Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (517 page)

“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.

* * * *

All the way home, Helen and I said nothing to each other. Nothing about Toby, nothing about Xavier’s, nothing about miracles—nothing.

Weirdly, cruelly, my thoughts centered on rabbits. How I would no longer be able to abide their presence in my life. How I would tremble with rage whenever my career required me to criticize a copy of
Peter Rabbit
or an Easter card bearing some grinning bunny. I might even start seeking the animals out, leaving a trail of mysterious, mutilated corpses in my wake, whiskers plucked, ears torn off, tails severed from their rumps and stuffed down their throats.

Total silence. Not one word.

We entered the elevator, pushed 30. The car made a sudden, rapid ascent, like a pearl diver clambering toward the air: second floor, seventh, twelfth…

“How are you feeling?” I said at last.

“Not good,” Helen replied.

“‘Not good’—is that all? ‘Not good’? I feel horrible.”

“In my case, ‘horrible’ would not be a truthful word.”

“I feel all knotted and twisted. Like I’m a glove, and somebody’s pulled me inside out”—a bell rang, the numeral 30 flashed above our heads—“and my vital parts, my heart and lungs, they’re naked and—”

“You’ve been reading too many of the poems you deconstruct.”

“I hate your coldness, Helen.”

“You hate my candor.”

I left the car, started down the hall. Imagined exchanges haunted me—spectral words, ghostly vocables, scenes from an intolerable future.

Dad, what are these lumps under my arms?

Swollen lymph nodes, Toby.

Am I sick, Dad?

Sicker than you can imagine. You have Xavier’s Plague.

Will I get better?

No.

Will I get warm?

No.

Will I die?

Yes.

What happens when you die, Dad? Do you wake up somewhere else?

There’s no objective evidence for an afterlife, and anecdotal reports of heaven cannot be distinguished from wishful thinking, self-delusion, and the effects of oxygen loss on the brain.

The apartment had turned against me. Echoes of Toby were everywhere, infecting the living room like the virus now replicating in his cells—a child-sized boot, a dozen stray checkers, the miniature Crusaders’ castle he’d built out of balsa wood the day before he went to camp. “How do you like it, Dad?” he’d asked as he set the last turret in place. “It’s somewhat ugly,” I’d replied, flinching at the truth. “It’s pretty lopsided,” I’d added, sadly noting the tears welling up in my son’s eyes.

On the far wall, the picture window beckoned. I crossed our rugless floor, pressed my palms against the glass. A mile away, a neon sign blazed atop the cathedral in Galileo Square.
assuming god exists, jesus may have been his son
.

Helen went to the bar and made herself a dry martini, flavoring it with four olives skewered on a toothpick like kabobs. “I wish our son weren’t dying,” she said. “I truly wish it.”

An odd, impossible sentence formed on my tongue. “Whatever happens, Toby won’t learn the truth.”

“Huh?”

“You heard Prendergorst—in the Nightmare Era, terminal patients sometimes tapped their bodies’ natural powers of regeneration. It’s all a matter of attitude. If Toby believes there’s hope, he might have a remission.”

“But there isn’t any hope.”

“Maybe.”

“There
isn’t.
”

“I’ll go to him, and I’ll say, ‘Buddy, soon the doctors will…the doctors, any day now, they’ll…they’ll c-c…’”

Cure you
—but instead my conditioning kicked in, a hammerblow in my skull, a hot spasm in my chest.

“I know the word, Jack. Stop kidding yourself. It’s uncivilized to carry on like this.” Helen sipped her martini. “Want one?”

“No.”

I fixed on the metropolis, its bright towers and spangled skyscrapers rising into a misty, starless night. Within my disordered brain, a plan was taking shape, as palpable as any sculpture I’d ever deconstructed at the Wittgenstein.

“They’re out there,” I said.

“Who?”

“They can lie. And maybe they can teach
me
to lie.”

“You’re talking irrationally, Jack. I wish you wouldn’t talk irrationally.”

It was all clear now. “Helen, I’m going to become one of them—I’m going to become a dissembler.” I pulled my hand away, leaving my palm imprinted on the glass like a fortune-teller’s logo. “And then I’m going to convince Toby he has a chance.”

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“Somehow they’ve gotten around the burn. And if
they
can,
I
can.”

Helen lifted the toothpick from her martini glass and sucked the olives into her mouth. “Toby’s hair will start shedding in two weeks. He’s certain to ask what that means.”

Two weeks. Was that all I had? “I’ll say it means n-n-nothing.” A common illness, I’d tell him. A disease easily licked.

“Jack—
don’t.
”

A mere two weeks. A feeble fourteen days.

I ran to the kitchen, snatched up the phone. I need to see you, I’d tell her. This isn’t about sex, Martina.

610-400.

It rang three times, then came a distant click, ominous and hollow. “The number you have reached,” ran the recorded operator in a harsh, gravelly voice, “is out of service.” My bowels became as hard and cold as a glacier. “Probably an unpaid bill,” the taped message continued. “We’re pretty quick to disconnect in such cases.”

“Out of service,” I told Helen.

“Good,” she said.

7 Lackluster Lane, Descartes Borough.

Helen polished off her martini. “Now let’s forget this ridiculous notion,” she said. “Let’s face the future with honesty, clearheadedness, and…”

But I was already out the door.

* * * *

Girding the gray and oily Pathogen River, Lackluster Lane was alive with smells: scum, guano, sulphur, methane, decaying eels—a cacophony of stench blaring through the shell of my Adequate. “And, of course, at the center of my opposition to abortion,” said the somber priest on my car radio, “is my belief that sexual intercourse is a fundamentally disgusting practice to begin with.” This was the city’s frankest district, a mass of defunct fishmarkets and abandoned warehouses piled together like dead cells waiting to be sloughed off. “You might even say that, like many of my ilk, I have an instinctive horror of the human body.”

And suddenly there it was, Number 7, a corrugated tin shanty sitting on a cluster of pylons rising from the Pathogen like mortally ill trees. Gulls swung through the summer air, dropping their guileless excrement on the dock; water lapped against the moored hull of a houseboat, the
Average Josephine
—a harsh, sucking sound, as if a pride of invisible lions were drinking there. I pulled over.

A series of narrow, jackknifing gangplanks rose from the nearest pier like a sliding board out of
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
—one of my most memorable forays into film criticism—eventually reaching the landing outside Martina’s door. I climbed. I knocked. Nothing. I knocked again, harder. The door drifted open. I called, “Martina?”

The place had been stripped, emptied out like the Hob’s hare whose photo I’d seen that morning in Prendergorst’s office. The front parlor contained a crumpled beer can, a mousetrap baited with calcified cheddar, some cigarette butts—and nothing else. I went to the kitchen. The sink held a malodorous broth of water, soap, grease, and cornflakes. The shelves were empty. “Martina?