Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  “Why not?” Eleanor Riggins-Galvez replied. “He can walk me down to the fish hatchery. If he asks me anything too painful, I’ll feed him to that ugly spotted gar in the main pool.”

  And so, hands plunged deep in the pockets of her lab coat, Dr. Petitt sauntered resignedly back to the treatment center. A brown thrasher scurried out of her way, and the October sunlight sifting down on Warm Springs gave every item on the lawn—gazebo, bird-bath, wrought-iron benches—a pastel fuzziness altogether alien to Bogota. Only the nineteenth-century French Impressionists, Carlos felt, could truly do this light justice, but they were a school not much in favor here at the near beginning of the third troubled millennium since Christ’s birth.

  October 9, 2013.

  Carlos began to ease the wheelchair down the long walk to the National Fish Hatchery. His passenger gripped her armrests as if she did not quite trust him. But, of course, torture victims always found it difficult to trust.

  “What songs did you sing to cheer your coworkers and patients at Casa Piadosa after the government takeover?”

  “First of all, Carlos, I didn’t sing the songs.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You would if you heard me sing. I have a voice like a stuck pig. I played the harmonica instead.”

  “Very good, señora. But what songs?”

  “That’s a second thing. Do you really believe Video Verdadero’s audience is going to give a good damn about my repertoire?”

  “Human interest. It’s for the program El Tiempo Turbulento. When it comes to news of heroes, the vidsat audience is insatiable, and we’ve done to death every bit of trivia about the members of the United Nations antiterrorist force that rescued you and the others. Besides, who’s to say what’s trivial and what’s of enormous consequence? I, for instance, would greatly like to know what you played. What was it that provoked those animals to take needle and thread to your lips?”

  “Needle and fishing line. Top-grade Filimar fishing line. That’s why I’ve got the mouth of an Amazonian shrunken head.”

  Carlos remained silent. Carefully, he negotiated a turn and pushed his charge onto the apron of the main display at the hatchery. Here, hundreds of unfamiliar fish, including many diamond-backed carp as long as his forearm, dozed under lily pads or finned from one shady spot to another.

  A party of shirt-sleeved Japanese tourists, who had probably just visited the Little White House of Franklin D. Roosevelt, milled about the display pond and the blond-brick aquarium next to it. Most of them evinced the same world-weary aloofness and torpor exhibited by the fish in the pale green water. Carlos did not feel comfortable around them and so kept his silence. The senora smiled and nodded at the Japanese, however, and seemed saddened when they boarded an orange gyrobus in the parking lot and departed the hatchery.

  “What songs?” Carlos asked again.

  “Mostly, I’m afraid, it was Beatles stuff.”

  “Beetles?”

  “Not bugs, Carlos. That group of English-born musicians who disbanded more than forty years ago. The most controversial member was shot by a deranged fan outside his New York apartment building about ten years later.”

  “John Lennon?” said Carlos tentatively.

  “You do remember, then?”

  “Hardly, señora.” The correspondent laughed. “I was born five or six months after this Lennon hombre fell dead on the pavement. I’ve read some things, heard a few tapes, seen some video. It’s not really my interest, though. I like Ravel and Debussy.”

  “Good for you. Anyway, it was Beatles songs I found myself playing in the compound while El Presidente’s thugs were holding us prisoner. ‘Love Me Do,’ ‘I Feel Fine,’ ‘Eight Days a Week,’ ‘Yellow Submarine,’ ‘Here Comes the Sun.’ Oh, a whole passel of such songs.”

  “Because they were cheerful?”

  “Yes. And because they came back to me unbidden across all the years. I hadn’t even thought about most of them since college days. Too many other things to worry about. During the government’s illegal siege of Casa Piadosa, though, they all came back—like doves alighting in the waiting branches of my memory.”

  “‘Like doves alighting,’” Carlos echoed her. “You should have been a poet.”

  She laughed self-deprecatingly. “You’re applauding doggerel, young man. Nevertheless, a facility with words is what I have in place of a singing voice. It’s my God-given compensation.”

