“Excellent!” Merrick increased the punishment to three hundred volts. “The end is in sight, child!”
“No! Please! Please! Enough!” Foam leaked from Connie’s mouth.
“You’re almost halfway there!”
“Please!”
The tachistoscope kept firing, Connie kept lying: falsehood after falsehood, shock after shock—like a salvo of armed missiles cruising along her nerves, detonating inside her mind. My niece asserted that rats chase cats. She lied about money, saying it grew on trees. The Pope is Jewish, Connie insisted. Grass is purple. Salt is sweet.
As the final lie appeared, she fainted. Even before Gloria could scream, Merrick was inside the glass cell, checking the child’s heartbeat. A begrudging admiration seeped through me. The doctor had a job to do, and he did it.
A single dose of ammonium carbonate brought Connie around. Easing her face toward the screen, Merrick turned to me. “Ready?”
“Huh? You want me…?”
“Hit it when I tell you.”
Reluctantly I rested my finger on the switch. “I’d rather not.” True. I wasn’t inordinately fond of Connie, but I had no wish to give her pain.
“Read, Connie,” muttered Merrick.
“I c-can’t.” Blood and spittle mingled on Connie’s chin. “You all hate me! Mommy hates me!”
“I like you almost as much as I like myself,” said Gloria, leaning over my shoulder. “You’re going to have a satisfactory party.”
“One more, Connie,” I told her. “Just one more and you’ll be a citizen.” The switch felt sharp and hot against my finger. “A highly satisfactory party.”
A single droplet rolled down Connie’s cheek, staining it like a trail left by one of Toby’s beloved slugs. This was, I realized, the last time she would ever cry. Brainburns did that to you; they drained you of all those destructive and chaotic juices: sentiments, illusions, myths, tears.
“‘Dogs can talk,’” she said, right before I pierced her heart with alternating current.
* * * *
And it truly was a highly satisfactory party, filling the entire visitors’ lounge and overflowing into the hall. All four of Connie’s older sisters came, along with her reading teacher and eight of her girlfriends, half of whom had been cured that month, one on the previous day. They danced the Upright while a compact disc of the newest Probity hit wafted through the ward:
When skies are gray, and it starts to rain,
I like to stand by the windowpane,
And watch each raindrop bounce and fall,
Then smile, ’cause I’m not getting wet at all.
The hospital supplied the refreshments—a case of Olga’s OK Orangeade, a tub of ice cream from No Great Shakes, and a slab of chocolate cake the size of a welcome mat. All the girls, I noticed, ate in moderation, letting their ice cream turn to soup. Artificially induced slenderness was, of course, disingenuous, but that was no reason to be a glutton.
The gift-giving ceremony contained one disturbing moment. After opening the expected succession of galoshes, reference books, umbrellas, and cambric blouses, Connie unwrapped a fully working model of an amusement park—Happy Land, it was called, complete with roller coaster, Ferris wheel, and merry-go-round. She blanched, seized by the panic that someone who’s just been brainburned invariably feels in the presence of anything electric. Slamming her palm against her lips, she rushed into the bathroom. The friend who’d bought her the Happy Land, a stumpy, frizzy-haired girl named Beth, reddened with remorse. “I should’ve realized,” she moaned.
Was the Happy Land a lie? I wondered. It purported to be an amusement park, but it wasn’t.
“I’m so stupid,” whined Beth.
No, I decided, it merely purported to be a replica of an amusement park, which it was.
Connie hobbled out of the bathroom. Silence descended like a sudden snowfall—not the hot snow of a brainburn but the cold, dampening snow of the objective world. Feet were shuffled, throats cleared. The party, obviously, had lost its momentum. Someone said, “We all had a reasonably good time, Connie,” and that was that.
As her friends and sisters filed out, Connie hugged them with authentic affection (all except Alice Lawrence, whom she evidently disliked) and offered each a highly personalized thank-you, never forgetting who’d given what. Such a grown-up young lady, I thought. But her greatest display of maturity occurred when I said my own good-bye.
“Take care, Connie.”
