But then he thought—the pressure of the tenure conference coming up, the bizarre events in the night, the sleeplessness, Katelyn’s waking up in near hysterics, this damned lump in his ear—of course he was on edge. Stressed. Big time.
“Look,” he said, “thanks for a perfectly delicious breakfast. Tomorrow’s my turn and it’s waffles unless there are objections.” He looked down at the still-gobbling Conner. “I’ll make yours without egg.”
“Fine.”
“They’ll be fascinating. I’m going to the health center, I’ll call you with a verdict.”
“Prediction,” Conner said. “They will find a small object enclosed in a membrane made of cutaneous tissue. And, if you search your body, you will find an indentation where that tissue was taken from. It’s called a witch’s mark.” He smiled up at Dan. “The grays have been with us for some time.”
“Conner, this happened last night in a kitchen full of people. I hardly think the grays could have operated on me without anybody noticing.”
“There was a moment—probably just a few seconds—when you were all turned off. The grays did what they did and turned you back on as they left. It’s called missing time. It’s the way they handle us. We’re their property, you know. You know what the great anomalist Charles Fort called the world? A barnyard. The grays are the farmers, and right now they’re doing a little farm work right here on Oak Road.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What are they doing?”
“For one thing, they’ve got some kind of a plan for you, which is why they gave you that implant. You’re involved, Dad.”
“Let’s look,” Katelyn said. “I want to see this thing for myself.”
But Dan did not want them to look at it. He retreated upstairs and took his shower. Safe in the stall, shaving and soaping himself up, he felt his body for the sort of indentation Conner had described.
Nah, there wasn’t one. They’d X-ray him at the health center and tell him what he already knew: he had a cyst that was mildly infected. The doctor would prescribe a couple of weeks of an antibiotic, and if it got worse, he’d go in and open the damn thing up.
He had to wash his hair, anyway, so he sat down on Katelyn’s shower chair that she used for shaving her comely legs and—well, what the hell, he felt along both ears and across the back of his neck.
There was nothing there. Thank you, Conner, it’s so delightful the two or three times a year that you’re wrong. As he stood back up, though, he felt a very slight soreness in his right buttock. He felt back there, just above the cheek. As his fingers ran along the smooth, wet skin, he knew. He felt again to be sure.
Then he was having an aura, one of those odd sequences of perceptions—in his case, a vision of stars all around him from his childhood planetarium, followed by a feeling of floating—that were the prelude to one of the seizures like he’d had in childhood.
He leaned up against the side of the shower. “Katelyn,” he managed to say. Not yell it, couldn’t do that. “Katelyn.”
The feeling of floating got stronger. It was uncanny, he even looked down to be sure his feet were still touching the floor of the stall. Then his eyes fixed on the drain, the silver circle of it with the water swirling down.
The drain became larger and darker, and now what he saw was a round black hole in a field of gleaming silver. Objectively, deep within himself, he knew that he was seizing. He felt nothing, you never did. All he could see was this opening that had been below him but was now above him, black and foreboding, getting bigger. It was like being drawn into the underside of a gigantic silver balloon, that was how the seizure affected his temporal lobe.
Then it was gone, bam. The shower was back, drumming on him. He coughed, gagged, recovered himself. Quickly, he rinsed his body, got out of the shower, and dropped down, still soaking wet, onto the toilet. Jesus God, he’d seized. After all these years, he had damn well seized.
In his late childhood, when the seizures had first been diagnosed, he’d been put on Dilantin. He had tolerated it well, and maybe he’d better go back on it. He hadn’t had actual spasms while in the shower or he would have gone down, so he was still dealing with a petit mal epilepsy. That was on the good side. On the bad side, for this to return after so many years suggested that there could be some other syndrome present. For example, maybe there had been epileptiform tissue in his brain that had developed a tumor. Maybe the thing in his ear was indeed a tumor. It would not be a primary, that did not happen to earlobes. It would be metastase of a hidden primary, asymptomatic until it began, last night, to press a nerve.
If this was a distal metastase of a brain tumor, he might well be a dying man.
He toweled himself and dressed fast. He went downstairs and through the kitchen again, where Katelyn and Conner were still breakfasting, Conner now absorbed in NPR on the radio, Meet the Press on TV, and the New York Times “Week in Review,” while Katelyn read the funnies in the Herald Leader.
“Zits is great,” she said as he headed out to the garage. “The father gets this—”
“Later. I’ll call.”
“Be sure they’re open.”
If they weren’t, he was heading to the Wilton City Hospital emergency room. There was no way he could make it through another night without knowing what this thing was.
In the event, the health center was open and staffed by a nurse and a squeaky little doctor who appeared to be just a hair older than Conner. He was tempted to head on to Wilton anyway, but his paranoia was running full blast, and he feared a note to Marcie from some tenure inquisitor: “Subject refused treatment at College H.C., preferred Wilton.”
Listen to that thinking, though. Paranoid. He was having seizures for the first time in over twenty years, and now entertaining lunatic paranoid fantasies . . . but how could he ask this freckled little boy with a sunburned skier’s nose for what he really needed, which was a damned Xanax drip to take home with him?
