by Mike Ashley
I hadn't known until then. I shuddered, and he grinned. "So what's wrong with being green? Don't worry, it's still experimental, and very, very temporary. Anyway, if we could get away from some of the really high-tech stuff and simply transfuse from any healthy person to one who is ill... see?"
"But wouldn't that be just as high tech?"
He shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not.
There are genetic blood characteristics that get passed on from parent to child, you know. Sickle cell anemia, which, by the way, comes in a package that includes resistance to malaria. Hemophilia gets passed on..." Whatever expression my face was registering made him stop. "Hey," he said softly. "I'm just spitballing."
I jerked upright so fast, I bumped into the steering wheel. I must have been dozing, dreaming. How clear Warren was, his hair thinning just a touch, a little too long, the color of wet sand; that day he had a suntan and looked almost ruddy. A big-faced ruddy man who looked as if he should be out plowing, or putting a roof on a building, or something else physically demanding. A sailor, he would have made a fine sailor. I can't see him now; my imagination is faulty in that I can't see images with any sharp detail. Only my dreams re-create with exactitude the people I have loved. My parents live on in my dreams; Warren is there; the children, but they won't show themselves to my waking mind. I have only feelings, impressions, nuances that have no names. Warren is a loving presence, a comforting presence, bigger in my mind than ever in person, stronger, more reassuring, strangely more vulnerable so that I feel I have to protect him. From what is as unclear as the visual image.
When I drove down here from the Portland airport, it was my intention to turn into the driveway to the house where I played out my childhood; instead, I kept driving, followed the road that became a track up to this lookout point. The end of the road. The place where the world disappears.
We came out here with Greg two years ago. His wife was gone by then, back to Indiana or somewhere with their two children, and he was lonely. Or so Warren said. I didn't believe it, and still don't believe Greg ever knew loneliness. His work was world enough. We built a fire on the beach and the children played in the surf and came near to get warm, then raced back to the frigid water.
"Tell Greg about the meals," Warren said, grinning, contented that day, even though he was a hundred years old.
I had told him and the children about a typical meal during the time of Abelard and Heloise. Our children wanted to eat that way, too. A long board against the wall, food within reach of everyone, people sharing the same bowls, the same cups, eating with spoons or fingers. The beggars crowding about, and the dogs crowding everyone, snapping at each other, at the beggars, at the diners and the servers.
Greg laughed when I described it. He was lazy looking, relaxed, but if Warren had turned a hundred, Greg had turned two hundred. An old worried man, I thought. He was only forty-five according to the official records, but I knew he was ancient.
"Was that during the plague years?" he asked. He was leaning against a forty-foot-long tree that had crashed ashore, riding the waves to be stranded here, a memento of the power of the sea during a storm. The tree trunk was eight feet thick. It might have been alive in Abelard's time.
"Not much plague yet, not in epidemic form in Europe at least, although plague was recorded back in the sixth century, you understand, and continued intermittently until it struck in pandemic force later, about the fifteenth century. This period was 1100 or so. Why?"
"The beggars were inside at the table?" he asked, bemused.
"They were kicked out shortly after that; the beggars had to stay beyond the door, but the dogs weren't banished."
The conversation ended there; the children found a starfish which we all went to examine, and the sun was going down by then.
Late that night we discussed when we would leave for home the following day. Traffic had been bumper to bumper coming out and it would be worse on Sunday.
"I may stay on a few days with the kids," I said. Warren could go back with Greg early, which they were both inclined to do, but I knew the children would be disappointed at the short stay, as I was.
It was summer; I had no classes, and this was the only kind of vacation we would have, a day now and then, two, three days at the coast.
"I wonder what it was like during the plague years," Greg mused, reviving the subject we had left hours before. "Anywhere from one-third to half the people gone, just gone."
"It wasn't exactly like that," I said. "It took 300 years before it stopped sweeping the continent in epidemic form, and during that period the church became the power it is now. Superstition, heresies, empowerment for the church and state, fear for the public, that's what was going on. Life was hell for most survivors."
