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salted with personal reaction.

'... You remember the time Roger Hebert smack me wit the oar, sparks shootin' through my head. Well, that's the way it was 'cept there wasn't no pain...'

Sitting in the boat for so long had caused Donnell's hip to ache, and to take his mind off the discomfort he played tricks with his vision. He discovered that if he brought the magnetic fields into view and shifted his field of focus forward until it was dominated by the white brilliance of a single arc, then the world around him darkened and the gros bon ange became visible. He looked out beyond the prow and glimpsed a glowing tendril of green among the silvery eddies. He turned his head, blinking the sight away, he did not want to verify or acknowledge it. It dismayed him to think Jocundra might be right, that he might be able to see anything he wished. Anything as ridiculous as Bayou Vert. Still, he was curious.

'What's off there?' he asked, pointing out the direction of the green current to Jocundra.

'Marshlands,' she said. 'A couple of towns, and then, past that, Bayou Rigaud.'

'Rigaud.' The word had a sleek feel, and important sound.

He steadied the boat for Jocundra as she moved forward to sit beside him. 'Why do you want to know?' she asked. But the old man's voice lifted from the shore and distracted his attention.

'If I was you, me,' he said contentiously, talking to the centermost cross. 'I'd end this boy's confusion. You let him see wit the eyes of angels, so what harm it goin' to do to let him know your plan?'

Chapter 12

May 30 - July 26, 1987

One night after patients had begun to arrive in numbers, Donnell and Jocundra were lying on their bed in the back room surrounded by open textbooks and pieces of paper. The bed, an antique with a mahogany headboard, and all the furniture - bureau, night table, chairs - had been the gifts of patients, as were the flowers which sprouted from vases on the windowsills. Sometimes, resting between sessions, Donnell would crack the door and listen to the patients talking in the front room, associating their voices with the different flowers. They never discussed their ailments, merely gossiped or exchanged recipes.

'Now how much lemon juice you addin' to the meal,' Mrs Dubray (irises) would ask; and old Mrs Alidore (a bouquet of Queen Anne's lace and roses) would hem and haw and finally answer, 'Seem lak my forget-list gets longer ever' week.'

Their conversations, their gifts and their acceptance of him gave Donnell a comforting sense of being part of a tradition, for there had always been healers in the bayou country and the people were accustomed to minor miracles.

'I think I'm right,' said Jocundra.

'About what?' Donnell added a flourish to the sketch he had been making. It was a rendering of one of the gold flashes of light he saw from time to time, similar to those Magnusson had drawn in the margins of his ledger; but this one was more complex, a resolution of several fragments he had seen previously into a single figure:

'About you being a better focusing agent for the fields than any device.' Jocundra smacked him on the arm with her legal pad. 'You aren't listening.'

'Yeah I am,' he said, preoccupied by the sketch. 'Go ahead.'

'I'll start over.' She settled herself higher on the pillows. 'Okay. If you transmit an electrical charge through a magnetic field, you're going to get feedback. The charge will experience a force in some direction, and that would explain the changes in light intensity you see. But you're not just affecting the fields. To cure someone as hopeless as Mr Robichaux, you have to be affecting the cells, probably on an ionic level. You aren't listening! What are you doing?'

'Doodling.' Dissatisfied, Donnell closed his notebook. It did not feel complete. He could not attach the least importance to the gold flashes, yet they kept appearing and it bothered him not to understand them. 'I'm listening,' he said.

'All right.' Jocundra was miffed by his lack of enthusiasm for her explanation. 'Now one basic difference between a cancer cell and a normal cell is that the cancer cell produces certain compounds in excess of normal. So, going by Magnusson's notes, one likelihood is that you're reducing the permeability of the nuclear membranes for certain ions, preventing the efflux of the compounds in question.'

Donnell rested his head on the pillow beside her. 'How's that relate to my