Looking for Marco Polo

by Alan Armstrong

  Your son, Mark

  4

  THE WHEEZING SICKNESS

  Maybe it was the long trip without sleep. Maybe he got it wandering in the cold damp of Venice. Whatever it was, that night it got him. Mark woke up coughing. He couldn’t get his breath. He banged on his mother’s door.

  “Mom, I can’t breathe,” he wheezed. “It feels like somebody’s standing on my chest.”

  His mother felt his head and listened to his chest. They tried the usual remedies—breathing over a sink of steaming hot water, rubbing Vicks on his chest and neck. Nothing helped.

  She went to the office and roused the night clerk.

  Mark’s door was open.

  “He’s sick!” she said. “My boy is sick. Get a doctor, please! Quickly, a doctor! He’s having trouble breathing.”

  Her voice had scare in it. The way she sounded made Mark scared.

  “You want … you want a doctor to come here, to this place, Madam?” the clerk stammered. “No, you must go to the hospital. It is best, the hospital.”

  “Look! He’s in no condition to go outside and ride in a boat,” she snapped. “I want a doctor to come here.”

  “The hospital is close, Madam,” the clerk pleaded. “I summon the rescue boat.”

  “The hotel does not have a doctor on call?”

  “No, Signora.”

  She hurried back to Mark’s bedside with her notebook and mobile phone. “I’m calling an army doctor here, an old friend of Dad’s. They were in the Gulf War together. Let’s see if he’ll come.”

  Mark was struggling to suck in air. It sounded like there was a whistle trapped in his chest.

  The phone rang for a long time. She was about to quit when the doctor answered. “Doctor Hornaday, this is Marian, Marian Hearn. Listen, I’m sorry to bother you so late, but I’m here with our son, and he’s having an asthma attack. He’s coughing—can’t get his breath.

  “No. The clerk says we should go to the hospital, but … You’ll come? Oh, wonderful, Doc. Thank you!”

  Mark was sitting up in bed, head to knees, hacking and panting, when the buzzer sounded.

  His mother left his door open when she went to the reception area to greet the doctor. Mark could see into the hallway.

  It took a long time, but at last the doctor appeared, out of breath from climbing the sixty-eight steps.

  Mark’s mother held out both hands in greeting. “Thanks for coming!”

  Dr. Hornaday was a tall black man with a tightly clipped mustache. His forehead gleamed. Mist had caught on his dark felt hat and in his eyebrows. His eyebrows were thick and gray like pads of steel wool.

  “It’s been a long time. Good to see you,” he said in a deep voice as he unwrapped his red wool scarf and tapped his hat against his coat to get the water off. His hair was like his eyebrows. He carried a scuffed black doctor’s case.

  Behind him limped a large black long-haired dog. His head came to the doctor’s waist. His coat was matted and wet. He shook himself hard, making his chain collar and tags clank like somebody emptying a box of silverware into a drawer.

  The dog’s big shake sent drops flying. Fluffed up, he looked huge. His paws were the size of Mark’s hands. When he walked, his claws clicked on the floor. He was panting from the climb, his long wet tongue gleaming bluish black over his big white teeth.

  Mark’s mother was surprised to see the dog. The night clerk was terrified. His mouth went wide like a clown’s as he flapped his arms wildly to wave the animal away.

  “Fuori! Fuori! Outside! Outside! None permesso! We do not allow dogs!” he squealed, hurrying behind his desk. “It is not permitted!”

  The dog smiled, woofed hello, and wagged. The swipe of his wag cleared the brochures and tourist ads off the side table.

  “I’m sorry, Signore,” the doctor replied as he stooped to pick up the wet brochures, “but this is no ordinary dog—he’s my buddy. I can’t travel the dark alleys of Venice at night without Boss. He’s my eyes, my map, and my protection. He’s not dangerous unless provoked. But then, of course … Well, I’m sure you understand.”

