In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (2 page)

The reporter, who had conducted his interviews with the hospital staff over the phone, and filed in the same way, was fortunate. Professor Salomon was not; time had in fact run out for her in more ways than one. Before she died, however, she had the satisfaction of seeing her report in print, its publication in the
New England Journal
spurred on by the article in
Time
.

In the four weeks that followed the first wave, mortality in the county was misleadingly low. The local daily never having printed the word, the contagion was spread almost exclusively among the hospital staff, in whom the disease lay latent for the month of July. At the end of the first week of August, the marks broke out over the hands, cheeks, jaws, and (most prominently) foreheads of approximately eighty-five doctors, nurses, orderlies, speech therapists and social workers, most of whom were brought in by their families in various stages of confusion, euphoria, and glossolalia.

In this second wave, observers reported yet another symptom, which followed those exhibited in the first wave in a distinct progression. Whether the onset was marked by dreamy confusion, giddiness, or fluently unintelligible speech, within twelve hours all such symptoms had lapsed into one: an uncontrollable paranoia, in which the sufferer was convinced that every object in the world, animate or inanimate, was involved in a vast conspiracy to do the patient harm.

Without exception, in this stage of the disease its victims spoke continuously for periods of up to twenty-four hours, offering elaborately detailed descriptions of the delusional system in which they were enmeshed. And without exception, the attending physicians reported that they had at times to fight off the conviction that their patients’ nightmares were real. Who can blame them? Confronted with an undeniable health emergency, swift to spread, invariably fatal, and marked at its heart by the inscrutable symbol of the word, little wonder that those who struggled to understand the disease struggled as well with fear. Unlike their patients, who had evolved an explanation for the menace within them, their doctors had no such comfort, and could only watch their patients die, and wonder helplessly if they had contracted the plague as well.

For plague, by the end of the first week of September, it had become. There is little point in going over the statistics of that hellish week: the figures beggar comprehension, and mere repetition will not suffice to make them meaningful. Certainly their import was dulled by the more immediate, personal tragedies that struck almost every household in the country at that time. And as the numbers grew to embrace other nations, other languages, their meaning became in no way more intelligible. No more than did the word, which, as it appeared in different nations, took on different forms, but had everywhere the same effect.

AT THIS TIME
, little remains to report, but I would like to offer before I close two or three items that strike me as significant. The first, as I have hinted, was almost lost in the events that followed so quickly on the disease’s emergence into the public eye. But Professor Salomon’s team, in the weeks between her death and theirs, continued its research into the origins of the contagion. And though the trail had by then grown cold, the scent was not so faint that they could find in this an excuse for the failure of their investigations: the disease was untraceable, they concluded, because it had no physical cause.

And here I find one of the most pathetic effects of this disease—the kind of case in which its action was so grievous because so clearly marked. One of Salomon’s survivors, a geneticist, whom I had known slightly during our years together at the university, and who was one of the few men I have ever met who might have deserved to be called a genius, telephoned me on the day the disease took hold of him. While I kept him on the phone, in the thirty minutes before help arrived I listened as he spun out the delusion that had come on him with the word. The spectacle, if I may call it that, of a mind of his caliber reduced to raving brought me close to tears.

But I feel obligated to report what he said to me that day, in part because it was my only immediate contact with a victim of the plague. And also because one aspect of the encounter still strikes me, somehow, as significant. I believed. All the time I was speaking to him, I found myself fighting off conviction. Naturally, the feeling passed, but I still find myself, several weeks later, struggling with a sense of opportunity missed: I felt at the time, and still in my weaker moments do, as though I had come close to penetrating the mystery of the word. This is, of course, one of the effects most frequently reported by those attending on the dying.

The disease, my caller insisted, was not, properly speaking, a plague. That is to say, it was not spread by any of the infectious mechanisms. The word was not a pathogen: it was a catalyst, and the disease itself immanent in humanity at large. He had deciphered a sequence, he claimed, in the human genome, which matched, in the repetitive arrangement of its amino acids, the structure of the word. It seemed the word, processed in the temporal lobe in the presence of sufficient quantities of norepinephrine—the quantities released at levels of anxiety commonly associated with imminent bodily harm—acted as a trigger for this hitherto unnoticed gene. The gene, once stimulated, distorted the chemical function of the cerebral cortex, and the result was the familiar progression of stigmata, hallucination, convulsion, death.

It was, of course, palpable nonsense. I did not tell him so. Pity restrained me. He needed me, he went on, to spread the word. I chided him, gently, on his phraseology. His response was impatient to the point of fury. I had to help, he insisted: my own expertise in linguistics dovetailed so neatly with his findings. The two of us, he said, could broadcast the key needed to unlock a cure. I allowed him to speak as long as he needed to, until the ambulance arrived and the receiver was quietly set down. Triage, in those days, was performed upon the spot.

