The Harvest

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “She spoke,” he said. “She was lucid. She understood what I said to her. She’s weak and a little feverish, but I believe she may even have gained some weight.” He looked at Ellen. “None of that should be possible.”

  “It’s a miracle,” Ellen said firmly. “At least that’s what I believe.” She laughed. “I’m a little feverish myself.”

  “Ellen, listen. I’m pleased about this. I couldn’t be happier. But I don’t understand it.”

  And truly, he did not. Yes, there was such a thing as a remission. He had once seen a lung tumor remit in a way that could be called “miraculous.” But Cindy was a vastly different case. Brain tissue had been destroyed. Even if the tumors had somehow vanished, she should not have been able to speak. That part of her brain was simply missing. Even without the tumors, she would have been in the position of someone who had suffered a severe stroke. Some recovery of faculties might be possible; certainly not a complete cure… certainly not what he had witnessed in the bedroom.

  He did not say any of this to Ellen. Instead, he offered: “I want to be sure. I want the hospital to look at her.”

  Ellen frowned for the first time this morning. “Maybe when she’s stronger, Matt. I don’t know, though. I hate to put her through all that again.”

  “I don’t want us to have false hopes.”

  “You think she might get worse?” Ellen shook her head. “She won’t. I can’t tell you how I know that. But I do. The sickness is gone, Dr. Wheeler.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to argue. “I hope you’re right. Cindy said something similar.”

  “Did she?”

  The girl had spoken with deliberation, as if the framing of the words still required enormous effort, but succinctly and clearly.

  “Poor Dr. Wheeler,” this emaciated child had said to him. “We’re putting you out of business.”

  * * *

  Strange as the incident was, here was something even stranger: He did not dwell on it or even think about it much after he left the Rhees’ house.

  He drove downtown along Promenade Street where the road followed the curve of the bay. There wasn’t much traffic. It was an easy drive, the ocean still and blue under a feathery wash of sky. Hot August noon and nothing stirring.

  He felt as strangely placid as Buchanan looked. Matt had blamed it on the fever—this empty calm, his own, the town’s—but then it occurred to him to wonder.

  Maybe Jim is right, he thought. We’re all infected. Machines in the blood. A sort of plague. The Taiwan Flu… hadn’t he dreamed about it? But these thoughts, too, slipped away beneath the glassy surface of the day.

  It turned out that Jill, the receptionist, hadn’t shown up for work—phoned in sick—but Annie was at the office, sitting in Reception fielding calls, mainly cancelled appointments. She put down the receiver and transferred queries to the service for an hour so she could break for lunch; Matt brought up food from the first-floor coffee shop—which was understaffed. Plastic-wrapped salads and ham sandwiches on white. Annie Gates picked at hers, eyes distantly focused. “Strange day,” she mused.

  Matt told her about Cindy Rhee, but the story felt distant, curiously immaterial, even as he told it.

  Annie frowned. Wrinkle of brow and purse of lips. Trying to fathom all this but meeting some internal resistance. “Maybe that’s why nobody’s keeping their appointments. They’re all—well, better.”

  Poor Dr. Wheeler. We’re putting you out of business.

  Maybe not better, Matt thought. Maybe sicker.

  He told Annie what Jim Bix had said about foreign bodies in the blood of his hospital samples, in his own blood. He hadn’t intended to tell her this, at least not yet—hadn’t wanted to worry her needlessly. But she nodded. “I heard something about it at the hospital. Had lunch with a staff nurse from the path lab. She was scared spitless. So was I, by the time she finished. So I called the hematology resident at the Dallas hospital where I interned. He didn’t want to talk about it, but when I told him what I’d heard he pretty much confirmed it.”

  So we were keeping this from each other, Matt thought. It was like an O. Henry story. How many other people were in on this secret?

  He said, “That means it’s not local.”

  “No. Are you surprised?”

  “No.”

  “The CDC must have known about it at least as long as Jim Bix.” She sipped her Pepsi. “I guess the clamps came down hard. There hasn’t been a hint of it in the papers. I suppose the thinking is, why worry people? A disease with no symptoms, a disease with no epidemiology because everybody already has it—so why start a panic?”

