Slow Sculpture (17 page)

She nodded.

He went on: “You found a lump. You went to a doctor and he made some tests and gave you the bad news. Maybe you went to another doctor and he confirmed it. You then did some research and found out what was to happen next—the exploratory, the radical, the questionable recovery, the whole long agonizing procedure of being what they call a terminal case. You then flipped out. Did some things you hope I won’t ask you about. Took a trip somewhere, anywhere, wound up in my orchard for no reason.” He spread the good hands and let them go back to their kind of sleep. “Panic. The reason for little boys in their pajamas standing at midnight with a broken alarm clock in their arms, and for the existence of quacks.” Something chimed over on the bench and he gave her a quick smile and went back to work, saying over his shoulder: “I’m not a quack, by the way. To qualify as a quack you have to claim to be a doctor. I don’t.”

She watched him switch off, switch on, stir, measure and calculate. A little orchestra of equipment chorused and soloed around him as he conducted, whirring, hissing, clicking, flickering. She wanted to laugh, to cry, and to scream. She did no one of these things for fear of not stopping, ever.

When he came over again, the conflict was not raging within her, but exerting steady and opposed tensions; the result was a terrible stasis, and all she could do when she saw the instrument in his hand was to widen her eyes. She quite forgot to breathe.

“Yes, it’s a needle,” he said, his tone almost bantering. “A long shiny sharp needle. Don’t tell me you are one of those needle-shy people.” He flipped the long power-cord which trailed from the black housing around the hypodermic, to get some slack, and straddled the stool. “Want something to steady your nerves?”

She was afraid to speak; the membrane containing her sane self was very thin, stretched very tight.

He said, “I’d rather you didn’t, because this pharmaceutical stew
is complex enough as it is. But if you need it.…”

She managed to shake her head a little, and again she felt the wave of approval from him. There were a thousand questions she wanted to ask—had meant to ask—needed to ask: What was in the needle? How many treatments must she have? What would they be like? How long must she stay, and where? And most of all— Oh, could she live, could she live?

He seemed concerned with the answer to only one of these.

“It’s mostly built around an isotope of potassium. If I told you all I know about it and how I came on it in the first place, it would take—well, more time than we’ve got. But here’s the general idea: Theoretically, every atom is electrically balanced (never mind ordinary exceptions). Likewise all electrical charges in the molecule are supposed to be balanced—so much plus, so much minus, total zero. I happened on the fact that the balance of charges in a wild cell is not zero—not quite. It’s as if there was a submicroscopic thunderstorm going on at the molecular level, with little lightning bolts flashing back and forth and changing the signs. Interfering with communications—static—and that,” he said, gesturing with the shielded hypo in his hand, “is what this is all about. When something interferes with communications—especially the RNA mechanism, which says, Read this blueprint and build accordingly, and stop when it’s done—when that message gets garbled, lopsided things get built, off-balance things, things which do almost what they should, do it almost right: they’re wild cells, and the messages they pass on are even worse.

“Okay: Whether these thunderstorms are caused by viruses or chemicals or radiation or physical trauma or even anxiety—and don’t think anxiety can’t do it—that’s secondary. The important thing is to fix it so the thunderstorm can’t happen. If you can do that, the cells have plenty of ability all by themselves to repair and replace what’s gone wrong. And biological systems aren’t like ping-pong balls with static charges waiting for the charge to leak away or to discharge into a grounded wire. They have a kind of resilience—I call it forgiveness—which enables them to take on a little more charge, or a little less, and do all right. Well then: Say a certain clump
of cells is wild and say it carries an aggregate of a hundred units extra on the positive side. Cells immediately around it are affected, but not the next layer or the next.

“If they could be opened to the extra charge, if they could help to drain it off, they would, well, cure the wild cells of the surplus, you see what I mean? And they would be able to handle that little overage themselves, or pass it on to other cells and still others who could deal with it. In other words, if I can flood your body with some medium which can drain off and distribute a concentration of this unbalanced charge, the ordinary bodily processes will be free to move in and clear up the wild-cell damage. And that’s what I have here.”