The man’s ravings were, of course, merely one more instance of the paranoia that marks the final hours of the victims of the plague. But, like all paranoid fantasies, his had some germ of truth in them, and it tantalized me. If we accept that the disease came into this world without phenomenal cause, another possibility remains. The disease is, I grant, born in the brain. But it is not the product of any mechanism so vulgar as genetic coding. It is purely a product of the human mind.

I offer this as a message of hope. For if the plague had its origins in the human mind, might it not be fought by the same powers that called it forth? Tabitha had been “playing with the newspapers,” her mother reported. So, this night, have I. I have before me the pages, already growing yellow, of the
I—Journal
in the first weeks of June. I visited the newspaper’s offices last night, forced to break in with a wrecking bar. The streets of the town were still, but for someone singing in the upper floor above a nearby shop. The words of the song were unintelligible: only the tune came through, a wandering melody, almost familiar.

I have spread them out here before me, these pages from the morgue, my fingers trembling, the paper brittle, my breath unsteady in my chest. I read the stories there: they are the old familiar ones, always the same. Family burns in fire. Two held in convenience-store murder. Ultimatum issued over genocide. War in the Middle East. Old news: these portents and omens reduced to columns of fading ink.

I know, of course, the risk I am taking. I know only too well how fragile has been the chain of circumstances that has protected me from the infection. I listen even now to the stillness outside my window, and am awed by the hush there, and what it says to me of my own great fortune. It is a mournful silence, broken only by the eternal singing of the katydids. They call, as they always have, of the coming of winter: mournful, and yet somehow pleasant, as all melancholy is.

But before I digress again, I would report the last significant item I have in my possession, and then I must go back to my own work, which has been too long interrupted. The information is this. In the later stages of the plague, the word disappeared. Almost as if it were no longer necessary, the last victims sickened, raved, and died without any visible sign of illness. I have a theory, of course. And although there is no means at my disposal to prove it even to my own satisfaction, I am convinced it is true.

The word, whatever it meant, whatever form it took in whatever language, was not the carrier of plague: not in any of the ways we sought to understand. Understanding was beside the point: for how could Tabitha, herself illiterate, have understood? The answer, plainly, is that she did not. I can imagine the scene vividly, even now, as the child turned the pages of the newspaper, rehearsing in her thoughts such anxieties as she had heard adults around her voice over pages such as these. Anxieties she did not understand, yet could not help but share: anxieties that, for all she knew, were made of words. Words she could not understand, but still she searched among them for some clue, some answer to the riddle of her life.

Children are suggestible, reader. To go from fear of unintelligible danger to a physical expression of that fear required only one word, any word, any arbitrary sequence of letters that happened to come to her as she “read.” That word, written in blood on her features, took her to the hospital, confirming all her fears—fears that conspired, after three days and nights of what must have been pure, unremitting terror, to stop her heart.

Do you doubt me, reader? What more would you have? Letters of fire across the sky? A voice speaking prophecy in your sleep? A look in the mirror at your own forehead? A list, perhaps, of the ways death can come to you, even as you read here, safe in your home?

What is it you want? The word?

I give you this, and then I must be gone. All you need is here before you—and the knowledge that what kills us now is any word at all, read in the belief that words can kill.

I know this now. I have been convinced for several days.

‘O Λoγoς!

‘O Λoγoς!

‘O Λoγoς!

M
y father’s heart beats in a glass jar on the mantel, a steady flickering at the edge of my eye. I try to avoid it, but by dinnertime each night I’m staring. Beneath my gaze it pulses, and perhaps it turns a richer purple. From the jar I hear a low, dull, quick sound, persistent as a muffled watch.

You may know already what a small thing a heart is. Close your fist. Dig your nails into your palm two times quickly. Repeat. There it is. But my father’s heart is large—fully as large as my head. The wide-mouth jar upon my mantelpiece once held a gallon of mayonnaise. Now, with the heart inside, it takes but two quarts of saline to brim it.

Atop the fluid, faint ripples shudder. Through them, I see the stubs of the aorta, vena cava, and the pulmonary vessels wave faintly, jerking. I tap the glass, and the tentacles withdraw; as suddenly as a slug surprised the whole mass shrinks, then slowly expands, and pulsates at its former size.

It has been a difficult possession. I am nervous about letting company near it. They might flick ashes in the jar, or jostle it. They might want to take it home. Vacations are, of course, out of the question. Whether the saline evaporates, or the heart in some way consumes it, I cannot say, but each day the level in the jar recedes, and I must top it off. Once each month the whole thing needs cleaning: I plop the beating mass out on the kitchen table—a few minutes in the air don’t seem to bother it—rinse out the jar, and refill. The heart retakes its seat unruffled, seemingly oblivious, except for a slight flush around the coronary arteries, a slightly grander bulging on diastole.

