Across the Spectrum

by Nagle, Pati

  With the first bite, he felt nauseated. He forced himself to eat a spoonful of beans. It took an effort to chew properly.

  Victor moved closer and sat in his usual place on the second bench. Jacob glanced up at the expressionless face and was struck, as he had been so many times over the years, by its beauty—the arched lips, the brows shaped like the wings of soaring gulls, the lines of jaw and cheekbone, the skin as fine as alabaster.

  “Stop hovering over me like an old grandmother,” Jacob grumbled. “I’m fine.”

  The perfect face inclined a fraction, lamplight gleaming on the blue-black hair. Even when the light fell on the eyes, they seemed all pupil, all emptiness.

  “You are not fine, Jacob. Your angina is worse, your cardiac function is compromised. The next infarction will kill you.”

  Jacob stared at his half-eaten plate of beans. Victor could hear his diseased old heart as it struggled and failed. Could taste the imminence of his death.

  “You might have died tonight,” Victor said, as Jacob knew he would. “I might have come too late to save you. You stubborn old Jew, do you want that? No? Then why won’t you take what I offer? Do you think your god cares if you drink blood—my blood—any more than he cares if I take a man’s blood or a deer’s?”

  “I care,” Jacob said quietly. “Blood then is not merely blood, it is the symbol of life. I revere life, I do not consume it. The word kosher means—”

  “Nothing!” Victor exploded. “Superstitious nothing!”

  Jacob shook his head, refusing to be drawn in. Victor was angry at being lectured. “Nu, you went looking for me?”

  For Victor to go near the town was remarkable in itself. Since he had followed Jacob up to the mountain, he had avoided other human contact.

  “A boy is sick,” Victor said. “Some pathology in his blood—not a pollutant, not any microbe in your books.”

  “Which boy?”

  A hesitation, a deepening of the stillness. For all the years Jacob had known him, Victor resisted learning names. At first Jacob thought it was because names bestowed individuality, identity; later, much later, when he knew Victor no longer sought out human prey, the truth came to him. Who could endure the memory of so many names?

  “Never mind,” Jacob said gently. “I’ll go down tomorrow and examine him.”

  “Be sensible, old man. You’re tired, you’re bruised from one end to the other, your heart requires rest. It’s too strenuous a journey for you.”

  Jacob lifted his chin. “I have a choice? This child is going to diagnose himself?”

  “At least let me carry the heavy things for you.”

  He would come after dark, of course, and vanish just as quickly. Jacob sighed. “The microscope, then.”

  “I will not let you go so easily.” Victor rose to his feet. Darkness swirled around him like a cloak. He placed his hands on the table and leaned forward. “Once I would have hunted there, in the village. I would have reveled in their terror. I would have been everything the priests said I was.”

  On any other night, Jacob would have turned away. Now the brilliance of the heavens lingered behind his vision. Everywhere, darkness gave birth to mystery. When he looked at Victor, this night of all nights, he seemed to be looking into a mirror.

  ∞

  I stayed hidden from Jacob for a long time, months in the city until the next big earthquake and the fires and then years afterward on the road. Hunger and plague stalked the countryside. People turned in an instant from friend to enemy, grateful to savage.

  Once I threw a rock through the glassless window of a ranch house where he was sleeping, to warn him. Other times I muddied his tracks or left a half-exposed cache of supplies and a false trail in the other direction. I argued with myself that this was madness, but still I watched.

  I never knew why Jacob kept going, nor did I have any notion of what he did or why he did it. Doctoring, to me, was just another kind of priesthood with its own collection of smells and incantations.

  Then one suffocating summer night, Jacob walked down a deserted side street of a little town, medical bag in hand. Following him, keeping to the shadows, I saw the jackals waiting: shaved, tattooed heads, black leather vests, back-sharpened knives. They had guns, too, but wouldn’t use them. They wanted to savor this killing.

  I took one from behind, breaking his neck with a jerk. A slash and the nearest lay in a spurt of arterial blood.

  Jacob turned, his eyes hidden behind twin moons of reflected light.

