Justin Tussing - Vexation Lullaby

Peter looked over Winchester’s shoulder as the technician highlighted areas for review, added tracking marks, and flipped through scans like a solitaire player who needed, perhaps, a black queen and wouldn’t spare a red queen a second glance.

Though Peter knew — at least in theory — what they were looking for, each machine spoke its own vernacular. He couldn’t translate the changing screens fast enough. As soon as he got oriented, a new image would replace the one he’d been studying — it wasn’t dissimilar from that children’s game where you stared at a pair of drawings to detect where the copy deviated from the original.

And then the exam was over.

Winchester asked Cyril and Alistair to make sure Cross sat up for a few minutes before they let him off the bed.

ONCE THE TWO other men left, Winchester scratched his upper lip before addressing Peter with a careful whisper, “When I first started training on this machine, I found all sorts of treasures lurking inside people, microcysts and tumors, but the more I see. . the less I see. There’s a problem arises when we try to name everything.”

“What’s that?”

“Responsibility.” Winchester peeked out the window at the men waiting beside the machine. “Let me show you a few things.”

Peter felt a twinge of apprehension — for Cross or for himself?

“First the edema.”

The machine divided Cross’s head into slices, which they riffled through like pages in a book.

“I’m not seeing any fluid,” Peter said.

“No, there’s good attenuation.” Another image popped up. Winchester highlighted a section on the outside of the singer’s skull. “Notice the superficial swelling. Nothing to be alarmed about, it’s just a goose egg. I’m guessing this is from his fall.”

Peter found himself nodding.

The next scan had three small areas fenced off.

“What am I looking at now?”

“They’re minor lesions. Call them rock-and-roll memorabilia. I’ve seen high school kids who looked worse, but, still, you can tell he’s no Mormon.”

“What about TIAs?”

Winchester pushed a button. “Mr. Cross, if you wouldn’t mind waiting there for another minute or two while you get your sea legs, Dr. Silver will be with you momentarily.”

The technician ran his finger against the screen. “Occasionally you land a spot that shouts at you, or maybe there’s something that doesn’t feel right. I’m not seeing that here. I’ll send the scans to your brain guy. Maybe he can ferret out something I missed.”

Peter rubbed his eyes. The hour had gotten late all of a sudden. “So he looks good, for the most part?”

“He looks great.”

A series of images cycled on the monitor.

“What are we looking at right now?”

Winchester switched to another screen. Inside a 3-D rendering of Cross’s skull glowed a latitudinal scan of the singer’s brain.

“Go back a few scans,” Peter said.

The men stared at something resembling a burl on a tree trunk.

“There,” Peter said.

“Shit,” said Winchester.

“That’s the basilar artery, right?”

Winchester hit a few keys and image rotated on the screen. “It’s not obvious.”

“But what does it look like to you?”

“You need to have a vascular surgeon to take a peek, but I think it’s presenting as a saccular aneurysm.”

Peter stared at the frog shape of the basilar artery at the base of Cross’s skull.

“It may have been there for years. Maybe all his life.”

What had Winchester said was the problem with naming everything?

“Typically the only time you find these things is after they burst.”

For too long, I’ve limited my passions to the arts and, yes, the intellect. In the process, I sort of cut myself off at the neck. Rosalyn says she took one look at my duster — the way it covers me from my ankles to my chin — and diagnosed the problem.

And, sure, at my age, even in the best of circumstances, these things can be touchy. Sometimes you don’t want to court failure. But if you don’t court failure, can you succeed?

Well, in the Columbus DoubleTree, Rosalyn helped me out of my duster. In the Columbus DoubleTree, she and I went on stage together — I’d forgotten, somehow, that a bed is a stage. She and I played both roles, performer and audience. We sang together. Yes, it was tentative, and we were not always in the same key, but it was full-bodied singing. And I felt — we felt — transported, which is what music promises.

Afterward, we were neither sad nor solemn. I moved to the second bed, because she and I are both creatures of habit — neither of us knew how to get comfortable beside another body.

Peter’s left leg had fallen asleep, but rather than wait for it to clear, he stumbled over to the scanner like some tin soldier. Before he could find the words he needed or could arrange them into a sentence, Cross read the look on his face.

“That bad?”

Had he ever been taught how to tell a person there was a bomb in their head? “Were you comfortable?”

Cyril moved close to Cross. “He’s doing all right, aren’t you, boss?”

The singer took a deep breath, scooted forward, and set his feet on the floor.

“We free to vamoose?” Alistair asked.

“Your father and I should probably have a discussion.” Peter’s voice sounded as dull and empty as his sleeping leg.

“I’m tapped out of words,” Cross said, waving a hand in front of his face. “Try me tomorrow.”

“It’s getting late,” said Cyril. “We need to get everybody on that plane.”

“Mr. Cross can’t fly.”

“You bullshitting me?” Cyril asked.

Cross nodded his head slowly, as though it were made of meringue. “He called me Mr. Cross.”

Winchester came out of the control room and stood beside Peter.

Alistair said, “You’re not suggesting we stay in Columbus?”

All along, Peter had assumed that if he could get Cross into a hospital, then order would assert itself.

Peter said, “You and I ought to discuss this in private.”

“This is as private as it gets.”

Chaos had proven itself more resilient than order. The tour had conquered the hospital.

“I can’t have you in a pressurized cabin,” Peter said.

Alistair put his hand on his father’s shoulder. “What’s this about?”

“Have I had a stroke?”

Winchester said, “Dr. Silver found a suspicious bulge in your basilar artery; it appears to be a saccular aneurysm.”

“Wait, he had an aneurysm?” Alistar asked.

“Not had, has .” Peter addressed Cross, “I don’t want you in a pressurized cabin until an expert looks at it.”

“Mud walls?” asked Cross.

“There could be unfavorable outcomes.”

“What if they didn’t pressurize the cabin?” Cyril asked. “Could he fly then?”

WHILE CYRIL CONSULTED with Bluto, Peter called the switchboard in Rochester and had them patch him through to Ann Chen, the hospital’s senior vascularist. She picked up on the third ring. Peter handed her off to Winchester, who fed her measurements. The two of them talked for ten minutes before Winchester returned Peter his phone.

“What do you think?”

“The files are too big for me to review them at home. From what I’m being told, there’s not a lot of redundancy in the vasculature, which is unfortunate. The biggest issue is we don’t have any growth trends.”

“He wants to get on an airplane. Do you think that’s risky?”

“It’s certainly riskier than not getting on a plane.”

Peter looked at Cross: the singer was sitting on a chair and nodding while Alistair toyed with a balance scale. “But if we stayed below five thousand feet and didn’t pressurize the cabin?”