The Monadic Universe, page 7
The light turned green and the medical van moved away. He walked the rest of the way home shaken, feeling as if he had just crossed a glass tightrope and miraculously it had not shattered.
He paused outside the front door to his building. The air of the city was oppressive, a mass composed of exhalations from a billion human throats and the wastes from inhuman machine processes. Sam went inside and up the creaky wooden stairs to the second floor. He opened the old latchlock to his apartment with a key and stepped inside. He closed the door, pushed in all the bolts, and lay down on the large bed in the center of the room. He was still shaking a little.
He tried to calm himself. It had been nothing, he told himself. No one was after him. The man who had jostled him in the crowdjam on 34th Street was a nobody—despite the fact that he had run into him again at the hospital last night. He was probably a subnormal janitor tunnel worker for the New York Hospital complex. The man had shown no sign of recognition when Sam had come out of Katherine’s makeshift treatment room in the branch of the hospital’s underground transfer tunnel. Kathy would have known if he were a euthanasia cop, but she had told him that the man was an orderly in the hospital, probably on an errand.
Kathy loved him. She loved him despite his age, Sam knew that, because he made her feel like a human being and not a trapped animal. They had their own world together, at least once a month, the uncrowded, unregulated world of each other’s presence. She loved him enough to risk saving his life, believing with him that the bootleg Poly-IC drug would in time induce a permanent remission of his body’s mimic-leukemia. Twice the drug had almost succeeded, boosting the percent of healthy cells in his bone marrow, running the hemoglobin count in his blood to supernormal levels, making him feel twenty years younger than his fifty-three years. But the bad cells had come back and Katherine had put him through a new series of treatments. “Sam, you’ve got to hang on,” she had said; “it may be a matter of just waiting long enough. The remissions are lasting longer.” She had pleaded with him, trying to coax him out of his depression, using words and looks, her body, and all the bootleg drugs and knowledge she could steal for him as a nurse and paramedic.
They would have their years of happiness. She had promised him that, for as long as he lived. He was safe with her; she was the one person who would never turn him in to the death cops. She would not do it without revealing herself as an accomplice in concealing a chronic disease. They would take her life and his for that. She was silent because she loved him.
Calmer now, he fell asleep.
The man with the flamethrower aimed it at him. The fire leaped out, burning his face, melting his eyes and flesh, scorching the bones of his skull, purging him of all infection.
Sam woke up with the sun in his face, shining at him through the hole in the dirty window shade, warm and blinding. He got up and staggered into the bathroom. His face was pale in the mirror. He looked at it carefully, searching for signs of last night’s fear. I have to see real dangers, he told himself as he took off the clothes he had slept in, and not torture myself with imagined ones. I found out soon enough to save my life and justify my existence. I do my job with no trouble. I’m useful. No one complains about me. I am not unfit. No one can tell the difference from day to day, not even the law. And I’m going to get better, maybe even next week. They’ll never know what I had, not even after I’m dead.
He took a quick sponge bath in the shower stall with his saved water ration. After shaving he had enough water left for two cups of coffee. Before going out, he took a look at himself in the long mirror on the back of his front door. His hair was thick and black and streaked with gray. His green city worker’s uniform was neatly pressed, and the buckle on his black belt was still shiny. He felt reassured by the sight of himself, and he felt definitely stronger after the previous day’s Poly-IC treatment.
He opened the door and went down the stairs. On the sidewalk he looked around and saw no crowd jams yet at any of the corners, although traffic in the street was increasing.
He started walking toward the food ration center where he worked, four blocks down-city. As he walked the noise grew louder around him and people began to fill up the sidewalk from the doorways of the apartment buildings. By the time he reached the center ten minutes later, he was walking slowly behind a mass of humanity at least a mile long, each person moving forward at the same time to avoid a jam. He cut out of the crowd and went inside the ration center and up to the second floor where his office was a desk between two partitions on a balcony overlooking the huge warehouse floor below.
He sat down at his desk and stared down into the huge floor area where endless lines of humanity had stood for more than thirty years of his life while he kept records and checked shipping orders, occasionally catching a counterfeit ration ticket and sending it up to the third floor to the men he had never seen. The only contact he had with them was through the intercom and the air tube which carried papers between floors.
Two years ago Katherine O’Faolian’s name had appeared on a counterfeit ration ticket. He had looked up from his desk and had seen her staring up at him, her eyes pleading. The look on her face had been one of unexpected horror. He had picked her out from all the thousands of people on the floor, and it had seemed obvious to him that she had signed the ticket unknowingly. He had torn it up in her sight and had sent down a blank form to replace it.
After work he had found her waiting for him by the front entrance. She had gone home with him, holding him up with her arm when he stumbled along the way. He had been right, he had told himself later; he could not have lived with the thought of her becoming a subnormal laborer for passing the ration ticket. The world lived by rigid rules of productivity, and it was anxious to use up human beings completely.
