“Lucia! It was for her sake I had tried to harness this power; for her sake I braved the flames, only to find my way to her door barred by fallen timbers. The charge had given me more strength than I had ever known, but the barrier was immovable. It was all I could do to escape the house before it, and everything in it, was consumed by fire. In as much time as it has taken to tell you, signore, the frog had taken away everything of value I had, but my punishment was not yet at an end.
“When I staggered out into the garden I saw through the dark rain a shape sitting in the pond; over the crack of thunder I heard what sounded like a low, mocking laugh. It was—the frog—croaking at me, and I knew from my time in the swamps what he meant by that croak: he was declaring his intention to mate.
“Can you imagine, signore, what would happen if that frog should have children? If the power I had wakened in it should breed true, and within years all the countless frogs of Earth had the strength of Hercules? It was too horrible to contemplate. I rushed to catch the devil but he evaded me with ease, heading for the swamp.
“I pursued it for years, never quite catching it but at least denying it the opportunity of finding a mate. Its course took me north, which puzzled me at first, until I learned of the powers of extreme cold to recharge a voltaic pile, as well as the ability of frogs to hibernate under snow—some instinct, I suppose, was showing it how to conserve the charge I had given it.
“Here is where I come into your story. Over time I harried the frog to the edge of the ocean, where I thought I might finally catch him: for even a frog such as he could not possibly swim that far. Again he thwarted me, though, for he led me down to the quay, where he jumped—a jump you would not believe if you saw it, signore—onto a ship that was departing just at that moment. Certainly it was too far for me to follow, and at first I thought he had finally beaten me, until my enquiries showed that the ship he had boarded was headed for San Francisco, and that another ship was due to depart for that port the next day.
“On that crossing I enjoyed a few weeks of leisure for the first time in years, and cast my mind to what I might do with the frog if I ever did succeed in catching it. To defeat it bodily was out of the question. Even with the vitality my jolt from the Leyden jar had given me—that which has allowed me to long outlive the three-score-and-ten years Our Lord allotted man—the beast had much greater power than I. Others had followed me in studying the nerveo-electric fluid, though, and had found there were some substances through which it could not pass: lead was one of these. With these facts in hand I formed a plan.
“The weeks of my passage crept by after that; finally we made port, and I crept out of the hold where I had concealed myself. I quickly learned that the first ship had arrived a week before, aided by favourable winds. Finding the trail cold I went inland; having heard that the chief virtue of Americans was curiosity I asked those I met whether they had heard or seen anything of a remarkable frog, one that could jump farther than any other. It did not take long for my inquiries to be gratified: a man, I heard, was harbouring the frog and exhibiting him. This was an unexpected development: I had presumed the beast hateful to all humanity, but now realized the hate that filled its heart was directed solely at me, its re-animator and tormentor. With this in mind I disguised myself as a man of your country, a simple prospector like so many others, and in this guise I approached the man whom I was told had found the frog—a signore Smiley, as of course you know.
“This Smiley, I had widely heard, could not resist a wager, and this was essential to my plan. So it was that when I found him and saw that he was carrying a lattice box, I asked him what lay within: a frog, said he, which in the charming naiveté of your nation he had named Daniel, and removed the lid. Within I saw at once that it was the frog, grown yet larger than when I had last seen it, and (by my good fortune) drowsing in the afternoon heat.
“Why, I asked—carefully concealing my excitement below a mask of indifference—why should he be taking such care of a simple frog? In a tone that implied he was imparting a great confidence he explained to me that Daniel was the greatest leaper since the first frog had been named by Adam. Now was the greatest test of my self-disguise, for of course no man knew the truth of his words better than I, and any hint of my true voice might wake the frog and set it to fleeing once more. Instead I expressed doubt, saying that I saw nothing about this Daniel that made it superior to any other frog; that, indeed, I would not hesitate to bet against his frog in a jumping contest. I was careful, though, to express it as a hypothetical—if I had a frog, I said, I felt sure it should prove no worse than his frog. Smiley rose to the bait, and set off to find another frog against which Daniel could race.
