The Second Cure

by Margaret Morgan

  ‘So what is it, this Cotan Syndrome?’

  ‘Cotard’s. Well, it’s like Reed said. People with Cotard’s think they’re dead. Sometimes they believe that their organs have rotted away, or just their brains. It’s occasionally associated with partial paralysis. In the original case described by Jules Cotard in the 1880s, his patient thought she had no digestive tract, and since she was dead anyway there was no point in eating. She died of starvation.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve never seen a case. But now, with luck …’

  ‘Shadrack! This is Reed we’re talking about. You know, an actual person?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry. No bedside manner.’ That lopsided smile again.

  ‘Jesus. So it’s an MRI you’re having done?’

  Shadrack shook his head. ‘FDG-PET.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Fluorodeoxyglucose-Positron Emission Tomography. It’s ideal for assessing hypo- and hypermetabolism. If I’m right, there’ll be a significant deficit in brain activity in particular regions. Of course, we need to get him tested for Toxo as well. I’ll get pathology onto that. Even if he has got Cotard’s, we can’t assume that’s why.’

  ‘Do you think the shock of losing his job might have triggered it?’ Charlie felt a piercing guilt.

  ‘On its own, no. There has to have been something pre-existing, whether brain trauma from injury or disease, or possibly severe depression or psychosis. Maybe his getting the arse tipped him over. Hard to know.’

  ‘Poor bastard.’

  ‘What does it mean for you?’ Shadrack leant back in his chair, assessing her. ‘It makes your position in the department less vulnerable, right? Will it be affecting your thinking about the job in my lab?’

  Charlie hesitated. ‘Sorry, I still don’t know …’ She did know, of course. She wouldn’t work with him. But if she told him, then that would be it. He’d go back to Queensland and there’d be no more chats, no more contact. Just the occasional conference where they’d bump into each other and lie about their lives. She was saved from elaborating by the arrival of the radiographer delivering the PET scans. Shadrack slapped them up onto the wall-mounted light boxes and peered at the blue-hued regions of Reed’s brain.

  ‘Ah, there we are!’ Shadrack was triumphant. ‘Look, this area here. The precuneus.’ It was dark blue.

  ‘What’s the precuneus do?’

  ‘It’s central to our sense of self, to our core consciousness. Normally, when we’re awake, it’s the most metabolically active part of our brains. But with Reed, it’s scarcely functioning. He thinks he’s dead because that’s what his brain is telling him.’

  Charlie stared at the blue patch, taking this in. ‘If this is really another symptom of Toxoplasmosis pestis we’re seeing …’

  Shadrack nodded. ‘It’s the most extreme neurological effect so far.’

  ‘It’s nihilism. Neurological nihilism.’ She took a deep breath, feeling the weight of her work, and of expectation. The delight Richard was feeling from his infection was utterly negated by this, by Winnie’s misery, by the miscarriages, by the cataclysmic ecological crisis. She had to find the answer. She had to save them.

  When they reached Reed’s room, they found his bed empty, the sheets flung off.

  ‘Probably in the loo,’ said Shadrack and tapped on the bathroom door. ‘You in there, Gordon?’

  A nurse entered, looking stressed. ‘Have you seen him? Dr Reed?’

  ‘Has he come back from radiology?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Yes, he was back in bed. But now he’s gone.’

  ‘Isn’t this a secure wing?’ asked Shadrack. ‘He can’t get out into the main hospital, can he?’

  ‘This section isn’t, no,’ the nurse said. ‘It’s not officially part of the psych ward, but there weren’t any beds available there. I’ve just checked the other rooms on the floor; he’s not there.’

  ‘We need to find him,’ said Shadrack. ‘He’s a risk to himself in this state. He believes he’s dead, so he thinks he can’t come to any harm …’

  ‘Where would someone go if they thought they were dead?’

  ‘Where other dead people are. A cemetery? Funeral home?’

  Charlie turned to the nurse. ‘Do you have a morgue here?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  As they reached the entry to the hospital morgue, Charlie’s phone rang. She glanced at the screen. Winnie. Clicking ‘decline’, she told herself not to forget to ring back later. The nurse opened the metal door and they entered.