  “You have many compensations. You heal the sick—”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Let me finish. You have deep feelings for the poor and the dispossessed. You have friends in high places all over the world. Your name is a benediction to almost everyone who hears it spoken. You play the harmonica—”

  “And I’m dying, Carlos.”

  “On the contrary, senora, you’re making a remarkable recovery from a brutal ordeal.”

  “I’m getting well enough to die. El Presidente’s stooges latch-hooked my lips together. Then, for the next eight days, they fed me on a tainted IV solution that introduced a slow-acting virus into my system. No antidote exists. El Presidente’s despicable regime may have toppled because of his own recklessness and that unprecedented United Nations strike, but this is his revenge on me, Carlos. I call it La Fiebre Furtiva.”

  The correspondent squinted at her. “The Secret Fever.”

  “It’s not contagious. No one at the Torture Rehabilitation Center has contracted it. Karen—Dr. Petitt—tells me that La Fiebre Furtiva is a figment of my imagination. A tenacious paranoid delusion growing out of my abhorrence of our captors’ tactics.”

  “Did they rape you?”

  “Don’t be naïve. That goes without saying. And broke my legs four or five times each for good measure.”

  Carlos glanced at a huge mottled carp gliding through the waters of the pond. How removed it seemed from the conflicts and atrocities of the upper world.

  “May I return tomorrow with my video equipment, senora? Dr. Petitt told me on the telephone that if I brought it today, she would not allow me to see you at all. So all I brought was this recorder.” With a manicured fingernail he tapped the miniature device on his belt.

  “Tomorrow, Carlos, bring your camera. I’ll intercede with Karen. After all, what’s a vidsat interview without pictures?”

  “Radio,” Carlos said, and they both laughed.

  The chimes of a local Protestant church began to reverberate through the pine-scented dusk. In obedience to their tolling, the young Colombian escorted Eleanor Riggins-Galvez back to the treatment center.

  That night she could not get the correspondent’s visit off her mind. No, that wasn’t entirely accurate. Neither the images of Carlos Villar himself nor the vividness of his foray into her life had made her insomniac. Rather, it was that offhand bit of business about the Beatles. That had her helplessly casting back, combing through the detritus of her days to find the beginnings of her half-forgotten infatuation with those four Liverpudlian rock ’n’ rollers. Her infatuation had long since turned into something else, of course—a dogged subconscious refusal to admit to herself that she had ever enjoyed their music or a rare burst of nostalgia spotlighting the teenage Eleanor Riggins in the dim but tolerant amusement of her latter-day self. The Beatles. Lord have mercy, the Beatles.

  In Guacamayo (it was true), the music of her young girlhood had come spilling out of her harmonica in spite of her adult self. Further, this music—these melodies—had almost certainly played a key role in stiffening her resolve in a situation of otherwise untenable terror. At first even El Presidente’s thugs had been charmed by her performances of the Lennon-McCartney material. But, finally realizing its part in boosting morale about the compound, they had retaliated by confiscating her harmonicas (she had five or six stashed among her belongings), and then by closing her mouth in as cruelly dramatic a fashion as they could devise without killing her.

  Ah, but why Beatles music? Why not Christmas carols, Negro spirituals, Appala
chian folk songs?

  At Casa Piadosa she had never really considered the matter. She had merely let the music flow through her as if she and the harmonicas voicing it were a single unthinking instrument for its peremptory expression. She was not so much playing the Beatles tunes as being played by them. That this music inevitably heartened the other hostages and even a majority of their swaggering guards—payrolled rapists, torturers, and assassins—was a happy accident. At first, anyway. At first.

  Now Eleanor sat in her wheelchair trying to recall a bygone era …

  JFK, Khrushchev, John Glenn, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the British invasion of the American popular-music charts.

  At first … well, at first the Beatles had not interested her. When they appeared on a long-running CBS variety hour early in 1964, she was a socially backward, intellectually precocious thirteen-year-old whose most passionate longing was to become a medical missionary in Africa or Latin America. She watched The Ed Sullivan Show that Sunday night only because her older brother, Marshall, had to see the mop-topped quartet make their American television debut, and because even her folks could scarcely contain their curiosity about this unlikely show-business phenomenon.

