Distress - A Novel Part 18

On the morning of the second day, Mosala and De Groot came to visit. They seemed like time travelers to me; my previous life on Stateless had already receded into the distant past.

204.

Mosala seemed shocked by my appearance. She said gently, "I've taken your advice; I've been examined thoroughly. I'm not infected, Andrew. I've spoken to your doctor, and he thinks you must have caught this from food on the plane."

I croaked, "Has anyone else, on the same flight-?"

"No. But one sealed package might have missed being irradiated, and ended up imperfectly sterilized. It can happen."

I didn't have the strength to argue. And this theory made a certain amount of sense: a random glitch had breached the technological barrier between Third World and First, momentarily scrambling the impeccable free-market logic of employing the cheapest caterers on the planet and then blasting away the risks with an equally cheap burst of gamma rays.

That evening, my temperature began rising again. Michael-the Fijian man who'd greeted me when I first woke, and who'd since explained that he was "both doctor and nurse, if you insist on using those archaic foreign words here"-sat by my bed for most of the night ... or at least, he was there in the flesh during every brief window of lucidity I experienced; the rest of the time, for all I knew, I hallucinated his presence.

I slept three straight hours from dawn to mid-moming-long enough for my first coherent dream. Clawing my way up toward consciousness, I clung defiantly to the happy ending: The disease had run its course, it had burned itself out. My symptoms had vanished. Gina had even flown in overnight-to take me back, to take me home.

I'd been woken by an intense cramp. I was soon expelling gray water full of intestinal mucus, gasping obscenities, wanting to die.

In the late afternoon, with the sunlit ward behind the screens as vague and luminous as heaven-re-enacting the same convulsions for the thousandth time, s.h.i.+tting out, yet again, every last drop of fluid the drip had fed into me-I found myself emitting a keening noise, baring my teeth and s.h.i.+vering, like a dog, like a sick hyena.

Early on the fourth day, my fever almost vanished. Everything which had come before seemed like an anesthetized nightmare, violent and frightening but inconsequential-a dream sequence shot through gauze.

A merciless gray solidity clung to everything in sight. The screens around me were caked with dust. The sheets were stained yellow from 205.

dried sweat. My skin was coated with slime. My lips, my tongue, my throat, were cracked and stinging, sloughing dead cells and seeping a thin discharge which tasted more like salt than blood. Every muscle from my diaphragm to my groin felt injured, useless, tortured beyond repair- but tensed like an animal flinching from a rain of blows, ready for more. The joints of my knees felt as if I'd been crouching for a week on cold, hard ground.

The cramps, the spasms, began again. I'd never been so lucid; they'd never been worse.

I had no patience left. All I wanted to do was rise to my feet and walk out of the hospital, leaving my body behind. Flesh and bacteria could fight it out between themselves; I'd lost interest.

I tried. I closed my eyes and pictured it. I willed it to happen, I wasn't delirious-but walking away from this pointless, ugly confrontation seemed like such a sensible choice, such an obvious solution, that for a moment I suspended all disbelief.

And I finally understood, as I never had before-not through s.e.x, not through food, not through the lost exuberant physicality of childhood, not from the pinp.r.i.c.ks of a hundred petty injuries and instantly cured diseases-that this vision of escape was meaningless, a false arithmetic, an idiot dream.

This diseased body was my whole self. It was not a temporary shelter for some tiny, indestructible man-G.o.d living in the safe warm dark behind my eyes. From skull to putrid a.r.s.ehole, this was the instrument of everything I'd ever do, ever feel, ever be.

I'd never believed otherwise- -but I'd never really felt it, never really known it. I'd never before been forced to embrace the whole sordid, twitching, visceral truth.

Was this what Daniel Cavolini had learned, when he tore away his blindfold? I stared up at the ceiling, tense and s.h.i.+vering, claustrophobic, all the nausea and pain spread across my abdomen hardening into rigid bands like metal embedded in the flesh.

By noon, my temperature started climbing again. I was glad: I wanted delirium, I wanted confusion. Sometimes the fever flayed every nerve, magnified and sharpened every sensation-but I still hoped it might erase this new understanding, which was worse than the pain.

It didn't.

Mosala visited again. I smiled and nodded, but said nothing, and I 206.

couldn't concentrate on her words. The two screens either side of the bed remained in place, but the third had been moved aside, and when I raised my head I could see the patient opposite me, a forlorn skinny boy with a drip, his parents beside him. His father was reading to him quietly; his mother held his hand. The whole tableau seemed impossibly distant, separated from me by an unbridgeable gulf; I couldn't imagine ever again having the power to climb to my feet and walk five meters.

Mosala left. I drifted.

Then I noticed someone standing near the foot of the bed, and an electric jolt ran through my body. A shock of transcendental awe.

Striding through unforgiving reality: an angel.