He held the shielded needle between his knees and from a side pocket of his lab coat he took a plastic box, opened it and drew out an alcohol swab. Still cheerfully talking, he took her terror-numbed arm and scrubbed at the inside of her elbow. “I am not for one second implying that nuclear charges in the atom are the same thing as static electricity. They’re in a different league altogether. But the analogy holds. I could use another analogy. I could liken the charge on the wild cells to accumulations of fat, and this gunk of mine to a detergent, which would break it up and spread it so far it couldn’t be detected any more. But I’m led to the static analogy by an odd side effect—organisms injected with this stuff do build up one hell of a static charge. It’s a by-product, and for reasons I can only theorize about at the moment, it seems to be keyed to the audio spectrum. Tuning forks and the like. That’s what I was playing with when I met you. That tree is drenched with this stuff. It used to have a whorl of wild-cell growth. It hasn’t any more.” He gave her the quick surprising smile and let it click away as he held the needle point upward and squirted it. With his other hand wrapped around her left biceps, he squeezed gently and firmly. The needle was lowered and placed and slid into the big vein so deftly that she gasped—not because it hurt, but because it did not. Attentively he watched the bit of glass barrel protruding from a black housing as he withdrew the plunger a fraction and saw the puff of red into the colorless fluid inside, and then he bore steadily on the plunger again.

“Please don’t move.… I’m sorry; this will take a little time. I
have to get quite a lot of this into you. Which is fine, you know,” he said, resuming the tone of his previous remarks about audio spectra, “because side effect or no, it’s consistent. Healthy biosystems develop a strong electrostatic field, unhealthy ones a weak one or none at all. With an instrument as primitive and simple as that little electroscope you can tell if any part of the organism has a community of wild cells, and if so, where it is and how big and how wild.” Deftly he shifted his grip on the encased hypodermic without moving the point or varying the amount of plunger pressure.

It was beginning to be uncomfortable, an ache turning into a bruise. “And if you’re wondering why this mosquito has a housing on it with a wire attached (although I’ll bet you’re not and that you know as well as I do that I’m doing all this talking just to keep your mind occupied!) I’ll tell you. It’s nothing but a coil carrying a high-frequency alternating current. The alternating field sees to it that the fluid is magnetically and electrostatically neutral right from the start.” He withdrew the needle suddenly and smoothly, bent her arm, and trapped in the inside of her elbow a cotton swab.

“Nobody ever told me that before or after a treatment,” she said.

“What?”

“No charge,” she said.

Again that wave of approval, this time with words: “I like your style. How do you feel?”

She cast about for accurate phrases. “Like the owner of a large sleeping hysteria begging someone not to wake it up.”

He laughed. “In a little while you are going to feel so weird you won’t have time for hysteria.” He got up and returned the needle to the bench, looping up the cable as he went. He turned off the AC field and returned with a large glass bowl and a square of plywood. He inverted the bowl on the floor near her and placed the wood on its broad base.

“I remember something like that,” she said. “When I was in—in junior high school. They were generating artificial lightning with a … let me see … well, it had a long endless belt running over pulleys and some little wires scraping on it and a big copper ball on top.”

“Van de Graaf generator.”

“Right! And they did all sorts of things with it, but what I specially remember is standing on a piece of wood on a bowl like that and they charged me up with the generator, and I didn’t feel much of anything except all my hair stood out from my head. Everyone laughed. I looked like a golliwog. They said I was carrying forty thousand volts.”

“Good! I’m glad you remember that. This’ll be a little different, though. By roughly another forty thousand.”

“Oh!”

“Don’t worry. Long as you’re insulated, and as long as grounded, or comparatively grounded objects—me, for example—stay well away from you, there won’t be any fireworks.”

“Are you going to use a generator like that?”

“Not like that, and I already did. You’re the generator.”

“I’m—oh!” She had raised her hand from the upholstered chair arm and there was a crackle of sparks and the faint smell of ozone.

“Oh you sure are, and more than I thought, and quicker. Get up!”

She started up slowly; she finished the maneuver with speed. As her body separated from the chair she was, for a fractional second, seated in a tangle of spitting blue-white threads. They, or she, propelled her a yard and a half away, standing. Literally shocked half out of her wits, she almost fell.

