He didn’t so much stand as slump forward off the stool. Very slowly, clearly in pain, he straightened. His right arm dangled, and he dragged his right leg behind him as though he were some Dickens character with a club foot. His ailment was exaggerated, I was certain. Also clearly real.
“Aaron, please tell me you’ll come again,” I said. “Tomorrow. The next day. Please.”
He turned, and in that one moment I forgot where I was, forgot the light and the bombings and everything else except the love I was never going to lose for this boy.
“Soon, Aunt A. You owe me a birthday sandwich.”
I don’t know why it seemed so important to keep Erick Kinney from seeing me cry. Spinning away fast, I walked straight across the warehouse and out of the Library. Once back in my car, I sat in the driver’s seat with the door open to the fetid fog, waiting for the Librarian to make his slow way out of the world he’d created and into mine.
Seated on my examination table in a backless paper gown in the ruthless fluorescent light, Erick Kinney looked no less pointy. His sallow skin seemed stretched too thin, and his dirty blond hair fell in scraggles to his shoulders. His satyr-goatee dangled listlessly off his chin. Except for the angry red rash spreading up his back and curling into his ribs, the man was almost entirely bones and hair. A talking owl-pellet.
Or, not talking, as had been the case since the moment we’d reached the clinic. “Are you in pain?” I asked, arranging implements on my little pull-cart next to the table.
As I moved about the room, I could feel his gaze, but every time I looked up, his eyes were aimed past me, out the door and across the hall. At my bookshelves, I realized.
“You’re not answering,” I said.
“You’re not actually asking,” said the Librarian. No smile creased his face, but something flickered in his eyes. Whatever it was, it was hard to look away from.
“Hold still,” I told him. “Say aah.” I stuck a swab in his throat.
He had his knees open, so I had to stand between them. Up close, he appeared even more grizzled, with little hairs sprouting from virtually every pore. He was also looking right at me, now. There was a draw to him, alright. I could feel it in my knees and under the soles of my feet, like an undertow. I held the swab in place a split second longer than I usually do. I think I wanted to see him gag.
He just sat there. Shoulders hunched, eyes dancing.
As soon as I removed the swab, he asked, “Can I look at your books?”
I held up the blood-pressure sleeve. Sighing, he extended his bony arm. In the end, I had to get the child-sleeve to fit him. I was squeezing the bulb, pressing the bell of my stethoscope into the crook of his elbow, when he said, “Is he really that stupid?”
I kept my attention on the pressure gauge as it nudged up, plunged down. “Which ‘he’ would that be?”
“Aaron’s father. For not marrying you.”
When I just ripped the Velcro open and removed the sleeve, he laughed. “No mock outrage? No how-dare-me? No how-much-has-Aaron-told-you? Oh, you’re one of mine, alright.”
“Hold out your hand,” I said, separating the tiny needle from its sterilizing bag. “I’ll try to get enough from your finger. I don’t need much.”
“Blood from a stone.”
“A suddenly talkative stone.” I jabbed the needle down, watched the blood well vibrant red in the yellow light. He stayed silent as I collected droplets. Somehow, his silence made me more nervous than his chatter did, so I asked, “What else has Aaron said?”
“That you’re my kind of doctor.”
“Meaning?”
“You serve the people who need serving, not the people who can pay. You read every spare second of your life. You don’t judge anyone, except sometimes Aaron.”
“I don’t judge Aaron. Except about bombing. Want to talk about involving idealistic young people who damn near worship you in bombing, since we’re talking?”
“That you keep yourself to yourself, because deep down you know that’s not only for the best, it’s better.”
It was his voice as much as his words, that grated in my ears and all over my skin. That bleat, sharp and quavery, too raw, like notes struck on a ruined piano with the lid thrown open. Or vocal chords with no sheath of skin. I had a momentary but powerful impulse to strap this Morlock, or faux-Weather Undergrounder, or whatever he was, to the examination table, rush back to the warehouse, roust the rest of them, and light the whole place on fire. Bring Aaron home.
