There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet—O God, there were so many stars you could have used.
What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?
The Last Homosexual
Paul Park
Just as the Devil is said to be able to quote scripture for his own purposes, so, too, the tools of science can be misused by the wrong hands. In the harrowing story that follows, Paul Park takes us to a nightmarish but all-too-possible future society where bogus “science” in the service of corrupt politicians and religious extremists has made people afraid that almost everything is “catching”—and where the most contagious things of all are fear and intolerance and hatred.
Paul Park is one of the most critically acclaimed writers of his literary generation, having received rave reviews and wide acceptance for novels such as Soldiers of Paradise, Sugar Rain, The Cult of Loving Kindness, Celestis, The Gospel of Corax, and Three Marys. His most recent novel is No Traveler Returns. His short work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, Interzone, Omni Online, Full Spectrum, Strange Plasma, and elsewhere, and has been collected in If Lions Could Speak and Other Stories. He lives with his family in North Adams, Massachusetts.
###
At my tenth high school reunion at the Fairmont Hotel, I ran into it Steve Daigrepont and my life changed.
That was three years ago. Now I am living by myself in a motel room, in the southeast corner of the Republic of California. But in those days, I was Jimmy Brothers, and my wife and I owned a house uptown off Audubon Park in New Orleans. Our telephone number was (504) EXodus-5671. I could call her now. It would be early evening.
I think she still lives there because it was her house, bought with her money. She was the most beautiful woman I ever met, and rich, too. In those days she was teaching at Tulane Christian University, and I worked for the Times-Picayune. That was why Steve wanted to talk to me.
“Listen,” he said. “I want you to do a story about us.”
We had been on the baseball team together at Jesuit. Now he worked for the Board of Health. He was divorced. “I work too hard,” he said as he took me away from the bar and made me sit down in a corner of the Sazerac Room, under the gold mural. “Especially now.”
He had gotten the idea I had an influence over what got printed in the paper. In fact I was just a copy editor. But at Jesuit I had been the starting pitcher on a championship team, and I could tell Steve still looked up to me. “I want you to do a feature,” he said. “I want you to come visit us at Carville.”
He was talking about the old Gillis W. Long Center, on River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Formerly the United States national leprosarium, now it was a research foundation.
“You know they’re threatening to shut us down,” he said.
I had heard something about it. The New Baptist Democrats had taken over the statehouse again, and as usual they were sharpening the axe. Carville was one of the last big virology centers left in the state.
Doctors from all over Louisiana came there to study social ailments. But Senator Rasmussen wanted the buildings for a new penitentiary.
“She’s always talking about the risks of some terrible outbreak,” said Steve. “But it’s never happened. It can’t happen. In the meantime, there’s so much we still don’t know. And to destroy the stocks, it’s murder.”
Steve’s ex-wife was pregnant, and she came in and stood next to the entrance to the lobby, talking to some friends. Steve hunched his shoulders over the table and leaned toward me.
“These patients are human beings,” he said, sipping his orange crush. “That’s what they don’t understand.” And then he went on to tell a story about one of the staff, an accountant named Dan who had worked at Carville for years. Then someone discovered Dan had embezzled two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the contingency fund, and he was admitted as a patient. “Now I’ll never leave you. Now I’m home,” he said when he stepped into the ward.
“Sort of like Father Damien,” I murmured. While I wasn’t sure why my old friend wanted this story in the newspaper, still I admired his passion, his urgency. When we said good-bye, he pressed my hand in both of his, as if he really thought I could help him. It was enough to make me mention the problems at Carville to my boss a few days later, who looked at me doubtfully and suggested I go up there and take a look around on my day off.
“People have different opinions about that place,” he said. “Although these days it would be hard for us to question the judgment of a Louisiana state senator.”
###
I didn’t tell Melissa where I was going. I drove up alone through the abandoned suburbs and the swamps. Once past the city, I drove with the river on my left, behind the new levee. I went through small towns filled with old people, their trailers and cabins in sad contrast to the towers of the petrochemical and agricultural concerns, which lined the Mississippi between Destrehan and Lutcher.
Carville lay inside an elbow of the river, surrounded by swamps and graveyards and overgrown fields. In the old days, people had grown sugar cane. Now I drove up along a line of beautiful live oaks covered with moss and ferns. At the end of it, a thirty-foot concrete statue of Christ the Redeemer, and then I turned in at the gate beside the mansion, a plantation house before the civil war, and the administration building since the time of the original leprosarium.
At the guardhouse, they examined my medical records and took some blood. They scanned me with the lie detector and asked some questions. Then they called in to Steve, and I had to sign a lot of forms in case I had to be quarantined. Finally they let me past the barricade and into the first of many wire enclosures. Soldiers leaned against the Corinthian columns of the main house.
