The Migration, page 20
20 MARCH: Martin has indicated his sensations are “muddled.” He feels “an absence, and sometimes a presence. A terrible shadow in his mind.” Might this be the inhibiting agent itself? Dr. Ballard says there is no way to verify without reducing the dosage in which case he fears the transition—effectively inhibited thus far—might resume. He has expressed concerns that new treatment approvals are likely to be delayed by current regulatory uncertainties and has informed me the M-Plagge trial is set to expire in seven days.
21 MARCH: Martin is minimally response.
23 MARCH: Dr. Ballard and I met today to discuss Martin’s progression. I’ve suggested we attempt to contact Martin’s sister and obtain consent for the trial to be extended indefinitely. Dr. Ballard has refused, claiming DONATION agreement prevents any further contact with the family. He insists that the cremation order must be enforced as scheduled and that not enough evidence exists to demonstrate the presence of the host’s identity. I suspect his concerns are for M-Plagge which has been expedited for further clinical trials in current JI2 patients. But surely Martin has demonstrated that our current frameworks for understanding the condition are inadequate? This is no disease.
(transcription taken from 23 March video record)
Dr. Varghese: Martin, do you know where you are?
Martin: Yes. At the Centre.
Dr. Varghese: Do you know what is happening to you?
Martin: Yes.
Dr. Varghese: Can you describe it?
Martin: Why?
Dr. Varghese: Because (a hesitation) there are others like you. You know that, don’t you?
Martin: Yes.
Dr. Varghese: They’ve changed. We want to know what they might be experiencing.
Martin: Yes.
(Twenty seconds elapse.)
Martin: I know what is happening to me. At least, I think I know. I’ve stalled, haven’t I? I’ve got stuck along the way. I can’t tell if I’m going backwards or forwards, anymore. Or which way I’m supposed to go. I keep having dreams.
Dr. Varghese: What do you mean, Martin?
Martin: There was something I was supposed to do.
Dr. Varghese: What?
Martin: I feel as if I’m failing a test I didn’t study for. I used to have dreams about that, you know. I had such awful dreams. Anxiety dreams.
Dr. Varghese: I’ve been having dreams as well.
Martin: I know.
Dr. Varghese: How do you know that, Martin?
Martin: Except they aren’t dreams. They’re more like memories. I am remembering something I was supposed to have done. A place I was supposed to go.
Dr. Varghese: Where?
Martin: I can’t tell you. You wouldn’t understand.
Dr. Varghese: Tell me about your memories, Martin.
Martin: Everyone got there ahead of me. Everyone is waiting for me.
Dr. Varghese: Does this frighten you?
Martin: I’m afraid of staying. I’m afraid they’ll leave me behind now. They’re out there and they are waiting for me. They want me to come with them. While there’s still time. I want to go now. May I go now? I want to go now. Please.
25 MARCH: Today Dr. Ballard told me the termination will be processed despite all my arguments. He has not reviewed my transcript. I don’t know what to do. Last night I had a dream. I felt as if someone was calling me. It was Martin’s voice but I knew it wasn’t Martin anymore. I don’t understand how Ballard can go through with this, knowing what we know.
I have registered a complaint with the Medical Research Council but I have been told that regulatory procedures have been temporarily suspended and Ballard has been given authority to proceed. Security has been posted outside Martin’s chamber and I have not been permitted any final contact.
27 MARCH: AS per protocols, Martin P. was injected with a succession of saline, sodium thiopental, and a lethal mixture of potassium chloride and pancuronium bromide, a paralytic designed to prevent spasms. Time of secondary death recorded as 2:32 pm. His body was delivered for autopsy prior to cremation.
31
I read the report through twice then a third time, curled up in my bed while rain slashes the large bay window. I underline passages, make notes in the margins, my cramped scrawl underneath Dr. Varghese’s surprisingly legible comments—the habits of reading Aunt Irene has taught me.
Tears blur the edges of the words until I have to wipe my face with the back of my hand. Afterward I stare outside as the setting sun casts bloody fingerprints on the surface of the river. The water is fast-moving, swollen with the runoff from the rain. Debris floats by, plastic bags and discarded soda bottles. I’m sickened by our carelessness, how humans are so willing to let something become someone else’s problem.
All I can think about is Martin. How I left him there on the field when I should have done something, helped him to safety. How the Centre should have done something to help him. But Ballard wouldn’t. He knew that Martin was alive but he didn’t care.