“You can look at the books, now,” I said, pushing a hard breath through my teeth. “I’ll just be a minute. A couple more tests, and I’ll run you back.”
“So you’re going to discover what’s wrong with us?” he said, sliding off the table, the gown slipping up his thighs as he landed, too close to me. He wasn’t attractive. Just…present. In a way I’d almost forgotten people could be.
“I’m concerned that I already know,” I said, making myself look away, but not before I saw him startle. “You’re going to need a spinal tap to confirm. It’s going to hurt.”
“What do you know?” he said quietly.
“Your joints hurt, yes?”
“All the time.”
“Your back?”
“All the time.”
“That rash been there long?”
“A while.”
“Fever?”
“It comes and goes. Or, it came and it went.”
“Diarrhea?”
“Some. Yes.”
“Tired a lot?”
He didn’t answer that.
“I’ll need a stool sample before you go. Bad luck living where you live. By the water, I mean. Especially this particular summer. With all the mosquitoes. This isn’t just about you, by the way, and I’m not giving you a choice. I think you’ve got West Nile, and I’m going to contact the CDC, and they’re going to make good and damn sure you get checked.”
I was in the process of turning away, and almost missed his grin. My limbs had become heavy, as though Erick Kinney had poured concrete into them in the seconds we’d been standing there.
“West Nile Virus,” he said. “Imagine that.”
“Bound to happen here sooner or later. And given where you live, and the filthy way you keep yourselves…”
Without bothering with his pants or his socks, he lurched out of the examination room and across the hall into my office.
“There’s no cure yet,” I called after him, wanting him to turn around. Wanting him not to touch my books. I didn’t trust him in there. Which wasn’t rational, wasn’t like me. I closed my eyes and ground my teeth and held on to the cool metal of my push cart and opened my eyes again. “But there’s plenty that can be done to ease the symptoms. Unless it turns into encephalitis or meningitis or something more serious, it’s not going to kill you.”
“That’s what they told my father,” Erick Kinney said dreamily, one long finger trailing across the decaying spines of my Hawthornes. Coming to rest for a moment on the fat, green bulk of my Robert Burton. My favorite books. He’d gone right to them. Contaminated them.
Which was ridiculous. Juvenile. Stupid.
“Your father had West Nile? What are you talking about? We just discovered it, and by the way, It’s not inheritable, and—”
“No, no,” he said. “I know. Just chatting. It’s rare I find someone worth having a chat with.”
“I have to tell you something else, I’m afraid.”
“Anything,” he bleated. “Lay it on me, Doc.”
“The rest of them. Your…whatever you call them. Followers.”
“Friends?”
“They’re not your friends,” I snapped.
He swung his head around. There was that grin again. “No? I suppose not.”
“They’re going to have be tested, too. Immediately, do you hear? Their lives could depend on it. And this could spread fast.”
“Not inheritable, you say,” he half-sang, to himself. “In a way, I suppos
e you’re right.”
“Hello? Mr. Kinney? I’m telling you you need to help me. You’ve got to get your people help. This is serious.”
He shrugged. “One already died.”
I almost dropped the materials I’d been bagging. Stepping into the hall, I felt that new heaviness again in my limbs. On my tongue, It was hard to speak.
“Died? Died how?”
“Couldn’t breathe. Clenched up. As far as we could tell.”
“You didn’t send him for help? You didn’t do anything for him?”
“Her. And you seem to have a mistaken impression of the way the Library works, my dear doctor. My personal physician, from here on out. I’m not their emperor. I’m not Jim Jones. I’m certainly not their prison guard. She could have strolled out the front door anytime she liked.” For a moment, he stood still, hunched over my desk, the fingers of his right hand straying up and down the spine of The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Then he grinned again. “Lurched out, I mean.”
My mouth opened. Closed. I wanted to run. Couldn’t remember how to move.
“You don’t love them,” I whispered.
