The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “Get him out of here,” Moses said, gesturing toward Doriskos when he next noticed him. “I need to concentrate, and he bothers me.”

  Helmut led Doriskos into the kitchen, sat him down in one of the chairs, and measured out the sedative and a glass of water to chase it. Doriskos let himself be dosed willingly enough. It was painful to look too closely at him in this extremity, this mute stupor of fear, so Helmut found himself something to do. He plunged into the cold-pantry to retrieve the bones of this week’s chicken to make soup. He wondered if he’d ever seen anyone look so tired, so tenuously poised on the breaking edge. The hands of the kitchen clock ticked off a progress toward dawn. Helmut went back to the surgery several times to see if Moses needed anything. Simion was still breathing.

  “I think he’s better,” Helmut told Doriskos. “I think he’s holding his own.”

  It was a while before Doriskos responded, as if he had to struggle his way up from deep waters, but it was then that he finally spoke.

  “I…didn’t…” he said. Whispered, really. And sounded as if he’d cried for a week.

  “Of course you didn’t,” said Helmut, whom Moses might have slapped for the indignant compassion of his tone in that moment, had he heard. “But maybe you could tell me a bit of whatever it was that did happen…that would help.” He came closer and, seeing that he was not flinched from, sat on the arm of the chair. “You can trust me, and I’ll see that you can trust Moses. We’re safe for you, do you take my meaning?” A reassurance about which Moses would have thrown a scene of operatic dimensions, but never mind that.

  Doriskos took a skitty look into Helmut’s eyes and seized onto the only safety within his grasp for miles around, the only person who would believe the truth if he told it. So, in a whisper, he told the story that had led up to the two hard slaps. And when he had told it all, he laid his head down on his arm and wept, utterly unstrung and exhausted crying. Helmut felt afraid to touch him much, as if it might upset him more, but he stroked his hair and spoke to him in the low, murmurous way that soothes a scared child.

  And while comforting him, Helmut discovered his infected wrist, put his experienced hand to his brow, and estimated a temperature of one hundred and one or two degrees. After all these years with Karseth, Helmut knew perfectly well what to do with such things, so he got a deep bowl of hot water, stirred in a handful of salt, and made Doriskos put his hand in to soak. The red crescent of the wound was hot and full with the yellow mess of suppuration. A bite inflicted in good earnest, in desperate self-defense, thought Helmut. He could not even imagine such a scene between this man and boy so obviously, defenselessly, two-hundred-percent enchanted with one another. Something had gone wrong beyond all prediction and imagination.

  Even more oddly, when Helmut got to the nasty business of cleaning the wound, Doriskos paid no attention to the pain if he felt it. Finally Helmut got the mess cleaned out and well soaked in peroxide. There was no reaction, when he applied the iodine, to pain that would have caused a man in a normal state to levitate, and none when he poulticed and bandaged the wound. Next, since the valerian alone had not put him to sleep, Helmut produced a tisane of chamomile, passiflora, and willow bark for the headache he would probably have had if he were in any shape to feel his own pain. “You are tired, and I’m putting you to bed now,” he told him. As if Doriskos were a very large and confused child, he led him upstairs to his own room and made him lie on the sofa there. As he covered him, Doriskos murmured something about not having slept for a week—he would never sleep—and then the drugs finally kicked in. He was out cold, a single tear seeping wearily from the outer canthus of each eye. He had the expression of a despised child, fresh from a whipping.

  A few minutes later, sheepishly, Moses called to Helmut and asked him if he would carry Simion upstairs. “He’s so little. I might hurt him. On my buttons, or something. Let’s put him in your room, it’s warmest there.” He shifted the slight body gingerly into Helmut’s arms.

  “How he’s shrunk,” thought Helmut. It was as if he’d starved himself back into childhood. Helmut remembered him in the flourishing health of late spring, sitting on the top of Gray Matter’s stall and pulling off his black riding helmet. He’d shaken his head a little, wanting the cool air to finger through to his scalp, and wiped his forehead with the heel of his hand in a gesture purely boyish. A little glimpse of what had almost been, a foreshadowing of strength gained and consolidated, and now he’d been reduced to worse than waifhood. He was as easy to carry as a load of dry sheets. One was sharply aware of his every breath, the debilitated workings of his lungs.