“Now—alone with the frog at last, and it confined in the lattice box Smiley had constructed—I put the final phase of my design into action. In my pouch I carried a quantity of lead shot, which, prying the still-dozing frog’s mouth open, I poured into its belly. I spoke earlier of lead’s quality of blocking the nerveo-electric fluid: my hope was to disrupt the flow of the fluid within the frog’s body, granting it the death I had denied it—and letting us both find rest at last.
“It seemed at first as though I had succeeded. The frog struggled, but its vitality seemed gone, and when shortly Smiley returned with another frog he found that his Daniel not only lost the race but refused to compete, failing even to leave the ground.
“In this, though, I now see my error; for if I had only burdened Daniel enough to reduce him to the level of an ordinary frog Smiley would have thought nothing odd. I had induced too great a change in him, though, for even a man of Smiley’s limited intelligence to accept. Lifting Daniel from the ground, Smiley overturned him, and the lead balls tumbled out of his mouth—too soon; for their work in blocking the nerveo-electric fluid was not yet done, and the frog quickly regained its diabolical energy. Smiley, simple man that he was, thought I had intended to cheat him in the wager; unable, with the limited command of English I had then, to explain the true facts of the situation I simply fled, being well aware of the propensity of your countrymen to arm themselves.
“The frog, with the daemonic cunning my experiment had given it, knew of course that it had lost its safe haven, and itself took flight; once I felt I was safe from retribution from Smiley I set upon its trail once again, and so I have been ever since, never again coming so near to ridding the world of the horror I unleashed upon it.”
At that, Signore Galvani—for that, he would have me believe, was his name—wiped his brow with a handkerchief, dabbed lightly at his eyes. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Clemens,” he said. “You are the first person who has ever heard my entire story, and I imagine the last as well; for my long hunt, I believe, is now finally near its end.” With that he shook my hand, placed his hat upon his head, and walked out into the snowy night.
Well, there it is. Easily enough explained, of course: there are many harmless old men who imagine themselves to be important figures from history, Napoleon I understand being the most popular choice, and I would be far from the first writer to meet someone who wished to insert himself bodily into one of my stories.
And yet—the next day I was (don’t laugh) invited to a skating party, which I attended, on the frozen surface of the Saint Lawrence River. There, amidst the general merriment caused by my attempts to stand on two feet, one young lad noticed a strange apparition: an old man chasing a small dark shape across the ice. My curiosity roused, I cast my eye over at it: there, indeed, was my interlocutor of the night before—chasing after a colossal dark green frog, which jumped five feet ahead of him with every hop. They were headed north, up towards the Bay of Fundy; and from thence, for all I know, the North Pole.
Now I ask you, what is a writer to do with that?
THE AFFLICTED
In the end I managed a bit of sleep, wedged between the trunk and branches of the oak, before dawn came. My knees and elbows ached as I lowered myself to the ground and I
could feel a blister forming on my shoulder where the strap of my .30-06 Winchester had rubbed against my oilskin all night. I went over the previous day’s events in my mind, walking myself carefully through every mundane moment from when I woke up to when I climbed into the tree to sleep; then I looked down at my watch, waited for the minute to turn over and started to rattle off words that started with L: life, leopard, lizard, loneliness. . . . Twenty words and thirty seconds later I took a breath and started down the train tracks.
It was about an hour’s walk to the camp, my last stop on this circuit. The clearing was packed with tents, their walls so faded by years of sun I could hardly make out the FEMA logo on the side; here and there ripped flaps of nylon fluttered in the breeze. The camps, cramped to begin with, were made even tighter by the lean-tos that had been built to expand the tents or shore them up, so that in places I had to turn sideways to squeeze my way toward the centre of the camp.
