Benighted

by Kit Whitfield

  “Yes, you see, that’s why I’m wondering. Most of my colleagues are involved in DORLA law somehow, and—well, if I took this course, I’m wondering about confidentiality. I’m not sure how it would be received.”

  “Confidentiality goes without saying.” He sounds almost emphatic in defense of his profession. “Cases like this are entirely personal. It’s a matter of individual choice, and there’s no question of revealing the patient’s decision.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. If you make a decision about your child’s future, of course you have the right to keep it to yourself.”

  “I’m not sure they’d consider it a decision I had a right to make.”

  “Of course you do. No one else does.”

  Becca sits quiet in the corner. Leo snuffles in her arms.

  “You think it’s my decision, then?”

  “Of course I do.” He looks almost pleased at the opportunity to expound. “Medicine has come such a long way since the days of those laws you were worrying about, Ms. Galley. We can do so many things now that would have been unimaginable even twenty, thirty years ago. Patients have every right to take advantage of the new techniques available.”

  “What’s the point of discovering something new if people don’t get to use it?” I ask the question quietly. Behind me, I hear Becca shift Leo on her lap.

  “Exactly.” A smile lights up Parkinson’s face. I’ve said something he believes in.

  “Even if it’s not really ethical?”

  “Excuse me?” The smile goes, he looks at me in perplexity.

  “I mean, surely you don’t have to do something just because you can?”

  “You should give the patient all possible options, Ms. Galley.” He’s frowning at me now, his eyes twitch toward his watch.

  “Do you, though?” I say. Becca shifts in her seat, I hear the rub of fabric against leather. She never liked arguments.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It just seems to me unlikely that you’d get agreement from many DORLA members. Do you think so? I’m just concerned that it’s the patient’s decision.”

  “I’m sorry, how does this affect your condition?” Authority rises in his voice, years of making decisions.

  “I just wondered how often…The thing is, I just wanted to know. I know what a bareback would think of it, what most barebacks would think of it. That’s why I doubt you always consult your patients, I mean, beyond a few oblique soundings-out they might not recognize for what they are. I just wondered—” I almost say “what a man like you,” but I don’t, I say, “I just wondered what you think makes it acceptable. Injuring babies at birth. Turning them into…” I spread my hands wide, almost in a shrug, the white thick scar on my forearm upwards, “well, into this.”

  “Ms. Galley—” He stands up.

  “Johnny Marcos,” I say.

  He stops. “What did you say?”

  I look blank-faced. I keep looking at him. “You couldn’t know what life is like with this disability. You’re an intelligent man, though, you must be able to think about it.”

  He sits back into his chair, slow, not looking away from me, not answering.

  “It’s really a bad life,” I say. My voice betrays me, it shakes for a moment, and I curl my fingers up tight, covering my soft palms. “You know about the miscarriage I had, I told you about that. That was from a lune attacking me. And the thing is, nobody was surprised. It was generally agreed that I got off easier than I might have.”

  Leo whimpers in the corner, and Becca shushes him. I don’t turn and look at her, but I hear her voice, tight as a stretched rope.

  “We can’t afford psychiatrists,” I say. “But we suffer just about every abuse in the system, one way or another. And there aren’t any compensations.”

  His hands rest on the desk. The fingers are curled, as if relaxed, but tendons stand out at the knuckles, and I see he’s holding them in that position, stiff like spiders.

  “You’ve probably heard this before,” I say. “You do remember Johnny Marcos, don’t you?”

  He doesn’t move.

  “Are you thinking about that?” I ask. “All this time you thought I was a patient?”

  “What do you want?” he says. It’s the voice of a man talking to a blackmailer, a mugger.

  “I want you to keep your hands where I can see them, to begin with.”

  “May…”

  I glance over my shoulder, and hear my voice going soft. “If you want to wait in the lobby, that’s okay. He’s seen you, he knows you know I’m here.”

  Becca looks at me, then at Parkinson, and shakes her head. Her face is pale and her arms are tight around her son, but she stays in her chair.

