by Nagle, Pati
A soft tap and Victor entered, carrying a leather satchel and a large pack. He moved warily, his eyes never still. Emmanuel Cooper waited inside the door. He smelled faintly of cut hay. Jacob laid one hand on his arm and said, “We will do our best for him.”
Emmanuel Cooper started for the door, every line of his body expressing reluctance. Teeth glimmered in a fleeting smile. “I’ll pray for you.” A nod. “Doc, Doc Victor.”
The door closed.
“Oy. Did you hear that, Victor? Now you’re included in his prayers.” Without waiting for a reply, Jacob described the results of his earlier examination.
Victor listened, his eyes fixed on the boy’s pale face. “Acute myelogenous leukemia. Diagnosis confirmed by the presence of leukemic blast cells in peripheral blood smears.”
“Let’s take a look then, you and I.”
Victor’s pack contained the sturdy wooden box which housed Jacob’s microscope, alcohol lamp and light-focusing mirrors. At Jacob’s command, Victor set up the apparatus on the clothes chest.
Jacob smeared a drop of the boy’s blood on a clean glass slide, added stain and a cover slip. Ignoring the ache in his knee, he crouched beside the chest and positioned the slide on the microscope stage. The eyepiece showed him a circle of brightness. Then, as he adjusted the fine focus, detail became apparent—the reddish biconcave discs, a single mature white cell.
He wet his lips as his eyes scanned the field, marking the primitive, undifferentiated cells which should not be there.
Victor bent over the microscope, adjusting the focus and scanning the slide. He spent a long time looking. “Those are the blast cells?”
“Yes,” Jacob answered. “They’ll be all through his bone marrow, crowding out the normal blood-forming elements. Liver, spleen, lymph nodes, too.”
“The sickness rages in his blood.” Victor knew the technical terminology; he remembered everything Jacob had taught him, everything he’d read in the medical texts. It was not his intellect which responded so powerfully to the boy’s illness.
“Do you remember how you cured me?” Jacob asked. “How my blood flowed into your body and then you reversed it? My blood—through your body—and back to mine. Like dialysis, only better. Deeper. Permanent.”
“Dialysis,” Victor said, as if tasting the word. “You mean to try it with this child. You think it will work?”
“I think we must find out.”
Victor placed one hand on the faded quilt, not quite touching the boy’s arm. “Why should I do such a thing?”
“You must answer that question yourself,” Jacob said. Even as I must.
“You mean Maimonides’s choice? You mean the single action which will tip the balance between good and evil in my soul?” His voice roughened into a whisper. “There is no balance, Jacob.”
Behind Victor’s quiet statement, Jacob thought he heard the echoes of despair. “No balance, Victor?” he said gently. “Yesterday that might have been true. But today or tomorrow, perhaps there will be.”
“There will be? You mean that if I save this boy’s life now, it will somehow make a difference?”
Jacob laid one hand on Victor’s shoulder. “Was it evil to save my life?”
“I had no choice. Not that first time.”
“And afterwards?”
Victor looked up with his lightless eyes. “That was many years ago. And this boy, what is he to me?”
Jacob recalled the moment he truly acknowledged what Victor was. He had asked himself almost the same question, What is this creature to me? He is not a Jew. He is not even a man. He’d spent the rest of his life searching for the answer.
“What you are to me, or I to you. What any one of us is to another, a fellow human being in need of our help.”
With feral quickness, Victor leapt to his feet. His lips drew back over his teeth and his face went ashen. His legs trembled. He cried out, “I cannot change what I am!”
Weariness swept through Jacob. He felt worn out with a lifetime’s struggle, as if he had given all that was in him to give. He turned and walked to the door.
Victor started to follow him, then paused, as if hesitant. Something shifted behind the darkness of his eyes, something disused and half-forgotten. He turned, glanced down at the boy. With his free hand, he brushed the boy’s hair back from his forehead and caressed his cheek. For an instant, Jacob caught the expression on Victor’s face. What he saw there was neither hunger nor desire, but the faintest shadow of hope.
