The Blue Period

by Luke Jerod Kummer

  “A tried-and-true tactic,” Manyac assures Pablo.

  “Of course it is,” says Vollard. “Every writer’s in love with himself.”

  Pablo looks on as the two carnivores wrangle over the gallery exhibition’s details. On one hand, he is flattered by Manyac’s public praise. But these dealings also raise even more skepticism about how he is being handled. Manyac certainly stands to grow richer from this than what he pays Pablo as a stipend. And if Pablo’s work is good enough to nab winning looks from an impresario like Vollard, then he’s sure to be worth much more.

  This wariness about being cheated, Pablo knows, is only more to weigh on him. Meanwhile, his fever has worsened at the gallery. His appetite is gone, there’s a sickliness in his muscles, and his head feels consumed by dark clouds moving fast, waiting to burst.

  In a harshly lit antechamber of a nondescript building beside the train tracks leading to the Gare du Nord, a short, brown-haired secretary presides over a leather-top desk bearing a clunky stenograph machine. She uses it for recording notes whenever the doctor charges off in a dust cloud of oration, which he demands be documented for his review and ultimate consideration in an appropriate journal, be it in, or not in, his delineated field. “I am no shire horse with a set of winkers on,” Dr. Louis Jullien is apt to say. “I’ll trot where I please.”

  In science, pseudoscience, politics, and society elsewhere, many wild theories float around, he contends. But so many esteemed idea-makers should stop attempting to peer into the soul, analyze our early childhoods, or palpate headbones, scanning for abnormalities, perversions, or tell-all convexities and lumps. He declares they ought to instead limit their field of vision to a microscope’s eyepiece. For Dr. Jullien, one of the most accomplished venereologists in all Paris—where this line of practice is in considerable demand—increasingly believes that everything ailing humankind is caused by bitty creatures, nefarious as they are ubiquitous and elusive to all but those with the most acutely trained eyes using the highest grade of equipment. “Even bad dreams may have as their source a virus,” he says. “Kill the cause, end the nightmare.”

  The trouble is, due to all his dictations, Dr. Jullien has been spending less time at the microscope. As with preparing manuscripts, culturing tissue swabs, and even some examinations, this is now more often a task completed by the secretary, who’s known no other occupation since she was Dr. Jullien’s patient as a schoolgirl and came into the employ of the office because she’d no other means of repayment. By this point, she has more learning than some medical doctors of high degree.

  Pablo, by way of a city directory uncovered among the detritus left behind by so many comers and goers in Manyac’s apartment, has arrived at the office on the morning after Manyac brought him to visit Vollard. He only hopes the physician who advertises that he can cure “all maladies of love” might save him. After all, if Dr. Jullien had diagnosed that other mad artist in Vollard’s gallery from his brushstrokes alone, what better place to seek aid?

  In the waiting room, Pablo finds a cherrywood bench, where a couple patients are idling—not surprisingly, a stout sailor in a striped marinière sweater and an old lecher whose nose is as caved-in as a fallen theater marquee. The man’s every feature seems to be disintegrating. Sadly, there’s also an adolescent gal in a Windsor chair opposite them, legs crossed. Pablo knows she’d rather be in purgatory than here.

  The secretary is full in the face and not unattractive, with flush lips recalling poinsettia leaves and alarmingly feline eyes. A Latin cross studded with clear crystal rhinestones dangles from a thin gold chain just above her neckline.

  “Good day, young man,” she curtly says to Pablo, although she appears to be no older than he.

  “Is the doctor in?”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “I need treatment.”

  “What do you seek to remedy?”

  “I’ll tell Dr. Jullien, please.”

  “Tell it to me first, or not at all.”

  “In my country, we call it the French Disease.”

  “And what sovereign is that?”

  “Spain.”

  “If in your country the infection of which you speak is more common than in France, and the limited statistics available suggest this be the case, should you not call it a Spanish disease instead?”

  “But we’re Spanish?”

  “Well, don’t look at me. That is no fault of the French.” She asks if Pablo has money to pay the doctor. “This isn’t a charity, you know?”

