by Ann
One of the guards was kneeling, flashlight in hand, between the blond girl’s thighs. The other one leaned forward with her soiled feet, a dead weight, crossed behind his head.
– Yes, the vagina and the rectum, too. We’ve had a lot of drunks brought in. Some of them crap all over the floor. But you, of all people, realize how necessary it is to make a complete examination. You’d be surprised what we find sometimes. It pays to be thorough, because later, when everything is being sorted out, certain questions will be asked. Questions that we won’t be able to laugh away so easily. Jesus, the paperwork! And I don’t dare go to sleep, myself. Who knows what would happen? At least none of us will wind up in one of these circles. God, what a smell! I wish you would tell them about the smell. Every once in a while it comes back to me full force. Well, it’ll be over soon enough. I’ve been authorized to terminate all receiving procedures. I have to wait now for my replacement. He should’ve been here already. Must have gotten held up at the main office. Paperwork. I was just tidying up a few things. You know, don’t like to leave a messy house. From now on the roundhouse will be admitting only relatives and other such witnesses for the purposes of identification. You wouldn’t believe how many of these clowns have been carried in here without so much as a driver’s license or even a voter’s card. People who, for the most part, were found in the streets.
I almost forgot. There’s another one. Not far from here, I think. A man stuck, head first, in a garbage bin.
– That’s a new one.
By the docks. I tied a certificate to one of his toes.
– The docks? Oh, you mean the other side of town. Out of our jurisdiction, anyway. With any luck, he’ll turn up at the movies. You know, the Omega? You’ll have to go there to track the woman down. That’s where she’d be taken, if the old man remembered to make the call. We’re moving the whole operation there. They’ve already started to receive.
A button at the bottom of the phone dial pulsed with light.
– Yeah……What?……Uh-huh…yeah, sure……Okay…right…
They had begun to dress the girl. Her blouse was on. She was still naked from the waist down. One of the guards tapped the registrar’s chair with the handle of a brush whose bristles were caked in luminous green paint.
– What number?
The registrar put his mittened hand over the mouthpiece, cradled the receiver between chin and shoulder, reopened his ledger and answered, after a pause…
– Eight. One. One. Twenty-five.
You can scour the mustiest tomes of this library for the early legends, wives’ tales and remedies against the dread disease. The old man has let his beard grow out uncombed for days. He emerges on one of the upper tiers, leaning over the brass rail with shelves of antique books rising out of a shadow from three sides of the deep recess behind him, and makes a sign for you to come up. The only other light glows dimly on a caged rostrum near the check-out desk at the end of the main hall. You have walked across the darkness, the clop of your heels echoing off the distant ceiling, rebounding from hidden corners, through all the levels and tiers, until you reach the foot of an iron stair, one of many that spiral into the upper depths of the library. He beckons you with a vague gesture, silently, as though all words have been put away for a time between the pages of a book he has yet to locate, which is why, in spite of everything (the epidemic, the rumors of his disappearance and death), he, the antiquarian, has taken up residence here in one of the abandoned lofts, making his bed upon towering piles of yellowed newsprint no one asks for anymore. Not even a watchman to keep him company through the long hours of the night, to pass the time with him in idle conversation if only he could rouse himself to speak a word or two. He walks with a blind man’s cane, tapping the planks beneath his feet and the sections of cast-iron grillwork, each with its unique design, below the railing which keeps him from the abyss. He knows how to walk in the dark, if the occasion should arise; but, thus far, each recess of books in the tier he now inhabits conceals a small bulb that floods a yellow light from above. The switches are hidden in the corners of the outermost shelves. Each night, as he makes his rounds, the light follows him. He never scruples to double back, having flicked one switch on, to click the switch of the preceding recess off. What he loses in time and legwork is more than compensated by the saving of electricity, for it is entirely possible that no one will come to replace the bulbs which have burnt out. The watchman has gone to tend the victims of this terrible disease. No one is spared. Architectural Design is already lost in darkness. It’s only a matter of time, perhaps just hours, minutes, before another recess goes. He might, of course, venture out into the foggy streets for a new bulb. There are none in the janitor’s closet. He had often gone to look under the basement stairwell, but there were only crates packed with straw, leaning mops, pails full of dirty rags tucked behind the joists. For a younger man it would be less of a problem to replace the bulb. Plenty of ladders about – aluminum rungs painted brown, a ridged mat nailed to each of the narrow steps to guard against an unexpected slippage. But he was old. Staring into his own grave, as he liked