"Where?" I say sharply. Very few Asian-Americans contract the disease; something else no one understands. There are none in our colony.
"At the Rim. One of the guards. Two other men were kicking him and yelling names at him—we couldn't hear too clearly over the intercom boxes."
"We? You and Rachel? What were you two doing at the Rim?" I say, and heard my own tone. The Rim, a wide empty strip of land, is electro-mined and barb-wired to keep us communicables Inside. The Rim is surrounded by miles of defoliated and disinfected land, poisoned by preventive chemicals, but even so it's patrolled by unwilling soldiers who communicate with the Inside by intercoms set up every half-mile on both sides of the barbed wire. When the colony used to have a fight or a rape or—once, in the early years—a murder, it happened on the Rim. When the hateful and the hating came to hurt us because before the elecro-wiring and barbed wire we were easy targets and no police would follow them Inside, the soldiers, and sometimes our men as well, stopped them at the Rim. Our dead are buried near the Rim. And Rachel and Jennie, dear gods, at the Rim . . .
"We went to ask the guards over the intercom boxes if they knew how to stop termites," Jennie says logically. "After all, their work is to stop things, germs and things. We thought they might be able to tell us how to stop termites. We thought they might have special training in it."
The bedroom door opens and Rachel comes out, her young face drawn. McHabe smiles at her, and then his gaze returns to Jennie. "I don't think soldiers are trained in stopping termites, but I'll definitely bring you something to do that the next time I come Inside."
There it is again. But all Rachel says is, "Oh, good. I asked around for more drywall today, but even if I get some, the same thing will happen again if we don't get something to stop them."
McHabe says, "Did you know that termites elect a queen? Closely monitored balloting system. Fact."
Rachel smiles, although I don't think she really understands.
"And ants can bring down a rubber tree plant." He begins to sing, an old song from my childhood. "High Hopes." Frank Sinatra on the stereo—before CDs, even, before a lot of things—iced tea and Coke in tall glasses on a Sunday afternoon, aunts and uncles sitting around the kitchen, football on the television in the living room beside a table with a lead-crystal vase of the last purple chrysanthemums from the garden. The smell of late Sunday afternoon, tangy but a little thin, the last of the weekend before the big yellow schoolbus labored by on Monday morning.
Jennie and Rachel, of course, see none of this. They hear light-hearted words in a good baritone and a simple rhythm they could follow, hope and courage in silly doggerel. They are delighted. They join in the chorus after McHabe has sung it a few times, then sing him three songs popular at Block dances, then make him more 'ade, then begin to ask questions about the Outside. Simple questions: What did people eat? Where did they get it? What did they wear? The three of them are still at it when I go to bed, my arthritis finally starting to ache, glancing at Mamie's closed door with a sadness I hadn't expected and can't name.
"That son-of-a-bitch better never come near me again," Mamie says the next morning. The day is sunny and I sit by our one window, knitting a blanket to loosen my fingers, wondering if the donated wool came from Chinese or Korean sheep. Rachel has gone with Jennie on a labor call to deepen a well in Block E; people had been talking about doing that for weeks, and apparently someone finally got around to organizing it. Mamie slumps at the table, her eyes red from crying. "I caught him screwing Mary Delbarton." Her voice splinters like a two-year-old's. "Mama—he was screwing Mary Delbarton."
"Let him go, Mamie."
"I'd be alone again." She says it with a certain dignity, which doesn't last. "That son-of-a-bitch goes off with that slut one day after we're engaged and I'm fucking alone again!"
I don't say anything; there isn't anything to say. Mamie's husband died eleven years ago, when Rachel was only five, of an experimental cure being tested by government doctors. The colonies were guinea pigs. Seventeen people in four colonies died, and the government discontinued funding and made it a crime for anyone to go in and out of a disease colony. Too great a risk of contamination, they said. For the protection of the citizens of the country.
"He'll never touch me again!" Mamie says, tears on her lashes. One slips down an inch until it hits the first of the disease ropes, then travels sideways towards her mouth. I reach over and wipe it away. "Goddamn fucking son-of-a-bitch!"
