“I let my subscriptions lapse.”
“But the TV news? The radio?”
“I didn’t watch, and I don’t have a radio in the car.”
Before disappearing into the corridor to the examination rooms, she said, “That country house of yours must really be isolated.”
* * *
The ice drips from the eaves as I drive up and park beside the garage. Unless the sky deceives me there is no new weather front moving in yet; no need to protect the car from another ten centimeters of fresh snow.
Sunset comes sooner at my house among the mountains; shadows stalk across the barren yard and suck heat from my skin. The peaks are, of course, deliberate barriers blocking off light and warmth from the coastal cities. Once I personified them as friendly giants, amiable lummoxen guarding us. No more. Now they are only mountains again, the Cascade Range.
For an instant I think I see a light flash on, but it is just a quick sunset reflection on a window. The house remains dark and silent. The poet from Seattle’s been gone for three months. My coldness – her heat. I thought that transference would warm me. Instead she chilled. The note she left me in the vacant house was a sonnet about psychic frostbite.
My last eleven years have not been celibate, but sometimes they feel like it. Entropy ultimately overcomes all kinetic force.
Then I looked toward the twilight east and saw Rigel rising. Luna wouldn’t be visible for a while, so the brightest object in the sky was the exploded star. It fixed me to this spot by my car with the intensity of an aircraft landing light. The white light that shone down on me had left the supernova five hundred years before (a detail to include in the inevitable article – a graphic illustration of interstellar distances never fails to awe readers).
Tonight, watching the hundred-billion-degree baleful eye that was Rigel convulsed, I know I was awed. The cataclysm glared, brighter than any planet. I wondered whether Rigel – unlikely, I knew – had had a planetary system; whether guttering mountain ranges and boiling seas had preceded worlds frying. I wondered whether, five centuries before, intelligent beings had watched stunned as the stellar fire engulfed their skies. Had they had time to rail at the injustice? There are one hundred billion stars in our galaxy; only an estimated three stars go supernova per thousand years. Good odds: Rigel lost.
Almost hypnotized, I watched until I was abruptly rocked by the wind rising in the darkness. My fingers were stiff with cold. But as I started to enter the house I looked at the sky a final time. Terrifying Rigel, yes – but my eyes were captured by another phenomenon in the north. A spark of light burned brighter than the surrounding stars. At first I thought it was a passing aircraft, but its position remained stationary. Gradually, knowing the odds and unwilling to believe, I recognized the new supernova for what it was.
In five decades I’ve seen many things. Yet watching the sky I felt as if I were a primitive, shivering in uncured furs. My teeth chattered from more than the cold. I wanted to hide from the universe. The door to my house was unlocked, which was lucky – I couldn’t have fitted a key into the latch. Finally I stepped over the threshold. I turned on all the lights, denying the two stellar pyres burning in the sky.
* * *
My urologist turned out to be a dour black man named Sharpe who treated me, I suspected, like any of the other specimens that turned up in his laboratory. In his early thirties, he’d read several of my books. I appreciated his having absolutely no respect for his elders or for celebrities.
“You’ll give me straight answers?” I said.
“Count on it.”
He also gave me another of those damned urological fingers. When I was finally in a position to look back at him questioningly, he nodded slowly and said, “There’s a nodule.”
Then I got a series of blood tests for an enzyme called acid phosphatase. “Elevated,” Sharpe said.
Finally, at the lab, I was to get the cystoscope, a shiny metal tube which would be run up my urethra. The biopsy forceps would be inserted through it. “Jesus, you’re kidding.” Sharpe shook his head. I said, “If the biopsy shows a malignancy…”
“I can’t answer a silence.”
“Come on,” I said. “You’ve been straight until now. What are the chances of curing a malignancy?”
Sharpe had looked unhappy ever since I’d walked into his office. Now he looked unhappier. “Ain’t my department,” he said. “Depends on many factors.”
“Just give me a simple figure.”