to tell his wife before the sickness came. There was no guarantee that any of the shops would be open, including his own, which he hadn’t been to for almost a month. When the landlady died he gathered up some provisions, left his wife without a word of fond farewell, and set out for the library. He knew that she would have sent word after him to the old house lost in a mist behind the tree where an animal rocked its nights away in the branches. To the roundhouse, she or her brother would have come to look for him amid sleepers whose pale faces turned toward a blackness beyond the measure of time and space. He has read the histories, all the ancient registers of lore and quackery. And now he stands, beckoning you, making a sign which brooks no glib interpretation. He might, for all the world, be swatting a fly as he waits for you. And when you have reached the top of the clankering spiral – you come up through the hole in an iron grate, without light, your eyes straining toward that lunar mass of gray-white beard – he will conduct you on a long, meandering tour through the darkness (you will not be able to find your way back so easily), at the end of which, two steps down, where he parts the wine-colored drapes of an opera loge, you are seated at a school desk overlooking the black gulf of the library theatre. A legal pad lies on the desk. You will be able to take notes. Nothing more will escape you. There’s a pen dangling underneath from a copper chain. A candle at your feet, near a book of matches. It’s just thick enough to be fitted into the inkwell. You will stop here in silence with the old man sitting behind you, his armchair turned to the wall as you strike a match, waiting for the curtain to rise. At the top of the pad, above the first of the aqua lines, someone has written: Hist. of Medicine.
The pantomime begins under the thatched roof of a hut. Through the opening, snowflakes drift and churn in gusts of wind against the night. You would be expected to note here that the hut is empty, though in the middle of the floor a small fire has recently burned. There remains a heap of glowing embers. A rude flap made of canvas, like a topsail, suddenly unrolls to cover the opening. On it these words, painted in blood, seen by the light of the coals: Eld Wanderer. A pickaxe and shovel lean, one crossed on the other, by the wall to the right of the flap. The interior of the hut, whose upper reaches are lost in a conical shadow, bristles with tufts of straw. Curtain.
Behind you the old man goes into his cigarette cough, a gravelly hack which he tries in vain to stifle as he keeps himself amused by making Chinese shadows on the wall, hands clasped to shape the profile of a boxer dog, or a cat. He passes through the whole repertoire of illusive silhouettes. Then, with an unintelligible whisper, he turns toward you, begging the loan of five or six sheets of paper, which can easily be spared since the pad is full. He assures you by a series of emphatic gestures that, should you have need of it, a second pad has been placed inside the desk for your convenience. You raise the lid a crack, just enough to slip your hand through. You can feel it, a
pad. Also, a pair of manicure scissors. Both of which you hand to him.
The next scene of the pantomime is staged to represent the night. Without stars. A silver web gleaming under the moon. The sky, completely black, against which the patterns work their geometric transformations. Symmetries intermesh so delicately that a breath might blow them out of shape or cause an unmendable tear. Euclidean and non-Euclidean allures. The threads swerve in a hypothetical sphere beneath the dome of a long-vanished planetarium. Some of the seats are rocking, giving off abrupt squeaks in the dark. An unseen cat meows. Who can tell how far the web continues, beyond the touch of moonlight, into an emptied cosmos? Curtain.
Yellow curlicues seesaw gently to the floor behind you. All this time, while your eyes were turned to the void, the old man has been snipping away, cutting himself a miniature fool’s cap with two diminutive windows giving on the inside of the cone. When he turns his head in a certain way the flickering candlelight shines through. A pale square with indistinct borders winks open and shut at the base of the pyramidal shadow. The old man balances an oblong cut-out on the bridge of his nose in such a way that it reappears in silhouette behind the curtained ‘window’ on the wall of the loge.
The third tableau depicts a winding gallery cluttered with recently vacated beds. An old château where giant birds of prey walk, tipping the great chandeliers with their downy skulls – vultures, cormorants on holiday from the sea, eagles bald or bristling with a thick head of fur to be smoothed down, almost mechanically, with dampened wing-feathers whenever they catch a glimpse of themselves in the tall mirrors between the gallery windows. Windows opening on a garden overgrown with weeds. The granite fountain, covered by verdigris moss, whose dried-up basins languish under a black sediment, flanked by two armless statues: a faun, with cheeks puffed out, blowing imaginary panpipes; an ancient bronze of the Huntress, her nose eaten away by the pox of time and weather. Both against a cloudless afternoon sky. The mammoth birds are looking for someone. They veil their eyelids against the shafts of window-light. Curtain.