“Thanks for coming, Unc, and thanks for the roller skates. Thing is, I already have a pair, better than these. I’ll probably swap them for a sweater.”
A citizen now. I was proud of her.
* * * *
Back at the apartment, the phone-answering machine was blinking. Three flashes, pause, three flashes, pause, three flashes, pause. I grabbed a bottle of Paul’s Passable Ale from the fridge and snapped off the top. Three flashes, pause. I took a sizable swallow. Another. The late-afternoon light poured through the kitchen window and bathed our major appliances in the iridescent orange you see when facing the sun with eyes closed. I finished my beer.
Three flashes, pause, three flashes, pause: a staccato, insistent signal—a cry of distress, I realize in retrospect, like a call beamed semaphorically from a sinking ship.
I pushed play. Toby had written and produced our outgoing message, and he also starred in it: My folks and I just want to say / We’d like to talk with you today / So speak up when you hear the beep / And we might call back before we sleep.
Beep, and a harsh male voice zagged into the kitchen. “Amusing message, sort of—about what I’d expect from a seven-year-old. This is Dr. Bamford at the Kraft Institute, and I presume I’m addressing the parents of Toby Sperry. Well, the results are in. The Hob’s hare that bit your son was carrying high levels of Xavier’s Plague, an uncommon and pathogenic virus. We shipped the specimen to Dr. Prendergorst at the Center for the Palliative Treatment of Hopeless Diseases in Locke Borough. If you have any questions, I’ll be only mildly irritated if you call me. From now on, though, the matter is essentially in the Center’s synecdochic hands.” Beep. “John Prendergorst speaking, Center for the Palliative Treatment of Hopeless Diseases. You’ve probably heard Bamford’s preliminary report by now, and we’ve just now corroborated it down here at Hopeless. Please call my office at your earliest convenience, and we’ll arrange for you to come by and talk, but I’m afraid no amount of talk can change the fact that Xavier’s is one hundred percent fatal. We’ll show you the statistics.” Beep. “Hi. It’s Helen. I’m at the office, working on that neuropathology of spiritual possession piece. Looks like it’ll be a long day and a longer night. There’s some chicken in the freezer.”
My reaction was immediate and instinctual. I ran into the study, grabbed Helen’s unabridged dictionary, and looked up “fatal,” bent on discovering some obscure usage peculiar to Prendergorst’s profession. When the doctor said “fatal,” I decided, he didn’t mean fatal, he meant something far more ambiguous and benign.
Fast
Fasten
Fat
Fatal Adjective. Causing death; mortal; deadly.
Fatalism
Fatality Fatally
No. The dictionary was lying. Just because Prendergorst’s forecast was pessimistic, that didn’t make it true.
Fata Morgana Noun. A mirage consisting of multiple images.
And, indeed, a vision now presented itself to my vibrating brain: one of the few copies of The Journal of Psychic Healing that I’d elected to spare, a special issue on psychoneuroimmunology, its cover displaying a pair of radiant hands massaging a human heart.
* * * *
Fatuous Adjective. Silly, unreal, illusory.
* * * *
Psychoneuroimmunology wasn’t fatuous, I’d decided—not entirely. Even the peripatetic prose of The Journal of Psychic Healing hadn’t concealed the scientific validity of cures spawned by the mind-body connection.
So there was hope.
Oh, yes, hope. I would scour the city’s data banks, I vowed. I would learn about anyone who’d ever beaten a fatal illness by tapping into the obscure powers of his own nervous system. I would tutor myself in sudden remissions, unexpected recoveries, and the taxonomy of miracles.
* * * *
Fault
Faust
Favor
Fawn Noun. A young deer.
* * * *
Because, you see, it was like this: on his fifth birthday we’d taken Toby to the Imprisoned Animals Garden in Spinoza Borough. Fawns roamed the petting zoo at will, prancing about on their cloven hoofs, noses thrust forward in search of handouts. Preschoolers swarmed everywhere, feeding the creatures peanut brittle, giggling as the eager tongues stroked their palms. Whenever another person’s child laughed upon being so suckled, I was not especially moved. Whenever my own did the same, I felt something else entirely, something difficult to describe.