By evening, she and Peter are holding hands. They sit side by side, and his fingers creep up her thigh under what they think is the cover of the table. Mamie slips her hand under his buttocks. Rachel and Jennie look away, Jennie flushing slightly. I have a brief flash of memory, of the kind I haven't had for years: myself at eighteen or so, my first year at Yale, in a huge brass bed with a modern geometric-print bedspread and a red-headed man I met three hours ago. But here, Inside . . .here sex, like everything else, moves so much slowly, so much more carefully, so much more privately. For such a long time people were afraid that this disease, like that other earlier one, might be transmitted sexually. And then there was the shame of one's ugly body, crisscrossed with ropes of disease. I'm not sure that Rachel has ever seen a man naked.
I say, for the sake of saying something, "So there's a Block dance Wednesday."
"Block B," Jennie said. Her blue eyes sparkled. "With the band that played last summer for Block E."
"Guitars?"
"Oh, no! They've got a trumpet and a violin," Rachel says, clearly impressed. "You should hear how they sound together, Gram—it's a lot different than guitars. Come to the dance!"
"I don't think so, honey. Is Dr. McHabe going?" From both their faces I know this guess is right.
Jennie says hesitantly, "He wants to talk to you first, before the dance, for a few minutes. If that's all right."
"Why?"
"I'm not . . .not exactly sure I know all of it." She doesn't meet my eyes: unwilling to tell me, unwilling to lie. Most of the children Inside, I realize for the first time, are not liars. Or else they're bad ones. They're good at privacy, but it must be an honest privacy.
"Will you see him?" Rachel says eagerly.
"I'll see him."
Mamie looks away from Peter long enough to add sharply, "If it's anything about you or Jennie, he should see me, miss, not your grandmother. I'm your mother and Jennie's guardian, and don't you forget it."
"No, Mama," Rachel says.
"I don't like your tone, miss!"
"Sorry," Rachel says, in the same tone. Jennie drops her eyes, embarrassed. But before Mamie can get really started on indignant maternal neglect, Peter whispers something in her ear and she claps her hand over her mouth, giggling.
Later, when just the two of us are left in the kitchen, I say quietly to Rachel, "Try not to upset your mother, honey. She can't help it."
"Yes, Gram," Rachel says obediently. But I hear the disbelief in her tone, a disbelief muted by her love for me and even for her mother, but nonetheless there. Rachel doesn't believe that Mamie can't help it. Rachel, born Inside, can't possibly help her own ignorance of what it is that Mamie thinks she has lost.
* * *
On his second visit to me six days later, just before the Block dance, Tom McHabe seems different. I'd forgotten that there are people who radiate such energy and purpose that they seem to set the very air tingling. He stands with his legs braced slightly apart, flanked by Rachel and Jennie, both dressed in their other skirts for the dance. Jennie has woven a red ribbon through her blonde curls; it glows like a flower. McHabe touches her lightly on the shoulder, and I realize from her answering look what must be happening between them. My throat tightens.
"I want to be honest with you, Mrs. Pratt. I've talked to Jack Stevenson and Mary Kramer, as well as some others in Blocks C and E, and I've gotten a feel for how you live here. A little bit, anyway. I'm going to tell Mr. Stevenson and Mrs. Kramer what I tell you, but I wanted you to be first."
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"Why?" I say, more harshly than I intend. Or think I intend.
He isn't fazed. "Because you're one of the oldest survivors of the disease. Because you had a strong education Outside. Because your daughter's husband died of axoperidine."
At the same moment that I realize what McHabe is going to say next, I realize too that Rachel and Jennie have already heard it. They listen to him with the slightly open-mouthed intensity of children hearing a marvelous but familiar tale. But do they understand? Rachel wasn't present when her father finally died, gasping for air his lungs couldn't use.
McHabe, watching me, says, "There's been a lot of research on the disease since those deaths, Mrs. Pratt."
"No. There hasn't. Too risky, your government said."
I see that he caught the pronoun. "Actual administration of any cures is illegal, yes. To minimize contact with communicables."
