The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

I didn’t have a fluorescent board at home, so I hung the print before a desk lamp. I looked at it all through dinner and for a change didn’t wait in vain for the phone to ring. The coils were odd, but there was also something familiar about them, and these were two separate things, the strangeness and the familiarity. After a while I lost my concentration and watched a little TV. One of the channels was showing a horror B-movie and I watched it disinterestedly as my mind floated here and there on its own, without my being fully conscious of it. It’s a way as good as any for dealing with problems, but this time the solution came not from that but, rather, from the tiny part of me that was actually watching the television. One of the monsters there was sawing through the arm of another monster, and I noticed immediately the cheap special effect – the saw and the hand about to be cut were two separate images filmed at different times and joined artificially. It was easy to see that the saw didn’t really touch the arm. And it was the same phenomenon that I could see in Benjamin’s X-ray – the coils looked like an artificial addition to the picture.

There was something calming about this, of course. Incidents like this are not common but, sometimes, despite all precautionary measures, they happen. A foreign object finds its way between the camera and the subject, the result being spread in all its glory before my reading lamp. If Benjamin still needed it, I would send him for a repeat scan, and if not – all to the better.

And still the coils seemed familiar.

On his next visit I explained all this to him, apart from the strange feeling I had about the coils, and he seemed pretty happy. Another problem occupied him by now. He had something in his eyes. That’s how he put it, and I couldn’t get a better explanation out of him. I examined his eyes and could see nothing out of the ordinary, apart from a redness that could have been caused by a thousand and one things, most of them not worthy of attention. But when I examined his right eye through an ophthalmoscope I saw it: a tiny grey circle, barely seen against the redness of the cornea.

There was one in his left eye too.

They both seemed familiar, just like the coils. They also seemed, as hard as it was for me to believe when watching something that was real and not a scan, unconnected. If the coils in his arm seemed like foreign bodies that entered by mistake into the field of vision of the X-ray camera, then the circles in his eyes seemed like foreign bodies that entered by mistake into the field of vision of reality.

I think I managed to hide the shock I felt. I gave Benjamin eye drops, closed the clinic early and went home to rest. And watch TV. And think.

And in the morning I arrived at the clinic two hours before opening time and dismantled the ophthalmoscope. I examined all the parts through a magnifying-glass, but found nothing to explain the little grey circles, that were similar to the little grey coils, that were similar to nothing I knew even though my brain insisted otherwise.

I didn’t know how to reassemble the device and decided to just buy another. I had money after all, and besides, it was tax-deductible. I spent the rest of the time before my first patient’s appearance in thoughts of this nature, that were relaxing in their simplicity and mundanity but which led me nevertheless, in one way or another, to the mystery of Benjamin’s grey parts, thoughts that were only halted with the appearance of the patient himself.

‘Benjamin,’ I said, surprised. He never came to me two days in a row. ‘Is everything all right?’

Usually, on his visits, he would merely point at the source of pain or discomfort, speaking as little as possible, and let me complete the diagnosis on my own. Not today. ‘I have a crop circle,’ he said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘A crop circle. You know. Like the ones aliens make.’

‘Benjamin…’ I said, but he had already launched into an explanation that was exceptional both in its length and its contents. Crop circles are giant circles, and sometimes more complex shapes, that are formed in wheat or corn fields by the pressing down of the stalks. All kinds of attributes are ascribed to them, and stories are told of strange things that have happened to the stalks. There are people who believe that they are proof of the existence of aliens. The rest of the world, of course, assumes it’s merely a practical joke.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I don’t really believe in aliens either, but let’s get back to you, Benjamin.’

He looked at me. ‘I have a crop circle,’ he said again. ‘On my tummy.’

I stared at him, thinking of whether I needed to send him to see a psychiatrist. Then I laid him down on the examination table, turned on the strongest lamp, and opened his shirt. I asked him to point to the place where the circle was, and he did.

Despite everything, I needed all my will power not to laugh.

‘Benjamin,’ I said, ‘that’s your navel. Your belly button.’

‘It’s a crop circle. Look at the hairs there, see what happened to them.’

‘It’s only natural that the hairs around…’ I said, and then I saw.

They were bent. Or stood, erect, at unnatural angles. Circles within circles, around the navel. But more than that – they were grey.

I passed my hand over his stomach, touching them. I wasn’t sure I was touching them all. It seemed to me that some passed through my palm, as if they were air. As if I was air. It was not a pleasant feeling. Under my hand, Benjamin shuddered. I felt a kind of electric current, something passing between us through my spread fingers,