The MRI

A short story

Casey Blaine curled his fingers around the emergency call switch. 

“If you have any problems, squeeze this,” the technician, a man in his twenties with circular pink eyeglasses, had said as he rested the switch in Casey’s palm. Casey lay on the MRI’s table, which was still extended outside the machine. 

Casey wasn’t sure what constituted a problem, but he tried not to imagine any because his heart was already thumping and goosebumps popped all over his arms and neck in anticipation of being in the MRI machine’s narrow tube for the next thirty minutes.

I volunteered for this, Casey lamented. I didn’t have to get an MRI, but at seventy-seven, one’s body doesn’t work as well as it did when I was twenty, and an MRI can help spot tumors, brain disorders, and heart problems while there’s still time to treat them. It’s only a half hour, nothing compared to thirty-seven months at Mohawk Correctional.

He ached everywhere and wondered if the pain was a warning sign of something terminal. His varicose veins hurt. Insomnia gave him nonstop headaches. His hearing was crap. He peed every five minutes. Acid reflux was like hot oil spilling down this throat. His back—he didn’t want to think about his back, his nemesis since he ruptured his disc and first visited an MRI machine a half-century ago.

The MRI technician placed headphones over Casey’s ears and tightened the straps around his chest and pelvis to keep him immobile. 

He shut his eyes as the table slid into the machine. A cascade of claustrophobic waves rolled through his body.

What if there’s an earthquake while I’m in it? How do I get out? What if the power fails and they forget about me? Or I’m crushed to death? Worse, what if rubble blocks the entrance and I suffocate?

Loud clicking and whirring invaded his ears, a combination of a broken steam radiator and angry gorillas banging on metal trash cans, the same sound as fifty years ago, something the MRI companies should have fixed by now. 

Casey imagined the MRI’s wall closing in, the container contracting, invisible tubes sucking out the air. 

Without warning, the MRI lurched sideways like an out-of-control amusement park ride. A deep, rolling thunder assaulted his ears, and cold air shrieked as it gusted through the chamber. Casey opened his eyes the second before the light inside the MRI went out, plunging him into blackness.

As the thunder boomed, flashes of lightning shattered the dark, bolts zigzagging every which way. 

His skin stung as if a cloud of static electricity swallowed him.  

The thunder and lightning raged for several more seconds, stopping just before the technician’s euphonic and feathery voice floated through the MRI’s speakers, “Finished.”

A woman. Casey was sure there had been a male MRI operator. Maybe they had to switch techs because of the storm.

The missing headphones were the first oddity Casey noticed after the table slid out from the tube. The second was the flickering fluorescent light on the ceiling, and the third was the room’s walls, now pale blue instead of white.

But the oddest thing of all was Casey himself. Gone were his headache, acid reflux, aching bladder, and tired shoulders. He held up his hand. No liver spots.

His leg hurt like a motherfucker, though, because a ruptured disc compressed the sciatic nerve from his spine to his foot.

Before the technician could unbuckle the belt that bound him to the table, Casey unsnapped it and leaped off.

I’m not slow anymore.

He glanced left and right, but because he couldn’t find what he was looking for, he ran into the clinic’s hallway, his gown open and flapping behind him, until he found a bathroom. 

The mirror revealed what Casey already knew. Somehow, he was young again. His eyes were sharp and alert, skin unwrinkled, nose unbent as if the acne-scarred Goliath had never pulverized it in a bar fight, and his hair blond and full. 

That meant—he held that thought as he ran to the reception desk—and shouted to the receptionist, “What’s the date? What’s the year?”

The startled desk clerk stuttered, “December eleventh. Thursday.”

“The year!” 

“Nineteen-eighty.”

“Nineteen eighty,” Casey repeated and then shook his head. “It’s two-thousand-thirty-two.”

But it’s not.

I’ve traveled fifty-two years back in time. Casey was no longer seventy-seven. He was twenty-five. 

A memory of things that had not yet happened flashed forward in Casey’s mind. He gasped. 

His disastrous marriage to Nancy. They had met a month from now, fallen in love, and hated each other six months later. He remembered his arrest for securities fraud and the horror of over three years in prison, his mother dying while he was incarcerated, the string of failed relationships that followed his release, his father whom he rarely talked with and saw even less often until he, too, died, his descent into pills, and his long, miserable slog as a Dodge salesman. 

Casey Blaine screamed when the light inside the MRI went out. He screamed even louder when the biggest lightning and thunderstorm he’d ever experienced rocked the machine like a small ship in a turbulent sea. 

When the storm stopped and Casey exited the MRI, the technician removed the headphones from his ears. Round, pink glasses framed his brown eyes. 

Where did those headphones come from? For that matter, where did the male tech come from?

The room’s color was different from thirty minutes ago. An impossibly thin television sat on the desk. No, not a TV, something else.

The technician tapped a small, rectangular object in his hand, which glowed blue. What is that?

Casey ached everywhere except for his leg, the reason he got this MRI. His muscles felt threadbare. He raised his hand. 

A liver spot?

His bladder stung. He ran his tongue along the inside of his mouth, where he felt the empty space of two missing teeth. Casey ignored the technician and hobbled to the reception area, furniture, wall art, and other patients muted as if drained of color. 

Panting, Casey asked the receptionist for a mirror and dropped it after he saw an old man reflecting back with leathery skin, reddish-brown blotches on his cheeks and forehead, thin, gray hair, and cloudy eyes.

“What’s happened? What did you do to me?’ After a moment’s thought, Casey asked, “When is this?” his voice raspy and thin.

“What?” 

“What’s the date, the year? Tell me!” He gripped the reception counter to steady himself.

“It’s December eleventh, two-thousand-thirty-three.”

“No, not possible. This isn’t happening.” But it was happening. Casey covered his face with his hands, did quick math, and calculated that he was seventy-seven years old. I exist in a seventy-seven-year-old’s shell. 

My youth is gone, stolen from me. I’ve missed everything and I don’t have much time left.

Tears streamed down Casey’s wrinkled cheeks as he cried over a wonderful life he would never know.

---

If you enjoyed The MRI, I think you’ll like my story, The Ferris Wheel.