Offload

by Michael Just

It’s just that at night I have to offload, is all. If I don’t offload, I’ll get real sick by morning. Some days, I just call in sick because I haven’t done a complete wipe by the a.m.

I appear normally enough. Normally? Is that a word? I have a job, an apartment, a cat, a car. Yet I can’t know people with any sort of regularity. Reason being they begin to suspect me. They accuse me of Epstein-Barr or chronic fatigue syndrome or lupus or some disease like that. Not a diagnosis, but an accusation.

I believe that everyone on planet earth should serve a purpose, fulfill a function. And I, too, have a role, however involuntarily performed. It started when I was the ‘sick kid’ at school, and that began when I started being around other kids. That would’ve been preschool. My first memory is letting Doris Stroeller take my temperature with her thumb while we played doctor, and me getting sick that night.

It wasn’t so much letting her stick her thumb in my ear that made me catch her mumps. It wasn’t breathing in the germs that came from her breath, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was the connection.

I had a crush on Doris because she had red hair like my mom. And as soon as I found myself liking her, I felt my jaw get big, first on one side, then the other. I reached out my fingers and felt the lump on the underside of my jaw. And I had mumps. I was mumps. They sent me home from school and made me get a doctor’s note before they let me back in. It felt as if I’d done something wrong. And not because I took off my clothes in front of Doris Stroeller when I was her patient (she’d told me I had to do that).

But the next morning, I woke and I was fine. I mean, not a trace of mump. I felt my throat and it was back to normal. Still, I stayed home for a whole week, pretending to be sick. My superpower was already paying off.

Throughout those first weeks in preschool, I contracted measles and chicken pox and the flu and a dozen colds and earaches. I’d come home, willowing in the heat of a fever, wavering like a tree in storm.

“My God, child. What is it today?” Mother would say. She’d haul me back before the doctor, and that’s when I first heard that terrible, condemning word: malingering.

Doctor Silver meant: somaticizing, hypochondria, Munchausen’s by proxy. Mother meant sensitive, bullied, misunderstood, delicate. Dad meant faking, lazy, trying to get out of school. I saw my first psychologist before first fucking grade.

Dr. Ball, PhD, who had a habit of reminding everyone that he had a PhD, was our school psychologist. He’d never met a diagnosis he didn’t like to hang on some poor kid before age 8. Even before the end of his first meeting with Mother and me, I remember that he forklifted these big, thick textbooks off the shelf, bigger books than I’d ever seen. I didn’t know they could make books that big that would still open and close. Old dusty tomes he probably hadn’t looked at since grad school, or maybe in his case, he used them as pillows at night to prop up his great big head so that it didn’t sink into his mattress and drown him. I despised Dr. Ball. He condemned me to a childhood of DSM designations.

I’d been playing with my classmate, Tim Shone, one afternoon playing with Legos and dinosaurs at lunchtime. Tim suffered from an untreatable case of ADHD. After recess was over, Ms. Longpane dispatched me to Ball’s office that afternoon because I wouldn’t stop turning around and talking to Eileen Diaz, interrupting Ms. Longpane’s lecture on the differences between numbers and letters, and blurting out that a small ‘l’ wasn’t a ‘1’ and why a ‘B’ wasn’t a ‘13’ upside-down.

Down in Dr. Ball’s cramped office filled with boogery toys and smelly puppets, I ran around his swivel chair 13 times, turned his stapler into the jaws of a T-rex, and, mistook his ear drops for eye drops, with school nurse consequences. I’d pick up the background noises, missing the questions he leveled at me straight out of his Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I remember hearing the words of the kid screaming in the nurse’s office across the hall instead of the questions designed by Dr. Daniel Amen, MD, to screen for ADHD, which Dr. Ball read to me out loud. By the end of the day, I snuck a couple sips of Dr. Ball’s coffee and it calmed me down. Dr. Ball began to suspect that I wasn’t a malingerer after all. Hell, I didn’t even know what ADHD was, much less that Tim Shone had been diagnosed with it.

Next morning, just before Mother filled the script Dr. Ball had asked Dr. Silver to write for Stratera, I wasn’t the way I’d been the afternoon before. I wasn’t picking out the Lego box from the closet followed immediately by Power Rangers followed by Play-Doh, from which I sculpted the crude likeness of the African Gray we kept named St. James, whom I’d just let out of her cage. I’d miraculously metabolized the ADHD which Dr. Ball was damn sure I had.

By age 7, Mother and I went to Mayo and Johns-Hopkins in the same summer. Some vacation. They diagnosed me with childhood extreme somatization disorder, a newly invented textbook category invented only for me. Dr. Ball had written a peer-reviewed article using me as the case study.