  “Come mai!” the clerk exclaimed, throwing up his hands and scuttling back to his sleeping closet. He slammed the door and locked it.

  Mark had never had a dog. He couldn’t take his eyes off Boss. The dog stared back as he shuffled and shifted beside the doctor and finally sat down to scratch. Adding to the clanking of his collar and tags was the thump-thump-thump as his scratch paw hit the floor. Mark was sure he could feel the beats. He figured the dog weighed more than he did, one hundred pounds at least. Boss’s ears were black triangles, cocked up and shifting, following everything as he looked around. They were silky-looking, delicate, sea-shell pink inside.

  Mark was so busy staring he forgot about coughing.

  Boss lurched up and shuffled noisily into his room. He put his big blunt muzzle on the bed. Without thinking, Mark put out his hand. The dog laid his head on it. The boy started, but he left his hand where it was. The dog’s head was warm and comforting.

  “Huh,” said the doctor, following his dog. “I never saw him do that before.”

  “He’s allergic to most animals!” Mark’s mother said warily.

  “We’ll see,” said the doctor, turning to Mark. “Hello. I’m Doctor Hornaday.”

  The doctor’s eyes were large and calm. Mark nodded and tried to say hello back, but a cough ripped through him.

  “Call me Doc,” said the man with a smile. “Take off your top so I can listen to your breathing.”

  He wore a black turtleneck under a tweed jacket. His pants were dark corduroys. A stethoscope hung around his neck. He took a pressed white handkerchief from his breast pocket, shook it open, and wiped his face. Then he pulled on thin rubber gloves. They made his hands look as if they’d been dipped in milk.

  “You afraid of what I’ve got?” Mark coughed.

  “No,” said the doctor gravely. “I do this to make you afraid of what I’ve got.”

  “You can’t make me afraid!” Mark said.

  Hornaday smiled. “I’m glad. I didn’t think I could.”

  Boss thumped his tail. It was as long as Mark’s arm and twice as big around. Mark caught a whiff of his warm, wet dog smell. It was a good, comfortable smell, strong like a horse. The dog was watching everything.

  Dr. Hornaday bent down, pressing the warm stethoscope to Mark’s chest. He smelled of damp wool and soap. His hands were warm. They trembled a little.

  “Okay. Open wide and stick out your tongue so I can check your throat.” He used a flat wooden stick to hold Mark’s tongue down as he aimed a small flashlight at the back of his throat.

  “How does it look?” Mark asked when Hornaday finished.

  “Okay. No sign of infection. Now lie back and make yourself comfortable while I take your temperature and check your blood pressure. Keep this in your mouth until the bell rings,” he said as he handed Mark the thermometer.

  He wrapped a pad tight around Mark’s upper arm and began squeezing the bulb pump.

  “What’s my temperature?” Mark asked when Hornaday took out the thermometer.

  “Normal. Looks to me like your Mom’s right. You’ve got what the Greeks called the wheezing sickness: asthma. You’ve had it before?”

  Mark nodded. “Yeah, but never this bad.”

  Hornaday smiled. “We’ll take care of it. I’m going to give you some medicine to open things up. It may make you see things, but you know, people have discovered important things in their visions.”

  Boss caught Mark’s eye and blinked slowly.

  Doc turned to Mark’s mother. “Any medicines he should avoid?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Good,” said the doctor. “So it would be all right if I put him on a machine to start him on some things to calm down his breathing tubes?”

  “Yes,” she answered in a small voice.

  “Okay with you?” he asked Mark.

  “Yeah,” he said, pa
nting.

  Mark’s mother watched, hands to her cheeks, as the doctor opened his case. It was like a toolbox with compartments for different-sized tapes and bandages, medicines, scissors, needles. He lifted out splints and wraps, then a small white box with a clear plastic tube. He plugged in the box, pulled the cap off the tube, and attached a soft cup with silver scales and black dot eyes that made it look like a fish head.