  Pablo nods.

  The secretary scans a ledger with the names of disorders, the corresponding prices of treatment to the right of each one.

  “Let’s see, syphilis . . . syphilis . . . syphilis . . . ,” the woman says in a loud stage whisper as she draws her finger down the page.

  Pablo stands there bashfully, pretending everyone in the office can’t hear her, even though there is no escaping that they surely can.

  “Yes, there we are—the Spanish Scourge. Fifty francs. Pay and be seated.”

  When it’s Pablo’s turn, the secretary guides him into a back room beyond a sturdy door with frosted glass. The doctor is stuffing tobacco into his pipe at a pedestal desk cluttered with tied-together papers and notes stabbed on spindle files. He is a long, angular man, with a neat beard and prominent ridge in his brow. Pablo can’t help thinking how much he looks like Don José at his easel. The resemblance troubles him. On the opposite side of the office, there’s an examining table with stirrups and a glass cabinet filled with brown bottles arranged around a bronze mortar and pestle. Beneath this is an index of many drawers. A menagerie of medical equipment—microscopes, calipers, scales, shakers, canisters, chimneys, steam traps, meters, tubing, drips and a bain-marie—is assembled on a center table beside a carriage clock. Dr. Jullien stands up and briefly stares at the clipboard the secretary gave him before telling the patient to hold out his hands.

  Pablo shows the doctor the newly formed freckles that appeared on his palms before he left Barcelona. They scared him almost to death.

  “Anywhere else?” the doctor inquires. “Shoulders, chest, how about the feet?”

  Pablo shakes his head.

  “But you noticed an ulcer, didn’t you, near your groin? About a month or so prior, am I right?”

  He nods.

  “And a fever, nocturnal headaches? Intercostal rheumatoid?” Dr. Jullien asks, impatiently adding, “Pains in your ribs, son. Does it hurt there?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “No matter. We can fix you. That’s the dilemma—the grandness and curse—of modern science. Your generation, given its predispositions, should be very, very thankful for the medicine of these times. Innovation couldn’t have arrived at a more necessary moment. Although it’s difficult to distinguish the originator, the chicken or the egg? What do you suppose, boy?”

  “Chicken or egg?”

  “Yes. Did science mature to treat the immorality of our desires, or did we kneel to temptation soon as we knew consequences might be evaded? Did the chicken come first, or was it the embryo from which it hatched?”

  “The rooster?”

  A smile interrupts the doctor’s exam. “Why, you’ve a mind on you after all! Most of your ilk haven’t any—complete ciphers. This generation is full of them. But you may have a gram of that precious gray matter yet. And we aim to preserve it, we do. Nooo, no, you needn’t wind up like one of those lunatics in the street, for whom we also could trace back what ails him to some trollop who infected his loins ages ago.”

  Pablo’s nose uncontrollably jumps.

  “The advances we’ve made,” Dr. Jullien begins again, as if feeling the simmering of his intellect, the ideas and words flowing like liquid inducted through an alembic, “enable us to peer into the world of molecules, view the very etiologies of what sickens us. What causes those spots on your hands? At this very moment, your body is like a flax crop being decimated by countless locusts. Only on an infinitesimal
ly smaller scale, that is, yet, conversely, infinitely numerous. An outburst of a bacterium, as opposed to a migratory insect, is doing terrible things inside you.” The bubbling boffin allows himself to cool a moment, muttering regret that his secretary has been out of earshot, before adding, “In theory.”

  “Theory?”

  “Not mine alone! It’s simply a fact that’s yet to be proved, like many of the truest facts.”

  “But you aren’t certain?” Pablo presses.

  The doctor explains that in this case the exact microorganism has escaped identification. “It could be so many horrendous little critters,” Dr. Jullien says, a billion bogeymen infesting the closets of Pablo’s being, creating chaos and destruction everywhere they lurk. But, he confesses, no one knows their shape.

