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Science is unsure, wiping sweaty palms against a waistcoat already stiff with the crusts of human fluid before attempting to pull a squirming, kicking rabbit out of the endless deep of a black hole hat.  It's a first time performance, and the magician is holding his breath as sure as the audience; the reputation of Hippocrates is on the line, the desire to succeed immense.  Training, guesses, and belief in chemical possibilities straighten his spine as the arm with the rolled up sleeve plunges down into the hat, in search of that rascal rabbit which is life.  Clinical trial Number One.

The man is a color you see in cookbook plates from the fifties, not quite real, oddly off, yet green is green and yellow is called vanilla.  You can tell the colors were painted on in watercolor, that the inks the printer used were stock.  His limbs flap as he gestures, the muscles melting into bone giving a rubbery appearance partially due to the lack of hair; here is a doll in need of a sewn wig, painted eyebrows, lashes.  Startlingly blue eyes look past the speaker, slightly unfocused; everything, everything is off, as if a learning artist sculpted an image of this man in a Saturday morning class.

Can I say he is fading?  Not without being unfair, the new tumor in his brain will be targeted with gamma knife radiation, a complicated plan that focuses 200 beams of radiation, which alone will not harm surrounding tissue, but at the pinpoint where those beams meet gets a solid dose of concentrated magic.  There is more to the preparation than to the actual procedure, one show only; depending on size, the shrinkage may take two months; the intruder is compared to a pea, one that is felt through a hundred mattresses.  Who knows, who knows.  Even the grand machine of Science understands that hypothesis is a prediction, anticipated by earlier, exploratory practice where sometimes the wires are visible.

Yet it is as if I am seeing double; there is the man walking outside of himself only by inches, not separate but neither together.  The medication can provide the side effect of hallucination, the side effect of death; he says his dreams are vivid nightmares which he accepts as part of the illusion, designed by the brain as a response to supposed daytime alarms.  I feel as if I am the one witnessing things not there; this is not the man yet of course it is; this is not real but that is error; I hug him as I leave, and the eternal awkwardness which exists between us is captured fleetingly through our disappearing reflections in   invisible mirrors multiplied, then dismissed by a simple square root of a rational number.  The two of us have been through the same mill, in spite of being kept apart within the same house.  Now that was a heck of a magic trick.

I am exhausted with today's revelations, but for heaven's sake; nothing compared to what the patient is auguring, calculating, wishing.  He is watching for that celestial rabbit to appear, the well-spring of sustenance; for himself to come out the other side of the rabbit hole and have restored the missing pieces in order to move forward.  Years have whirled past on the dull green wheels of hospital and tests, procedures and treatments, disappearing through chasms of yesterday.  It's hell being sick, your life is a series of shadows and rearrangements, discomforting ripples blurring the storyline, and eventually you fall into magic.

Here is what I wish, for I am no less considerate of enchantment: that you go find and listen to the unceasing waves that will crash on shores longer than humanity will exist on this planet.  Always the waves, the waves, the lull of the foamy waves.  Echo their song, feel the tidal pulse pull you up to supernal lunacy, for life is a rhythmic phenomenon of motion.  Sleep well and in peace.  I will watch over you.  Goodnight.