  “Surely they can’t keep it a secret much longer.”

  “Maybe they won’t have to.”

  He felt enclosed in a dome of feverish tranquility. Part of him was conducting this conversation quite reasonably; another part was encapsulated, silent, but frightened by what Annie had said. These were thoughts he had not yet allowed himself.

  A distant, dreamy note crept into her voice. “If this infection has a purpose—and I think it does—we’ll all know pretty soon what it is.”

  He gave her a sharp look. “What makes you think it has a purpose?”

  “Just a feeling.” She shrugged. “Don’t you think that?”

  Not a question he wanted to answer.

  “Annie, can I ask you something? You said when you heard about this from your friend you were scared. At the time.”

  “Yes.”

  “But not now?”

  Her frown deepened. “No… not now. I’m not scared now.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, Matt.” She regarded him solemnly across the remains of lunch. “I don’t honestly know.”

  * * *

  He spent the afternoon cleaning up paperwork and attending a single patient: a thirty-year-old housewife keeping an appointment to monitor her blood pressure. Yes, she was sticking to her diet. Yes, she was taking her medication.

  Her pressure was a textbook-normal 120 over 80 despite a degree and a half of fever. She seemed absentminded but she smiled as she left. Thank you, Dr. Wheeler.

  Matt pulled his chair to the window and watched shade and light mark time in the street beyond.

  We’re being sedated.

  The town was quiescent. Every motion seemed isolated, a unique event. A car crawled along the hot blacktop in slow motion. An elderly man, his collar open and his suitcoat over his shoulder, stepped out of the Bargain Cuts Uni-Sex Barber Shop and paused to run a bony hand across his stubbled head. Sunlight winked on windshields, softened road tar, and lifted haze from the blank and distant ocean.

  I should be terrified, Matt thought. And I’m not. And that should be terrifying, too. But it wasn’t.

  Sedation. What else to call this clinical calm? We should be screaming. We should be outraged. We should feel violated. Because this was—

  Was what?

  The end of the world?

  * * *

  Yes, Matt thought. Probably the end of the world. That was probably what this was.

  At three o’clock a courier came upstairs with a folder of test results from the private med lab on the third floor. The blood results might be skewed, but apparently they could still sort out gonadotropin from a few CCs of urine. Matt gave the dossier a quick perusal. Then he phoned Lillian Bix and told her she was pregnant.

  * * *

  They closed the empty office at four.

  “I walked to work,” Annie said. “Maybe you can drive me back to your place.” Matt looked blank. “Your dinner party. Remember?”

  He almost laughed. The idea was ludicrous. How was he supposed to conduct a dinner party? Serve salt peanuts and play “Nearer My God to Thee?”

  Annie smiled. “It’s okay, Matt. Some cancellations phoned in this morning. Check your memo pad. There are probably more on your machine at home. You can call it off if you want… I’ll get dinner at a restaurant.”

  He shook his head. �
�No. Annie, I want you to come home with me. But there might not be anybody else.”

  “I know.”

  “Nothing to celebrate.”

  “I know, Matt. Maybe we can have a drink. Watch the lights.”

  “I’d like that,” Matt said.

  * * *

  She was right about the party, of course. Everybody had canceled—most citing the flu—except for Jim and Lillian Bix, who showed up with a bottle of wine.

  The mood was not celebratory, though Lillian had announced her pregnancy to Jim and Jim announced it to Annie. It was obvious from their slightly dazed expressions that his friends felt the way Matt did: fenced off, somehow, from the significance of all these strange events. “Like a patient etherized upon a table”—T. S. Eliot, if Matt recalled correctly. The phrase echoed in his head as the four of them fumbled around the kitchen, improvising dinner, while Rachel watched a TV newscast in the next room. The President, Rachel said, had canceled his Friday night speech. But everything was quiet in Washington.

  Later, Matt switched off the air conditioning and the adults adjourned to the backyard deck. Lawn chairs in a cooling breeze, wine in stemmed glasses. Sunset faded; the first stars emerged. The breeze swayed the big Douglas fir at the back of the yard and Matt listened to the sound of its branches stirring, as gentle in the dusk as the rustling of a woman’s skirt. “My God,” he said, “it’s—quiet”

  Jim looked quizzical. “What do they say in the movies? Too quiet.”

