by Unknown
I picked up one of the bottles and held it up to the light leaking through the dingy slats of the Venetian blinds. A deep voice, hardly more than a whisper, rumbled “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.” Startled, I dropped the bottle. Quicker than a serpent, the man’s arm shot out and grabbed it, millimeters before it would have shattered on the formica tabletop. An instant later he was sitting back in his chair once more, one long finger alongside his jaw, a slight twist of perverse amusement on his lips as he said, “Nor, I think, would you wish to release the contents into the atmosphere.” He waited just a moment, then added “The virus in that bottle is what killed the dinosaurs.” From that moment I knew I was—yes, I will say it—in love.
Weeks would pass before we managed to trace the cause of the disease to the anti-radiation spray applied to government-issue foundation garments. Despite the hard work (my back has never fully recovered, and even now I cannot look at a duck bill without cringing), I did not regret a moment of it, for the Better Doctor (as so many of us refer to him) and I became as close as only two fighters on the vanguard of disease can become—a closeness, I suspect, far deeper than any mere marriage (though I must confess that fantasies of that sort at times challenged my professionalism). Pleased as I was to see the epidemic quashed, I could not stop a tear as we parted, me to a research fellowship in sexual mistaken identity at Johns Hopkins, Thwack to some new urgent and top secret campaign in Southeast Asia (though he would never reveal the details, those of us in the Thwack Pack paid special note to the CIA battle with miniature pigs trained to eat napalm).
Several years passed, and despite getting caught up in my work, a rawness would creep into the back of my throat whenever I thought of my friend. He might be anywhere, of course, on whatever secret mission. That report of astronauts covered in parasitic moonstones—was it the Better Doctor who found the formula to get the rocks off? Often I would think of him during sexual congress (these congresses took place several times a year, with much lively discussion of human and sometimes wider mammalian behavior).
Then, one evening, I was walking across campus, a rather vigorous young graduate student carrying my books, when a disheveled homeless man seemed to come from nowhere and began to “rap” at us in a thick patois. None of it made any sense until suddenly he said “Yo! Would it take you aback if I gave you a thwack? Would you fall on your bed? Would you give a lamb head?” I gasped and staggered against a tree. Thinking the vagrant had struck me, my young acolyte prepared to wade in with fists pumped. To stop him, I sent him to call 911, for I knew that despite his youth and truly impressive physique he would not have lasted ten seconds in battle with the ancient figure before him. I did not wish to see him hurt, or his face disfigured by the slash of razor-sharp fingernails. After all, I had witnessed the Better Doctor wrestle alligators for the curative liqueur derived from their saliva. Youth and muscle are no match for a man tested in the field. We rushed off before the police could arrive, and soon we were sitting at my kitchen table with hot chocolate and brandy.
“I’ve followed your career,” Thwack told me. “Your work on the purported werewolf outbreaks on the Upper East Side saved a great many lives and much adolescent heartbreak.”
I blushed.
He added, “And incidentally saved me the trouble of rushing to New York when I was in the midst of research in Mecca.”
“Ah,” I said, “the voices emitting from the ka’aba stone.”
He inclined his head slightly.
“So that was you. I thought I detected your subtle touches.”
We held up our glasses to each other, then drank deeply.
When he finished he sat back and looked steadily at me. I did my best to meet his gaze without flinching, until finally he allowed one eyebrow to rise, ever so slightly.
“Tell me,” he said, “do you think you could get away for a time?”
“Yes!” I blurted, and felt tears spring to my eyes. “Oh yes!”
He said, “Perhaps you have heard of the malady known as color deafness?”
“I believe so,” I said. “The sufferer cannot distinguish between the accents of various ethnic groups. I gather it does not produce any serious threat, only some minor confusion and embarrassment.”
“Do you now?” he said, and my cheeks flushed. “And how much embarrassment might it cause at a summit at the United Nations?”
I could only sit with my mouth hanging open. “Do you suspect foul play?” I asked.
“I suspect nothing and everything. All I know for sure is that we leave tonight.”
That was the start of many adventures, most of which I am not at liberty to discuss. I can only say that I count them among my happiest moments, fighting disease alongside the wisest, kindest, most masculine man I have ever known.
