I was a deflated lump on a chair at the side of an old desk in police headquarters downtown. Inspector Morse, the Homicide Chief, sat behind the desk, while two of his detectives stood beside me.

My viaticals salesman was an insurance agent by the name of Hector Ruiz. My doctor, Jed Stewart, had recommended him. Jed and I had been best friends since college. Room-mates, in fact. After college, Jed went off to medical school while I chose the law.

It was Jed who broke the news that I had cancer. During an annual check-up, a week shy of my fortieth birthday, Jed remarked rather casually that he had seen something while examining my eyes. He said he wanted me to undergo a CAT scan. Just routine. Nothing to worry about.

But when Jed called the following week, I didn’t like the sound of his voice.

"Something wrong?" I asked with a nervous laugh.

"Just get over here, Mike," Dr. Stewart had said. "And bring Carol with you."

Carol is my wife. Our marriage hadn’t been going all that well the last couple of years. Like most couples, we tolerated each other in the daily grind, wondering where the love and romance had gone.

The afternoon of Jed’s call, in fact, I had just ended an affair with one of my firm’s paralegals. After another lunch hour tryst at our usual motel, I told Sandy I couldn’t leave Carol because of the kids. The truth was I had grown tired of the paralegal. That’s the kind of guy I was – and still am, I guess – a turd.

Anyway, Jed came out into the waiting room wearing a professional scowl. He walked Carol and me back into his office and sat behind his desk. After brooding for a time, he blurted it out. I had a brain tumor. He offered further explanation, but I couldn’t concentrate. It seemed unreal, like a bad dream.

The bottom line, it wasn’t operable.

After another long pause, he added: I had six, nine months to live. Tops.

Just like that. Carol suddenly reached over and rubbed my arm. I let her hold my hand. After a minute, I gave up the idea that I was going to pass out, took a deep breath and tried to swallow.

"But I feel great." I protested.

Jed nodded, seeming to know what I meant. I may not feel anything for some time, he agreed, a month, maybe two. But soon enough, I would notice things, little things at first, lapses of thought, judgment, motor skills. I might get headaches, and one day I might lose my sense of smell or touch or simply wet my pants. It could be anything, depending on how fast and in what direction the tumor grew.

The thought of an unwanted mass of cells eating away at my brain made me sick and I nearly lost it again. I went dizzy and wondered if that was a symptom of the disease.

Carol sensed my unease and squeezed my hand. After a moment, I pulled out of her grasp and she gave me a hurtful glance.

Jed came to the rescue. He asked Carol if she would mind stepping out of the office for a few minutes. He needed to confer with me in private, doctor to patient. There was a protest of sorts as she opened her mouth and hesitated momentarily. Scowling, she picked up her purse and left the office.

Alone, Jed asked me about my finances.

"My finances are shit," I told him. "You know that".

This past summer, as we got sloshed during and after our annual alumni golf tournament, I cried the blues again how damn broke I was.

Jed also knew that I wasn’t happily married, and that I had not been a faithful husband. I had admitted to him more than one affair in my thirteen years of marriage. For his part, Jed had admitted three or four of his own, the last one resulting in a bitter divorce.

"My house is still mortgaged to the hilt, way beyond what its worth," I went on. "I have fifty, sixty thousand on four credit cards. And you know how much it costs to have both Elizabeth and Janey attend Thomas More Academy." Jed nodded. His son, Jed Jr. had just started the middle school there this fall.

In short, my finances were a total disaster. Now, bankruptcy was no longer an option, it was a certainty, just to get Carol and the kids off the hook. We’d have to sell the house, move into an apartment. I had a disability policy but that wouldn’t even begin to cover all our bills. Not only would I be dying, but I’d be dying poor.

"How much life insurance you got?" he asked.

I scowled. At the moment, that seemed a damned heartless question.

"Don’t much give a shit," I told him, "if you want to know the truth."

That’s when he explained to me what a viatical was. He recommended that I set up an appointment to see Ruiz and gave me his card. Before stuffing it into my pocket, I read that Ruiz was an agent for some outfit, Life Benefactors.

"He might be able to help you stay out of the poorhouse," Jed told me. "At least spend your last few months without that on your mind. Use the money for something for yourself – a vacation, an orgy – I don’t know."

Without much enthusiasm, I stared at the card a moment and said maybe I’d give the guy a call.