My Uncle Raymond, my dad’s brother, came to stay with us for a few weeks after Grandma died until we could find a placement for him. Uncle Raymond was someone Mother called ‘special.’ Later on, they said he either had psychosis or a bipolar disorder. After a couple days with him, I’d hear the voices he would hear: of the monster-clown with the gravelly, slow motion voice, telling him to stab my hamster and then stab himself. After that, Dr. Ball, PhD, needed a second opinion.

So he sent me to this shrink bug, Dr. Clawson, at Chicago Children’s. Clawson did a blind study with me as the hamster, but not in the conventional way doctors perform their pet experiments. He rolled me down a hallway in a wheelchair, then had me report what I was feeling. I told him my thumb hurt. I started hacking up a lung. I screamed as I watched my ankle swell up. I’d developed an unbiopsed cyst on the joint of my thumb, a serious pulmonary infection, a cracked tibia, all in the space of 5 minutes. Dr. Clawson had his license to practice medicine suspended for using me in the way that he had. And Mother learned to keep me away from doctors’ offices and clinics and especially hospitals.

But using me as a guinea pig was instructive, and I was written up in yet other medical journals. I had no way of knowing the peculiar disorders suffered by the children whose rooms the unethical Clawson had wheeled me past. Yet I developed their symptoms within minutes.

That would’ve made me a medical curiosity on its own. But by age 9, I graduated to medical celebrity. The children whose rooms Clawson had wheeled me past? Two were cured. A miraculously healed broken leg (attributed to a misread x-ray) and a disappearing cyst (attributed to a misdiagnosed wart) that was gone next day. The pulmonary infection suffered by the third child, a girl named Heidi, didn’t go away. She died. Two out of three ain’t bad, Dr. Ball quipped. Even I knew how wrong it was those words dropped from his cold tongue. I’m sorry, he said after Mother and dad and I all stared back at him.

But our horror at his stab at Gallows-Bedside-Manor-Humor (what else could we diagnose it as) was erased by what he said next:

“Not only have two of those kids healed, but we examined your leg and your thumb and checked out your lungs, and all your symptoms, well, they’re gone!”

“It’s always the next morning, and he feels better, Doctor,” Mother agreed.

What they did not know was what it took to take the sick off them and put it on me: a long slumber filled with nightmares where I literally, somehow, changed places with the ill person. Where I was extracted from my own body, floated over to the sick one, where I floated a few moments before I dropped down, while the patient took flight from themselves and hovered over me before sinking into my body. Sometimes, I’d get a fever and feel terror, and sometimes I’d wake screaming and Mother and dad would come rushing into my room.

“What’s wrong?”

“Did you have a bad dream?”

“I don’t know,” I panted as Mother cooled my brow with a wet washcloth dad got from the bathroom. “I don’t remember.”

After a kindergarten filled with colds and earaches, with raw throats and flus, Mother home-schooled me. There were so many trips to the pediatrician that she was suspected of Munchausen’s by proxy, and had to undergo two investigations by DCFS. Over the years of a friendless childhood, my curse grew worse. I became more ‘intuitive,’ as Mother described it. And I didn’t even need physical proximity to catch what ailed you. It depended on how close we were in an emotional sense. The medical journals used different words to describe it: they called it affinity when I caught the diseases of other children with whom I’d developed friendships; consanguinity, when I contracted the illness of a relative; and propinquity when I took on the disorder from someone in physical proximity, like the time I ‘caught’ hemochromatosis from an older woman on the plane ride to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

Mother developed sciatica. So, too, did I, my symptoms flaring in rhythm with hers even when she was in Ohio visiting her sister. When Mother and dad divorced and he moved out, I’d catch a cold when he did. I developed the same bone deformity he had on his left foot, just to the right of his big toe. And here’s the thing: when he had his bone shaved by the foot doctor, after a night of pain, my deformity went away, too.

Tim Shone’s ADHD showed incredible improvement after we spent time together. Uncle Raymond’s voices ‘ameliorated,’ ‘self-resolved.’ Sometimes these symptoms, if they were from chronic conditions like Mother’s sciatica or Uncle Raymond’s mental illness or Tim Shone’s ADHD, would come back to the sufferer. But if I caught a cold that dad had, even though he was across town and we never even had visitation that weekend, he never got it back. But sometimes, I could even cure chronic conditions, if I was close enough to the sick person, close enough in a relational sense. It all depended. We could never tell.

And it always happened at night. That’s when they healed. We exchanged dreams, sort of. It’s kind of hard to explain. But I dreamt their dreams and they dreamed mine, and we’d each wake up in the morning and be normal. I lost a lot sleep that way. I would wake up exhausted, especially after I hit puberty. In my adolescence, it felt like I was suffering from two things at once: the disease of the day, plus puberty. And then, I hit my 20’s and things really started to change.

