Q: But to what purpose? Shouldn’t society’s goal be to eradicate disease?
A: I’ve never suggested that anyone but myself should be infecting themselves. But disease used to be as much a part of our lives as eating, drinking, sleeping. Of course it still is, but its effects have become so muted, so distanced from our consciousness that we usually aren’t even aware that we are ill. I believe that our appreciation of our frailties in a world that will travel on without us has been stolen from us.
“The philosophers and religious toastmasters speak of a paradise which was, or will be, free of disease. Disease has been our punishment for disobedience, they tell us, for following the unapproved ways. It is as if these diseases were administered by demons—in the old days they often had the names of mythological creatures—and can be alleviated through prayer and obedience. So we pray to modern medicine and we do what the professionals tell us to do. I’m not sure that’s always a good thing.”
“You shouldn’t grant so many interviews, you know. If you keep yourself a bit of a mystery we’ll make more money. And spouting off about the medical profession isn’t to our benefit—they’re still responsible for about a third of our income. Besides, in case you’ve forgotten, I’m a medical professional.”
Mickey spoke to him from the shower. Mickey was always speaking to him from the shower. Most citizens who could afford it had a full communication system in the shower. A layered shower of sound, heat, water, and air was about the most relaxing thing a person could do in the modern world.
“Answering questions isn’t what you do best,” Mickey said, sliding into bed next to him. He put his hand on Jerome’s chest, feeling the scar tissue there, pretending to be slightly repulsed, but his gentleness betrayed him. “Are you ever going to get your nipples back?”
Jerome glanced down at the two little patches of scar where his nipples should have been, a left over symptom from his six months as a victim of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria, the rapid aging disease. In many ways it had been one of the most rewarding—as well as difficult and dangerous—of his transformations, involving surgeries, bone reduction, and genetic tampering. The result was not a perfect emulation of progeria by any means, but close enough for this world.
Most rewarding of all had been when the three remaining victims of progeria came to visit him and share the stage. “The bird people,” Mickey had said of the four of them together, and thought it inexpressibly cute. Jerome had found them ineffably sad. During their limited time together they’d felt like the brothers he’d never had. Those with progeria resembled each other far more than they resembled the members of their own families. His recovery from progeria had been long, two years in the making, a process of countless surgeries and painful genetic experimentation, and costing far more than he’d made from the performances. But it had been an emotionally full time for him, and he’d retained the scars in lieu of nipples as a monument to the journey.
“No,” he said finally. “I think this is the way they’re going to be from here on out.”
Mickey pursed his lips but said nothing. He slowly began touching Jerome’s torso, checking out each scar, each monument to a past performance.
“Cut it out, Mickey. Please, not tonight.”
“We haven’t checked your skin thoroughly in awhile. That’s my job, remember? Looking for hot spots, places where one of your little escapades is attempting a comeback?”
“I know, just leave it tonight, okay?”
“Hold on.” Mickey reached over and grabbed a cleanser off the bedside table. “You got a little pustule coming back. That could mean serious stuff. Gross … why can’t you just have the measles sometime?”
“Dammit, Mickey.” Jerome pulled himself out of bed and hobbled to the chair. Something in his leg was bothering him, but he wasn’t about to tell Mickey that. “I’m just never clean enough for you, am I? That’s what this is about.”
“What this is about is that you’re getting careless. You’re supposed to run through one of the hospitals at least once a week, remember? Get checked out? That was the deal we made with the Health Services in order for you to practice this ‘art’ of yours. You haven’t had a thorough check in three months.”
“I’ve always passed. There’s never been a problem.” He’d stumbled over the word “passed,” hoped Mickey didn’t notice.
“So what are you afraid of? Why not get checked out?”
Jerome looked at him: his perfect nails, his perfect skin. His perfect hair: Jerome used to watch Mickey when he cleaned it, each hair pulled individually into a nozzle of the vacuum head, stripped and scented, then a scalp scrub and scrape. When, to please Mickey, Jerome had tried the same thing, and the derma shaves, the full body wipes, he’d been injured or had had to stop because of the extreme discomfort.
“I’ve never been clean enough for you. I’ve never been tidy. I leave things scattered around, I carry things around with me, I can’t let them go. I can’t forget, I don’t want to forget. I crave contact, Mickey. And contact is always messy.”
Mickey responded by getting dressed again. As if in defiance he slipped on the shiny stiff clothes of his profession, clothing which would not crease and therefore trap dirt. His translucent nails glittered against the red material like jewels. Even from this distance Jerome could smell the particularly acidic aroma of the cleansing mouthwashes Mickey used to clean his teeth and gums and kill anything—even taste—that food might leave behind.
Jerome knew that Mickey sometimes swallowed the scouring wash even though there were strong warnings against it. “I’m a professional—I know just how much my body will tolerate.” Once every two years Mickey, like half the population, submitted to a painful and dangerous blood cleansing.
