“If only to keep the patients alive,” he muttered. His voice had softened as we progressed into the complex, and now I had to lean close to him to understand. After the second checkpoint, when we put our masks on, I had to ask him to speak up.
We put on isolation suits and latex gloves. We stood outside some glassed-in rooms, watching people drink coffee and read newspapers, as they sat on plain, institutional couches. “Obesity,” whispered Steve, which surprised me. No one in the room seemed particularly overweight.
“These are carriers,” he hissed, angry for some reason. “They aren’t necessarily infected. Besides, their diet is strictly controlled.”
Later, we found ourselves outside again, under the hot sun. I stared into a large enclosure like the rhinoceros exhibit at the Audubon zoo. A ditch protected us, and in the distance I could see some tar-paper shacks and rotted-out cars. “Poor people,” mumbled Steve through his mask. “Chronic poverty.” children were playing in the dirt outside one of the shacks. They were scratching at the ground with sticks.
Again, I don’t want to drag this out. I want to move on to the parts that are most painful to me. Now it hurts me to imagine what a terrible place Carville was, to imagine myself walking numbly through. That is a disease as well. In those days, in Louisiana, we were all numb, and we touched things with our deadened hands.
But for me, there was a pain of wakening, as when blood comes to a sleeping limb. Because I was pretending to be a reporter, I asked Steve a lot of questions. Even though as time went on I hoped he wouldn’t answer, but he did. “I thought this was a research facility,” I said. “Where are the labs?”
“That section is classified. This is the public part. We get a lot of important guests.”
We were standing outside a high, wrought-iron fence. I peered at Steve through my mask, trying to see his eyes. Why had he brought me here? Did he have some private reason? I stood in the stifling heat with my gloved hands on the bars of the fence, and then Steve wasn’t there. He was called away somewhere and left me alone. I stood looking into a small enclosure, a clipped green lawn and a gazebo. But it was dark there too. Maybe there were tall trees, or a mass of shrubbery. I remember peering through the bars, wondering if the cage was empty. I inspected a small placard near my eye. “Curtis Garr,” it said. “Sodom-ite.”
And then suddenly he was there on the other side of the fence. He was a tall man in his mid-fifties, well-dressed in a dark suit, leaning on a cane. He was very thin, with a famished, bony face, and a wave of gray hair that curled back over his ears. And I noticed that he also was wearing gloves, gray leather gloves.
He stood opposite me for a long time. His thin lips were smiling. But his eyes, which were gray and very large, showed the intensity of any caged beast.
I stood staring at him, my hands on the bars. He smiled. Carefully and slowly, he reached out his gloved forefinger and touched me on my wrist, in a gap between my isolation suit and latex hand.
Then as Steve came up, he gave a jaunty wave and walked away.
Steve nodded. “Curtis is priceless,” he muttered behind my ear. “We think he might be the last one left in the entire state. We had two others, but they died.”
* * *
Last of all, Steve took me back to his air-conditioned office. “We must get together for lunch,” he said. “Next time I’m in the city.”
Now I can wonder about the Father Damien story he had told me at the Fairmont. I can wonder if in some way he was talking about himself. But at the time I smiled and nodded, for I was anxious to be gone.
I didn’t tell Steve the man had touched me. Nor did I tell the doctors who examined me before I was released. But driving back to New Orleans, I found myself examining the skin over my left wrist. Soon it was hot and red from rubbing at it. Once I even stopped the car to look. But I didn’t tell Melissa, either, when I got home.
She wouldn’t have sympathized. She was furious enough at what she called my “Jesuit liberalism,” when I confessed where I had been. I hated when she talked like that. She had been born a Catholic like me and Steve, but her parents had converted after the church split with Rome. As she might have explained it, since the differences between American Catholic and New Baptist were mostly social, why not have the courage to do whatever it took to get ahead? No, that’s not fair—she was a true believer. At twenty-eight, she was already a full professor of Creationist biology.
“What if somebody had seen you? What if you had caught something?” she demanded as I rubbed my wrist. I was sitting next to the fireplace, and she stood next to the window with the afternoon light in her hair. All the time she lectured me, I was thinking how much I wanted to make love to her, to push her down and push my penis into her right there on the Doshmelti carpet—“I don’t know how you can take such risks,” she said. “Or I do know: It’s because you don’t really believe in any of it. No matter what the proofs, no matter how many times we duplicate the Watanabe results, you just don’t accept them.”
I sat there fingering my wrist. To tell the truth, there were parts of the doctrine of ethical contagion that no educated person believed. Melissa herself didn’t believe in half of it. But she had to pretend that she believed it, and maybe it was the pretense that made it true.
I didn’t want to interrupt her when she was just getting started. “Damn those Jesuits,” she said. “Damn them. They ruined you, Jim. You’ll never amount to anything, not in Louisiana. Why don’t you just go on up to Massachusetts, or someplace where you’d feel at home?”
I loved it when she yelled. Her hair, her eyes. She loved it too. She was like an actress in a play. The fact is, she never would have married one of those Baptist boys, sickly and small and half-poisoned with saltpeter. No matter how much she told her students about the lechery vaccines, no matter how many times she showed her slides of spirochetes attacking the brain, still it was too late for her and me, and she knew it.