  ‘He’s not here,’ said Shadrack.

  ‘Wait,’ said Charlie. She walked over to an autopsy table at the end of the room. On it lay a figure. It was Reed, his lower half covered with a sheet. He looked to be asleep, until she saw the far side of his body. The nurse gasped at the sight of her patient. He had a bloody gash in his neck where his carotid artery had been opened. The blood had ceased flowing, but it was copious, congealing along the side of his head and torso, pooled on the table. On the floor beside him was a scalpel, apparently fallen from his hand.

  Reed had converted his imagined death into reality.

  29.

  Brisbane

  It wasn’t a press conference but a live broadcast from Effenberg’s hospital room beamed across the country. Brigid had joined the other journalists in the parliamentary media office to watch. Effenberg sat in a wheelchair, one arm in a sling and the other attached to an IV drip. Sitting next to him was Marion, her face a picture of loving concern. A pause, then he looked deep into the camera, and spoke in avuncular, intimate tones, the voice he favoured for wooing voters.

  ‘Well, my fellow Queenslanders, as you can see, I’m alive. If the gunman had just a slightly better aim, I wouldn’t be here talking to you this evening.’ A quiet, wry smile. ‘You know, one of the nurses said to me earlier that I was very lucky, and I’ve been thinking about that. Was it luck? I don’t know. I wonder if there’s a reason the bullet missed my heart. Maybe I was spared for a reason. Maybe I have a higher purpose. A job to do. Maybe …’ He shook his head, as though humbly wondering at the mystery of God’s ways. How does anyone fall for this crap? Brigid wondered.

  ‘Anyway,’ Effenberg continued, ‘the bullet went through my shoulder, but the damage isn’t serious, the doctors tell me, and I have the best nursemaid on the planet, here …’ He patted Marion’s hand and they shared a smile.

  ‘The gunman has been caught and is being detained under the Terrorism and Civil Threat Act, so I can’t give much detail about him. But what I can tell you is that he has confessed that he is infected. He has the Plague. He is, sadly, unclean. So in a way, he deserves our pity as much as our anger.’

  ‘What the hell …?’ murmured Brigid. Since when did the parasite turn people into would-be assassins?

  ‘A wise man once said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”’ Effenberg’s voice grew sterner, a righteous rage hovering just beneath the surface. More performance, working the crowd, practised over decades preaching with the Song of Light.

  ‘I am not going to be the good man who does nothing. The evil of this Plague needs to be fought, and I swear to you I’ll fight it to my last breath. And to do that I need your help. I need your support. I need you to tell me, “Yes, Jack, yes. We are with you.” I need your mandate.

  ‘That is why I am calling an election to be held on the thirtieth of May, six weeks from now. And that is why I’ll be asking you to vote in a referendum; for you to say yes, yes, let North Queensland secede, let the new state of Capricornia be a sanctuary, a place where there will be no Plague, no unclean, no terror. A safe place for people of all faiths, for Christians, for Jews, for Muslims, for Hindus. A place for honest and good people. A place for the future.’

  A smile at Marion. ‘We can do it. Together, we can do it. Thank you. And God bless.’

  Someone muted the sound and the journalists fell into instant c
onversation, dissecting what they just heard.

  ‘Credit where credit’s due. A lesser bloke would find it hard to bounce back like that.’ It was Scoop Johnson. Of course. Brigid could already hear the fawning words he’d be writing, doing Effenberg’s work for him.

  Brigid’s anger spilled over. ‘You reckon?’ she demanded, rounding on the him. ‘No one seems to have witnessed this shooting, we’re never going to be told who it is that supposedly shot him, there won’t be a public trial, and … was that even a hospital room or was it the set from some medical soap? Oh, and just as his Royal Commission into the union movement starts – a show trial if I’ve ever seen one, tame judge and all – and just when Effenberg becomes the victim of this so-called assassination attempt, he calls a snap election and referendum. You think this is all coincidence?’

