The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  Domenica said, “Ascensión.”

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s Ascensión now,” Domenica said patiently.

  Joaquin cursed himself, then forced a muttering laugh. “I guess I never got used to that.”

  Domenica didn’t seem to think his gaffe very strange. “If I contracted Big Bonebreaker, Dr. Cruz, how fast would the symptoms set in?”

  Joaquin gave del Negro a weary look, as if he did not like discussing such dark topics with patients. Then he held the needle up where she and del Negro could see it, like a sleight-of-hand artist showing his audience an ordinary coin, and sterilized it twice with alcohol. “The fever would begin as soon as your immune system started fighting the virus with macrophages.” He paused, shrugged, and answered her finally. “Within hours.” Joaquin sucked her blood into the syringe wondering if her hemoglobin would look different, somehow, beneath a microscope. Could one see holiness in the blood of the Patron Saint of Plagues?

  When he had secured the sample and disposed of the needle, Domenica asked him, “When did you stop whipping yourself, Reynaldo?”

  That watery, fountainous noise that he had first heard during the riots in the zócalo bubbled through the room, drowning out the valve works of the ALHEPA. How could she know? Joaquin froze, as if he could feel the espiritu sanctu filling up the corners of this room. Was she prophesying? Could she see Joaquin staggering alongside the insane priest, the heavy leather strap in Joaquin’s unbroken hand? Could she see, after that, his rising fury and hatred for a pitiless God? He glanced briefly into the nun’s penetrating eyes but couldn’t look there very long. Over the roar of the boiling noise in the room, he whispered, “What makes you think I whipped myself?”

  Her tone was not accusatory, but tolerant. “I’ve met lots of flagellants. It’s the way you move your upper body,” she said, “like you have a sunburn.”

  Joaquin held the next needle in his right hand. He curled his broken left hand against his stomach. “I joined a procession. Yes. In a moment of weakness.”

  “No, señor. I’ve never seen weakness in a St. John’s Procession. Thirty-nine lashes, just like the Savior’s. You were taking on Mexico’s sins?” Domenica asked. “Or maybe you felt guilty about something?”

  How vast was her prescience? Could she see him in that room in the villa, lying with his back flayed open? Could she see the words on the walls, the words that he’d painted in his own blood?

  Virus sum.

  I am virus.

  The words were almost on his lips as if Joaquin were being compelled to admit his identity.

  Then he recalled lying in bed and watching this very woman on netcast, standing with her arms around the despot, the man who’d stolen Joaquin’s research on the pilone. He kept his eyes on the nun’s arm.

  Traitor. Judas. Malinche.

  “Let me ask you a question instead, Sister,” Joaquin said, hoping that deflecting her question wouldn’t make del Negro suspicious. He had to restrain himself from taking her slender arm too violently. “Do you believe your own miracles? Or are they fantasies?”

  A look of distaste crossed her face. She leaned away from him, her arm still firmly in his hand. “I don’t discuss my visions, Dr. Cruz.”

  Joaquin couldn’t be sure, but she sounded as if she wanted to add, Especially with you.

  He removed the tainted cotton ball. “Please, Sister,” Joaquin said. “I badly want to know.”

  Her posture was straight and perfect as she looked down at him holding her arm, haughty as a queen having her royal person attended. She nodded, finally, seeing something in Joaquin that perhaps instilled her with confidence. Or was that merely resignation? “I believe, Dr. Cruz, yes,” she said, her voice sounding clear as a note from a violin. “Of course I believe what happened to me.”

  He wished he could draw that belief out of her body with the needle. He wished he could have just a drop of her confidence in God’s benevolence, to study it, to analyze, to swallow, and absorb.

  Joaquin could still feel del Negro’s eyes on him. He swabbed another needle, not daring to swab it with the infected cotton ball yet. Joaquin slipped the clean needle neatly into Domenica’s vein. “I mean, do you really believe that those messages came from God?”

  She watched the syringe fill with blood, then looked away. “Yes. That’s what I believe.”

  Blood swirled into the syringe’s chamber. “You believe the plague was a test of some kind?”

