“That part of the ear’s not very sensitive. It could’ve been there for a while, just recently become irritated.”
They reached the X-ray room and the doctor turned on the lights, which flickered to life, revealing the same X-ray machine that had been there for all the years Dan had been involved with Bell College. Probably war surplus, and not from a recent war.
The doctor took four views of his ear and then he was sent off to the waiting area, an extraordinarily bleak little room with an anorexic gray couch against one wall, three plastic chairs, and two chair-desks for students who might wish to study while waiting for their bad news.
Dan would have taken out his iPod and listened to the
Half an hour later, he began to fear that the young doctor, upon seeing the X-rays, had leaped into his car and rushed off to Wilton with them.
He went back into the depths of the place, where he found him sitting in a tiny office studying a thick textbook. “Oh, hi,” he said. “Let’s see if that e-mail’s come in yet.”
“E-mail?”
“Yeah, your X-ray’s being read by our radiologist. He got it online.”
Now, that was somewhat reassuring—a high-powered radiologist at another institution was reading his film.
“Here it is.” He opened an e-mail. “Boy, these guys need their English translated into English.”
“You can’t read medical terminology?”
“I can’t read a Sri Lankan’s idea of medical terminology. Your radiologist is in Trincomalee. Actually sounds rather romantic, Trincomalee.”
Dear heaven.
He reached across his desk and pulled out an X-ray folder. “This is interesting,” he said. He put two of the X-rays up on a wall light. “You have a foreign object in your ear,” he said, “as I suspected.”
Dan stared at the X-ray. The object was a tiny pinpoint of light. He could hear Conner’s precise young voice, “They will find a small object…” He asked, “Is it enclosed in a membrane?”
“A membrane? Not likely. Maybe a little calcification if it’s been there for a while. I think it’s a metal filing. It could have migrated from anywhere.”
“I have a sore place on my buttock.”
“Let’s take a look.”
He lowered his trousers.
“Nothing visible. Perhaps a slight indentation is all.”
Once again, Conner had been exactly right.
“So, what should I be doing about this?”
“If it bothers you, I can take it out.”
“You?”
He laughed a little. “Quite easily. It’s not deep, it’ll take five minutes.”
He lay on the examining table and let the nurse swab his ear with iodine. They injected him a couple of times, and went in.
“Feel anything?”
“No.”
“Okay, here it is. It’s a white disk. A—whoa.”
“What?”
“It just went—what the hell?”
“What?”
“I’m withdrawing.”
“Did you get it?”
He was silent as he took a stitch in the wound.
“I did not get it,” he said at last. “I got a little sliver of it before it migrated. It’s down in your earlobe now.”
He felt the lobe. “How can that be?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not a normal object.”
He had to say the word, hard as it was. “Cancer?”
The doctor laughed. “Cancers don’t generally run like hell when you touch them with a scalpel.”
“Was it, uh, a living thing, then?”
“Dr. Callaghan, I have no idea what it was. But I am going to do two things to put that question to rest. First, I’m going to put this sliver under a microscope, then I’m going to send it to the lab.”
“Does this happen to people often?”
“First one I’ve seen. Foreign objects are a whole subdiscipline of trauma medicine. It’s nothing to worry about, though. I wouldn’t think twice about it.”
They went into another room, this one containing a lab bench with a fairly decent microscope on it. The doctor prepared a specimen slide and put it into the viewing area. He lowered his face to the binocular.
Dan watched him, waiting.
He lifted his head. “Okay, off it goes to pathology.”
“But—what did you see?”
“White material. Probably some sort of a protein.”
“Why did it move? Is it a parasite?”
“Lord, no! Here—take a look for yourself.”
Gratefully, Dan looked into the microscope. What he saw was shaped like a sickle of moon, and along the curved outer edge there was what looked like movement. “What am I seeing? It’s still moving, am I right?”
“That has to be a light effect.”
Dan adjusted the scope. Clearly, the thing had scilia on it, and the scilia were propelling it. He lifted his face. “Scilia,” he said, “look.”
The doctor barely glanced at it. “Well, call day after tomorrow, we’ll give you the pathology report.”
“But it has scilia on it that are moving. So it’s a living thing, it must be. And it can migrate. What if it goes somewhere else? Into my brain or my heart?”
“There are no ear parasites like this.”
And that ended that. Another two patients had come in, and the doctor was off to attend to their hangovers.
On the way home, Dan called and told Katelyn that he was fine. She asked him what they’d found, and he came, quite unexpectedly, to a powerful personal moment. He found himself shaking so intensely that he pulled over to the side of the road.
“Dan?”
“Sorry. It was a little something in there. They took it out.”
“What sort of a little something, honey?”
“Not a tumor.” He found that he very much did not want to tell her that Conner had been right. He did not want Conner to be right, and he never, ever wanted to ask Conner how he had known. “It was a little cyst. Took ten minutes to get rid of it. The main delay involved waiting for the radiologist to evaluate it… in Trincomalee. It seems we outsource our diagnostics to experts in the Third World. Or is it the fourth world? Is there a fourth world?”
“You sound a bit out of it.”
“It’s been a long twenty-four hours, dear. I’m coming home and I’m going to turn on the TV and watch Sunday golf and spend the afternoon in a coma.”
All the way home, without knowing why and without being able to stop, he cried. There was no sound. In fact, his expression never changed, except for wetness flowing down his cheeks. He felt like an idiot, he never cried. But he couldn’t stop himself now, because a tremendous sorrow was coming up from his depths, a hidden river exposed.
He remembered this so well, this anguish that he could not control. It had been a feature of his childhood,