But I tap the jar, and it mimes surprise: Don’t tap, it says; don’t tap. There is a dry, bleachy smell rising off the saline, and the faintest whiff of sweat.

It has learned the trick of propelling itself around the jar. The left ventricle twitches, a wave spurts from the descending aorta, and the whole mass rises from the bottom; a delicate pursing of the pulmonary arteries steers. I have found it at times spinning slowly, tootling an inaudible tune from the upbranching aortal pipes. On each rotation, it brings into view the scarification surrounding one collapsed and knotted vessel. It sees me staring, and with an abrupt spasm turns itself. The tubules wave at me. Go away, it says, go away.

I can’t remember when it came into my possession. The question seems odd to me. When I stop and consider, of course I know that it must have come to me, on some day and in some place, but I feel it has always been with me. I know I had it when I went off to school, and carried it around from rented room to room, in and out of boxes for four years, and sometimes never a proper place to put it, hidden or exposed. My sophomore year it was a doorstop, but the gesture was transparent, to me and it, and there was bad blood on both sides.

Lately, I have felt the old antagonism resurfacing. I awake at night, and feel my own heart thudding wildly. I have fears—did I dine on botulism? am I growing bald?—and hear a low, dull chuckling from the other room. It is as mute as Adam when I see it by daylight, but I have suspicions of its nights. I have these past few evenings, about the hour of midnight, tried sneaking up on it with a flashlight. The beam reveals only a sodden lump of flesh, slumped and snoozing, a bubble hanging on the slack aortal lip. My own heart quiets at the sight, although at bottom I feel there lurks a lump of anger—sleeping, but alive.

I have raged at it of late: Leech, I cry: Bloodsucker. It burps clear saline in mild protest; innocence sits on every valve. I am not taken in. It has not been so many years since I have seen it raging in its turn, swollen to the size of a dirigible, as full of gas and fire, stopping traffic across four lanes of Sixth Avenue. A cab driver had refused to carry it: “I don’t haul meat.” I spent the balance of that day in terror, cradling the jar in my lap (we took a bus), looking into it each time the saline sloshed. It refused to look up.

At times—the oddest times—it has reared up inside its jar and reviled me. Ingrate, it cries. Weakling. Disappointment-to-me. I try to explain (I always try to explain), but the heart distends to twice its normal size. There is saline everywhere. I am afraid it will explode.

In an hour it is talking back at the small TV that sits beside its jar. It complains at the commercials. I keep my distance.

Once again I have awakened, and checking my pulse I find it slow, laboring, uneven. From the next room there is no sound. I snap on the light in the living room, and the heart starts, wrinkles into itself, and shields its blinking atria. Wake up, I tell it, knowing it is already awake, but I enjoy the violence in my voice too much to stop. Wake up. It is rubbing its bulging cheeks. I bring my face closer to the brine. Are you listening to me?

I have surprised it. No pirouetting, no calliope tunes: even the look of injured innocence is gone. It blinks up at me blankly like a baby from a carriage, unsure. My own heart is racing.

Now I am here, I am not sure what to say. It won’t wait long. Suddenly I am embarrassed, and, sensing this (it is uncannily acute), the heart starts to regain its buoyancy. Slyly, as if only at the whim of a current, it starts to rise through the fluid. I worry suddenly that it may break the surface, a gaping vein present itself an inch below my lips. I back away, mumble, “Just wanted to see you were all right.”

Fantasies of revenge float through my mind all day. When I come home, I will slip it, jar and all, into the freezer. But does brine freeze? I could, while dusting, jostle it off its perch. The hearth is hard, the jar will shatter. It will flop about a minute or so, and then lie still. I am depressed when I arrive home. The key in the lock, the silence behind the door arrests me: what if something has happened? I fear the random violence of burglars.

One morning, I find the heart on the surface, lying on its side, a froth of bubbles around it. It looks an unhealthy gray. I lift it from its fluid, and, unmindful of the wet, I cradle it against my chest. I croon soft words in its direction. It lifts an artery, and quivers.

A week passes, and all is well. It was singing this morning when I left for work, sporting with the bits of toast I fed it. The doctor has taken it off salt. I am cheerful, the morning air expansive in my chest. As I come home that night I am whistling.

It is as if nothing has happened. The heart turns its back ostentatiously as I enter. The television fills the room with cheers. As I try to speak, it waves an aorta impatiently for silence: a line drive into right field; one man comes home, then another; the last holds up at third. The crowd is wild; the heart is assiduously intent. I drop my briefcase on my bed and take a shower.

As the steam climbs up the glass, water gurgles about my feet, the sounds of the next room fade. The thudding in my ears is all my own; the jar on the mantelpiece is empty, a crust of salt at its bottom. Tomorrow, I tell myself, I will throw it away. And suddenly I am sobbing as if my heart will break.