As my immune system aged, I didn’t always bounce back like I did in my early years. I mean, when I was 16, I caught three different types of cancer in a year’s time. Boom, the next morning, nothing. No symptoms. In my 20’s, something like that would age me. I’d grow thin for a few days, stay bedridden. The diseases – the serious ones – would sometimes bounce back and forth between me and the patient.

Now I’m in my early 30’s and, outside my job, I stay away from most people most of the time. I have no friends. I never married for obvious reasons. The closer the relationship, the more I synch with someone, the more I get what they have. I got Alzheimer’s from an elderly neighbor last month and couldn’t remember how to get to work for three days straight. Three days. I just can’t afford to lose time like that.

I’d have been dead years ago, if it hadn’t been for the offload. It’s a method I learned. It’s a way to discharge the excess sickness from my mind and my body. It happens when I sleep. It happens when I dream.

I had a dream when I was about six. First dream I ever remember. Dr. Silver called it a night terror, because I woke up screaming. I had the same dream for weeks, it seemed. In the dream – a nightmare really – I’d be in this operating room, strapped down on a gurney. There were these gray-skinned beings. One of them brushed against my wrist accidentally and I remember its skin was cold and damp. And they had these almond eyes, all irises. They must’ve been able to see in the dark very well. Eyes the size of coffee saucers, I swear. Long, unmuscled arms. Long fingers like forceps. Their clothing reminded me of the upholstery on dad’s lounger; it was dark and it melded into their skin and it was covered with intricate motherboard in places.

Strange devices occupied the walls of the immaculately white room. A musical instrument, like a black rubber tuba, was connected by a hose to what looked like a radar or radio device. All of the machines were housed in 1950’s style metal with rounded edges, all painted white to match the walls that glimmered with their own interior light. I’d seen a TV show, I think it was The X-Files, with UFO’s and ET’s at about the time when the night terrors began. The technology resembled the stuff from the show, but the creatures didn’t. They seemed so real.

Lucid dreaming, Dr. Ball called it. The creatures looked down on me with their thin, quivering, noseless nostrils, and they smiled with their thin, leathery lips from undersized mouths. And they seemed to be trying to help me. But I was horrified and all I did was scream and fight against the straps.

And I floated up out of my own chest. I looked down on myself and saw that I didn’t have my own body. Oh, I had one alright, but it wasn’t mine. It was one of theirs! Long skinny pale frail. The toes thin little wisps of things that ended in nail-less but sharp hooks. And my heart, where my heart should’ve been, a ganglion of wires reached out like the roots of a tree that sank down into my sternum. From my breadbasket, the roots grew together and became a trunk. That’s what it was, but it was hued gray and bunched together in a cord and it quavered and sweated like the skin of the eight or so beings which stood around me in an ellipse. And the trunk that grew from my chest shot straight up in a stalk that separated again into limbs and branches and twigs, diffusing into the ceiling. The ceiling. A gray cloud with hundreds of millions of convolutions like an improbably complex cortex. But I had no reference for what a cortex was back then. And it moved like a cloud. With no fixed surfaces. A storm cloud with lightning flickering from its interior, an interior that pulsed with uncountable vessels, like capillaries, like braided channels in a river delta. And they’d flash in different sections a hundred times a second, in sync with purple flashes along the circuit boards of the leathery covering grafted onto the skins of the creatures that smiled around me. And I’d wake with this incredible thirst. Screaming. Mother and dad rushing in, their only child a sweating mess, nauseous, strangely comforted by that cool, damp washcloth dad damped on my forehead. That admixture of pain and terror and paternal soothing.

The next morning, Mother on the phone:

Yes, I’d like to make an appointment with Dr. Ball please. It’s my son, Jesse. Yes, that’s the one.

‘Dreams of unrecognizable content;’ ‘Forebodings of doom;’ ‘Sense of a foreshortened future;’ scribbled Dr. Ball, PhD. ‘Childhood PTSD’ was the pigeonhole into which he crammed me after that one.

The night terrors went away a few weeks after they began. But I never forgot them. And about 10 years after they started, after I stopped being able to recover as fast from the sicknesses I took on, they came to mind again. I had this case of TB that went on for three days. I had night sweats and I got up three times one night just to change my tee shirt. And that brought to mind that strange operating room.

The TB caused a fever and that made my nightmares even more vivid than usual. I had a flashback to those night terrors. Only this time, I saw a ‘purpose’ for the tree that grew out of my chests where my heart should’ve been: I could discharge whatever sickness I had, of mind or body, through that gray cord.

