The Touch

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Excellent, Dr. Bulmer.”

  He bent and casually plucked the weapon from the guard’s hand. Rossi looked up at him in wonder and terror.

  Just then the elevator doors opened. The blond guard stood within, a woman slouched next to him.

  “Sylvia!” Alan cried in shock. How could she be—!

  “What the hell are you doing out here?” Henly said, stepping forward as Sylvia straightened up behind him and beamed at Alan.

  Ba stepped up beside Alan, the pistol dangling in his hand.

  “Good evening, Missus,” he said, then turned to Henly. “We shall need this car.”

  Henly said, “What the fuck—?” and reached for his own pistol.

  Ba stepped into the car and slammed him against the back wall.

  “Take us down, please, sir,” he said.

  Alan stepped in and took Sylvia in his arms. She clung warm and soft against him.

  Henly was nodding and fumbling with his key ring. “Yeah. Sure.” He keyed an override and the car started down.

  “Thank God you’re all right!” Sylvia said, hugging Alan close.

  “I’m fine,” Alan said, “but I don’t know about the senator.” He suddenly realized that he was touching Sylvia and nothing was happening. What ever had caused the sudden progression of the senator’s disease seemed to have passed.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know. The Dat-tay-vao—some sort of reverse effect.”

  His eyes were drawn to Ba, who was holding his hand out to Henly. The awestruck guard meekly handed his revolver over to the gaunt figure that towered over him. Ba emptied the cartridges from both pistols, put them in his pocket, then handed the empty weapons back to Henly. “Please not to do anything foolish.”

  The doors slid open and they were on the ground floor. Alan hurried Sylvia toward the doors while Ba brought up the rear.

  “Dave!” Henly yelled from behind them as they passed the front desk. “Stop ’em!”

  Dave looked at Alan and Sylvia, then looked at Ba and shook his head.

  “You stop ’em!”

  47

  Ba

  Ba felt refreshed in the warm, humid air of the outdoors. He had never been able to adjust to air conditioning. He stepped ahead of the Doctor and the Missus and opened the rear door to the Graham for them. It was a proud moment for him to be able to lead these two safely from the Foundation. He would have freed anyone had the Missus asked, but it was especially pleasing to aid the Doctor. It lessened the weight of his debt to the Doctor for Nhung Thi; it helped to balance the scale between them.

  Once they were inside, he got in the driver’s seat and made a U-turn into Park Avenue’s downtown flow at the next cross street.

  “I don’t think it would be wise to take Dr. Bulmer back to Toad Hall just yet, Ba,” the Missus said from the back seat.

  Ba nodded. The same thought had occurred to him. “I know a place, Missus.”

  “Then take us there.”

  “Now hold on, everybody!” the Doctor said. “Just hold on a minute! I’m a free man and I want to go home!”

  “Alan,” the Missus said softly, “you haven’t got a home anymore. It’s gone. They burned it.”

  “I know that! I mean Monroe. That’s where I live. I’m not going to hide from anybody!”

  “Alan, please. I know you’ve been pushed around a lot lately, but Ba and I have just gone to a lot of trouble to get you out of the Foundation. A little legal finagling could put you back there in no time—or worse. If something has happened to McCready, they could blame it on you and you could wind up in Bellevue!”

  There was silence in the rear. Ba thought he knew what might be going through the Doctor’s mind. It seemed not only cowardly, but an apparent admission of guilt to run and hide. But the Missus was right—better to seek shelter until the storm passed.

  Still, he could not help but sympathize with the Doctor, who must be feeling that his life was no longer his own. And truly it wasn’t. Ba had now been privileged to meet two men with the Dat-tay-vao, and neither had been fully in control of his life. For the Touch has a will of its own, and knows no master.

  The Monday night traffic was thin. He reached Canal Street quickly and followed it east between Little Italy and Chinatown, then turned downtown on Bowery until he came to a tiny sidestreet where refugees from his country had collected during the seventies. They all shared the kinship of strangers far from home, but none so close as those who had risked the open sea together in his boat. Most of his fellow villagers had settled in Biloxi, Mississippi, still living as fishermen, only now in the Gulf of Mexico instead of the South China Sea. But one or two had straggled to the Northeast. He stopped now before the ram-shackle tenement that housed one of the elders of his former village.