The more she yelled at me, the hotter she got. After a while, we went at it like animals.
* * *
Two months later, I heard from Steve again. I remember it was in the fall, one of those cool, crisp, blue New Orleans days that seem to come out of nowhere. I had been fired from the paper, and I was standing in my vegetable garden looking out toward the park when I heard the phone ring. I thought it was Melissa, calling back to apologize. She had gone up to Washington, which had been the capital of the Union in the old days, before the states had taken back their rights. She was at an academic conference, and lonely for home. Already that morning she had called me to describe a reception she had been to the night before. When she traveled out of Louisiana, she always had a taste for the unusual—“They have black people here!” she said. “Not just servants; I mean at the conference. And the band! There was a trombone player, you have no idea. Such grace, such raw sexuality.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear about that,” I said.
She was silent for a moment, and she’d apologized. “I guess I’m a little upset,” she confessed.
“Why?”
“I don’t like it here. No one takes us seriously. People are very rude, as if we were to blame. But we’re not the only ones”—she told me about a Dr. Wu from Boise who had given a paper the previous night on Christian genetics. “He showed slides of what he called ‘criminal’ DNA with all the sins marked on them. As if God had molded them that way. ‘With tiny fingers,’ as he put it.”
I wasn’t sure what the New Baptists would say about this. And I didn’t want to make a mistake. “That sounds plausible,” I murmured, finally.
“You would think that. Plausible and dangerous. It’s an argument that leads straight back to Catholicism and original sin. That’s fine for you—you want to be guilty when everybody else has been redeemed. But it completely contradicts Fargas and Watanabe, for one thing. Either the soul is uncontaminated at birth or else it isn’t. If it isn’t, all our immunization research is worthless. What’s the point of pretendi
ng we can be healed, either by Christ or by science? That’s what I said during the Q&A. Everybody hissed and booed, but then I found myself supported by a Jewish gentleman from New York. He said we could not ignore environmental factors, which is not quite a New Baptist point of view the way he expressed it, but what can you expect? He was an old reactionary, but his heart was in the right place. And such a spokesman for his race! Such intelligence and clarity!”
That was the last time I spoke to Melissa, my wife. I wish we had talked about another subject, so that now in California, when I go over her words in my mind, I might not be distracted by these academic arguments. Distracted by my anger, and the guilt that we all shared. I didn’t want to hear about the Jewish man. So many Jews had died during the quarantine—I can say that now. But at the time, I thought Melissa was teasing me and trying to make me jealous. “That’s the one good thing about you getting yourself canned,” she said as she hung up. “I always know where to find you.”
Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t answered the phone when it rang again a few minutes later. I almost didn’t. I sulked in the garden, listening to it, but then at the last moment I went in and picked it up.
But maybe nothing would have been different. Maybe the infection had already spread too far. There was a red spot on my wrist where I’d been rubbing it. I noticed it again as I picked up the phone.
“Jimmy, is that you?” Steve’s voice was harsh and confused, and the connection was bad. In the background was a rhythmic banging noise. Melissa, in Washington, had sounded clearer.
After Steve was finished, I went out and stood in my vegetable garden again, in the bright, clean sun. Over in the park, a family was sitting by the pond having a picnic. A little girl in a blue dress stood up and clapped her hands.
What public sacrifice is too great, I thought, to keep that girl free from contamination? Or maybe it’s just now, looking back, that I allow myself a thought. Maybe at the time I just stared numbly over the fence, and then went in and drank a Coke. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I got in the car and drove north.
Over the past months, I had looked for stories about Carville in the news. And Melissa had told me some of the gossip—there were differences of opinion in Baton Rouge. Some of the senators wanted the hospital kept open, as a showpiece for foreign visitors. But Barbara Rasmussen wanted the patients shipped to a labor camp outside of Shreveport, near the Arkansas border. It was a place both Steve and I had heard of.
Over the phone he’d said, “It’s murder,”—a painful word. Then he’d told me where to meet him. He’d mentioned a time. But I knew I’d be late, because of the slow way I was driving. I wasn’t sure I wanted to help him. So I took a leisurely, roundabout route, and crossed the river near the ruins of Hahnville. I drove up old Route 18 past Vacherie. It was deserted country there, rising swamps and burned-out towns, and endless cemeteries full of rows of painted wooden markers. Some had names on them, but mostly just numbers.
I passed some old Negroes working in a field.
Once I drove up onto the levee, and sat staring at the great river next to a crude, concrete statue of Christ the Healer. The metal bones of His fingers protruded from His crumbling hands. Then over the Sunshine Bridge, and it was early evening.
I first met them on River Road near Belle-Helene plantation, as they were coming back from Carville. There was a patchy mist out of the swamp. I drove slowly, and from time to time I had to wipe the condensation from the inside of my windshield.