“Maybe thirty percent. All bets are off if there’s a metastasis.” He met my eyes while he said that, then busied himself with the cystoscope. Local anesthetic or not, my penis burned like hell.
* * *
I had finally gotten through to Jackie Denton on a private line the night of the second supernova. “I thought last night was a madhouse?” she said. “You should see us now. I’ve only got a minute.”
“I just wanted to confirm what I was looking at,” I said. “I saw the damn thing actually blow.”
“You’re ahead of everybody at Gamow. We were busily focusing on Rigel –” Electronic wheeps garbled the connection. “Nick, are you still there?”
“I think somebody wants the line. Just tell me a final thing: Is it a full-fledged supernova?”
“Absolutely. As far as we can determine now, it’s a genuine Type II.”
“Sorry it couldn’t be the biggest and best of all.”
“Big enough,” she said. “It’s good enough. This time it’s only about nine light-years away. Sirius A.”
“Eight-point-seven light-years,” I said automatically. “What’s that going to mean?”
“Direct effects? Don’t know. We’re thinking about it.” It sounded as if her hand cupped the mouthpiece; then she came back on the line. “Listen, I’ve got to go. Kris is screaming for my head. Talk to you later.”
“All right,” I said. The connection broke. On the dead line I thought I heard the twenty-one-centimeter basic hydrogen hiss of the universe. Then the dial tone cut in and I hung up the receiver.
* * *
Amanda did not look at all happy. She riffled twice through what I guessed were my laboratory test results. “All right,” I said from the patient’s side of the wide walnut desk. “Tell me.”
“Mr Richmond? Nicholas Richmond?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Mrs Kurnick, with Trans-West Airways. I’m calling from Denver.”
“Yes?”
“We obtained this number from a charge slip. A ticket was issued to Lisa Richmond –”
“My wife. I’ve been expecting her sometime this weekend. Did she ask you to phone ahead?”
“Mr Richmond, that’s not it. Our manifest shows your wife boarded our Flight 903, Denver to Portland, tonight.”
“So? What’s wrong? Is she sick?”
“I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”
Silence choked me. “How bad?” The freezing began.
“Our craft went down about ten miles northwest of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The ground parties at the site say there are no survivors. I’m sorry, Mr Richmond.”
“No one?” I said. “I mean –”
“I’m truly sorry,” said Mrs Kurnick. “If there’s any change in the situation, we will be in touch immediately.”
Automatically I said, “Thank you.”
I had the impression that Mrs Kurnick wanted to say something else; but after a pause, she only said, “Good night.”
On a snowy Colorado mountainside I died.
“The biopsy was malignant,” Amanda said.
“Well,” I said. “That’s pretty bad.” She nodded. “Tell me about my alternatives.” Ragged bits of metal slammed into the mountainside like teeth.
My case was unusual only in a relative sense. Amanda told me that prostatic cancer is the penalty men pay for otherwise good health. If they avoid every other health hazard, twentieth-century men eventually get zapped by their prostates. In my case, the
problem was about twenty years early; my bad luck. Cooling metal snapped and sizzled in the snow, was silent.
Assuming that the cancer hadn’t already metastasized, there were several possibilities; but Amanda had, at this stage, little hope for either radiology or chemotherapy. She suggested a radical prostatectomy.
“I wouldn’t suggest it if you didn’t have a hell of a lot of valuable years left,” she said. “It’s not usually advised for older patients. But you’re in generally good condition; you could handle it.”
Nothing moved on the mountainside. “What all would come out?” I said.
“You already know the ramifications of ‘radical.’”
I didn’t mind so much the ligation of the spermatic tubes – I should have done that a long time before. At fifty-one I could handle sterilization with equanimity, but –
“Sexually dysfunctional?” I said. “Oh, my God.” I was aware of my voice starting to tighten. “I can’t do that.”
“You sure as hell can,” said Amanda firmly. “How long have I known you?” She answered her own question. “A long time. I know you well enough to know that what counts isn’t all tied up in your penis.”