Ruiz told me I’d needed to get a second opinion. From one of their doctors.

His insurance agency was in one of those strip malls along a busy suburban boulevard. There were a couple of secretaries typing away or answering the telephone outside in the general office area. In addition to viaticals, Ruiz’ agency sold the usual assortment of auto and life insurance policies.

As I sat before him, my mood hadn’t picked up much since Jed had delivered the awful news just yesterday afternoon. I hadn’t slept very well last night, managing perhaps a couple hours. The rest of the time I had tossed and turned in bed next to Carol. Finally, with the alarm clock on my night table blaring 3:00 a.m., I had gotten up and sprawled out on the living room couch where I continued to toss and turn. It irked me that Carol had slept soundly through it all, not rising even once to console me.

In the morning, she explained rather sheepishly that the stress from yesterday had completely wiped her out. She asked if I wanted her to take off from work, even though she clearly wasn’t enthused about it. The bridal shop where she worked was busy and the owner was out of town. When I told her, no, I’d be all right, she didn’t argue and quickly dressed and left. As soon as she was out the door, I called Ruiz’ agency.

"Once your condition is confirmed," Ruiz continued, "the funds can be disbursed." He looked up from a folder containing my life insurance policy and a copy of Jed’s medical report that had been faxed to him that morning.

"You do understand how a viatical settlement works," he said.

I nodded. Actually, though a morbid concept, it wasn’t complicated. As a sideline to his insurance agency, he represented Life Benefactors, a group of anonymous investors who had put a pile of money into an escrow account. In exchange for fifty per cent of my life insurance policy, a tidy sum of five hundred thousand dollars, I would name the Life Benefactors investors as beneficiary under the policy, replacing Carol. When I died, in six to nine months, they would receive one million dollars, doubling their investment in less than a year.

"Who invests in that sort of thing?" I asked. "Viaticals."

Ruiz frowned. "I am not allowed to reveal that."

"No," I said. "Not who – not the actual people. I mean what kind of people."

"Your typical investors," Ruiz said with a shrug. "Lawyers, doctors."

"And what if," I asked and swallowed, "what if I don’t die so fast? What if I beat the odds somehow and live to a ripe old age."

Ruiz shrugged. "That’s the risk they take," he said, then shrugged. "Though, in my experience, that’s never happened."

With that happy comment, I told him I needed a couple days to think it over. Cutting my wife and kids out of my life insurance was not something I took lightly. I had a conscience.

Sure, Ruiz said, think it over. He wasn’t going anywhere. The problem was, if somebody else came along, some other poor sap like me who had been dealt a bad hand and needed money, there might be nothing left for me. Ruiz added that there was only about a million dollars of investor funds left in his Life Benefactors escrow account at the moment because they had just paid out a settlement last week. It wasn’t easy finding investors for this sort of thing, he said. Makes some people squeamish.

In the parking lot of Ruiz’ office, the thought of selling Carol and the kids down the river suddenly made me feel guilty, sick almost. It was my good friend,

Dr. Jed Stewart, who set me straight.

I drove to his office right after seeing Ruiz and he immediately interrupted a consult to see me. Back in his office, he grabbed a bottle of Chivas Regal from the bottom drawer of his long mahogany desk, poured some into a glass and came over and handed it to me. With a hand on my shoulder, he apologized for not being able to join me for a drink but he had a waiting room full of patients.

After he sat down behind his desk, Jed said to me: "Not to be totally heartless, but you know Carol will remarry within a year after you are lowered into the ground."

"Gee, thanks," I said and winced as I sipped his scotch.

He shrugged. "It’s human nature. She’s attractive. Thirty-five."

"Thirty-four," I corrected. "But I know what you mean."

I wanted to cry. Although the thrill had gone out of our marriage some years ago, the thought of Carol making love to another man began to distract me. And my daughters, they’d have a new daddy.

"Gotta face reality, bud," Jed went on. "You know the way of the world. Life goes on."

I nodded and took another sip of Chivas.

"You won’t be leaving her high and dry," he said. "They’ll end up okay."

"So she and the kids will have to live a little more frugally at first," he continued while I sat in a daze before him. "But think of the situation you’re facing: spending your last days in poverty, having to work to the bitter end, and then, when your brain finally starts to malfunction, and you just can’t work anymore, you’ll be made to feel even worse because you simply can’t maintain their lifestyle."

