by Paul Park
There was an uncomfortable silence while Dr. Paraclete fished out a cigarette. His suit had a zipper over the mouth, and he unzipped it. He lit the cigarette and blew a puff of smoke into the room; Thanakar could smell tobacco mixed with marijuana, as well as something else, some sweet antiseptic smell.
“Contagion is a subtle thing,” repeated Dr. Paraclete, more clearly now that his mouth was bare. “Subtle and insidious. Viruses and microbes, I have devoted my life to them, classifying, analyzing, and destroying. I see from your hands that you, too, are a doctor, though doubtless of an insufficient kind. Even so, even in Charn you must have heard of me. Otherwise you would not have come.”
Uncomfortable, Thanakar caressed his knee. “I understood you were a psychoanalyst,” he said.
“Precisely. I am the first. I am the only man who understands the true pathology of mental illness. Microbes, sir, microbes! For generations we have treated influenza, bloodpox, cholera, sometimes with wonderful results. We have had success with many new antibiotics. Why not neurophrenia, paranoia, unhappiness, and hysteria?”
“You believe these to be contagious illnesses?” asked Thanakar.
“Highly contagious. Let me exemplify. One patient is an alcoholic. Well, what is the first thing I discover, but that most of his friends are also alcoholic. What is more, his father also drank. You see? It is because a child’s immune system is so weak. Adults are resistant, but a child can be exposed and never know it. There is an incubation period, of course. I am working with a man who has a history of child abuse. Well, as it turns out, his uncle had abused him when he was only twenty-three months old. The period of incubation lasted most of his adult life.”
“I’ve never thought of it like that,” said Thanakar, caressing his leg.
“Think of it now. Think of yourself. Are you happy? No, don’t tell me. Think. Think about your friends. I tell you, two unhappy people can infect and reinfect each other until they die.”
“And you,” asked Thanakar. “Are you a happy man?”
Dr. Paraclete shook his head. “Too soon,” he moaned, sucking on his cigarette. “I was exposed too soon.”
* * *
Thanakar spent the evening in Jenny’s room. He had a stack of drawings on his lap, and they sat together on Jenny’s bed, examining them by the light of the bedside lamp. Jenny was sucking on her thumb and stroking her upper lip with the edge of her forefinger. She was leaning her head against Thanakar’s shoulder, and from time to time she would turn her head to press her face against his shirt, to sniff at the dark material.
“This one,” said Thanakar. He had picked up one of a new series. Jenny had finished with her drawings of the head-shaped mountain, and instead had penetrated deep inside. There, among caves and waterways and rough-hewn tunnels, two women slowly struggled up into the light. Some of these new drawings showed islands and dark lakes, and cirques covered with houses, and caverns lit with bonfires, and rocky warrens full of life. They showed armies marching, and struggling together in the dark. They showed people washing livestock in the murky pools. They showed tunnels cut out of the rock, and some were dry and clean, and some were damp and fleshlike, with bulging stalactites and slick walls. And always somewhere, prominent in the foreground, distant and occluded in the back, separate from the rest of the detail, always the figures of the two women were included in the drawing, muffled in shadows and black clothes, their faces always hidden.
“This one,” said Thanakar. In the middle of the page a village rose up the sides of a great cavern, built on tiers cut into the rock. A central bonfire illuminated the streets and cast its beams into the far recesses of the drawing, down into the far left-hand corner, where two women crouched among the stones. They were in a narrow passageway, separate from the rest of the cavern. One had collapsed against a boulder, hiding her face, while the other was holding up a lizard by its tail.
“This one,” said Thanakar. He rubbed his finger over the image of the woman, the one holding the lizard.
Jenny shook her head and buried her face in Thanakar’s shoulder. “Tell me,” he said. “Who is she? Who is this one?” He pointed to the other figure, crouched against the stone.
Again Jenny turned her face against the doctor’s shirt. And she didn’t look again until he had reached the last of the drawings. At long last it was a landscape, a hillside aboveground, and there was weather and fresh air and light. Two women struggled down a slope of gravel and shaped rock.