I visualized the TB pulsing up through the roots in my chest. It was hard at first. The sickness wanted to stay inside me. The roots, the arteries in the trunk of that tree, were clogged. They were filled with solids, with sap, and I had to blow this preservative out of them. Anyway, once I pushed and pushed with my breath and my mind and my chest, I managed to expel the sickness all the way up through to the branches that reached into the cloud at the ceiling of the operating theater. I don’t know how to describe it. It felt like blowing through a straw, like forcing a shit. I felt all my muscles strain. And the next thing I saw? That dark, storm cloud that made up the ceiling of the surgery, it — it blew up with lightning. All the little vessels and roots lit like chain lightning. The sickness diffused up through the cloud. I have a name for it now: I call it discharging, or offloading. I woke up the next day and the tuberculin fever had broken.

But as I get older, I’m not always able to push everything through the network all the way up into the cloud. I just don’t have the oomph. Takes too much out of me. So I wake up still a little sick. Sometimes it takes a couple nights, or even more, to push it all through.

When they do studies on you, when they publish you in the New England Journal of Medicine, they never use your name, or identifying characteristics. But somehow, somebody or some Body are always able to identify me anyway. Needless to say, my gift made me popular.

I turned down all the interviews, whether they’re on talk shows or online. I get lots of phone calls. I receive many offers. I field numerous requests, some for a lot of money. I turn them all down. I change my phone number about once every six months. I block my number. I gave up on having an email address much less a Facebook or twitter account. You get to know about people, human nature, I mean.

People want to pay me good money to take the sick off their spouse or their kid or even their iguana (no shit). I’ve never done it for money, because I don’t believe I should misuse this. Also, yes, it takes too much of a toll. But when some mom calls me and tells me her only daughter’s got leukemia, how can I say no?

I just try to be selective, is all, and discrete. Because I’ve had the black van parked out in front of the apartment. I’ve gotten, and this is recent, I’ve gotten hang-up calls at 1 in the morning. It was that leukemia kid’s mom, I know it. She did an interview for cash after I spent a few hours with her daughter to take the sick off. I made her sign an NDA like I do with all my patients, but she gave up my name and address. That’s when I had to do a couple interviews, just to make them go away for a while. I downplayed my ability. But then the black van started showing up, and I started getting calls from Sloan-Kettering and the CDC and WHO the hell knows who?

Last night, I came home after a long day. I’m an LCSW at a hospice. Believe it or not, once someone is dying, I can’t do a thing for them. I just can’t. It’s like they’ve got a trajectory and they have to follow it. Like they’re caught up in some kind of tractor beam and they’re being sucked away from life, vacuumed up out of their bodies. Before that, before they’re dying, I can cure them. So working at a hospice isn’t a problem for me. The dying don’t affect me at all. You remember that little girl, Heidi, I told you about? The one who Dr. Clawson wheeled me past at Children’s Memorial Hospital, who ended up dying from a pulmonary infection? I never got her symptoms at all. The dying are safe and comforting for me. I don’t mind being with them, and that calm comforts them. I can always tell when someone’s dying. I can tell because I don’t catch what they have.

Yesterday, my boss was sick. Had the flu. I’m pretty close to her in a working relationship sort of way. So I got her flu, and I came home last night pretty sick.

That’s when I spotted that van. I lapsed into a fevered sleep a little after midnight. That’s when I got the first hang-up call. There were two more after that. I fell asleep again about 2:00. I kept dreaming about this letter, this report I got in the mail a couple days ago from the Centers for Disease Control, with whom I have this weird working relationship. They’ve used me as a variable in about a dozen experiments, and in return they provide me with free medical care.

Anyway, the report concluded what Sloan-Kettering had years ago: my biopsies and MRI’s and CT-scans and blood samples and DNA tests and all the other tests “did not reveal any unusual regenerative properties.” And they invited me, almost subpoenaed me in for other tests. DOJ had done that once with something they called an Investigative Demand. Tried to force me to have a blood test for reasons of national security. Could they do that? My lawyer said no, so he responded with a nasty letter. Maybe it was them in the van parked out front.

I woke up again a little while later. Four of them stared down at me. One man held each of my arms, another tied down my legs with a cord. Another put the chloroform sponge over my mouth so Kathy in the unit next door, whose soft snoring often put me to sleep, couldn’t hear me scream.

I came to in the back of a van. Must’ve been the one parked out front, and it was too well-appointed to belong to the Department of Justice. It had a sink, a flat screen, a two-seater velour sofa with matching carpet and a leather swivel chair. All those MIB who’d kidnapped me couldn’t fit inside. The driver started her up. A man, a big, fat man with a soul patch under his lip and a slim, pencil mustache in the handlebar style, sat in a dark suit on the couch, taking up the place of both lovers. But it was the dude in the black leather swivel chair who ran things.