I shook my head silently.
“Listen, damn it, cancer death is worse.”
“No,” I said stubbornly. “Maybe. Is that the whole bill?”
It wasn’t. Amanda reached my bladder’s entry on the list. It would be excised as well.
“Tubes protruding from me?” I said. “If I live, I’ll have to spend the rest of my life toting a plastic bag as a drain for my urine?”
Quietly she said, “You’re making it too melodramatic.”
“But am I right?”
After a pause, “Essentially, yes.”
And all that was the essence of it; the good news, all assuming that the carcinoma cells wouldn’t jar loose during surgery and migrate off to other organs. “No,” I said. The goddamned lousy, loathsome unfairness of it all slammed home. “Goddamn it, no. It’s my choice; I won’t live that way. If I just die, I’ll be done with it.”
“Nicholas! Cut the self-pity.”
“Don’t you think I’m entitled to some?”
“Be reasonable.”
“You’re supposed to comfort me,” I said. “Not argue. You’ve taken all those death-and-dying courses. You be reasonable.”
The muscles tightened around her mouth. “I’m giving you suggestions,” said Amanda. “You can do with them as you damned well please.” It had been years since I’d seen her angry.
We glared at each other for close to a minute. “Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She was not mollified. “Stay upset, even if it’s whining. Get angry, be furious. I’ve watched you in a deep-freeze for a decade.”
I recoiled internally. “I’ve survived. That’s enough.”
“No way. You’ve been sitting around for eleven years in suspended animation, waiting for someone to chip you free of the glacier. You’ve let people carom past, occasionally bouncing off you with no effect. Well, now it’s not someone that’s shoving you to the wall – it’s something. Are you going to lie down for it? Lisa wouldn’t have wanted that.”
“Leave her out,” I said.
“I can’t. You’re even more important to me because of her. She was my closest friend, remember?”
“Pay attention to her,” Lisa had once said. “She’s more sensible than either of us.” Lisa had known about the affair; after all, Amanda had introduced us.
“I know.” I felt disoriented; denial, resentment, numbness – the roller coaster clattered toward a final plunge.
“Nick, you’ve got a possibility for a healthy chunk of life left. I want you to have it, and if it takes using Lisa as a wedge, I will.”
“I don’t want to survive if it means crawling around as a piss-dripping cyborg eunuch.” The roller coaster teetered on the brink.
Amanda regarded me for a long moment, then said earnestly, “There’s an outside chance, a long shot. I heard from a friend there that the New Mexico Meson Physics Facility is scouting for a subject.”
I scoured my memory. “Particle-beam therapy?”
“Pions.”
“It’s chancy,” I said.
“Are you arguing?” She smiled.
I smiled too. “No.”
“Want to give it a try?”
My smile died. “I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”
“That’s encouragement enough,” said Amanda. “I’ll make some calls and see if the facility’s as interested in you as I expect you’ll be in them. Stick around home? I’ll let you know.”
“I haven’t said yes. We’ll let each other know.” I didn’t tell Amanda, but I left her office thinking only of death.
* * *
Melodramatic as it may sound, I went downtown to visit the hardware stores and look at their displays of pistols. After two hours, I tired of handling weapons. The steel seemed uniformly cold and distant.
When I returned home late that afternoon, there was a single message on my phone-answering machine:
“Nick, this is Jackie Denton. Sorry I haven’t called for a while, but you know how it’s been. I thought you’d like to know that Kris is going to have a press conference early in the week – probably Monday afternoon. I think he’s worried because he hasn’t come up with a good theory to cover the three Type II supernovas and the half dozen standard novas that have occurred in the last few weeks. But then nobody I know has. We’re all spending so much time awake nights, we’re turning into vampires. I’ll get back to you when I know the exact time of the conference. I think it must be about thirty seconds now, so I –” The tape ended.
I mused with winter bonfires in my mind as the machine rewound and reset. Three Type II supernovas? One is merely nature, I paraphrased. Two mean only coincidence. Three make a conspiracy.
