by James Morrow
“Do you care?” my sister asked.
“Hard to say.” The doctor fanned me with his clipboard. “Your husband?”
“Brother,” Gloria explained.
“Jack Sperry,” I said.
“Glad you could make it, Sperry,” said the doctor. “When there’s only one family member out here, the kid’ll sometimes go catatonic on us.” Merrick shoved the clipboard toward Gloria. “Informed consent, right?”
“They told me the possibilities.” She studied the clipboard. “Cardiac—”
“Cardiac arrest, cerebral hemorrhage, respiratory failure, kidney damage,” Merrick recited.
Gloria scrawled her signature. “When was the last time anything like that happened?”
“They killed a little boy over at Veritas Memorial on Tuesday,” said Merrick, edging toward the control panel. “A freak thing, but now and then we really screw up. Everybody ready?”
“Not really,” said my sister.
Merrick pushed a button, and PIGS HAVE WINGS materialized before my niece on a Lucite tachistoscope screen. Seeing the falsehood, the doctor, Gloria, and I shuddered in unison.
“Can you hear me, lassie?” Merrick inquired into the microphone.
Connie opened her mouth, and a feeble “Yes” dribbled out of the loudspeaker.
“You see those words?” Merrick asked. The lurid red characters hovered in the air like weary butterflies.
“Y-yes.”
“When I give the order, read them aloud.”
“Is it going to hurt?” my niece quavered.
“It’s going to hurt a lot. Will you read the words when I say so?”
“I’m scared. Do I have to?”
“You have to.” Merrick rested a pudgy finger on the switch. “Now!”
“‘P-pigs have wings.’”
And so it began, this bris of the human conscience, this electroconvulsive rite of passage. Merrick nudged the switch. The volts ripped through Connie. She let out a sharp scream and turned the color of cottage cheese.
“But they don’t,” she gasped.. “Pigs don’t…”
My own burn flooded back. The outrage, the agony.
“You’re right, lass—they don’t.” Merrick gave the voltage regulator a subtle twist, and Gloria flinched. “You did reasonably well, girl,” the doctor continued, handing the mike to my sister.
“Oh, yes, Connie,” she said. “Keep up the awfully good work.”
“It’s not fair.” Sweat speckled Connie’s forehead. “I want to go home.”
As Gloria surrendered the mike, the tachistoscope projected SNOW IS HOT. My brain reeled with the lie.
“Now, lass! Read it!”
“‘S-s-snow is…h-hot.’” Lightning struck. Connie, howled. Blood rolled over her lower lip. During my own burn, I’d practically bitten my tongue off. “I don’t want this any more,” she wailed.
“It’s not a choice, lass.”
“Snow is cold.” Tears threaded Connie’s freckles together. “Please stop hurting me.”
“Cold. Right. Smart girl.” Merrick cranked up the voltage. “Ready, Connie? Here it comes.”
HORSES HAVE SIX LEGS.
“Why do I have to do this? Why?”
“Everybody does it. All your friends.”
“‘H-h-horses have…have…’ They have four legs, Dr. Merrick.”
“Read the words, Connie!”
“I hate you! I hate all of you!”
“Connie!”
She raced through it. Zap. Two hundred volts. The girl coughed and retched. A coil of thick white mucus shot from her mouth.
“Too much,” gasped Gloria. “Isn’t that too much?”
“You want the treatment to take, don’t you?” said Merrick.
“Mommy! Where’s my Mommy?”
Gloria tore the mike away. “Right here, dear!”
“Mommy, make them stop!”
“I can’t, dear. You must try to be brave.”
The fourth lie arrived. Merrick upped the voltage. “Read it, lass!”
“No!”
“Read it!”
“Uncle Jack! I want Uncle Jack!”
My throat constricted, my stomach went sour. “You’re doing quite well, Connie,” I said, grabbing the mike. “I think you’ll like your present.”
“Take me home!”
“I got you a pretty nice one.”
Connie balled her face into a mass of wrinkles. “‘Stones—’!” she screamed, spitting blood. “‘Are’!” she persisted. “‘Alive’!” She jerked like a gaffed flounder, spasm after spasm. A broad urine stain bloomed on her smock, and despite the mandatory enema a brown fluid dripped from the hem.