I take pictures of the report but I’m at a complete loss of what to do with them. I doubt, despite what she said, that Dr. Varghese would be willing to go on record if I leaked them. Would they believe me? I don’t think so. No one trusts people like me. I understand that better now. They’re cut off from what’s happening to us. Nate Peverill seemed to hate Lilee and me before he got sick. He didn’t want to believe he was just as vulnerable. Now he has JI2 he’s one of us. He understands.
I decide to send the photos to Bryan and a few minutes later my phone buzzes.
BTaite: bloody hell
BTaite: sophie where did you get this?
FeeFeesFeed: my clinician gave it to me
BTaite: I don’t understand it not all of it anyway but
BTaite: god poor Martin and they just
FeeFeesFeed: I know
A long pause.
BTaite: how could they do that to him?
FeeFeesFeed: they’ve been hiding this from us. they know something survives
FeeFeesFeed: they know that much about the nymphs and still
I stare at the phone, thinking about how different Dr. Varghese had looked from when I first saw her. Then she’d been professional, authoritative—but not always. Sometimes when I’d talked to her I’d see a chink in her armour, the sense of another person underneath: a sister, a friend. She’d cared about me—and maybe she’d cared about Martin too. She’d tried to fight on his behalf but it hadn’t been enough to save him.
BTaite: what about m-plagge?
FeeFeesFeed: i wouldn’t want that not in a million years
BTaite: not even if it would make you better?
FeeFeesFeed: he was trapped they did that to him they didn’t care about who he had been or what he was they just didn’t care
FeeFeesFeed: the nymphs were talking to him
FeeFeesFeed: he wanted to go with them
FeeFeesFeed: then they killed him.
FeeFeesFeed: theyll do that to us won’t they? if we die. if we let them
And now the tears are coming harder, so hard I can’t see the screen anymore.
FeeFeesFeed: bryan u still there?
The carrier is up but he still doesn’t answer. I wait half an hour, an hour, my frustration mounting. I feel so useless. All the things I used to count on are slowly disappearing and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it.
The HemaPen is lying in its cradle. I pick it up, thinking about how I helped Kira to use this the first time. It hurt, she told me, and I’d insisted she use it anyway. I’d tracked her symptoms just like they told me to, tracked my own—because I thought they had my welfare at heart. From the bookshelf I search for the heaviest thing I can find: a Folio Society hardback of The Deeds of the English Kings wrapped in pebbled brown leather. It’s expensive, beautiful—but I don’t care. I slam it down against the device again and again until the frame cracks and the delicate filigree of its innards is revealed.
I stare at the ruined thing. And I know there won’t be another. Whatever treatment the Centre has developed, I want no part of it.
“Sophie? Are you okay?” Aunt Irene knocks on the door. “I heard a crash.”
“Hold on a second!” I sweep the fragments of the HemaPen under Kira’s old bed along with the papers before I open the door. “It was nothing. You don’t need to worry. I just slipped on the last rung coming down.” I glance at the ladder leading up to my bed.
“I suppose you could always move to the bottom….” She trails off when she notices my red eyes.
“Have you been crying?”
“I’m fine.”
Fidgeting under my gaze, she tries the light switch but nothing happens. “No power, huh?” she murmurs. “Nada.”
“I just sent Charlotte to pick up more candles.” Another long look. “Do you want to give me a hand with this? It’s okay if you’ve…got other things you’re doing right now.”
In the hall is what looks like a large fishing box.
“What’s that?” I try to keep my voice level but there’s that push again, the twitch in my blood when my emotions are intense.
“An emergency kit. There’s a storm front building and I want to be prepared. Just in case.”
“Just in case?” She doesn’t respond. Instead she carries the box downstairs into the kitchen, me following behind. She places it on the counter and cracks the lid open. Inside are heavy duty flashlights, what looks like a hand-crank radio, a penknife and a whistle. She begins rooting around in the pantry cupboard, pulling out tins and stacking them on the table.
“So what do you reckon then, niece of mine?” she says in an overly chipper voice. “We’ve got peanut butter, some canned tuna, chili…green beans or peas?” I don’t answer her but she carries on as if I did. “I’m going to put in enough food for a week, so whatever we pack in here you better be willing to eat.” Aunt Irene stacks the cans carefully.
I dig around further in her kit and come up with Ziploc bags filled with tablets. One of them is labelled WATER PURIFICATION. The other contains an assortment of prescription medications, plus ibuprofen, paracetamol, and a packaged tin of something called Queasy Drops.