  Moses built the biggest fire he dared in Helmut’s fireplace. Every hot-water bottle and soapstone boot dryer and warming pan in the house was anchored around Simion’s chilled body. Trying to get him out of the remainder of his clothes, Moses found he couldn’t manage it, and Helmut took over as he had in their younger days when, after undressing many a screaming baby to examine it, Moses couldn’t stuff it back into its little garments. The devastation of the boy’s body, shrunken and loose within its dehydrated skin, made them cringe. Moses looked away while Helmut took out one of his heavy nightshirts and got Simion into it, then put a load of blankets and down quilts over him.

  Simion’s face was utterly blank, as faces get when the person within no longer dreams. Moses was very glad that Simion had remained unconscious while he cleaned out his infected burns and bandaged them, but now it was important to bring him out of this state. He tilted another half-spoonful of honey into Simion’s mouth and rubbed his throat to make him swallow. He could not resist getting Helmut’s comb and working the tangles out of Simion’s hair. After a few minutes’ slow and careful work, it lay straight and smooth on the pillow. He had thought before that it was the most beautiful hair he had ever seen, almost too pretty to be real, and that it must be like satin to the hand. It had served its wearer very ill, as if there were truth in those legends wherein a flaxen mane gained a peasant the hand of an evil prince or the lust of a demon lover. Moses ran his palm under the toneless fingers of Simion’s left hand and thought: If I get you over this, I will see that you’re safe, as a child should be. You won’t have to earn your living like this again. If I get you over this, I’ll go the extra mile to get you truly well, so you can compete with people who enjoy proper health. The race is to the swift and the prize to the strong, as you and I well know. You can take your place with the swift and the strong. If I get you over this…

  “Doriskos hasn’t done what you think he did,” said Helmut.

  “I’ll believe that when I hear it from this one. Will you look at him—I’ve seen healthier-looking people on the slab at the morgue. And actually filthy, like a little street Arab. Look at those nails.”

  “The same thing with Doriskos, too. Most out of character. If he doesn’t think of it himself, I’ll put him in the tub tomorrow, and wash his hair while I’m at it. He needs a bath in the worst way.”

  “There are lots of things that he needs,” said Moses darkly. “And, speaking of needs, deuce take all, there are things I need, and it’s hours before I can get at anyone at Apothecaries Hall. Hell,” spat Moses, noticing the prostrate Doriskos. “Why’d you put him on the sofa in here?”

  “Because he needs to be watched, so I didn’t put him downstairs, and I figured you’d have a shattering tantrum if I had him lie down in your room,” said Helmut reasonably.

  “That’s true,” admitted Karseth. “What did he say?” This with a squeamish sidewise gesture toward Doriskos.

  “Enough for me to write a novel, but I won’t tell you unless you promise not to yell and wake him up. I gave him enough of that valerian to sedate a stableful of stallions before he went off. You won’t have a seizure if I tell you?”

  “I won’t make extravagant promises about self-restraint where Doriskos is concerned, but I’ll make an effort. What in hell?”

  Helmut took a cautious look at Doriskos. He bent to Moses’s ear and whispered.
Moses, listening to Simion’s pulse with his trained fingertips, attended. He looked back and forth among Simion’s face, Doriskos’s, and Helmut’s. Periodically, he aired a few nice East End curses—indignant, consternated, a stranger in the psychic realm of such a story. Disgust and fascination passed over his face. When he’d heard the end of it, at once contemptuous and shaken, he pronounced: “A raving lunatic! I always knew it! That’s a little boy there, not some wench he’s married and whom you’d expect him to beat like a carpet for getting hot petticoats—doesn’t the ass know the difference! He’s demented, and I’m going to have him confined, I swear to God!”

  “You’re an atheist, so your oaths to God don’t count, and no, you won’t do any such thing,” Helmut said. Against this night’s events, the familiar feints and cadences of their bickering steadied them, almost soothed them. Already they both had a clear sense of the state of siege they had entered. “However angry you are,” said Helmut, “you’re going to have to be careful and gentle with Doriskos. You don’t understand everything afoot in this situation, and you have two patients here.”