You find a deck of playing cards inside the desk. The old man becomes excited. He drops the pad and scissors on the floor and holds out his hands. He fans the deck into a perfect circle and thrusts it, face down, under your chin. Pick a card. Any card. You draw the eight of spades. He closes the fan, shuffles the deck, shapes it into a tidy stack, and places it carefully between his feet. The old man’s mind is wandering. His lips move. A garbled noise escapes his clenched gums in a spray of spittle. Now he turns his face to the wall. A voice comes over the loudspeaker.
– In the fourth and last tableau, the curtain rises on three wax figures. Narcolept, oh Narcolept! It seems as though daylight will never come! They have all but reached the end. One, dragged along the pavement by the other two, his feet cradled in their hands. From offstage, electric fans waft clouds of dry-ice vapor under the lamps. They cannot see the street. The buildings. Across the footlights. Lost.
Before the mask. I must at least go through the motions for as long as the antitoxin can keep me awake. An increase from 0.5ml. of a 2,000 million per ml. vaccine, given as the first dose. My eyelids are getting heavy. A little while, and yet a while longer, to follow the tick of the clock (corner-of-the-eye hallucinations: livid specks that seem to jump out of the walls before a glance decomposes them), and I will have begun to dream. A window impossible to distance. Somewhere beyond the grimy panes there was, there is, another room, high above Promontory Wall, where he used to spend his time.
1.0ml. Behind the tree, the window. Fog too thick, at first, to cast even a faint reflection in the clouded glass. There, above the porch roof. Slate tiles toward a rusty gutter with the creak of something that rocks in the lower branches, no guttering water, not a sign of rain, though the air was leaden and damp. He waited, stretched out in his bed with the light off, for her footfall on the stair. He must have been down there, the old man, the antiquarian, leaning back, his cane chair squeaking from across the green of the tabletop the night the landlady died. The canaries had gone to sleep. Then, by degrees, the mist swallows up the image with its shifting forms and hidden noises. It comes back to me.
No one dies of the plague. One simply never wakes. When they first began to nod off in the streets, I took them for dead. The fog had not yet settled like a pall over the city.
1.5ml. I could almost see him then, the Ancient Wanderer, walking out among the sleepers. He had thrown a veil over the dark pools of his eyes and went from one to another with lamp in hand, or as an undulating shadow on a wall of water. The narcolept. Their faces turned up to him. In the empty streets. From the stairs I heard him breathing white smoke under the lampposts, down to the docks where keelboats and schooners were no longer even silhouettes. He walked alone to the end of the jetty. Somewhere behind the last crab shanty there was a noise of splashing water as he threw himself into the bay. Once, he came at night to the theatre. No one had cause to recognize him. There, from the edge of the darkness beyond the footlights, he showed his sad face to the actors. He was sitting alone, marking time by sketching a maze of webs around their bodies the night the old man saw him.
The metabolic process remains more or less normal, or normalizes according to the needs of sleep. As long as intravenous nourishment is provided, there is no reason at all why the patient cannot live out his allotted span of life in dreams. Glucose. Tubes to drain off the liquid excretions. Growth of hair and fingernails continues long after the last evacuation of feces. Always, whenever too many of them have been gathered in one place, the overpowering stench of sugared urine.
2.0ml. No effect. To keep myself from dozing off, I reset the alarm every five minutes and tried to picture the moon, which no one has seen for weeks. Before the mask, it was a lot easier to get around my office without knocking drug samples and specimen tubes off the cabinet tops. A full moon every night, large and yellow, under clouds swept by wind across the heavens. Something I’d read in a book. In cutting the eyeholes, I hadn’t followed the pattern closely enough. Whenever I ventured out, or if I was called away, I had to be careful of where I walked. A distinct fall-off of light toward the edges. The moon had all but disappeared behind the trees. The silvering that limned the rooftops passed, and I was alone in the streets. They must have come for me before morning. A half moon every night, blood-red, hovers near the horizon. Without stars or light, he waited for her footfall on the stair. He was in his room, stretched out on the mattress. The mattress leaned against the wall, by the window. He had stretched out on the bare springs to keep from turning over. A waning moon each night the map hung under a sheet of glass. Second window. What I can see of the mist from here. The old man is leaving, going down the wooden porch steps. He will not return. He has taken almost everything. By degrees, piece by piece, until nothing remains but the smile in a pool of lunar clouds.