“Excellent!” Merrick increased the punishment to three hundred volts. “The end is in sight, child!”
“No! Please! Please! Enough!” Foam leaked from Connie’s mouth.
“You’re almost halfway there!”
“Please!”
The tachistoscope kept firing, Connie kept lying: falsehood after falsehood, shock after shock—like a salvo of armed missiles flying along her nerves, detonating inside her mind. My niece asserted that rats chase cats. She lied about money, saying it grew on trees. The Pope is Jewish, Connie insisted. Grass is purple. Salt is sweet.
As the final lie appeared, she fainted. Even before Gloria could scream, Merrick was inside the cell, checking the child’s heartbeat. A begrudging admiration seeped through me. The doctor had a job to do, and he did it.
A single dose of smelling salts brought Connie around. Easing her face toward the screen, Merrick turned to me. “Ready?”
“Huh? You want me…?”
“Hit it when I tell you.”
Reluctantly I rested my finger on the switch. “I’d rather not.” True. I wasn’t inordinately fond of Connie, but I had no wish to give her pain.
“Read, Connie,” muttered Merrick.
“I c-can’t.” Blood and spittle mingled on Connie’s chin. “You all hate me! Mommy hates me!”
“I like you almost as much as myself,” said Gloria, leaning over my shoulder. “You’re going to have a satisfactory party.”
“One more, Connie,” I told her. “Just one more and you’ll be a citizen.” The switch felt sharp and hot against my finger. “A highly satisfactory party.”
A single droplet rolled down Connie’s cheek, staining it like a trail left by one of Toby’s beloved slugs. It was, I realized, the last time she would ever cry. Brainburns did that to you; they drained you of all those destructive and chaotic juices: sentiments, illusions, myths, tears.
“‘Dogs can talk,’” she saidsaid, right before I pierced her heart with alternating current.
And it truly was a highly satisfactory party, filling the entire visitor’s lounge and overflowing into the hall. All four of Connie’s older sisters came, along with her reading teacher and eight of her girlfriends, half of whom had been cured that month, one on the previous day. They danced the Upright while a compact disk of the newest Probity hit wafted through the ward:
When skies are gray, and it starts to rain,
I like to stand by the windowpane,
And watch each raindrop bounce and fall,
Then smile, ’cause I’m not getting wet at all.
The hospital supplied the refreshments—a case of Olga’s OK Orangeade, a tub of ice cream from No Great Shakes, and a slab of chocolate cake the size of a welcome mat. All the girls, I noticed, ate in moderation, letting their ice cream turn to soup. Artificially induced slenderness was, of course, disingenuous, but that was no reason to be a glutton.
The gift-giving ceremony contained one disturbing moment. After opening the expected succession of galoshes, reference books, umbrellas, and cambric blouses, Connie unwrapped a fully working model of an amusement park—Happy Land, it was called, complete with a roller coaster, Ferris wheel, and merry-go-round. She blanched, seized by the panic that someone who’s just been through a brainburn invariably feels in the prese
nce of anything electric. Slamming her palm against her lips, she rushed into the bathroom. The friend who’d bought her the Happy Land, a stumpy, frizzy-haired girl named Beth, reddened with remorse. “I should’ve realized,” she moaned.
Was the Happy Land a lie? I wondered. It purported to be an amusement park, but it wasn’t.
“I’m so stupid,” whined Beth.
No, I decided, it merely purported to be a replica of an amusement park, which it was.
Connie hobbled out of the bathroom. Silence descended like a sudden snowfall—not the hot snow of a brainburn but the cold, dampening snow of the objective world. Feet were shuffled, throats cleared. The party, obviously, had lost its momentum. Someone said, “We all had a reasonably good time, Connie,” and that was that.
As her friends and sisters filed out, Connie hugged them with authentic affection (all except Alice Lawrence, whom she evidently disliked) and offered each a highly personalized thank-you, never forgetting who’d given what. Such a grown-up young lady, I thought. But her greatest display of maturity occurred when I said my own good-bye.
“Take care, Connie.”
“Thanks for coming, Unc, and thanks for the roller skates. Thing is, I already have a pair, better than these. I’ll probably swap them for a sweater.”