“Good god, of course I don’t love them. What’s to love? I love the idea of them, though. The Avenging Booklovers’ Army. An all new branch of the ABA. Isn’t that what we do, after all? You and me? We always love the idea of them.”
I couldn’t speak. Didn’t need to. He might as well have been back on his milk crate under the Clocktower, now, except that he was talking only to me. That was part of the secret, I realized. Part of his power. He always seemed to be talking only to the person right in front of him.
“Take an achievement like this,” he said, and lifted The Anatomy of Melancholy off my shelf, gently, with his crooked hands. It was a 1920s one-volume edition, gilt-lettered, heavy. If it dropped on him, I thought, it would crush him like a cockroach.
“Be careful with that,” I said pointlessly.
“Perhaps the greatest act of understanding—no, more than that, of creative insight—no, more than that, too…of empathy ever attempted. A complete parsing of the weight every single human being feels, no matter where they’re from or what they achieve or whose love they attain, from the moment they draw breath until the moment they cease to do so.” He had the book open now, turning his hands this way and that so that every square of inch of his skin brushed the pages, as though he were performing an ablution in holy water.
“Books like this. The greatest tools the supposedly magnificent human animal has ever come up with for transcending its own skin and inhabiting another’s...but they can only be used, appreciated, or created when one is alone. There is no literary irony greater than that of the medium itself.”
“I’ll take that stool sample, now,” I said.
He sighed. And then he actually tsked. But his fingers lifted away from my book.
“I’ll put it back,” I told him. Because I didn’t want him touching it anymore.
“Too late. You’ve already opened it. Already shown it to your precious…stepson? Ward? Anyway, once that’s done, you’ve left him wide open.” He was out of my office now, passing uncomfortably close (because I couldn’t seem to step back) as he took the collection kit from my limp hands and made for the bathroom.
“Open to what?” I asked. Not wanting to know, helpless to keep quiet.
His smile was different, now. Slow. Self-satisfied. “To every little germ of an idea. Everything we decide we are going to refuse to burn or bury as instructed.”
The moment he was out of sight, I forced myself to walk. I went into the examination room, labeled vials, bound everything together, entered notations on the computer. Then I grabbed my keys, shut out the lights, and made for the front door.
“Just leave the kit on the exam table,” I called into the silence. “I’ll be out front. I’ll drive you home.”
He wasn’t long. And I was relieved to find that on the sidewalk, in the night air, my limbs felt lighter, and they moved when I told them to. Erick Kinney stopped talking until long after we were in the car, down the hill, almost all the way back to the Library. If the radio had worked, I would have turned it up as loud as it would go. I was practically pressed up against the driver’s-side door by the time we reached the street of warehouses. He just sat, hunched, pallid, breathing in quick pants like a coyote.
“You know, my father didn’t particularly like Hawthorne,” he murmured as I pulled my Saturn to the curb. From the pensive way he stared into the fog, he almost seemed to be reading it. “It’s just what they sent him. That summer.”
“I like Hawthorne,” I said.
“Me, too.”
“His Veiled Lady.”
“His men ‘of shabby appearance, met in an obscure part of the street.’” He plucked at his own shabby jeans, turned to me, and through the goatee, under the corpse-like pallor, I glimpsed something. Thought I did. “You should really come in,” he said. “Veiled Lady.”
And I felt myself stir. Start to unlock my door. For Aaron, I was thinking. Just to get Aaron. Then I was gripping the door handle. Holding on.
“Get them to doctors, Mr. Kinney,” I said. “Tomorrow. I’ll be back with the police to check.”
I wanted him to grin again. His grin scared me. And his shrug made me furious. Fear and fury would keep me nailed where I was. Instead, of course, he sat there reading my face, the way he had the fog. The way he did the whole world. “Goodnight, Personal Physician,” he said.
Then he was out of my car, lurching across the street, and Aaron was emerging from the doorway where he’d clearly been waiting, throwing an arm around his mentor’s shoulders to help him back to his Library. And I was all but gunning the engine as I turned around, floored the accelerator, and got the hell out of there.