Without a word, Victor opened the leather bag so that the lantern lit its contents, needles wrapped in fine boiled cloth, lengths of precious surgical tubing, disinfectant. Setting aside the bag of IV glucose water, its use-date long expired, he began laying out the transfusion equipment. He seemed to have forgotten Jacob’s presence.
The sleeping boy didn’t stir as Victor punctured his veins and then his own, attached the tubing to the needles and checked for air bubbles. Then Victor lay down and began slowly, rhythmically, to clench and open his fist.
Jacob stood by the door and watched, but he could not bring himself to lift the wooden latch. He lingered at the very edge of the light, his eyes held by the pool of brightness cast by the lantern. Life seemed to have gone on beyond him, as if it possessed a momentum of its own; he felt it slipping through his fingers.
∞
Jacob woke to the clatter of goats. He pulled his coat over his shoulders, shivering in the mild morning air. His joints ached and his eyes stung as if from too little sleep. He felt a longing to be back in his own house, away from all the noise and bustle.
The boy’s fever was down. He stirred and asked for breakfast as Jacob re-examined him and called the parents in. People came by in response to news spread by the older Cooper boys. They shook Jacob’s hand. He tried to tell them about remissions and relapses and placebo effects.
What did it matter, he asked himself, if these country people did not grasp the niceties of prognosis? They knew the taste and scent of hope.
Jacob drank from the metal cup which hung beside the outdoor pump. He took off his coat and folded it, noticing the shiny cuffs, the bits of hair and dust, the grime along the collar. It smelled like an old man’s coat.
The day filled with light, the clouds thin and hazy. Brightness drew him onward, up the trail to his mountain. He was already nine parts gone into the hills, with only his physical body yet to follow. One step and then another, he plodded and trudged, slowing to catch his breath, but never stopping.
∞
His feet followed the trail out of old habit, but as he went on, the familiar landmarks seemed increasingly wild and exotic, as if he had somehow strayed across unimaginable distances, across centuries as well as miles. He might be journeying with Moses out of Egypt, with the sun pouring over his shoulders and the sky stretching overhead.
He thought of the medical instruments which he’d left behind. There they would remain, safe, for Victor to find. It seemed fitting that he set forth with no baggage, no provisions, alone into the wilderness.
Victor. He should have prepared him better or done more so that the townspeople would accept him. He should not have held on so long.
At moments he seemed to pass through the steepening hills without a trace. Hawks pierced the bright sky, lizards sunned themselves on rocks, insects whirred. Sweat beaded his face. His breath came high and fast, too fast.
Pain crept through his chest, tightening like a wire net over his left shoulder and arm. Panting, he sat down on the tufts of dried grass that lined the path. The angina would pass, he told himself, unbelieving his own words. The warm air turned chill and the sky dimmed. His left hand trembled. Then hillside slipped and faded.
∞
Jacob awoke in his own bed. Candles, his precious Sabbath candles, burned on the nearby table. He thought he had never seen anything as wondrous and as fragile as their flickering light.
Victor had drawn one of the benches beside the bed. His face was very pale. He
held a small knife in his hands, one Jacob had never seen before. The metal glinted; it looked very sharp.
“You have run out of time,” Victor said. “It must be now, or you will truly die and nothing I can do will bring you back.”
Jacob opened his mouth. For a moment, nothing came out, no words, no breath. He shook his head.
“Why do you persist in this folly?” Victor sounded more desperate than angry. “It’s not a sin—you must see that. The exchange of blood between brothers is sacred, an ancient and honorable tradition. Listen to me! The priests of my homeland make blood out of wine—Christ’s holy blood, they call it. They make it every day and thrice on Sundays. If they can do that with their words and hand-wavings, then why can’t you turn my blood into holy wine?”
Jacob reached out, grasped the hand that held the knife. It was like trying to hold steel with paper. “It would still be blood.”