A citizen now. I was proud of her.
Back at the apartment, the phone-answering machine was blinking. Three flashes, pause, three flashes, pause, three flashes, pause. I grabbed a bottle of Paul’s Passable Ale from the fridge and snapped off the top. Three flashes, pause. I took a sizeable swallow. Another. The late-afternoon light poured through the kitchen window and bathed our major appliances in the iridescent orange you see when facing the sun with eyes closed. I finished my beer.
Three flashes, pause, three flashes, pause: a staccato, insistent signal—a cry of distress, I realize in retrospect, like a call beamed semaphorically from a sinking ship.
I pushed PLAY. Toby had written and produced our outgoing message, and he also starred in it: My folks and I just want to say / We’d love to speak with you today / So speak up when you hear the beep / And we might call back before we sleep.
Beep, and a harsh male voice zagged into the kitchen. “Amusing message, sort of—about what I’d expect from a seven-year-old. This is Dr. Bamford at the Kraft Institute, and I presume I’m addressing the parents of Toby Sperry. Well, the results are in. The Hob’s hare that bit your son was carrying high levels of Xavier’s Plague, an uncommon and pathogenic virus. We shipped the specimen to Dr. Prendergorst at the Center for the Palliative Treatment of Hopeless Diseases in Locke Borough. If you have any questions, I’ll be only mildly irritated if you call me. From now on, though, the matter is essentially in the Center’s synecdochic hands.” Beep. “John Prendergorst speaking, Center for the Palliative Treatment of Hopeless Diseases. You’ve probably heard Bamford’s preliminary report by now, and we just now corroborated it down here at Hopeless. Please call my office at your earliest convenience, and we’ll arrange for you to come by and talk, but I’m afraid no amount of talk can change the fact that Xavier’s is one hundred percent fatal. We’ll show you the statistics.” Beep. “Hi. It’s Helen. I’m at the office, working on that neuropathology of spiritual possession piece. Looks like a long day and a longer night. There’s some chicken in the freezer.”
My reaction was immediate and instinctual. I ran into the study, grabbed Helen’s unabridged dictionary, and began looking up “fatal,” bent on discovering some obscure usage peculiar to Prendergorst’s profession. When the doctor said “fatal,” I decided, he didn’t mean fatal, he meant something far more ambiguous and benign.
Fast.
Fasten.
Fat.
Fatal. Adjective. Causing death; mortal; deadly.
Fatalism
Fatality
Fatally
No. The dictionary was lying. Just because Prendergorst’s forecast was pessimisitc, that didn’t make it true.
Fata Morgana. Noun. A mirage consisting of multiple images.
And, indeed, a vision now presented itself to my vibrating brain: one of the few copies of The Journal of Psychic Healing that I’d elected to spare, a special issue on psychoneuroimmunology, its cover displaying a pair of radiant hands massaging a human heart.
Fatuous. Adjective. Silly, unreal, illusory.
Psychoneuroimmunology wasn’t fatuous, I’d decided—not entirely. Even the peripatetic prose of The Journal of Psychic Healing hadn’t obscured the scientific validity of cures spawned by the mind-body connection.
There was hope. Oh, yes, hope. I would scour the city’s data banks, I vowed. I would learn about anyone who’d ever beaten a fatal illness by tapping into the obscure powers of his own nervous system. I would tutor myself in sudden remissions, unexpected recoveries, and the taxonomy of miracles.
Fault.
Faust.
Favor.
Fawn. Noun. A young deer.
Because, you see, it was like this: on his fifth birthday we’d taken Toby to the Imprisoned Animals Gardens in Spinoza Borough. Fawns roamed the petting zoo at will, prancing about on their cloven hoofs, noses thrust forward in search of handouts. Preschoolers swarmed everywhere, feeding the creatures peanut brittle, giggling as the eager tongues stroked their palms. Whenever another person’s child laughed upon being so suckled, I was not especially moved. Whenever my own did the same, I felt something else entirely, something difficult to describe.
I believe I saw the alleged God.
