Shakedown

Chapter Thirty-five

I learned two things at the radiologist’s office. The first was that no one would tell me the results of my MRI. Everyone had a friendly smile, offered a helping hand, and gave me the same answer. Your doctor will tell you.

If they had seen something awful on the films, if I only had twenty-four hours to live, or if all was well and I could look forward to being interviewed for my hundredth birthday by the Today show weatherman, they wouldn’t tell me. Telling me nothing came as easily to them as breathing.

I imagined the radiologist sitting in her office,?ipping through films, tossing them into separate piles marked yes, no, and try again later, the medical version of a fortune-telling eight ball. Whatever the news, she would pick up the phone and hand it off to the patient’s primary doctor, whose job it would become to break it to the patient while she receded, Oz-like, behind the lead curtain.

My life, my future, had become a digitized entry in the American medical machine. I’d been reduced to a one-dimensional collection of data points, diagnostic codes, and billing schedules. The system knew everything about me, but I was the one who remained in the dark, enlightenment waiting on the other side of the weekend, another version of the neon sign in the bar on Strawberry Hill promising free beer tomorrow.

The second thing I learned was that an MRI made a hell of a racket.

“It’s the magnets,” the technician explained, her genial disembodied voice filling my headphones as I lay inside an elongated tube that with only a few inches between my nose and the ceiling was more coffin than diagnostic dream machine.

“Just relax,” she told him, “and don’t move.”

“Easy for you to say,” I answered.

“That’s why we get to say it,” she said with a practiced laugh.

My appointment was at eight o’clock. I was finished at eleven. While the MRI was thin-slicing my bones and tissues, relieving them of their secrets, my squad was being x-rayed by the polygraph examiner. I was lying still. I wondered if any of them were still lying.

Kate had left a message on my cell phone that our class in facial micro expressions would begin at seven o’clock at my house. She was, she said, bringing dinner and a toothbrush. I heard the echo of advice I had often given Wendy: “Be careful what you ask for.” I had eight hours to ponder the women in my life. That was plenty of time to sort things out, even if I spent part of it chasing bad guys.