"You know—the big Vietnamese guy. He says he saw you do something at the party."

"The party," Alan said in a flat, vacant tone. "It seems so long ago." And then his eyes lit. "The party! That MTA guy's head! Yeah… Ba could have seen."

There was silence for a moment, then Alan took a deep, shuddering breath. "It's true, you know. I can… do things I would have laughed off as utterly impossible two months ago. I… I can cure just about anything when the time is right. Anything. But it doesn't do Tommy any good, does it? I mean, what goddamn good is it if I can't use it on Tommy, who was the most important little sick person in my life!"

Biting his lip, he turned and walked a few steps away, then returned.

"You know something?" he said, slightly more composed. "Before you came I was sitting there actually thinking of digging up the grave and seeing if I could bring him back."

With a quake of fear, Sylvia remembered the old story of The Monkey's Paw.

"Sometimes I think I'm going crazy," he said, shaking his head sharply.

Sylvia smiled and tried to lighten the mood. "Why should you be any different from the rest of us?"

Alan managed to return the smile. "Did you come here to see someone?"

Sylvia thought of Greg, whose marker was on the other side of the field. She had buried him close to home rather than in Arlington, but she had never returned to the site.

"Only you." He gave her a puzzled look. "Ba has some things to tell you."

He shrugged. "Let's go."

___18.___

Alan

"And you say this man simply touched you?"

Ba nodded in response to the question.

Alan sat with Sylvia in the back of the Graham; it was the first time he had been in the car, and he marveled at its plush interior. Ba sat up front, half-turned toward them. The car was still parked in the cemetery.

Ba had told them of his freakish growth as a teenager and how his mother feared he would grow too tall to live among others. When the man who had what Ba called the Dat-tay-vao came to his village, his mother had brought him forward for healing.

"What did you feel?" Alan asked. He could barely suppress his excitement. The folky-mythical aspects of Ba's tale were hokey, but they didn't matter. Here was proof! Eyewitness corroboration that such a power existed!

"I felt a pain deep in my head and almost fell to the ground. But after that I grew no taller."

"That backs up the Vietnam connection. It all fits!"

"What's the Vietnam connection?" Sylvia asked.

Alan decided it was best to start at the beginning, so he told her about the derelict, Walter Erskine, and the incident in the emergency room.

"The healings started shortly after that. I've always been sure that bum passed on the power to me—how and why, I don't know, but I had my lawyer, Tony DeMarco, look into Erskine's past. Tony found out he was a medic in Vietnam. Came home crazy. Thought he could heal people. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by the V.A. Joined a faith-healing tent show in the South but got kicked off the tour because he wasn't healing anybody and was never sober."

"Alcohol puts the Dat-tay-vao to sleep," Ba said.

Alan wondered if that could be why Erskine became a drunk—to stifle the power. "Evidently he lived on the Bowery for years when for some reason he came out here to Monroe and found me, gave me some sort of electric shock, and died. Is that how the Dat-tay-vao is passed on?"

Ba said, "I'm sorry, Doctor, but I do not know. It is said that the Buddha himself brought the Dat-tay-vao to our land."

"But why me, Ba?" Alan desperately wanted to know the answer to that question.

"I cannot say, Doctor. But as the Song tells: 'It seeks the one who would touch, / Who would cut away pain and ill.' '

" 'Seeks'?" Alan was uneasy about the idea of being sought out by this power. He remembered the derelict's words: You! You're the one! "Why seek me?"

Ba spoke simply and with conviction. "You are a healer, Doctor. The Dat-tay-vao knows all healers."

Alan saw Sylvia shudder. "Do you still have that poem, Ba?" The driver handed her a folded sheet of paper and Sylvia passed it to Alan. "Here."

Alan read the poem. It was confusing and sounded more like a riddle than a song. He found one line particularly disturbing. He said, "I'm not too keen on this part about the balance. What's that mean?"

"I'm sorry, Doctor," Ba said. "I do not know. But I fear it might mean that there is a price to be paid."

"I don't like the sound of that!" Sylvia said.

"Neither do I," Alan said, his uneasiness growing. "But so far I've kept my health. And I haven't got any rotting portrait in the attic. So I think I'll just keep on doing what I've been doing—only a little more discreetly."

"A lot more discreetly, I hope," Sylvia said. "But just what have you been doing?"

Alan glanced at his watch. He still had a good hour and a half until his first patient showed up. And there was something very important he wanted to discuss with Sylvia.

"I'll tell you over breakfast."

Sylvia smiled. "Deal."

___19.___

Sylvia

Alan sat across from her, sipping his fourth cup of coffee, silent at last. They had left Ba so he could run some errands and Alan had driven her to this Glen Cove diner where he swore they made the best hashbrowns on the North Shore.

While polishing off scrambled eggs, bacon, a double helping of the famous hashbrowns, and a torrent of coffee in a rear booth, Alan had talked nonstop about what he had accomplished since the Dat-tay-vao had found him.

Sylvia listened in wonder and awe. If all this were really true… she thought about Jeffy for an instant, and then blocked the thought. If she let herself hope for a single minute…

Besides, as much as she respected and admired Alan, she simply couldn't believe all the cures he described had really happened. This was the real world. Her world. Miracles didn't happen in her world.

"God, it's good to be able to talk to someone about this," he said as he hunched over his cup.

"Doesn't your wife… ?"

He shook his head. There was pain in his eyes. "She doesn't want to hear about it. She's frightened about the publicity."

"She should be. You both should be."

"I can handle it."

"And you should be concerned about what Ba told you about who is the master with the Touch."

"I can handle that, too. I'm going to cut back on when and how I use it. Don't worry. I can control it." He laughed. "I sound like a drunk, don't I?" He suddenly switched to an authentic Brooklyn accent. " 'Don't worry, Doc. I may put away a fifth now an' den, but I ain't no alcoholic, y'know? I can han'le it.' "

Sylvia laughed. "That's good. Where'd you pick that up?"

"From life. I grew up in Brooklyn. Mine was the token Wasp family between Jewish and Italian neighborhoods. We lived on…" His brow furrowed. "I don't know. The street name slips my mind. Doesn't matter. I think the only reason they tolerated us was because we were poorer than they were."

They sat in silence a moment, then he said:

"Ginny and I have had our problems since Tommy died. She changed. Maybe it would have been different if he'd been stillborn or had died in the first couple of days. But he held on." She saw a wavering smile pull up the corners of Alan's mouth. "God, what a little fighter he was! He wouldn't give up. He shouldn't have lasted as long as he did. And that was the real problem, I guess. A priest told us it was better to have had him for a little while and lose him, than not to have had him at all. I don't know about that. You can't ache like this for what you've never known." His hands gathered into fists. "If only Tommy hadn't become a real person to us, a little guy who could grab your finger and smile, and even giggle if you tickled him in the right spot. But to have him and love him and hope for him for those three months— eighty-eight days, to be exact—and then to lose him, to see the life drain from his face and the light in his eyes go out. That was cruel. Ginny didn't deserve that. Something inside her died right along with Tommy, and nothing has been the same since. She…"