Wickett's Remedy

by Myla Goldberg

  “Would you shut up about it already?” George growled. “There ain’t nothing we can do about it so what’s the use? We asked for this mess. You think they would’ve called on graybacks if it was gonna be fun and games? We ain’t worth nothing—that’s why we’re here. And the sooner you get that into your skull the better off you’ll be!”

  There was a knock on the quarantine door. “Is there a problem in there?” came the voice of an escort.

  “Everything’s fine,” she tried to assure him.

  “If those fellows are giving you a hard time—”

  “No, no,” she insisted. “We were just having a conversation.”

  “Don’t make me come in there,” the voice threatened before footsteps were heard walking away.

  “How are you boys feeling today?” she asked. She wanted to apologize for everything: for the gaps in her knowledge, for the escort’s rough voice, for the locked door and the closed windows and the helplessness that inhabited quarantine with them. She wanted to give each man a pair of proper trousers and a decent shirt. She wanted to stand them all for a pint at O’Reilly’s. She wanted to dance with Frank again, somewhere no one would give them a second glance.

  After he left Gallups, Sergeant at Arms Calvin DiBrosio loved to describe his courageous acts of heroism that morning—which certainly would have transpired if only the nurse had let him inside the ward.

  “We’re all right,” Frank answered, their eyes briefly meeting. “At least for now, anyway. Ain’t that right, fellas?”

  As far as Lydia could tell, Frank’s assessment was correct. No one appeared feverish, which meant she needed only to serve breakfast to consider her responsibilities met. “You’re all really quite brave,” she said.

  “We ain’t brave,” George said quietly. “Just desperate.”

  She distributed ten trays and without another word left the room.

  She treated the rest of the day as a contrivance in which she was a small cog. She filled her mind with the clicks of a cog; she moved with the steadiness of a cog, traveling her designated circuit in Dr. Gold’s machine. Percy only slept now, if sleeping was what she could call his closed-eyed struggle for breath. She was attending his bedside toward afternoon’s end when his face contorted as if he was bearing a heavy weight and his eyes opened. When he saw that she was with him, his breathing accelerated, his chest sounding as if it was taking in some curdled version of air. She realized he was trying to speak.

  “No, Percy,” she murmured. “You mustn’t exert yourself. Is there something I can get you? Water? A new compress?”

  Percy shook his head and then gestured with his fingers.

  “You want to get something for me?” she asked. Percy nodded. She wondered how high his fever had climbed.

  Percy pointed to her again, and then to himself. With his finger he traced a line from his left shoulder to his breastbone, repeated the gesture on his right side, and then drew a line from his breastbone to his stomach. Then he pointed at her again. When she did not respond, he reenacted the procedure. It looked as if he was tracing a giant Y.

  “I’m sorry, Percy,” she whispered, “but I don’t know what you’re asking for.”

  Percy shook his head, repeated the strange pattern once more, and then smiled.

  Lydia smoothed his forehead. She wondered who he thought she was. “I’m afraid whatever it is will have to wait,” she murmured. He closed his eyes. Every few minutes she refreshed his compress because his fever demanded it and because this slight comfort was all that remained to offer him. At her shift’s end, when Nurse Foley stood outside the curtain and Lydia could not stay with him any longer, she dipped her hand into the bowl of cool water and pressed her palm to his temple. “Good-bye Percy,” she whispered. She rose and approached the bed curtain. She gazed at Percy one last time, then passed to the other side.

  Lydia was eating dinner when Dr. Peterson entered the dining hall and did not take his seat. Every head in the room turned as though attached to a single string held in Petersons hand. Everyone knew what he was there to say.

  “I have some sad news,” he began, and the room exhaled. The doctor gave details but Lydia did not listen. The details did not matter. She stared at her plate, shocked by the anger that had bloomed inside her. Their presence on Gallups was absurd. They ought never to have come. When she looked up from her plate, Dr. Peterson had finished speaking and was walking toward her table. Killington and Warner turned toward him, certain his approach was meant for them, but she knew, somehow, that he had come for her.

  Bertram is outraged that after commandeering Percival Cole’s care, Joe left it to him to inform the others of the young man’s death.

  “Hello, Wickett,” Dr. Peterson said.

  “He went quickly,” she replied.

  “He was an incredibly promising young man. His death is a terrible blow.” There was a pause, during which the doctor stared at her as though trying to peer under her skin. “Even in the depths of sickness,” he resumed, “Percival’s thoughts were of research and the advancement of knowledge.” He paused again. “To that end,” he finally continued, “he wished to invite you to his autopsy.”

  Lydia stared at Peterson. To her surprise she found him blushing.

  “I am extending this invitation solely out of respect for Percival Cole’s wishes,” he blustered. “I ought to tell you I don’t think this at all appropriate.” He shook his head. “Some sights were not meant for—”

  “I’ll come,” she said.

  Percy Cole is pleased to have eventually learned, among Us, of Miss Wickett’s acceptance of his invitation.

  Peterson’s voice was firm. “I’d be happy to provide you a chance to see him one last time under—better circumstances.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Lydia answered. “I would like to come regardless.”