He remembered the night she had come to his apartment in the middle of winter to find him sick and weak. He remembered a small woman with brown hair and blue eyes wearing a nurse’s uniform. As she had leaned over him, he had noticed how pale her face had seemed, making her freckles more prominent than he had ever seen them. Later that night she had brought a doctor to him, and had covered his face while he was being examined and diagnosed, and he had wondered if that was to protect him or the doctor. He had never found out whether the doctor had been a legal practitioner or not.
He remembered how gently she had told him what he had a few days later. It had become fairly common recently: a mimic-leukemia, something which could start like a cancer of the blood, disappear suddenly and return just as unexpectedly to kill the marrow’s capacity to make fresh blood cells. The Poly-IC drug could prod the bone marrow into new production, and might eventually stimulate the organism into a complete remission, but he had to have intravenous doses of the stuff whenever his healthy cell count went down. The drug’s side effects were flu symptoms, high temperature, and severe shivering during the treatment, but they went away in reasonable time.
He had avoided the end, but complete remission had not taken place. The world wanted him to die. There were too many human cells to make a healthy humanity; failing cells had to be flushed out of the organism. In one or two generations the patient might begin to live again.
Sam sat up straight in his chair and picked up a pen from his desk. He picked up the first sheet of paper from the pile in front of him and tried to read it, but his eyes wandered to look out through the glass instead. A line was forming by the first trough below; workers dressed in green coveralls were coming in to dispense the day’s first rations. Suddenly Sam was looking at the same man who had jostled him in the crowdjam and whom he had seen at the hospital. The man was staring up at him blatantly, deliberately torturing him with his presence. Sam tried to look as if he were doing his job, but his eyes refused to limit their attention to the paper on his desk. The man continued to stare at him. Sam knew the man was sensing his fear, and when he smiled at him Sam almost cried out inside, sure that the other’s gaze had penetrated into him and had seen everything.
He knows, Sam said to himself; but I won’t lead them to you, Kathy. He hid his sweat-covered face with his hand, hoping that somehow he might die right there, that his circulatory system would shatter like glass, spilling his diseased fluids into his body cavities and leaving nothing for his heart to pump. He remembered how strong he had been after the first few treatments. Kathy had been delighted with him, vowing that she would never want anyone else. He remembered the first time he had made love to her and how she had cried out. The sleep he had shared with her then seemed so very precious now, and he wished that he had died in it …
He took his hand away from his face and looked for the stranger below; but the man was no longer looking at him. Suddenly he seemed just an ordinary man waiting passively for his rations to be doled out.
At four o’clock they put the news on over the building’s loudspeakers. Sam tried to ignore it as he checked through some files in the cabinets in the rear of the balcony, but he listened to the last few minutes of the commentator’s daily inspirational when he got back to his desk.
“… and finally I say to all good Americans who want to see a better America—the world is out of control, but we have closed our shores, stopped all pollution, cut our population growth to hold steady under two billion this year; our death rate is the highest in the world this year and last. And we will have our Horn of Plenty! Our best scientific minds are working day and night to perfect the universal matter synthesizer which will give us anything we want from basic raw materials—anything from a ham sandwich to a chunk of steel. Unlimited fusion power—power to rip matter apart at its basic level and put it back together into anything … fusion power and laser scanning of matter to form the image and the reality of a better world, a planet free of the need for agriculture and the tasteless synthetics we eat now. Money and time and mind will free mankind, as long as the research continues, as long as the unfit pass from our midst. Those who cannot serve the future with healthy bodies must contribute by quitting the game. They too are patriots and heroes, here by a mistake of nature or the curse of the past.
We must set things right, purging humanity of sickness so it may survive into better times. The Horn of Plenty is just around the corner. We cannot hesitate now and waste all those who have died. Courage …”
It was the same speech every day. Only the voices changed. Sam knew it by heart, like he knew the prayers of his childhood. He had grown up at the end of the good times near the turn of the century. He had seen all the good ideas die in their application to life. He had lived through the drug resistant plagues, through the brief reprieves of the 1990s, through the tyranny of the innovations control boards and their stifling of new technologies, through the global depression following the world crop failures. He had seen UN-enforced migrations, culminating in the complete isolationism of the big powers after the pogroms and expulsions. He had been a plumber and electrician, a union official. At fifty-three he held his job in the food ration chain because national employees were never fired. They worked until they died or contracted a disease. He had lived to see his union pension and social security turn into ration tickets. At work he tried to look fit enough to avoid suspicion that might lead to a spot medical check. In many cases old age was defined as a terminal and chronic disease. The death cops could arrest you directly for that, diagnose you at the euthanasia terminal and send you on your way, saving everyone time and money.
But Kathy lived in this world with him, making it bearable. She was there at night when he felt most alone and afraid, and she would never hurt him. She was exactly what he needed her to be. She was for him; for now.
“This way please. Don’t worry. It’s all arranged. Lie down. Give me your arm.”