He had his hands folded, his index fingers propping up his chin while his elbows perched on the armrests. Had a meticulous white beard, a long mane of white hair, groomed like the Spaniard in the Dos Equis commercials who says Stay thirsty my friend. He swiveled his chair a few degrees right, a few left. I was laying on the floor between his alligator-shoed feet and the cowboy boots of the heavy dude. They hadn’t tied me. They didn’t have to. I’d never weighed more than 155 pounds. Judging from all the starts and stops, the van bumped down my street.

“You want to know what this is all about, don’t you?” the man with the flourishing white hair asked me, very politely.

I nodded. I supposed a nod was hard to discern in the dirty darkness of the van. “Yes.”

“You will know, in time.” He nodded to his muscle. “Let him sit.” The fat man immediately leaned over and picked me up by an arm with one bacon hand, hauled me up, sat me next to him. The two of us hardly fit.

The white-haired man snapped his fingers and eyed his helper and then pointed to the floor. Reluctantly, the weightlifter rose and squatted against the rear doors.

“Are you hungry?” white-hair asked.

I shook my head.

“Thirsty?”

I nodded.

He pointed to a small fridge along the wall. The Incredible Bulk fetched a bottle of water, untwisted the cap, and handed it to me.

The one-way glass from the rear double-window let in the amber street lights which passed by endlessly. The light rippled across white-hair’s face like the bright line a copier makes when it’s doing its thing. The repeating line of light revealed the overly deep laugh lines drawn down either side of his lips. They showed gray eyes, one anyway. The other seemed dead, a cracked glass look to the cornea. An old scar zigzagged down the middle of the eyeball. He wore a dark suit. And both of them smelled faintly of cologne and bourbon, as if they’d just come from a strip joint.

“Where are you taking me?” My voice was hoarse. He looked at me and smiled compassionately.

After about an hour of lively non-conversation, I noticed small things, like the bulge in the left breast of his helper, and the ponytail pulled back loosely on white hair’s head. He didn’t tie the rest of his hair back, just the rear. A peculiar style.

I noticed that the driver of the van wore sunglasses in the middle of the night. He had Google glass. I could read bright but tiny characters scroll across the bottom of the right lens. I looked through the twin rear windows of the van and noticed that an SUV followed us. No front plate. When headlights from traffic in the opposing lane passed us, it lit up two men in the front seat of the black-glassed Cadillac following us.

I noticed we were heading out into the country, but that we took side roads instead of the Interstate. And I noticed when white hair slid his hand over his eyes for a moment, and the short, fat wrestler struggled up out of his crouch, pulled a black silk bandana out of his suit pocket, and fit it snugly over my eyes.

“I apologize for the inconvenience,” white hair said softly. “This is required.”

We drove on like that for about three hours, never stopping. The van turned left twice. We’d been heading west before that. That meant we headed south, then drove west again, then south.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I reported like a little boy. White hair snapped his fingers.

The van halted. The back doors swung open. The bull helped me down, pinched my elbow.

“Ow! Let up.”

He escorted me to the edge of the road. I felt the road-grade gravel scrape my sandals. I didn’t really have to go that bad. I mean, a guy can always go a little bit. You always got that reserve, right? But I just wanted to smell the air, to hear the sounds.

The air smelled like alfalfa, like cow shit. The sound of it was crickets chirping, and frogs croaking. Frogs. That meant we were near water. We must’ve been downstate, in farm country.

I unzipped. I did my business. Then it struck me that I unzipped. I hadn’t gone to bed with my pants or shirt or shoes. They must’ve dressed me after they chloroformed me. I didn’t know what that meant. But I couldn’t feel my wallet in my back pocket. Didn’t know what that meant either.

After I finished my business, they didn’t even let me zip back up before two pairs of hands walked me back to the van, launched me back in, and touched me down onto the loveseat. In moments, we were back on the road.

After another half hour or so, we stopped. The metal doors swung open, two pairs of hands again set me down on the ground, walked me up soft, pea gravel, and vaulted me over stairs. An old door whined open with a creak. Another door opened with a swoosh. The first door slammed. Screen door. The second door sucked shut. A lock turned. I was hurried up creaky steps, a landing, then another half-flight. Must’ve been a farmhouse. They dragged my feet across a wood floor. A door opened. The rustle of several pairs of feet. The musty smell of camphor or wax or –, and then the blindfold came off.

I stood in an old bedroom with varnished baseboards. The center of the scene: a small body swallowed by a hospital bed. The room dimly lit with candles and ochre bulbs that sprouted from the walls in old electric light sockets and glass-globed lanterns. The place had never been rewired. The wallpaper peeling and hoary, ancient men-of-war and Cutty Sarks repeating, sailing endlessly on swells bound for some foreign land.

The emaciated child – a boy –rested with his eyes closed. Monitors hooked to his chest.

