DAEMONOMANIA: Book Three of the Aegypt Cycle (7 page)

I
t had been just a cough at first, not even a bad cough, but persistent. Rosie’s mother, who was always made uncomfortable
by illness, had watched Rosie and listened to her with that peculiar cross on her face, formed of her contracted brows, her
pinched inquiring nose, and the furrow running up her brow between the deepened wrinkles—stigmata she could still produce.
Rosie as a kid thought it was what was meant by saying someone was cross.

She coughed and coughed: Dr. Crane came and looked into her throat and took a culture, the swab making her gag and spatter
his glasses with sputum, but there was nothing. She coughed daylong, nightlong; would be sent home from school, put to bed,
seem to improve, and start again. She was eleven, no twelve: had not yet had her first period.

“Look, Mommy.” Passing the cheerful and chock-full gift shop, stuffed animals large and small, some bandaged or with little
casts and crutches; balloons, games, puzzles, treats.

“Yes, hon, same as you have.” Sam’s Mary Janes rapped on the terrazzo floor, and her small hand was damp in Rosie’s.

Oh the interior of those nights coughing: watching the strip of light beneath her door, waiting for Mom to come into her room
once again, sit on her bed in her static-crackly nightgown of rayon, and feel her head. No fever, she never did have a fever,
but her mother felt her forehead over and over. Held her too while Rosie coughed, her coughs reaching deeper, searching her
until a violent spasm came too deep even for coughing and she produced a spoonful of yellowish sputum.

She had entirely forgotten, entirely forgotten: until she looked up at the name of this place and it began returning to her,
sometimes in a
stream so fast that she had to stop walking while it filled her, saying
Oh oh
while Sam puzzled over her. She remembered the life she had led bound up with that cough, a life different from the life
she had led before and after. She and her cough: she hadn’t chosen it, didn’t like it, God no: but remembered, in some awe,
the feeling of settling in with it, getting to know it: her life, different from others’.

Would Sam do that, was she doing it already, going into that place where she would live alone?

“Hi, we checking in today?”

“Um yes I guess.”

“And what department are we visiting today?”

“Neurology.”

“Sure.” A smile for Sam, who looked up at her. Grandmotherly in glasses hung with gold chains. Information taken, and an elaborate
set of directions given, as though they faced a labyrinth, which they did.

It was to this place they had brought Rosie at last (not to this cheerful pastel new place with its blond furniture and wide
windows, but nevertheless here, Little Ones). She was losing weight, not getting better, her mother too giving way under the
pressure of it, of it and everything—so Rosie imagined, able now to put this event or episode into the story (opaque or invisible
to her then) of her parents’ marriage and her father’s death. Took away her clothes, installed her on her ward, in her white
bed.

The poor kid, Rosie thought, oh that poor kid: filled up with pity for the skinny scared girl, carrot-topped, cat’s-eye glasses
awry on her face, in her bed, coughing ceaselessly for no reason. For no reason.

Neurology turned out to be housed in the older, shabbier wing, much shabbier, dismayingly shabby for a big hospital; the sixth
floor, reached by a cavernous clanking elevator, big enough for a rolling bed or a cart full of breakfasts, of which it smelled
too; and now Rosie, as though following her own old trail by scent, knew she had been this way before: knew this sad smell,
cold toast and porridge and ineradicable traces of soured milk.

“Ever been here before?” the nurse at the intake window asked her, and Rosie thought for what must have seemed a long time
before understanding that Sam was meant and not her; and they and their papers were given over to an aide, who would take
them down to the treatment room.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” the aide asked Sam.

“Sam.”

“Huh. Same as me.”

“Your name is Sam?” Rosie asked in wonderment.

“No. Nope. But I got a boy’s name, just like her. Bobby.”

“My name’s Samantha,” said Sam firmly, already touchy about this.

“Mine’s jes Bobby.”

She was a sharp-faced, narrow woman, with pale lashless eyes that made Rosie think of Pilgrims or of farm women in old photographs,
but her black hair was teased and flipped and puffed in imitation of country singers, not quite enough of it though. They
followed her down halls and half flights of stairs. She saw Rosie look up at the ceiling tiles stained in yellow arcs like
a peed bed.