I don’t want to drag this out with a lot of description. Carville was a big place. Once you were inside, past the staff” offices, it was laid out in sections, and some were quite pleasant. The security was not oppressive. When he met me at the inner gate, Steve was smiling. “Welcome to our Inferno,” he said, when no one else could hear. Then he led me down a series of complicated covered walkways, past the hospital, the Catholic and Protestant chapels, the cafeteria. Sometimes he stopped and introduced me to doctors and administrators, who seemed eager to answer questions. Then there were others who hovered at a respectful distance: patients, smiling and polite, dressed in street clothes. They did not shake hands, and when they coughed or sneezed, they turned their faces away.
“Depression,” murmured Steve, and later, “alcoholism. Theft.”
It had been around the time I was born that Drs. Fargas and Watanabe, working at what had been LSU, discovered the viral nature of our most difficult human problems. I mean the diseases that even Christ can’t heal. They had been working with the quarantined HIV-2 population a few years after independence, during the old Christian Coalition days. Nothing much had changed since then in most of the world, where New Baptist doctrine didn’t have the same clout as in Louisiana. But those former states that had been willing to isolate the carriers and stop the dreadful cycle of contagion had been transformed. Per capita income rates showed a steady rise, and crime was almost nonexistent. Even so, thirty years later there was still much to learn about susceptibility, about immunization, and the actual process of transmission. As is so often the case, political theory had outstripped science, and though it was hard to argue with the results, still, as Steve Daigrepont explained it, there was a need for places like Carville, where important research was being done.
“If only to keep the patients alive,” he muttered. His voice had softened as we progressed into the complex, and now I had to lean close to him to understand. After the second checkpoint, when we put our masks on, I had to ask him to speak up.
We put on isolation suits and latex gloves. We stood outside some glassed-in rooms, watching people drink coffee and read n
ewspapers, as they sat on plain, institutional couches. “Obesity,” whispered Steve, which surprised me. No one in the room seemed particularly overweight.
“These are carriers,” he hissed, angry for some reason. “They aren’t necessarily infected. Besides, their diet is strictly controlled.”
Later, we found ourselves outside again, under the hot sun. I stared into a large enclosure like the rhinoceros exhibit at the Audubon Zoo. A ditch protected us, and in the distance I could see some tarpaper shacks and rotted-out cars. “Poor people,” mumbled Steve through his mask. “Chronic poverty.” Children were playing in the dirt outside one of the shacks. They were scratching at the ground with sticks.
Again, I don’t want to drag this out. I want to move on to the parts that are most painful to me. Now it hurts me to imagine what a terrible place Carville was, to imagine myself walking numbly through. That is a disease as well. In those days, in Louisiana, we were all numb, and we touched things with our deadened hands.
But for me, there was a pain of wakening, as when blood comes to a sleeping limb. Because I was pretending to be a reporter, I asked Steve a lot of questions. Even though as time went on I hoped he wouldn’t answer, but he did. “I thought this was a research facility,” I said. “Where are the labs?”
“That section is classified. This is the public part. We get a lot of important guests.”
We were standing outside a high, wrought-iron fence. I peered at Steve through my mask, trying to see his eyes. Why had he brought me here? Did he have some private reason? I stood in the stifling heat with my gloved hands on the bars of the fence, and then Steve wasn’t there. He was called away somewhere and left me alone. I stood looking into a small enclosure, a clipped green lawn and a gazebo. But it was dark there, too. Maybe there were tall trees, or a mass of shrubbery. I remember peering through the bars, wondering if the cage was empty. I inspected a small placard near my eye. “Curtis Garr,” it said. “Sodomite.”
And then suddenly he was there on the other side of the fence. He was a tall man in his mid-fifties, well-dressed in a dark suit, leaning on a cane. He was very thin, with a famished, bony face, and a wave of gray hair that curled back over his ears. And I noticed that he also was wearing gloves, gray leather gloves.
He stood opposite me for a long time. His thin lips were smiling. But his eyes, which were gray and very large, showed the intensity of any caged beast.
I stood staring at him, my hands on the bars. He smiled. Carefully and slowly, he reached out his gloved forefinger and touched me on my wrist, in a gap between my isolation suit and latex hand.
Then as Steve came up, he gave a jaunty wave and walked away.
Steve nodded. “Curtis is priceless,” he muttered behind my ear. “We think he might be the last one left in the entire state. We had two others, but they died.”
###
Last of all, Steve took me back to his air-conditioned office. “We must get together for lunch,” he said. “Next time I’m in the city.”
Now I can wonder about the Father Damien story he had told me at the Fairmont. I can wonder if in some way he was talking about himself. But at the time I smiled and nodded, for I was anxious to be gone.
I didn’t tell Steve the man had touched me. Nor did I tell the doctors who examined me before I was released. But driving back to New Orleans, I found myself examining the skin over my left wrist. Soon it was hot and red from rubbing at it. Once I even stopped the car to look. But I didn’t tell Melissa, either, when I got home.
She wouldn’t have sympathized. She was furious enough at what she called my “Jesuit liberalism,” when I confessed where I had been. I hated when she talked like that. She had been born a Catholic like me and Steve, but her parents had converted after the church split with Rome. As she might have explained it, since the differences between American Catholic and New Baptist were mostly social, why not have the courage to do whatever it took to get ahead? No, that’s not fair—she was a true believer. At twenty-eight, she was already a full professor of Creationist biology.
