"And?"
“They're clear."
"Cured?"
Dan saw Jose's head nod in the dark. "Yep. They're now HIV neg. Their peripheral smears are normal, their CD four cell counts are normal, their skin lesions are gone. Not a single goddam trace that they were ever exposed to HIV. Hell, they both used to be positive for hepatitis B surface antigen and now even that's gone."
Jose sounded as if he was going to cry.
"But how—?"
"Nothing I did. Just gave them the usual—AZT, didanosine, TP-five—and let me tell you, man, they weren't all that reliable about taking their meds. Fucking miracle, that's what it is. Medical fucking miracle."
Dan's mouth went dry. Talk of miracles did that to him lately. So did talk of seeing the Virgin Mary in his neighborhood.
"Miracle. You mean like . . . Preacher?"
"I can't say much about Preacher. I've got no medical records on him from when he was blind, so I can't say anything about the condition of his retinas when he couldn't see. All I can say is that his vision has improved steadily until it's almost twenty-twenty now. But . . . these two AIDS patients, they were documented cases."
Dan sensed a certain hesitancy in Jose.
"I wouldn't happen to know these two patients, would I?"
Jose hesitated, then sighed. "Normally I wouldn't tell you, but they're going to be in all the medical journals soon, and from then on they'll be news-show and talk-show commodities, so I guess it's okay to tell you they're both regulars at your Loaves and Fishes. You'll hear their names soon enough."
Dan stumbled a step.
"Oh my God."
"Well, you knew some of them had to be HIV positive."
Dan tried to remember who hadn't been around lately.
"Dandy and Rider?" he said.
"You guessed it."
"They had it but they're cured?"
"Yep. Both with a history of IV drug use, formerly HIV positive, now HIV neg. You figure it out."
Dan was trying to do just that.
He knew Carrie wouldn't have to think twice about an explanation when she heard the news: The Virgin did it.
And how was he supposed to counter that? Damned if he wasn't beginning to think she might be right. First Preacher gets his sight back, then people all over the area start sighting someone they think is the Virgin Mary, and now two of their regular guests at St. Joe's are cured of AIDS.
The accumulated weight of evidence was getting too heavy to brush off as mere coincidence.
He glanced at Jose and noticed he still looked glum.
"So how come you're not happy?" Dan said.
"Because when I gave Rider and Dandy the news they gave me all the credit."
"So?"
"So I didn't do anything. And if they go around blabbing that Dr. Martinez can cure AIDS, it's going to raise a lot of false hopes. And worse, my little clinic is going to be inundated with people looking for a miracle."
A miracle . . . that word again.
Dan clapped him on the shoulder, trying to lighten him up.
"Who knows. Maybe you've got the healing touch."
"Not funny, Dan. I don't have the resources to properly treat the people I'm seeing now. If the clinic starts attracting crowds I don't know what I'll do." Suddenly he grinned. "Maybe I'll direct them all to St. Joe's Loaves and Fishes. If they're looking for a miracle, that's the place to find it."
A knot of dread constricted in Dan's chest, stopping him in his tracks.
"Don't even kid about that!"
"Hey, think about it," Jose said, laughing. "It all fits. Preacher regained his sight there, and both Dandy and Rider are regulars. Maybe the cure-all can be found at Loaves and Fishes. Maybe Sister Carrie's stirring some special magical ingredient into that soup of hers."
Dan forced a smile. "Maybe. I'll have to ask her."
Carrie held up two Ziploc bags. "Here they are. The magic ingredients."
When he'd mentioned Jose's remarks to her this morning, she'd smiled and crooked a finger at him, leading him down to the subcellar. It was the first time he'd been down here since he'd carried in the Virgin. After Carrie lit the candles, Dan saw that the Virgin looked different. Her hair was neater, tucked away under her wimple, and those long, grotesque fingernails had been clipped off. The air was suffused with the sweet scent of the fresh flowers that surrounded the bier.
Carrie then reached under her bier and produced these two clear plastic bags.