"So how has this 'research' been carried on?"
"By doctors willing to go Inside and not come out again. Data is transmitted out by laser. In code."
"What clean doctor would be willing to go Inside and not come out again?"
McHabe smiles; again I'm struck by that quality of spontaneous energy. "Oh, you'd be surprised. We had three doctors inside the Pennsylvania colony. One past retirement age. Another, an old-style Catholic, who dedicated his research to God. A third nobody could figure out, a dour persistent guy who was a brilliant researcher."
Was. "And you."
"No," McHabe says quietly. "I go in and out."
"What happened to the others?"
"They're dead." He makes a brief aborted movement with his right hand and I realize that he is, or was, a smoker. How long since I had reached like that for a non-existent cigarette? Nearly two decades. Cigarettes are not among the things people donate; they're too valuable. Yet I recognize the movement still. "Two of the three doctors caught the disease. They worked on themselves as well as volunteers. Then one day the government intercepted the relayed data and went in and destroyed everything."
"Why?" Jennie asks.
"Research on the disease is illegal. Everyone Outside is afraid of a leak: a virus somehow getting out on a mosquito, a bird, even as a spore."
"Nothing has gotten out in all these years," Rachel says.
"No. But the government is afraid that if researchers start splicing and intercutting genes, it could make viruses more viable. You don't understand the Outside, Rachel. Everything is illegal. This is the most repressive period in American history. Everyone's afraid."
"You're not," Jennie says, so softly I barely hear her. McHabe gives her a smile that twists my heart.
"Some of us haven't given up. Research goes on. But it's all underground, all theoretical. And we've learned a lot. We've learned that the virus doesn't just affect the skin. There are—"
"Be quiet," I say, because I see that he's about to say something important. "Be quiet a minute. Let me think."
McHabe waits. Jennie and Rachel look at me, that glow of suppressed excitement on them both. Eventually I find it. "You want something, Dr. McHabe. All this research wants something from us besides pure scientific joy. With things Outside as bad as you say, there must be plenty of diseases Outside you could research without killing yourself, plenty of need among your own people—" he nods, his eyes gleaming "—but you're here. Inside. Why? We don't have any more new or interesting symptoms, we barely survive, the Outside stopped caring what happened to us a long time ago. We have nothing. So why are you here?"
"You're wrong, Mrs. Pratt. You do have something interesting going on here. You have survived. Your society has regressed but not collapsed. You're functioning under conditions where you shouldn't have."
The same old crap. I raise my eyebrows at him. He stares into the fire and says quietly, "To say Washington is rioting says nothing. You have to see a twelve-year-old hurl a homemade bomb, a man sliced open from neck to crotch because he still has a job to go to and his neighbor doesn't, a three-year-old left to starve because someone abandoned her like an unwanted kitten . . .You don't know. It doesn't happen Inside."
"We're better than they are," Rachel says. I look at my grandchild. She says it simply, without self-aggrandizement, but with a kind of wonder. In the firelight the thickened gray ropes of skin across her cheek glow dull maroon.
McHabe said, "Perhaps you are. I started to say earlier that we've learned that the virus doesn't affect just the skin. It alters neurotransmitter receptor sites in the brain as well. It's a relatively slow transformation, which is why the flurry of research in the early years of the disease missed it. But it's real, as real as the faster site-capacity transformations brought about by, say, cocaine. Are you following me, Mrs. Pratt?"
I nod. Jennie and Rachel don't look lost, although they don't know any of this vocabulary, and I recognize that McHabe must have explained all this to them, earlier, in some other terms.
"As the disease progresses to the brain, the receptors which receive excitory transmitters slowly become harder to engage, and the receptors which receive inhibiting transmitters become easier to engage."
"You mean that we become stupider."
"Oh, no! Intelligence is not affected at all. The results are emotional and behavioral, not intellectual. You become—all of you—calmer. Disinclined to action or innovation. Mildly but definitely depressed."
The fire burns down. I pick up the poker, bent slightly where someone once tried to use it as a crowbar, and poke at the log, which is a perfectly shaped molded-pulp synthetic stamped "Donated by Weyerhaeuser-Seyyed." "I don't feel depressed, young man."