  “Seriously,” Matt said. “Listen. You can hear the trees.”

  Now they crooked their heads at the evening and grew attentive.

  “I can hear the frogs,” Annie marveled. “From the river, I guess. My gosh. Way down the valley.”

  “And that ringing sound,” Lillian said. “I know what that is! The flagpole over at the elementary school. I walk by there some mornings. The rope bangs against the staff when the wind blows. It always reminds me of a bell.”

  A distant, random tolling. Matt heard it, too. Jim said, “Is all this so odd?”

  “Friday night,” Matt said. “The highway runs along the river. You can usually hear the traffic. Usually nothing but. People going to the movies, guys out at the bars, maybe a lumber truck roaring by. It’s the kind of sound you can put out of your mind, but you notice it when it’s gone. There’s always some kind of noise up here, even after midnight. A train whistle. A siren once in a while. Or—”

  “TV,” Annie said. “Everybody in the neighborhood with their TV turned up. On a summer night like this? With the windows open?” She shivered, a tiny motion; Matt felt it when he took her hand. She said, “I guess hardly anybody’s watching TV tonight.”

  Matt glanced back at the house, where Rachel had switched off the TV and was standing at the window of her room, the light behind her, gazing moodily into the twilight.

  “So everybody went to bed early,” Jim offered. “The flu.”

  This offended Lillian, who sat upright in her chair. “You don’t have to protect me. I know what’s happening.”

  Matt and Jim exchanged glances. Matt said gently, “If you know what’s happening, Lillian, you’re one up on the rest of us.”

  Her voice was raw, her eyes mournful. “Everything’s changing. That’s what’s happening. That’s why there’s nobody here tonight but us.”

  There followed a silence, which Matt guessed was acquiescence, then Jim raised his glass: “To us, then. The hardy few.”

  Lillian drank to show she wasn’t angry. “But I shouldn’t,” she said. “Wine puts me to sleep. Oh, and the baby. It’s bad for the baby, isn’t it? But I suppose just a sip.”

  Tang, clang, said the distant flagpole.

  * * *

  Matt stopped to say goodnight to Rachel and found her already dozing, tucked in a pink bedsheet, the window open to admit a breath of night air.

  He pulled up a chair beside the bed, mindful of its creak as he sat.

  Rachel hadn’t changed her room significantly since her mother died. It was still very much a child’s bedroom, lace blinds on the window and stuffed animals on the dresser. Matt knew for a fact that she still owned all her old toys: a vanity chest full of My Little Ponies and Jem; of miniature stoves, TV sets, refrigerators; a complete Barbie Camper set neatly folded and stored. The chest was seldom opened, but he supposed it served its purpose as a shrine: to Rachel’s mother, or just to childhood, security, the kingdom of lost things.

  He looked at his daughter, and the thought of the toy chest made him suddenly, inconsolably sad.

  I would give it all back if I could, Rache. Everything the world stole from you.

  Everything the world is stealing.

  She turned on her side and opened her eyes. “Daddy?”

  “Yes, Rache?”

  “I heard you come in.”

  “Just wanted to say goodnight.”

  “Is Annie staying over?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. I like it when she’s here in the morning.” She yawned. Matt put a hand on her forehead. She was a little warm.

  A troubling thought seemed to hold her attention for a moment. “Daddy? Is everything going to be all right?”

  Lie to her, Matt thought. Lie and make her believe it. “Yes, Rache,” he said.

  She nodded and closed her eyes. “I thought so.”

  * * *

  He unwound the studio bed in the basement for Jim and Lillian, who had both had too much wine, or were otherwise “etherized”: too dazed, in any case, to drive.

  I know how they feel, Matt thought. Bound up in cotton. Buoyant but sleepy. There had been occasions, as a college student, when he had smoked marijuana in a friend’s dorm room. It had sometimes made him feel like this… encased in a protective and faintly luminescent fog… afloat, after he had found his way home, on the gently undulating surface of his bed.