“We’re movn,” she said. “So they don’t spend a dime back here. When we’re all moved into the new part they’ll fix up back
here.”

Back here. Back here, deep in, you saw more: the kids in the public areas were mostly just entering, or leaving, all better,
but here kids whose illnesses couldn’t be guessed at moved slowly through the halls in wheelchairs or were pushed in coffin-
or boatlike carriages of plywood stencilled with their floor number; kids in hospital gowns, some cheerful, some dazed, some
it was hard not to look away from, though Sam didn’t, her eyes wide, silent. Shaved heads were popular, in Neurology: half
a head shaved, and a big bandage. Please please let them not shave her head.

“Aren’t we going to see this doctor?” Rosie asked. “Dr. Marlborough?”

“You do the test first,” Bobby said. “Then you got something to talk about.”

If courts of law are like crossroads—one road leading to punishment, cost or confinement, and the other to liberty, exculpation,
vindication—then the waiting rooms of doctors are like the trunks of trees: the squirrel of your thought scampers out along
a hundred branching ways as you sit there with the doctor’s magazines, running toward cure, toward quick cure, toward nothing
really wrong at all; or toward something sort of mysteriously wrong which might one day get worse, a little worse, a lot worse,
or really quickly worse, very bad right now, much worse than you thought or than you feel, but then maybe better, the resources
of medicine—as mysterious as the forces of disease—brought all to bear, one quick treatment, or a few treatments, many treatments,
endless treatments, bewilderment, failure, surrender. Death. Life. Half-life worse than death. All these embryonic fruiting
bodies ready to come forth at each twig tip.

The test anyway had not been bad; Sam had allowed them to do with her as they liked, curious and unafraid and mild; Rosie
wanted almost to warn her, oh don’t Sam, fight back a little; they put their
electrodes on, she lay hooked up with her arms over her breast like a baby pharaoh or Frankenstein’s Daughter, and even fell
asleep for a while (
She’s asleep
said the technician, watching not Sam but the pen making its shuddery marks on the graph paper) and then it was done, and
they gave her a lollipop, transparent barley sugar, Sam would remember it years later; then back up, making their own way
this time, to the doctor’s office, through a corridor that passed the nurses’ station of the ward. By the station there was
a windup rocker chair just like one Sam used to have, a Swingading, a Rockadoo, what was it called: a little seat hanging
from a frame, a spring you wound up that kept the seat swinging back and forth like a metronome. Sam as an infant had suffered
from Mystery Shrieking, colic maybe or maybe not, and the only thing that would soothe her was to be in motion. In this one
a large white fat baby, too large, too white somehow, sat unmoving but awake, expressionless, rocking; only just in passing
did Rosie see that the back of its big bald head did not match the front, that right over the arc of its skull, under the
skin, could be discerned the line where whatever made up the back was joined, not precisely, with the front.

They waited now to see the doctor, to find out about Sam. Inside his little office he was reading the EEG. They were next
to see him. Sam continued telling the story of Brownie’s life to Brownie; Rosie read her booklet about epilepsy. Though epilepsy
was once thought to be a dangerous and uncontrollable form of insanity, it can now usually be fully controlled by medication.
Most people with many types of seizure disorders lead full lives without any difficulty. Who were the most and the many, she
wondered; when did you find out you weren’t them. Famous people who have suffered from seizure disorders include Julius Cæsar
and the beloved children’s poet Edward Lear, author of “The Jumblies” and many other works.

“Samantha Mucho? That you, honey?”

The Jumblies, Rosie remembered: far and few, far and few, the lands where the Jumblies live.

The doctor didn’t look up, when the nurse showed them in, from the long paper; a mechanical pencil in his hand hovered over
the marks but in the end chose not to alight on any; he looked up and smiled, and showed them seats.

“Never been here before, huh?” he asked.

“No,” Rosie said. Sam climbed into her lap and hid her face in her mother’s shirt. “I have. A long time ago.”

He looked up, interested. “Oh yes? For what reason?”

“Just a cough,” Rosie said, and for a moment felt tears rise to her
eyes. The doctor looked down again, losing interest. He was a large ugly man, black hair plastered over a pear-shaped head,
and two large moles or warts on his chin.

“So you know why we did this?” he asked.