A heart barely beating, judging from the monitor along the wall. The ribs barely heaving. An oxygen machine hooked clear tubes to the cannulae that fed into his old, red nostrils. All the equipment state-of-the-art, incongruous with the ancient light and the old, planked floor.

Two, no, three nurses, stood by, white-suited. A Filipino man seemed in charge, a man of 50 years with yellow eyes and a grave look on his chiseled face. On a wheeled stool, he sat next to the strangely gray-haired boy. A South Asian woman stood on the other side and checked the clear plastic bag, the IV drip. Another read a report on an electronic notebook and handed it to the white-maned king, who seemed to run everyone and everything, as he strode into the room right after the two double-breasted guards who’d dragged me up the stairs walked in. In the far corner, so dark I barely noticed at first, a figure, small and frail, sunk into a newer, stuffed chair that looked like it’d been brought in for a long vigil. A white hankie floated in front of the face of the shadow. I heard the sound of weeping, a woman sniffling.

The panel door closed. Everyone waited for the king to speak. But he waited, waited ‘til the rasp of the breath machine, the O2 thing, droned and bellowed, and until the beep of the heart/pulse monitor was recognized by us all. Until the tiny body, all of 11 perhaps, its fists balled and its toes cramped and curled, was affirmed as the center of the dark manger scene.

“He’s my son,” he announced in the deep resonance of a narrator.

No one replied. I and the father and the son took up the fore of the room in a purposive triangle. I was to speak next. Everyone knew. All waited.

“What’s wrong with him?”

The king approached the boy, and so tenderly took his hooked fingers and slipped his own in the palm, the man’s hand a placeholder for death, giving the son’s hand something to hold onto in this world yet. With his other veined hand, the father traced the tip of his finger along the deep fissures around the boy’s mouth, as if the boy starved of something but no one could nourish him. But he wasn’t starving. I’d seen many die, and his face did not have the look of malnourishment.

“Methuselah Syndrome,” the man whispered so as not to wake his dear, sweet child. “There’s no cure.”

Then the man looked over his shoulder at me. His gray eye pleading. I alone held the power; that’s what the eye of this powerful man’s pleading look told me.

I trembled, cold. I glanced around the room: first at the Filipino man, a wise elder with years of experience in him, into his dusky eyes and graying hair; then at the Indian woman, with the bindi, the third eye chakra which held the point of unity before birth and after death. Then at the middle aged woman whose job seemed to be to monitor the machines which monitored the boy, which helped keep that body alive; then at the two blue suits who hulked with muscle and metal beneath the unsubtle hides of their Armani; and then I turned to the frail shadow in the corner, the woman webbed in shadows, hushed in soft sobs, the presumed mother who seemed already to wear the dark veil of mourning. I gazed at her, a cobwebbed shape, a thin headstone covered over in grief and dust. I gazed at her the longest. The amber candlelight and soft incandescence beseeched the walls, silence lapping, begging my lips for words. I spoke not.

The quiet of the others seemed to come from the absence of my own words. Finally, as my eyes rested back on the boy and it became clear in the languid, semi-darkness that I would not honor the plight of the boy and his mother and his father with a reply, the king approached me.

He said nothing. He caught the strands of dark hair over my ear between the backs of his fingers. He grazed the fingers of his other hand across the features of my face, a blind man searching the walls of a cave for crevices and cracks with which to find his way. He reached that hand beneath my eyes and drew the skin of my neck down until our eyes meet, peering into me like the doctor of a soul, searching for an answer.

I knew what he examined me for. But I was afraid to say. What would they do to me, do with me, once they knew?

“How long does it take?” he finally wondered aloud.

“It begins right away, depending on the severity of the symptoms. I start taking on the symptoms of the patient’s ailment immediately.”

His head riveted back to his son, looking for signs of youth in the face.

“The true healing of the sick happens at night, when they go to sleep. And when I sleep. There’s an exchange of dreams. We dream the same dream. We join. Then we separate. That’s when it really happens.”

The white-maned king snapped his fingers to one of his men. “Get him a cot.” The suit left the room. Then the father turned to me. “We’ll let you alone then. We’ll all leave and let you sleep.”

My lips parted, but my reticence must have been obvious. “What is it?” the shadow mother asked from her seat in the corner.

“I . . . don’t think you understand how this works,” I murmured.

“What d’you mean?” the king growled.

“I can’t help him.”

“You will.”

“I really can’t help him.”

“I understand. Dying is . . . not something you expected to do when you went to sleep last night.” He was gentle, empathic.

I shook my head. “No, I can’t die from the process.”

“You will explain,” he commanded.

“Please, Phillip,” the woman said from the corner. “He did nothing to deserve this.” The more she spoke, the more I picked up a slight accent. I couldn’t place it.