  Hornaday poured in medicine and turned it on. It started whirring. When a white mist came out, he handed Mark the cup. “I know it looks a little silly, but push the fish head to your nose and mouth and breathe in. The mist will open things up. Try it for a few minutes, then we’ll see how you do on your own.”

  Mark was breathing better by the time the mist stopped and the doctor pulled off the mask.

  Mark’s mother yawned widely. Too late, she tried to cover her mouth.

  “The medicine’s going to make him wakeful for a while,” Doc said. “Boss and I will stay with him until he goes to sleep. Go back to bed. He’ll be all right.”

  Boss looked up and seemed to smile.

  “I should stay,” she said.

  “Your boy will be all right,” the doctor said again.

  “You sure?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Hornaday in a firm voice that made Mark sure too.

  “We’ll talk,” the doctor continued. “Mark will tell us what he wants to do in Venice. Maybe we can give him some tips. Boss and I have gone all over these hundred islands.”

  Boss growled a two-beat noise that sounded like “Uh-huh!”

  5

  THE SCHOOL OF THE STREET

  The medicine made Mark’s heart pound. He was breathing easier, but he felt jumpy.

  Hornaday bent over to listen to his chest again.

  “Can I listen too?” the boy asked.

  The doctor handed him the stethoscope and waited while he fit the black plugs into his ears. When Mark nodded, Hornaday began moving the other end slowly over his chest.

  Mark’s mouth formed an O of surprise. “It sounds like a storm in there. It’s really bad, huh?”

  “No,” said the doctor, “just some stuff we’re going to clear up.”

  Hornaday stood and blew out hard, as if he were blowing up a balloon.

  “You try doing that. Make it hard to blow the air out; you’ll force more oxygen into your lungs.”

  Mark tried. The doctor nodded and clapped slowly as he puffed like Mark.

  “Good. Do it to a count: in two-three-four, out two-three-four. Keep time beating against the bed. Concentrate on your breathing; it’ll take your mind off everything else. Get more air; you won’t feel so bad. It’s a kind of hypnosis.”

  Hornaday bent down and reached for his overcoat.

  Mark stopped counting. “Hey!” he said, coughing. “You said you’d stay.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Hornaday replied, pulling an orange from the coat pocket. He began to peel it. His fingers were long and slender, the color of walnut. A sharp orange smell filled the room. He handed Mark a section.

  “Persians called oranges apples of Paradise. Some people think it’s the fruit Eve offered Adam. They’re good medicine.”

  As the boy chewed and swallowed, his throat cleared a little. “How do you know what Persians called oranges?” he asked.

  “I once asked an old man in the bazaar for an apple of Paradise,” the doctor replied. “He handed me an orange.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Keep breathing to the count and I’ll tell you,” said the doctor as he lifted Mark’s backpack off the chair and sat down.

  “It was at Tabriz, in Iran—what they used to call Persia. I was with your dad there. When I was a boy, I heard about this young Venetian who went to China on the Road of Silk—‘the road of all roads’—five thousand miles from the Mediterranean to China’s Yellow River. A thousand years before Christ, rats, fireworks, oranges, silk, salt, slaves, and pepper were moving westward along that road.”

  Mark’s eyes widened. “Rats?” he asked.

  “Rats, umbrellas, noodles, hissing cockroaches, ideas, walnuts, opium, gunpowder, and a whole lot more.

  “I found myself on it,” Hornaday continued. “I saw men in headscarves, women in the black hijab that covered their faces. I ate figs and dates and grilled goat; I heard camel bells and drivers’ calls and smelled the animals and the dung fires at night. The stars looked the way Marco Polo had described them.”

  Mark sat up so suddenly he started coughing again. “Dad gave me his book,” he wheezed. “He’s on the desert where Marco was on his trip. We haven’t heard from him for a long time. We came here to find him. He’s living with the herders, writing about them.”

