“A dried-out cat’s eye.”

“Nice. And I’m to get Dad to wear this, I suppose.”

“No, it’s for you.”

“For me?”

“It’s an amulet,” she said, and placed it around my neck and leaned back and gazed at me as if I were a sad-eyed puppy in a pet store window.

“What’s it for?”

“To protect you.”

“From what?”

“How do you feel?”

“Me? OK, I guess. A little tired.”

“I wish you could have met my son,” she said.

“I wish so too.”

Poor Caroline. It seemed she wanted to conduct several conversations but didn’t know which to pick.

She stood suddenly. “OK, then,” she said, and went out by the back door. I almost took the amulet off but for some reason was overcome with fear of being without it. I thought: The thing that makes a man go crazy isn’t loneliness or suffering after all- it’s being kept in a state of perpetual dread.

The next few days I spent at the mirror, confirming my features with the touch of my hand. Nose? Here! Chin? Here! Mouth? Teeth? Forehead? Here! Here! Here! This inane facial roll call was the only valuable way I could think of to pass the time. Somewhere else in the house Caroline, Dad, and Terry were circling each other like rabid dogs. I stayed well away.

I spent many hours sitting with Eddie in his office. It seemed to me it was he, and not I, who had taken on the qualities of an accident in slow motion, and I didn’t want to miss the show. Besides, Caroline’s gift had put doubts about my health into my mind, and I thought it best if I let Eddie examine me. He gave me a thorough going-over. He tested the dull thumping of my heart, my sluggish reflexes; I even let him take my blood. Not that there was a pathology lab in the area where he could send it. He just filled a vial and gave it to me afterward as a keepsake. He said there was nothing wrong with me.

We were in the office listening to the radio through the stethoscope when something extraordinary and unexpected happened- a patient! A woman came in visibly upset and agitated. Eddie put on a solemn face that for all I know might’ve been genuine. I sat there on the edge of my seat while the woman gibbered on. “The doctor’s very sick,” Eddie translated to me. “Maybe dying,” he added, and stared at me for a long time, just to show me he wasn’t smiling.

The three of us piled into Eddie’s car and drove at breakneck speed to the doctor’s house. When we arrived, we heard the most awful screeching imaginable.

“It’s too late. He’s dead,” Eddie said.

“How do you know?”

“That wailing.”

Eddie was right. There was nothing ambiguous about that wailing.

He turned off the engine, grabbed his doctor’s bag, and combed his hair down with his hands.

“But he’s dead- what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to pronounce him dead.”

“Don’t you think that nightmarish howling has pretty much got that covered?”

“Even in a village as remote as this, there are rules. The dead must be officially declared dead,” he said. I took a deep breath and followed Eddie and the woman inside.

A dozen or so people were crowded around the dead doctor’s bed; either they had come to mourn him or had arrived earlier to watch him die. The doctor that I’d seen a few days earlier tearing around the countryside on his motorbike was now perfectly motionless. The man whose statuesque physique I had envied had caved in. His body looked as if someone had gone in with a powerful vacuum cleaner and just sucked everything out: heart, ribcage, spine, everything. Frankly, he didn’t even look like skin and bones, just skin.

I kept an eye on Eddie but he’d made himself look harmless and sincere, which was no small trick considering the vile thoughts going on in his head. The village doctor was gone- now it was between Eddie and the young doctor. I could see Eddie thinking, He shouldn’t be too hard to discredit. Eddie straightened himself up, ready to seduce the mourners. It was his first pronouncement as a doctor.

They all spoke to Eddie in quiet tones, and afterward he turned to me and I saw a flicker of derangement, ruthlessness, obstinacy, and deviousness. It’s astonishing the complexity that can be perceived in a face at the right time of day. Eddie took me aside and explained that the apprentice had been here when the doctor had died and had already proclaimed him dead.

“He didn’t waste any time, the little bastard,” Eddie whispered.

“Where’s the young doctor now?”

“He went home to bed. Apparently he’s sick too.”

This time Eddie couldn’t contain his glee. He asked directions to the young doctor’s house and went off, I was certain, to treat him in as negligent and slipshod a manner as possible.

He drove fast. I caught him practicing his sweetest possible smile in the rearview mirror, which meant he was gearing up to play the tyrant.

The young doctor lived by himself in a hut high up in the mountains. Eddie raced inside. It was a struggle to keep up with him. The young doctor was lying on the bed with his clothes on. By the time I entered, Eddie was leaning over him.

“Is he all right?” I asked.

Eddie walked around the bed as if he were doing a victory dance.

“I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

“What’s he got?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a virus, but an uncommon one. I don’t know how to treat it.”

“Well, if the old doctor had it and now the young doctor has it, it must be contagious. I’m getting out of here,” I said, covering my mouth as I left.

“It’s probably not contagious.”

“How do you know? You don’t know what it is.”

“Could be that something crawled inside them and laid eggs in their intestines.”

“That’s just disgusting.”

“Or else it’s something they ate together. I don’t think you have to worry.”

“I’ll decide when and where I worry,” I said, heading outside.

The young doctor died two days later. Eddie didn’t leave his bedside the whole time. Despite Eddie’s insistence that the virus wasn’t contagious, I refused to set foot inside the death chamber. I knew the very moment the young doctor died, though, because the same hideous gut-wrenching wails as before echoed through the village. Frankly, I was suspicious of all this showy mourning and finally decided it was just a cultural tic, like those smiles. It’s not actually uncontrollable grief, I thought, it’s a show of uncontrollable grief. Quite a different thing.

That’s how Eddie became the doctor of the village. He’d gotten what he wanted, but this didn’t soften him up. It was an error of judgment on my part to imagine it would. And it was an error on Eddie’s part to imagine that becoming the village doctor by default would warm the villagers to him. We went door-knocking. Some slammed the door in Eddie’s face; they thought he’d put a hex on the two doctors, a pox on both their houses. Eddie came out looking like a grave robber. We did the rounds anyway. There were no bites. And it was in no small part because the people didn’t seem ever to get sick.

I’d scarcely thought it was possible, but Eddie was becoming even more unpleasant. All this healthiness was getting to him. “Not one patient! All I want is for someone to get ill! Violently ill! What are these people, immortal? They could do with a little motor neuron disease. Show them what life’s really about.” Eddie meant badly. His heart was in the wrong place.

Thank God for farming accidents! After a few inadvertent amputations and the like, he eventually managed to scrounge up a couple of patients. The people were afraid of hospitals, so Eddie had to do things in the rice fields that I personally wouldn’t want done to me in anything other than the most sterile environment. But they didn’t seem to mind.