, This is the way it used to be. This used to be the simple answer to everything. I’d hold Ginny and she’d hold me, and it would be enough. Everything would be all right.

  “Let’s not talk about this any more tonight,” she said finally, pulling away. “Let me sleep on it.”

  “We should talk this out, Ginny. It’s important.”

  “I know it’s important. But I can’t handle it right now. It’s too much. You’re talking like someone who belongs in a mental hospital, and I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”

  As Alan watched her go up the stairs, he remembered that tomorrow was the twenty-seventh. His receptionist had reminded him that his office hours started late in the morning because of that. He always started late on May 27. Now was hardly the best time to ask, but maybe this year Ginny would come.

  “Ginny? Would you come
with me?”

  She turned at the top of the stairs and looked at him questioningly.

  “It’s the twenty-seventh.”

  Her face suddenly went blank, devoid of any feeling. She shook her head silently and turned away.

  He wandered around the first floor aimlessly for a while. He felt lost and very much alone. If only he could talk to someone about this! The pressure was building to explosive proportions inside him. If he didn’t let it out soon, he’d really be crazy.

  He went to the kitchen, made a cup of instant coffee, and brought it back to the living room. He stopped and stared in surprise when he saw another cup of coffee already there.

  When had he made that?

  Shaking his head, he dumped both into the kitchen sink. He returned to the living room and lay back in the recliner, thinking about the power.

  How could something that seemed like such a miraculous boon become such a curse?

  He closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

  17

  Sylvia

  “There he is now,” Sylvia said as she spotted Alan’s Subaru. She leaned forward and pointed past Ba’s shoulder.

  Ba nodded from the driver’s seat. “I see him, Missus.”

  “We’ll follow him to his office and catch him before he goes in.”

  Jeffy had been dropped off at the Stanton School and Sylvia was on her way to Alan’s office, determined to speak to him before he saw his first patient.

  She leaned back in the rear seat, wondering how she would broach the subject. Last night she’d almost been able to accept what Ba had said about this healing touch, this Dat-tay-vao, as he called it. Now, with the sun flickering and slanting through the oaks along the road on a beautiful spring morning, it seemed preposterous. But she had decided to follow through with her decision to speak to Alan about it, and pass on Ba’s warning. She owed him at least that much.

  They were approaching the office now. But Alan didn’t turn into the parking lot. She saw his car slow momentarily as it passed, then pick up speed again. There were two cars and a van in the parking lot, and one man sitting on the front steps.

  “Do I follow him, Missus?” Ba said as he slowed the car.

  Sylvia hesitated. He wasn’t headed toward the hospital—that was in the other direction. “Yes. Let’s see where he’s going. Maybe we’ll still get a chance to speak to him.”

  They didn’t have far to go. He turned into Tall Oaks Cemetery. Ba stopped the car at the gate and waited.

  Sylvia sat tense and quiet while invisible fingers of ice encircled her stomach and squeezed.

  “Go on,” she said at last.

  Ba turned the Graham through the gate and followed the winding asphalt strip through the trees. They found Alan’s car pulled to the side about a third of the way along the drive. Sylvia spotted him a few hundred feet off to the left, kneeling in the grass on a gentle rise.

  She watched him a moment, puzzled. She didn’t know much about his past, but she knew he was not from around here and had no family in the area. On impulse she got out of the car and walked toward him.

  She knew Tall Oaks well. Too well. It was one of those modern cemeteries that didn’t allow standing markers. All headstones had to be flat little slabs laid in the ground in neat rows to facilitate groundskeeping. Gone was the old-fashioned creepy cemetery with its mausoleums and cracked, tilted headstones. In its place was this open, grassy field ringed by trees.

  As she came up behind Alan she saw that the ground around him was littered with colorful cardboard and clear plastic packaging, all torn to pieces. When she saw what he was doing, she stopped in shock.

  He was lining up little plastic action figures along the edges of a headstone plaque.

  She moved closer to get a look at the inscription of the headstone:

  THOMAS WARREN BULMER

  Tommy, we hardly knew ye.

  Her throat tightened. She took another step to see the dates at the bottom of the brass plaque. The date of birth was eight years ago today. She caught her breath involuntarily when she saw that the date of death was only three months later.

  Oh, God! I didn’t know!

  Filled with guilt and embarrassment for intruding on him at a moment like this, she spun and began to hurry back down the rise.

  “Don’t go,” he said.

  Sylvia stopped, turned. He was still squatting, but he was looking up at her. His eyes were dry and he was smiling.

  “Come say happy birthday to Tommy.”

  She went and stood at his side while he gathered up the toy packaging.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “No reason you should.” He stood up and surveyed the toys he had displayed on the headstone. “How’s it look?”

  “Great.” She didn’t know what else to say.

  “Well, it won’t last long. One of the groundskeepers will rip them off for his kids. But that’s okay. Better than having them ground up by the lawnmowers. At least somebody will be getting something out of them. Tommy would have loved Harry Potter, you know.”

  “How did he—?” She caught herself. The question had filled her mind since the instant she had read the plaque, but she hadn’t meant to ask.

  Alan didn’t seem to mind. “Tommy had a congenital heart defect: endocardial fibroelastosis. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just say that his heart wasn’t up to the job. We had every specialist in Manhattan look at him. They tried everything they knew. But nobody could save him.” His voice cracked. “And so he died. He was just learning to smile when he up and died on us.”

  He raised his free hand to his eyes as a sob racked him. Then another. He dropped the wrappings and covered his face with both hands.

  Sylvia didn’t know what to do. She had never seen a man cry before, and Alan’s grief was so deep that she wanted to cry herself. She put an arm around his hunched shoulders. Touching him and feeling the tremors within him made his pain a physical thing. She wanted to say something comforting…but what could she say?

  Alan suddenly regained control and wiped his face dry on his sleeves.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking away, obviously embarrassed. “I’m not a crybaby. I come here every May twenty-seventh, and I haven’t cried for the last five or six times.” He sniffed. “Don’t know what’s the matter with me today.”

  A thought struck Sylvia with the force of an explosion. “Is it because you think that maybe if he had been born this year, you could have saved him?”

  Alan’s eyes were wide as he turned toward her.

  “Ba told me,” she said.

  “Ba?” It almost seemed as if he didn’t recognize the name.

  “You know—the big Vietnamese guy. He says he saw you do something at the party.”

  “The party,” Alan said in a flat, vacant tone. “It seems so long ago.” And then his eyes lit. “The party! That MTA guy’s head! Yeah…Ba could have seen.”

  After a lingering silence, Alan took a deep, shuddering breath. “It’s true, you know. I can…do things I would have laughed off as utterly impossible two months ago. I…I can cure just about anything when the time is right. Anything. But it doesn’t do Tommy any good, does it? I mean, what goddamn good is it if I can’t use it on Tommy who was the most important little sick person in my life!”

  Biting his lip, he turned and walked a few steps away, then returned.

  “You know something?” he said, slightly more composed. “Before you came I was sitting there actually thinking of digging up the grave and seeing if I could bring him back.”

  With a quake of fear, Sylvia remembered the old story of The Monkey’s Paw.

  “Sometimes I think I’m going crazy,” he said, shaking his head sharply.

  Sylvia smiled and tried to lighten the mood. “Why should you be any different from the rest of us?”

  Alan managed to return the smile. “Did you come here to see someone?”

  Sylvia thought of Greg, whose marker was on the other side of the field. She
had buried him close to home rather than in Arlington, but she had never returned to the site.

  “Only you.” He gave her a puzzled look. “Ba has some things to tell you.”

  He shrugged. “Let’s go.”

  18

  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 suspected 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.