The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “I will… I did, I thought. Write letters. But can you really not? If he’s right, what have you got to lose?”

  “Last winter I was going up to…settle some things, endowment matters. Noah Porter had invited me to give some lectures, too, and I was going, come Hell or high water. I stopped with my people in North Carolina to rest up for the rest of the journey, and one night I got warmed up on brandy and walked out into the snow, into that mauve light it makes, and got badly chilled before I had sense enough to go in. The next morning, I woke up spitting blood, oh, it was a nasty episode, it would have upset you. I had things for you, candy, and news. I gave the candy I’d brought to my aunt to make up for throwing up on her counterpane—I am to the last my own graceless self. And I came back here, back to the island. Decent time, that’s what I’ve got to lose. I can handle myself like a basket of eggs and not be terribly miserable, or I can play fast and loose and go out bleeding like a stuck pig. The consumption lets me read and write and take the occasional drive, but it will have me. I’m making you uncomfortable.”

  “I’d be lying if I said I was at my jolly ease, but it’s your right,” said Simion. “You deserve for someone to be uncomfortable about you. I understand the emblematic part about the buzzards, but what did you mean that was emblematic about sweating, or the fact that neither of us do much?”

  “You didn’t understand? If you don’t, it’s going to be difficult to explain,” said Simeon Lincoln. “No doubt I have no business going into all its gray ramifications with you at all. I can’t say what I mean without using the metaphor freezing, and I feel that’s a disloyalty to my dear New England. But I think we both have suffered a chill, a frostbite of the whole sensibility. With me, the consumption began it. I don’t remember feeling well in all my life. I don’t know what it means. I’ve had a cough ever since I was eight years old. The disease is inside me and therefore on all sides of me, between me and everyone else. My jealous vampire mother, father, lover, and bride. I can’t quicken my pace to a trot. I couldn’t lift you in my arms and carry you to save my life, or yours, or anyone’s. The rot in the lungs makes everything smell and taste revolting. I used to be able to dress to conceal my thinness, now nothing conceals it. At college, in the basement where we washed… I ought not to speak of it to you, it’s ugly, and furthermore it’s not decent.”

  “Do go on,” Simion urged. “Unless it’s painful.”

  “It is, but you’re dying to hear it and I’m dying to tell it, so I will. I nearly died of embarrassment among all those healthy Yankee boys. You see, even then, sensual feelings overtaxed my heart, and the thoughts alone could bring on choking attacks. Or perhaps it was something other than my ailment…mortal terror. More frightening, at any rate, than death at kissing distance. To reverse my…feelings, I thought of my own body, like an old rachitic starved mule. Imposed chastity, do you understand? With persons of both sexes. You are not to live this kind of life, do you hear me!” said Lincoln, with a sudden fierce glare. His eyes, of that fierce pale packed-ice blue, bored into Simion’s eyes. Then he calmed himself slightly, got himself in hand. “The point is, for me it’s over. It’s not over for you. I live in hope that you’re strong enough and stubborn enough to take back everything that’s been taken from you thus far. You don’t have this evil ailment. But you’ve been beaten and frightened into a parcel of raw nerves and half-invalidism by that old sadist, for whom I wish there was a Hell. Oh, I’m not criticizing you—you’re tough as old leather, or you’d be stone-dead. Tough enough to hear what I have to say, even, so I am going to accept the indulgence granted the doomed man and tell you my hatefulest secrets. Here’s one: I’m going to die a virgin, and the Haliburton villagers would think it’s because I’m some sort of a saint. But I despise saints, their self-denial revolts me; they should try tuberculosis for mortification of the flesh. Those who’d deprive themselves should be deprived even more than they had in mind, and those with the sense to take and taste should have the world opened to them! Frivolous pain—there’s more than enough pain in the world to go round, and more than enough deprivation. Me, I despise this aridity I’ve been forced into. If I had had my way, I should have had beautiful lovers of both sexes, and beautiful children, and in the best of all worlds I should have had you for my child. I don’t believe there is a God; if there is, I look forward to spitting in his face for a piss-poor job of running things. If there were one, would he ordain the worthlessness and agony of this kind of life? Would I die without ever having lived, and would you go into your manhood with this shaken body and chilled spirit? Something’s happened to the feeling self—it’s like the body that doesn’t sweat even though it’s ninety degrees. It’s been sealed by a chill, and I haven’t been able to warm you. That isn’t all I’ve been unable to do, and here’s another asp I’ve hugged to my vitals all these years. Have I ever told you this—why I didn’t offer to take you off John Ezra’s hands until the last? It’s because in my constant company, breathing my air, you would have almost certainly gotten what I have. If not for that, I would have stolen you the night I came to Haliburton and turned up somewhere very far away, even here perhaps, a widower with a half-orphaned son. My God, how you’ll suffer before you finally get free and clear of him, and telling you these things is all I can do about it! But, for what it’s worth, this is the confession of my weak and inadequate affection. And I can’t talk about it any more. Let’s talk about something else, or even about nothing for the moment. Would you like to drive down by the waterfront and see the ships come in? Visit the library? Or perhaps go to the racing stables?”