“Stay on your feet!” he snapped, and she recovered, gasping. He stepped back a pace. “Get up on the board. Quick, now!”

She did as she was told, leaving, for the two paces she traveled, two brief footprints of fire. She teetered on the board. Visibly, her hair began to stir. “What’s happening to me?” she cried.

“You’re getting charged after all,” he said jovially, but at this point she failed to appreciate the extension of even her own witticism. She cried again, “What’s happening to me?”

“It’s all right,” he said consolingly. He went to the bench and turned on a tone generator. It moaned deep in the one to three hundred cycle range. He increased the volume and turned the pitch control. It howled upward and as it did so her red-gold hair shivered
and swept up and out, each hair attempting frantically to get away from all the others. He ran the tone up above ten thousand cycles and all the way back to a belly-bumping inaudible eleven; at the extremes her hair slumped, but at around eleven hundred it stood out in (as she had described it) golliwog style.

He turned down the gain to a more or less bearable level and picked up the electroscope. He came toward her, smiling. “You are an electroscope, you know that? And a living Van de Graaf generator as well. And a golliwog.”

“Let me down,” was all she could say.

“Not yet. Please hang tight. The differential between you and everything else here is so high that if you got near any of it you’d discharge into it. It wouldn’t harm you—it isn’t current electricity—but you might get a burn and a nervous shock out of it.” He held out the electroscope; even at that distance, and in her distress, she could see the gold leaves writhe apart. He circled her, watching the leaves attentively, moving the instrument forward and back and from side to side. Once he went to the tone generator and turned it down some more. “You’re sending such a strong field I can’t pick up the variations,” he explained, and returned to her, closer now.

“I can’t, much more … I can’t,” she murmured; he did not hear, or he did not care. He moved the electroscope near her abdomen, up and from side to side.

“Yup. There you are!” he said cheerfully, moving the instrument close to her right breast.

“What?” she whimpered.

“Your cancer. Right breast, low, around toward the armpit.” He whistled. “A mean one, too. Malignant as hell.”

She swayed and then collapsed forward and down. A sick blackness swept down on her, receded explosively in a glare of agonizing blue-white, and then crashed down on her like a mountain falling.

Place where wall meets ceiling. Another wall, another ceiling. Hadn’t seen it before. Didn’t matter. Don’t care.

Sleep.

Place where wall meets ceiling. Something in the way. His face, close, drawn, tired; eyes awake though and penetrating. Doesn’t matter. Don’t care.

Sleep.

Place where wall meets ceiling. Down a bit, late sunlight.

Over a little, rusty-gold chrysanthemums in a goldgreen glass cornucopia. Something in the way again: his face.

“Can you hear me?”

Yes, but don’t answer. Don’t move. Don’t speak.

Sleep.

It’s a room, a wall, a table, a man pacing; a nighttime window and mums you’d think were alive, but don’t you know they’re cut right off and dying?

Do they know that?

“How are you?” Urgent, urgent.

“Thirsty.”

Cold and a bite to it that aches the hinges of the jaws. Grapefruit juice. Lying back on his arm while he holds the glass in the other hand, oh no, that’s not … “Thank you. Thanks very—” Try to sit up, the sheet—my clothes!

“Sorry about that,” he said, the mindreader-almost. “Some things that have to be done just aren’t consistent with panty-hose and a minidress. All washed and dried and ready for you, though—any time. Over there.”

The brown wool and the panty-hose and the shoes, on the chair. He’s respectful, standing back, putting the glass next to an insulated carafe on the night-table.

“What things?”

“Throwing up. Bedpans,” he said candidly.

Protective with the sheet, which can hide bodies but oh not embarrassment. “Oh I’m sorry.… Oh I must’ve—” Shake head and he slides back and forth in the vision.

“You went into shock, and then you just didn’t come out of it.” He hesitated. It was the first time she had ever seen him hesitate over
anything. She became for a moment an almost-mind-reader: Should I tell her what’s in my mind? Sure he should, and he did: “You didn’t want to come out of it.”