Paths

by David DeSimone

  Rita placed the MRI coil down. “We’ll find something for you,” she said smiling and left the room.

  She returned a few minutes later with blindfold and handed it to Eva.

  “Thank you.”

  Eva put on it on.

  Rita then affixed the MRI coil onto the top of the bed. She lowered Eva into coil and strapped her in. Eva tried to move her head.

  “I can’t move at all.”

  “Good. You’re not suppose to move,” Rita said. “Now we can start the test.”

  Although rendered sightless by the blindfold Eva nonetheless sensed the machine as a looming presence over her body. Sounds grew softer around her, the darkness somehow darker.

  Drew watched the bed convey his wife into the belly of the beast and felt a pang of sympathy.

  When the bed finally came to a stop, Drew reached for Eva’s hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Rita said. “I can’t have you hold hands, sorry.”

  Music began piping through hidden speakers just as an ominous humming and clicking commenced.

  Eva tried to focus on the music, some soft rock ballad from the 80s. She hated soft rock but especially from the 80s. Instead of comfort, the music annoyed her to no end. She asked for someone to turn it down. Mercifully the volume lowered.

  Eva’s neck began to throb again.

  Rita disappeared into the control booth leaving Drew and Eva completely alone.

  The humming and clicking increased in intensity.

  The clicking then changed to a loud clanging.

  Clanging turned to banging.

  And then back to clanging.

  Clanging and banging emanated from all directions within the machine.

  Eva felt trapped. It sounded as though the machine was about to collapse and crush her. She wished she could hold Drew’s hand. At that moment she realized that he was her real “happy place” and not the waves and beaches.

  After a while, Eva began to adjust to the sounds, even the music.

  Then something began to happen.

  Eva noticed a change in the repetition of the knocking. It started as a slight shift, just a momentary skip in the rhythm of the beat and then the clanging jumped a notch in volume and the rapping increased.

  Eva hoped that it meant that they were almost done.

  The rapping grew louder and faster.

  Eva began to worry. Something wasn’t right. She thought she heard the muffled sounds of voices coming from the control booth. In an instant the music was cut.

  Eva was left with only the loud rapping, which by now crescendoed to insanely frantic proportions, akin to a deafening drum roll.

  She called out to Drew. “Drew, what’s going on?”

  Drew turned to the people in the booth and saw Rita with a man, shoulder to shoulder, working on the controls. They appeared to be arguing. He heard their voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying, but whatever it was couldn’t have been good.

  As the pounding continued its maddening drum roll there then came a loud clattering, as if a metal part inside broke off and got caught in a fan.

  Drew jumped out of his chair and called for help.

  Eva felt warmth blanketing her body. She couldn’t recall ever reading about an MRI scanner doubling as a tanning bed, yet that’s exactly how it felt. She felt the warmth on her arms, chest and face - all the exposed areas of her body. As the seconds passed, the heat increased from warm to very warm and was quickly on its way to becoming hot.

  Eva tried to move. The straps had her head thoroughly pinned inside the headgear. She tried kicking free but only managed to bang her knees on the increasingly warming surface of the faltering scanner.

  Hands reached in.

  The heat kept increasing.

  The skin on Eva’s arms, chest and face became especially sensitive to the heat.

  Working feverishly, Drew tried to free his wife from the MRI coil that held her captive to the bed.

  “HELP US!” he screamed again. He too felt the intense heat on his body.

  Rita made a beeline for the control panel and tried desperately to get the bed to roll out from under the scanner. It wasn’t moving. As Rita punched in commands to get the bed to move, the male technician positioned himself on the other side of Drew, reached under the scanner and worked with Drew to free Eva.

  Deciding that the bed wasn’t coming out, Rita then turned her focus on Drew. He was beside himself with panic, his hands shaking beyond his control. She grabbed to pull his arms away.

  “Let me do this!” she shouted. “Mister Fairwood! Please let me do this!”

  With surprising suddenness and strength Rita shouldered her way in between Drew and his wife, forcing Drew to step back and in no time she had the straps undone.

  The male technician went to the foot of the bed. He struggled to get hold of her thrashing legs and Drew rushed over to assist. He shouted for Eva to lie still so he and the technician could pull her out. Fighting through her panic, she did as she was told.

  The machine shook the entire room, tipping chairs over.

  Drew and the male technician pulled Eva out in one swift motion.

  Rita ran out to alert Security.

  Drew threw his arms around his wife and headed for the door with the technician close behind.

  Before they could exit, they were struck by a blast of hot air that sent them tumbling across the room.

  The MRI went silent. Drew, Eva and the technician looked toward the machine.

  What knocked them to the ground was a pressure pulse caused not by flames but by plasma - or heated gas - that burst from a middle seam of the machine with an array of bright shimmering rays of light shifting from blue to yellow to red. As the seam widened, more rays shot forth, until the machine was surrounded by a 360-degree incandescent corona of light and color.

  While Drew was tending to his wife, the male technician stared transfixed. Just as he thought things couldn’t get any stranger, the rays did something beyond anything he could have imagined. They spread out and completely blanketing the three of their bodies, forming a kind of wetsuit but instead of Lycra, these suits were made of glowing gas.