Dan took them from her and examined them. One contained an ounce or so of a fine, off-white powder; the other was full of a feather-light gray substance that looked for all the world like finely chopped . . . hair.
He glance back at Carrie and found her smiling, staring at him, her eyes luminous in the candle glow.
"What are these?" he said, hefting the bags.
"Hers."
"I don't get it."
Carrie reached out and gently touched the bag of fine, gray strands. "This one's her hair." She then touched the bag with the powder. "And this is what's left of her fingernails."
"Fingernails?"
"I trimmed her nails and filed the cuttings down to powder."
"Why on earth . . . ?"
Carrie explained about the strand of hair in Preacher's soup, and how he'd begun to see again almost immediately after.
"But that was coincidence," Dan said. "It had to be."
"Are you sure?" she said, trapping him with those eyes.
"No," he said. "I'm not sure. I no longer know what I'm sure of or not sure of anymore. I haven't been sure of much for a long time, and now I'm not even sure about the things I've been sure I couldn't be sure of."
Carrie started to laugh.
"Sounds like a country-western song, doesn't it," Dan said, then he too started to laugh.
"Oh, Lord," Carrie said after a moment. "When was the last time we laughed together?"
"Before Israel," Dan said.
Slowly, she sobered. 'That seems like so long ago."
"Doesn't it."
Silence hung between them.
"Anyway," Carrie finally said, "I've been dosing the soup with tiny bits of her hair and her ground-up fingernails every day since she arrived."
Dan couldn't help making a face. "Carrie!"
"Don't look at me like that, Dan. If I put in a couple of snippets of hair I mix it with the rosemary. If I use some fingernail, I rub it together with some pepper. Tiny amounts, unnoticeable, completely indistinguishable from the regular spices."
"But they're not spices."
"They are indeed! You can't deny that things have changed upstairs since the Virgin arrived."
Dan thought about that and realized he couldn't deny that things had changed. In fact, strange things had been happening at the Loaves and Fishes during the past month or so. Nothing so dramatic as the return of Preacher's sight, but the place had changed. Nothing that would be apparent to an outsider, but Dan knew things were different.
First off, the mood had changed. The undercurrent of suspicion and paranoia that had prevailed whenever the guests gathered for a meal was gone. They no longer sat hunched over their meals, one arm hooked around the plate while the free hand shoveled food into the mouth. They ate more slowly now, and they talked. Instead of arguments over who was hogging the salt or who'd got a bigger serving, Dan had actually heard civil conversation along the tables.
Come to think of it, there hadn't been a fight in two weeks—a record. The previously demented, paranoid, and generally psychotic guests seemed calmer, more lucid, almost rational. Fewer of them were coming in drunk or high. Rider had stopped talking about finding his old Harley and had even mentioned checking out a Help Wanted sign he'd seen outside a cycle repair shop.
But the biggest change had been in Carrie.
She'd withdrawn from him. It had always seemed to Dan that Carrie had room in her life for God, her order, St. Joe's Loaves and Fishes, and one other. Dan had been that one other for a while.
Now he'd lost her. The Virgin had supplanted him in that remaining spot.
Yet try as he might he could feel no animosity. She was happy. He couldn't remember seeing her so radiant. His only regret was that he wasn't the source of that inner light. Part of him wanted to label her as crazy, deranged, psychotic, but then he'd have to find another explanation for the changes upstairs . . . and the cures.
"You think she's responsible," he said, stepping past her to stare down at the prone, waxy figure. She looked so much neater, so much more . . . attractive with her hair fixed and her nails trimmed.
"I know she is."
Dan's gaze roamed past the flickering candles to the flower-stuffed vases that rimmed the far side and clustered at the head and foot of the makeshift bier.
"You've done a wonderful job with her. You've turned a coal room into a grotto. It's like a shrine. But how do you keep sneaking off with all these flowers? Aren't you afraid one of these trips somebody in the church is going to catch you and ask you what you're up to?"