By the second glass of scotch, I was downright angry.

Jed checked his watch and told me that he had to go. Patients were cooling their heels in each of the treatment rooms, and the waiting room was full.

He got up from behind his desk and, as he walked around my chair, patted my shoulder. "Like I said," he told me, "Life goes on, my friend."

At the door, as if to underscore his advice, he turned to me and added: "I know that if I was you, I’d take the money and run. Spend my last days on some exotic island. In the arms of a beautiful woman." His mouth twisted into a grin. "Or several."

It should not be awfully surprising that to a guy facing certain death within the year, with the prospect of his widow screwing another man while he was rotting in the grave, Jed’s argument sold me.

I drove straight back to Ruiz’ office. He didn’t seem surprised by my quick return.

In the next five minutes, I signed over my life insurance policy to Life Benefactors. Ruiz also had me sign a document acknowledging that I was of sound mind, that I knew what I was doing. He had one of the secretaries come in to witness that. Then he called a doctor and made an appointment for me the following morning to confirm Jed’s diagnosis. Assuming that happened, five hundred thousand dollars would be mine, wired into any account I designated.

"We recommend," said Ruiz, "that you do not use an existing account. Especially a joint account with your spouse."

I nodded, listening.

He added that Life Benefactors could help me set up an offshore account that would be difficult for U.S. courts to reach.

"Of course," Ruiz explained ruefully, "your wife will not be altogether pleased with the idea of losing your life insurance. She may take legal action to get at the viaticals settlement."

I nodded, and felt bad, momentarily, that I was really planning something that would leave her and the girls high and dry. The least I could do was pay off the house. That would leave me with nearly four hundred grand to play with. Should be an ample enough sum to last six to nine months. And if I didn’t manage to exhaust it all by the time I passed away, they’d have a few more dollars left over to live on. Until, as Jed confidently predicted, Carol found that new guy who would provide for her and my kids.

"Okay," I said with a sigh. "I’d like your help with doing that. Establishing an offshore account."

Ruiz nodded and brought over more forms to sign. Within another ten minutes, he was shaking my hand and solemnly congratulating me. Despite my instant riches, he seemed to appreciate that there was really little to celebrate. I still had a tumor in my brain.

"You will not regret this," he promised.

I nodded half-heartedly and said goodbye.

The next day, I underwent another CAT Scan and an examination by the Life Benefactors doctor. He was tall and serious and reminded me of Jed. Same age, same dry feedback. At the end of his rather hasty examination, he glumly reported that Jed’s diagnosis had been confirmed.

"I’m sorry, Mr. Reed," he said. "I’ll fax my report to Mr. Ruiz."

I gave the deal final approval and five hundred grand was wired into an account set up for me in an offshore bank in the name of a special foreign corporation which, of course, I controlled.

Ruiz put me in touch with a travel agent, an overweight, middle-aged blonde well past her prime. She greeted me at the agency with too much make-up, a fake smile and sagging breasts under a soft, pink sweater.

"Hector told me you might be looking for something exotic," she said right off.

"I am certainly not gonna spend my last days in Buffalo, New York, during January, February and March," I laughed. "And April and May, for that matter." Like I said, I still didn’t feel sick and with that much money to my credit, suddenly free of the obligations of family and career, it was hard not to feel relaxed, downright giddy.

"And you don’t want to go to any of those places that offer alternative or experimental cancer treatment?"

"Nah," I told her flatly. "It’s hopeless, my doctors tell me." I tapped my skull. "The cancer’s too deep in the brain."

She frowned sympathetically.

"Well, then," she said, and turned to her computer screen. "Somewhere warm and exotic." After a minute or so searching some database, she looked at me with a generous smile, and said: "I think I have just the place."

The island of Dominica, one of the Windward Islands in the southeast quadrant of the Caribbean Sea between Guadeloupe and Martinique, has the shape of a sixteen by twenty-nine mile emerald kidney floating in the deep blue sea. The island had been inhabited since the fourteen hundreds by Carib Indians, who called themselves, Kalinagos. They had journeyed in canoes from South America’s Amazon basin, quickly conquered the native Arawaks, and renamed the island, Waitikubuli, which literally means, "tall in her body." Stories circulated for years that the Caribs practiced voodoo, and that they had been cannibals.