  He marveled at the shimmering light surrounding his own arms and legs and torso. He wriggled his fingers and watched gaseous light twirl before his eyes. The technician’s name was Tray.

  Tray recalled the first and only time he dropped acid. At that time, he was a sheltered suburban kid barely into his teens.

  The kid who had given him acid was Donny Delminico. Donny was two years older than Tray. He was streetwise and short-tempered, never backing out of a fight, even if his opponent outsized him. It was this fearlessness and raw anger that qualified him as the uncontested leader of a group consisting of four other high school boys, including Tray.

  So when Tray gave him shit about trying acid, Donny was a little pissed. The others in the group had followed his lead. So what the fuck was up with Tray?

  Unpleasant as it may be, sometimes you just had to show who’s boss, and for Donny that time had come.

  Knowing he had the rest of the group to back him, instead of threatening Tray with physical violence, Donny chose a different tactic. He goaded the other boys into antagonizing Tray, using names like “fucking pussy”, “faggot” and other nasty slurs that were equally demeaning, sickening even; because in a group situation a bruised ego hurts more than a bruised cheek.

  It worked.

  Tray accepted the acid. The tiny purple flake sat weightless on the tip of his index finger.

  He raised his finger to his lips, hesitated, and asked where Donny had gotten it.

  “Someone I know,” Donny said. “What the fuck is it to you?” His cold stare added that if Tray kept stalling, not knowing where he got it would be the least of his problems.

  He placed the purple flake onto his tongue and closed his mouth, while butterflies fluttered crazily in his stomach.

  An hour passed and Tray remained surprisingly sober
. Believing the storm had blown over, he went home early and fell into a peaceful slumber.

  He awoke shortly after midnight by an unnerving feeling of disconnect, a sense of floating outside of himself, like an out-of-body experience.

  His eyes shot wide open.

  He tried to sit up, but was held down by the grip of the drug.

  The terror, sharp and paralyzing, had commenced.

  Wrapped in cold sweat, he felt shivery all over, his pounding heart felt on the verge of exploding.

  Tray managed to tilt his head up. In front of him were shapes, strange phantasmagorical wonders straight out of a lunatic’s nightmare. Had he not been so fraught with tension, had his throat not felt so tight, he would have screamed. Instead, he could only gape in silent horror.

  Shapeless phantoms of every prismatic color - red, yellow, green, blue and purple - danced at the foot of his bed while forms, shifting in various shades of red incandescence, swirled with smooth liquidity over his head.

  Although fully aware that everything happening around him was directly attributed to the drug, knowing this failed to quell the panic that threatened to drive Tray insane. His biggest fear was that he would never come down from this nightmare.

  He endured this torture for five hours before finally blacking out.

  At the same time Tray was having his bad trip, Donny Delminico felt the complete opposite. Instead of fear, he felt ecstatic. The drug had injected him with a powerful sense of freedom and joy he never felt before.

  Like Tray, he too saw phantasm shapes in all their colorful richness. However, unlike Tray, he welcomed them, embraced them, had in fact decided they were angels sent by God to take him across the Kingdom of Heaven on a fiery chariot, like some modern-day Elijah.

  Seduced by whisperings that only he could hear, Donny followed the angels out of his house, climbed into his eight-cylinder, fuel-injected chariot exiting his driveway and then exiting his life.

  The following day, feeling surprisingly alert after having only three hours of sleep, Tray was at his hallway locker taking out books for Geometry class when the high school principal’s voice came on the intercom announcing Donny Delminico had died in a car accident. Tray at first worried he might still be in bed either dreaming or still under the influence of acid. But he wasn’t. The nasally timbre of Mr. Elmstead’s voice was too loud, too annoying to be a hallucination. The voice on the intercom had said that Donny had lost control of his car and crashed into a tree. Even though there had been no mention of drug use, Tray knew it definitely contributed to the accident. Mr. Elmstead also didn’t mention the toxicology report, which found three times the normal recreational amount of lysergic acid diethylamide found in Donny’s blood, nor the mess awaiting state troopers, paramedics and cleanup crew.

  Donny hadn’t been wearing his seat belt. When he struck the tree at the bottom of the roadside ditch, he was catapulted through the windshield. His skull, already fractured in several places from impacting the windshield, exploded when it struck the tree. Donny’s head looked like a burst ten-pound bag of raspberry jam with a single eyeball and a few teeth floating just above the surface.

  The MRI accident was similar to Tray’s acid trip in that he once again witnessed something bizarre and frightening, but different and perhaps worse, because now he was left without an explanation. Such strange lights mystified him. It was just a big magnet for chrissake! Weird shit like this isn’t supposed to happen!

  The idea of radiation exposure began to worry him. Maybe there was some kind of underground tank rupture that caused the machine to explode and was now filling the room with radioactive gas. He didn’t know how the guts of the damned thing really worked! He was just a technician!

  Nevertheless, if the output was radioactive, he and the nice couple with him, and maybe everyone in the hospital, were fucked.

