One night after patients had begun to arrive in numbers, Donnell and Jocundra were lying on their bed in the back room surrounded by open textbooks and pieces of paper. The bed, an antique with a mahogany headboard, and all the furniture - bureau, night table, chairs - had been the gifts of patients, as were the flowers which sprouted from vases on the windowsills. Sometimes, resting between sessions, Donnell would crack the door and listen to the patients talking in the front room, associating their voices with the different flowers. They never discussed their ailments, merely gossiped or exchanged recipes.
‘Now how much lemon juice you addin’ to the meal,’ Mrs Dubray (irises) would ask; and old Mrs Alidore (a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace and roses) would hem and haw and finally answer, ‘Seem lak my forget-list gets longer ever’ week.’
Their conversations, their gifts and their acceptance of him gave Donnell a comforting sense of being part of a tradition, for there had always been healers in the bayou country and the people were accustomed to minor miracles.
‘I think I’m right,’ said Jocundra.
‘About what?’ Donnell added a flourish to the sketch he had been making. It was a rendering of one of the gold flashes of light he saw from time to time, similar to those Magnusson had drawn in the margins of his ledger; but this one was more complex, a resolution of several fragments he had seen previously into a single figure:
‘About you being a better focusing agent for the fields than any device.’ Jocundra smacked him on the arm with her legal pad. ‘You aren’t listening.’
‘Yeah I am,’ he said, preoccupied by the sketch. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I’ll start over.’ She settled herself higher on the pillows. ‘Okay. If you transmit an electrical charge through a magnetic field, you’re going to get feedback. The charge will experience a force in some direction, and that would explain the changes in light intensity you see. But you’re not just affecting the fields. To cure someone as hopeless as Mr Robichaux, you have to be affecting the cells, probably on an ionic level. You aren’t listening! What are you doing?’
‘Doodling.’ Dissatisfied, Donnell closed his notebook. It did not feel complete. He could not attach the least importance to the gold flashes, yet they kept appearing and it bothered him not to understand them. ‘I’m listening,’ he said.
‘All right.’ Jocundra was miffed by his lack of enthusiasm for her explanation. ‘Now one basic difference between a cancer cell and a normal cell is that the cancer cell produces certain compounds in excess of normal. So, going by Magnusson’s notes, one likelihood is that you’re reducing the permeability of the nuclear membranes for certain ions, preventing the efflux of the compounds in question.’
Donnell rested his head on the pillow beside her. ‘How’s that relate to my being the focusing agent?’
‘NMR.’ She smoothed down his hair. ‘Magnusson’s stuff on it is pretty fragmentary, but he appears to be suggesting that your effect on the cameras was caused by your realigning the atomic magnetic nuclei of the camera’s field and transmitting a force which altered the electrical capacitance of the film. I think you’re doing more or less the same thing to the patients.’ She chewed on her pencil. ‘The fact that you can intuit the movements of the geomagnetic field, and that you’re able to do the right things to the patients without any knowledge of the body, it seems to me if you had enough metal to generate a sufficiently powerful field, two or three tons, then you’d be able to orchestrate the movements of the bacteria with finer discretion than any mechanical device.’
Donnell had an image of himself standing atop a mountain and hurling lightning bolts. ‘Just climb upon a chunk of iron and zap myself?’ ‘Copper,’ she said. ‘Better conductivity.’ ‘It sounds like magic,’ he said. ‘What about the wind?’ ‘There’s nothing magical about that,’ she said. ‘The air becomes ionized under the influence of your field, and the ions are induced to move in the direction imposed on the field. The air moves, more air moves in to replace it.’ She shrugged. ‘Wind. But understanding all this and being able to use it are two different things.’ ‘You’re saying I should go back to the project?’ ‘Unless you know how we can buy three tons of copper with a Visa card.’ She smiled, trying to make light of it.
Something was incomplete about her explanation, just as there had been about his sketch, and he did not believe either would come to completion at Shadows. ‘Maybe as a last resort,’ he said. ‘But not yet.’
