Paths

by David DeSimone

  “Did you get your prescriptions yet?”

  “No, not yet. The doctor’s on his way, though.”

  Tray nodded. “Any topical?”

  “Just over-the-counter stuff that we’ll get when we go to the pharmacy,” Eva said.

  “Okay. Do you know how to get to the pharmacy?”

  “Just upstairs past the neonatal unit - right?”

  “Yes, but you can’t go through there without author-”

  “We know,” Drew muttered. He stared at Tray sheepishly through downcast eyes. “We found ourselves there by accident while we were looking for the elevators.”

  Tray acknowledged him with a simple nod. He continued, “When you go back up to the security desk,” he said, “go the opposite direction towards the Feinberg Wing, and just follow the signs that say Pharmacy. It’s a roundabout way but it shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  Drew thanked him. He asked, “How are you feeling? We’re talking so much about ourselves we almost forgot about you?”

  “I’m good,” Tray said. “No damage done. I’ll know for sure after the urinalysis and blood test.”

  “Us too,” Drew said. “We asked the doctor and he said it was to test for exposure to toxins.”

  “Yep.”

  “But he seems to think we shouldn’t worry.”

  Tray shrugged. “The tests are just protocol.”

  To Tray, Eva asked, “What about you, are you worried?”

  Tray shook his head.“ I think the worst is over.” He took a beat, thought for a moment and said, “But it was weird. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Eva agreed. She added, “You look like you want to say something else.”

  Tray cocked his head, rubbed his chin thoughtfully and said, “Well…with MRIs, there’s, like, only a one-in-a-million chance of an accident, any accident, happening, although they have happened in the past.

  “For instance, a man, I forgot the year, lost both eyes when his ocular implants, which were metallic…” he hesitated, “reacted to the magnetic field.”

  Drew blinked in surprise.

  Although Tray tried to spare them the gory details, he failed.

  Drew envisioned a man lying on a table under a machine with his eyes closed, waiting contentedly for the exam to begin. The machine starts to hum as it begins the process of booting up.

  Cheesy soft rock kicks in from hidden speakers.

  The magnets are energized and the unsettling sounds of knocking commence, then, in an instant, the expulsion of the eyeballs.

  Screams follow.

  As Drew imagined the eyeballs flying out of their sockets, it was Frank Sloan’s screaming face he saw.

  “That’s horrible,” Eva groaned.

  Tray continued. “Another time a man was having his wrist scanned when the foam padding of his wrist straps caught on fire.”

  “Jesus!” Drew exclaimed.

  “In that case it was the technician’s fault for having put the scan settings too high. And probably the most tragic instance occurred in 2001 when an oxygen tank was pulled into the MRI while a little boy was being imaged. It was fatal.”

  This time it was Eva who expressed outrage. She covered her mouth and was almost in tears.

  “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this,” Tray said with a hint of regret.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Eva said. “But if I had known before I got under that machine, I wouldn’t have come within a thousand miles of it.”

  Tray smiled but his eyes looked tired. “Anyway, our number one concern is that there is absolutely no metal whatsoever anywhere inside the MRI room.”

  “Makes sense,” said Eva.

  Drew: “What if I have a metal joint or something?”

  “Unless your implant is MRI compatible, which we’d know through your medical records, you would not qualify for an MRI. You’d have to go to X-Ray instead.”

  “Okay,” Drew said. “Just curious.”

  “Let me assure you that those few accidents that I had mentioned are exceptions to the rule. Millions of scans had been done without incident. And since then there have been changes in safety protocol that make MRIs even safer.”

  “Then how do you explain this?” Eva said nodding toward the MRI room.

  “Well, I’m glad you asked because that brings me to my point.” A troubled look stole over him.

  He shook his head. “What I told you are all cases that could have been avoided if extra security measures had been taken.

  Human error in other words.

  There was only one case in which human error could not be held accountable. That happened a couple of years ago in a New York City hospital when a fire broke out and caused the oxygen tanks to explode. The room was destroyed and patients needed to be evacuated due to all the smoke it caused but, thankfully, no one was hurt. It turned out be a faulty machine. But I want to stress that was the only case of faulty machinery.

  “In this case none of that happened. We followed all protocol and recently had the machine inspected inside and out. There were no faults.”

  Eva countered, “You guys must have missed something because, obviously, the machine went amok.”

  It struck a nerve in Tray because it implied he was partly to blame. “I can assure you,” he said raising his hands placating, “we did everything by the book.”

  Seeing hurt in his eyes she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest that you had anything to do with it.”

  Tray breathed, said, “I understand.” He patted her shoulder to show everything was okay. “We’re all pretty shaken up by this.”

  “Yes.”

  Tray continued, “But what happened in there today was something that has never happened before, ever. Yes, it was an accident and accidents do happen, but what I saw in there I can’t explain. There’s absolutely nothing in those machines that would cause something like that to take place.”

  “An electrical discharge,” Drew suggested.

  “Maybe, but the way we had become surrounded by that strange illuminated substance, whatever it was, behaved more like a gas than an electrical discharge. Besides, if it were electrical we’d be fried. It wasn’t electrical. It may have been electrically induced, but what was created wasn’t electrical.”