I believe I saw the alleged God.
Three
Appropriately, the Center for the Palliative Treatment of Hopeless Diseases occupied a terminal location, a rocky promontory extending from the southern end of Locke Borough into the choppy, gunmetal waters of Becket Bay. We arrived at noon on Sunday, Helen driving, me navigating, the map of Veritas spread across my knees, its surface so mottled by rips and holes it seemed to depict the aftermath of a bombing raid. A fanfolded mile of computer paper lay on the back seat, the fruit of my researches into psychoneuroimmunology and the mind-body link. I knew all about miracles now. I was an expert on the impossible.
We parked in the visitors’ lot. Tucking the printout under my arm, I followed Helen across the macadam. The structure looming over us was monumental and menacing, tier upon tier of diminishing concrete levels frosted with grimy stucco, as if Prendergorst’s domain were a wedding cake initiating a marriage destined to end in wife abuse and murder.
In the lobby, a stark sign greeted us. attention: we realize the decor here does nothing to ameliorate your sorrow and despair. write your borough representative. we’d like to put in decent lighting and paint the walls. A bristle-jawed nurse told us that Dr. Prendergorst—“You’ll know him by his eyes, they look like pickled onions”—was expecting us on the eleventh floor.
We entered the elevator, a steamy box crowded with morose men and women, like a cattle boat bearing war refugees from one zone of chaos and catastrophe to another. I reached out to take Helen’s hand. The gesture failed. Oiled by sweat, my fingers slipped from her grasp.
No one was waiting in the eleventh-floor waiting room, a gloomy niche crammed with overstuffed armchairs and steel engravings of famous cancer victims, a gallery stretching as far back in history as Jonathan Swift. Helen gave our names to the receptionist, a spindly young man with flourishing gardens of acne on his cheeks, who promptly got on the intercom and announced our arrival to Prendergorst, adding, “They look pale and scared.”
We sat down. Best-selling self-help books littered the coffee table. You Can Have Somewhat Better Sex. How to Find a Certain Amount of Inner Peace. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Diet. “It’s a mean system, isn’t it?” the receptionist piped up from behind his desk. “He’s in there, you’re out here. He seems to matter, you don’t. He keeps you waiting—you wait. The whole thing’s set up to intimidate you.”
I grunted my agreement. Helen said nothing.
A door opened. A short, round, onion-eyed man in a white lab coat came out, accompanied by a fiftyish couple—a blobby woman in a shabby beige dress and her equally fat, equally disheveled husband: rumpled golf cap, oversized polyester polo shirt, baggy corduroy pants; they looked like a pair of bookends they’d failed to unload at their own garage sale. “There’s nothing more I can say,” Prendergorst informed them in a low, tepid voice. “A Hickman catheter is our best move at this point.”
“She’s our only child,” moaned the wife.
“Leukemia’s a tough one,” said Prendergorst.
“Shouldn’t you do more tests?” asked the husband.
“Medically—no. But if it would make you feel better…”
The couple exchanged terse, pained glances. “It wouldn’t,” said the wife, shambling off.
“True,” said the husband, following.
A minute later we were in Prendergorst’s office, Helen and I seated on metal folding chairs, the doctor positioned regally behind a mammoth desk of inlaid cherry. “Would you like to put some sugar in your brain?” he asked, proffering a box of candy.
“No,” said Helen tonelessly.
“I guess the first step is to confirm the diagnosis, right?” I said, snatching up a dark chocolate nugget. I bit through the outer shell. Brandy trickled into my throat.
“When your son gets back from camp, I’ll draw a perfunctory blood sample,” said Prendergorst, sliding an open file folder across his desk. Beneath Toby’s name, a gruesome photograph of the deceased Hob’s hare lay stapled to the inside front cover, its body reduced by the autopsy to a gutted pelt. “The specimen they sent us was loaded with the virus,” said the doctor. “Absolutely loaded. The chances of Toby not being infected are perhaps one in a million.” He whisked the file away, slipping it into his top desk drawer. “A rabbit killing your child, it’s all faintly absurd, don’t you think? A snake would make more sense, or a black widow spider, even one of those poisonous toads—can’t remember what they’re called. But a rabbit…”
“So what sort of therapy are we looking at?” I asked. “I hope it’s not too debilitating.”
