Stories: All-New Tales

An unclean foot with tuberous three-inch nails flipped aside the dead bird. The villagers drew closer, close enough to touch, and leaning in and jabbering with great intensity, urged them forward by tugging at their shirts and waistbands. They, or perhaps just he, Spencer Mallon, was being urged, importuned, begged to execute some unimaginable service. They wished him to perform some kind of task, but the task remained mysterious. The mystery became clearer only after a rickety hut seemed almost to materialize, miragelike, from the barren scrap of land where it squatted. One of the men urging Mallon along yanked his sleeve more forcefully and implored him, with flapping, birdlike gestures, to go into the hut, evidently his, to enter it and see something—the man indicated the necessity for vision by jabbing a black fingernail at his protuberant right eye.

I have been chosen, Mallon thought. I, not Urdang, have been elected by these ignorant and suffering people.

Within the dim, hot enclosure, he was invited to gaze at a small child with huge, impassive eyes and limbs like twigs. The child appeared to be dying. Dark yellow crusts ringed its nostrils and its mouth.

Staring at Mallon, the trembling villager raised one of his own hands and brushed his fingertips gently against the boy’s enormous forehead. Then he waved Mallon closer to the child’s pallet.

“Don’t you get it?” Urdang said. “You’re supposed to touch the boy.”

Reluctantly, unsure of what he was actually being asked to do and fearful of contracting some hideous disease, Mallon extended one hand and lowered his extended fingers toward the boy’s skeletal head as if he were about to dip them for the briefest possible moment into a pail of reeking fluid drawn from the communal cesspit.

Kid, he thought, for the sake of my reputation, I hope we’re going to see a miracle cure.

At the moment of contact, he felt as though a tiny particle of energy, a radiant erg as quick and flowing as mercury, passed directly from his hand through the fragile wall of the boy’s skull.

In the midst of this extremely interesting and in fact amazing phenomenon, the father collapsed to his knees and began to croon in gratitude.

“How do these people know about me?” he asked.

“The real question is, what do they think you did?” Urdang said. “And how do they think they know it? Once we have had our audience, I suggest we put on our skates.”

Urdang, Mallon realized, had no idea of what had just happened. It was the restoration of a cosmic balance: a bird died, and a child was saved. He had been the fulcrum between death and the restoration. A perfect Indian experience had been given to him. The great yogi would embrace him as he would a son, he would open his house and his ashram and welcome him as a student of unprecedented capabilities.

Proceeding down a narrow lane in the village proper, Mallon carelessly extended two fingers and ran them along a foot or two of the mud-plastered wall at his side. He had no plan, no purpose beyond just seeing what was going to happen, for he knew that in some fashion his touch would alter the universe. The results of his test were deeply gratifying: on the wall, the two lines traced by his fingers glowed a brilliant neon blue that brightened and intensified until it threatened to sear the eyes. The villagers spun around and waved their arms, releasing an ecstatic babble threaded with high-pitched cries of joy. Along with everybody else, Mallon had stopped moving to look at the marvelous, miraculous wall. An electrical buzz and hum filled all the spaces within his body; he felt as though he could shoot sparks from his fingers.

I should touch that kid all over again, he thought. He’d zoom right up off the bed.

In seconds, the vibrant blue lines cooled, shrank, and faded back into the dull khaki of the wall. The villagers thrust forward, rubbed the wall, flattened themselves against it, spoke to it in whispers. Those who kissed the wall came away with mouths and noses painted white with dust. Only Mallon, and perhaps Urdang, had been chagrined to see the evidence of his magic vanish so quickly from the world.

The babbling crowd, not at all disappointed, clustered again around him and pushed him forward. Their filthy, black-nailed hands gave him many a fond pat and awed, stroking caress. Eventually they came to a high yellow wall and an iron gate. Urdang pushed himself through the crowd and opened the gate upon a long, lush flower garden. At the distant end of the garden stood a graceful terra-cotta building with a row of windows on both sides of its elaborately tiled front door. The dark heads of young women appeared in the windows. Giggling, the women retreated backward.