  “I assure you,” Peterson tried one last time. “You will not cheapen Percival’s invitation by choosing differently.”

  “When is the autopsy to take place?” she persisted, her mouth dry. She had seen corpses before. More importantly, Percy thought she could do it.

  “An hour from now, in the lab.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Peterson.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” he pronounced, his voice gentle. “You will likely find you prefer to remember Percy differently.”

  Only after Peterson’s exit did Lydia appreciate the table’s silence. Warner looked like he might speak, but she left the dining hall before he had the chance.

  Dr. Peterson points out that Wickett’s recall of the morgue has been affected by her subsequent traumatization there. The morgue was quite large, with several modest windows and deep green counters.

  Lydia had been inside the morgue only once before, during Nurse Foley’s cursory tour of the hospital. It was a cramped, windowless room lined with black counters. Percy’s draped form lay on a marble slab at the room’s center. Dr. Gold and Dr. Peterson stood beside the body, attired in surgical caps, gowns, and gloves. The rest of the medical staff ranged in a semicircle just beyond arm’s reach. The room was too small for so many people. Only once she joined the periphery of the semicircle did Lydia realize she was the only woman. Cynthia Foley’s absence felt like both a victory and a warning.

  “If any of you should begin feeling uncomfortable,” Dr. Peterson cautioned as if addressing the group, though looking only at Lydia, “I ask that you leave quickly and quietly by the door so as not to disrupt these proceedings. I now defer to Dr. Gold.”

  Towering over the draped figure, Dr. Gold resembled an Old Testament Abraham who had heeded too late God’s call to spare his son. “Percival Cole was a friend and colleague,” he began in a subdued voice. “His desire that his death not be in vain is shared by us all. We are honored and grateful to have this opportunity to so honor his wishes. Hic locus et in hora mortis nostrae.”

  “Hic locus et in hora mortis nostrae,” a few of the interns repeated.

  Dr. Gold th
inks it only proper to secularize Lydia’s ecclesiastical Latin. He and the interns pronounced the words: Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae—This is the place where death rejoices to teach those who live.

  “In the necropsy of Acting Assistant Surgeon Percival Cole,” Gold continued, “I, Surgeon Joseph Gold, Ph.D., will serve as prosector and Surgeon Bertram Peterson shall be my diener.”

  The silence that filled the room had the sanctity and weight of the nave. The covered marble slab at the room’s center had become its own pulpit, the half dozen medical personnel its congregation, and Dr. Gold their surpliced cleric. That Lydia felt more intruder than member of this uncommon sacrarium was due to the glances sent her way by the rest of the flock.

  Cecil Worth, for one, was quite unhappy to see Lydia in attendance: he had wagered a modest sum that she would lack the nerve to come.

  The instruments on the tray between Gold and Peterson glinted silver under the electric lights. A pair of scissors, a large pair of tweezers, and what looked like a long, sharp bread knife with a narrow blade were frighteningly banal: it seemed profane to employ such everyday objects for such a grim purpose. The others—like the handsaw and what resembled a large pair of clawed pliers for pulling a tooth from a mouth of terrible proportions—were disturbingly singular.

  Lydia’s attention was diverted from the tools by the rustle of cloth as Dr. Gold pulled the sheet away from the slab. Percival Cole’s body had not been permitted to lie flat. An object had been placed beneath his torso, so that his chest protruded upward while his neck and arms fell back in a morbid swan dive. The body had lost its natural color to become a waxy blue-gray; someone had fashioned a loincloth from a towel, a gesture of modesty for which Lydia was thankful.

  Corpses, in Lydia’s previous experience, had been clothed in pajamas or hospital gowns. This, to her mind, was their natural state. Clothed, a body still pretended at belonging to the world it had abandoned. Until viewing Percy, Lydia had not realized the degree to which the hospital gowns of Carney’s corpses had softened the bluntness of death. A corpse was a dead animal. They were all nothing more than animals, bloated by vanity into wearing clothes and ascribing lofty purposes to their actions, when in reality they all died the same dumb death that awaited any overworked nag—limbs stiff, features frozen in a rictus of shock and pain. Percy did not look like he was sleeping. His mouth gaped; his eyes bulged. Lydia did not imagine he might raise himself from that marble slab to reassure her once again with a gentle hand on her shoulder. His corpse resembled a waxwork crafted by a clever candlemaker.

  “External examination reveals the body to be tinged a shade of heliotrope consistent with cyanosis. There are several raised purple blisters ranging in diameter from one-sixteenth to one-eighth of an inch about the chest and neck.”

  As Gold spoke, the interns took notes while Peterson stood ready, the instruments waiting beside him. Lydia began to wish she had not come.

  “We will now proceed to the opening of the trunk,” Gold pronounced with a confusing mixture of solemnity and detachment, making it difficult to determine whether he viewed the corpse before him as a former colleague, or a specimen, or something impossibly in between. Dr. Peterson reached for a large scalpel with a flat, wide blade and—before Lydia fully realized what was happening—sliced into Percy’s chest. The sight launched a gut-level alarm through her body, but she did not want to be seen turning away. Instead she stared just below the level of the slab, though that did not erase what she had already seen. Peterson had cut a deep, Y-shaped incision into Percy Cole. He had incised the left shoulder to the breastbone and then repeated the procedure on Percy’s right side with only slightly more effort than was required to slice through a roast pig. The tail of the Y was longer than the one Percy had traced for her, a cut that ran down past the navel, dividing Percy’s torso into three unequal portions.