  “You, I suppose, in your usual subtlety, understand the whole of it?”

  “I understand that there’s more to it than meets my eye,” said Helmut. “Understanding that you don’t know everything is the cornerstone of all understanding. But I think in this case most particularly. And I want you not to barge in ahead of the angels.”

  In the morning, with Simion still as immobile as a statue of a little dead saint, Moses laid the cards out on the table before Doriskos. He had posted himself in a hard chair by the side of the bed and kept his left hand lightly round Simion’s wrist, monitoring his pulse. Even deliriously tired as he was, Doriskos came awake at the doctor’s tone, the cold, hard core of conviction behind it.

  “Very well, my man, here it is. We have here a very sick boy with a brushfire cachexia of unknown cause—you know what a cachexia is?—that means starving to death, right down to the bone!—and some infected burns, and a heart murmur that wasn’t there as of September. A heart murmur, as I’m sure you don’t know, is a perilous thing. With a patient who just has a little one, I can usually afford to say that it probably doesn’t mean much and that he can carry on, so long as he uses ordinary good sense and takes moderate care. But this boy’s developed a pronounced one, rheumatic probably, and I can’t tell what the damage will be, or how much it’ll hamper and hobble him in his life. I do know he’s in abysmal shape; he could go into pneumonia or pleurisy any minute. If he were a papist, I’d get him a priest.” Moses looked at Doriskos, who had not answered him and was breathing through his mouth, as if he were about to cry, or was simply scared to the brink of hysteria. He had not taken his eyes from Simion’s face in all the time Moses had been speaking to him. In his mind’s eye, Moses saw this large man lowering his dark bulk over his patient’s frail body; in the pit of his stomach, he felt a hot and horrid writhing sensation, a fanged anger. And this anger had to do with more than the stark fact of sex, or disparate ages, or the danger of alliances between student and teacher; it had to do with poverty and other powerful affinities between Moses and his patient, and it was a potent and inflammatory emotion.

  “Look at me, Klionarios, damn you. I’m talking to you, not to the wall. Even though, perhaps, I might as well be. Why couldn’t you find yourself some appropriate toy, some stupid little swish who paints or writes verses?” Moses demanded. “God blast your eyes, why couldn’t you play with Peter Geoffrey, who’d accept your use and abuse with squeals of ecstasy? Why this one? This one’s potential is…infinite! He could grow up to be a genius of a scientist, a Newton or Kepler! He’s a virtuoso mathematician already, with a memory the likes of which I’ve never seen! Even if he hadn’t come to such harm, being your male mistress would make of him nothing but a wicked and dangerous plaything, and I’m not going to stand by and see it. But you’re not going to take a mathematical genius and make him into an effeminate little male cocotte, and that’s my last word on it! Well,” said Moses, noting Doriskos’s drowning look, “haven’t you anything to say at all?”

  “I…” faltered Doriskos. “I, no, I can’t…”

  “You disgust me. And someday soon, you’ll find out how much.”

  “How is…has he wakened? Has he spoken?”

  Ah, you would like to know about that—has he wakened to tell me what you did to him? “He’s comatose, you stupid ass. No, he hasn’t wakened, and he may not ever. I have my hands full with him now, but I’ll see to you later—I don’t know whether it’ll be jail or the lunatic asylum, but we’ve got one of each in this town, and I’ll see to your proper disposal when I get the time. In the meanwhile, since you imagine that you care for him, you could make yourself useful. I don’t dare leave him, so you can go and post my classes at the Sheff and the anatomy lab, and then take this list to Apothecaries Hall and bring these items back posthaste! Tell the clerk to put it on my bill,” he added, a final bit of contempt like a mouthful of spit.