1975: DR. QUEENIE BISHOP (AS TOLD TO HER NIECE, DR. K. J. BISHOP)
The Dimcross Home for the Elderly Confused: never was a building more like a dead pachyderm. And were the giant concrete goannas really a necessary addition to the roof? One would not think so. It was designed by an architect who believed a loony bin should look like a loony bin; but why a loony bin should look like goannas conquering a dead elephant, I do not know; and nor, I suspect, did the architect.
At any rate, the building does not inspire an attitude of sanity. The gates look to be made of numerous writhing eels, and are of a size excessive enough to invite a comparison with the gates of Pandemonium, though Satan might well have foregone the railing finials of alternating owl heads and pineapples. Atop the gateposts are two alarming, great-mouthed statues from South America. Beyond these doormen, in front of the house, spreads a garden where approximately 50 elderly men and women sport with phantoms, or are made sport of; as the residents all wear pajamas and nightgowns, they appear like sleepers acting out the nonsense of dreams.
One of these is my aunt, Dr. Queenie Bishop, perhaps the most brilliant medical mind of her generation (she was awarded the 1972 Royal Australian Society of Medicine Prize for her research into spontaneous human combustion). Whenever allowed outside, she can be found digging up one of the flowerbeds in the garden, looking for the birds she believes to be buried in the ground. Not being permitted the use of a spade—for her own safety—she digs with her hands.
On this occasion, my aunt recognized me as someone called Dorothy Spot, and was excited to see me. She asked me how the buzzard was, and had we seen the ornamental drownings in Rome? I told her the buzzard was well and sent his love, and that the drownings had been most edifying.
After this exchange of pleasantries, Aunt Queenie returned to her digging. Presently, while she scrabbled in the dirt, she began to whisper a name:
“Thackery, Thackery, quackery, bushwhack . . .”
I turned the tape recorder on.
When the editors of this volume asked me whether I could obtain from my aunt a short reminiscence about Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead, I replied that nothing could be more easily arranged. Aunt Queenie rarely talks about anyone else; and if she does, she is liable to confuse them with an animal, or a vegetable, or, as she has done several times in my mother’s case, the Hotel Continental in Tangier. But she remembers Lambshead with—relatively speaking—remarkable clarity. At least, she remembers going on a expedition with Lambshead, who had been her mentor since medical school. The trip was to Papua New Guinea, in 1975, when my aunt was in her forties. It immediately preceded the sudden, tragic loosening of her grip on reality that forced her retirement from medicine and from public life.
“. . . I always loved the birds, you see. In the jungle, the birds of paradise. He didn’t like birds. He put the birds in the dirt. Wherever I go, the birds are in the dirt. Dirty, dirty birds! He made the birds dirty. He was a filthy man, Dorothy! Never ever washed his hands. Doctors! They carry disease, you know. Worse than rats. My dear, I feel I must tell you, we have doctors here. They try to hide, pretend to be curtains and whatnot, but I tell you they’re doctors. Most unhygienic! . . . And now I’ve
got birds. Thwack gave me the dirty birds . . . I was a fool! Why I ever went near that man, I don’t know. I’ve always avoided doctors like the plague. They’re always rubbing up against sick people, you see. Fingers in dirty mouths and wherever else. But Lambshead, oh, Lambshead was the worst—FILTHY! The Lord made them, clean and unclean, and Thwack was unclean. Wasn’t interested in the patients, you see . . . not in healing. He loved the diseases. The little worms, the parasites, all the bugaboos and viruses—they said his love for viruses was infectious—health was not an optimal state, in his view, you see—sickness was. The worse, the better. In other people, of course. The man himself couldn’t even put up with a cold, you know. Sat wrapped in a blanket with his feet in a mustard bath. Nasty feet, Dorothy. He had very bad feet indeed . . . they took him all walkabout, spreading his germs, his cultures . . .”
“And what happened in New Guinea, Aunt Queenie?” I said. Let me assure the reader that I was not prodding cruelly. My aunt’s monologues on the subject of Dr. Lambshead always culminated in the events of that camping trip in the New Guinea Highlands.