  “Something suspicious has been studied by me in plasma, something almost serpentine,” the physician explains. “But I cannot confirm it in regard to the pathogenesis of the symptoms manifested.” He seems unaccustomed to being interrogated by a patient, and his brow stiffens. Then, a frisson fills his face. “Have a seat,” he exclaims, pushing Pablo down into a swivel chair and wheeling him to the table arrayed with instruments. “I’ve an instance of something related, something really remarkable,” he says, bending Pablo’s neck over the tall brass microscope. “Ghastly, too!”

  Dr. Jullien unlatches a small filing box on the table and removes from it a rectangular glass slide. He rushes to the cabinet on the room’s other side and yanks open a drawer before returning with a clear phial containing a dollop of pale yellow—like a melted droplet of the moon, captured and preserved.

  “There, take that, an excretion from the urethra of my previous patient. You may have seen him exiting,” he says. “A very, very rangy fellow. Head almost can’t fit beneath the door. Every inch crawling with the clap. Wife has it, too. She’s even bigger than he! Frightening, isn’t it?”

  Pablo nods.

  “They swap it back and forth, like polo players on great vast horses, bumping the ball around with their mallets. No way to say who gave it to whom first, carrying on as they do. But”—the doctor raises a forefinger—“neither tells the other one they come to me. Nooo, no. They each found me in-deee-pen-dent-ly,” he sings, one beat at a time, “after experiencing acute symptoms of blennorrhea—mucus discharge, accompanied by irritation of the meatus.

  “That’s the power of publicity, thanks be to my ad placed in the city directory. Best investment I ever made, after my microscope—and Madame Jullien, that is. So far, the unhappy couple haven’t both arrived on the same day. That’ll be a holler! When we call the police, tell them to bring their game rifles!”

  The doctor gives a hoarse laugh before turning serious again.

  “Such is the condition of the modern age,” he says, and sighs. “The decadence, I call it, for which, remember, lad, the root of the word is ‘decay.’ No morals, not a one, not anymore.”

  Once the exuded purulence is smeared onto the slide, Dr. Jullien lights a safety match and draws it to the tobacco protruding from his pipe’s bowl before lowering the flame and holding it beneath the glass rectangle. After the specimen is dry, he applies a dribble of methylene blue from an eyedropper before sandwiching it all together beneath a thin translucent square and placing it under the microscope. Pablo struggles to raise enough of a smile to show he’s a good sport as the doctor switches on the instrument’s newfangled illumination mechanism and adjusts the knobs of the armature.

  “Go on. It won’t leap from the slide. What do you see?”

  Pablo shutters his other eye and squints to glare through the eyepiece, and suddenly he is peering through the ocular into a frigid blue planet. Shifting shapes and formed masses drift by one another like cobalt-filled clouds on a white background, an inverse of the sky.

  “Where am I?”

  “Inside the pus!” the doctor screams with delight. “That’s the magic!” He proceeds to narrate Pablo’s journey, guiding him to the globular structures, slightly darker than the rest. “Looks like a harlot’s puckered lips?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s her! Little Missus Blue Monster.”

  “Have I already been kissed?”

  “No, lad. Should you be so lucky. You’ve something far nastier. Makes those Neisseria gonorrhoeae look like playthings. You’ve got the syphilis,” he says, expelling the syllables like a sneeze. “She’s one real tricky devil!”

  “Are they ‘she’?” Pablo asks.

  “It is not known whether these microorganisms are gendered,” the doctor explains. “We can’t say until we’ve seen her with our own eyes.”

  “But you did it again, said ‘her.’”

  “Just a way of speaking, son. In my mind, they’re hordes of tiny treacherous tarts, preying upon mankind.”

  The doctor gives Pablo two needles of arsenic, one in each arm, and—for good measure and good science—an injection of silver nitrate administered via a catheter of vulcanized rubber directly to the urethra. “You’re lucky, boy. If the chancre were present, I’d have excised and cauterized it to jugulate the infection. Seems to have receded on its own. Clever, isn’t she?”

  Now, they must treat the affliction internally, the doctor imparts, to prevent further penetration of the microbes before they infect the nervous system and gobble up the very seat of consciousness. “Protect the brain!”