  ‘You’re not serious,’ snorted the journo. ‘Better get yourself fitted for that tinfoil hat, Brigid.’ He looked around at their colleagues, encouraging laughter at the mad leftie conspiracy theorist, and quite a few obliged.

  ‘You reckon that’s paranoid? You think Effenberg hasn’t got the electoral system stitched up, old-style, and won’t manipulate the process to set up his happy little fiefdom in Capricornia?’

  ‘I hope you’re not planning on writing that,’ he sniggered. ‘Not unless you want your credibility down the toilet.’

  ‘Or worse.’ It was Keith, muttering in her ear. ‘You be careful, Brigid. I wouldn’t even be saying that out loud.’

  ‘I can look after myself, Keith,’ she replied, more harshly than she intended, and stalked off to write her piece.

  30.

  Sydney

  Winnie had first met Phillip Guthrie shortly before she got married. He and Hector had trained together at Moore Theological College and were ordained as priests at St Andrew’s Cathedral on the same day. The friendship between the two men survived both years and distance. Shortly after his ordination, Phillip was posted to the Armidale diocese, but they kept in touch through letters and occasional visits. Phillip married a local girl, Georgina, who helped establish him in the community. His devotion to his parishioners was famous, and the couple never had a shortage of company or invitations to dinner. They had no children and Winnie had never asked why.

  When the Guthries returned to Sydney, they were frequent visitors to the house in Normanhurst where Winnie and Hector had settled. Winnie grew to admire Phillip’s compassion, intelligence and the depth of his faith. She was drawn to his empathy for people of all stripes and leanings, a virtue her husband struggled to attain and then failed to maintain. With Georgina, she shared the particular burdens of a minister’s wife. The four grew close. Phillip baptised Richard and Brigid, and when Hector succumbed to his pancreatic cancer, his friend presided over the funeral. Along with Georgina, he helped Winnie through her grief. He took over Hector’s parish and he stopped her life from feeling so empty.

  During his time at St Cecilia’s, Winnie had still felt central to its workings, until two years earlier when Phillip had been posted to a different parish in the far southwest of the city, and Tricia had wasted no time getting the ear of the new incumbent. It was an eighty-kilometre drive through dense traffic and heavy rain, and Winnie knew she risked damaging her healing ankle by making the journey. But she didn’t want to ask Richard to drive her, and she couldn’t expect Phillip to come all the way to Cowan. Charlie and Richard would not have approved of her escapade, so she didn’t tell them. She’d waited until they’d left, Richard for an all-day rehearsal, Charlie for university, before heading off to Tricia’s and then across town. She hated the subterfuge, but she hated the thought of not talking to Phillip even more.

  Small talk helped delay the conversation she’d been rehearsing in her head for the last week. Georgina had settled them on the sofas in the lounge room with coffee and biscuits and left them alone, aware this was a pastoral matter, not a social visit. Winnie forced herself to make some small talk. She told him about Tricia moving to Queensland and about the other comings and goings in his old parish, and while he made interested noises in response, she could tell he was wondering why she was there. He was as uninterested in hearing her chatter as she was in making it.

  So she blurted it out. Phillip didn’t seem surprised. He sighed. ‘You’re infected, then,’ he said. ‘You’re the eighth person I’ve spoken to this week, all with the same story: “I don’t believe any more.”’

  ‘Oh no,’ cried Winnie. ‘It’s collapsing. The church is collapsing …’

  ‘I am worried, Winnie. They’re the ones who’ve come to talk to me. Church attendance is down thirty, maybe forty per cent. I’m guessing there are lots who don’t know how to break the news.’

  ‘Or they’re ashamed.’ Like her. Her shame had seeped into her bones, a constant ache.

  ‘Shame?’ said Phillip. ‘Perhaps. But there is no reason for shame. It’s not like it’s a matter of choice.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not.’ Winnie told him about Mr Darcy dying, and that she must have caught it from him.

  ‘I’m sorry. How hard for you.’

  ‘It was,’ Winnie agreed. ‘But not as hard as this.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m sure.’