Victor freed himself from Jacob’s grasp and, with a single movement, slashed across his own wrist. Black fluid welled up along the cut.
“You need not die,” Victor said. “Even now, you need not die. Why can’t you accept my gift, even as I accepted yours?”
Jacob lay back. Night closed in around him and cold seeped into his marrow. He remembered another story his own father had told him. Once, a long time ago, wise and holy men had asked God to put an end to death. God had agreed, but on this condition: that everyone would remain forever exactly as they were. That there would be no more death, but no more birth, no youth, no discovery, no first awakening of love.
No moment of breathless silence beneath the stars.
Jacob had never been able to understand why the wise men had chosen death when every instinct urged otherwise. Perhaps God had been right all along. For something new to be born into the world, something old must pass.
Victor put down the knife. His hair swept back from a widow’s peak to fall around his face like a mourner’s shawl. Within his endless eyes, a flicker of light battled against shadow.
“I shall remember you, Jacob Rosenberg, you stubborn old Jew. Every time I make Maimonides’s choice, every time I go among those people to heal them, every time I turn toward life, then shall I remember you.”
Victor picked up Jacob’s hand in his marble-smooth fingers. For the first time, his touch felt warm and Jacob realized that was because his own flesh had grown so cold. Jacob’s sight went milky, as if the color had bleached out of the candlelight.
“Yis-gadal ve-yis-kadash she-may rabbo be-lmo deeve-ro chiroosay . . . “
Slowly, but without any hesitation, Victor began reciting the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. Jacob had never spoken it aloud, for the ritual required a community. Over the centuries, the words had not changed—not Hebrew but Aramaic, from the time of the Babylonian captivity. Victor might have heard it in a Warsaw ghetto, a Palestinian oasis, a New York cemetery, engraved forever on his perfect memory. The same phrases of faith and continuation might have been spoken anywhere, were still being spoken everywhere.
“Magnified and sanctified be His great name in the world which He created . . . “
Jacob’s lips moved with the words, his voice an echo to Victor’s, yet somehow it sounded as if there were other voices joined to theirs, spilling out of the room over the hillside. Their music filled him utterly. He felt an answering presence, a pressure growing deep within him, strangely painless, like an immense bubble pushing outward.
“May He who makes peace in the heavens, make peace for us . . . “
Galactic light inundated the bubble, each mote of brilliance apart and separate, each effortlessly bound to the swirling immensity. In his very heart and core, the last stubborn stronghold opened itself, released its grasp. The light swept through him, fading and ecstatic with the final whispered Amen.
Survival Skills
Nancy Jane Moore
I love this story for a lot of reasons. It was the story I wrote during my first week at Clarion West and was the first one of my Clarion stories to sell. I also love that I predicted the economic crash during a boom time—it’s probably the closest thing to predictive SF I’ll ever write. But mostly I love it because it tells a story about why guns are not the solution to most problems, even violent ones. I didn’t start out with the moral when I wrote it—I started out with the man, the boy, and the gun—but it worked its way into the story, which pleased me enormously.
∞ ∞ ∞
“Yeah, it’s a great gun, all right. Fifth generation Uzi. Light, compact. And never jams.” I took the gun off the shelf, handed it to the kid.
As he reached for it, his dirty sweatshirt rode up, exposing a knife handle in the waistband of his jeans. He grabbed the gun quickly and tugged his shirt down, glancing over at me to see whether I’d noticed the knife.
I tried to look as if I hadn’t.
The kid—he might have been sixteen—aimed the gun at the tiny window at the top of the basement wall. “Money in the bank,” he said.
When I was his age I’d have said “Far out.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Back in ninety-nine when I bought it I figured it made me a real man, that nobody’d ever mess with me again. Goes to show the difference a few years can make.”
He handed it back, reluctantly, and slumped down into the orange easy chair I’d found abandoned on the street a couple of months ago. His right hand rested at his waist and played with the edge of his shirt. He hadn’t told me his name.