Jerome’s face suddenly blazed into existence on the mottled white bedroom wall. “Disease Artist may face charges in recent Cholera! mishap,” the high-toned announcer said. There followed
a collage of interview segments:
“Tuberculosis was the disease of the Industrial Revolution, syphilis of the Renaissance, and melancholy of the baroque period. The message then was the same as now: disease is a sin, disease is not normal.”
“In ancient times epilepsy was considered a holy disease.”
He sounded ridiculous, and trapped within the rough wall texture, he looked quite ill.
*
From The Disease Artist: A Performance Chronicle:
During the last year of his career, following the disruption at his Cholera! engagement, The Disease Artist enacted a number of manifestations in a relatively short period of time:
His scrofula was remarkable in the brilliance of its “neck collar” rash, a bright red which awed the spectators. The accompanying suppurations were plentiful and some said spelled out intriguing messages if you understood the language.
His short-lived sleeping sickness performance disturbed some of its audience when The Disease Artist manifested a morbid craving for meat, devouring a number of dead animal parts and then attempting to bite his partner of ten years, Mickey Johnson.
His portrayal of a memorable yellow fever victim, attempting to explain the breeding habits of mosquitoes while vomiting up large quantities of blood made greasy and black from gastric juices.
His leprosy and his yaws were cancelled in mid-performance. There are no existing eyewitness accounts.
*
With Mickey gone and the government threatening to close down his career, The Disease Artist found that his recuperation times had lengthened and the side effects of his various recovery regimens were increasing. He had been experiencing severe shortness of breath for several days before he decided to return to his local hospital. But once the day’s attendant recognized him, he ordered a battery of screening tests to check for any lingering issues.
Jerome waited over two hours for the attendant to return. He wondered how sick you had to be to actually see a full-fledged doctor anymore. Worm food. Mickey used to say t
hat his art was coarsening him.
The hospital was as slow and quiet as most of the city’s restaurants. And every bit as concerned with disinfection. The spray from the nozzles was a constant background music.
He did not know when hospitals had become places of such quiet. Now you could walk inside a hospital and be almost oblivious to pain and blood and the mess of illness. Of course this did not mean that the patients no longer felt the pain, no longer spilled the blood. There must be a higher survival rate in these new hospitals, but in their hush and tidiness they felt more like old fashioned funeral homes.
A sudden rush in the corridor, figures passing, a whoosh of pressure, sharp perfume scent. Curious, he climbed off the gurney and walked into the hall.
In the next room activity was manic. Attendants rushed around a small figure in the narrow bed. Blood everywhere. The significance of this did not occur to him immediately. Blood everywhere. He stepped closer. A young woman lay beneath one of the blue life blankets, but something had malfunctioned, things had gone messy, and the girl was bleeding out through nose and mouth and from wounds invisible.
Suddenly Jerome realized he was alone in the room with the bleeding girl. There was so much blood, more blood than most had seen in decades, more blood than any small human had the right to contain.
*
Mickey thought he would retrieve the rest of his belongings while Jerome was out. He watched the apartment for days, and seeing no activity during that period he used his handprint to get in, both saddened and pleased that it had not been erased from the building’s memory.
He found Jerome wandering from room to room, followed by jets of disinfectant and his own image from the day’s newsreels. The stench was as bad as from any of Jerome’s performances. He thought about checking the supplies of masking and cleansing compounds for the apartment, then remembered he didn’t live there anymore.
“If I’m doing my job correctly, if I’m taking the particular malady far enough, some permanent physical damage always occurs: even after the course of the disease has been reversed, scars are invariably left behind. As far as mental scars, well, how can I even answer that?”
“They’re saying I’ve retired,” Jerome said, still walking, now swinging his arms in agitation, now scratching at visible sores. He did not look at Mickey directly. “This is some sort of documentary retrospective on my work. They say no one has seen me in months.”
“… constant treatment for tissue repair and scar removal. It leaves a mottled, textured appearance to my skin (He shows the camera his arm.) Mickey says it’s like touching an enlarged fingerprint: you find yourself trying to identify and interpret the ridges and whorls. Mickey? He’s my assistant, no, more than that: my partner.”
“I heard about the incident at the hospital,” Mickey said. “That must have been awful. Those blankets …” He paused. “Well those blankets never fail.”
Jerome stared at him as if unsure who he was.
“… molecular computers and various antibiotic vehicles handling most of the repairs. But their work is never one hundred percent complete.”
“It really wasn’t that bad,” Jerome finally replied. “I mean, that’s the way it used to be, right?”
“Relics and ruins get left behind: a discolouration in the skin, a twist in the joint, an internal pattern which persists. I am a relic and a ruin. I believe we all are.”
“It used to be injury, pain, and dying, right? Used to be it was always messy.”
“Mickey says that one of these relics is going to kill me eventually, and Mickey is probably right, but
so what?”
“That’s what my art’s about, reminding people of all that.”
“But so what?”
Mickey stopped and looked at him. “That’s really what you think?”
“Well, of course. That’s why the people come.”
“It’s just the human condition.”