  “Maybe Domenica doesn’t want to answer any more questions, Dr. Cruz,” del Negro said, resting his pointy elbows on his knees.

  “I don’t mind, Pedro.” She looked down at Joaquin, down her nose, like a teacher at a student, and said, “Yes. Of course. The plague is obviously a test.”

  He watched her face as he withdrew the needle. “Why do you think the Virgin comes to you?”

  Clearly, she did not expect such a question. Her wide mouth and wide-set eyes, which had looked froglike to Joaquin only days ago, now seemed a countenance of graceful contemplation. He liked looking at her, understood why so many loved her, but forced himself to look down at the needle and secure the sample. “In the Book of Job,” said Domenica, speaking so softly she sounded like she was whispering secrets in his ear, “God says ‘Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth? Declare if thou knowest it all.’ I don’t, Dr. Cruz. I only know what has happened to me. Not why.”

  Don’t belittle me, Joaquin thought, securing the sample. He didn’t want to hear platitudes and vagaries and Bible verses, especially from her. “Why,” Joaquin said, “doesn’t He come to anyone else? To Dr. del Negro—or me for example?”

  “Later, in the Book of Job, God also says—”

  “I’m not inferior to you,” Joaquin said. He paused, rallied his composure with a terse laugh at himself. To cover the rash choice of words, he sweetened his voice to sound jesting, chiding. “I know Job, Sister. Very well as a matter of fact,” he said, worrying that his anger had shown and that the nun might now fear him. He looked up into her face and he smiled at her until she smiled back. “At the end of that Book, you’ll remember, God repeats what Job has already declared, that God is great and man is dust. Those words did nothing to answer the question posed. No?”

  “And what was the question posed in Job?” the nun asked, rolling down her sleeve.

  Joaquin got to his feet with a pinching pain in his back. He looked down at her, trying to give her the same pedantic stare she had just given him. “Why does God slay wicked and good alike? Why the hypocrisy? Why did God send the Virgin to you, yet still allow this plague to happen?”

  Her voice was musical, but her eyes were hard. “You sound exactly like Job.”

  “This plague has made me sympathetic, yes,” Joaquin said. “I think if Job were here, he would want to know why God used His divine power merely to speak through you, rather than to help the afflicted or, say, to confront the person who started this epidemic.”

  Domenica shook her head with sadness on her lips. “Job never got answers to his questions.”

  “That’s my point,” Joaquin said.

  “That’s the point.”

  “I simply want my day in God’s court, Sister, before I die.” Joaquin laughed, knowing that he had spoken those words a bit too loudly, with too much force. He smiled down at Domenica again to ease the moment, but she would not smile back this time. “I mean, all of Mexico wants fair representation. Because whether we confess or not, the same end comes to us. You see, Sister? Whether I admit my sin, or correct my wrongs, still I—we are kept at arm’s length from God. We watch thousands die every day. We suffer. We doubt.” Joaquin shook his head, marveling. “But you don’t suffer, Sister. You have no cause to doubt.”

  Domenica clenched her jaw, angry at him, obviously, but unwilling to unleash her words. She composed herself, closing her eyes. “I suffer. I doubt.”

  “You just told me that you believed. It’s easy when you bask in the glow of divinity, isn’t it?”
Joaquin pressed. “You get so much more than the rest of us, Domenica. You’re a favorite daughter and the rest of us are stepchildren of the Almighty. Is that fair?”

  She kept shaking her head. “I don’t pretend to understand.”

  “No, you’re just afraid to admit what you know is true. God is the ultimate consumer. He eats and eats and eats and He is never satisfied.”

  The nun was pretending to listen, but he could feel that she wanted to stand and run. He could see the air lock in her posture, its low pressure pulling her away from him.

  “He is all the things I fought—-fight as a doctor,” Joaquin said. “God is rot. God is bacteria. He is pestilence and plague and the turning worm. No matter what we doctors do to undo God’s appetite, no matter how we succeed and advance, God will eventually devour us all.”

  Del Negro was staring at him, and Joaquin faltered. But it didn’t matter what that dupe thought. God was certainly listening now, here, with His precious mouthpiece sitting before Joaquin. Could God be goaded to respond to these poisonous words spilling over his beloved daughter?