Then Jenny looked up. She reached out her hand to the doctor’s neck, to where a golden locket hung from a chain, a tiny thing, unopened now for weeks, containing a single hair and a photograph of Charity Starbridge, taken when she was a young girl.
* * *
That evening, far away, Princess Charity emerged out of a hole in the ground into a light, fine, crystal rain. By that time she had spent several weeks in the dark, and her pupils were dilated, and there was mud on her face and cobwebs in her hair. In the hour after sunset she crossed through a barricade of planks put up in the shape of an X over the mouth of an abandoned mine just twenty miles from the Caladonian frontier. The mine emerged into a gravel pit, a long, broken slope stretching down into the rain. If Charity had not been too fatigued to raise her head, if she had cared to look, she would perhaps have noticed that the entire hillside had been built into the shape of a woman’s face. Ruined and eroded by the rain, nevertheless it was still recognizable—the face of the fourteenth abbess of a local priory, who had been part owner of the mine. Charity emerged through a hole under her left eye and slid halfway down her cheek before she was able to stop herself. She sat down wearily in a pile of shattered rock and looked around.
Above her the antinomial labored down the slope. She was bleeding from cuts on her forehead and her hands, and the lines in her face were filled with grime. She was whistling through the gaps in her teeth, and she held her flute in her left hand. Then she stopped suddenly, and crouched down in the hump of a small boulder, and the music she was humming changed a little. She was out of breath, and the notes came in ragged gasps, but soon they formed themselves into a different melody, more solitary, less compromising, the song of herself, which no one but herself would ever understand. She watched Charity diminish among the rocks of the lower slope; she made a small gesture with her flute, and then she turned away. For she had seen in her mind’s eye a stream of water flowing from the north, over the next hill, and in her mind she followed it, mile after mile, back up into her own country. When Charity looked back she had disappeared, and the princess was too tired and hungry to go back up to find her. She didn’t care, for she had seen the lights of a town shining down below.
On the hillside Charity sat listening for a moment, to see if she could catch a wisp of melody somewhere, an intimation of the song called “now I am.” But there was nothing, only the crystal rain as fine as mist, drying to a crystal powder on her shoulders and her hair. In a little while she got up and went forward, down into the world.
That night, past midnight, Jenny Pentecost drew a picture of the princess eating dinner. In that little village on the slopes of the mine, Charity fell in among simple, pious folk, for whom the revolution was just distant words. She was too tired to dissimulate, and when they found out who she was they fed her the first new vegetables of that spring—potatoes as small and as precious as pearls. They made a bath for her in a tin tub, and then saved the dirty bathwater and decanted it in earthen vessels, and sprinkled it upon their hearths and fields, their children and their household gods. They bowed their heads and would not look her in the face.
In their village many houses still were empty, abandoned and not yet reoccupied. In one of these, a stone building that had been a shrine, they made a home for her. Each family brought gifts: blankets, pillows, mattresses of straw. And they were with her constantly, asking her blessing or advice, or just sitting near her, staring at her every movement. They were amazed by everything she did, by the way she sat and drank and combed
her hair, by the way she yawned and slept. Sometimes when she was asleep, they would come near to touch her hands.
During the next week Jenny Pentecost drew many pictures of these scenes. But always Charity’s face was hidden, so that as Thanakar pored over them, he was concerned only with trying to find some clue as to the child’s illness. He had no way of understanding, nor could Jenny have told him, for by that time she only spoke in whispers, and in a language that was private to herself alone. It was based on a system of numerology that seemed to have sprung unaided from her own heart, for it had no basis in mathematics or mythology.
She had assigned numbers, arbitrarily, it seemed, to weather patterns, places, states of mind, types of food, and articles of clothing. These she would multiply and combine with the date and the hours of the day, to form a calculation for each thought and action, each event, identifying its position in a landscape of her own. “5719076 x 9191919,” she would whisper to herself very softly.