  “Get him!” yelled the tallest, the leader.

  The world blurred as I darted in. Air rushed by me, though I had no breath to steal. I spun and lashed out at another hunter with one foot. Hand bones shattered and the knife went spinning in an elongated arc. I back-handed the next across the jaw and his head snapped back, twisting. I heard the crack! of his fractured spine. Felt the sudden, exhilarating chill as his heart stuttered and froze.

  Three of them left now. The leader raised his hand, aiming the weapon he’d thought hidden. I caught the whiff of machine oil and gunpowder. He screamed, “Bastard!” and pulled the trigger.

  It would have taken me hours to die from such a belly wound, if I had been a living man. He saw my eyes and knew me for what I was—the template of evil beside which he was no more than the merest shadow. Wordless, he turned and fled. The other two bolted after him into the night.

  Jacob crouched beside one of the crumpled bodies. His gaze took in the street, the clotting shadows. He straightened up and came toward me. Behind the moonlit lenses, his eyes narrowed and then widened.

  “I remember you,” he said, wondering. “From San Francisco. The transfusion, it worked. You’re alive!” He paused, brows knotting. “But you haven’t changed at all.”

  But he had. The road had taken its toll, the nights birthing babies in lonely ranch houses, the miles walked in sleet or blazing heat, the poor food, the tainted water. I marked the lines around his eyes and mouth, the shining dome of his forehead where the hairline had receded.

  I closed my hand around his arm, this skinny weakling of a man with no muscle to speak of, no strength, no fear. I could break him with a single finger.

  “Where are you taking me?” he said.

  It was the wrong question. Not where was I taking him, but where was he taking me?

  ∞

  The river snaked along the valley floor, barely more than a mud-banked trickle until the winter rains came again. A mule-drawn reaper crawled across the squares of gold-ripe grain. The village itself centered around a much-repaired farmhouse, barn and silo. A criss-cross of unpaved streets led to a smithy, chicken coops, pigsties, pens for goats and milk cows, a shed for the mules. The roofs were covered with water heaters, tubes of age-whitened plastic.

  Jacob trudged down the hill toward the village. His long coat was now too warm and the pack weighed heavily. Thirst gnawed at him. He knew he should have stopped, rested. There had not seemed enough time.

  A woman’s voice hailed him from the cluster of houses. Something white waved from one of the windows, a dish towel or apron. His eyes were no longer keen enough to tell. When the woman emerged, he recognized her—the elderly beekeeper, wearing faded denim overalls several sizes too big for her. She offered him a dipper of water.

  The water had a faint metallic taste. Jacob handed the cup back to her. “I had word a child is sick. Whose is it?”

  “The Coopers’ boy. Young Peter.”

  And so, the town had gone on without him, kaleidoscopic lives slipping through his fingers.

  The Cooper family house lay to the north end of the settlement. It was one of the newer buildings, pine from the scrub forest ten miles seaward, simple and a bit dark because window glass was hard to come by. The door stood open to reveal a wood-burning stove made from parts of gasoline automobiles.

  Jacob paused at the threshold. Perhaps Victor’s sensitivities had rubbed off on him, that he could feel the fear hanging like a pall in this house. These peop
le remembered all too vividly the plagues, the bloodrot and the fevers. Even a common cold might send whispers through the community, “Will it begin again?”

  This night, it comes for me?

  A chair leg scraped over the bare wood floor in the second, smaller room. For a moment Jacob did not recognize the woman standing shadowed there, one hand on the door frame, only the skull-shaped face, the eyes like wells of darkness. In the texture of her bones, he read the certainty that her child was dying.

  Then she moved into the light and became Mary Cooper. “Doc!” An exhale, barely audible.

  The room was small and close, one bed covered with a faded quilt under a window and another along the opposite wall, a wooden chest and the rocking chair where Mary had nursed her babies. The unfinished walls bore pegs for clothing and a narrow shelf with handmade toys, bits of antler and smooth-worn green glass.