  “It’s all right,” I tell Parkinson. “In the way you’re thinking, it’s all right. I’m not here to blackmail you, or arrest you. That’s not my department. I’m not going to get between the mills of DORLA and you.” He thought he was safe. I can see it in his face, no one’s mentioned Johnny Marcos to him before this moment. Maybe they’ll come for him one day, quietly, in secret; maybe they won’t. If they do, the day they do, will I get to hear about it?

  He looks up at me, and I see his face draw itself tight. He looks like a younger man, steady and calm. “I don’t think you could if you wanted to.” I raise my eyebrows. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. What is it you want, Ms. Galley?”

  “I want to know why you did it.”

  He looks at me, and suddenly he’s older again, old enough to be my father, old enough to be beyond my reach. “I can’t say I know what you’re talking about. Why did I do what?”

  I smile at him, just for a moment, then I calm my face. “I’m not asking why you killed Johnny.” He blinks, a short static twitch, as if his eyes weren’t connected to the rest of his face. “I don’t suppose I could get that out of you. Maybe if I arrested you, put you down in our cells, ran an interrogation over you, but I don’t think that’s really my thing anymore. Anyway, I can make a guess. You panicked, both of you. Johnny had a gun, he threatened you. When you spend your life hunting lunes and taking pressure from lycos all day, it’s easy to feel they’d all tear your throat out given a chance. But you weren’t to know that. You don’t deal with us after we’ve grown up. Maybe you really thought he’d kill you.” He’s looking at me, his eyes blue and clean, the whites bright enough to break your heart. “Probably that’s what you think now, anyway. If he hadn’t known something that could ruin you, would you really have thought he was so dangerous? You could think about that, sometimes, you know, when you’re waiting for a train and haven’t anything else to do.”

  “Is that a suggestion?” he says. “Or just a thought you had while waiting for your own train?”

  I shrug, spreading my hands, bare palms and scarred wrist open to his gaze. “Humor me.”

  He looks at me for a long second. “What is it you want?”

  “I want you to know you’re going to hell,” I hear myself say.

  He glances at my throat, sees the St. Giles medal hanging there. Not a crucifix, something says inside my head. I’m no real Christian, just a woman making the Aegidians her own faith. A wrathful God frowns before my face for speaking so utterly beyond my rights.

  It’s almost reassured him, though. He didn’t hear a warning against his soul, he heard a hysterical woman preaching at him.

  “I’ll worry about my own soul, thank you,” he says. He isn’t comfortable, but he isn’t really afraid of me.

  “I’d like to hear your justification.”

  “For my work?”

  “Yes.” I nod, almost polite. “Please.”

  “My work is practiced with the consent of your own order.” He looks at my pale hands. “Has it occurred to you that one reason people with your disability experience so much discrimination is because you are so few? Most people have very little contact with you. Anmorphic people work all day for DORLA, they socialize among themselves, they don’t meet the rest of th
e population very much unless they arrest them. A few thousand more members could make all the difference for you. If you want to keep the curfew system going—and personally I can’t think of a better alternative.”

  I sit quiet, listening to him. Becca sits behind me, rocking Leo to and fro.

  “Then there’s the other reason for your unpopularity, of course. You’re known, infamous for your treatment of prisoners. I don’t believe you can be sitting there with no blood on your hands, Ms. Galley, not for a second. It seems to me that with more of you, you might be less inclined to resort to such primitive methods. I’m concerned for your victims, you know, most people are. It would be a great humanitarian advance to improve DORLA’s resources. For you, as well as anyone else. Look at you. You’re”—he glances down, looks at a file on his desk—“twenty-eight years old, and already you have white hairs. I don’t say this to hurt your feelings, but you could pass for ten years older than you are without a question.” It’s not aggressive, it’s assessing, a doctor’s opinion. “I’m sure you’d appreciate more help in your life.”

  I turn around, look at Leo for a moment. He doesn’t want to be sitting on Becca’s lap; he’s decided he’s old enough for the floor. He arches his back and churns his legs, willful and determined and vitally concerned with his own wishes. “I’d appreciate more financial resources,” I say. “Not more children, not like this.”