“Doctor, I have a little cyst in my left ear that’s giving me trouble. Mild trouble, but it’s waking me up at night when I lie on my side.”
He sat on the edge of the examining table while the doctor, if that’s actually what he was, gently examined the ear.
“I’m assuming a subcutaneous infection,” Dan said, aware of his own nervousness. He wanted to also say that he’d seized, but he dared not do that. Paranoid delusions aside, if that got back to Marcie, it might indeed have implications.
“There’s a mass,” the young doctor said.
Dan felt the blood drain out of his face, felt his heart turn over. He was forty. He was dying.
“Let’s do an X-ray,” the doctor said.
He followed him back into the green-tiled, Lysol-scented depths of the health center. Dan managed to get enough spit up to talk. “What do you expect to find?” he asked mechanically.
“Have you been doing any sort of carpentry?”
“Carpentry?”
“There’s a mass in there with something hard in it. I’m thinking a nail head. Something along those lines.”
“Can you see a point of entry?”
“Not anymore. When did it start hurting?”
“Last night.”
“That part of the ear’s not very sensitive. It could’ve been there for a while, just recently become irritated.”
They reached the X-ray room and the doctor turned on the lights, which flickered to life, revealing the same X-ray machine that had been there for all the years Dan had been involved with Bell College. Probably war surplus, and not from a recent war.
The doctor took four views of his ear and then he was sent off to the waiting area, an extraordinarily bleak little room with an anorexic gray couch against one wall, three plastic chairs, and two chair-desks for students who might wish to study while waiting for their bad news.
Dan would have taken out his iPod and listened to the New York Times, but his iPod was on his bedside. His choices were a coverless copy of Bicycling or the front half of a not-very-re
cent Newsweek.
Half an hour later, he began to fear that the young doctor, upon seeing the X-rays, had leaped into his car and rushed off to Wilton with them.
He went back into the depths of the place, where he found him sitting in a tiny office studying a thick textbook. “Oh, hi,” he said. “Let’s see if that e-mail’s come in yet.”
“E-mail?”
“Yeah, your X-ray’s being read by our radiologist. He got it online.”
Now, that was somewhat reassuring—a high-powered radiologist at another institution was reading his film.
“Here it is.” He opened an e-mail. “Boy, these guys need their English translated into English.”
“You can’t read medical terminology?”
“I can’t read a Sri Lankan’s idea of medical terminology. Your radiologist is in Trincomalee. Actually sounds rather romantic, Trincomalee.”
Dear heaven.
He reached across his desk and pulled out an X-ray folder. “This is interesting,” he said. He put two of the X-rays up on a wall light. “You have a foreign object in your ear,” he said, “as I suspected.”
Dan stared at the X-ray. The object was a tiny pinpoint of light. He could hear Conner’s precise young voice, “They will find a small object . . .” He asked, “Is it enclosed in a membrane?”
“A membrane? Not likely. Maybe a little calcification if it’s been there for a while. I think it’s a metal filing. It could have migrated from anywhere.”
“I have a sore place on my buttock.”
“Let’s take a look.”
He lowered his trousers.
“Nothing visible. Perhaps a slight indentation is all.”
Once again, Conner had been exactly right.
“So, what should I be doing about this?”
“If it bothers you, I can take it out.”
“You?”
He laughed a little. “Quite easily. It’s not deep, it’ll take five minutes.”
He lay on the examining table and let the nurse swab his ear with iodine. They injected him a couple of times, and went in.
“Feel anything?”
“No.”
“Okay, here it is. It’s a white disk. A—whoa.”
“What?”
“It just went—what the hell?”
“What?”
“I’m withdrawing.”
“Did you get it?”
He was silent as he took a stitch in the wound.
“I did not get it,” he said at last. “I got a little sliver of it before it migrated. It’s down in your earlobe now.”
He felt the lobe. “How can that be?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not a normal object.”
He had to say the word, hard as it was. “Cancer?”
The doctor laughed. “Cancers don’t generally run like hell when you touch them with a scalpel.”
“Was it, uh, a living thing, then?”
“Dr. Callaghan, I have no idea what it was. But I am going to do two things to put that question to rest. First, I’m going to put this sliver under a microscope, then I’m going to send it to the lab.”
“Does this happen to people often?”
“First one I’ve seen. Foreign objects are a whole subdiscipline of trauma medicine. It’s nothing to worry about, though. I wouldn’t think twice about it.”
They went into another room, this one containing a lab bench with a fairly decent microscope on it. The doctor prepared a specimen slide and put it into the viewing area. He lowered his face to the binocular.
Dan watched him, waiting.
He lifted his head. “Okay, off it goes to pathology.”
“But—what did you see?”
“White material. Probably some sort of a protein.”
“Why did it move? Is it a parasite?”
“Lord, no! Here—take a look for yourself.”
Gratefully, Dan looked into the microscope. What he saw was shaped like a sickle of moon, and along the curved outer edge there was what looked like movement. “What am I seeing? It’s still moving, am I right?”