  Jacob remembered Peter as a whirlwind of freckles, impish grin, always sporting a skinned knee or elbow. Now he’d shrunk, his skin stretched over sharp-edged bones. Jacob leaned over him, noticing the fever-bright eyes, the purpling bruise on one temple. Emmanuel Cooper might be a stern man, but never one to strike his children.

  Jacob slid his pack off, took off the coat and folded it carefully, sat on the bed beside the boy’s legs. The child did not respond. Jacob touched the pale cheek, felt the heat radiating from the boy’s body. He pulled the patched quilt up around the thin shoulders.

  Relentlessly his mind enumerated the symptoms. Fever, pallor, easy bruisability. Rapid onset. Age between three and seven. Exposure to mutagenic agents—who in the entire community had escaped that? He couldn’t be sure without a microscopic examination of the boy’s blood.

  Jacob sat back and ran his fingers over his beard. And if he were correct, then what? He had a little pancillin left from the last batch from Sanfran, some cephaloxin for resistant bacterial strains; he could make tinctures of willow or foxglove or birth-ease for other conditions. Poppy syrup to numb the pain. Straws, straws in the wind.

  We cured leukemia once.

  He knew why no one had sent for him earlier, though he had once lived as one of them. Now he saw what he had not wanted to see before, their need to continue without him.

  An idea germinated and took root in Jacob’s mind. It might not work, for the malignancy arose from the bone marrow and not the blood itself. It might do no more than buy the child a little more time. Victor might refuse. But what choice did he have but to try?

  ∞

  “Are there more like you?” Jacob asked me. We huddled around a campfire somewhere near the old Oregon border, him for warmth and me without any good reason. I had fed earlier on the blood of a chicken which Jacob had drained and then salted for his own dinner.

  The question was one I had been dreading. I could not understand how Jacob could know what I was, could have seen what he had seen, and still have no fear of me. And with every one of his interminable questions, I feared the ending of that innocence.

  Some streak of madness urged me to say, “What, should I create another as cursed as I am?”

  “Tell me, who has cursed you?”

  I looked away into the night. The only sounds were the faint crush of the falling embers. Images of the past, like flakes of light, sprang up behind my eyes. I could not hold them. I no longer remembered a time before I became evil or what sin placed me forever beyond redemption. I knew only there had been such a time.

  Jacob’s question echoed in my mind. Who had cursed me? Who? Could it be that I had become only what I believed I must be?

  The thought blew away in an instant. I was damned forever; the priests had sworn it a thousand times over.

  “I am what I am,” I said in a voice I hardly knew as my own.

  I had had no choice but to drink the blood that changed me forever. I never knew why the nosferatu forced it down my throat, mostly likely to share his eternal damnation. But what if immortality were a gift freely offered? What if there were two of us to share the long unbroken nights?

  “A long time ago, a very long time ago,” Jacob said, his voice settling into the musical rhythm of a storyteller’s, “a wise man named Maimonides wrote that each man is both good and evil, in such balance that perhaps his very next action could tip the scales and determine his fate. And if a city contains both good and evil people, in equal proportion, then one man’s choice might determine its course. And if an entire nation—”

  “Stop!” I saw where this story was going. “What has any of this to do with me?”

  “I think it is Maimonides’s choice we all must make. Every hour, every day. Even me, Victor. Even you.”

  ∞

  Jacob settled on the porch with the children who were too young to work in the fields. They crowded around him, their eyes shining. He took each child on his lap in turn. At first they were stiff, for it had been too long since he was here last. Then they softened to his words and touch. His mood lifted. Through the afternoon he examined them individually, telling each his favorite story. Aesop and Moses and Peter Pan.

  He thought to continue with the other villagers, the women who’d stayed behind and the others who returned early to prepare the evening meal, but he felt too tired. His chest wavered on the border of pain, a thrumming deep in his bones. He told himself it was only the long night, the walk down the mountain—no, it was more than that.

  This night, it comes for me?

