Faith Page 4

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  The word didn’t take long to get out. Even now he could feel them looking at him from the corners of their eyes with a desperate, eye-popping expectation. It was always the same, and was going to get worse.

  Rachel had found him two weeks previously, rocking on the floor of his apartment, wailing and in fiery pain. A week in the hospital had brought some relief from the pain, but the joint degeneration from his Rheumatoid Arthritis had accelerated dramatically and he was now housebound to a wheelchair. He had regained some use of his arms, able to grasp objects as big or bigger than a can, but unable to type or even use a fork. He had been relocated to a rehab center where the doctors reckoned he would spend the next few months, learning how to live with his infirmity. His editors at American Fanfare had been kind in taking their time distancing themselves from him, but he knew the tether would be cut shortly and his life as a journalist was at an end.

  It was only a chance encounter in the drab dining hall a week ago, when he had reached out to touch one of the other wheelchair bound patients, that had started it all. He didn’t even remember why he had touched the man. Maybe to comfort him. He had turned back to his meal of liquid gruel, something he could hold in his hand and drink with a straw.

  A stunned clattering behind him had caused him to look back. The man he had touched, a twenty year old black man who had been paralyzed in a car accident, had stood up with wobbling sureness from his wheelchair and pushed it over. That was the clattering sound Alan had heard. The man had stood there shakily, his eyes wide and white and bulging in his black face, staring at Alan with fright and wonderment. He took a step, then another, growing steadier by the second. He took another step towards Alan and Alan, in that instant, wanted more than anything to cower away from this freak of nature: a man with a sheared spinal cord who should never walk again steadily plodding towards him.

  The two dozen other invalid patients in the dining room erupted in shouts and amazement. Every eye turned towards Alan and he recoiled in fright as their hungry, demanding gaze landed on him. The rehab attendants appeared then and settled the protesting, newly ambulatory man back into his wheelchair and spirited him and Alan away. They had seen it, too.

  A week later, they could put it off no longer. It was time for Alan to return to the general rehab population. The attendant pushed him down the hallway and Alan could as much feel as see those in their rooms wheeling their useless bodies to the doorways, parking their wheelchairs in the openings and staring after him as he rolled by, hungry lions in the den. But, Alan thought, God would not shut the lions’ mouths and they would eat him up, bit by bit and day by day until he was all used up.

  He began to weep, his warm tears running down his face and spotting his white hospital gown, knowing that his gift, like Cyrus’s, had come at a dreadful cost. He thought back to the punishing touch of the angel, Emmanuel (it meant “God is with us”. Alan had looked it up). He remembered Cyrus removing his sunglasses on that terrible night, looking at him with those empty sockets and saying: “I could heal the blind, but I could never heal myself.”

  And Alan knew that those he touched might yet rise from their imprisonment, but he would remain forever jailed, a wizened husk left to live out his useless years in pain and want.

  God was not mocked.

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