I laid the gun casually on the table, and opened the bottle of whisky I’d brought home with me. The label said it contained Scotch, but I didn’t much think so when I poured it into a cracked mug and a yellow plastic glass. It looked wrong, smelled even wronger. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have touched anything but Macallan single malt. Like I said, things change.
I handed the boy the glass. He took it with his left hand. His face wore a puzzled frown. He’d been looking at me funny since I’d invited him in.
I’d found him hiding behind the sickly rhododendron that sits beside my front door. He must not have heard me walk up, because he’d jumped when I said, “Kind of damp and cold back there, isn’t it, son? Why don’t you come in and warm up a little?”
He’d stared at me at first, like a deer caught in headlights, but then he’d shrugged. “Sure, why not?”
The heat in my basement room filtered out the November chill. The kid took a big slug of the so-called Scotch, coughed, and then took another one.
I said, “Yeah, I was on top of the world back in the nineties. Made so much in the stock market I didn’t even have to work. Guess you wouldn’t think it to look around this place.”
The boy looked around the room. A sneer replaced the frown for a brief moment.
I knew what he saw. Sink in one corner, microwave sitting on top of a two-foot-high refrigerator—that was my kitchen. Stained futon rolled up against the wall—bedroom. I dined at the table that currently held the whisky and the gun, and we were sitting in the two chairs that constituted the living room. A trail of extension cords crisscrossed the room to the jerry-rigged jumble of outlets stealing power from Pepco. They fueled the kitchen appliances and a couple of lamps.
“Nice place,” he said. He tried to maintain the sneer, but his voice held the faintest note of envy.
“I’ve lived in worse. After Black Thursday—you know, when the Worldwide Stock Market crashed back in twenty oh four—I ended up on the street. How old were you back when all that happened? Nine, ten?”
“Seven,” he said.
“Old enough to know things went bad. But you probably didn’t understand why. They teach you kids about that stuff in school these days?”
“I haven’t been to school in awhile,” he said.
“Figures. You ought to learn something about it, son.”
He gave me his signature shrug.
“The market ran on-line twenty-four/seven, so you could buy or sell from anywhere, anytime. The tech existed, so they set it up. Just like the
atomic bomb or asbestos—we used it before we understood what we had. And all it took to bring it down was a couple of million people panicking.”
“My dad jumped out a window. On K Street.” The boy said it matter-of-factly, as if it didn’t really mean anything.
“Jesus.” No wonder he’d ended up on the street. “Lost everything, I’d guess.” How could a man do that to his kid? I almost felt sorry for the boy. “Losing everything makes people crazy. I went off the deep end myself.” But I didn’t jump.
I drank some of the whisky. It was a few steps up from grain alcohol. “Yeah, I got pretty nuts living on the street, trying to keep myself alive. Carried that Uzi everywhere, waved it in people’s faces.”
The kid grinned. I figured he knew something about waving guns in people’s faces. Or at least knives.
“Enya Sensei—my Aikido teacher—she laughed at me when I bought this gun.”
“You learned to fight from a girl?” The sneer had definitely reappeared.
“What, you don’t think a woman can show a man how to fight? Those tough broads out on the streets these days—they probably got a few things to teach you.”
“Well, some of them, I guess. But you’re talking about a long time ago.”
Kids always think anything that happened before they were born occurred in the dark ages. “Yeah, I took martial arts from a woman. Learned a lot, too. That’s why I always called her ‘Sensei.’ That’s the Japanese word for teacher. It’s a respect thing.”
“I know that,” the boy said, impatiently. I’m sure he did. Action movies haven’t gone out of style. They don’t bother much with fancy special effects these days—they cost too much—they just have more killings, more gore.
“Of course, Aikido was just a hobby for me. I got to play at being a samurai. It relaxed me from the real world of stocks and bonds.”
The boy didn’t really want to hear me reminisce, but when you drink another man’s whisky, you’re obligated to do some listening. He chugged the rest of his glass of so-called Scotch, and stared expectantly at the bottle.
I poured him another drink.