  ∞

  We came to a town which had lost its doctor and pleaded with Jacob to stay. There was a hunger in him, a weariness from all those shiftless years. I saw it in the way he touched the dusty books, the exquisite care with which he laid out the dead man’s instruments. He set the brass microscope on the dining room table and lit an alcohol lamp.

  I watched as he squeezed a drop of his own blood on a glass slide. The rank, intoxicating perfume filled me. I held myself very still.

  He gestured for me to come nearer. Warmth lingered on the focusing wheels where he’d touched them. As I squinted through the aperture, the image jumped and trembled, a phantasm of brilliance.

  I sat back in astonishment, for although I knew the lamp supplied the illumination, in that moment it seemed to me that the blood itself gave rise to the light.

  “Look again,” Jacob said. “Blood is not magic, but tiny enucleated cells. Corpuscles, they were once called.”

  I would have wept then, if I had been able, at the sight of those swirling discs, pale as damask rose, in their silent, mystical dance. I knew the darkness of blood—the hunger, the fever, the thousand intimate shades of death. But of the light of blood, I knew nothing.

  It wasn’t until Jacob laid one hand on my shoulder that I tore myself away. He adjusted the lamp to shine on the pages of the book he held. “Here is a stem cell, found in the bone marrow. It gives rise to these immature cells, called erythroblasts, which lose their nuclei as they synthesize the hemoglobin to carry oxygen to every part of the body. It’s not so mysterious.”

  Not so mysterious.

  All through that night, I pored over the books and stared at the circle of light with its ghostly shapes. I had seen books like this over the years, the drawings of Vesalius and Michelangelo. They held no interest for me, beyond a fleeting acknowledgment of the artistry involved.

  But this—this orb of light-soaked blood, this remembrance of the time I had brought healing instead of death—it drew me, excited me, sickened me.

  But Jacob was wrong. It was mysterious. Life itself was mysterious. Mysterious and beautiful and terrible beyond bearing, because I no longer had a part in it.

  ∞

  Jacob awoke some time later, thirsty but steadier in his thoughts. A pulse rippled through his chest. He got up, used the outhouse, washed, and began his work again. The men presented the usual array of badly healed wounds, minor infections, and arthritis. A cough that might be old tuberculosis or one of the spore-borne lungrots or only a reaction to harvest dust. He prescribed, dosed, warned,
instructed in exercise and hygiene.

  The Cooper parents nodded as Jacob explained his diagnosis. It didn’t matter to them that he could not be certain. “We don’t want him to suffer,” Emmanuel Cooper said, his voice rough.

  The evening meal, communal because of the ongoing harvest, was eaten on long tables outside the old farmhouse. Hand-carved wooden trenchers alternated with stoneware plates, for the kiln was small. The women served pies of smoked ham and rabbit, potatoes, beans and onions, stewed apples, cornmeal cakes with honey. A chair instead of the usual benches was brought up for Jacob.

  They all settled in their places and even the children grew still, watching Jacob with solemn eyes. The coming twilight carried an expectant hush. Emmanuel Cooper turned to Jacob. “Will you lead us in grace, Doc?”

  Faces turned toward him, sun-reddened and weathered. He had birthed many of them, treated them, held them when their loved ones died. How could he throw this honor back in their faces?

  “I will lead you,” he said in a scratchy voice. He paused, waiting for words. Gentle as dew, they came.

  “Blessed be Thou, Lord our God, Master of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth. . .”

  More, there should be more. His thoughts blurred. Phrases in Hebrew came to him and blew away again, like dead leaves.

  Stillness hung over the table. Jacob’s eyes focused on the bowed heads. A wave of emotion—tenderness and awe and something he could not put a name to—swept through him. Tears rose to his eyes; his heart fluttered like a caged bird.

  From the other end of the table, someone murmured, “In Jesus’s name, Amen.” A moment later, they were laughing and handing round the platters of food.

  ∞

  Half-drowsing, Jacob sat on a chair drawn up beside the Cooper boy’s bed. Around him, the house lay still and quiet. The two older children who usually shared the second bed spent the night with friends so that he could stay near his patient. From outside came the small noises of the animals, the barely audible cries of hunting bats.