"One of what trips? I haven't borrowed any flowers from the church since she arrived."
Dan turned back to the flowers—mums, daffodils, gardenias, gladiolus, their stalks were straight and tall, their blossoms full and unwrinkled—then looked at Carrie again.
"But these are . . ."
“The same ones I brought down the first day." Her smile was blinding. "Isn't it wonderful?"
Dan continued to stare into those bright, wide, guileless eyes, looking for some hint of deception, but he found none.
Suddenly he wished for a chair. His knees felt rubbery. He needed to sit down.
"My God, Carrie."
"No," she said. "Just His Mother."
That wasn't what he needed to hear. Things like this didn't happen in the real world, at least not in Dan's real world. God stayed in his heaven and watched his creations make the best of things down here while priests like Dan acted as go-betweens. There was no part in the script for His Mother—especially not in the subceller of a Lower East Side church.
"Is it her, Carrie? Can it really be her!"
"Yes," she said, nodding, beaming, unhindered by the vaguest trace of doubt. "It's her. Can't you feel it?"
The only thing Dan could feel right now was an uneasy chill seeping into his soul.
"What have we done, Carrie? What have we done?”
AIDS CURES LINKED TO VIRGIN MARY
A prayer vigil outside St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church on the Lower East Side last night attracted over two thousand people. Many of those attending proclaimed the recent well-publicized AIDS cures as miracles related to the sightings of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the area during the past month. When asked about the connection, Fr. Daniel Fitzpatrick, associate pastor of St. Joseph's, responded, "The Church has not verified the figure that has been sighted as actually representing the Virgin Mary, and certainly there is no established link between the figure and the AIDS cures. Therefore I would strongly caution anyone with AIDS from abandoning their current therapy and coming down here looking for a miracle cure. You might just find the opposite."
THE DAILY NEWS
CDC to Begin Epidemiological Study On Lower East Side
(Atlanta, AP) The Center for Disease Control has announced it will begin a limited epidemiological study of the five cases of AIDS reported cured of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Spokesman for the Center . . .
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Paraiso
"Are these all the clippings?" Arthur Crenshaw asked as he reread the Times article for the third time.
"The latest batch," Emilio said.
Arthur slipped the rest of the clippings back into the manila envelope but held on to the Times and Daily News pieces. For a moment he stared through the glass at the Pacific, glistening in the early afternoon sun, then glanced to his right where Charlie lay.
He'd turned the great room into a miniature medical facility: a state-of-the-art AIDS clinic with round-the-clock nursing, a medical consultant with an international reputation in infectious diseases, and a patient census of one.
All to no avail.
Charlie was fading fast. He'd received maximum doses of the standard AIDS medications, including triple therapy, and had even undergone a course of a new and promising drug that was still in the experimental stages. Nothing worked. Apparently he'd picked up a particularly virulent strain of the virus and had ignored the symptoms in the early stages. Only scant vestiges of Charlie's immune system had remained by the time he'd started treatment. On his last visit, Dr. Lamberson would not commit to how much time he thought Charlie had, but he said the prognosis was very grave indeed. Ordinarily Lamberson would laugh at the thought of a house call, but with what Arthur was paying him, he came when called. He'd just brought Charlie through a severe bout of pneumocystis pneumonia and said another would certainly kill him.
Charlie was sleeping now. His hospital bed had been wheeled closer to the glass wall so he could read in the sunlight, and he'd dozed off after a few pages. He had no strength, no stamina, and the pounds were melting from his frame like butter. And he was so pale. Arthur had begun insisting on colored sheets so that he could look at his son without feeling he was being absorbed into the mattress.
Charlie, Charlie, Arthur thought as he stared at his son. If only you'd listened! Dear boy, you never meant to hurt anyone. You don't deserve this. Please don't die, not until I can work up the courage to tell you I understand, that for a while I . . . I was like you. Almost like you.
