First day of radiation

Day one, as expected was the roughest.

I'm not usually one for references, literary or otherwise, but this is impossible to resist. Radiation is Inferno plus 2001: A space Odyssey with a splash of Frankenstein.


First there was the guide. He called me out from the waiting room, yellow medical folder in hand, a photo of me on its cover. The file contained everything pertinent about my brain. He opened the fogged glass door, the portal I'd been seen other people enter once a speaker-boxed voice called their names from above, and held it open for me to pass through.

Inside, we descended a long ramp. As we walked,he told me what to do each day I came. Sign in, wait for my name to be called on the loudspeaker, come down the ramp, and wait by the chairs until someone comes for me. He could hardly have been gentler--the bleakness of tone is all mine.

We turned the corner and down another ramp. At the end of that, we stood before two open doorways, separated by a large and tastefully decorated tree. Next to each doorway was a little control room, each with a large bay window looking onto something I couldn't see. Inside, a few technicians looked at screens. He told me mostly I would go in left door, but sometimes in the right. They did the same thing, he said. Ready?

We entered the left passageway--as we passed, I noted the door, which looked like a bank vault lock--a movable wall of metal, thick as a cinder block. On its face was the radiation symbol: a circle surrounded by three trapezoids with curved sides. The little circle, I thought, was my head. The trapezoids were the radiation shooting in; or, they were my thoughts shooting out; or, they were like the squiggly lines of a cartoonist to indicate some emotion--grief, fear, anger, but these were the mechanical forms of the emotions, since the lines were not squiggly at all but smooth and delineated geometric shapes. The caption read: Danger, high radiation area.

We descended still another long ramp, and as we approached the bottom, I heard music, indistinct at first, but as we neared I judged it soothing. It bouncing off the walls and up the corridor, but could not make it as far as the thick door. It got clearer as we reached the turn, and I could make out a voice. On the counter was a small CD player.

I turned to take in the room and there was the machine.

I wasn't prepared for it. I imagined something small, something like the photon guns of the sci-fi movies I'd seen. This was not a tool--this was an entity. It took up most of the room--everything was drawn to it, no matter where you stood, it remained the center. Silent and still as a statue, it seemed to brood over something it could never express or solve. Its body gave it bravado--an enormous rectangular box of flat metal jutting out from the wall into the middle of the room. The body had none of the delicacy I expected from sharp-edge technology, having instead the air of a brutish printing press, pistons and hydrolics hiding under its metal skin.

But the head was really the wonder: two sets of thick arms, also dark gray, formed a cross, jaws open, leaving a large square mouth in the center. In this middle of this mouth was a target board--there, at last, evidence of its sophistication: a circular digital screen with orange numbers, all single digits with one decimal place, some negative, some positive.

Only a few feet in front of its waiting mouth was the hard bed I was to be laid on. "That's where you stay," one of the two technicians said. They moved back and forth from the counters to the bed, then from the bed to the machine, from the machine back to the counters. They worked devoutly, reverently, in silent symbiosis with the machine, knowing what it needed when it needed it without a signifier passed between them.

On the bed there was a black molding in the shape of human shoulders and neck, and a plastic bowl where the back of my head would fit. The other technician was holding the white plastic mask of my head.

"You should feel the same when you leave as when you came in," one tech said. "You ready? Sit right up here. Now, scoot up a bit, a bit more. That's good. Now when you come out, don't get up right away, because you'll be up in the air, the table moves around up and down, will turn at some points so the machine can reach at different angles. Alright?"

The back of my head hurt because of the metal plate there. The white mask came over my head, and each technician stood on one side of me, locking the mask into place, tighter, and tighter with each snap, until I was frozen in place. A laser light from above hit just under my left eye, and the bottom of my vision there was bathed in a soft glow of red light.

"If you need us, just wave, we'll be watching from up there, in the window. But most people don't need anything, but just in case, so you know, we'll be right there, ok?"

I imagine they sealed the vault after they left me in the mouth of the machine.