  He was single, living in a studio apartment in New Haven with two goldfish, Louie and Lou, drove a Honda Civic and owed $7500 in student loans. Otherwise he had no debts.

  He was 32, stood 5’11, well groomed, had a full head of blonde hair, and stayed fit by jogging four miles a day. It wasn’t his looks that detracted women. Tray thought himself moderately handsome. His problem was that he was shy, painfully shy. He simply didn’t know how to speak to women. Words didn’t come out the way he wanted leaving him stammering and embarrassed.

  Tray scoured dating sites for a year until he recently got lucky. She was an accountant, pretty and, most important, interested in him. They had a date, dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant, and dessert in a fancy Italian cafe. He dropped her off and was a little disappointed when she didn’t invite him in. She asking to see him again however offset his disappointment. They set a date for Saturday, just a day away.

  And now this.

  Great!

  Nothing more to ruin a date than radiation poisoning.

  That’s just fucking great!

  Sometimes he really believed he had the luck of Job.

  Tray heard shouting and turned his attention to the man holding his wife. “Help us, please!”

  He got to his feet and went over to them.

  The machine fell silent. At the same time the room went dark. Seconds later the emergency lights kicked on above the exit door.

  Tray helped Eva to her feet. He guided both of them by using the emergency lights from the examination room, through the doorway, down the short corridor, back to the waiting room.

  Inside the waiting room three security officers and an emergency medical team made up of an attending physician and two critical care nurses helped lead the elderly couple and the construction-looking guy out into the corridor with only flashlights and emergency lights as their source of illumination.

  12

  An hour passed.

  Eva and Drew sat waiting in an examination room for the attending physician to return.

  She lay on an exam bed staring at the ceiling through a cold compress mask. She looked like a female version of Michael Myers from Halloween. Additional compresses had been applied to her arms and chest. Despite feeling a little foolish when picturing how she must look to the outside world, she welcomed the cool relief the compresses provided to her tender skin.

  Drew sat beside her in a black leather chair.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Not so good. My nose hurts the most. It feels like it’s been in a toaster.”

  “Well, in a way it was.”

  She paused.

  “It’s been a crazy day, hasn’t it?” Eva said as she continued to stare at the ceiling.

  “Yes, absolutely,” he replied.

  A nurse came in to check on them. To Drew she looked sixteen years old, although she was probably in her early twenties. She smiled a broad, dimpled smile, and Drew couldn’t help but smile back. “Hello. How are we doing?” The nurse said amiably.

  Eva shrugged. “Eh, so-so.”

  The nurse lifted the compresses and examined Eva’s burns. Although there was some redness and minor blistering, she didn’t look too bad.

  “Not going to die, right?” Eva asked with a hopeful grin.

  “Nope,” the nurse said. “Just some mild burns, no worse than a mild sunburn.“

  “How long do we have to stay?” Eva asked.

  “The doctor will let you know. He’ll be with you shortly.”

  To the nurse Drew asked, “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  The nurse shook her head. “Not sure,” she said. “I heard that it was some kind of power surge.”

  “Power surge?”

  “Uh-huh,” said the nurse noncommittally.

  “That was the strangest power surge I’ve ever seen.”

  “Sorry I don’t have any other answers for you.”

  “That’s okay. It was just weird. There was some kind of, like, aura of light and color surrounding us. I can’t really describe it,” he said, slightly
embarrassed.

  The nurse shrugged.

  “So you really don’t know what could have caused it?”

  Eva sat up and removed the compress mask from her face. Because her eyes had been covered by the blindfolds that was the only area that wasn’t burned. She looked like someone who had been out in the sun too long and forgot to take off her sunglasses.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” the nurse said.

  “The man that helped us get out,” Eva said, concerned. “What about him? Is he okay?”

  “Tray?”

  “Oh, that’s his name?”

  “Yes. He’s fine.”

  “Is he around? I’d like to thank him, we both would,” Eva said.

  “Yes,” Drew agreed. “He may have saved our lives.”

  “I’m not sure where he is,” the nurse said as she turned toward the door. “Let me go check.” She left the room.

  Eva lay back down and placed the cold compress back on her face.

  “Some luck we’re having today, huh?” Drew said.

  “Yep,” she replied. “Some luck.”

  “Almost killed twice today,” he said in a far-off way. “First by a crazed maniac in a pickup, and now an MRI gone wild.”

  A pause.

  “I can’t wait to get home,” she said.

  “You and me both.

  After a long silence the door clicked and a man entered.

  Eva removed her mask, and both she and Drew looked up.

  It was Tray. He looked surprisingly well composed considering what he went through.

  Drew immediately jumped out of his chair and went straight for a hug.

  Eva grew misty and had to swallow. She had never seen her husband so unguarded. It was understandable. Tray had risked his life to save theirs.

  Eva slid off the bed and joined the men for a group hug.

  “Thank you so much!” Drew said in a choked voice.

  “You’re welcome,” Tray said, clapping Drew’s shoulder. “You’ll be billed later.” They all shared a laugh.

  “How are you feeling?” Tray asked.

  Eva shrugged. “I’m okay. Feels like sunburn. That’s all.”