  The trip had taken less than fifteen minutes. Ba set the emergency brake and turned in his seat.

  “You will be safe here,” he told the Doctor.

  Dr. Bulmer looked up and down the dark, ill-lit street, then up at the rickety building. “I’ll have to take your word on that, Ba.”

  “Come,” he said, stepping out and opening the door.

  “Go, Alan,” said the Missus. “If Ba says it’s all right, then you can take it to the bank.”

  Ba glowed with pride at her words as he watched them embrace and kiss.

  “All right,” the Doctor said. “But just for tonight. Twenty-four hours and that’s it. Then I’m coming home.”

  As the Doctor stepped out of the car, Ba closed and locked the door behind him. He didn’t like leaving the Missus alone here on the street, but the motor was running and he would only be a few minutes.

  He guided Dr. Bulmer into the building and up the flaking stairway to the fourth floor.

  “Chac is an old friend,” he said as they climbed. “If my fishing village still existed, he would have been an elder there.”

  “What’s he do now?”

  “He sells newspapers.”

  “What a shame.”

  “Better than what was in store for him at home. The communists wanted us to work for them in exchange for a ration of rice. We call that slavery. We have always worked for ourselves.”

  “You work for Mrs. Nash.”

  Ba did not pause or look back at the Doctor. He knew the question and knew the answer. “When I work for the Missus, I work for myself.”

  “I hear you,” the Doctor said. And by the tone of his voice, Ba knew that he understood and there was nothing more to be said.

  They reached the fourth-floor landing. Ba knocked softly but persistently on the door that read 402. His watch said 11:16. Chac might be asleep—he rose daily at four and was on the street in less than an hour. He hated to disturb the older man’s sleep, but the time of his arrival was not of his choosing and Chac would understand.

  A voice spoke from the other side of the door. “Who’s there?”

  Ba announced himself in the Phuoc Tinh dialect. There came the clicks of locks and the rattle of chains, and then the door was pulled open and Ba felt himself embraced by the shorter, older man.

  “I cannot stay,” Ba said, fending off offers of food and drink. He heard a child cough in the back room. He glanced questioningly at Chac.

  “My grandson, Lam Thuy. He’s almost three now. He stays here while Mai Chi and Thuy Le work at the restaurant. Here. Sit and let me make you tea.”

  “The Sergeant’s daughter awaits me below. But I have a favor to ask.”

  “Anything for Ba Thuy Nguyen! You know that!”

  Ba smiled, warmed by the elder’s approbation. “A friend needs shelter for a few days—shelter from the weather and from all eyes except those of this house hold.”

  Chac nodded. “I understand perfectly. It shall be done. This is he?”

  Ba brought the Doctor forward and spoke in English for the first time. “This is Dr. Bulmer. He did all that could be done to make Nhung Thi’s last days peaceful.”

  “Th
en he shall be as one of us,” Chac replied, also in English.

  He shook the Doctor’s hand and brought him forward, welcoming him into his home.

  “I must go,” Ba said, feeling the urgency to get back down to the street where the Missus waited unprotected. But first there was something he had to tell the Doctor.

  He drew him aside as Chac bustled toward the kitchen to make tea.

  “Doctor,” he said in a low voice, leaning very close. “Please not to mention the Dat-tay-vao to anyone.”

  The Doctor’s eyebrows lifted. “I hadn’t planned to. But why not?”

  “Not time to explain now. All will be made clear later. Please do not mention the Dat-tay-vao here. Please?”

  The Doctor shrugged. “Okay. Fine with me. But, listen”—he touched Ba’s arm—“thanks for tonight. And take good care of that lady.”

  Ba gave him a slight bow.

  As he left the apartment, he heard the child coughing again. Louder.