“Not really.” She wished he’d talk to Sam, ask how she was. Couldn’t he see she was afraid?

“Seizures come in a lot of varieties,” he said. “Some are what we call idiopathic, which means we don’t know what causes them.
Most of them are, actually. I think Sam’s are that kind.”

“Oh,” Rosie said, not knowing what to make of this, but not encouraged; Dr. Marlborough seemed to read her face, and said:

“Actually that’s okay. Idiopathic seizures are often the kind that don’t do real harm. They’re not due to some underlying
pathology; they’re just the way someone is.”

Rosie said nothing.

“I say I
think
that’s what they are. But there’s some kind of funny things here.” He lifted his eyes from the strip of paper. “Sam,” he
said, “do you want to see your brain working?”

She looked at him with a face that made Rosie laugh, a curl of her lip that suggested she thought the invitation bizarre,
maybe unseemly; but after a moment she climbed from Rosie’s lap and went to Dr. Marlborough’s side. All three of them looked
at the long paper, unwieldy as an ancient scroll, and as obscure.

“See, here’s your brain, making waves,” the doctor said. “Every time your brain made waves, the pen moved. Your brain moved
the pen. And the waves are very nice. But see?” He let his pencil touch certain clusters of marks that seemed to Rosie no
different from the rest. Sam lifted her hand slowly to her head and placed it on her curls, as though she might be able to
feel the waves, still rising.

“Well they suggest that maybe there is an underlying disorder, a particular place in the brain that’s giving rise to these
seizures. But we can’t tell unless she has one while she’s hooked up to the machine.”

“Oh great,” Rosie said.

“Well, what we’re doing, and what I’d like to suggest for Sam, is a new sort of program we’ve started here. You come in for
a number of days—three is usually enough, it might take less—and we have a system where Sam can be attached to an EEG of a
special kind during all that time.”

“Yikes. That sounds awful.”

“Well, it’s pretty flexible. You have a portable unit, you can get around …”

“And you just wait for her to have a seizure?”

“Um—well no. What we’re learning is that in children whose seizures have a distinct focus or foci, there are brain events
that aren’t quite seizures, or that don’t quite precipitate seizures, and that happen rather frequently; that’s what we’d
be looking for.”

Rosie thought, or tried to. “And so then?”

“Depends. It might help you figure out how best to control the seizures. Maybe down the road, if they persist or get worse,
we can say well we know where they’re coming from and we can neutralize that area.”

“Neutralize?”

“Surgically.” He added quickly: “I really don’t think that’s Sam’s case. I really don’t.”

“Well if it cured her.”

“You don’t want to have to do surgery. Living with idiopathic seizures is preferable.”

She put her head in her hands, overwhelmed. “But how do I,” she said. “How. If one’s always going to happen, how.”

Dr. Marlborough closed his plump hands together and rested his chin on them. Rosie thought she saw him glance covertly at
his watch. How weird it is, she thought, this man I don’t know, who doesn’t know me, that I have to trust so much, more than
any lawyer, more than any best friend, but who isn’t my friend; who I have to trust to be not only smart but wise. And no
way of knowing if he’s either, no way but the usual ways you decide about people, which don’t apply.

“This is what I think,” Dr. Marlborough said. “You’ll never know when one’s going to happen, and there’s not much that you
can do beyond making sure she takes her medication to prevent one, and not much you can do to cause one either. So the best
thing to do is just act every day as though one will never happen again.”

To get out they had to return the way they had come, which Sam seemed to remember, tugging at her mother’s hand, plenty ready
to go; Rosie looked around for guidance, saw Bobby the aide, who nodded and pointed the way Sam was going; this led them past
the nurses’ station, past the child in the rocker. Rosie didn’t want to go that way, resisted Sam’s tug. It was still there,
still unmoving except for its ticktock motion back and forth.

“Yets go, Mommy. This way.”

Rosie couldn’t shut her eyes and be led, but that’s what she wanted; couldn’t turn back because back was only farther in.
But she was for a moment unable to move, because a dreadful certainty had taken over
her and held her and stopped her breath. Two certainties: that no time had passed since she had been a patient here on a ward—that
this was then, and not done yet; and that the baby in the rocker chair, with its split-level head and black-currant eyes open
a crack, was not a real baby at all, but something else entirely.