  “The racing stables,” Simion said through his tight throat, aware of the unendurability of another word on the subject and conscious that he had been told all anyone ever would be told about Simeon Lincoln’s chill. Both of them braced themselves against the cushions, drawn tight as bows, with the hamstrung expression that both of them got when fighting tears; the Arctic and Antarctic together were not as cold and rigorous as that look. They were quiet for five minutes that seemed to last a decade.

  Lincoln came out of it first, and when he turned to Simion, the rigor had gone from his face. Having recovered, he seemed to recollect the next item on his agenda for this talk and drove on, doggedly, to the heart of the matter.

  “Your Greek professor…what’s between you and that man? Be truthful with me, do you love him?”

  “Yes, I do!” Simion said, shocked at the anger in his own tone. He tried to rein it in. “Yes…that’s putting it lightly. I’m obsessed with him. I have thoughts I’m sure I’d get arrested for if anyone could read them off my face. But I don’t think he loves me. He writes me the silliest letters.”

  “No one can read anything off your face unless you mean them to, and sometimes not then. Silly how?”

  “Six pages about the weather and the sunsets. That’s silly, isn’t it?”

  Lincoln gave his malicious little chortle. “The poor son of a…the poor devil. I bet you’ve got him in agony. And you write him little postcards about the weather here.”

  “I write him quite impertinent things, actually. I guess I’m trying to get a response. He’s so vague sometimes. He’s more than shy. It’s as if he doesn’t even know how to reveal himself to a friend. And yet he’s sometimes extremely bold, and I never know when to expect the change. He’ll give me this look from time to time, as if he’d die for me, and then he’ll have his head in the clouds for days on end. He’s a strange one. He has no…signposts and crossroads to guide one.”

  “Has the strange one made any direct overtures of any sort?”

  “Well, he kissed me good-bye.”

  “Little boy, that is a signpost and a crossroad, as you put it in your concrete manner, if there ever was one. What do you want, a wedding ring?”

  “In fact, yes,” Simion allowed. “And if he’d acknowledge it ever so faintly in these letters of his, I’d like that too.”

  “You saucebox! Anyhow, you love this man? Don’t
be silly and turn red, you’re old enough that this makes sense by now. You love him and you’d welcome his further advances if he’d make them? Yes?”

  “Yes, very well, I do, I would,” said Simion.

  “Let him know it, then. Don’t stint him or let him stint you out of fear. Use everything you’ve got—oh, but you’ve got it, too; you could charm a Confederate Dead statue right down off its pedestal if you wanted to. Don’t ever find yourself in my present position. Go after the man,” said Lincoln.

  The enjoinder had deathbed force. Simion desired earnestly to talk about something other than death. He wondered if Lincoln would respond to a cheeky remark of the Kneitel type he’d learned to appreciate, talking to Helmut in the stable. With most of the grown-up/child barriers down between them, he ventured it. “Confederate Dead statues are so unattractive,” he drawled. “He’s not. I’ll show you his photograph when we get home.” He almost said, “He’s to die for,” but caught himself in time.