  Simion had been in Karseth’s house nearly forty hours when he came awake, his awareness coming back to him in little drifts. The first thing that occurred to him, even before he opened his eyes, was that he was wearing someone else’s clothes, a nightshirt with nothing on under it—he never slept that way except on warm nights of high summer. Then: “I’m on my back. Why? I hate it.” He wanted to turn over but couldn’t, as if his limbs had turned to lead and sunk into a peculiarly soft mattress, and then he realized that he was in a place he didn’t know, a bed slept in by someone else; he smelled the scents of other people’s skins and another household. As if smell, the most primitive sense, was the keenest one in this extremity. He was also thirsty, a terrible and urgent thirst. His mouth and throat felt papery and sore. When he opened his eyes, he seemed in some dim amnios and was even more alarmed, recognizing the swimmy weakness of vision that meant that he was more than sick, that he was in danger. He must have made some startled, frightened cry.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” said Helmut. Simion knew him by his handclasp before he could see him. Finally he managed to focus his eyes.

  “I’m not at home,” he said, and he meant to speak at full voice, but what came out was a desiccated whisper. “I feel horrible, where am I?”

  “You’re with us, and you’re safe,” said Helmut with shaky vehemence. He sounded very upset. Simion felt the warmth of Helmut’s hands on his and wished that some of that heat would go into him instead of lingering on his surface. A chill had soaked into him down to the marrow, and he craved warmth and warmth and more warmth, the hot sea of the womb, the heat of someone else’s blood warming his.

  “I’m cold.”

  “I’ll get you some fresh hot bricks and water bottles and put some fresh coals into the warming pan,” Helmut said. He got up, out of the lamplight and Simion’s vision, and called into the hall: “Moses!”

  “Moses, get up, he’s awake!” Simion heard. “I said, he’s awake!”

  Less than a minute later, Karseth was there in his nightclothes and dressing gown. Rumpled and unshaven, up from his first sleep since Doriskos’s pounding on his door, he bent over Simion, a watch in one hand. He laid the index finger of the other over the vein in front of Simion’s right ear. “Shh,” he said. “Later we’ll talk, we most assuredly will talk, but I want to see what’s happening here.” Then he listened long and carefully to the limping but perseverant heart that had resumed beating at his insistence not so long ago. When he finished, he said to Helmut, “Amazing. Not good. But, compared with twelve hours ago, absolutely amazing. Are you thirsty, perhaps?” he asked Simion.

  Simion nodded and was promptly offered milk to suck up through a glass tube. He drank it, then asked, “What happened?”

  “Little man, I don’t know all of what happened. When you’re well enough to talk, you’ll tell me,” said Karseth. “But not now. Right now you just drink and sleep. You go back to sleep. You’re too young for the fight you’ve been f
ighting, but we have you safe. You put it all out of mind for the meantime. Rest all you can, go back to sleep.”

  But he didn’t, not immediately, interest stirring in him below the drug-fog, as they made comfort for him. Helmut adjusted the pillow to cradle his head, then moved away to fill two water bottles with warm water. He wrapped them in a couple of flannel pillowcases and tucked Simion’s hands between them. The little veins began to open and tingle in his fingertips, the feeling even came back a bit, and it wasn’t pain. Helmut pulled the quilts up to his chin and tucked him in, making a warm little world to lull his shocked body. It stopped seeming so hard to breathe. He went to sleep and said, hoped he said before he passed out, “I’m always going to remember this.”

  And things were like this for several days: a sort of undersea, vegetable life in which he woke to drink like a parched plant and tilted back into a sleep that was more like the sleep of a plant, a tortoise, or a stone than like the sleep of a sentient human. Ultimately, of course, this sea of sleep spat him up. He came to reluctantly, grudgingly—it had been the first time in his life that he could remember feeling so little, feeling so safe from the assaults of sentience.

  That evening, he and Karseth talked. That did not feel safe.

  “So. Would you like to tell me about it?”

  “About what? What’s the matter with me?”

  Karseth bit his underlip as if he were keeping a difficult rein over his temper. “A great many things are the matter with you. If I didn’t think the sight would do you harm, I’d hold a mirror over you and show you yourself. You’ve lost a vast amount of weight, none of which you could afford. When you arrived here, I could count every rib and vertebra, it made me queasy to see you out of your clothes. You were as dehydrated as a cholera victim. Would you like to tell me what happened?”