“What if somebody had seen you? What if you had caught something?” she demanded as I rubbed my wrist. I was sitting next to the fireplace, and she stood next to the window with the afternoon light in her hair. All the time she lectured me, I was thinking how much I wanted to make love to her, to push her down and push my penis into her right there on the Doshmelti carpet—“I don’t know how you can take such risks,” she said. “Or I do know: it’s because you don’t really believe in any of it. No matter what the proofs, no matter how many times we duplicate the Watanabe results, you just don’t accept them.”
I sat there fingering my wrist. To tell the truth, there were parts of the doctrine of ethical contagion that no educated person believed.
Melissa herself didn’t believe in half of it. But she had to pretend that she believed it, and maybe it was the pretense that made it true.
I didn’t want to interrupt her when she was just getting started. “Damn those Jesuits,” she said. “Damn them. They ruined you, Jim. You’ll never amount to anything, not in Louisiana. Why don’t you just go on up to Massachusetts, or someplace where you’d feel at home?”
I loved it when she yelled. Her hair, her eyes. She loved it, too. She was like an actress in a play. The fact is, she never would have married one of those Baptist boys, sickly and small and half-poisoned with saltpeter. No matter how much she told her students about the lechery vaccines, no matter how many times she showed her slides of spirochetes attacking the brain, still it was too late for her and me, and she knew it.
The more she yelled at me, the hotter she got. After a while, we went at it like animals.
###
Two months later, I heard from Steve again. I remember it was in the fall, one of those cool, crisp, blue New Orleans days that seem to come out of nowhere. I had been fired from the paper, and I was standing in my vegetable garden looking out toward the park when I heard the phone ring. I thought it was Melissa, calling back to apologize. She had gone up to Washington, which had been the capital of the Union in the old days, before the states had taken back their rights. She was at an academic conference, and lonely for home. Already that morning she had called me to describe a reception she had been to the night before. When she traveled out of Louisiana, she always had a taste for the unusual—“They have black people here!” she said. “Not just servants; I mean at the conference. And the band! There was a trombone player, you have no idea. Such grace, such raw sexuality.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear about that,” I said.
She was silent for a moment, and she’d apologized. “I guess I’m a little upset,” she confessed.
“Why?”
“I don’t like it here. No one takes us seriously. People are very rude, as if we were to blame. But we’re not the only ones”—she told me about a Dr. Wu from Boise who had given a paper the previous night on Christian genetics. “He showed slides of what he called ‘criminal’ DNA with all the sins marked on them. As if God had molded them that way. ‘With tiny fingers,’ as he put it.”
I wasn’t sure what the New Baptists would say about this. And I didn’t want to make a mistake. “That sounds plausible,” I murmured, finally.
“You would think that. Plausible and dangerous. It’s an argument that leads straight back to Catholicism and original sin. That’s fine for you—you want to be guilty when everybody else has been redeemed. But it completely contradicts Fargas and Watanabe, for one thing. Either the soul is uncontaminated at birth or else it isn’t. If it isn’t, all our immunization research is worthless. What’s the point of pretending we can be healed, either by Christ or by science? That’s what I said during the Q&A. Everybody hissed and booed, but then I found myself supported by a Jewish gentleman from New York. He said we could not ignore environmental factors, which is not quite a New Baptist point of view the way he expressed it, but what can you expect? He was an old reactionary, but his heart was in the right
place. And such a spokesman for his race! Such intelligence and clarity!”
That was the last time I spoke to Melissa, my wife. I wish we had talked about another subject, so that now in California, when I go over her words in my mind, I might not be distracted by these academic arguments. Distracted by my anger, and the guilt that we all shared. I didn’t want to hear about the Jewish man. So many Jews had died during the quarantine—I can say that now. But at the time, I thought Melissa was teasing me and trying to make me jealous. “That’s the one good thing about you getting yourself canned,” she said as she hung up. “I always know where to find you.”
Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t answered the phone when it rang again a few minutes later. I almost didn’t. I sulked in the garden, listening to it, but then at the last moment I went in and picked it up.
But maybe nothing would have been different. Maybe the infection had already spread too far. There was a red spot on my wrist where I’d been rubbing it. I noticed it again as I picked up the phone.
“Jimmy, is that you?” Steve’s voice was harsh and confused, and the connection was bad. In the background was a rhythmic banging noise. Melissa, in Washington, had sounded clearer.
After Steve was finished, I went out and stood in my vegetable garden again, in the bright, clean sun. Over in the park, a family was sitting by the pond having a picnic. A little girl in a blue dress stood up and clapped her hands.
What public sacrifice is too great, I thought, to keep that girl free from contamination? Or maybe it’s just now, looking back, that I allow myself a thought. Maybe at the time I just stared numbly over the fence, and then went in and drank a Coke. It wasn’t until a few hours later that I got in the car and drove north.
Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition Page 22