Only three days after signing over my life insurance policy to Life Benefactors, I was sitting on the veranda of a two-bedroom cottage overlooking a pristine, azure expanse of ocean off the western coast of the island, just south of Dominica’s capital, Roseau. With a book written by some modern cosmologist/philosopher on my lap, describing God as a cosmic variant of string theory, and a warm, sweet ocean breeze blowing up from the beach, I took a swig of Kubili, a dark beer brewed on the island.

Swallowing the sweet ale, I never felt better.

Surrounding me was Dominica’s natural splendor. Exotic birds and animals populated its lush rain forests. High mountain peaks, including Morne Diablotin and Morne Trois Pitons, and its many rivers and waterfalls spawned by constant rains which fell from the mountains and volcanic hills, made it a naturalist’s paradise.

Thankfully, it had yet to become a haven for the ordinary tourist, the noisy, restless, honeymooning couples or elderly snowbirds, that still flocked to the more familiar Caribbean islands like Jamaica or Grand Cayman. With a population of only seventy-thousand, Dominica had seemed the perfect place to escape the hustle of the human race, where in my last days I might find solitude and peace. On an island which so closely resembled The Garden of Eden, it seemed the ideal place to contemplate the end of my life.

Of course, I didn’t totally envision living as a monk on the island. With a wink, my blonde-haired travel agent had promised that Dominican women were dark and lithe and beautiful. She promised that I could find whatever I wanted on the island, including solitude and perversion.

I had rented a two bedroom cottage from an elderly German couple, the Heinz, who had expatriated from Buenos Aires years ago and purchased the quite aptly named, Oceanview Resorts. The modestly furnished cottages, going for only two thousand dollars a month, included a housekeeper and promised complete privacy and relaxation. My German landlords seemed to especially respect the need for security and seclusion.

I had arrived at the cottage late the night before. While unpacking early the following morning, I was overcome by a fit of remorse, struck by the sudden realization that I had abandoned everything, my entire life; that I would never see Carol and the kids again and was facing death alone. Overcome with grief, I sat in a lump on the edge of the bed.

But it was too late. I was already dead to them. By now, Carol had found the note I had scribbled before rushing out of the house to catch the flight to Miami, my pitiful way of explaining the terrible thing I had done. Trying to ease the hurt, I had started by telling her that I had used some of the viatical money to pay off the mortgage. At least, she would not have to worry about finding a place to live. I closed by telling her that I still loved her but because of the cancer and our lousy finances, I didn’t know what else to do.

And in the cool, air-conditioned hum of the otherwise silent bedroom of the cottage, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps, I really did love her.

And the girls – God, did I miss them! The next time they would see me would be in a coffin in Dexter’s Funeral Home – if they came!

I cried for a time on the edge of the bed, wondering if there was a way to extract myself from the viaticals deal. But I had spent over a hundred grand already between paying off the mortgage and getting to Dominica. There seemed nothing I could do but see it through. Somehow, I had to live with it and try to enjoy the final months of my life alone on this island paradise.

On top of this remorse, self-loathing, and regret, I remembered that I had cancer. A brain tumor. The thought of dying, of oblivion, now immobilized me.

The sudden, pleasant chime of the doorbell roused me.

Someone was at the back door. It opened to a small fenced-in lawn edged with a fragrant flower garden. Beyond the fence was a narrow path winding down a small hill through thick flowery overgrowth, ending at a small private beach.

A thin, dark-haired girl, a Carib, was at the door. She looked to be no more than eighteen.

"I was sent to you," she said, and smiled. Her accent was thick, lyrical.

Upon my arrival late last night, I had decided to leave unpacking for the morning and instead paid a visit to a bar I had noticed about two-thirds the way along the narrow road leading to the resort from the small airport at Roseau. After a couple exotic rum drinks, I had asked the wizened, bronze-skinned bartender if he knew where I could find some company for my lonely afternoons. "You know," I had explained with a wink, "a woman." He flashed a smile in return and promised to see what he could do. I gave him my address at the Oceanview and a fifty dollar tip.

"I was sent," repeated the girl, basking in the golden sunlight in the doorway, "to bring you happy."

I gulped and suddenly forgot about the brain tumor, Carol, the kids. I stepped back and let the girl into the cottage.