“I can,” said the king, “pay you enormously. Grant you almost anything.”

“Almost,” I replied. I wasn’t afraid of his desperation, of his power, and I didn’t know why. “If you could grant any wish, were you really prince of this world, then you’d be able to stand before this, and stop it.”

“Oh, but that is where you err,” he replied calmly, coldly. “I brought you. You stand before this. You will halt it.”

I shook my head. “When someone’s process becomes irreversible, I can’t stop it. I can save lives. I can’t arrest death.”

“There’s no difference,” he replied quickly.

“But there is a difference. Most people don’t understand that death isn’t the absence of life. It’s not the opposite of life. It’s not the end of life.”

The door opened and the suited man dragged in an air mattress. “This was all I could find.”

“Leave it outside,” his boss said. He motioned for his other guard to push the man and the mattress out and shut the door, and it was done.

“You will explain,” he demanded again.

“I don’t have the power of life and death or of life over death. That’s beyond what any of us has, except when it comes to our own deaths.”

“Papa,” a voice squeaked. All eyes drew to the boy in bed.

Phillip rushed to his son’s bedside. The Filipino nurse vacated his stool, and Phillip sat, almost kneeling, holding his son’s hand. The eyes cracked open, just slits coated in a custard rime. The lips dry and cracked. The Indian woman softly cleansed the eyes of their puss, and the older nurse sponged the lips so that they softened into youth, softened enough for words, for a few moments anyway.

“Alexander,” whispered his father, stroking the child’s thin, graying hair. “We’ve brought someone to help you. You’re going to be alright.”

“Phillip, no,” the woman in the corner mumbled and sobbed.

She rose from the shadows and joined the lighted world, coming to her son’s side, standing over her husband’s shoulder. She was young, slight, dark-haired, olive skinned, exotic.

“How are you feeling, right now?” Phillip asked his son, glancing at the monitors.

“The same,” Alexander confessed.

Phillip peered up at me, motioned with a hand for me to come over to the other side of the bed. I did as I was told, moving in slow, fluid movements. I’d done this kind of thing before.

“Grab hold of his hand, and let the process begin,” he ordered. “We’ll leave. I’ll get a real cot and you’ll sleep beside him. I can get you sleeping pills if that’s what’s needed.”

I reached out and held the boy’s hand. It was wrinkled and gnarled like his father’s. I wondered whether the sins of the father were indeed visited sometimes upon the child. I smiled down, and Alexander peered up at me and smiled back with teeth brittle and yellow. His face sallow. His eyes sunken. Then I realized that no, Alexander wasn’t suffering for his father’s transgressions. For his eyes weren’t really old in a biological sense. They held a wisdom.

I worked in a hospice. Children who died young were often old souls, accumulating decades in years. They only needed to live a few short years, it seemed. I saw that in this boy’s eyes; his readiness, even his peace.

“I’m ready, Papa,” said the boy, gazing again at his father.

“To get well,” Phillip replied.

Alexander just smiled. And his father knew what the smile meant. “No,” his father muttered, holding in his sobs.

His mother knew what it meant, and she broke out in a shriek, kneeling, clenching the sheets over her child’s breast.

Phillip let go his son’s hand, marched over to me, grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the wall, pinning me up by my jaw. “He will live if you have to suffer and die a thousand times.”

I choked.

“Papa, no!” Alexander cried out in a remote voice, because it had already begun its move. “If you love me, you’ll let him go.”

Phillip released me. I hacked, and swept my fingers against my throat, coming up with a dab of blood.

“Let him come to me,” Alexander said.

His father motioned for me to approach, and I came back to the bedside.

Alexander squeezed my hand. He peered up at me, into me, with sad, gray eyes swallowed by crows’ feet and furrows. But the eyes blazed, burned like distant stars. The muscles around the eyes narrowed for a moment. He gripped my hand even tighter, feeling my palm and the back of my hand with his thin claws, the nails on them clipped squarely by another’s hand. Then he nodded. He knew. Somehow, he knew. About my gift.

“You don’t have to explain, to me,” he mumbled. “But you don’t want to anymore, do you?”

A tear dropped unexpectedly from my cheek.

“That’s why you’re staying sick longer and longer,” he said and swallowed dry. “It’s killing you.”

I nodded.

“What’s he talking about?” Phillip demanded.

“Let me take this from you,” Alexander whispered to me with a generous smile. “I don’t want to make you weaker.”

“It could be my present to you.”

He closed his shriveled eyes and he shuddered. And I felt cold all over, as if the electricity in my body drained off like a battery running down, all the charge swirling down the arm that held his hand, and into him. Then he shuddered. I swooned, and the Filipino man rushed over to keep me from falling over.

In a moment, it passed. I felt the energy return to me. My eyes opened. Alexander’s eyes opened a moment later.

