It is difficult to convey just how weird it was when the thing actually arrived — not just the boxy console itself, which looked like it belonged in an ’80s sci-fi movie, but the accompanying instruction booklet, whose preamble informed me that “as an American national, you have the legal right to medically treat yourself by common law according to Amendment IX of the U.S. Constitution.” After that came a lot of advice on the different kinds of frequencies generated by the machine and how to hook up the metal hand cylinders — which, when dampened and gripped, were supposed to transmit the frequencies from the machine into my flesh.

Then came the frequency list: First 873 preprogrammed “channels,” usually linked to a specific ailment, from acidosis to zygomycosis, and then a longer list, which went beyond the frequencies supposedly discovered by Rife and his followers to include 50 years’ worth of purported revelations by ordinary sick people using the machines.

It felt like something out of a paranoid fiction, a slice of invented Americana by way of Paul Auster or Thomas Pynchon. Was it all a hoax, generated by charlatans sitting down with a list of medical conditions and a random number generator? Or did all the complex frequency combinations represent the fruits of a multigenerational labor, some kind of secret investigation conducted by the sick and suffering over years and decades?

There were two channels listed for Lyme disease, each one containing dozens of frequencies. I set the machine up inside the drop-leaf desk in our back bedroom, my office, the most private space that I could find. I dampened the terry cloth and gripped the cylinders, like a robot recharging his batteries or a video game player with a control in either hand. Then I punched in the first channel and hit start.

Naturally, it worked.