Impulsively I dialed Denton’s home number; there was no answer. Then the lines to Gamow Peak were all busy. It seemed logical to me that I needed Jackie Denton for more than being my sounding board, or for merely news about the press conference. I needed an extension of her friendship. I thought I’d like to borrow the magnum pistol I knew she kept in a locked desk drawer at her observatory office. I knew I could ask her a favor. She ordinarily used the pistol to blast targets on the peak’s rocky flanks after work.
The irritating regularity of the busy signal brought me back to sanity. Just a second, I told myself. Richmond, what the hell are you proposing?
Nothing, was the answer. Not yet. Not … quite.
* * *
Later in the night, I opened the sliding glass door and disturbed the skiff of snow on the second-story deck. I shamelessly allowed myself the luxury of leaving the door partially open so that warm air would spill out around me while I watched the sky. The stars were intermittently visible between the towering banks of stratocumulus scudding over the Cascades. Even so, the three supernovas dominated the night. I drew imaginary lines with my eyes; connect the dots and solve the puzzle. How many enigmas can you find in this picture?
I reluctantly took my eyes away from the headline phenomena and searched for old standbys. I picked out the red dot of Mars.
Several years ago I’d had a cockamamie scheme that sent me to a Mesmerist – that’s how she’d billed herself – down in Eugene. I’d been driving up the coast after covering an aerospace medical conference in Oakland. Somewhere around Crescent City, I capped a sea-bass dinner by getting blasted on prescribed pills and proscribed Scotch. Sometime during the evening, I remembered the computer-enhancement process JPL had used to sharpen the clarity of telemetered photos from such projects as the Mariner flybys and the Viking Mars lander. It seemed logical to me at the time that memories from the human computer could somehow be enhanced, brought into clarity through hypnosis. Truly stoned fantasies. But they somehow sufficed as rationale and incentive to wind up at Madame Guzmann’s “Advice/Mesmerism/Health” establishment across the border in Oreg
on. Madame Guzmann had skin the color of her stained hardwood door; she made a point of looking and dressing the part of a stereotype we gajos would think of as Gypsy. The scarf and crystal ball strained the image. I think she was Vietnamese. At any rate she convinced me she could hypnotize, and then she nudged me back through time.
Just before she ducked into the cabin, Lisa paused and waved back from the head of the stairs; her dark hair curled about her face in the wind.
I should have taken to heart the lesson of stasis; entropy is not so easily overcome.
What Madam Guzmann achieved was to freeze-frame that last image of Lisa. Then she zoomed me in so close it was like standing beside Lisa. I sometimes still see it in my nightmares: Her eyes focus distantly. Her skin has the graininess of a newspaper photo. I look but cannot touch. I can speak but she will not answer. I shiver with cold –
– and slid the glass door farther open.
There! An eye opened in space. A glare burned as cold as a refrigerator light in a night kitchen. Mars seemed to disappear, swallowed in the glow from the nova distantly behind it. Another one, I thought. The new eye held me fascinated, pinned as securely as a child might fasten a new moth in the collection.
Nick?
Who is it?
Nick …
You’re an auditory hallucination.
There on the deck the sound of laughter spiraled around me. I thought it would shake loose the snow from the trees. The mountain stillness vibrated.
The secret, Nick.
What secret?
You’re old enough at fifty-one to decipher it.
Don’t play with me.
Who’s playing? Whatever time is left –
Yes?
You’ve spent eleven years now dreaming, drifting, letting others act on you.
I know.
Do you? Then act on that. Choose your actions. No lover can tell you more. Whatever time is left –
Shivering uncontrollably, I gripped the rail of the deck. A fleeting pointillist portrait in black and white dissolved into the trees. From branch to branch, top bough to bottom, crusted snow broke and fell, gathering momentum. The trees shed their mantle. Powder swirled up to the deck and touched my face with stinging diamonds.
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