Something more that runs counter to every precept of medicine. Just before the plague of sleep, another nameless disease had taken form. Those who were exposed to the contagion began to dematerialize. They were only half there, as though the accumulating mists had wanted to eat them alive. Since the brain was almost the last organ to deteriorate, the victim was forced to suffer in full consciousness not so much the fading away, but the agonizing process of starvation. At first, the skin became a mass of effervescing dust behind which the internal organs gradually came to appear. Once the victim had reached this stage, a normal examination became impossible. The desire to eat remained; but, as the disease took its course, any solid or liquid nourishment placed in the mouth fell through the floor of the buccal cavity to the ground before it could be swallowed. The internal and external musculature remain in working order almost to the end. Temperature seems to play a crucial rôle in determining the degree of dematerialization of any given part of the body. The pathology, here, is elemental. The tip of the nose, the ears, the toes, and often the buttocks, being anywhere from a quarter to a full two degrees cooler than the normal bodily temperature,
tend to retain their density over a longer period of time than those organs and tissue which are normally concealed by the epidermal layer. One way to retard the illness, then, would be to keep the patient constantly exposed to the cold which, however, would almost certainly result in pneumonia or some other complication. The process of dematerialization is such that, once the cutaneous envelope becomes affected, the glands, the musculature, the lymphatic and circulatory systems, being from one to four degrees warmer, will already be too far gone by the time the skin has begun to effervesce, removing all possibility of an early diagnosis. The incubation period is unknown. One cannot be absolutely certain that the dematerialization is in any way connected to the endless sleep.
2.5ml. Another opening. Then the old man must have known something. Before the mask. Before the mist. To imitate the buzz of the flies. It deflates. Without light, the putrid blot spreads over it, driving them mad. From room to empty room. Old, tumbledown crates. Shreds of crumpled waxpaper. And if I dare to close my eyes. Another street. In a strange part of the city. I was with her, upstairs with the one who died. Before the fog. The flies. What passed for a bed, a night table by the curtained window, the faint ellipse of lamplight thrown up on the wall, bending out along the ceiling’s end. If this was the room. One without a clock. The ticks. It was much easier then, without the eyeholes or the goggles to fog my vision of a moonless night. Without stars. I could see her leaning in the doorway at the top of a long flight of stairs, where the light had begun to seep through. An opening, yes. I went on tiptoe. Late in the afternoon. In the morning. On a moonless night when the noise of the traffic was not so loud. If I closed my eyes, she would be there in the half-light of her room because my office was too far off, though I would have preferred to have her there, like all the others. Someone must have told him about it the night the landlady died. He must have been told. They would have come for me. Before morning. Upstairs, where so little remained of what we knew. All the rooms were empty, except one. The room with a second window on the mist. A bit more of the warbling. One of my patients sang like a nightingale. Other silhouettes. The flies. And all because the rats, as rats are wont to do, were making a bit of noise on their own, sniffing amid the wood shavings for a crumb of cheese the cat had carried away. In my eyes, the steps. One at a time. Like all the others. A soft tread on rubber mats nailed to the wood. On tiptoe in the night. The flies. The fleas. All that remained to be collected was lost to him. He had relinquished any rights he might have had to the landlady. Old jukebox colors tinged with a fading redness in the air. By way of recompense. Be careful, one of the steps has a loose mat. Squeak by squeak. The odor I could smell, always, on my hands. I have to go now. The police will handle everything, I have to go. Just after five. Scratches. Contusions. Where the lamplight glimmered through. We tried it on the bed. She lay in the shadows. The steps, once more. Not that I’m old. I return, step-shadows dwindling over the tips of my shoes. As I neared the top, she was standing with the light behind her, the one who died, and like the poor landlady after her, not even the unkept promises of the old man could bring her back. I told you to phone the police. Are you deaf? Or he has lost his own shadow beyond the last reaches of the mist. He searches the library alone each night for the words to come to him again. To come while I still have time to remember the ticks, not just a tick at a time. Between which, the notable absence of a clock at the bedside. Standing between the bed and the curtained window. Now, if she wanted to sleep. It would have to be the floor. Soon she would be too far gone. Nothing, at the brink of death, but this coarse-grained shroud of dust sinking through the floorboards, down through the stippled ceiling to the last staircase, and into the bowels of the earth. If they told him about it, he must also know the horror of that night. Her skin took color with the cold, but the bed wouldn’t hold her. She sank under my weight through the mattress. Echoes of the wind passing through old piano wire. I found her under the springs, stretched out beneath the hanging wads of dust, in a shadow.