  “Your father always was a brave man,” said Hornaday, gently pushing Mark down. “But take it easy. You don’t want to get started hacking again.”

  Mark lay back. He was excited. He wondered how much Doc knew about the place where his dad was.

  “What’s so special about Marco Polo?” the doctor asked. “There were merchants and monks who went to the East before he did. They left reports, but nobody reads them. Why do we read Marco?”

  The dog turned to watch Mark’s face as if he was following the conversation.

  “I don’t know,” Mark said, “but he sounds like he’s the first one, like he’s going into outer space. But Dad told me about some guy who tried to follow Polo’s route from his book and got lost. Did Marco tell the truth?”

  Hornaday nodded. “I’m pretty sure he went to Mongolia and China, and later to India. His last adventure is as full of truth as anything I’ve ever read—his coming-home story.”

  Mark nodded. “Mom and I went to where his house was,” he said. “I went through the arch they walked under. That’s all that’s left.”

  Hornaday got up and took a spoon and a bottle of red liquid from his case. He shook the bottle and poured. “Swallow,” he said, aiming the spoon.

  “Argh!” the boy sputtered, spitting and making a face. “That’s awful—like something you’d put in a car.”

  “Right,” said Hornaday. “Pipe cleaner. Label says it’s cherry-flavored.”

  “Don’t believe it.”

  Doc shrugged. “Probably no worse than what the medicine man gave Marco when he got sick in the mountains.”

  “I haven’t got to that part,” Mark said. He looked hard at the doctor. “Can you tell me about Marco Polo?”

  “Nobody knows much,” Hornaday replied as he sat down again. “We know what’s in his book, but beyond that? We don’t even know what he looked like.”

  “I’ve seen pictures,” Mark said. “The museum—”

  The doctor cut him off. “Venice is full of Marco pictures—paintings and drawings, sculptures too—all done after he was dead. They didn’t think much of him when he was alive, so they didn’t paint and sculpt him like they did the priests and politicians we don’t hear about anymore. Was he fair or dark? By some accounts, he had African blood, so maybe he looked like me. More than anything, though, I’d like to know who made him so curious about the East.”

  “Maybe his teacher at school?” Mark ventured. “Or his father and mother?”

  Boss grew more and more restless, rattling his collar, sneezing, snorting, making a sort of humming noise.

  “Does he need to go out?” Mark asked.

  “Him? No,” said Hornaday, reaching down and rubbing the dog’s head. “Marco talk always gets him stirred up.”

  “How come?”

  “He’s got a family connection to Marco Polo’s dog,” the doctor explained.

  Mark looked at Boss.

  The dog grunted deeply.

  “It wasn’t Marco’s parents that taught him about the East,” Doc said. “His mother died soon after he was born, and his father left on a trading trip before he was three. Marco didn’t see him again until he was fifteen. It must have been somebody else.”

  “Who then?” Mark asked.


  “Nobody knows for sure. You’ll just have to imagine it.”

  “You can’t imagine history!” Mark exclaimed. “That’s for stories.”

  “Really? Why?” the doctor asked. “History is stories. It comes from what the historian imagines. He soaks up everything he can and then imagines what happened. I bet if you pretend you’re on your own like Marco was, you’ll learn a lot,” said Hornaday.

  Boss thumped his tail.

  “My dad’s on his own like Marco,” Mark said slowly. “Right now the people who sent him can’t find him because the water dried up where he was supposed to be and he had to go somewhere else.

  “Can you tell me about Marco’s father?” Mark asked.

  “He was a trader,” the doctor began, “off with his brother on the Silk Road, swaying at the caravan’s pace on one of the strands that ran to China and back, loaded down with the goods they’d taken on at Venice, poking their noses out like hungry squirrels, venturing farther and farther east to get the best price.

  “They got caught between warring tribes. They were surrounded by a horde of horse warriors dressed in black.”