  “You don’t like your life, I see. But I do believe that if you were more numerous, it wouldn’t be so difficult for you.”

  “Don’t tell me this is for our benefit. You talk as if it was DORLA’s suggestion. I know it wasn’t. Someone came to DORLA and suggested it.”

  “How would DORLA suggest it? You don’t request a medical treatment if you don’t know it’s available. They needed to be made aware of the possibility.”

  “But why would you come up with it? How? How could you do experiments to find out if it was possible?”

  Parkinson sighs. “They weren’t begun ethically, certainly. Prisoner-of-war camps, for the most part, or political prisoners in countries even less civilized than our own. Experiments that tended to fail.” Fail and take the mother and child into the dark with them. I’ve heard those stories. “It began as an academic exercise, really. A tremendous challenge. Think of it: no other species experiences metamorphosis at the rate we humans do, transformation from one state to another and back again. It’s truly a miraculous process. Brilliant men have studied it for a lifetime and still don’t know all there is to know. It’s miraculous, and it’s tremendously fragile. A few adverse conditions for a few minutes at the moment of birth, and it’s destroyed forever. If we could just understand those conditions, we’d be so much closer to understanding our own nature. And we’re doing it, we’re closer now, far closer than we would have believed twenty years ago. Such a difficult process, and we’re mastering it. How many medical techniques can you think of that only affect humans, that can’t be tested on animals at all because there simply isn’t anything comparable in the animal experience?”

  “You’re using research tested on humans, aren’t you?”

  “Discarding a valuable medical discovery for the sake of some dead sufferers who are beyond help is not an ethical practice. Ask any doctor, they’ll tell you the same thing.”

  “You’re talking as if this—this thing you can do to children is for their own good.” It’s Becca talking. Both of us turn. Parkinson’s face is surprised, as if I’d brought a dog in and it had decided to voice its own opinion, and heat floods up my arms from fingertips to chest as I see my sister, her voice a little hesitant, speak my thoughts ahead of me, of her own free will declare herself against this glossy room and the articulate man within it.

  He doesn’t address her. He turns back to me. “For the greater good. As for the individuals—well, they manage. You manage, I’m sure you could tell me hundreds of examples of individuals coping perfectly well with this”—he raises his hand, held stiff like an oar—“minor disability.”

  “Oh, yes,” I say. “This is how we cope.” I reach into my bag and pull out a sheaf of photographs. I lay them on the table before him, one after the other, like a card dealer.

  The flattened silver bullet the pathologist took out of Nate’s broken skull.

  A crime scene photograph, an empty cell after a lune mauled a catcher. Blood pools on the ground, gels around the straw, smears up and down the tiled walls. It’s an old picture. There’s no one in the cell. This is how it would have looked, the night Johnny brought Ellaway to the shelter.

  Paul. He stands, looking away from the camera as if ashamed. Bruises layer his chest, black and purple, cracked skin laces around his ribs. They all took pictures, the day they were released: Sarah was thinking of suing. They didn’t, of course. Paul’s head is averted. There’s a window to his side with the sun pouring through in a cold winter blaze. His eyes are creased against the unaccustomed light.

  Parkinson looks at the pictures. “What are you trying to prove, Ms. Galley? Is this supposed to disturb me? I am a doctor, I’m not unused to the sight of blood.”

  I laugh, I actually laugh. “Oh, I know you’re not.” I lay out more pictures.

  Nate on the slab. “Seligmann did this,” I say. “The man you let out onto the streets to take our eyes off you.”

  Another picture. David, his arm destroyed. “And Seligmann’s friend. Who you wouldn’t treat. I can’t believe he didn’t ask you to steal antiallergens for him. You helped Seligmann escape and hid him so he’d get rid of the evidence for you. But you wouldn’t take that risk for another man.”

  “Do you expect me to dignify that with an answer?”

  “No,” I say, “I don’t.” I lay out my last two pictures.

