Jacobs watched him with interest but no detectable concern, although Hugh’s rock-dog ’do now hung in unwashed clumps to his shoulders and his clothes were equally dirty. After five minutes or so, just as he was losing interest and getting ready to walk back to the fleabag where he now hung his hat, the vertigo hit. He reeled, putting out one hand and knocking over a disassembled stereo speaker. He almost recovered, but he hadn’t been eating much, and the world turned gray. Before he hit the shop’s dusty wooden floor, it had turned black. It was my story all over again. Only the location was different.
When he woke up, he was in Jacobs’s office with a cold cloth on his forehead. Hugh apologized and said he would pay for anything he might have broken. Jacobs drew back, blinking in surprise. This was a reaction Hugh had seen often in the last weeks.
“Sorry if I’m talking too loud,” Hugh said. “I can’t hear myself. I’m deaf.”
Jacobs rummaged a notepad from the top drawer of his cluttered desk (I could imagine that desk, littered with snips of wire and batteries). He jotted and held the pad up.
Recent? I saw you w/ guitar.
“Recent,” Hugh agreed. “I have something called Ménière’s disease. I’m a musician.” He considered that and laughed… soundlessly to his own ears, although Jacobs responded with a smile. “Used to be, anyhow.”
Jacobs turned a page in his notebook, wrote briefly, and held it up: If it’s Menière’s, I might be able to do something for you.
“Obviously he did,” I said.
Lunch hour was over; the girls had gone back inside. There was stuff I could be doing—plenty—but I had no intention of leaving until I heard the rest of Hugh’s story.
“We sat in his office for a long time—conversation’s slow when one person has to write his side of it. I asked him how he thought he could help me. He wrote that just lately he’d been experimenting with transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, TENS for short. He said the idea of using electricity to stimulate damaged nerves went back thousands of years, that it was invented by some old Roman—”
A dusty door far back in my memory opened. “An old Roman named Scribonius. He discovered that if a guy with a bad leg stepped on an electric eel, the pain sometimes went away. And that ‘just lately’ stuff was crap, Hugh. Your Rev was playing around with TENS before it was officially invented.”
He stared at me, eyebrows up.
“Go on,” I said.
“Okay, but we’ll come back to this, right?”
I nodded. “You show me yours, I show you mine. That was the deal. I’ll give you a hint: there’s a fainting spell in my story, too.”
“Well… I told him that Ménière’s disease was a mystery—doctors didn’t know if it had to do with the nerves, or if it was a virus causing a chronic buildup of fluid in the middle ear, or some kind of bacterial thing, or maybe genetic. He wrote, All diseases are electrical in nature. I said that was crazy. He just smiled, turned to a new page in his pad, and wrote for a longer time. Then he handed it across to me. I can’t quote it exactly—it’s been a long time—but I’ll never forget the first sentence: Electricity is the basis of all life.”
That was Jacobs, all right. The line was better than a fingerprint.
“The rest said something like, Take your heart. It runs on microvolts. This current is provided by potassium, an electrolyte. Your body converts potassium into ions—electrically charged particles—and uses them to regulate not just your heart but your brain and EVERYTHING ELSE.
“Those last words were in capitals. He put a circle around them. When I handed his pad back, he drew something on it, very quick, then pointed to my eyes, my ears, my chest, my stomach, and my legs. Then he showed me what he’d drawn. It was a lightning bolt.”
Sure it was.
“Cut to the chase, Hugh.”
“Well…”
Hugh said he’d have to think it over. What he didn’t say (but was certainly thinking) was that he didn’t know Jacobs from Adam; the guy could be one of the crazybirds that flap around every big city.
Jacobs wrote that he understood Hugh’s hesitation, and felt plenty of his own. “I’m going out on a limb to even make the offer. After all, I don’t know you any more than you know me.”
“Is it dangerous?” Hugh asked in a voice that was already losing tone and inflection, becoming robotic.
The Rev shrugged and wrote.
Won’t kid you, there is some risk involved in applying electricity directly through the ears. But LOW VOLTAGE, OK? I’d guess the worst side effect you’d suffer might be peeing your pants.
“This is crazy,” Hugh said. “We’re insane just to be having this discussion.”
The Rev shrugged again, but this time didn’t write. Only looked.
Hugh sat in the office, the cloth (still damp but now warm) clutched in one hand, seriously considering Jacobs’s proposal, and a large part of his mind found serious consideration, even on such short acquaintance, perfectly normal. He was a musician who had gone deaf and been cast aside by a band he’d helped to found, one now on the verge of national success. Other players and at least one great composer—Beethoven—had lived with deafness, but hearing loss wasn’t where Hugh’s woes ended. There was the vertigo, the trembling, the periodic loss of vision. There was nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, galloping pulse. Worst of all was the almost constant tinnitus. He had always thought deafness meant silence. This was not true, at least not in his case. Hugh Yates had a constantly braying burglar alarm in the middle of his head.
There was another factor, too. A truth not acknowledged until then, but glimpsed from time to time, as if in the corner of the eye. He had remained in Detroit because he was working up his courage. There were many pawnshops on 8-Mile, and all of them sold barrel-iron. Was what this guy was offering any worse than the muzzle of a thirdhand .38 socked between his teeth and pointing at the roof of his mouth?
In his too-loud robot’s voice, he said, “What the fuck. Go ahead.”
Hugh gazed at the mountains while he told the rest, his right hand stroking his right ear as he spoke. I don’t think he knew he was doing it.
“He put a CLOSED sign in the window, locked the door, and dropped the blinds. Then he sat me down in a kitchen chair by the cash register and put a steel case the size of a footlocker on the counter. Inside it were two metal rings wrapped in what looked like gold mesh. They were about the size of those big dangly earrings Georgia wears when she’s stylin. You know the ones I mean?”
“Sure.”
“There was a rubber widget on the bottom of each, with a wire coming out of it. The wires ran into a control box no bigger than a doorbell. He opened the bottom of the box and showed me what looked like a single triple-A battery. I relaxed. That can’t do much damage, I thought, but I didn’t feel quite so comfortable when he put on rubber gloves—you know, like the kind women wear when they’re washing dishes—and picked up the rings with tongs.”
“I think Charlie’s triple-A batteries are different from the ones you buy in the store,” I said. “A lot more powerful. Didn’t he ever talk to you about the secret electricity?”
“Oh God, many times. It was his hobbyhorse. But that was later, and I never made head or tail of it. I’m not sure he did, either. He’d get a look in his eyes…”