  “God will side with fascists,” Joaquin said, lazily lifting his hand and pointing to Domenica. “He will anoint killers. When scientists perform beneficial deeds for mankind, populations skyrocket and God eats them like candy. When scientists perform accidents or even—even evil—when thousands die as a result, God doesn’t stop it. No, he comes running to the trough to feed.” His voice was loud, deep, satisfying in his throat like a flowing music after years of silence. “God is a disgusting glutton, devouring whatever plate is set before him—good, evil, blessed, profane—”

  Domenica whispered, “Joaquin.”

  “How am I to make sense of it?” he asked. “The line between God and nature, creation and creator, evil and good, is so thin, so easily crossed, that it’s hard to see which side—”

  “Doctor, I want to give you something,” the nun said. “I want to do something for you.”

  Joaquin caught himself, and he clenched his right hand. He’d said too much again. “You do?” He took a deep breath. He glanced at del Negro, who was sitting in his chair, pale-faced from accessing his pilone, Joaquin imagined. He glanced at the tainted cotton ball just out of his reach. “What do you want to give me?”

  The nun stood, put her hands on Joaquin’s plastic-covered shoulders, and urged him to his knees. He knelt and she raised a hand in benediction.

  Joaquin’s mouth parted and he blinked rapidly in total confusion.

  “Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Holy Virgin, Blessed be the Fruit of thy Womb, Jesus Christ the Savior.” The woman said the prayer so quickly that the words ran together. She begged the Madonna to protect and bless him for all the days of his life.

  For Joaquin, the blessing was so unexpected, he could not deny or refuse it. The words acted on him like a spell, turning his muscles to wood, bones to marble. He bowed his head, and let her speak.

  When the prayer was finished, Domenica raised his head with her hand under his jaw. The nun’s face was flushed and pretty. He looked into her eyes and crossed himself.

  Then she tenderly unsealed his clamp mask, let it drop against his collarbone, and held his face in her hands. She bent, and touched her lips to his.

  Skin to skin.

  Joaquin tried to speak but his voice wouldn’t come. He could not make sense of the kiss. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “You deserve a blessing. Whether you intended it or not,” Domenica said, “you’ve made everything right.”

  Del Negro leaned forward in his chair as if watching a matador raise his curved blade. The nun placed her hands on either side of the kneeling Joaquin’s face. Everything white in the cell was rouged with the light of a false setting sun.

  Footsteps sounded outside the nun’s dorm room. Many voices, shouting. One rose above the others. “Muñoz! Goddamnit, which room are you in?”

  Joaquin recognized the voice. An old friend. A student. A cascade of realization fell over Joaquin, and he shoved himself away from the nun, throwing her to the bed and quickly wedging himself between del Negro and the air lock.

  Del Negro pushed back his chair and immediately dropped into a crouch. “In here!” Del Negro shouted at the door. “He’s in Domenica’s room!”

  “Where?” that voice answered. “Which door? We can’t find you!”

  Joaquin kept his body turned toward del Negro, but he reached back and twirled the ALHEPAs spin lock all the way tight. Then he removed the pipe from the handle and hefted it in his good hand. Just then he heard footsteps right outside the air lock.

  So did del Negro. “Joaquin locked the door!” he shouted. “Pull the air lock apart!”

  Joaquin looked at the nun, lying on the bed where he had shoved her. She tricked me! She wanted the virus. He lunged at her and found del Negro in front of him, ready.

  “Pedro, don’t fight him, we have—”

  Joaquin lashed out at del Negro. A low, sickening thud sounded from pipe meeting skull.

  Domenica cried out, “Pedro, no!”

  Del Negro crumpled around Joaquin’s knees, as if del Negro could drag Joaquin down into unconsciousness with him.

  The pipe fell again and again on the treacherous doctor’s zigzag scar. “You led me here!” Joaquin shouted. Even after del Negro’s hands dropped, unable to protect himself, the pipe continued to fall. “You led me right to her!”