“That has to be a light effect.”
Dan adjusted the scope. Clearly, the thing had scilia on it, and the scilia were propelling it. He lifted his face. “Scilia,” he said, “look.”
The doctor barely glanced at it. “Well, call day after tomorrow, we’ll give you the pathology report.”
“But it has scilia on it that are moving. So it’s a living thing, it must be. And it can migrate. What if it goes somewhere else? Into my brain or my heart?”
“There are no ear parasites like this.”
And that ended that. Another two patients had come in, and the doctor was off to attend to their hangovers.
On the way home, Dan called and told Katelyn that he was fine. She asked him what they’d found, and he came, quite unexpectedly, to a powerful personal moment. He found himself shaking so intensely that he pulled over to the side of the road.
“Dan?”
“Sorry. It was a little something in there. They took it out.”
“What sort of a little something, honey?”
“Not a tumor.” He found that he very much did not want to tell her that Conner had been right. He did not want Conner to be right, and he never, ever wanted to ask Conner how he had known. “It was a little cyst. Took ten minutes to get rid of it. The main delay involved waiting for the radiologist to evaluate it . . . in Trincomalee. It seems we outsource our diagnostics to experts in the Third World. Or is it the fourth world? Is there a fourth world?”
“You sound a bit out of it.”
“It’s been a long twenty-four hours, dear. I’m coming home and I’m going to turn on the TV and watch Sunday golf and spend the afternoon in a coma.”
All the way home, without knowing why and without being able to stop, he cried. There was no sound. In fact, his expression never changed, except for wetness flowing down his cheeks. He felt like an idiot, he never cried. But he couldn’t stop himself now, because a tremendous sorrow was coming up from his depths, a hidden river exposed.
He remembered this so well, this anguish that he could not control. It had been a feature of his childhood, had come after his seizures.
He thought he knew why the syndrome had returned. This was probably the most tense period he had never known in his life. He was not a particularly successful teacher. In fact, he was pretty much a failure. Bell wasn’t just a holding tank for second-rate students, it was a refuge for dead-end teachers, too.
He had his good points. You could not find a more loving husband. You could not find a better man to father a kid as sensitive and exasperating as Conner. But he tended to the pedantic when he lectured. He was too careful, too humorless, too predictable.
Still, he had built a life for them at Bell. Conner’s life was here. Katelyn was having a successful career in the sociology department. She was tenured, popular with students, had crowded classes. She was pulling down seventy grand to his forty-eight-five, also. It would not be fair for his failure to uproot her.
Tomorrow at ten sharp, he would have his final tenure review with Marcie. Of course, it wasn’t the official word, that came from the tenure committee next week. But by the end of the meeting tomorrow, he’d know.
He drove past Marcie’s house, noted that all the blinds were down. A signal? An omen? He drove on, circling blocks—but not Marcie’s of course, God forbid—and forcing back these ridiculous, if thankfully silent, tears.
When he arrived home, he hoped to avoid Conner.
“I was right,” his son said as he got out of the car. “I was exactly right.”
“Conner, you were wrong. It was a cyst.”
“Where is it?”
“Oh, brother. Son, it’s in the garbage at the health center.”
“Dad, do you realize what that is? It’s an alien artifact! It’s important, there’s even a Web site about them. A lot of Web sites.”
Dan tried to get past his son an
d into the house.
“Dad, it’s important! You’re involved in a close-encounter situation and—”
“SHUT UP!” He ran across the garage. “Will you just SHUT UP!”
Katelyn appeared. “What’s the matter with you? What’s going on out here?”
“Katelyn—oh, God. Katelyn, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Conner. Please forgive me, both of you.” He tried to smile. Failed. Shook his head. “Look, Conner, you’re always asking for space. I need some space right now. I need some, okay?”
“Dad, are you crying?”
“It’s a mild allergy to the anesthesia.”
“Dad’s just had an operation, Conner. We need to back off.”
“But Mom, he’s letting them throw away an implant!”
“Goddamnit, there’s no such thing! Conner, for a supposed genius, you can be an amazing idiot. A Web site on alien implants is your source of information? You urgently need to learn some discrimination, son. You can do calculus backward and recite Wittgenstein, and yet you come up with this garbage.”
“Be careful, Dad. It was Wittgenstein who said, ‘Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.’ ”
Dan knew not to pursue it. No matter how correct he might be, in a sentence or two more, Conner would win the argument. To avoid that, Dan went inside, took a relatively good Barolo out of the wine rack, opened it and grabbed a glass, and headed for the family room. Golf, decent wine, and deep, deep sleep were what he needed.
He’d gone over the top, of course. The boy was terribly sensitive, of course. Well, he’d apologize later. Conner got under your skin. He really did have a skill at that.
He poured some wine, drank it . . . and felt his ear. The damned thing had moved again. It had returned to its original site, under the stitch.
He considered screaming. But no, that would be rude. Instead, he poured himself another full glass and drank it down.
PART FOUR
THE HANGED MAN