get work, and she has to give up her own tenure here—it’ll be a mess, son. And something like this—a UFO in the backyard—can ruin my chances. Marcie Cotton already wants to write me off. So please, for me, do not say anything about us seeing it for at least another few weeks.”
Conner gazed off into the middle distance. “Prediction: the Keltons’ tape, if it is halfway decent, will make this place famous. Prediction: Dr. Jeffers will make a total idiot of himself about it and he’ll end up with walking papers. Prediction: you will not be damaged by this, but Dr. Cotton will still screw you to the wall.”
Every time Conner used the word “prediction,” a chill went right through Dan. Their son was never wrong. Actually, he found that he was so on edge and Conner sounded so right that he almost burst into tears—and was instantly appalled at himself. How could he possibly react like that? That wasn’t him.
But then he thought—the pressure of the tenure conference coming up, the bizarre events in the night, the sleeplessness, Katelyn’s waking up in near hysterics, this damned lump in his ear—of course he was on edge. Stressed. Big time.
“Look,” he said, “thanks for a perfectly delicious breakfast. Tomorrow’s my turn and it’s waffles unless there are objections.” He looked down at the still-gobbling Conner. “I’ll make yours without egg.”
“Fine.”
“They’ll be fascinating. I’m going to the health center, I’ll call you with a verdict.”
“Prediction,” Conner said. “They will find a small object enclosed in a membrane made of cutaneous tissue. And, if you search your body, you will find an indentation where that tissue was taken from. It’s called a witch’s mark.” He smiled up at Dan. “The grays have been with us for some time.”
“Conner, this happened last night in a kitchen full of people. I hardly think the grays could have operated on me without anybody noticing.”
“There was a moment—probably just a few seconds—when you were all turned off. The grays did what they did and turned you back on as they left. It’s called missing time. It’s the way they handle us. We’re their property, you know. You know what the great anomalist Charles Fort called the world? A barnyard. The grays are the farmers, and right now they’re doing a little farm work right here on Oak Road.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What are they doing?”
“For one thing, they’ve got some kind of a plan for you, which is why they gave you that implant. You’re involved, Dad.”
“Let’s look,” Katelyn said. “I want to see this thing for myself.”
But Dan did not want them to look at it. He retreated upstairs and took his shower. Safe in the stall, shaving and soaping himself up, he felt his body for the sort of indentation Conner had described.
Nah, there wasn’t one. They’d X-ray him at the health center and tell him what he already knew: he had a cyst that was mildly infected. The doctor would prescribe a couple of weeks of an antibiotic, and if it got worse, he’d go in and open the damn thing up.
He had to wash his hair, anyway, so he sat down on Katelyn’s shower chair that she used for shaving her comely legs and—well, what the hell, he felt along both ears and across the back of his neck.
There was nothing there. Thank you, Conner, it’s so delightful the two or three times a year that you’re wrong. As he stood back up, though, he felt a very slight soreness in his right buttock. He felt back there, just above the cheek. As his fingers ran along the smooth, wet skin, he knew. He felt again to be sure.
Then he was having an aura, one of those odd sequences of perceptions—in his case, a vision of stars all around him from his childhood planetarium, followed by a feeling of floating—that were the prelude to one of the seizures like he’d had in childhood.
He leaned up against the side of the shower. “Katelyn,” he managed to say. Not yell it, couldn’t do that. “Katelyn.”
The feeling of floating got stronger. It was uncanny, he even looked down to be sure his feet were still touching the floor of the stall. Then his eyes fixed on the drain, the silver circle of it with the water swirling down.
The drain became larger and darker, and now what he saw was a round black hole in a field of gleaming silver. Objectively, deep within himself, he knew that he was seizing. He felt nothing, you never did. All he could see was this opening that had been below him but was now above him, black and foreboding, getting bigger. It was like being drawn into the underside of a gigantic silver balloon, that was how the seizure affected his temporal lobe.
Then it was gone,
In his late childhood, when the seizures had first been diagnosed, he’d been put on Dilantin. He had tolerated it well, and maybe he’d better go back on it. He hadn’t had actual spasms while in the shower or he would have gone down, so he was still dealing with a petit mal epilepsy. That was on the good side. On the bad side, for this to return after so many years suggested that there could be some other syndrome present. For example, maybe there had been epileptiform tissue in his brain that had developed a tumor. Maybe the thing in his ear was indeed a tumor. It would not be a primary, that did not happen to earlobes. It would be metastase of a hidden primary, asymptomatic until it began, last night, to press a nerve.
If this was a distal metastase of a brain tumor, he might well be a dying man.
He toweled himself and dressed fast. He went downstairs and through the kitchen again, where Katelyn and Conner were still breakfasting, Conner now absorbed in NPR on the radio,
“Zits is great,” she said as he headed out to the garage. “The father gets this—”
“Later. I’ll call.”
“Be sure they’re open.”
If they weren’t, he was heading to the Wilton City Hospital emergency room. There was no way he could make it through another night without knowing what this thing was.
In the event, the health center was open and staffed by a nurse and a squeaky little doctor who appeared to be just a hair older than Conner. He was tempted to head on to Wilton anyway, but his paranoia was running full blast, and he feared a note to Marcie from some tenure inquisitor: “Subject refused treatment at College H.C., preferred Wilton.”
Listen to that thinking, though. Paranoid. He was having seizures for the first time in over twenty years, and now entertaining lunatic paranoid fantasies… but how could he ask this freckled little boy with a sunburned skier’s nose for what he really needed, which was a damned Xanax drip to take home with him?
“Doctor, I have a little cyst in my left ear that’s giving me trouble. Mild trouble, but it’s waking me up at night when I lie on my side.”
He sat on the edge of the examining table while the doctor, if that’s actually what he was, gently examined the ear.
“I’m assuming a subcutaneous infection,” Dan said, aware of his own nervousness. He wanted to also say that he’d seized, but he dared not do that. Paranoid delusions aside, if that got back to Marcie, it might indeed have implications.
“There’s a mass,” the young doctor said.
Dan felt the blood drain out of his face, felt his heart turn over. He was forty. He was dying.
“Let’s do an X-ray,” the doctor said.
He followed him back into the green-tiled, Lysol-scented depths of the health center. Dan managed to get enough spit up to talk. “What do you expect to find?” he asked mechanically.
“Have you been doing any sort of carpentry?”
“There’s a mass in there with something hard in it. I’m thinking a nail head. Something along those lines.”
“Can you see a point of entry?”
“Not anymore. When did it start hurting?”
“Last night.”
