Machine Of Death (25 page)

Suddenly the room came alive with pounding music, and lights overhead began to flash, and smoke poured onto the far-off stage, and a swell of cheering began to rumble the walls, and James closed his eyes and sighed. 

“I’m moving on to other cities, other states, full of people like you,” Dr. Eli said, pacing frantically back and forth on the stage, microphone clenched in one hand, the other hand circling like he was launching airplanes off a carrier. “I’m meeting thousands of folks, telling them they don’t have to be afraid, just like
you’re
not afraid. Telling them what
you
already know. Telling them they don’t have be
shackled
to that little black machine in their doctor’s office.” Here he paused to allow raucous applause, taking a sip from a bottle of water on a stool. “Telling them they can tap into that
power
that’s in all of us. That power that’s in
you
, and
you
, and
yes
ma’am, it’s in you too.” 

The room burned with cheering. As soon as Dr. Eli had taken the stage, awash in strobe lights and sparklers, the entire massive family sitting in front of James had climbed onto their chairs, flailing their arms and shouting, and forty minutes later, they hadn’t come down yet. James noticed that the bald boy and his mother were not clapping, or standing on their seats, or swaying with their eyes closed, or even paying much attention at all. The hair-sprayed lady next to James wasn’t so much as craning her neck, although she did occasionally check her watch. The boy’s head now rested in her lap.

The aisles were crammed with people eager to be a part of Dr. Eli’s last seminar in town. More kept trying to shove their way into the room, pleading with the black-shirted security guards, rattling the locked doors elsewhere in the hallway. James watched his parents: Mom held her purse on her lap with both hands, and Dad sat slumped in his chair, occasionally shifting uncomfortably. Was
this
what he’d been so worried about?

Dr. Eli welcomed a line of people onto the stage to share their experiences. A tearful young woman clutched Dr. Eli’s microphone with both hands; he wrapped his arm around her shoulder.

“My—my paper said ‘airplane,’” she said, to a loud chorus of boos from the audience. Dr. Eli quieted them with a look, nodding to the woman to continue.

“My paper said ‘airplane,’” she went on, “and I was scared to go anywhere
near
a plane after that.” Laughter. “No plane rides, no airports. I couldn’t pick up my brother from his trip. I couldn’t visit my Grandma out in Chicago. We had to move because our house was too close to the, to the flight path. I couldn’t get no other job, I had to ride the bus every morning back to the same old neighborhood.   I was scared every morning to get too close to the airport, but I had no other job, I had no other place to go.”

The crowd was quiet now, watching as she blotted her eyes with a mascara-stained tissue. Dr. Eli squeezed her shoulder.

“But Dr. Eli told me, you don’t got to be afraid, you don’t got to live your life that way,” she said. A few scattered cheers from the back of the room. “He told me, we have control. We don’t live our lives because of what some box says, what some piece of paper tells us. We are human beings. We are free. We are alive.”

The room erupted with approval. The family in front of James screamed their lungs out. James looked over and realized that his mother was pressing her hand to her eyes. He met her look with his own, and she laughed, embarrassed, and turned away.

Dr. Eli’s staff brought a small metal box out onto the stage. It was shiny black, with vents along both sides and a small control panel on the front. Its lights were dim and its
LCD
screen was dark. The circular receptacle on the right side was empty—no thin glass vial of blood—and the printer had no inch-long strip of paper protruding like a tongue from its serrated mouth. But all the same—it was a predictor box.

The black square loomed huge on the video projection screen, and when Dr. Eli’s assistant handed a sledgehammer to the sniffling woman, the crowd went nuts. She heaved it up and brought it down on the box, sending plastic knobs and circuit-board fragments whirling into the audience. James saw that a stack of predictor boxes waited at the rear of the stage, one for each person in line for the microphone.

They kept coming, one after the other:

“My wife will tell you:  I’m a new man. I stay up late. I leave the house.”

“Yesterday I did it. I drove to the store for the first time in five years.”

“Finally, I took my grandchildren to the zoo. Thank you, Dr. Eli.”