I should have gone home. I didn’t generally spend much time in my apartment, passed my after-clinic hours eating out or walking the Castro or over to Haight, sometimes seeing concerts or movies but often just haunting the blocks where the used bookshops used to be, and which still retained their traces. I should have done that then.
Instead, I went back to the clinic, figuring I needed to work. Get my brain clear. Get the reek of Erick Kinney out of it. I put The Anatomy of Melancholy back in the gaping space it had left on my shelf. I did data entry and paperwork for a while. I ordered out for pad thai and turned on the radio. Eventually, I lay back in my reclining armchair and turned out the lights and let the sounds of my street seep into the room. That far-off clanging, as though something were always being built nearby, just around the next corner, but I could never find it. Occasional stumbling footsteps or slurred shouts from a homeless person or a drunk. That faint echo passing cars leave in fog. My nighttime companions for so long.
Is he really that stupid, the bastard had asked. Damn right, too. Why had Oliver let me go? I’d never understood. Aaron hadn’t either, he’d been furious even at five. The last thing I’d ever wanted, to come between the two of them. And I’d never quite gotten past it all either, apparently.
Very early—too early—I’d settled on this image of myself. The creature in the clinic. The Veiled Lady. Alone with her spells, her private regrets. Why had I done that?
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But what I saw was the Librarian’s wagging beard, his satyr-grin. And what I heard was that bleat, reverberating inside my head. Burn or bury. That summer. His panting breath, his crooked hands. That’s what they told my father. That summer. His followers arrayed around him in the Library, like broken pieces of a model. Kissing the decrepit book he read them. How the Morlocks got their limp. The germ of an idea. That summer.
I sat bolt upright, mouth open, grabbing so hard at the chain for the lamp beside my chair that I knocked the whole lamp over, heard the bulb smash on the floor. I stood, the fragments grinding to dust under my soles.
“Jesus Christ,” I said aloud. The words small and useless in my useless little room.
Hurrying into the
hall, I flipped on every light in the Clinic, as though that would help. As though light would make any difference. It’s crazy, I was thinking. A night terror. A fog phantom. I grabbed Erick Kinney’s kit out of my drawer anyway, removed the throat swab from its vial, took it upstairs to the little lab I’d built myself, as a hobby, mostly, over the lonely years.
It took me all of three minutes to find it. It was right there for all to see who cared to look. Impossible to miss. I checked the stool sample, too, though I didn’t need to. The cells looked different than the ones in my Epidemiology 101 textbook twenty years ago. Had to be different, had to be a brand new strain, after all. But they were unmistakable, all the same. The Scourge of Summer, risen from the dead.
All the way down the hill toward the Bay, I worked it over in my head. Tried to convince myself it was impossible. Then I gave that up and worked on figuring out how it had happened, instead. How had I even known?
But I had the answer to that one. I’d figured it out the same way I’d figured out virtually everything I knew: I’d read it somewhere. God knows where. Retained, it somehow. Those summers. Those damp, terrifying Julys and Augusts, when families fled the beaches. When parents kept their children indoors, away from their friends, and prayed the killer in the streets would sweep past them. When kindhearted librarians assembled bundles of books from the shelves and sent them in pouches to the already-afflicted, the ones who’d been quarantined, so they’d have something to do to pass the hours while their muscles withered and their lungs froze and they slowly, slowly strangled. The pouches all came with little candies, a card full of get well wishes, and a letter of instruction asking that the books not be returned. That they be burned, or buried, just in case polio really could linger on the pages.
Erick Kinney was seated by himself on the sidewalk outside the Library. The door had been yanked shut. I moved straight past him, kicked repeatedly at the metal. The sound boomed and rolled like thunder. No one came.
“They’re gone,” the Librarian said, after the echoes from my volley of kicks finally subsided.
I looked down. “Gone?”
That grin. Horrible. Lopsided. “Every. Last. One.”
The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Page 24
