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Show 154 current was passed, which she came by and increased by turning a knob in front of him every fifteen minutes. He was to watch the dial and call her if either the current or the hot packs started to hurt. While he lay there feeling his hand lose sensation (except at the wrist, where the salt burns had begun to scale after the first week) and his leg boil soft, a remarkable thing was happening, invisibly. Ions from the oil of wintergreen were forced by the impulse passing through his body into his sciatic nerve, and the nerve, he reported solemnly, throbbed less and less each week. He could walk now, he could sleep and climb stairs without searing pain. He expected in time to be able to resume the act of love. He was not cured, but he was better. He did not know how the thing worked, he admitted it sounded like quackery, but he was better. He turned his chair aside and flexed his knee above the table to show them. The drummer said he had heard of being turned on before but had never understood what it meant until now. Gail, who had smiled and nodded all through the account, clapped her hands. Was_ it like that? she wanted to know. "Like that?" asked the playwright, mashing the ash in his pipe with a thumb and relighting. She had a friend-did they know Peter Mason?-who was a Jesuit priest and a graduate student in art history. He had told a group of them over coffee one night after a seminar about some of the penitential practices expected of you during your novitiate, things like ritual flagellations and wearing the catena. "It was some kind of wire chain you had to wear so many hours a day under your cassock," she said. "It went around your thigh and it had little barbs all around it that just barely pricked your skin, and you weren't supposed to limp or anything to let on when you were |