  The physician writes a script for Pablo to bring to the dispensary: a preparation of two grains of bichloride of mercury, to be taken orally as a prophylactic until a follow-up visit. “Fear not,” Dr. Jullien reassures Pablo as he walks him to the door, throwing an arm around his shoulders. “There is no cure per se, but treatments, delivered on an ongoing basis, can keep you from suffering the worst of it. You may even lead, for the most part, a perfectly natural life up to the end.” The doctor drones on about side effects, but Pablo has stopped listening. Right, he thinks—or does he say it out loud?—just make it till we die.

  The trains nearby are sounding as Pablo leaves the office with the afternoon heat coming on. His loins ache. His heart could bound from his chest and ride away. There is no doubt how he contracted this malady. It must be Germaine. His head feels like it is growing bigger and bigger, and his legs are like soft spaghetti. His belly cramps, and his bladder is full, but he is afraid that loosening any cork will mean surrendering all control. Pablo heads toward the engine horns until he is hobbling along a narrow pasture of brome and sow thistle littered with discarded rail ties. He clings to a chain-link fence that runs parallel to the tracks and river below, thinking of the blue world beyond that microscope’s eyepiece. Pablo remembers how colors, any of them, had not been his first love, how when Don José brought him that japanned tin, the watercolors got in the way of the lines. All he had wanted to do was draw. But the bottle of blue on Papa’s high shelf was something splendid. The Virgin, she always wore blue, like the statue on Aunt Pepa’s altar. And this is why they’d wrapped Conchita in that gauzy wool swaddle of the same color. If only it could have rescued her. But why had he not been able to save her instead of yielding to temptation?

  Memories spin along with everything else, like swirling pigment and linseed.

  The sour smell of wet, rotting lumber pickles the air.

  Pablo leans into the fence grating and vomits onto the tracks, the locomotive’s whistle blaring as he empties his bladder and bowels at the same time.

  Hours pass before Pablo is strong enough to stand. Remembering dreams of twisted masses of cobalt and indigo, he thinks he must have been out cold for a while. His tongue feels cemented to the roof of his mouth. He tries to wash his clothes along the banks of the Bassin de la Villette, the fading sun bouncing off the water. They are hopelessly ruined, though, and he lets them drift away and float corpse-like down the canal. But Pablo refuses to return to Manyac’s apartment in his wrung-out underwear, which is the only garment he’s standing in on the outskirts of Paris, like a lost savage. Should he spend his last francs
on some cheapjack getup? Or scrimp and buy a pistol to finish off Germaine? She’s done him irreconcilable harm, he thinks, his head still pounding. And she did even worse to Carles, who’d had the right idea firing at her before he bungled it, bless him.

  It’s one thing to get a thrill out of pretending but another to go on letting someone else pretend.

  At a flea market nearby, Pablo ignores the stares of passersby and purchases a pair of bib-and-brace overalls with his last bits, reasoning he can always strangle Germaine for free.

  Back at the apartment, Pablo tells Manyac he was accosted by apaches who stole his clothes, and the man is as sympathetic as a priest, taking his papuce to be fitted for proper garments, treating him to a lunch of blanquette de veau, and granting him next month’s allowance.

  Still, Pablo feels uneasy around Manyac and plans to avoid him when he can. He will work at night and sleep during the day, communicate through left notes. The art dealer seems happy enough, so long as one canvas after another for the upcoming show piles up.

  When he isn’t painting, Pablo struggles to focus on anything but fury for Germaine. He’s convinced himself it is she, not he, who led the greatest friend he’s ever had to end his life with a lump of lead. So, too, she—presider of a million microscopic she-demons—has forever altered Pablo’s predicament, infecting him with this onerous, fatal perhaps, disease. What terrifies him more than death, disfigurement, or dementia, though, is that this wretched curse might blind him.

  But each time Germaine’s statuesque outline appears on the horizon of Pablo’s imagination, so, too, returns that inevitable attraction. “I’m like a pigeon devouring poisoned grain,” he repeatedly hears himself think. During that one night of seduction—which, frankly, even Saint Anthony would have succumbed to—she hammered a stake into his soul.