"It's a depression of the nervous system, but a new kind—without the hopelessness usually associated with clinical depression."
"I don't believe you."
"Really? With all due courtesy, when was the last time you—or any of the older Block leaders—pushed for any significant change in how you do things Inside?"
"Sometimes things cannot be constructively changed. Only accepted. That's not chemistry, it's reality."
"Not Outside," McHabe says grimly. "Outside they don't change constructively or accept. They get violent. Inside, you've had almost no violence since the early years, even when your resources tightened again and again. When was the last time you tasted butter, Mrs. Pratt, or smoked a cigarette, or had a new pair of jeans? Do you know what happens Outside when consumer goods become unavailable and there are no police in a given area? But Inside you just distribute whatever you have as fairly as you can, or make do without. No looting, no rioting, no cancerous envy. No one Outside knew why. Now we do."
"We have envy."
"But it doesn't erupt into anger."
Each time one of us speaks, Jennie and Rachel turn their heads to watch, like rapt spectators at tennis. Which neither of them has ever seen. Jennie's skin glows like pearl.
"Our young people aren't violent either, and the disease hasn't advanced very far in some of them."
"They learn how to behave from their elders—just like kids everywhere else."
"I don't feel depressed."
"Do you feel energetic?"
"I have arthritis."
"That's not what I mean."
"What do you mean, Doctor?"
Again that restless, furtive reach for a non-existent cigarette. But his voice is quiet. "How long did it take you to get around to applying that insecticide I got Rachel for the termites? She told me you forbid her to do it, and I think you were right; it's dangerous stuff. How many days went by before you or your daughter spread it around?"
The chemical is still in its can.
"How much anger are you feeling now, Mrs. Pratt?" he goes on. "Because I think we understand each other, you and I, and that you guess now why I'm here. But you aren't shouting or ordering me out of here or even telling me what you think of me. You're listening, and you're doing it calmly, and you're accepting what I tell you even though you know what I want you to—"
The door opens and h
e breaks off. Mamie flounces in, followed by Peter. She scowls and stamps her foot. "Where were you, Rachel? We've been standing outside waiting for you all for ten minutes now! The dance has already started!"
"A few more minutes, Mama. We're talking."
"Talking? About what? What's going on?"
"Nothing," McHabe says. "I was just asking your mother some questions about life Inside. I'm sorry we took so long."
"You never ask me questions about life Inside. And besides, I want to dance!"
McHabe says, "If you and Peter want to go ahead, I'll bring Rachel and Jennie."
Mamie chews her bottom lip. I suddenly know that she wants to walk up the street to the dance between Peter and McHabe, an arm linked with each, the girls trailing behind. McHabe meets her eyes steadily.
"Well, if that's what you want," she says pettishly. "Come on, Pete!" She closes the door hard.
I look at McHabe, unwilling to voice the question in front of Rachel, trusting him to know the argument I want to make. He does. "In clinical depression, there's always been a small percentage for whom the illness is manifested not as passivity but as irritability. It may be the same. We don't know."
"Gram," Rachel says, as if she can't contain herself any longer, "he has a cure."
"For the skin manifestation only," McHabe says quickly, and I see that he wouldn't have chosen to blurt it out that way. Not for the effects on the brain."
I say, despite myself, "How can you cure one without the other?"
He runs his hand through his hair. Thick, brown hair. I watch Jennie watch his hand. "Skin tissue and brain tissue aren't alike, Mrs. Pratt. The virus reaches both the skin and the brain at the same time, but the changes to brain tissue, which is much more complex, take much longer to detect. And they can't be reversed—nerve tissue is non-regenerative. If you cut your fingertip, it will eventually break down and replace the damaged cells to heal itself. Shit, if you're young enough, you can grow an entire new fingertip. Something like that is what we think our cure will stimulate the skin to do.
"But if you damage your cortex, those cells are gone forever. And unless another part of the brain can learn to compensate, whatever behavior those cells governed is also changed forever."
Wastelands Page 31