Three
Appropriately, the Center for the Palliative Treatment of Hopeless Diseases occupied a terminal location, a rocky promontory extending from the southern end of Locke Borough into the choppy, gunmetal waters of Becket Bay. We arrived at noon on Sunday, Helen driving, me navigating, the map of Veritas spread across my knees, its surface so mottled by rips and holes it seemed to depict the aftermath of a bombing raid. A fanfolded mile of computer paper lay on the back seat, the fruit of my researches into psychoneuroimmunology and the mind-body link. I knew all about miracles now. I was an expert on the impossible.
We parked in the visitors’ lot. Tucking the printout under my arm, I followed Helen across the macadam. The structure looming over us was monumental and menacing, tier upon tier of diminishing concrete levels frosted with grimy stucco, as if Prendergorst’s domain were a wedding cake initiating a marriage destined to end in wife abuse and murder.
In the lobby, a stark sign greeted us. ATTENTION. WE REALIZE THE DECOR HERE DOES NOTHING TO AMELIORATE YOUR SORROW AND DESPAIR. WRITE YOUR BOROUGH REPRESENTATIVE. WE’D LIKE TO PUT IN DECENT LIGHTING AND PAINT THE WALLS. A bristle-jawed nurse told us that Dr. Prendergorst—“You’ll know him by his eyes, they look like pickled onions”—was expecting us on the eleventh floor.
We entered the elevator, a steamy box crowded with morose men and women, like a cattle boat bearing war refugees from one zone of chaos and catastrophe to another. I reached out to take Helen’s hand. The gesture failed. Oiled by sweat, my fingers slipped from her grasp.
No one was waiting in the eleventh-floor waiting room, a gloomy niche crammed with overstuffed armchairs and steel engravings of famous cancer victims, a gallery stretching as far back in history as Jonathan Swift. Helen gave our names to the receptionist, a spindly young man with flourishing gardens of acne on his cheeks, who promptly got on the intercom and announced our arrival to Prendergorst, adding, “They look pale and scared.”
We sat down. Best-selling self-help books littered the coffee table. You Can Have Somewhat Better Sex. How to Find a Certain Amount of Inner Peace. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Diet. “It’s a mean system, isn’t it?” the receptionist piped up from behind his desk. “He’s in there, you’re out here. He seems to matter, you don’t. He keeps you waiting—you wait. The whole thing’s set up to intimidate you.”
I grunted my agreement. Helen said nothing.
A door opened. A short, round, onion-eyed man in a white lab coat came out,
accompanied by a fiftyish couple—a blobby woman in a shabby beige dress and her equally fat, equally disheveled husband: rumpled golf cap, oversized polyester polo shirt, baggy corduroy pants; they looked like a pair of bookends they’d failed to unload at their own garage sale. “There’s nothing more I can say,” Prendergorst informed them in a low, tepid voice. “A Hickman catheter is our best move at this point.”
“She’s our only child,” said the wife.
“Leukemia’s a tough one,” said Prendergorst.
“Shouldn’t you do more tests?” asked the husband.
“Medically—no. But if it would make you feel better…”
The couple exchanged terse, pained glances. “It wouldn’t,” said the wife, shambling off.
“True,” said the husband, following.
A minute later we were in Prendergorst’s office, Helen and I seated on metal folding chairs, the doctor positioned regally behind a mammoth desk of inlaid cherry, “Would you like to put some sugar in your brain?” he asked, proferring a box of candy.
“No,” said Helen tonelessly.
“I guess the first step is to confirm the diagnosis, right?” I said, snatching up a dark chocolate nugget. I bit through the outer shell. Brandy trickled into my throat.
“When your son gets back from camp, I’ll draw a perfunctory blood sample,” said Prendergorst, sliding an open file folder across his desk. Beneath Toby’s name, a gruesome photograph of the deceased Hob’s hare lay stapled to the inside front cover, its body reduced by the autopsy to a gutted pelt. “The specimen they sent us was loaded with the virus,” said the doctor. “Absolutely loaded. The chances of Toby not being infected are perhaps one in a million.” He whisked the file away, slipping it into his top desk drawer. “A rabbit killing your child, it’s all faintly absurd, don’t you think? A snake would make more sense, or a black widow spider, even one of those poisonous toads—can’t remember what they’re called. But a rabbit…”
“So what sort of therapy are we looking at?” I asked. “I hope it’s not too debilitating.”