  Johnny stands with his family. Debbie stands holding her mother’s free hand, her face clean and cheerful, full of the prospect of a new baby. A little gawky, but sweet as only a child who hasn’t learned her body yet can be. Julio slouches against his father, trying to look cool, and Peter stands beside him, leaning on his shoulder. Sue’s pregnancy doesn’t show much yet, there’s just a little rounding of her stomach, but you can see it, because Johnny has looped his arms around her and is holding it, his hands cradling his unborn child. He’s grinning, his jowls crease all over with the smile on his face.

  The second picture comes from the mortuary. Johnny lies on a slab. His head rests at the wrong angle, the great hollow at the back of it pulling it off balance. Pieces of his face are missing.

  Parkinson looks at the pictures, looks up at me.

  “I don’t like your theory of the greater good,” I say. “The price is too high.”

  And I reach into my bag again.

  He opens his mouth again, but when he sees the gun, he closes it. His hand edges toward the telephone, and I reach out and take hold of it, put it gently back where I can see it. He feels warm, damp, his touch comes off on my skin.

  “May, what are you doing?” Becca’s on her feet, her arms tight around Leo.

  “It’s okay, Becca.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “This won’t take a minute.” She starts toward me, but I flinch, just for a second, and she stops. “I’m sorry about this, really I am, but this won’t take a minute.”

  Parkinson sits with his hands where I can see them.

  “I don’t think you did it out of public spirit,” I say. “You’re no hero of medicine. I think maybe you did it for the money, and because you could. That’s what I think. Mostly, you did it because you could. Because it didn’t really touch you. That isn’t so anymore.”

  Parkinson twitches; one hand jumps on the desk.

  “Don’t try to grab the gun off me. You did that once before, remember? Not again.”

  “You’ll go to jail for life if you shoot.” His voice is shaking, his face pale. The gloss is gone, the life he’s lived, the security and authority and success that his safe birth bought him. All the nourished, healthy blood has dr
ained out of it, and I see it, I see the face that Johnny saw.

  “I took a life sentence at birth,” I say, and draw back the catch.

  “May, don’t.” Becca is hoarse, whispering with fear.

  I look at the face of the murderer, and pull the trigger.

  Parkinson gives a small, hoarse cry, and Becca gasps. The click of the empty chamber is the quietest thing in the room.

  I look at him for a second more, then put the gun back in my bag. “You thought I’d do it.” I shake my head. “I’m not you. I wouldn’t do that.”

  Leo starts to cry; the pressure of his mother’s arms is crushing him. Becca is shivering, the sound of her panting rises over her son’s tears. I sweep up the pictures and walk over to her. “Here, let me take him.” She looks at me, tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, and she shakes her head. It isn’t a rejection. She presses a hand to her forehead and passes Leo over to me. Over his head, I look at Parkinson.

  “You’ll…” he says.

  “Nothing will happen to me. The gun comes from DORLA. I didn’t even have to steal it: I went straight into Weapons, spoke to the man at the desk. I told him I didn’t need ammo, and he didn’t even bother signing it out. I’ll return it tonight, and no one will ask.” Maybe some discipline will be handed down, I might lose my pay raise or have to be yelled at. It doesn’t mean a thing. “You can tell them about this, the day they come for you,” I say.

  Leo is still crying in my arms. I rest his wet cheek against mine, cupping his head, still looking at Parkinson. His face has flooded red, bright under his graying hair, and I see him again, not the face of a murderer, but just a man, an aging man who thought for a few moments that death was coming sooner than he was prepared for. I smile at him, shake my whitening hair out of my eyes. “Now you know,” I say. “That’s how it feels on the other side.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  The day Marty comes back to work, I haven’t much time to talk to him. I’m going one way down the corridor, my arms full of papers, he’s going the other. His throat is wrapped in scars, and when we stop to talk, his voice is thinner than before, but his eyes are clear and he carries himself well, all six foot one of him is straight and balanced. It’s an unusual look in DORLA, and it takes a moment to figure out what it is. He looks rested.