  48

  Alan

  “You were Nhung Thi’s doctor?” Chac said in thickly accented English after Ba had gone and the kettle had yet to boil.

  “Yes. Not much I could do for her, I’m afraid.” He worked to shut out the memory of her death agonies. A horrible way to go. He’d prefer almost any form of death to being eaten alive by lung cancer.

  Alan distracted himself by studying Chac’s grotesquely arthritic hands, noting the thickened and gnarled joints, the ulnar deviation of the wrists and fingers. How did this man manage to hand out his papers? How on earth did he make change?

  He let his gaze wander around the tiny front room. The cracking plaster had been freshly painted; the furniture was old and rickety but waxed and dust free. A chubby plaster Buddha sat cross-legged on a corner table; a crucifix hung on the wall above it.

  The child coughed again from the rear of the apartment. It carried a higher-pitched sound this time.

  “Your son?” Alan asked. It seemed unlikely, but you never knew.

  “Grandson!” Chac said, puffing himself up.

  The coughing persisted, its bark becoming distinctly seal-like. But that wasn’t what alarmed Alan. It was the whistling intake of breath, the increasingly labored stridor between coughing spasms that lifted him to his feet and drew him toward the sound.

  That child was in trouble!

  Chac, too, recognized the distress in the cough. He darted ahead of Alan and led the way. Halfway there, a thin woman of about Chac’s age in a long, dark blue robe came out into the hall and joined the procession to the bedroom at the far end of the apartment.

  Just before they reached the door, the cough shut off abruptly, as if a noose had been tightened around the throat. Chac turned on the light as they rushed into the room. Alan took one look at the black-haired boy with the mottled face and wide, panicky, black eyes, and knew there wasn’t a second to spare.

  Croup—with epiglottitis!

  “Get a knife, small and sharp!” he said to Chac, shoving him back toward the kitchen.

  He was going to have to try an emergency tracheotomy. He’d seen it done twice during his clinical training a dozen or so years ago, but had never yet been called upon to do one himself. He’d always prayed the situation would never arise. Cutting open someone’s throat and then crunching through the cricothyroid membrane to form an airway without severing an artery or lacerating the thyroid was a difficult enough proposition on a still patient. On a squirming, bucking, fear-crazed child, it seemed madness to try. But this boy was going to die if he didn’t get air soon.

  Chac rushed back in and handed him a small knife with a sharp, two-inch blade. Alan would have preferred a narrower blade—would have loved the 14-gauge needle he’d kept in his black bag for a decade now just for an occurrence such as this. But his bag was in the trunk of his car.

  The child was rolling and thrashing on the bed, arching his back and neck in a hopeless effort to pull air into his lungs.

  “Hold him down,” Alan told Chac and his wife.

  The woman, whom Chac called Hai, looked at the blade with horror, but Chac shouted something to her in Vietnamese and she steadied her hands on either side of the child’s face, now a dark blue. When Chac had situated himself across the boy’s body, pinning his arms under him, Alan moved forward. With his heart pounding and the knife slipping around in his sweaty palm, he stretched the skin over the trachea.

  Ecstatic voltage shot up his arm.

  With a vortical wheeze, air rushed into the child’s starved lungs, then out, then in again. Slowly his color returned to normal as he sobbed and clung to his grandmother.

  Alan stared at his hand in wonder. How had that happened? He glanced at his watch: 10:45. Was the Hour of Power still on? What time had McCready said for high tide? He couldn’t remember! Damn! But did it matter? The important thing was that the little boy was alive and well and breathing normally.

  Chac and his wife were staring at him in awe.

  “Dat-tay-vao?” Chac said. “You Dat-tay-vao?”

  Alan hesitated. For some strange reason he had a feeling he should say no. Had he been told to deny it? But why? These people knew about the Touch.

  He nodded.

  “Here?” Chac said, leaning closer and looking in his eyes. “Dat-tay-vao here in America?”

  “So I’m told.”

  The Vietnamese couple laughed and wept and hugged their sobbing grandson, all the while babbling in Vietnamese. Then Chac came forward, holding out his deformed, arthritic hands, smiling timidly.