  The room took on the faint butchery smell she associated with the meat market on Dorchester, a smell previously linked to Sunday dinner. She kept her gaze averted. She had not noticed before that Percy wore a ring, but there it was—a silver band encircling his dangling pinky finger. Then came a liquid plash as a thin stream of pinkish water drained from a hole in the slab to a bucket below. She heard the clink of metal; Peterson had obtained a new instrument from the tray. Next came a crunch, similar to that of a tree bough breaking but moister and duller. Then it came again. Another clink of metal, then a pause, and then the scalpel hit the floor with a purely musical sound, like a triangle being struck from an orchestra’s back row. Several people gasped. Somewhere to her left, a low voice beside her murmured, “My God.”

  “With the removal of the sternum,” came Dr. Gold’s voice, now slow and strained, as if hands gripped his windpipe, “we can observe the lungs, which are extraordinarily swollen and discolored.” The silence of the room had electrified. “In thirty years in this profession I have never seen anything like this.” She stared at her feet; she would die staring at her feet if that was what it took to avoid seeing what had made Dr. Gold sound like a frightened old man.

  “Percy never had a chance,” someone near her groaned. “The poor fellow drowned inside his own skin.” Her throat constricted and the air around her felt warm.

  Another instrument was removed from the tray. The air smelled more strongly of meat now and she thought of the dinner she had just eaten. Sour saliva filled her mouth. She forced the sour taste back down. Her feet had become fixed to the floor.

  “The left lung is uncharacteristically heavy,” Dr. Gold murmured. She watched Gold’s legs move as if underwater from the slab to a nearby counter. In the silence of the room it was possible to hear him placing something on the metal tray of a scale. Then, speaking almost to himself, Gold said, “That can’t be.” His voice wavered. “Seven hundred grams. It’s all fluid.” There was another pause before Gold’s voice returned, as small as a child’s. “This must be some new kind of infection—”

  Something solid hit the floor with a heavy thunk. Though she knew the body on the slab had not moved, in her mind’s eye Percy was now standing, his chest dangling open, a dark space where his left lung had been.

  “Get some ammonia from the cabinet,” a voice commanded.

  “He’s coming to,” said another.

  “You all right, Cecil?” asked a third.

  As she turned her head toward the voices she caught a glimpse of Percy’s dangling hand. In place of fingers she now saw five test tubes filled with red fluid, one of which was encircled by a silver ring.

  Joe?

  Who is it?

  I waited in my room but you didn’t come.

  It’s useless.

  You did everything you could. I know it, the men know it, and Percy knew it.

  You didn’t see him. You didn’t see his lungs.

  I’m so sorry, Joe.

  I was going to give him so much.

  It’s a loss.

  It’s a goddamn travesty. To think what he could have become.

  We’re doing important work, Joe.

  No one thought I would find enough volunteers, but I did. And I was honest with them. They knew what they were getting into.

  We all knew the risks.

  And at Harvard—the kids were falling over each other to work with me. Dr. Joseph Gold, defeater of yellow fever and typhus. Dr. Joseph Gold, who can’t transmit flu to a single goddamn Navy deserter but kills off his best assistant surgeon.

  Shh. Let’s go to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.

  Don’t touch me.

  It’s all right, Joe. I know you’re upset.

  You don’t get it, do you? Every study I do, I can find someone like you. But not someone like Percy.

  Joe—

  Get out of my room.

  Joe, please—

  Get out of my goddamn room.

  FAILS TO FIND INFLUENZA CURE

  Joint Board Endorses None of the Vaccines at Present in Use

  A joint boa
rd of medical scientists and statisticians appointed by the state board of health to inquire into the prophylactic and therapeutic qualities of several vaccines which have been made to fight the so-called Spanish influenza germ has submitted the following report, which does not make a definite finding as to any one vaccine, but generalizes in its conclusion:

  “1—The evidence at hand affords no trustworthy basis for regarding prophylactic vaccination against influenza as of value in preventing the spread of the disease or of reducing its severity.

  “2—The evidence at hand convinces the board that the vaccines we have considered have no specific value in the treatment of influenza.

  “3—There is evidence that no unfavorable results have followed the use of the vaccines.”

  Hello? Ladies Relief Society. I’m leaving soup and bread by your door. Are you well enough to retrieve it?

  Are you a nurse?

  I’m afraid not.

  We’re five of us, all ill. Can’t you fetch us a nurse?

  A member of the Red Cross Motor Corps will be coming when she can. In the meantime, keep your windows open and drink lots of water. Have you any—has anyone gone to their final rest?

  My youngest.

  Is she—still with you?

  Yes. Yes she is. It’s been two days now but the undertaker hasn’t come.

  If you can manage it, you ought to try to bring her to the street tomorrow morning. There will be a wagon—