by R. M. Ryan
“I come down here all the time to try on shoes. I love to see my toes wiggling there. It makes me feel young again.” He smiles, sharing a secret with me. “You won’t tell my daughter. She’s the one who’s selling the store. She doesn’t understand. She thinks I’ll get something from the radiation. What does she know?”
He plugs the cord in.
“Here we go,” he says.
He flips the Bakelite switch. Nothing happens.
“This machine’s like me. Sometimes you got to give us a little push to get us going.”
He flips the switch back and forth and bangs the kick mark on the side of the machine with his foot. Suddenly the Adrian thunks. It snaps to attention. The familiar humming starts, but I hear crackles and then I feel the tingle of a little electric shock.
“Whoa . . .”
“Nothing to worry about. Just a tickle of electricity. Look at your feet, Mr. Reilley.”
“Ryan.”
Mr. Dreyhouse isn’t listening; he’s looking through one of the viewfinders on top of the machine. I look, too, and sure enough, there are the bones of my two feet in that wavery green light that now brightens and now darkens.
“Too tight, Reilley. See how those shoes squeeze your little toe?”
The Adrian begins to lift and drop, as if it’s breathing, and the crackle of the electricity becomes louder and the tingle sharper. I step off the machine and see a slight halo of electricity around Mr. Dreyhouse’s fingers.
“Science lets us see the truth inside,” he says. He leans on the Adrian. Maybe the electricity locks him there.
I walk away through the must of the basement. I turn around. He’s still back there, haloed in the light of the single overhead bulb, his thin hair standing straight up.
“You’ll electrocute yourself,” I yell at him.
“I’m used to it. Finding out the truth requires a little pain sometimes, Mr. Reilley.”
67.
Sergeant Richard Ryan received a United States Army Commendation Medal from the Forty-Second MP Gp (Customs) for his work as a translator and black-market investigator in Germany during the early 1970s.
R. M. Ryan is the author of another novel and two books of poetry.
This novel is dedicated to Steven Unger, who died in November of 2011, late casualty of the war in Vietnam.