“. . . He said I was his sweet fresh girl. ‘You’re a dewy rose, Queenie.’ But he didn’t always call me Queenie. Sometimes he called me Dr. Bishop. He liked to pretend I was a doctor, you see! Well, I thought it was just the old goat’s fun. I’d be ashamed now, but it was the seventies—we were all for letting it hang out and indulging our fantasies and sometimes hygiene was not our first concern. But Thwacky said I was his clean-as-a-whistle girl, a vision of spring, a rose in the jungle . . . Eve herself, he said, couldn’t have glowed more with health . . . and I said yes, and I supposed he was after a bit of you know what, the dirty old, the bad feet and the bad head, the bad old medicine man, and what did I care what he said? I just wanted to watch the fowl of the air . . . Now it was, I don’t know, two or three weeks since we’d left Moresby. We were up in the foggy boggy hills. Thackery was looking for the Wig Men, among whom he hoped to find an obscure disease, something tropical and horrendous, and isolated tribes often proved fruitful in this regard, he said . . . well, we never found the Wig Men—but we found the preacher and the half-caste girl, didn’t we? Missionary—dime a dozen in those parts—said the girl was his daughter—well, no need to ask about that, but she seemed fond of him, though he was a Methodist, and not even a handsome one . . . but, oh! Dying in the jungle! Thackery loved him! Things were hatching out of him—insects—butterflies, moths—originating in the papillary layer of the dermis, quite spontaneously . . . Papuan Papillon Disease, Thwack called it, and even I thought that was funny. Poor man! The preacher, not Lambshead. Even if he was a Methodist. The preacher, not Lambshead. Lambshead was a dirty godless heathen . . . The preacher said it was a thing the local gods had given him. ‘Stronger than we give them credit for,’ he said . . . well, Thacko Wacko didn’t give a hoot who made this fascinating lurgy, he just wanted some, the dirty so-and-so! But it got better—I mean it got worse—it wasn’t just the preacher man who was afflicted, but the girl too, only with her it was on the outside. That night, Dotty, in the camp . . . in the dirt, in the mud below, we saw a hatching. Butterflies crawled out of the jungle mud . . . all hers, all made by the Papuan Papillon Disease, and didn’t Thwack love it! Oh, that dirty old man . . . all over the Earth he trod, finding plagues—founding plagues! Oh rose thou art sick . . . was a clean Queenie, now a ring-a-rosies, we all fall down . . . A disease whose symptoms appeared outside the body of the sufferer. Outside! But just in women. Men got it under the skin, women got it under the ground. Thwack said it was his favorite bugaboo ever. ‘Diseases are unconscious artists; the body is their medium. To be able to appreciate what a disease can do is a sign of a sophisticated and liberated mind,’ he said. Culture vulture. Loved the aches and pains, the scars and lesions—but only in other people—so he was afraid, this time, in case he started hatching things . . . but the girl put his mind at rest. Only one way to catch it, she said, and you know what I mean. Well, we knew she wasn’t the preacher’s daughter. She said it was something his god had given him, then he gave it to her. ‘What a hoot!’ said Thwack . . . then it was night time, Dotty, and it was so dark, all the stars behind the clouds, you see—well, you didn’t see—and then I was awake, and he was there in my tent, in a mask made of mud and little bones, and he said to me, ‘The jungle’s full of fearsome bugaboos, Dr. Bishop. We can’t have you getting sick. That wouldn’t do. So here’s a little needle, take it from the witchdoctor—ooh-eeh-ooh ah ah, ting-tang, walla-walla bing-bang!—’ and he gave me a big needle, like the ones they give me here, when they’re not pretending to be curtains. He thwacked me with the blood of the preacher man—stab in the back—and now I’ve got it, but not the butterflies, I’ve got it worse, I’ve got the birds—and they’re down there and I can’t get them out—”
That was my aunt’s story, as I had heard it many times. We can only speculate about what—if anything—happened to her on that trip to the New Guinea jungle. Dr. Vanbutchell suspects an incident of a sexual nature; but there are people for whom a cigar is never just a cigar, nor a missionary just a missionary. I suspect Dr. Lambshead may indeed have done something to Aunt Queenie, but from what I have been able to learn second-hand about Lambshead’s character, it seems wrong-headed to presume untoward advances were made; not that man’s style, I would say. But perhaps he did, indeed, inject her with something that caused her unhingement. I am inclined to suspect professional jealousy, a fear that his protégé’s star was growing brighter than his own. The only thing I may say with certainty is that neither Papuan Papillon Disease, nor its avian variant, exists anywhere but in the jungles of Dr. Queenie Bishop’s ruined mind.