  Like the figures of a code, blood swirled across Joaquin’s coveralls. He stood straight and looked at the nun. She screamed and tried to run past him to the door, but he sidestepped in front of her and she backpedaled away from him.

  “You lied!” Joaquin said. “You’re God’s own precious one and you lied!”

  Behind him, he could hear the ALHEPA filter being swiftly pried apart.

  “Joaquin!” that well-known voice shouted from beyond the air lock. “Leave them alone!”

  Domenica ran to her table and seized a slender candlestick. She turned to face him with her weapon.

  In a leap, Joaquin was in front of her. “How could you lie?”

  She brought the candlestick straight up, catching him under the chin, but all it did was gouge him.

  That voice came from inside the room now. “Joaquin!”

  He brought the pipe sailing down on the crown of the nun’s head, and, as if her feet had been swept out from under her, Domenica collapsed.

  Joaquin stood over her, straightening her head with his foot. He was ready to bash the life out of her so that the Holy Renaissance couldn’t isolate his beloved children from her blood, when suddenly, a hot coal burned into the back of his knee.

  He fell backwards, pain ripping up his leg. The agony of landing flat on his flagellated back was nearly as awful as the searing pain in his leg.

  What happened? he thought. Or maybe he said that.

  His ears hurt, too. The sound of a gun blast echoed through his mind. That was when Joaquin realized he had been shot. The red sunlight hurt his eyes as he wondered why he wasn’t passing out.

  A moment later, a face loomed into his field of vision. White. Pasty. A scrub of blond hair.

  “I wondered if you might be here,” said Joaquin.

  TUESDAY, MAY 24. 3:31 P.M.

  SOMETHING IN THE WAY he fell reminded Stark of Joaquin, but the man Rosangelica shot now seemed like a beached ocean thing, a broken crab-creature that did not belong in this world of oxygen and light. The way it lay on its back, wincing and sucking in air through gritted teeth. Its left hand broken, deformed. Streaks of white shot through the matted, black hair.

  Stark couldn’t look at the wounded thing anymore, so he turned away in disgust and saw the officer, Carriego, about to enter Domenica’s cell. “Stay in the hall,” he shouted.

  Carriego backed out, the shield of his helmet reflecting dramatic red sunlight back into Domenica’s room.

  Stark went to Muñoz, looking at the injury to his head. There was no point in taking his wrist, feeling for
a pulse. The amount of blood was confounding.

  Sister Domenica, however, was trying to drag herself up by pulling on the bedspread.

  “Domenica is hurt!” Stark shouted to Rosangelica, as he knelt to examine the nun. Domenica’s face was a wash of blood from the split skin of her forehead. “Head injury. Rosangelica! Get a level-four team up here! And tell them to bring two extra suits.” He looked back at Domenica. “Oh shit,” he said in English, “I shouldn’t have—wait. Just lie down. Relax.”

  “I’m OK,” Domenica whispered, sounding like a sleepwalker. She allowed Stark to prop her in a sitting position. “It looks bad, but I have something in me now.”

  Stark only half heard what the nun was saying. He’d glanced at Rosangelica, who was standing over Joaquin, looking down at him. “Fecha. Cuchillo. Faker. Get up here. Fayuca.” Her handgun was held loosely and she seemed to be waving it toward his face, as if toying with aiming and firing. “Done. They’re on their way. Oeste. Up. Voltage.”

  Stark watched the gun for a moment, wondering if she could really kill twice in as many hours. “Rosangelica,” he warned.

  She lifted her face as if startled. “I know. We need him alive now.”

  “Doctor?” Domenica said. “Get Pedro. Where’s Pedro?”

  “No. Pedro is—no,” Stark said. He refused to look at the body, its head injuries. They were too much.

  “Oh. Oh,” she mewed. Then Domenica said, “But we did it. Pedro and I fooled Joaquin Delgado.” She tried to open her eyes but the blood made her squint. “I have it. I kissed him to make sure. I have it.”

  “Holy Mother of God,” Rosangelica said, coming to stand next to Domenica.

  “You have it? No.” Stark couldn’t make sense of what she’d said. They had Joaquin. They had his blood. They didn’t need a human host now. “Why? Why did you do this?”