  “Help me? Please?”

  Another warning bell sounded in a distant corner of his mind. Hadn’t Axford told him that the Touch was damaging his mind? But how could he say such a thing? Alan felt fine!

  “Sure,” he said. It was the least he could do for the man who was giving him shelter. Alan enclosed the gnarled fingers in his own and waited but nothing happened.

  “The hour has passed,” he told Chac.

  The Vietnamese smiled and bowed. “It will come again. Oh, yes. It will come again. I can wait.”

  “I’m getting cabin fever,” Alan told Sylvia.

  He had spent a restless night and had been delighted to hear from her this morning. But talking on the phone was a far cry from being next to her and did little to ease his growing claustrophobia. The little apartment occupied the southeast corner of the building. Nice and warm in the winter, no doubt, but the sun had been blazing through the windows since 6:00 a.m. and the temperature of the soggy air here in the front room had to be pushing into triple figures already.

  Hai, dressed in the classic loose white blouse and baggy black pajama pants of her people, bustled around the kitchen while her grandson munched on a cracker, both unmindful of the heat. It all came down to what you were used to.

  “I’ve been cooped up for days—first in that glorified hospital room at the Foundation, now in an apartment so small you rub shoulders with somebody every time you move!”

  “You promised to stay one day.”

  “And I will,” he said, looking at the clock. It was 9:00. “In just a little over twelve hours I’m walking out of here. I don’t care who’s looking for me—McCready or the Mafia—I’m gone.”

  “I don’t think the senator will be doing much looking. He’s in a coma in Columbia Presbyterian.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Of course not! You sound surprised.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Well, didn’t you tell me last night that he went into some sort of convulsion when he tried to make you heal him? What’d you call it—a myasthenic crisis?”

  Alan groped for the memory. The story sounded familiar. It came back slowly, like a slide projection very gradually being brought into focus.

  “Oh, yeah. Sure. They say anything else about him?”

  “No. Just that he’s critical.”

  Did I do that? Alan asked himself after he had said good-bye to Sylvia.

  Had he wanted to harm t
he senator? Had that somehow influenced the Touch to worsen his illness rather than cure it? Or had McCready simply worked himself into such a state that he brought the crisis upon himself?

  Why try to kid himself? He had felt an odd sensation in his arms before McCready collapsed. Not the usual electric pleasure. Something different. Had he brought that on or had the power itself initiated it?

  He didn’t know. And not knowing worried him.

  He shifted in the chair, felt something crinkle in his pocket, and pulled out Mr. K’s empty Camel pack. Smiling, he set it on the table. Mr. K…Alan wondered if he had really stopped smoking.

  There came a click of a key in the lock of the apartment door and Chac came in, dressed in a blue work shirt and denim cover-alls. He bowed to Alan, then embraced his wife. Hai brought tea for both of them. Alan accepted it with what he hoped was a gracious smile. He was swimming in tea.

  He watched with amazement as Chac deftly lit an unfiltered cigarette with his deformed hands. As Alan tried to hold up his end of a halting conversation about the weather, he detected a growing murmur of voices in the hall outside the door. He was about to ask Chac about it when the Vietnamese slapped his hands on his thighs and said, “It is time!”

  “Time for what?”

  “Dat-tay-vao.” He held out his hands to Alan. “Please?”

  Was the Hour of Power on? And if so, how did Chac know? Alan shrugged. Only one way to find out.

  He grasped the twisted fingers—

  —and there it was again. That indescribable pleasure. Alan found something very comfortable in the Touch today. Maybe it was because Chac took its existence and effects for granted; there was no doubt to overcome, no preconceptions to butt against, no need to cover it up, just simple acceptance. And maybe it was because the Dat-tay-vao itself was back among the people who knew it best and revered it most. In a sense, the Touch had come home.

  Chac raised his new hands and wrists before his eyes and flexed his slim, straight fingers. Tears began to roll down his cheeks. Speechless, he nodded his thanks to Alan, who placed an understanding hand on the older man’s shoulder.