The straps tightened around his body. The nurse’s face fell away and he saw that it wasn’t Kathy O’Faolian. It was the face of a death cop, a skull with glass eyes leaning over him, attaching the gas mask to his face and leaving it there, leaving it forever, and nodding back and forth as it turned on the flow of oblivion with white fingers, making him taste the gas in his mouth. He screamed into the mask, gasping the mixture into his lungs …
He woke up and Kathy was mopping his face with a cloth. He shivered under the blankets. The empty intravenous bottle hung on its post near the bed.
“How do you feel?” she asked, and smiled.
“Like before,” he managed to say. “Maybe— maybe this time will be the last.”
She nodded, smiling. Her eyes were so clearly blue in the lights of the small room, so completely without guile or despair, so young.
“I love you,” he said and shivered again, so violently this time that he shook the metal bed.
He heard someone take hold of the doorknob and turn it back and forth loudly, followed by a knock on the door.
“In the hall, Kathy, someone’s there,” Sam said.
She stood up and turned her back to him. He looked up at her, but the low overhead light blinded him partially. “They’ve found us, Kathy—who could it be?” She paid no attention to him.
“Open up, Kathy,” a voice said from beyond the door; “open up or I’ll bring help.” Sam knew that he couldn’t even get up to defend her; and she didn’t seem to care.
She went to the door and opened the lock. Someone pushed the door open, and Sam saw a figure shove Kathy back.
“Harry, how did you find this place?” she asked, and her voice sounded strange to Sam, as if what she was saying was for his benefit and not for the intruder.
The man did not answer. He came over and looked down at him, and Sam recognized the face which had terrified him.
“Old man,” Harry said, “I’m going to kill you the easy way. I’m going to turn you in. A thirty second call is all it will take. They’ll never know who did it. Maybe tomorrow morning—”
“Harry, for God’s sake please leave!” Kathy said.
The man turned suddenly to face her. Sam heard the silence and then Harry saying, “You dump him and I’ll let him live … Kathy, I love you, I’ve known you a long—”
And he heard Kathy, his Kathy, whisper back, and he knew she was hoping he wouldn’t hear. “Okay, Harry, but go now, I beg you. I’ll come to you later for sure, but go now.”
In a moment the other man was gone and Sam heard Kathy close the door to the dark hallway. He shivered again, less violently now. He felt like stretching all the muscles of his body in one long motion. “Sam, I’m sorry I’m not what you want me to be,” Kathy said somewhere far away. “It was all real between us, everything, believe me.” It was all a bad dream. Nothing to worry about. Abruptly there was nothing underneath him. He fell and was slowed to perfect stillness by a liquid sleep.
In the long moment before he woke up he dreamed of soaring birds and swift gazelles leaping against a background of graceful trees. He opened his eyes, losing the clearest sky he had ever seen; but he was left with a sensation of physical well being that he had not known since his youth. He knew it was the drug, but he could almost believe that this time the remission would be complete.
He sat up and saw that he was alone in the room. He threw off the covers, got up, and had started to put on his pants when the door opened with a key from the outside and Kathy came in wearing her nurse’s raincoat.
“Oh, you’re up,” she said almost coldly.
He finished dressing and sat down on the bed, remembering and waiting for her to speak. He wanted to believe anything that she would say but something inside him was transfixed and screaming.
“I had to go to him,” she said, “to save your life. I went while you slept.”
He looked up at her. It was someone else speaking to him, not Kathy. “While I slept… ?”
She nodded. “Sam, forgive me,” she said in a low voice, “but you see I had to do it. It’s been going on for a long time, from before I met you, from when he and I first started at the hospital. He says he can’t stop …”
He looked at her, saw the half-formed tears in her eyes, but no shame. He felt old despite his borrowed health, a survivor from a different world, draining the life from … this child with the last kicks of his diseased body. He was lying to her, revealing to her what he wanted her to see of him—the way he was inside under all the old flesh, the way he could never be again. And hiding behind even the youth inside him was an old man, buried deeper than he would admit to himself. That was the person who wanted her, who needed her with the attachment of a jealous child and would do anything to keep her.
He stood up and looked at her, wondering what the two of them said to each other about him. “Who is he, Kathy; where does he live?”
She looked at him and the possibility of tears was gone from her eyes. He came up to her and shook her. “Where does he live, Kathy, what’s his name? Choose now, love, do you hear me?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“He’s an orderly—Harry Andrews, across the street …”
He went past her and out the door. “Sam!” she shouted after him. “Come back. Don’t you see it’s over with him … Sam!” He ignored her cries and walked down the branch corridor to the main passage which ran up to street level a quarter mile away. There he went through an old door which let him out into an alley in back of the hospital. It was a seldom used exit, and even if anyone noticed him his green uniform would get him by.
He came out into the street from the alley and noticed the old brick apartment building across the ‘ street from the hospital, where many of the hospital staff lived for as long as they could hold their jobs. Harry Andrews probably shared rooms with a dozen other men.