As I got deeper into the camp pale figures began to emerge from the tents, most of them dressed in filthy pajamas and bathrobes and nearly all bearing scars or fresh wounds on whatever pale flesh was exposed. I kept my .30-06 at my side and quickened my pace as they began to shuffle after me on slippered feet.
A single tent stood in the middle of the camp, as worn as the rest but bearing a faded Red Cross logo. When I reached it I turned around and shrugged out of my backpack one arm at a time. All the narrow paths that led here were now blocked by the shambling forms that had come out of the tents: they paused as they reached the clearing, watching me carefully as I cradled my rifle.
After a few moments one of them stepped forward. He was bald, save for a fringe of white hair, and he had a bloody gash down the side of his face. Unlike most of the others he was still in reasonably good shape, his skin the colour of a walnut. I levelled my rifle at him; he took another shambling step and then stopped.
“Hey, Horace,” I said. I gestured at the cut on his face. “That looks bad.”
He shrugged. “There’s worse off than me.”
“I know,” I said, lowering my rifle, “but we’ll start with you. Then you tell me who’s worse off.”
He looked back at the others. “There’s a lot that are in bad shape, Kate,” he said. “How long do you have today?”
I leaned the rifle in a spot where I could reach it in a hurry if I needed to. “You’re my only stop.”
He nodded, though he knew as well as I did that even in a full day I only had time to see the worst cases. Their affliction aside, my patients’ age and the conditions they lived in meant that each of them had a host of issues for me to deal with. I counted on Horace to keep an eye on who was seriously injured, who had developed anything infectious, and who was showing signs of going end-stage. Everything else—minor illnesses and injuries, the frequent combination of scurvy and obesity caused by their diet of packaged food—I couldn’t even hope to treat.
I glanced up at the sky, saw just a few white clouds. “Let’s set up outside today,” I said. “Sunshine and fresh air ought to do everyone some good.”
“Sure. At least we’ve got plenty of those.” Horace gestured to two of the waiting patients and they came up to the tent, giving me a wide berth, and hauled out the exam bed. He turned to the others. “You might as well get on with your day. I’ll come get you when she’s ready for you.”
A few of the waiting patients wandered off when he said this, but most stayed where they were. The line was mostly silent, with little chatter: the camp residents were used to isolation, many of them only coming out of their tents when I visited or to take care of bodily necessities.
I patted the exam table and Horace sat down on it stiffly. I unzipped one of the pockets on my backpack, drawing out my checkup kit, then held his wrist in my hand to take his pulse and slipped the cuff around his arm and inflated it. “Any cough?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Little bit now and then,” he said. “I used to smoke. Guess I’m better off now, huh?”
I nodded. A lot of my patients were former smokers: when they were kids everyone had been, and they had grown up watching cigarette ads on TV. I got the TB kit and a pair of gloves out of my pack, pulled on the gloves, and tapped a syringe of PPD into his forearm. “Let’s hope it’s just that,” I said.
He scowled. “Does it matter?” he asked.
I shook my head. “TB’s a bad way to go. You remember how this works?”
He nodded.
“Tell me anyway.”
“Watch where you pricked me for three days. If there’s a spot, stay out of camp until you get back.”
“Good. Hey, do you remember what we were talking about last time I was here? You never finished that story.”
“You wanted to know how Adele and I met. Right?” I nodded. “Well, she used to work in the corner store. I would go in every day to buy something, just to see her. Of course all I could afford was a Coke, so she started to wonder—”
I reached out to tap him on the lips, right under his nose, and nodded with relief when he didn’t react. “Horace, that thing you pull to open a parachute—what’s that called?”
“It’s a—damn it, that’s, I know it . . .” He closed his eyes, frowning. “I don’t remember.”
“Never mind,” I said. “How’d you get the cut?”
He was silent for a moment. “You know how it is.”