She had made a catalog of all her thoughts and memories. And every morning she would draw a quick cross-section of her head, with the flea growing ever larger, its chamber at the back of her skull ever expanding. Every morning it would crack the wall of some tiny cubicle in that vast labyrinth and suck out the occupant into its mouth. The flea was feasting on her memories. Every day the number she had penciled in the margin of her sketch grew smaller.
One day Jenny came to Thanakar, shaking with urgency, and she showed him a drawing of a small town below a hill—dilapidated stone houses on a single street. And there were horsemen coming down out of the hills, carrying the flags of the League of Desecration: a child’s red hand upon an orange ground. In the cellar of a farmer’s house, Princess Charity crouched under some bags of straw, her face hidden in shadow.
Thanakar was good with numbers. He made some calculations with the numbers in the margin. He was acute enough to understand them, partly. He was acute enough to understand that this was something that was happening at that exact moment in the landscape of Jenny’s mind, perhaps a hundred miles to the south and west. But more than that he couldn’t understand.
Though he could not bring himself to follow any of their advice, Thanakar was still taking her to various psychiatrists around the town. On the morning of November 66th, he stood out in the slowly settling rain, in the courtyard of a block of offices in the Avenue of Bliss. Jenny was undergoing a second battery of tests inside, in the office of a doctor that specialized in clairvoyance.
The results of the first test had been confusing. The psychologist had come out to Thanakar as he was pacing the halls. She was carrying a sheaf of papers.
“How did she do?” Thanakar had asked.
She had done badly. The psychologist explained. “Look. This is a test in which she tries to guess the card that I am holding in my hand. Out of ninety times, she couldn’t do it once.”
“Well, that tells you something, doesn’t it?”
“You don’t understand. There are only four choices—a circle, a cross, a square, and a dog’s head. A normal person, answering at random, should achieve a score of twenty-five percent. To fail on every question, that is remarkable.”
The psychologist had asked him to bring Jenny back to be retested. He had taken time away from work and come down through the crowded streets. In those days every hour brought more refugees to Caladon, sixty thousand in that week alone. Pushing through the streets, Thanakar felt new currents of resentment and unrest, and there were soldiers everywhere.
The refugees were all his countrymen. In Charn the National Assembly had banned the practice of religion. In the first weeks of November, soldiers of the Desecration League rode out into the countryside of Charn, smashing shrines and killing priests. Always they were preceded by waves of refugees, the faithful and fanatical, the wealthy and well born. Two hundred thousand refugees had cut the knot of the unravelers and crossed the border into Caladon.
When Thanakar had first come into the city underneath the Argon Gates, he had been one of a small number, for most were held at the frontier. But each day after that there had been more: Starbridges on horseback and in carriages, crowding the hotels and the restaurants. And they were followed by an endless stream of poorer folk, beggars on the road, crossing the soda plains with their pots and pans upon their heads, pushing wheelbarrows piled high with kettles and with clothes.
At first there had been room for them in the capacious streets of Caladon, but on the forty-second of November, the Argon gates were closed by orders of the king to all but the most influential. Under the walls the people camped in plywood shelters and under sheets of corrugated iron. Thanakar had found work in a miserable shantytown strung out along the red-brick battlements. A gynecologist from Caladon had staffed a clinic there; she was a priest of Angkhdt, and required no certificate. She and sixteen nuns had built a new dispensary in an abandoned brickyard. Under canvas shelters the sick lay in concentric circles, arranged according to disease.
Thanakar had read about this doctor in the papers, which otherwise were full of xenophobia and hate. In the fourth week of November he had crossed the barbed-wire checkpoint, to work among his countrymen. And while the gynecologist delivered sugar children, and the nurses and the nuns distributed fresh water and first aid, Thanakar was put in charge of seven patients.
Soon he had them taken up, and taken to a separate tent, where their ravings would not harm the others. For it was at that time, among the Charnish refugees, that the first cases of a new and strange disease were diagnosed. Later it would devastate whole dioceses. But it was first observed by Dr. Thanakar Starbridge, in the camp at Kethany, and he called it black brain fever. In his diary from that time he described the symptoms—melancholia, followed by hallucinations, and then by catatonia. Death came rapidly, sometimes in a few days, and when the skulls of the corpses were split open, it was found that their brains were black and rotten, almost liquid in their cases.