  During the program Eleanor made up her mind that these four British boys were silly looking and their songs energetic but primitive pieces of nonsense. Although the elder Rigginses exchanged disbelieving glances and acidulous remarks about the musicians’ haircuts and singing voices, they remained almost as attentive as Marshall and Eleanor to the band’s performances. Afterward, more amused by her parents’ behavior than by the Beatles’, Eleanor went to her room to do her homework. What was all the fuss about?

  Two years later she was still relatively untouched by the fevers of Beatlemania. Of course, she could not turn on the radio without hearing one of the group’s songs or go into a store without encountering some sort of makeshift shrine to their ubiquitous appeal (tee-shirt displays, magazine covers, Beatle wigs, outsized posters). However, her own private goals (divinity school, Johns Hopkins Medical College, a tour in the Peace Corps) kept her from idolatry. She knew her own mind, and the uncompromising rigor of her goals isolated her so that she could pursue them.

  Then, one Saturday morning, Susan Carmack—Eleanor’s only close friend in the tenth grade—stopped by her house with a copy of the new Revolver album. In Eleanor’s bedroom, Susan put the vinyl disk on the turntable of a tacky portable stereo and insisted that she listen to a ditty called “Eleanor Rigby.” This proved to be a driving but melancholy song with a haunting lyric.

  “It could be about you,” Susan said, “if your name was Rigby instead of Riggins.”

  “Thank goodness for that syllable’s difference, then.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a depressing song, Susan. Eleanor Rigby dies alone in her flat, and nobody comes to her funeral—that’s why.”

  “Still,” said Susan Carmack.

  “Still what?”

  “I’d be ecstatic if John and Paul wrote a song called ‘Susan Carmody’ or ‘Susan Carlisle’ or something. I wouldn’t even mind if the girl in the song got knocked up and had an abortion and finally went to live in a Mexican whorehouse.”

  “I’ll bet you wouldn’t.”

  Laughing and arguing, they listened to “Eleanor Rigby” two or three more times, then to the other songs on the album. Along with a whimsical photomontage, the record’s cardboard sleeve featured Beardsleyesque pen-and-ink portraits of the four elfin fellows. Eleanor found herself staring at these portraits with genuine respect. Elfin or not, the Beatles had added the startling dimension of social consciousness to their work. Good for them. Thus inspired, in fact, she put down the jacket and hurried into her brother’s bedroom to borrow the harmonica he kept hidden in one of his dresser drawers. With it, back in her own room, she played impromptu off-key accompaniments to “Taxman,” “Yellow Submarine,” and several others. Susan, giggling, egged her on.

  And so, like a sinner fussed over and prayed for by tenacious fundamentalists, Eleanor finally surrendered to the spirit animating her peers. At the advanced age of fifteen, she, too, was a victim of Beatlemania …

  Dr. Petitt, silhouetted against the dull fluorescents of the corridor, stood in her doorway.

  “Mrs. Galvez, don’t you want me to help you into bed?”

  “Please.”

  “And just what are you doing up at this hour?”

  “Remembering the first time I was tortured, Karen.”

  Maneuvering Eleanor’s wheelchair closer to the narrow bed, Dr. Petitt said nothing. Her silence was not hard to interpret. She was undoubtedly wondering why her patient had chosen these lonely moments before bedtime to call up such unpleasant memories. Further, she was probably cursing herself for permitting Carlos Villar to come to the center to plague Eleanor with questions about the siege at Casa Piadosa.

  “Karen, the first time I was relentlessly tortured was when I was fifteen. It had nothing to do with Guacamayo.”

  “Good.” The neurologist pulled the bed linen over her patient’s body and then began to plump her pillow. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Why do you suppose I brought it up?”

  “Go ahead. I’ll sit in your wheelchair while you talk.”