"And the Renaissance came about," Greg said thoughtfully. "Would it have happened without the plague? No one really knows, do they?"
"That's the romantic version," I said, not quite snapping at him. "The silver-lining theory. Out of every evil thing comes something good. You believe that?"
Warren had been brooding, gazing at the fire in the fireplace, snapping and cracking, a many-hued fire burning off salts and minerals of dried wood scavenged from the beach. He sounded very tired when he spoke now. "The Renaissance came about because people had used up all the resources they had available to them; they were desperate for better ways to farm, to make clothing, to warm themselves. Better ways to survive. They had to invent the Renaissance. It had nothing to do with plague."
I realized that they had had this conversation before; neither was saying anything the other had not already heard. I stood up.
"Are you going to tell me what you're doing in your lab?"
Greg looked blank, and Warren shook his head. "Same old stuff," he said after a long pause. "Just the same old stuff."
If it was just the same old stuff -artificial blood, whole blood transfusions, work they had been publishing for years - why had they both become so old? Why were they both terrified? Why had Warren stopped talking about his work altogether, and refused to talk about it when I brought it up?
Greg got up abruptly and went to bed, and Warren shook his head when I asked him again what they were doing. "Go on to bed," he said. "I'll just be a few minutes."
What do you do if your husband holds the agent to destroy half the human race? You try not to know it; you don't demand answers; you go to bed.
A gale has arrived finally. Now the trees are thrashing, and the broom is whipping about furiously, making its own eerie shrieking sound, and the rain is so hard it's as if the sea has come up here and is raging against the car, pushing, pushing. I am getting very cold and think how strange that I was so reluctant to turn on the motor, use the heater. I can hardly even hear the engine when it starts and, as soon as I lift my foot from the accelerator, I can't hear it at all.
Greg's wife took her two children and ran when she learned. I wonder if that is why Warren refused to tell me anything for so long.
In the past two years Warren became a stranger to us, his family. We saw him rarely, and only when he was so fatigued he could hardly stay awake long enough to eat, to bathe. I didn't see Greg at all after that day at the coast, not until two weeks ago.
Warren came home late. I was already undressed for bed, in my robe. He was so pale he looked very ill. "I blew the whistle," he said, standing just inside the door, water running off his jacket, down his hands, down his face. I went to him and pulled the jacket off his shoulders. "It's going to be out of our hands by tomorrow," he said, and walked stiffly into the living room to sit on the sofa.
I hurried to the bathroom and came back with a towel, sat beside him, and began to dry his hair, his face.
"Will you tell me about it now?"
He told me. They had found a viroid that had an affinity for some blood groups, he said. Not even a whole virus, not a killed virus, a piece of a virus. They had combined it with the O group first and nothing happened, but when they then combined the O b
lood with A blood, the viroid changed, it became whole, replicative, and the A blood was destroyed, consumed. He said it in a monotone, almost absently, as if it were of no real consequence, after all. And then he buried his face in his hands and cried.
Forty-five per cent of Caucasians have A-group blood; five percent have AJB. Thirty per cent of Blacks have A or AJB. Thirty per cent of Amerinds have A or AB... And the virus they created could destroy all of them.
I held him as he wept and the words tumbled incoherently. They would both go to Atlanta, he said that night, he and Greg, and someone would come to oversee the packing of the material, the decontamination of the lab.
"Greg came in while I was on the phone," he said at some point. "He tried to stop me. I hit him. God, I hit him, knocked him down! I took him home and we talked it over."
"Does he agree, then?"
"Yes," he said tiredly. "It was like hitting your father, your god."
"Why didn't you stop when you knew what it was?"
"We couldn't," he said. He was as pale as death, with red-rimmed eyes, a haunted look. "If we did it, then so will someone else, if they haven't already. We kept trying to find an out, an antidote, a cure, something."