  Over the next few days on the island, a relaxed quiet fell between the two friends. Lincoln, unburdened of what he’d wanted to say, was almost himself; Simion’s feelings were divided between reeling shock at finding someone other than Andy who knew of his proclivities and outright approved of them and the gratification of some dim sense he’d always had about Lincoln. He would come back from the beach in the afternoon and nap on Lincoln’s ragged study sofa as he’d done as a child, while Lincoln read on his chaise. Waking, he’d feel peaceful and rested. They talked more easily now; Simion told him about Andy.

  “He’s lovely to me,” he said, trying to explain his own inexplicable, ungrateful backholding. “That is, even when I don’t deserve it. Or, no, he loses his patience, but he loses it in a civilized way. He’s arch and sarcastic, but even then, he’s careful not to hit me on a raw nerve. He’s so considerate that he confuses me. And I confuse myself with my nasty, judgmental ways. I think: He’s spoiled. And I distrust him for it. Which isn’t right. He’s rich, but he actually isn’t spoiled at all; merely having lots of toys doesn’t mar you; it’s other things that do that, and he isn’t spoiled. He has a gift for…hedonism. For finding pleasure, and making pleasure where it’s not to be found. It’s not his fault that he’s sweet and charming and wasn’t raised by a demented preacher with fast fists. I have the hardest time trusting anyone who hasn’t suffered awfully in some way, as if I thought it formed character, which I doubt. In my own case, all it’s done is to give me stomach ulcers and taught me to be difficult even when I don’t mean to. As for Andy, perhaps I get furious with him just because he shows me how unreasonable I really am, and yet I can’t make myself do differently. I don’t understand someone who’s able to come forth with jokes and humor when the thing that would make sense is a fist in the face. Amiability is a mystery to me. I don’t understand happiness either. Do you suppose someday I will?”

  “It’s one of my great hopes. And your Greek professor,” said Lincoln, who somehow shied away from pronouncing Doriskos’s name even though he knew it perfectly well, “has he suffered?”

  “Oh, terribly,” said Simion, with what Andy called his Pre-Raphaelite smile.

  Still, these weather reports wore on one. Interposed with Andy’s clever letters, they looked especially weak and irritating. Finally Simion was emboldened to write back: “Of all the sciences, I am perhaps least interested in climatology. It is a vague science, and I am ill at ease with vagueness. I am afraid that unless things are aired between us, we may have another vague term, full of portentousness, and the air thick with things unsaid. I’m an ignorant boy and you’re a man of the world, you know, and you have to help me a little if you want results.” He was feeling so momentarily bold that he actually gave it to the ferryman to mail. Though he smiled to himself for an hour, later he could barely believe he’d done it. Controversy of any kind should not travel by letter; it means far too long to wait, and fret, and dread the response. However, the next fortnight’s events diluted Simion’s attention to this trouble he’d created for himself.

  With no identifiable provocation, Lincoln took a sharp turn down. The weather was sweet, neither too hot nor too humid, and there had been no jolts or evil surprises. Simion had his first intimation that Lincoln was worse than expected when the iceman started calling daily and leaving off huge supplies; he remembered his boyhood chore of gathering up a couple of pailfuls of clean snow every day during winter, just in case it was needed to staunch bleeding. When he was ten, he had noted the deeply shaded cold spot near the school where the snow lingered into April, and there he had dug a deep hole and lined it with rocks and straw to store ice into the spring. As he took the dripping blocks from the icehouse deliveryman, he remembered hearing the blood-cough and running out there to dig up ice.

  Lincoln’s temperature began to rise lazily to one hundred and two degrees by suppertime every day and never went down to normal; near him, Simion could feel his sick heat. He knew that when you were this thin, a constant fever wrung you out, unmanned you, and in a few days broke your will for anything except reading light fiction and feeding your thirst a good, steady supply of clear liquids. He made soda-water lemonade for Lincoln and read to him by the hour, trying to pin his unstrung attention to earth; his drifting seemed as dangerous as his temperature. His medical man, Dr. Legare, began to come over every other day on the ferry.

  Matters came to a head one horrible night when Simion woke, hearing gagging coughs from Lincoln’s bedroom on one side of him and, out front, Bond Foster harnessing the ponies. Simion saw Bond heave himself up hastily onto the box, then the trap moved out of the yard and down the sandy road leading to the dock. He was out of bed in an instant and opened Lincoln’s door without asking permission.