  “Any theories?” Drew asked while slipping into his leather jacket.

  Tray shook his head. “None.”

  “Seriously?” Eva said.

  “No. None. There are liquid helium tanks inside the MRI, which are needed to get the magnets to work, but if those ruptured you wouldn’t get what happened today, you’d get a release of cold gas.” He paused for effect. “Very cold gas. Enough to freeze us instantly. Obviously, that didn’t happen or we’d be dead.”

  Eva’s eyes went wide. “Now I’m going to have nightmares for a year.”

  Drew suddenly recalled the anomaly in the sky he, his wife and other people in the gas station saw earlier in the day and wondered if that might have had something to do with the MRI’s meltdown. He was about to ask but decided he had enough weirdness for one day. They were all tired and just wanted to go home. One more stop at the gas station to fill the tank and that’s exactly what he was going to do. Go home. Throw a frozen dinner in the microwave and let Eva do whatever she needed to do to calm down while he tossed down a couple of beers.

  “Well, I’m glad the both of you are okay,” Tray said offering a hand first to Drew, then to Eva. “The MRI’s shot, but there was little damage to that area.”

  “Why do you say that?” Eva asked.

  “Because right above it is the Neonatal Unit.”

  Stunned, she said, “You mean where the newborns are?”

  “Yep. They’re directly overhead.”

  “Are they okay?” she asked.

  “They’re fine. The power surge, or at least that’s what they’re calling it, didn’t affect anyone or anything up there.”

  “Thank God for that,” she said.

  CHAPTER 4
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br />   BEGINNING THE END

  1

  Eva turned the radio on and dialed into a news station as they were heading northeast on I-95. Nothing was locking on. The digital numbers on the display flickered and danced crazily across the digital display.

  “What, another thing!” she groaned.

  “What?” “Let me try,” he said and turned the dial this way and that while managing to keep his eyes on the road. He tapped the display as if that could fix it.

  His fingers moved slowly, methodically, as if trying to get a feel for a signal but couldn’t find one for whatever reason.

  I’d love to have a stiff drink, Eva thought.

  It was only when Drew gave up and pulled his hand away when a signal locked in.

  The digital numbers snapped into cohesion and voices clearly filled the inside of the car.

  “Yes!” he shouted triumphantly, though remained puzzled why it worked now.

  “I don’t know how you did it,” she said, “but thanks.”

  Although the numbers were readable, they still flickered slightly. Eva noted this with some concern, but her attention switched to the news on the radio when the reporter talked about the anomaly.

  According to experts, the apparent “dark hole”, was nothing more than the effects of localized freezing temperatures that caused ice-crystals to form – a phenomenon known as a fallstreak hole. The shadow was the result of light deflection due to the sun’s low angle.

  Case closed.

  It was compared to a similar instance that occurred on November 14, 2014 over the skies of Victoria, Australia. On that morning, residents were stunned to step out from their doorsteps, look up, and see something that looked like a giant loaf of bread over their heads stretching across for miles. Police phone lines were jammed with panicky calls. Internet and social media sites clogged the web with the usual conspiracy theories – the Apocalypse, UFOs, HAARP.

  In the end, clear heads prevailed. When the Australian Bureau of Meteorology released the official explanation as a fallstreak to the public a few days later, the excitement rapidly declined. Life in Victoria resumed back to normal. Scientists can be such killjoys.

  But Drew wasn’t satisfied. Although he wanted to believe what he heard, something didn’t make sense. How can ice crystals form a complete shadow without any light being reflected or refracted like in a rainbow? The radio cut out and then came back on. Music replaced the squawking voices. He looked over in time to see Eva pulling her hand away from the dial.

  “Weird,” she said. “The radio cut out and now it’s working again, but only after I take my hand away.”

  She demonstrated by holding her hand close to the radio. The numbers on the display flickered and the music faded out. Once again, she pulled her hand away, and the music returned.

  Drew did the same and the same thing happened. He was confused.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably a lot of static in the air.”

  “On this day? It’s humid and misty.”

  “Well, excessive water vapors in the air can create ionized atoms, and those atoms can-”

  “Wait. Stop. It doesn’t matter. I just want to know why does the radio go nuts only when we touch it?”

  He struggled with the question. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “But I’m sure it has something to do with the weather.”

  Changing the subject he asked her how work was going.

  “I don’t know,” she moaned. “I lost a sale on a house for reasons that are beyond my control, but I’ll still get crap for it.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “If someone backs out because of cold feet there’s nothing I can do.” As she spoke she lightly touched her cheek testing its sensitivity - it hurt.

  “It would have been a nice commission,” she lamented.

  “Yep.”

  “What about you?” she said. “How are things at Grober’s?”

  “Just trying to get a handle on this project I’m working on with Frank Sloan.”

  “The young guy who’s been giving you grief.”

  “The arrogant prick who’s been giving me grief. You have to twist the guy’s arm like a pretzel to get him to do anything for you.”

  “What happened?”

  “We’re developing this new security program that supposed to automatically connect you to secured sites based on nothing more than your thumbprint.”

  “Sounds pretty neat,” she said.

