barbed wire—I had no idea how—and came to me to clean up the wound. I asked him if they didn’t have iodine at home, and he shrugged and didn’t reply. In fact, he never talked about himself, beyond—more or less—the medical reasons for his current visit. Every week he visited me, with one reason or another, as he grew up from a boy to a teen and then a man, still thin, still curly-haired and bespectacled. When I opened my own clinic, twelve years later, Benjamin was my first client.
His medical problems were always a little odd. He came to me bruised in unlikely places—his right ear, for example—or suffering from bizarre diseases—like an arthritis that had the same symptoms as gum disease, didn’t respond to medication and disappeared after a week—but always healed miraculously and returned to me to verify the fact, and perhaps discover some new ailments in the process. It’s possible that other doctors would have ridiculed him and his various ills—and certainly my cooperation with it and with him—but I couldn’t bring myself to be so cruel to him.
The coils, however, were something completely new. I had sent him for an X-ray several days before, at his insistence. He brought the films back to my clinic, in the brown paper folder of the National Health, searched through them for a minute or two and then found what he was looking for. I clipped the film to the illuminator and examined it, not expecting to find anything out of the ordinary—or at least the ordinary in terms of Benjamin Schneider.
But, to my surprise, something was there. Two grayish coils, semi-transparent, meaning that whatever they were made of was not solid enough to completely block the X-rays. And there was something else odd about the picture, though at first I couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Does it hurt?” I asked. He shook his head. I examined the wrist myself, but externally it was not possible to discern anything out of the ordinary. I told him that I had to think about it, and that he should come back to see me in a few days. I looked at him, worried he might be upset by that, but he just nodded and left, to all appearances satisfied that his fate was in good hands. How little did you know, Benjamin. How little did we know.
I had quite a lot of work to do in the office that day, so I took the film home with me afterwards. I didn’t have an illuminator at home, so I hung the film before a desk-lamp. I stared at it all through dinner, mesmerized, and for a change didn’t sit waiting in vain for the phone to ring.
The coils were odd, but there was also something familiar about them, and these were two separate things, the strangeness and the familiarity. After a while I lost my concentration and watched a little TV. One of the channels was showing a horror B-movie and I watched it disinterestedly as my mind floated here and there on its own, without my being fully conscious of it. It’s a way as good as any of dealing with problems, but this time the solution came not from that but, rather, from the tiny part of me that was actually watching the television.
In the movie, one of the monsters there was sawing through the arm of another monster, and I noticed immediately the cheap special-effect: the saw and the hand about to be cut were two separate images filmed at different times and joined artificially. It was easy to see that the saw didn’t really touch the arm. And it was the same phenomenon that I could see in Benjamin’s X-ray: the coils looked like an artificial addition to the picture.
There was something reassuring about this. Incidents like this are not common but sometimes, despite all precautionary measures, they happen. A foreign object finds its way between the camera and the subject, the result being the mysterious thing illuminated in all its glory before my reading lamp. If Benjamin still needed it, I would send him for a repeat scan, and if not—all the better.
Still, the coils did seem
His medical problems were always a little odd. He came to me bruised in unlikely places—his right ear, for example—or suffering from bizarre diseases—like an arthritis that had the same symptoms as gum disease, didn’t respond to medication and disappeared after a week—but always healed miraculously and returned to me to verify the fact, and perhaps discover some new ailments in the process. It’s possible that other doctors would have ridiculed him and his various ills—and certainly my cooperation with it and with him—but I couldn’t bring myself to be so cruel to him.
The coils, however, were something completely new. I had sent him for an X-ray several days before, at his insistence. He brought the films back to my clinic, in the brown paper folder of the National Health, searched through them for a minute or two and then found what he was looking for. I clipped the film to the illuminator and examined it, not expecting to find anything out of the ordinary—or at least the ordinary in terms of Benjamin Schneider.
But, to my surprise, something was there. Two grayish coils, semi-transparent, meaning that whatever they were made of was not solid enough to completely block the X-rays. And there was something else odd about the picture, though at first I couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Does it hurt?” I asked. He shook his head. I examined the wrist myself, but externally it was not possible to discern anything out of the ordinary. I told him that I had to think about it, and that he should come back to see me in a few days. I looked at him, worried he might be upset by that, but he just nodded and left, to all appearances satisfied that his fate was in good hands. How little did you know, Benjamin. How little did we know.
I had quite a lot of work to do in the office that day, so I took the film home with me afterwards. I didn’t have an illuminator at home, so I hung the film before a desk-lamp. I stared at it all through dinner, mesmerized, and for a change didn’t sit waiting in vain for the phone to ring.
The coils were odd, but there was also something familiar about them, and these were two separate things, the strangeness and the familiarity. After a while I lost my concentration and watched a little TV. One of the channels was showing a horror B-movie and I watched it disinterestedly as my mind floated here and there on its own, without my being fully conscious of it. It’s a way as good as any of dealing with problems, but this time the solution came not from that but, rather, from the tiny part of me that was actually watching the television.
In the movie, one of the monsters there was sawing through the arm of another monster, and I noticed immediately the cheap special-effect: the saw and the hand about to be cut were two separate images filmed at different times and joined artificially. It was easy to see that the saw didn’t really touch the arm. And it was the same phenomenon that I could see in Benjamin’s X-ray: the coils looked like an artificial addition to the picture.
There was something reassuring about this. Incidents like this are not common but sometimes, despite all precautionary measures, they happen. A foreign object finds its way between the camera and the subject, the result being the mysterious thing illuminated in all its glory before my reading lamp. If Benjamin still needed it, I would send him for a repeat scan, and if not—all the better.
Still, the coils did seem
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