We were still on the sofa side by side. He drew away from me and got to his feet, an old man laboriously rising; he staggered when he started to walk. "I need a drink."
I followed him to the kitchen and watched him pour bourbon into a glass and drink it down. If he and Greg couldn't find the cure, I was thinking, then who could? They were the best in the field.
I keep thinking of what Greg said that day on the coast: the plague killed off one-third to half the population of Europe, the same numbers that make up the A, the AJB, the AO blood groups. And out of that horror, he thought, had come the Renaissance.
I know so much more about blood groups and complexes now than I did two weeks ago; I put in a period of cramming, as if for an examination. I am in the A group. Mikey is AO. Warren is O. Sandra is A, and Chris is O.
I drove Warren to the lab the next morning, where we were met by a middle-aged man who introduced himself to Warren and ignored me. They went inside without a backward glance. When they were out of sight, Greg appeared, coming from the corner of the brick building, walking toward me. He had a Band-Aid on his jaw; Warren had one on his middle knuckle.
"At the last minute," Greg said, "I found I didn't want to see anyone, not Warren, not the hot-shot epidemiologist. Just tell Warren I'm taking off for a few days' rest, will you?"
I nodded, and he turned and walked away, old, old, defeated, sagging shoulders, slouching walk, his hair down over the collar of a faded gray ski jacket that gleamed with rain, sneakers squishing through puddles.
Such a clear picture of him, I marvel, coming wide awake again. The car is much too warm now; it has a very efficient heater. I want to sink back down into dreams, but instead I force myself up straighter in order to reach the key, to turn off the ignition. My hand feels encased in lead.
I packed for Warren and later that day he dashed in, brushed my cheek with his lips, snatched up his bag, and ran out again. He would call, he said, and he did several times, but never with anything real to say. I was as guarded on the phone as he was. Anything new? I asked, and he said no, same old stuff. I clutched the phone harder and talked about the children, about the rain, about nothing.
I did the things I always did: I braided Sandra's hair, and made Mikey do his homework; I talked to my own class about The Canterbury Tales; I shopped and made dinners; I washed my hair and shaved my legs... Mikey had a cold and Chris caught it, and I was headachy and dull feeling. Late fall things, I told Warren over the phone. He said it was rather warm in Atlanta and sunny. And, he said tiredly, he would be on the seven-o'clock flight due in Portland on Friday. We made soft thankful noises at each other; I had tears in my eyes when I hung up.
Trish Oldhams called the following evening. She wanted Warren and when I said he was out of town, there was a long pause.
"What is it, Trish? Anything I can do?" I hoped it was nothing; my headache was worse and now I was afraid it was flu, not simply a cold.
"It's Greg," she said at last. "I was going to ask Warren to go check on him. He called, and he sounded ... I don't know, just strange."
"What do you mean, strange?"
"He said he wanted to tell me goodbye," she said in a low voice. "I... is he sick?"
"Not that I know. I'll drop in on him and call you back. Okay?"
Time is a muddle for me now. I can't remember when Trish called but I didn't call her back. I found Greg loading boxes into his truck that he had backed up partway into the garage. His house was surrounded by unkempt gardens and bushes and a lot of trees, two or three acres that he ignored. Trish used to maintain it all. I remember thinking what a wilderness he had let it become.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded, when I stopped behind his truck and got out of my car.
"Trish called. She's worried about you."
"You're shivering. Come on inside."
The inside was a shambles, things strewn about, drawers open, boxes everywhere. He led me to the kitchen where it was more of the same. The table was piled high with books and notebooks; others were on the floor, on chairs.
"Sit down," he said. "You're shaking, you're so cold." He poured us both whiskey with a drop of water, and he sat opposite me, with the piles of stuff between us. "Trish," he said after a moment. "I shouldn't have called her, I guess. She was surprised. I made her leave, you know."
I shook my head. "Why?"