  “If we could get it to work. I tell Frank to clean up his code and he tells me that that’s not his job. Software design is his job.” His face grew red as he spoke, hands squeezing the steering wheel till his knuckles turned white. “I came close to choking the smug sonofabitch.”

  “So why don’t you report him?” she asked.

  “It wouldn’t do any good. Grober sees Sloan as a rising star. I figure he’ll be Senior VP in five years, maybe less, so I have to watch my step.”

  “But you’re his boss,” she said indignantly. “He’s disrespecting you.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Technically he’s right. It really should be up to me to troubleshoot. But he’s part of our team. If he wasn’t such a prima donna we’d have a beta version released well before the deadline, and the rest of us wouldn’t panic over crunch time.

  “Sorry I took you away from all that.”

  ‘It’s all right. Getting nearly killed twice today goes a long way in taking your mind off work.” He shot her a sly grin. “It kind of puts things in perspective - you know? About work, life, and all that.” Eva punched a button on the radio. A few seconds later music came on.

  Drew said, “I think I should open my own private practice specializing in exposure therapy designed for neurotics such as myself. You subject the patient to real-life crises with each one more life-threatening than the last. If the patient isn’t cured by the first crisis situation, he or she is put through an even more dangerous one. It keeps going on and on until either the patient is cured or killed.”

  They shared a laugh.

  “So?” she asked.

  “So what?”

  “Are you cured?”

  “Hon,” he put a hand on her knee. “It’ll take more than crazy locals and killer MRIs to cure my neuroses.”

  She chuckled, “You’re warped.”

  2

  “Can you believe it?” Drew said, pulling up to gas pump number 7.

  “Can I believe what?”

  “The gas,” Drew huffed as he killed the engine. “Four dollars and thirty cents a gallon! It’s outrageous!”

  “We’ll go someplace else.”

  “No.”

  Drew unfastened the seat belt and took the keys out of the ignition. He pocketed the keys. “I don’t feel like spending all day looking for the cheapest gas.”

  “Well, then stop complaining. You’re making my face hurt.”

  “Sorry.”

  He paused, noticed the redness on her face - it had gotten a bit lighter. “How is that by the way?”

  “Still hurts, but better.”

  “It looks better.”

  Touching her face, she said, “It’s probably going to blister more, and eventually my skin will begin to peel.”

  “Is the prescription topical helping at all?”

  She patted her nose with the tip of a forefinger. “Not really.”

  “Well, maybe some aloe will help. I’ll see if they have some in the store,” he said.

  Eva nodded, “Okay, thanks.”

  He got out of the car and closed the door, and then pushed the lock button on his keychain out of habit, locking Eva inside.

  When Drew lifted the gas nozzle, he caught a whiff of gasoline. It had an intensely cloying, somehow grimy odor, but Drew didn’t mind. A part of him actually liked it. The odor sparked memories of his late teenage years when the only thing that mattered in life was girls, computers and making good grades. But he also li
ked cars, especially his first car, a 1977 Triumph TR7. It was yellow, the color of a lemon. He bought it with money earned as a newspaper delivery boy. Every morning at the crack of dawn from spring until late fall beginning in his sixteenth year, and lasting for two years, young Drew folded newspapers into tight tubes. He then stuffed them in protective plastic pockets, pedaled his bike up and down the hilly streets of his suburban neighborhood and lobbed the thick newspaper rolls toward the front stoops of row upon row of cookie-cutter homes. You had to aim for the sweet spot, he recalled with mild amusement. It was an area right in the middle of the landing, where the paper was within arm’s reach from the door. Throw it too hard and you risk breaking a window; throw it too softly, however, and you risk suffering the wrath of customer ire over complaints that the paper was either thrown too far to get to, or left carelessly in an area that caused it to get soiled.

  It was a grueling job, but Drew was determined to get his car, and after eight months of toil, putting up with annoying suburbanites, barking dogs and a lot of bad weather, he had finally saved up the money. To help pay for the car, his father chipped in another couple hundred bucks, but not until he was sure his son reached an agreed quota, $1200.

  He found the TR7 in the classifieds of a local paper, and when he went to check it out, accompanied by his father, it was love at first sight. The car was small, sleek, wedge-shaped. It looked like a giant doorstop on wheels, but it was cool, very cool. The seller was an average-looking man with an accent Drew couldn’t place, either Italian or Greek or whatever - he couldn’t tell. He was only seventeen. What did he know? And did he really care? The answer was no, he didn’t. The only thing he cared about was the car. He had to have it.

  The car practically sold itself. Just one look at the kid and the seller knew that he would be rid of the yellow demon. The money was secondary to the prospect of freedom, freedom from the horrible burden on wheels that nearly cost him his marriage and sanity.

  The TR7 had some surface wear, scrapes here and there, some rusting along all four-wheel rims, minor things you’d expect to find in a used car. But it looked good, a two-door convertible, sexy shape, spoilers, a sporty black mounting rack on the trunk, 5-speed manual stick shift; and its age gave it vintage status. Spend a few hundred bucks and it will be a collectible worth ten times more than the amount he paid. Oh, the foolishness of youth!