Her name was Marlena, Lena for short. I led her to the back bedroom. She slipped out of her simple, white tee shirt and tight shorts, and we were soon writhing on the bed in unabated passion. Carol had never been quite this good, not even before we were married. I came in about five minutes. Lena quickly dressed, leaving me spent and out of breath, sprawled across the bed with the sheets in disarray around me.

"Where are you going?" I asked, still craving her.

"I come back," she promised and smiled.

Before leaving, she had me sign a receipt for a hundred dollar charge on my debit card. Afterwards, I fetched a Kubuli from the small fridge in the kitchenette, and my book of the mostly incomprehensible musings of some stray astrophysicist. Sitting on a chaise lounge chair on the veranda, sipping the ale, I felt all right with myself and the world, forgetting my troubles, my loneliness, and accepting my decision to end my days in Dominica.

Lena proceeded to fill my days with a kind of meaning. I arranged for her to come over every afternoon, and stay as long as it took me to screw her, usually half and hour or so. Sometimes, if she didn’t have another customer waiting, she lingered in the bedroom after our love-making and we talked.

During the second week of this, Lena asked why I was so lucky that I could spend all my time eating, drinking, reading on my veranda in the warm breeze, and fucking her. Had I won the lottery?

"I’m dying," I told her.

She squinted at me.

"You are what, senor?"

"Dy-ing," I repeated, angry now for having to tell her. It brought back the cold hearted fact that in only a few months, I would be worm meat. The daily sex with her had put that miserable reality out of my mind.

"Do you wish to say it, senor?"

Tell me, she meant.

So I told her everything. My brain tumor. The viaticals settlement. How I’d abandoned my wife and daughters.

"I am sorry for you, senor," she whispered and sidled up against my thigh in a show of sympathy.

"Me, too," I laughed.

Almost a month had passed since Jed’s diagnosis and I still felt great, never better, in fact, considering that I was living in a veritable paradise without a care in the world. Except my impending death.

"Maybe," she said, "maybe my grandpa, he can help you."

I frowned. "Yeah? How?"

"He is, what you say, a holy man in the tribe," she said. "A bush doctor."

"Bush doctor?" I smiled and drew her close. She was such an innocent, wild thing. Her slender, dark body did not have an ounce of fat. She was pure muscle, lithe and supple as a panther. I have to admit that I am a tit man, but her lack of them did not turn me off. Despite screwing her every day the last two weeks at a hundred dollars a pop, I had not grown tired of it.

"So he can cure me," I said with a sly grin, "you think?"

"He has others."

I looked at her. She had a deep, hard look whenever she was being profoundly serious.

"Others?"

"Si," she said. "It is well known on the island that he can do such things."

I frowned, smelling a con.

"And what will this cost me?"

"Depends on what he is asked to do," she said, with a frown. "For me, maybe nothing."

The next morning, I asked my housekeeper, a dark withered rag of a woman, a mongrel, part Jamaican, part Creole, what she knew of the bush doctors on the Carib reservation. Her eyes boggled with the mere mention of it. Yes, there were such men. They used herbs and demons to make magic, and sometimes to give cures. Most of them are loco, she added, voodoo. Dangerous. Nevertheless, sometimes foolish American touristas went to the Carib Territory to receive such magic.

That afternoon, as we lingered among the tangled silken sheets after another hour or so of torrid sex, I asked Lena if she could arrange a meeting with her grandfather, the bush doctor. What did I have to lose?

She gasped, glad to help. Tomorrow morning, she promised, she would take me to him.

Just after sunrise, with Lena at my side in the rented Jeep Wrangler I used to get back and forth to Roseau, I took Transinsular Road to Carib Territory. During the first part of the trip, Lena slept, gently snoring while a soft bass and hum of reggae tunes played on the only local FM station I was able to catch from Roseau. I tried not to think how stupid it was for me to place any hope that voodoo and herbal remedies could cure my cancer.

Lena finally started to awaken as we approached the village of Belis just outside the lush jungles of the Central Forest Reserve. We seemed to have been transported into a primeval place, a veritable Garden of Eden unknown to man. The spell was broken by the occasional car that would come straight at us from the east and whiz past with furious purpose.

"Do you know about my people?" Lena asked as we headed deeper into the dark forest. High in the beautiful, thick palm and banana trees, colorful parrots and other exotic creatures of the jungle gawked and screamed at us with seeming disapproval.