I opened a steri-wipe and washed his wound; he flinched as I ran my fingers along the edges of the cut. “Does it hurt?”
He shrugged, gritting his teeth and hissing as I pressed a chitosan sponge into the wound and then covered it with plaskin, running my fingers along the edge to make the seal. He jerked his head suddenly and I pulled my hand back. “What is it?” I asked. “Did I hurt you?”
“Rip cord!” He broke into a broad grin. “Rip cord. Right?”
“That’s good, Horace,” I said. “No progression since last time. Anybody else I should know about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your cut,” I said. “Those are bite marks. Who was it?”
“Jerry,” he said after a moment. “He didn’t—I didn’t know he’d gone end-stage.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. One of the things that makes the affliction so terrifying is how rapidly and unpredictably it can progress, smouldering like an ember in some and burning like a brushfire in others. That’s why it has to be dealt with when the first symptoms surface, when they’re still the parents and grandparents we had known in spirit as well as in body. “I don’t suppose he’s in the dog cage?”
Horace shook his head. “Ran off. Guess he’s out in the woods somewhere. “He was quiet for a moment. “Am I going to—will I . . . ?”
For a moment I said nothing, trying not to look him in the eyes. The fact is that nobody knows for sure what causes the affliction, or even how it spreads: it could be that it’s lurking in all of us, waiting for us to grow old. It seemed to me that the ones who had friends or spouses in the camps stayed well longer—but when one went, the others almost always followed soon.
“I can tell that’s paining you,” I said. “Say no to a little morphine?”
“I guess not.”
“Arms up, then,” I said, and fished out a syringe. He held his arms up in front of him so that the sleeves of his bathrobe fell to reveal his bare forearms. I drew a finger over his papery skin, tapped the syringe on a good vein. “How does that feel? Better?”
“One of those and I don’t feel much of anything,” he said. He took a breath, then smiled weakly. “What do you suppose two would do for me? Or three?”
“I don’t aim to find out,” I said.
“Damn it, Kate—if I’d gone end-stage, you wouldn’t hold a moment’s thought before you dropped me.”
I shook my head. “I’ll put down an animal in pain, but you’re still a man.”
“You won’t feel that way when you’re my age.”
<
br /> Even seeing just the worst cases took most of the day, and after that I still had the public health work—checking that the rain barrels storing the water supply weren’t contaminated, and that the honey buckets were being emptied far enough from the camp—so it was already dark when I finished up, and too late to head to my cabin. I crashed in the Red Cross tent, sleeping on the exam table.
The next morning I rose a bit after dawn and started back to the tracks. My joints were stiff from being on my feet the day before, my skin itched sympathetically from all the scabies cases I had seen and my stomach was still leaden with the camp ice cream—sugar, wild berries and Crisco whipped together—one patient had insisted on giving me. (Crisco is a big part of camp cooking, which goes a long way towards explaining the chronic obesity in the camps; the other factor is that, for the most part, the residents have absolutely nothing to do, no motivation even to get out of their tents. The end-stagers, of course, don’t have access to the camp food and typically become malnourished soon after they turn.)
Once I had finished my self-check I headed off again, along the train tracks. When I was about halfway to the station I saw that someone else had broken a trail out from the tracks, into the woods: there were a lot of confused footprints in the mud there, and what looked like blood on some thorns. I followed the trail for a little while, keeping a careful pace, then sped up when I heard the shrieks.
The trail led me into a small clearing in the shade of a tall willow. A man and two women, all clearly end-stage, were standing at the foot of the tree. There was a tension between the three of them, like cats facing off over a fallen baby bird, and when I got a bit nearer I could see the cause: a young girl, maybe ten years old, was up in the tree.
I fished my glasses out of my coat pocket, put them on, and then raised the .30-06 to my shoulder. The broad trunk of the tree made it hard for me to line up my shots, and I was worried that dropping the first one would break the tension between them and send the other two up the tree after the girl.
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