  Tonight he climbed into bed beside Annie.

  It had been a while since they’d slept together, and now he wondered why. He’d missed this, the presence of her, her warmth and what he thought of as her “Annie-ness.” She was a small woman, all her vivid energies and enigmatic silences packaged tightly together. She rolled on her side but snuggled closer; he curled himself around her.

  The first time Annie came home with him Matt had been guilt-ridden—this had still been very much Celeste’s house and Annie an intruder in it, an insult, he worried, to her memory. And he had wondered how Rachel might take it. A rivalry between Annie and his daughter was a complication he had dreaded.

  But Rachel had taken to Annie at once, accepted her presence without question. “Because she mourned,” Annie suggested later. “She mourned for her mother and I think in some ways she’s still mourning, but she isn’t hiding it from herself. She’s letting go of it. She knows it’s all right for me to be here because Celeste isn’t coming back.”

  Matt winced.

  Annie said, “But you, Matt, you don’t like letting go. You’re a collector. You hoard things. Your childhood. This town. Your idealism. Your marriage. You can’t bear the idea of giving any of it up.”

  This was both true and maddening. “I gave Celeste up,” he said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “It’s not that simple. There’s a certain way you shouldn’t let her go—she’s a part of you, after all. And there’s the giving up you couldn’t help, which is her dying. And there’s the space in between. Not a very big space right now. But that’s the space where I fit in.”

  Matt wondered, holding Annie close to him, what had provoked this old memory.

  You’re a collector. You don’t like letting go. He guessed it was true.

  Clinging to Annie now. Clinging to Rachel. Clinging to Jim and Lillian and the practice of medicine and the town of Buchanan. Everything’s changing, Lillian had said. But it was too much to let go of.

  A cool finger of air touched the skin of his shoulder, and Matt pulled up the bedsheet and closed his eyes in the summer dark; and then
, like Annie, like Rachel, like Jim and Lillian and everyone else in Buchanan and in the sleeping world, he began to dream.

  A wave of sleep crossed the globe like the shadow of the sun, a line of dreaming that lagged only a few hours behind the border of the night.

  It was a sleep more complete than the planet had known since the human species migrated out of Africa. Sleep tracked across North America from the tip of Labrador westward, and it possessed almost everyone equally: possessed the shift workers, the insomniacs, the wealthy, and the homeless; possessed the alcoholic and the amphetamine addict alike.

  It possessed farmers, fishermen, the inmates of penitentiaries, and penitentiary guards. It possessed Methedrine-saturated truckers spinning Waylon Jennings tapes in the cabs of eighteen-wheelers, who pulled into the breakdown lanes of empty highways and slept in their rigs; possessed airline pilots, who landed 747s on the tarmac of sleeping airports under the direction of air-traffic controllers who methodically emptied the sky, and then slept.

  There were isolated, and temporary, exceptions. Medical emergencies were rare, but telephone lines were maintained by a few dazed workers (who slept later); ambulances evacuated injuries to hospitals, where a few residents, functional but dazed beyond wondering at the events that had overtaken them, stanched the few wounds of a few sleeping patients… whose injuries, in any case, seemed to heal without much intervention. Fire crews remained functionally alert, though curiously sedated. No one slept until they had attended—without much conscious thought—to the obvious dangers: cigarettes were extinguished, ovens switched off, fireplaces damped.

  Chapter 7

  The Quiet

  The fires that did break out were accidents of nature, not humanity. In Chicago, a welfare mother named Aggie Langois woke from a powerful and incomplete dream—which was not a dream—to find flames licking out of a 1925-vintage wall socket and kindling the paper curtains of her two-room apartment. She took her sleeping baby and her wakeful but calm three-year-old and hurried them downstairs, two flights to the sidewalk… and was surprised to find the other occupants of the building calmly filing out behind her. The crack dealer from 3-A was carrying the legless old man from 4-B; and Aggie’s personal nemesis, the neighbor girl who was a cocktail waitress and who liked to party after hours when the children were trying to sleep, had brought out a score of blankets and handed three of them to Aggie without comment.