“Thank you, Dr. Eli. For giving me my life back.”

“God bless you, Dr. Eli. Thank you.”

James was speechless. 

Mom and James kept their hands on either side of Dad, helping him step down from the curb and into the Hilton parking lot. They passed through the knot of people at the weekend-retreat sign-up tables, seeking out the night air, finding it cool and calming. 

“I think that was really interesting,” James said. Mom gave Dad a knowing look, then smiled at the sidewalk.

“It’s just a lot of junk,” Dad said. “They don’t cure you. This Egyptian, he doesn’t heal you. It’s a bunch of baloney.”

“Well, it seems like he helps a lot of people get over their hangups,” James said. “I mean, those predictor boxes really mess up a lot of people.”

“These predictors, schmedictors, they are a hazard,” Dad said. “People don’t realize this, scientists, idiots. They are a real hazard.”

The lady with the bald son stood underneath a lamppost, a stack of bright paper in her hand, shoving pages into the stream of people. Mom took one. 

The bald boy watched them walk away, twisting his fingers around each other as if he were kneading clay. 

James watched the boy until he grew uncomfortable. The boy never looked away. 

The new flyer was bold black text from a home printer, photocopied onto yellow paper: “
TIRED
OF DR.
ELI’S
LIES?”

James picked the paper from the floor, where it had fallen as they entered the house last night. “No more cheap theatrics. Ready for
REAL
HEALING?” it read.

Dad called him from the other room. James put the flyer on the table by the door and ran into the kitchen, where Dad was struggling with the juicer.

“Mom makes me some of that carrot juice,” he said, holding a bundle of carrots in his hand. James took the carrots and fed them into the juicer, one by one, until he had filled a glass with carrot juice. When he turned around with the glass in his hand, his father was sprawled on the floor. 

“There he is,” Dad slurred, his eyes slowly focusing, urging the doctor to look to the doorway. “This is my son. This is my son, James.”

James shook the doctor’s hand and hugged his father, his hands recoiling at the spine thin beneath the paper gown, the shoulder blade jutting into his palm, the ribs, each one distinct. Dad’s face was swollen; he worked his jaw like he was chewing taffy. He took a sip of water, and it took him three tries to swallow.

“I’d like to watch him here for a few days,” the doctor said. “He had another episode last night that required the shock paddles. I think this is some cause for concern.”

“My…my heart is acting up now,” Dad said, fighting to get the words out. “I never had problems with my heart, never.”

“It’s possible the medication he’s been taking for the lymphoma may have adversely affected the cardiac system,” the doctor said. “I’m really worried that there is a potential for arrhythmia. I’m going to prescribe some treatment that will hopefully keep his heart running smoothly.”

“Pills, pills, more pills,” Dad said. “Everywhere you go, they give you pills. One pill for this, one pill for that.”

The doctor wrote on his prescription pad. “Does he have any history of respiratory or kidney problems?”  

After Mom arrived, James began to wander the hospital’s halls, trying not to glance into open doors as he walked. When he did, he saw the same thing, over and over: death on hold, waiting, biding its time, typically with its mouth open, breathing shallowly, its eyes either closed or open staring at nothing.

He realized for the first time that he was scared; he did not know if he would have the opportunity to complete his relationship with his father, and it worried him. He didn’t know if he would trust himself to seize the opportunity, even if it presented itself. 

He wondered how long it would be before he would no longer be able to recognize his father in the figure that lay in the bed down the hall, the father that had once hoisted him onto his shoulders, or balanced his tiny body on the palm of his hand. The man in James’ memory was strong and robust, and did not have the dim, sallow eyes that the man down the hall seemed to have. 

James wondered, not for the first time, why his father had read the slip of paper from the predictor box in the first place, and if it would have even mattered had he not. 

“Who
is
this kid? What makes him qualified to do anything?” James asked, perhaps more bitterly than he meant to. His mother glanced over at the living room where Dad lay sideways on the couch, and gestured for James to keep his voice down.

“His website says—”

“His
website
,” James sneered.