In his diary for the sixth week of November, Dr. Thanakar made a note of his own feelings, when he was working with these patients. He was sick at heart. He feared that in his daughter he was seeing a slow progress of the same malady. It was for this reason that he took off time from work, to bring Jenny to all the specialists in Caladon, to try to find some clue. In the office of one alienist, an old, obese woman with sunken eyes and a slow voice, he had heard for the first time a theory that was later to become famous.
“I believe you,” the alienist had said. Her voice was slow, without being particularly rich or deep. “I believe you. The conditions are related, that is clear. I have heard of this brain fever. It is contagious, is it not?”
“I don’t know. How could it be?”
“How, indeed? I am summarizing what you told me. But perhaps your patients catch this illness from your hands.”
“No,” said Thanakar. “How can you say that? In most cases, death comes in sixty hours.”
“And do none survive?”
“Yes. Some do. In some the symptoms have been less acute.”
“And these survivors, do they have anything in common? Do they have anything in common with your daughter?”
“I don’t know,” said Thanakar miserably. “Two are out of danger, but they have suffered terrible brain damage.”
The alienist wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Let us look at this another way,” she said. “You love your daughter, do you not?”
“Very much. Of course I do.”
“Have you considered, perhaps, that it is love that is keeping her alive?”
“I take good care of her.”
“I’m not talking about that. Perhaps you take good care of all your patients. I’m talking about love. I mean as medication, not as therapy.”
“I don’t understand.”
Like most Caladonians, the alienist had disgusting manners. She blew her nose onto her hand and then rubbed her palms together. “Let me put it another way,” she said. “This spring every patient that I see i
s starved for love. I don’t mean that in a sentimental way. I mean it is a hunger that is killing them, a function of the weather and the insecurity of life. In summer we have other epidemics—surfeits and venereal diseases—not like this. But one full year ago, in spring, there was a devastation on our eastern coast that forced the evacuation of twenty fishing villages. It sounds similar to the fever you describe.”
“It was not the same,” said Thanakar.
“It was a fever that killed many. At that time philosophers first speculated about the cause.”
“No, it is ridiculous,” interrupted Thanakar. “I have read the history, and it is not the same. If love were medicine, my daughter would be well.”
“At that time, Saint Carilon Bargee first speculated as to the cause,” continued the woman, frowning. “He said there were many kinds of love. He compared it to a source of light. He said if we could manage to break love apart into its component elements, the way a prism breaks apart a beam of light, then we could have a panacea for all ills. If you could find the precise type of love that would most benefit your daughter. . . . It is not sexual love, I feel sure.”
“No?” cried Thanakar, furious, his voice full of sarcasm and rage. “I don’t see why not. Didn’t I tell you that in Charn she had been terribly abused? Perhaps she feels the lack of it. Besides,” cried Thanakar, “don’t tell me about Carilon Bargee. He was a lunatic. Didn’t he poison himself with his own serum, an injection that was supposed to duplicate the feel of being loved? He set his skin on fire.”
“He was before his time,” the alienist had said.
Now, standing in the courtyard on the 66th day of November, waiting for the results of Jenny’s second test, Thanakar again felt some of his anger. All psychiatrists were fools, he thought. They inhabited a realm of darkness and ate despair like food. What was the alternative? thought Thanakar.
He was standing in the courtyard of a block of psychiatric offices, staring at the rain. The courtyard he had found by chance, searching for a toilet. A pair of doors had given way into an open space, a garden surrounded by windowless, white walls, where the sugar drifted down like snow. It was a rock garden: round, white pebbles like the tiny eggs of some small bird were raked in swirls around a central pile of rocks. Nothing grew. Nevertheless it was a restful place. The arrangement of the rocks was pleasing to the eye. Thanakar stood on a path of polished stones, next to a tiny spirit house of bronze.