“Oh, Jerome. They already know about the likelihood of injury, of death. All that mess. But you still keep it tidy for them. Watching you is like looking at a painting or watching one of those old films. You keep the mess out of their living rooms.”
“I should know. I’ve been doing this, we’ve been doing this, such a long time.”
“No one cares, Jerome. No one even remembers. You ask those Filthies kids, or those Job characters, why those people used to die, why it happened, what it meant, especially what it means about them and being human, they’re not going to know. They’re just going to point to that picture of you on their cloaks, and sound out whatever slogan they have written there. That’s all they know how to do.”
Mickey thought Jerome might have stopped after that, but he was wrong.
*
From The Disease Artist: A Performance Chronicle:
The only film remaining of The Disease Artist’s last performance is of rather poor quality, shaky and a bit out-of-focus, obviously taken with an antique film camera. Under normal circumstances this film would have been enhanced and brought up to contemporary standards, but a clause in the will of the original owner, The Disease Artist’s long time partner Mr. Mickey Johnson, forbids any form of alteration and/or augmentation. Few firsthand accounts of this performance have survived, most of those merely relating that The Disease Artist appeared to be in a state of advanced mental deterioration due to his disease, and babbled incoherently throughout the final days of the performance on any and all subjects which passed at random through his mind. This lack of specifics as to his final commentaries is particularly troubling in that the sound was turned off for most of Mr. Johnson’s less-than-adequate filmed record.
Also puzzling is the choice of The Disease Artist’s final ailment128: a rather undramatic assemblage of symptoms—weight loss, a barely visible swelling of the lymph glands, dry cough, fatigue and fever—symptoms indicative of a number of conditions. Only the white blemishes on the tongue, the red, brown, and purple marks on the nose and eyelids, and the various skin rashes are of any particular aesthetic appeal.
Only at the end of the Johnson film do we hear any clear statements from The Disease Artist. At one point he is heard to say, “It is our need to be remembered, to let other people know that we once walked this world.” And at another, “To tell them how it was, how it used to be, how it felt to be there.”
Clearly, we must take this as an artist’s statement about what it must mean to be an artist in a world that does not always appreciate one’s chosen art form. It is unfortunate that like the fictional Hunger Artist before him, who never found his defining food, our own Disease Artist passed from us without ever discovering his defining disease.
*
128 The AIDS epidemic ran its course some fifty years ago. With the exception of The Disease Artist’s final performance, there have been no reported cases since that time.
HALLOWEEN
STREET
Halloween Street. No one could remember who had first given it that name. It had no other. There was no street sign, had never been a street sign.
Halloween Street bordered the creek, and there was only one way to get in: over a rickety bridge of rotting wood. Grey timbers had worn partway through the vague red stain. The city had declared it safe only for foot or bike traffic.
The street had only eight houses, and no one could remember more than three of those being occupied at any one time. Renters never lasted long.
It was a perfect place to take other kids—the smaller ones, or the ones a little more nervous than yourself on Halloween night. Just to give them a little scare. Just to get them to wet their pants.
Most of the time all the houses just stayed empty. An old lady had supposedly lived in one of the houses for years, but no one knew anything more about her, except that they thought she’d died there several years before. Elderly twin brothers had once owned the two centre houses, each with twin high peaked gables on the second story like skeptical ey
ebrows, narrow front doors, and small windows that froze over every winter. The brothers had lived there only six months, fighting loudly with each other the entire time.
The houses at the ends of the street were in the worst shape, missing most of their roof shingles and sloughing off paint chips the way a tree sheds leaves. Both houses leaned toward the centre of the block, as if two great hands had attempted to squeeze the block from either side. Another three houses had suffered outside fire damage. The blackened boards looked like permanent, and arbitrary, shadows.
But it was perhaps the eighth house that bothered the kids the most. There was nothing wrong with it.
It was the kind of house any of them would have liked to live in. Painted bright white like a dairy so that it glowed even at night, with wide friendly windows and a bright blue roof.
And flowers that grew naturally and a lawn seemingly immune to weeds.
Who took care of it? It just didn’t make any sense. Even when the kids guided newcomers over to Halloween Street they stayed away from the white house.
*
The little girl’s name was Laura, and she lived across the creek from Halloween Street. From her bedroom window she could see all the houses. She could see who went there and she could see everything they did. She didn’t stop to analyze, or pass judgments. She merely witnessed, and now and then spoke an almost inaudible “Hi” to her window and to those visiting on the other side. An occasional “Hi” to the houses of Halloween Street.
Laura should have been pretty. She had wispy blonde hair so pale it appeared white in most light, worn long down her back. She had small lips and hands that were like gauges to her health: soft and pink when she was feeling good, pale and dry when she was doing poorly.
But Laura was not pretty. There was nothing really wrong about her face: it was just vague. A cruel aunt with a drinking problem used to say that “it lacked character.” Her mother once took her to a lady who cut silhouette portraits out of crisp black paper at a shopping mall. Her mother paid the lady five dollars to do one of Laura. The lady had finally given up in exasperation, exclaiming “The child has no profile!”
Celestial Inventories Page 4