Mom sucked in her breath, held it for a second. “A lot of people say he’s helped them feel better.”

“People. What people? People we know?”

“Sick people. I don’t know. They’re on the website.”

“
His
website, of course it’s gonna tell you—”

“We already went to see him.”

James stopped short, and closed his mouth. 

His mother turned toward the living room and put a hand on her cheek, and then leaned backward, so that James caught her by the shoulders. She leaned into her son, and James wrapped his arms around his mother, and she sighed, and she spoke softly:

“We saw him at Dr. Eli’s seminar—the kid sitting with his mother. The, you know, bald head?” James nodded. Mom went on: “His name is Tim and he’s just the sweetest little guy.”

She leaned her head on James’ shoulder. His own mother was smaller than he was, more frail, tired from shuffling her husband to doctor’s appointments every day, tired from administering pills and treatments and praying late into the night, tired from waking up early to make sure he woke up at all.

“Tim said he could…reach inside you,” she continued, as she and James watched the softly heaving body that lay on the couch a room, a world away. “He said he could close his eyes and feel inside you, and feel what was wrong, and move his fingers around and fix it, just like running his fingers through your hair, just like untying a tangled knot.”

“Mmm,” James said, because he didn’t know what else to say, and also because he felt so sad for the woman that he held in his arms, and wished that she wouldn’t believe in things that would just disappoint her, and also wished that maybe it were true.

“He said he could feel the atoms in your body,” she said, whispering now, still looking away, still watching her husband sleep. “He said he could reach into your dad’s throat and feel the tumors and pluck them off like strawberries.”

“Did he?” James said.

“No,” Mom said. 

James’ parents went back to see Tim and his mother with the painted fingernails, even though they didn’t bring up the subject with James again. James found Dr. Eli’s brightly-colored flyer under a stack of unread magazines, and looked it over again and laughed and shook his head and thought of all the people who’d read that tiny, fortune-cookie slip of paper torn from a predictor box and who had never again gone near buses or bathtubs or microwaves. People who’d stopped smoking or drinking or started smoking or drinking, people who knew there’d be no risk in skydiving and so sat there stone-faced as they fell ten thousand feet through the air, never having any fun at all.

Most of all he thought of Tim, the skinny, bald kid lying curled in his mother’s lap in the back row of the Hilton’s banquet hall. Did he have leukemia or something? What was his game, and what did he want with James’ parents?

And why couldn’t he heal himself?

So one night, James stayed up late and confronted his parents as they came home from Tim’s house, and made sure they hadn’t given him any money, and watched his father take slow steps up the stairs. And after they disappeared upstairs, James sat alone on the couch, and exhaled and admitted to himself, well, really, when it came right down to it, what’s the harm?  

The ambulance woke James up. The siren grew louder and then stopped, deadly close, and James was on his feet instantly.

Mom let the paramedics in the front door and James stood in the hallway as strange men shouted to one another, 100 cc’s of this and that and finally they eased him down the narrow stairs on a backboard and slid him onto a gurney, and James took his father’s hand for a brief second before the red doors slammed and he was gone. 

“It’s his heart,” the doctor said. “He hasn’t been taking his medication.”

James stared at his mother, who looked quickly away down the hall. “He was worried about the side effects,” she finally said.

The doctor took a few moments to choose his words. “At this point, I’m not too concerned about the side effects,” he said.

She looked up at him, and got his meaning, and James felt her weight press into him again. 

“Dad, you have to take your pills.”

His father looked up from his prone position on the pull-out couch bed, his throat swollen like a bullfrog, his breathing thick and labored, his face drizzled with a week’s worth of downy beard. “Get that junk away from me,” he managed.

James sucked his breath and leaned back on the recliner, drumming his fingers on the leather arm, and sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you. The doctor says the pills are going to keep your heart strong. You don’t want that to happen again, like the other night.”

“That doctor is a crook,” Dad gasped. “Those pills are what’s a killer. Worse than that lymph, whatever you call it, lymphoma. The pills are the killer.”