The Second Coming

here?”
    Vance’s eyes gazed unfocused into his. “I thought there might be a little sumpn wrong with you.”
    â€œWas there?”
    â€œNot what I was afraid of. Actually I was right all along. It looked to me like you were having little petty-mall seizures, but when you took to falling down and acting even meaner than usual, I was afraid it might be something more serious. As it is, they even got a pill for what ails you. You won’t even have to stay in a hospital. A convalescent home for a spell is all you need, long enough for me to get you regulated. Let’s go back to the mountain, boy. At least I know now what was causing your slice. What a relief. I thought for a while your golf game was shot.”
    â€œPoppy,” said Leslie, coming close and straightening his smock, giving it firm tugs and pats like a mother. “Vance and Dr. Ellis want to have a little powwow with you. Jack and I will be waiting in the hall. When the scientists get through with you, we want a piece of you. Jack, Vance, and I have cooked up something special for the four of us. But that can wait.”
    Jack Curl took his hand too and squeezed it with both of his in a special way like a fraternity grip. Jack seemed more English than before. His hair flew off unbrushed to one side. He didn’t use deodorant.
    They went into another room. Dr. Ellis was standing there, doing nothing, not smiling, not frowning.
    When the door closed, Vance turned on the light of a shadow box, another box, then another. There was the galaxy again, not swimming in deep space now but its poor pale image, an X-ray. Next to it a pelvis connected legbones to backbone as simply and comically as a Halloween skeleton. Next, a bigger woman-size pelvis had something new cradled in its womb, a puddle of white. What was hatching here?
    The two doctors lined up alongside him as if he were a colleague, a man among men. The women and priests were gone and they could talk.
    â€œBoy, you some lucky,” said Vance. “You want to know what I thought you had until Dr. Ellis here talked me out of it. You know I went to Chapel Hill and we know all about Duke assholes but this is one more smart asshole.”
    Dr. Ellis nodded and pressed his lips together in a faint smile. Will Barrett wished Vance would not try to be funny. Dr. Ellis was not the sort of person to be called an asshole. Vance went down the bank of X-rays, snapping his fingernail against the heavy celluloid. “I thought you had a prostatic growth here—” pow “—with metastases here—” pow “—here in the brain—” pow “I’d have given you three months. But you’re some lucky. What you got I barely heard of and Dr. Ellis has written a paper about. He even invented a test for it. Frankly I think he invented the disease. And that ain’t all. They can’t cure it but they got a drug for it and we can control it. Ain’t that right, Doctor?”
    Dr. Ellis went on with his nodding and faint smile. The two doctors fell back, folded their arms, and examined the X-rays as if they were a wall of Rembrandts. He saw that they were using the X-rays as stage props, something to look at so they could talk to him.
    â€œI’m afraid Dr. Battle is doing himself an injustice,” said Dr. Ellis dryly, his eyes drifting along the X-rays. He saw that Dr. Ellis had a way of feigning inattention which in fact allowed him to pay strict attention. “He suggested all along that you had a petit-mal epilepsy, which in fact you do, a rare form, so rare it bears the name of its discoverer. It’s called Hausmann’s Syndrome. It is in fact a petit-mal temporal-lobe epilepsy which is characterized by typical symptoms. It is not too well controlled by Dilantin but there’s a new drug which works very well. That is to say, it clears up the symptoms. What we have to do is rule out a lesion in the temporal lobe. Dr. Battle favors that. I don’t. The odd thing about the treatment is—”
    â€œWhat are the symptoms?” asked Will Barrett.
    Dr. Ellis shrugged. “As I recalled, Dr. Hausmann listed such items as depression, fugues, certain delusions, sexual dysfunction alternating between impotence and satyriasis, hypertension, and what he called wahnsinnige Sehnsucht —I rather like that. It means inappropriate longing.”
    It ought to be called Housmann not Hausmann, he thought, the disorder