  “Oh, I’m going to sing a little, too—even if I do sound like a stuck pig. You see, off and on during my last three years of high school in Richmond, the boys in my classes would taunt me with a parody of the Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ It went like this:

  ‘Eleanor Riggins

  Scrapes at the lice

  In her hair with her fingers and comb,

  She’s all alone.

  ‘Stoops by the teacher

  ,Browning her nose

  In the crease of that fat lady’s ass.

  O what a gas.

  ‘Such a homely harpy,

  She’s not the smoochin’ kind.

  Such a homely harpy,

  We love her for her mind.’”

  Eleanor’s wavering, birdlike falsetto ceased. Turning her head, she saw that Dr. Petitt, as if in spite of herself, was smiling. She smiled, too, just to let Dr. Petitt know that she had intended to provoke her amusement. Of course, the boys’ cutesy “torture” had not been funny at the time—not to her, anyway. It had, of course, played well to their sycophants and to new arrivals who had never heard it before. Eleanor had survived—she had even managed to preserve a little of her dignity—by steadfastly ignoring these performances. But you could hardly hope to emerge unscathed from that kind of protracted belittlement, and she had not. Finally, in fact, even Susan Carmack had deserted her, and those last three years of high school had been a friendless hell.

  “I don’t have a ready treatment for that one,” Dr. Petitt admitted.

  “Time,” said Eleanor Riggins-Galvez, relishing the bromide. “Time heals all wounds.”

  Carlos, who was staying at the Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta, returned the following day with his video equipment, a CD player, and a CD of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album that he had purchased at an all-night music bar not far from the hotel. The CD had cost forty American dollars, and having listened to it back in his hotel room, Carlos felt grimly certain that the dealer had burned it from somebody else’s imperfect copy of the original recording. Well, it would have to do. He meant it as a memento of his regard for Mrs. Galvez, not as something she would want to play over and over again.

  Walking from the Warm Springs heliport to the Torture Victim Rehabilitation Center, Carlos passed many of the hospital’s patients on the lawn. He had seen them yesterday, of course, but his involvement with Dr. Petitt and Mrs. Galvez had prevented him from paying much heed. Today their faces jumped out at him, masks in which only the eyes truly lived. Their bodies, whether propped in aluminum walkers, jammed in wheelchairs, or hobbling along with the aid of rubber-tipped canes, seemed to be encumbrances that the eyes in the masklike faces either despised or resented. And why not? Their bodies
had betrayed them. The enemies of their deepest moral and political beliefs had tried to use their bodies to make them renounce or recant those beliefs. Even the strong-willed survivors who had withstood the agony inflicted upon them had not yet escaped the memories of their degradation. Most of these patients never would, not even the ones who walked upright and bore no outward signs of their ordeal. As a result, their own bodies were strangers to them, mangled suits of armor imprisoning their souls.

  Time, apparently, did not heal all wounds—unless, of course, you regarded death as an acceptable panacea.

  Inside the hospital, Carlos filmed Mrs. Galvez taking her afternoon meal with a man who had recently lost both hands to a cadre of Argentine guerillas on the pampas. Beaming, this man fed La Gran Dama spoonful after spoonful of Brunswick stew with the living prostheses bioengineered for him by a Swiss company often engaged by the seven rehabilitation centers of Amnesty International. After this meal, Carlos recorded Eleanor trading good-humored insults with an orderly, wheeling herself down her gloomy first-floor corridor, and playing a game of video chess with a patient undergoing therapy at a facility in Toronto.

  Back in her own room, Carlos played the Abbey Road CD for her. A young Peruvian torture victim wandered in and leaned against the doorjamb to listen. He wore only a pair of faded gray gym shorts and a suede vest on which he had pinned dozens of sloganeering buttons: “Gente Arriba, Junta Abajo,” “Don’t Sell the Moon to General Motors,” and so on. Carlos also noticed that purple welts ran up and down the insides of the empty-eyed victim’s arms. Eleanor introduced him as Ramon Covarrubias, but the man only nodded. He took his leave as soon as the CD had finished playing. The senora was little more communicative; she thanked Carlos for his thoughtfulness.