"Because I was dangerous for her and the boys," he said, gazing past me. "A menace to her. I told her that and she would have hung on, but I told her I was a menace to the boys, too, and she left, just like I knew she would."
"I don't understand what you're saying." My glass rattled against the table when I tried to put it down. He took it and refilled it.
"I'm contaminated," he said. "Four, five years ago I nicked myself in the lab and got some of the viroid material in the cut. We thought I would die, Warren and I thought that, but as you can see ..." He drained his glass and put it down hard. "But it's there, the viroid, waiting to meet up with A-type blood, fulfill its destiny. Trish is A, and the boys are AO. It was just a matter of time before something happened, no matter how careful was. I sent her away."
It is all muddled. He said he would not be a guinea pig, live in quarantine. No one knew about him yet, but he would tell them soon. He had made Warren promise to let him tell them in his own time, his own way. I was drinking his liquor and having trouble following his words, but I finally had become warm, and even drowsy as he talked on. He couldn't infect me, he said, driving me home, and Warren was all right. I was safe. He insisted that I couldn't drive, and he called a cab to return home afterward. Blood contact was necessary he said, between a contaminated O and anyone else. Alone, the viroid was inert. And the virus? I asked. "Oh, that," he said grimly. "That's one of the things they'll be finding out in Atlanta. We, Warren and I, think it might be passed by any contact, or it could be airborne. They'll find out."
Today, Friday. I braided Sandra's hair and made Mikey brush his teeth, and told Chris that he couldn't go to a football game after school, not with his cold. Sandra was sneezing. I dragged into my one class, and then a committee meeting, and a late lunch with my friend Dora who told me to go home and to bed because I looked like hell. I felt like hell, I admitted, but I had to go to Portland to meet Warren. I wanted to go early enough to miss the traffic rush. I would have a snack in the restaurant and read and wait for his plane.
I heard the news bulletin on the car radio. Dr Gregory Oldhams had died in a fire at his house. There were no details. I pulled off the road onto the shoulder and stared ahead through tears. He had called Trish to tell her goodbye. He had packed up things he couldn't bear to have burned. A guinea pig, live in quarantine, in isolation, his own time, his own way...
Lights have come on in the house across t
he ravine. They are looking for me; Warren must have told them this is where I would come. Home. I wonder if he is with them; if he is, he may think to come up here. I rather imagine that they have him in a high-security lab somewhere, drawing blood, testing it, or packaging it to send to Atlanta.
They may send him back. He will be so tired. Would I scream at him if we met now? Probably, and he doesn't need it; he knows, and he will know for the rest of his life. If we met, and if I had a gun, would I shoot him? I can imagine doing it, and I would want to do it, but would I?
Warren's plane was going to be an hour late. It was five when I got inside the terminal; three hours stretched like eternity. I was too tired to do more than buy a book and a newspaper and then find a place where I could sit in peace. No food, I thought, shivering again.
Orange juice. I sat in the restaurant thinking about Greg, about yesterday, how he had driven me home. What he had said. Blood contact between an O and anyone else, airborne possibly after an A became infected. I remembered the Band-Aid on his chin, another Band-Aid on Warren's knuckle. How Warren had wept, not because of the work, but because he had struck Greg, his mentor, his father, his god.
I knocked over my orange juice when I attempted to lift the glass, and I stared at the spreading pool until the waitress's voice made me start. "You want another one?" she asked.
I fled to the restroom and studied my face in the mirror. Bloodless. It's the flu, I told myself. Just the flu. My fingers were tinged with blue under my finger-nails, my palms were drained of color.
I know I talked to someone in Atlanta, but I can't remember how it came about. There's a vague memory of someone else punching numbers from my credit card. I must have asked for help. I had to go through so many people, wait so long before someone who knew something came on the line. "Is it airborne?" I asked, and he had many questions, which I must have answered. He kept asking, "Are you there? Are you all right? Can you hear me?" I know he said, "Stay right where you are. Don't move from the phone. We'll send someone to help you."