Janet Walsh turned, half toward me. I raised myself up on my elbows and called out to her, terrified, enraptured. "I think I understand now. Why you do it. Not how . . . but why."

She looked straight at me, mildly puzzled, but unperturbed.

I said, "Please talk to me. I'm ready to listen."

Walsh frowned slightly, tolerant but uncomprehending, her wings fluttering patiently.

"I know I've offended you. I'm sorry. Can't you forgive me? I want to hear everything now. I want to understand how you make it work."

She regarded me in silence.

I said, "How do you lie about the world? And how do you make yourself believe it? How can you see the whole truth, know the whole truth ... and go on pretending that none of it matters? What's the secret? What's the trick? What's the magic7"

My face was already burning white hot, but I leaned forward, hoping that her sheer radiance might infect me with her great transforming insight.

"I'm trying! You have to believe I'm trying!" I looked away, suddenly at a loss for words, struck dumb by the ineffable mystery of her presence. Then a cramp seized me; the thing I could no longer pretend was a demon snake constricted inside me.

I said, "But when the truth, the underworld, the TOE . . . reaches up, takes you in its fist, and squeezes..." I raised my own hand, meaning to demonstrate, but it was already clenched tight involuntarily. "How do you ignore it? How do you deny it? How do you go on fooling yourself that you've ever stood above it, ever pulled the strings, ever run the show?"

207.

Sweat was running into my eyes, blinding me. I brushed it away with my clenched fist, laughing. "When every cell, every f.u.c.king atom in your body, burns the message into your skin: everything you value, everything you cherish, everything you live for ... is just the sc.u.m on the surface of a vacuum thirty-five powers of ten deep-how do you go on lying? How do you close your eyes to that?"

I waited for her answer. Solace, redemption, were within my grasp. I held my arms out toward her in supplication.

Walsh smiled faintly, then walked on without saying a word.

I woke in the early hours of the morning. Burning up again, drenched in sweat.

Michael was sitting on the chair beside me, reading from his notepad. The whole ward was lit softly from above, but the light of the words shone up more brightly.

I whispered, "Today, I tried to become . . . everything I despise. But I couldn't even manage that."

He put the notepad down, and waited for me to continue.

"I'm lost. I really am lost."

Michael glanced at the bedside monitor, and shook his head. "You're going to live through this. In a week, you won't even be able to imagine how you feel right now."

"I'm not talking about the cholera. I'm having-" I laughed; it hurt. "I'm having what Mystical Renaissance would call a spiritual crisis. And I have nowhere to turn to for comfort. Nowhere to turn to for strength. No lover, no family, no nation. No religion, no ideology. Nothing."

Michael said calmly, "Then you're lucky. I envy you."

I gaped at him, appalled by this heartlessness.

He said, "Nowhere to bury your head. Like an ostrich on reef-rock. I envy you. You might learn something."

I had no reply to that. I started s.h.i.+vering; I was sweating and aching, but icy cold. "I take back what I said about the cholera. It's fifty-fifty. I'm being equally f.u.c.ked by both."

Michael put his hands behind his neck and stretched, then rearranged himself on the chair. "You're a journalist. Do you want to hear a story?"

"Don't you have some vital medical work to do?"

208.

"I'm doing it."

Waves of nausea began sweeping up from my bowels. "Okay, I'll listen. If you'll let me record. What's this story about?"

He grinned. "My own spiritual crisis, of course."

"I should have guessed." I closed my eyes and invoked Witness. The whole action was instinctive, and it was over in half a second-but when it was done, I was shocked. 1 felt like I was on the verge of disintegrating . . . but this machinery-as much a part of me as anything organic-still worked perfectly.

He began, "When I was a child, my parents used to take me to the most beautiful church in the world."

"I've heard that line before."

"This time it's true. The Reformed Methodist Church in Suva. It was a huge, white building. It looked plain from the outside-austere as a barn. But it had a row of stained gla.s.s windows, showing scenes from the scriptures, carved by a computer in sky-blue, rose and gold. Every wall was lined with a hundred kinds of flowers-hibiscus, orchids, lillies- piled up to the roof. And the pews were always crammed with people; everyone wore their finest, brightest clothes, everyone sang, everyone smiled. It was like stepping straight into heaven. Even the sermons were beautiful: no h.e.l.l-fire, only comfort and joy. No ranting about sin and d.a.m.nation: just some modest suggestions about kindness, charity, love."

I said, "Sounds perfect. What happened? Did G.o.d send a Greenhouse storm to put an end to all this blasphemous happiness and moderation?"

"Nothing happened to the church. It's still there."

"But you parted company? Why?"

"I took the scriptures too literally. They said put away childish things. So I did."

"Now you're being facetious."

He hesitated. "If you really want to know the precise escape route . . . it all started with just one parable. Have you heard the story of the widow's mite?"

"Yes."