1983: DR. STEPAN CHAPMAN
A banging at the door in the dead of night is nothing unusual for a general practitioner. So I was not alarmed when such a banging wakened me at my modest apartment in Tucson, Arizona. It was 1983, and I was pursuing advanced research in pharmacology at Arizona State University.
Imagine my surprise when I opened my double-bolted door and discovered the eminent British pathologist, Dr. Thackery Lambshead, an imposing figure even in his eighties. Though he walked with a cane, his shoulders were broad, and his back still straight. His white hair rose vertically from his scalp like toothbrush bristles. The lenses of his tortoise-shell eyeglasses were thick and tinted purple. He wore a three-piece suit of white cotton, which seemed wrinkled as if from long hours of travel. I invited him in, and we drank tall glasses of iced tea in my den.
“Just rode the jets back from Delhi, Dr. Chapman. A bit of family trouble has come up there, unlikely as it seems. My niece Eulalia. Still getting into narrow scrapes in tropical climes at her age. Wanted to extend her modern dance training. Can you imagine?”
The doctor was a very fast talker, once he got going, and it was difficult to get a word in edgewise. Though I met him only once (despite our long acquaintance through letters), I am cursed with an eidetic memory for conversations, and thus can offer up this fragment of his table talk verbatim.
“I’ve never liked Eulalia, and she’s caused me endless trouble. But all the same, family is family, is it not? And despite our history, I’m damned if I’ll let her waste away as the thrall of some beady-eyed sorcerer from Bengal.”
“A sorcerer, sir?”
“Oh, he maintains a respectable front, the old fraud. He’s a national cultural treasure, I’m told. The last traditional master of Kathikali theater. Impressive performance art, if you like that sort of thing. Deafening gong orchestra. Incense to choke a horse. Sagas of the Monkey King, all that Hindu rot.”
“Your niece, Dr. Lambshead. Is she is danger?”
“She’s in full bloody lotus position and can’t get out, that’s what she’s in, young man. Continual clonus of the thighs. Purely psychosomatic, you understand. Horrible business, the human mind, and the treacheries it gets up to. Had to build the old girl a special wheelchair.”
“You ruled out a spinal injury?”
/> The doctor gave me a hard look. “I was ruling out spinal injuries before you were born, Dr. Chapman, and I’m not quite senile yet. I also ruled out Paraleptic Neuroplasia and Night Soil Fever. But more to the point, I’ve procured a sample.”
“A sample, sir? Of what.”
“The suggestibility drug that the old fruit bat’s been slipping to Eulalia. Here. Have a look.” The doctor drew a small glass vial from a vest pocket and tossed it onto my coffee table. “It’s the old Mesmer dodge, but what’s his herb of choice? That’s the great quandary. My grandfather knew Mesmer, did you know that? No, of course you wouldn’t.”
I uncapped the vial and sniffed at the contents—a lustrous blob of black resin.
“I didn’t dare to work up the pharmacology in Asia. The Fly Ebola’s all through their hospitals now.”
“The what?”
“It’s a housefly virus. You don’t keep up with the tropical disease journals? Well, it’s right through India and parts of Tibet as well. Nasty thing. Crossed over in a piercing parlor in Bengal apparently. Became a human disease, I mean. Then it spread to the liposuction clinics, the rhinoplasty stalls, the dental clinics, the beauty parlors, and now it’s all through the health care system. Many doctors and nurses infected. Terrible thing. Attacks the fat cells. Terminal cases bleed out, if that’s the word I want. Hideous. In any case, I wanted to get as far from there as possible before assaying the drug. And Arizona popped into my head, isn’t that silly? Too many Wild West movies, I suppose. But I knew that the IFS has offices here. So I looked in the directory of associate researchers, and there you were.”
“I wondered why you’d contact me of all people.”