"A little," I told her. "What I read in the brochures."

Lena told me that there were about three thousand Caribs living on the island, mostly in eight small hamlets in the Carib territory. They were descendants of an ancient Carib tribe that had invaded the island on canoes from South America and wiped out the native Arawaks over five hundred years ago. Her people were eventually subjugated themselves by Columbus and the Spanish, and later the French and English, reducing their population to their present numbers. Although most of her people were mongrels, an intermixture of Carib, slave Negroes, Creole, or peoples from the other islands who had come to live and work on Dominica, Lena claimed with a hint of pride that she, like her grandfather, was pure Carib.

With her eyes downcast, she told me that the Carib life was not for her. She was a whore now, but once she had been a little girl playing in her village, learning the Carib ways. Her transformation from that Carib girl to whore was a sad story about a hopeless teenager who didn’t want to follow the ancient ways and be married off to some hapless Carib banana farmer. With a laugh, she revealed her dream of meeting some rich American tourist and living in a Tudor mansion in some expensive subdivision back in the States. Chicago was where she wanted to live, and her eyes brightened with the mention of that. Chicago.

"Maybe you will still meet him," I told her as I reached over and stroked her silky black hair.

She glanced at me sideways and smiled.

"Maybe I already did, senor," she said.

After a long moment, I laughed.

"Does that mean, senorita," I said, "I don’t have to pay you any more."

She turned and glared out the window.

"Screw you," she whispered.

For a time after this exchange, we drove in silence through the brooding wet forest suffocating the road. Suddenly, we came out of it into an expanse of barren, flat terrain and bright sunshine.

"Turn here." Lena pointed to a bumpy, dirt trail. I made a right turn and sped onward raising dust, furiously attempting to negotiate deep holes that pocked the road.

Ten minutes later, we pulled into her grandfather’s village, nothing more than several haphazard rows of ramshackle wood huts with corrugated tin roofs surrounded by acres and acres of banana trees.

"This is Sineku," she said. "My village."

We slowed into it as the road narrowed to nothing more than a dusty sidewalk. The Caribs moved aside and gawked as we inched past them. After several turns, Lena pointed to one of the wooden shacks. Her grandparent’s.

As we stopped the Jeep in front of the hut, an old woman appeared on a crooked porch. Lena bolted from the Jeep and ran to her and gave her a one-sided hug. Gramma, I heard her say. The old lady held back, offering nothing.

Lena backed off, clearly hurt by her grandmother’s frosty greeting. It occurred to me that Lena would be viewed here as something of a prodigal, a bad girl. I saw Lena draw a breath and nod my way.

The old lady listened as Lena explained what we were doing there. With a nod, she opened the front door and both she and Lena entered the shack. I waited for what seemed an eternity in the stifling heat of the Jeep. Flies buzzed my head and after the long drive, I had to take a wicked piss. On top of that, my head was pounding, making me worry that this was the first real symptom of my brain tumor.

Finally, Lena came out and approached the driver’s side.

"My grandfather," she said, and looking away almost disgusted, "he will see you now."

I nodded but felt suddenly glum. The idea of coming here to be cured by a medicine man seemed now more than ever like a hopeless and silly waste of time.

Lena’s grandfather was a wizened old man, with a glint in his eyes that bespoke a long, healthy and happy life. Stringy, white hair streaked with gray touched his shoulders. His plum colored skin was taut and wrinkled. A long beak nose gave him the look of an ancient, mummified bird. He was seated at a rough wooden table in the part of the single room shack that served as the kitchen. On the other side was a low, narrow bed.

"Sit." Lena gestured to a chair next to old man. After I did so, she proceeded to sit across from him.

The old man stared at Lena for a time. She said nothing. She was different here, no longer the brass teenage whore. In this village, in this hut, she was simply this bush doctor’s granddaughter. At last, he said something to her in a guttural voice expressing, it seemed, displeasure. Lena held her tongue and let him finish. Finally, she told him something in Carib.

With that, he turned and cocked his head to consider me.

"He will examine you now," Lena said.

"What did he say to you?" I asked her.

"That I should stop being a whore," she said and laughed. "Come back here and find a Carib man, a banana farmer."