“We aren’t looking at any therapy, Mr. Sperry. At best, we’ll relieve your son’s pain until he dies.”
‘Toby’s only seven,” I said, as if I were a lawyer asking a governor to reprieve an underage client. “He’s only seven years old.”
“I think I’ll sue that damn camp,” Helen grunted.
“You’d lose,” said Prendergorst, handing her a stark pamphlet, white letters on black paper: Xavier’s Plague and Xavier’s-Related Syndrome—The News Is All Bad. “I wish I could remember what those toads are called.”
Had my brainburn not purged me of sentimentality and schmaltz, had it not, as it were, atrophied my tear ducts, I think I would have wept right then. Instead I did something almost as unorthodox. “Dr. Prendergorst,” I began, my hands trembling in my lap like two chilly tarantulas, “I realize that, from your perspective, our son’s chances are nil.”
“Quite so.”
I deposited the computer printout on Prendergorst’s desk. “Look here, over twenty articles from The Holistic Health Bulletin, plus the entire Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference on Psychoneuroimmunology and The Collected Minutes of the Fifth International Mind-Body Symposium. Story after story of people thinking their way past heart disease, zapping malignant cells with mental bullets—you name it. Surely you’ve heard of such cases.”
“Indeed,” said Prendergorst icily.
“Jack…please” groaned Helen, wincing with embarrassment. My wife, the Sweet Reason reporter.
“Miracles happen,” I persisted. “Not commonly, not reliably, but they happen.”
“Miracles happened,” said Prendergorst, casting a cold eye on the printout. “These incidents all come from the Nightmare Era—they’re all from the Age of Lies. We’re adults now.”
“It’s basically a matter of giving the patient a positive outlook,” I explained.
“Please,” hissed Helen.
“People can cure themselves,” I asserted.
“I believe it’s time we returned to the real world, Mr. Sperry.” Prendergorst shoved the printout away as if it were contaminated with Xavier’s. “Your wife obviously agrees with me.”
“Maybe we should bring Toby home next week,” Helen suggested, fanning herself with the pamphlet. “The sooner he knows,” she sighed, “the better.”
Prendergorst slid a pack of Canceroulettes from the breast pocket of his lab coat. “When’s your son scheduled to leave?”
“On the twenty-seventh
,” said Helen.
“The symptoms won’t start before then. I’d keep him where he is. Why spoil his summer?”
“But he’ll be living a lie. He’ll go around thinking he’s not dying.”
“We all go around thinking we’re not dying,” said the doctor with a quick little smile. He removed a cigarette, set the pack on the edge of the desk. warning: the surgeon general’s crusade against this product may distract you from the myriad ways your government fails to protect your health. “God, what a depraved species we are. I’m telling you that Toby is mortally ill, and all the while I’m thinking, ‘Hey, my life is really pretty good, isn’t it? No son of mine is dying. Fact is, I take a certain pleasure in these people’s suffering.’”
“And when the symptoms do start?” Helen folded the pamphlet into queer, tortured origami shapes. “What then?”
“Nothing dramatic at first. Headaches, joint pains, some hair loss. His skin may acquire a bluish tint.”
Helen said, “And then?”
“His lymph nodes will become painful and swollen. His lungs will probably fill with Pneumocystis carinii. His temperature—”
“Don’t go on,” I said.
The doctor ignited his cigarette. “Each case is different. Some Xaviers linger for a year, some go in less than a month. In the meantime, we’ll do everything we can, which isn’t much. Demerol, IV nourishment, antibiotics for the secondary infections.”
“We’ve heard enough,” I said.
“The worst of it is probably the chills.” Prendergorst took a drag on his cigarette. “Xaviers, they just can’t seem to get warm. We wrap them in electric blankets, and it doesn’t make any—”
“Please stop,” I pleaded.
“I’m merely telling the truth,” said the doctor, exhaling a jagged smoke ring.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 442