In the middle of the smudged circle I had made with my handkerchief, I saw the glimmer of their Coleman lanterns. The oak trees hung over the car. I pulled over to the grass and turned off the ignition. I rolled down my window and listened to the car tick and cool. Soon they came walking down the middle of the road, their spare, pinched faces, their white, buttoned-up shirts stained dirty from the cinders. One or two wore masks over their mouth and nose. Some wore civil-defense armbands. Some carried books, others hammers and wrecking bars.
The most terrifying thing about those New Baptist mobs was their sobriety, their politeness. There was no swagger to them, no drunken truculence. They came out of the fog in orderly rows. There was no laughter or shouting. Most of the men walked by me without even looking my way. But then four or five of them came over and stood by the window.
“Excuse me, sir,” said one. He took off his gimme cap and wiped the moisture from his bald forehead. “You from around here?”
“I’m from the Times-Picayune. I was headed up to Carville.”
“Well,” said another, shaking his head. “Nothing to see.”
“The road’s blocked,” offered a third. He had rubber gloves on, and his voice was soft and high. “But right here you can get onto the Interstate. You just passed it. Route 73 from Geismar. It will take you straight back to the city.”
Some more men had come over to stand next to me along the driver’s side. One of them stooped to peer inside. Now he tapped the roof lightly over my head, and I could hear his fingernails on the smooth plastic.
“I think I’d like to take a look,” I said. “Even so.”
He smiled, and then looked serious. “You a Catholic, sir? I guess New Orleans is a Catholic town.”
I sat for a moment, and then rolled up the window. “Thank you,” I murmured through the glass. Then I turned on the ignition, and pulled the car around in a tight semicircle. Darkness had come. I put on my headlights, which snatched at the men’s legs as I turned around. Illuminated in red whenever I hit the brakes, the New Baptists stood together in the middle of the road, and I watched them in my rearview mirror. One waved.
Then I drove slowly through the crowd again until I found the connecting road. It led away from the river through a few small, neon-lit stores. Pickup trucks were parked there. I recognized the bar Steve had mentioned, and I slowed up when I passed it. I was too late. From Geismar on, the road was deserted.
Close to I-10 it ran through the cypress swamps, and there was no one. Full dark now, and gusts of fog. I drove slowly until I saw a man walking by the side of the road. I speeded up to pass him, and in my high beams I caught a glimpse of his furious, thin face as he looked over his shoulder. It was Curtis Garr.
* * *
I wish I could tell you how I left him there, trudging on the gravel shoulder. I wish I could tell you how I sped away until the sodomite was swallowed up in the darkness and the fog, how I sped home and found my wife there, unexpectedly waiting. The conference might have let out early. She might have decided to surprise me.
These thoughts are painful to me, and it’s not because I can never go back. My friend Rob tells me the borders are full of holes, at least for white people. Passports and medical papers are easy to forge. He spends a lot of time at gun shows and survivalist meetings, where I suppose they talk about these things.
But I left because I had to. Because I changed, and Curtis Garr changed me. Now in California, in the desert night, I still can’t forgive him, partly because I took such a terrible revenge. If he’s dead or in prison now, God damn him. He broke my life apart, and maybe it was fragile and ready to break. Maybe I was contaminated already, and that’s why I stopped in the middle of the road, and backed up, and let him into my car. Melissa’s car.
He got into the backseat without a word. But he was angry. As soon as we started driving again, he spoke. “Where were you? I waited at that bar for over an hour.”
“I thought I was meeting Steve.”
“Yes—he told me. He described your car.”
I looked at him in the rearview mirror. His clothes were still immaculate, his dark suit. He was a fierce, thin, handsome man.
“Where are you going?”
He said nothing, but just stared on ahead through the windshield. I wondered if he recognized me. If he felt something in me calling out to him, he didn’t show it. At Carville, I’d been wearing a mask over my nose and mouth.
But I wanted to ask him about
Steve. “You’re Curtis Garr,” I said.
Then he looked at me in the mirror, his fierce eyes. “Don’t be afraid,” I said, though he seemed anything but frightened.
“I thought I was meeting Steve,” I said after an empty pause. “He didn’t say anything about you.”
“Maybe he didn’t think you would come.” And then: “We had to change our plans after Rasmussen’s goons showed up. Don’t worry about Steve. You’ll see him later. No one on the staff was hurt.”
Garr’s voice was low and harsh. I drove with my left hand. From time to time I scratched the skin over my left wrist.
Soon we came up to the Interstate. The green sign hung flapping. I-10 was a dangerous road, and ordinarily I wouldn’t have taken it. Most of the way it was built on crumbling pontoons over the swamp. In some places the guardrail was down, and there were holes in the pavement. But it bypassed all the towns.
Curtis Garr rolled down his window. There was no one on the road. In time we felt a cool draft off the lake.
Once past the airport, we could go faster, because the road was carefully maintained from Kenner to the bridge. The city lights were comforting and bright. We took the Annunciation exit and drove up St. Charles, the great old houses full of prosperous, happy folk.
In more than an hour, Garr and I had not exchanged a word. But I felt a terrible tension in my stomach, and my wrist itched and ached. I kept thinking the man would tell me where to drop him off. I hoped he would. But he said nothing as I drove down Calhoun toward Magazine, toward Melissa’s house on Exposition Boulevard.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection Page 36