And it was gone. It left me.

“What did you just do to him?” Phillip said. “Was that it? Is — is he healed now?”

“Papa, come here to my side and hold my hand here. Mama, you on this side.”

I let go Alexander’s hand and he gave me a knowing look, a gaze without fear. He could explain it to them as well as I could. But Alexander said to me: “You tell them.”

“When someone goes,” I began, “it’s because they’ve made up their mind to go. I can’t help them then, because, well, because it would interfere with them. It would block their path. It would do them and everyone who loves them more harm than good. They’d suffer greatly. So would you.”

Phillip finally let go his tears, in front of all his men. Alexander’s mother wailed. They knelt, one on each side of Alexander’s breast, laying their heads on his wraithlike ribs.

“No one stays a moment longer, or leaves a second before they choose,” I said softly. “Life’s not at an end. Life never ends. Death’s not an opposite. Life has no opposite.”

“Time to go now,” said Alexander, looking first at mother, then at father.

“You will see him again. And everything you love, you’ll see it all once again. None of it ever really leaves you. So close now, you can’t see it in front of you anymore, because it’s inside you. Always closer to you than your own breath.”

Alexander’s eyes closed. A smile across his lips.

His mother looked up at him, wreathed his face in her own hand, the face lit from within. His father swathed the cheek in his other hand. The face warm with rose, I could see, from across the room. The whole room alight. The nurses gazing in each other’s faces.

“Bodhisattva,” whispered the Indian woman, a tear on her face. “Saint,” said the Filipino man. All of us smiling, peering down upon Alexander, and then up at each other.

“Did you feel that?” his mother asked his father.

“Warm. A shock, like lightning,” Phillip replied.

A sourceless glow washed away even the lingering darkness of the far corners. The warmth remained for a moment until all the eyes in the room met with all other eyes, and then it blipped out.

The smile remained on the face, the eyes closed in a slumber of peace. The radiance lingered in his face, the blush on his cheeks.

“His hands, they’re still warm,” his father cried.

#

The check, a cashier’s check, was for 50 million dollars. A blue suit held it out to me. He was the more studious kind, the CPA type.

“I . . . can’t accept this,” I replied at my front door.

“He insists. He wants to apologize. He says that if this isn’t enough, he’ll give you half his wealth. That’s estimated at a billion dollars.”

“This,” I said, pointing at it but refusing its touch, “will ruin my life.”

“He’ll give you anything you ask for. He means it.” He handed me a card, and a satellite phone. “He wants you to know that you helped heal his grief. You changed his belief. He’s changing his life because of you. Giving everything away.”

I turned and glanced behind at all the moving boxes packed for donation to resale shops. “So am I.”

“He apologizes for that. He doesn’t want you to. Please.”

I shook my head. “He did me a favor, actually. He was the last among many,” I explained. “Governments, fat cats, godfathers. Tell him I’m glad it was him who kidnapped me and not someone else, someone less kind.”

The man thought about it, then nodded. He held out the check and the phone and the card.

A couple of other men waited at a discrete distance down the hall. “He still wants you to have this,” he said. “The phone is a way to reach him anytime, anywhere.”

Reluctantly, I took the phone and the card.

He stuffed the check in my pocket.

“I’m just gonna tear it up.”

“Then it’ll remain in an account, in your name, in case you ever need to draw on it. The account number and the bank are on the back of the card.”

I shook my head. “I just want to be a left alone now.”

“Then that’s what he’ll do. Promise.”

The man walked back down the hall and the other men followed. I never saw or heard from them or Phillip again.

I left all my things behind me, except for some essentials. The cat was the hardest, but I remembered as I handed him off to my neighbor, that I never really lost anything. You seem to lose everything you’ve ever loved. But if you loved it, you can never lose it. The act of loving it makes it one with you. And if you never loved it, then it never really belonged to you. Loss? It’s just a date, a door. Nothing more.

I disappeared after that. Just me, my passport, a backpack, and my own bank account.

I kept away from people after that. But not because I was afraid of getting sick every other week. Something happened after Alexander. My gift was gone, and I knew it would never come back.

I can’t catch what people have any more. I’ve stopped exchanging dreams with them. And I’ll never be afraid of dying, ever again. For the first time, I’m ready to live, because I’m always ready to go.

Michael Just writes book-length and short fiction in the genres of literary, mainstream/contemporary, mystery/suspense, thriller, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He is a former attorney, actor, psychotherapist, and adjunct professor with an amateur background in science, mythology, and storytelling. Born and raised in Chicago, he now lives in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest.  A hiker with an interest in geology, natural history, and Native American culture, Mike combines all of his interests and expresses them in his writing. Find his blog and links to his books at justmikejust.com