  Lincoln, fully present for the first time in days, glowered over the bedside bucket into which he’d been spitting plugs of pestilent slime and of himself. “Take yourself back where you belong, dammit! I’ve told you—”

  “The deuce I will! You’re alone on an island, with your man rowing to the mainland for Legare, and you want me to leave you alone to bleed to death? Here. Drink some ice water. And lie back and be still. That’s a bad position.”

  Lincoln let himself be hauled up, too depleted to resist being touched. His forearms were fishbelly-white; how could such a heat radiate up from such pallor? Simion put a cold wet rag on his head and gave him a fresh towel to spit into.

  “Don’t look in the bucket,” Lincoln rasped. “You’ll just puke and add a touch of fresh hell to all this.”

  “I won’t look, then, but I’m staying with you.”

  Lincoln sighed and submitted—ominous. For the next three hours they waited, Lincoln with shut eyes and grim mouth enduring his familiar pain, Simion scrutinizing each blot on the towel for the bright skeins of arterial blood. He did what the medical textbooks he’d read that term at college advised, doling out cold water and a couple of drops of laudanum every hour on the hour and putting the chilled cloths on the pulse points. He must have pressed at least a quart and a half of ice water on Lincoln during those three hours, but Lincoln didn’t have to piss. The fever took it all. The lamplight enclosed them against the night, a small lonely planet of pain.

  When Legare arrived in the blue dawn, he almost threw Simion out bodily, so angry was he at this reckless exposure. Legare was a fat man, but quick on his feet, and he had Simion by the nightshirt collar before one could say, “Oliver Twist.”

  “Out, goddamn it, you scapegrace, d’you want to get what you’ve just seen! And wash! Put some white spirit on those paws!”

  “I wanted him to stay out,” whispered Lincoln. “It’s the first time he hasn’t obeyed me.”

  The door slammed in Simion’s face. He got the alcohol and bathed his hands, as he’d done many times these last few days. Now his hands were winter-dry from it; it stung. His bare feet were chilled. There being nothing else to do, he took himself back to bed; he didn’t want to hear the disgusting, pitiful sounds from behind that c
losed door. With his hands over his ears, he conjured Doriskos’s image as forcefully as he’d ever done, to tuck his head under the phantom’s chin, listen to its powerful heartbeat, and be rocked to sleep. When he woke in the late morning, it was with both startlement and anger, as if intruded upon in some private activity. Legare was standing over him. He fixed Legare with a mean silver glare and did not say good morning.

  “That was excellent,” Legare told him conciliatingly. “You did everything I could have done. You brought him out of it as far as anyone can bring him at this stage of the game. How did you know what to do?”

  “Medical textbooks at college,” said Simion, minutely mollified.

  “Well, it was admirable. At unacceptable danger to yourself, but admirable. He’s asleep now. If you’ve read medical texts, you can guess for yourself that things must go downhill now.”

  “Looks to me like they’ve been downhill some while. Can’t you do anything?” Simion wished he could get Moses Karseth here—he had the irrational conviction that there was, somewhere, known to somebody, something that could be done.

  “Nothing except control the pain. It’s doom from the first. Since the age of seven or eight, your friend hasn’t had a chance. He’s been carrying his death since his childhood. And you’re the sort of person who catches this thing, I should know. You must leave the island at the first possibility.”

  “Why should I be the sort of person who catches it?” Simion argued. “You don’t even know me.”

  “Because you are, that’s all. Each physical type carries its own risks. A fleshy man like myself will go with complaint of the heart, especially if he’s a choleric, nervous sort, and a thin slip like yourself, given half a chance, will take the consumption. We all have to die, but we don’t have to take damn fool unnecessary risks. It would have been fine for you to visit during one of Mr. Lincoln’s good periods, but that’s not what this has turned out to be, is it? Mr. Lincoln and I talked about it before he dropped off, and my prescription for you is that you leave as soon as the arrangements can be made. You won’t make your friend unhappy in this extremity by acting the little mule, I’m sure.”