With some effort, the old man got to his feet, turned slowly, and pushed his chair away scraping worn floorboards. He came around the table and put his thick, withered hands around my shoulders. As he started to squeeze, I flinched a moment but calmed down with a sigh as his hands slid up to my temples. He rubbed and probed and finally came to the spot where the Jed had told me the cancer was growing inside my brain. The old man lingered there with his fingertips on my scalp. He had bent down and his face was so close I could smell his pungent, sickening breath. It was a sour, wormy odor I could not identify. His eyelids fluttered as he "examined" me and I suddenly realized that he was repeating a low, sonorous chant.

All at once, he stopped. He backed off and gave me, then Lena, an odd look. He started mumbling to her in Carib. After he was finished, Lena shot me a look.

"What’s he say?" I asked.

"He say," Lena frowned, "he say that there is nothing wrong in your head."

"What?" It was my turn to frown.

She explained that her grandfather did not find cancer in my brain. I wasn’t sick.

I reminded her my American doctors disagreed and that she must have misunderstood her grandfather. With a scowl, Lena turned to her grandfather and repeated my position.

The old man chuckled and clucked something.

Lena turned back to me and said, "He say your American doctors must be, how you say, quacks."

As soon as I got back to Roseau late that afternoon, I shot over to the small hospital, St. Lucian, in the central business district. After a short wait, a Pakistani intern came out to see me. I decided it was best to tell it to him straight, the whole story, with Lena there to back me up. The intern listened with a polite expression and nodded when I mentioned Lena’s grandfather.

"So, doctor, you can understand," I said. "I need to check it out."

Without protest, the intern arranged for me to have a CAT Scan the following morning. But it would cost me, he warned. Several hundred dollars. I laughed, and told him that money was no object.

After a sleepless night, I arrived at the clinic bleary-eyed and nervous. The Cat Scan went smoothly, without too long of a wait. By late that morning, another doctor, this time a Jamaican, was explaining the results with the computer generated pictures in my file spread open before him on a desk in a makeshift office on the first floor of the hospital.

"The radiologist did not see a tumor," he said flatly, with a shrug. "It appears, that that old magician may be right."

My spirits, not surprisingly, soared with that revelation. How could this have happened? I asked. How could I be infected with a growing mass of cancer in my brain one day, and free of it the next?

The doctor shrugged and mentioned something about spontaneous remission. He advised that I should return to America to confirm these happy results with my doctors.

I did just that, and you know the rest. I flew home the next day, leaving Lena in tears at the airport. My parting advice to her was that she should listen to her grandfather, return to the Carib village, and marry a banana farmer. Chicago was not such a nice place, anyway, I told her; it’s so damned cold.

Like I said, I was, and am, a turd.

It was late Saturday morning, almost noon, by the time I flew in and went straight from the airport to Jed’s sprawling Tudor in a subdivision lined with other massive Tudors and rich colonials. You should have seen the look on his face when he opened the front door in a designer wind suit with me there on his porch, in broad daylight, looking tan and healthy as I had ever been. With a sick grin, I told him what had happened, that somehow, I was cured. Scowling, hyperventilating a little, he let me and took me back into his den.

He poured us both some scotch and water and sat down behind his desk with his jaw still slack from the shock of my appearance.

"How the hell could this happen, Jed?" I took a sip of the scotch, Chivas Regal, naturally.

He shrugged and we sat in silence for a time. Finally, after a couple sips of scotch, he straightened in his chair, and offered the same lame excuse about spontaneous remission.

It was at that moment, when Carol – my wife – barged in, wearing but a robe and slippers. It was clear that she had slept over last night, in the house of my doctor and former friend. It was my turn for a slack jaw.

Carol screamed when she saw me and with a frightful look, backed out of the den. Jed’s eyes were large as saucers when I turned back to him.

"After you left," Jed started to explain, as he shifted uncomfortably in his chair, "after you abandoned her, she was devastated and reached out to me. One thing led to another."

"And, you let it, naturally."

"You were never coming back."

"Whose fault was that?"

I got up and started walking out of the den. Jed begged me to stay, talk it over. But I wasn’t listening. I needed some fresh air. Perhaps the shock of seeing Carol had awakened me to how completely and irrevocably my life had changed in the past month. My former life was now completely gone. I had died and been resurrected.

After I left Jed’s house, I suppose he could have made the call to set me up…