  Winnie was angered by his passivity. He seemed resigned. She wondered what she had expected. A magic wand? How could he help her? He was just a man. A man representing a god she didn’t believe in.

  ‘Will it come back?’ she asked. ‘My faith?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wish I did. I do know that God is still there. It’s just that some people can’t reach Him at the moment. Or He can’t reach them.’

  ‘But God can do everything. Isn’t that what we’re told? He’s omnipotent.’

  Phillip sighed again. Winnie could see this had been weighing upon him, that he’d been searching for understanding. He looked weary.

  ‘It seems to me,’ he began, ‘it is like a broken antenna. A “God receiver”.’

  ‘So we need a celestial handyman?’ said Winnie without humour.

  ‘Exactly. Yes. Who will, I guess, come in the form of a cure for the plague.’

  ‘That won’t be for years, Phillip. Can we wait? Can I wait?’

  ‘I pray so.’

  ‘There are some people who are saying that it’s not a broken receiver,’ Winnie ventured. ‘They say it’s a transmitter, that it’s all coming from within. They say the parasite is getting rid of something that’s been telling lies to us, that God’s presence was nothing but a hallucination.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  Winnie gazed at her hands. ‘I don’t know any more. But I do wonder how God could let this happen. How could He decide to send messages some of us can’t hear? And please don’t say “mysterious ways, His wonders to perform”. I might just scream.’

  ‘Faith isn’t certainty. By definition, it’s not certainty. God wants us to have faith in him, and that depends on imperfect knowledge.’

  Winnie felt the tears building up again and blinked them away with frustration. ‘But how can you have faith if there is nothing there? Nothing for faith to build upon? I can no more have faith in God than I can have faith in … Zeus, or Ra, or leprechauns! I don’t have imperfect knowledge. I have no knowledge, Phillip. None. It’s all gone.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he began, tentatively, ‘it might be best to continue as though you do believe. Follow the same path, go to church, pray, think about Jesus and what He beseeched us to do, think of God’s laws. So much of the comfort of our faith is in those things, Winnie. I can’t promise that it will bring your faith back, but the person you are is the person you’ve become because of your beliefs and the actions those beliefs have inspired. That is your path, and even though your faith has … wavered, the path is still there, waiting for you.’

  Winnie listened closely, absorbing that, seeking an answer in his words, but they sounded hollow. Would they ever have made sense to her? She couldn’t remember. ‘I have tried, Phillip. I still go to chur
ch, run scripture at the primary school, do the gardening club at St Anne’s aged care. I still pray. I try to pray …’

  ‘What I am suggesting is that you keep doing those things and perhaps they will bring comfort.’

  ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go,’ recited Winnie, the words coming, unbidden, to her mind.

  ‘What verse is that?’ Phillip frowned. ‘Not scripture …’

  ‘No, not scripture. It’s Shakespeare, from Hamlet. Claudius’s soliloquy. His prayers didn’t reach God, either.’

  ‘My thoughts remain below. Is that how it feels, Winnie?’

  She nodded. The tears finally tumbled from her eyes and her chest heaved with loss and pain.

  Phillip came to her side, sitting next to her on the sofa, and put an arm around her. She pushed her face into the crook of his neck. She couldn’t remember last time she had touched another person.

  ‘God is still there, I promise you,’ he told her.

  ‘Then God is cruel.’ She sobbed into his collar.

  ‘Can I pray with you, Winnie? Perhaps if we pray together, the thoughts will go to heaven.’

  Where it came from, Winnie didn’t know. A stirring born of the scent of his skin, the warmth of his body. She felt a sudden and profound yearning, an aching desire she hadn’t known since the early days of her marriage. It overwhelmed her. Her mouth moved blindly towards his, her tears smearing against his cheek. Her hand fumbled around his waist, grabbing his buttock.

  Phillip recoiled, standing up and backing away from her. The look on his face was of shock and betrayal, and Winnie felt a thudding horror at what she’d done. This man she’d known for forty years, this married man, this priest. She shook her head, wanting to undo the last twenty seconds.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Oh no, I am sorry, that was wrong, that was so wrong –’