It had been back in the sixties, in the hedonistic dens behind the Victorian facades of Haight Ashbury. Arthur had been looking for himself, trying anything—drugs, and sex. All kinds of sex. For a year he had lived in a commune where group sex was a nightly ritual. Every combination was tried—men and women together, women with women, and . . . men with men. He had tried it for a while, even enjoyed it for a while, but as time went on, he realized it wasn't for him.
Been there, done that, as the expression went.
But he'd never considered it as a lifestyle. Yet the memories haunted him. What if someone from those days stepped forward with stories of young Artie Crenshaw having sex with other men?
Many a night the possibility dragged him sweating and gasping from his sleep.
Not fair. Those days were long past. An aberration. He'd repented, and he was sure he'd been forgiven. He wanted Charlie to be forgiven as well. But would learning about his father's past lighten Charlie's burden?
Arthur didn't know. If only he knew.
So much he didn't know. Especially about AIDS. Arthur had begun his own research, learning all he could—more than he wished to know—about HIV, ARC, CD4, p24, AZT, TP-5, and all the rest of the alphabet soup that was such an integral part of the AIDS canon. He hired a clipping service to comb the world's newspapers, magazines, and medical journals for anything that pertained to AIDS. The flow of information was staggering, mind-numbing. What he could not comprehend he brought to Dr. Lamberson's attention.
The phone rang. Emilio answered it, said a few harsh words, then hung up.
"Who was it?" Arthur said without looking around.
"That puta reporter again. She wants an interview with Charlie."
Arthur closed his eyes. Gloria Weskerna from the Star. It still baffled him how she'd got his home number.
Somehow she'd picked up word that Senator Crenshaw's son was sick. Something was wrong with the son of a potential presidential candidate. What could it be? She and others of her tribe had started sniffing around like stray dogs in a garbage dump, hunting for anything ripe and juicy. Emilio had tightened security, carefully screening the nurses, setting up a round-the-clock guard at the front gate, and spiriting Dr. Lamberson and the nurses in and out in the black-glassed limousine.
"Change the phone number, Emilio," he said without looking around.
"Yes, Senador. If you wish, I can change this reporter's mind about hounding you."
Arthur turned to fa
ce his security man. "Really? How would you do that?"
"She might have a serious accident—a bad fall, perhaps, after which her home could burn and her car could be stolen. She would have so many other things on her mind that she would not have time to bother you."
Emilio said it so casually, as if planning a shopping list for the supermarket. Not a glimmer of amusement lightened his Latin features. Arthur knew he was not being put on. Emilio's sense of humor was about as active as Charlie's immune system.
Arthur trusted Emilio implicitly, but sometimes he was very frightening.
"I don't think so, Emilio. We'll just continue to stonewall. Our position will remain aloof: We admit nothing, we deny nothing. Implicit in our silence is the stance that these rags are not worthy of serious attention. That's the only way to keep the lid on things."
"As you wish, Senador."
Arthur realized he could keep the lid on Charlie's illness only so long as he stayed alive. If he died . . . he reminded himself with a pang that it wasn't really an if—it was a when . . . and soon.
When Charlie died, the shit would hit the fan. He might be able to dissuade the medical examiner from doing an autopsy, but the death certificate was another matter. He could not expect Dr. Lamberson to jeopardize his reputation, his medical license, and his entire career by falsifying a legal document.
He winced as he imagined the headlines.
SENATOR CRENSHAW'S SON DIES OF AIDS!!
That would be damaging, but he could weather it. He could not be held accountable for his son's actions. In fact, he could turn it around and blame Charlie's death on the moral bankruptcy of modern America. America was on the road to ruin, and who better to turn it around and lead it from the darkness into the light than a man who had been so grievously wounded by the nation's moral turpitude?
Yes, he could survive, perhaps even benefit from public disclosure of the cause of Charlie's death. His only worry was what rats might crawl out of the woodwork when they heard that Charlie had died of AIDS. What vermin from his past might step forward and say, "Like father, like son."
Arthur knew he could weather either one alone, but he would fall before the combination of the two.
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