"For years, as a schoolboy, I turned it over and over in my head. The poor widow's small gift was more precious than the rich man's large one. Okay. Fine. I understood the message. I could see the dignity it gave to every act of charity. But I could see a whole lot more encoded in that parable, and those other things wouldn't go away.

209.

"I could see a religion which cared more about feeling good than doing good. A religion which valued the pleasure of giving-or the pain-more than any tangible effect. A religion which put . . . saving your own soul through good works far above their worldly consequences.

"Maybe I was reading too much into one story. But if it hadn't started there, it would have started somewhere else. My religion was beautiful_ but I needed more than that. I demanded more. It had to be true. And it wasn't."

He smiled sadly, and raised his hands, let them fall. I thought I could see the loss in his eyes, I thought I understood.

He said, "Growing up with faith is like growing up with crutches."

"But you threw away your crutches and walked7"

"No. I threw away my crutches and fell flat on my face. All the strength had gone into the crutches-I had none of my own. I was nineteen, when it finally all fell apart for me. The end of adolescence is the perfect age for an existential crisis, don't you think? You've left yours awfully late."

My face burned with humiliation. Michael reached over and touched my shoulder. He said, "I've had a long s.h.i.+ft, my judgment's slipping. I'm not trying to be cruel." He laughed. "Listen to me, spouting 'season for everything' bulls.h.i.+t-like the Edenites meet II Duce: Get those emotional trains running on time!" He leaned back, and ran a hand through his hair. "But I was nineteen, there's no getting around it. And I'd lost G.o.d. What can I say? I read Sartre, I read Camus, I read Nietzche-"

I winced. Michael was puzzled. "You have a problem with Friedrich7"

The cramp tightened. I replied through gritted teeth, "Not at all. All the best European philosophers went mad and committed suicide."

"Exactly. And I read them all."

"And?"

He shook his head, smiling, embarra.s.sed. "For a year or so ... I really believed it: Here J am, staring into the abyss with Nietzche. Here I am, on the brink of insanity, entropy, meaninglessness: the Enlightenment's unspeakable G.o.dless rational d.a.m.nation. One wrong step, and I'll go spi-raling down."

He hesitated. I watched him closely, suddenly suspicious. Was he making this up as he went along? A little improvised Care'for'the'Whole'Patient routine7 And even if he wasn't. . . we'd had different lives, different histories. What use was any of this to me?

210.

I listened, though.

"But I didn't go spiraling down. Because there is no airyss. There is no yawning chasm waiting to swallow us up, when we learn that there is no G.o.d, that we're animals like any other animal, that the universe has no purpose, that our souls are made of the same stuff as water and sand."

I said, "There are two thousand cultists on this island who believe otherwise."

Michael shrugged. "What do you expect from moral flat-Earthers, if not fear of falling? If you desperately, pa.s.sionately want to plummet into the abyss, of course its possible-but only if you work hard. Only if you will the entire thing into being. Only if you manufacture every last centimeter of it, on your way down.

"I don't believe that honesty leads to madness. I don't believe we need delusions to stay sane. 1 don't believe the truth is strewn with b.o.o.by-traps, waiting to swallow up anyone who thinks too much. There is nowhere to fall-not unless you stand there digging the hole."

I said, "You fell, didn't you? When you lost your faith."

"Yes-but how far? What have I become? A serial killer? A torturer?"

"I sincerely hope not. But you lost a lot more than 'childish things,' didn't you? What about all those stirring sermons on kindness, charity and love?"

Michael laughed softly. "And the least of these is /aith. What makes you think I've lost anything? I've stopped pretending that the things I value are locked up in some magical vault called 'G.o.d'-outside the universe, outside time, outside myself. That's all. I don't need beautiful lies anymore, just to make the decisions I want to make, to try to live a life I think is good. If the truth had taken those things away ... I could never really have had them in the first place.

"And I still clean up your s.h.i.+t, don't I? I still tell you stories at three in the morning. If you want greater miracles than that, you're out of luck."

Whether it was genuine autobiography, or just a slick piece of ad hoc therapy, Michael's story began to undermine my panic and claustrophobia. His arguments made too much sense to me; they sliced through my self-pity like a hot wire. If the universe itself wasn't a cultural construct, the gray terror I felt from seeing myself as a part of it certainly was. I'd never had the honesty to embrace the molecular nature of my 211.

own existence-but then, the whole society I'd inhabited had been equally coy. The reality had always been glossed over, censored, ignored. I'd spent thirty-six years in a world still infested with lingering dualism, with tacit dumb spirituality-where every movie, every song, still wailed about the immortal soul. .. while everyone swallowed designer drugs predicated on pure materialism. No wonder the truth had come as a shock.

The abyss-like everything else-was understandable. I lost interest in digging myself a hole.

Vibrio cholerae declined to follow my example.

I lay curled on my side, my notepad propped up against an extra pillow, while Sisyphus showed me what was happening inside me.