The MRI machine is imposing. It resides in its own building where it hums ominously, attended by smocked technicians poised before multiple flat-panel displays.

After removing various metallic objects, I lie on a narrow platform poised before the glowing aperture. Straps are fastened across my chest to monitor breathing, and an IV is started in a vein in my left arm. Breathing must be synchronized with the imaging triggers, and contrast material that resonates a particular way in the intense magnetic field will be introduced into the IV at the appropriate moment.

Before the attendants step away, one places plugs in my ears - the kind I used to wear while piloting loud airplanes. She tells me to close my eyes - and think pleasant thoughts. This kind of advice is not usually the prelude to something welcome, but I comply as I feel the narrow platform begin to slowly insert me into the glowing core of the device. I do close my eyes, and think of lying on the bed in the old house in Merida where I stay, with the fan spinning slightly off-balance twelve feet above me... whooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh... The actual sound I hear is more like the deep throated pulsing of some sort of hyper-stellar drive, as the machine prepares to resonate my aqueous molecules in a way that can somehow be imaged in paper-thin slices. It pulses and throbs, but I try to think of the fan... whooshwhooshwhooshwoosh... I feel the breeze, as the machine circulates cool air to match my mental image. I briefly open my eyes and see the faintly luminous interior of the core, inches from my eyes. I close them again, and think of that twenty foot ceiling in the room in the hundred and fifty year old colonial house in Mexico. A house made of ancient limestone, and as much the opposite of this dense collection of electonics and metal and plastic as is possible.

Now the system begins to calibrate itself, testing my density and composition with a series of intense clacks and buzzes - TOC TOC TOC...cli-TOC cli-TOC cli-TOC...BZNNNTTTTT...BZNNNTTT. Then nothing but that throbbing, pulsing hyperdrive backdrop.

A disembodied tinney voice enters my ears, with that peculiar monaural headphone effect of being in the center of your head. "This will be a series of four - you'll need to hold your breath for thirty seconds on my cue". In keeping with the space travel ambience, she sounds like Sygorney Weaver, who she also resembled. Maybe if the MRI results indicate something truly ominous, it will free itself abruptly from my torso and scurry away, ending my ordeal here and now. Would this shock Sygorney? She has the world-weary manner of one who has seen it all, so probably not.

The series begins, with a deafening BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT. "Ok breathe...and out, breathe...and out, breathe...and HOLD it..." BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT-BZNNNT. This continues, interspersed with slight movement in or out of the narrow confines of the device core as I am virtually sliced like lunchmeat on the old circular blade appliance I remember my Mom using.

"I'm going to inject the dye now", Sygorney advises from that central space between my plugged ears. "You'll feel a coolness in your arm". I do. I'm lying twelve feet under the ceiling fan, feeling the coolness...whooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh.....

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