“Where would we go?” There isn’t enough here to last for long. “The JR Hospital is the evacuation point. It’s on high ground so it should be safe if there’s a major flood. Safer than here anyway.”
“And after that?”
“We’d wait until the water levels go down. Then we’d come back, I suppose, and get on with things. The same as always.” She stops what she’s doing and looks at me. “I’m sure we won’t have to evacuate. This is just a precaution.”
“That’s not what they’re saying.”
“If it went on for very long we’d go inland. Wait it out in a shelter.” She runs a hand through her hair, staring at me. “Come on, you. Help me finish this off?”
She’s already got several two-gallon jugs of water as well as a knapsack with a couple of warm shirts and trousers wrapped in plastic bags. I try to distract myself by helping out. I add my own clothes, two old T-shirts I used to wear camping, a pair of jeans, and a Common Misfits sweatshirt from last year. Strange to hold it now—it used to be my favourite but I haven’t worn it in months.
“You okay, sweetie?” She’s looking at me, concerned, her hair loose, as long as mine. “Your mum said you had a difficult meeting at the Centre.”
Tonelessly I answer, “Things have been pretty bad all around.”
“I suppose they have.” Wiping the sweat off her forehead, she gives me a sympathetic look. We shove the last of the things into the closet. “Let’s go into my office.”
* * *
—
Her office at home mirrors her office as the university. Her books are crammed haphazardly into makeshift shelves. To the right side of her desk hangs a corkboard bristling with a hodgepodge of clipped news articles, updates from the World Health Organization. She sits down in a large leather chair wedged in the angled space beneath the stairs. “So apart from the obvious, what’s on your mind?”
I choose my words carefully, torn between my desire to trust her and some sort of deeper fear that maybe she won’t understand, that she’d side with them. “I’m worried about the Centre, what they’re doing. They want to set up long-term care facilities for people like me.”
She looks up sharply.
“You didn’t know?” I ask.
“No one has told me anything,” she says, a trace of bitterness in her voice. “They’ve left me flying as blind as you. These are strange days—sometimes it feels difficult to be an adult. To know the right thing to do. Maybe your doctors are right. Maybe we just need to find a way to keep you safe until we can stop what’s happening.” She touches the objects on her desk as if they are charms. A way of warding off danger. But all this tells me is she doesn’t understand at all. How can I get through to her?
“What if we shouldn’t stop it?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if we need to let this happen? Let nature take its course?”
She stares out the window. “I thought I understood but this is unlike anything we’ve seen before. People are dying and I don’t know.” Her voice cracks with emotion and she squeezes her eyes shut.
“But it isn’t death,” I tell her. “That’s what I’m trying to say.”
She doesn’t want to admit it. “It’s worse.”
“Nature finds a way when it’s threatened, doesn’t it? It changes itself so the next generation will survive and have a better chance. What if that’s what’s happening? You told me you thought it might be happening for a reason, didn’t you? That maybe this has happened before?”
“Maybe.” Her gaze returns to me but she still sounds skeptical. “I’ve been searching through the records for anything that resembles what we’re seeing. There are references to strange—unnatural—phenomena. In the Middle Ages, there was frequent flooding and freezing. Roses on the willow trees at Lent.”
“Maybe they were clues.”
“It’s just speculation, Sophie. It still doesn’t tell us what this is. Or what we should do about it.”
“So speculate,” I insist and the urgency of my tone makes her glance up. “What’s the commonality? Why did it happen then? Why now?”
“The climate shifts, perhaps. Fluctuations in the temperature triggering an onset of the condition. I don’t know, the ash in the air? Sophie, there’s no way to be sure. We’re still digging into the records, processing soil samples. We don’t have enough information yet to say anything conclusively.”
I brush this aside. “So you still think it was the environmental triggers?” I remember Lane Ballard on the television, talking about locusts, the announcer’s frightened response. “But then why wasn’t it as bad as this back then?”
“Diseases spread so much faster now, Sophie. Our population is bigger than it was then, crammed into smaller spaces. Pathogens can spread further and faster than ever before.”
“You’re still thinking about this as a disease. But it isn’t a pathogen. That’s what Dr. Varghese told me. It’s something else, some sort of inherited condition. What if you’ve been looking at this wrong?”
“Fine. Perhaps things weren’t so extreme then, so the condition wasn’t so widespread. The…triggers weren’t as powerful.”
What she’s saying makes sense. Everyone has been talking for ages about how bad things are, how the storms are much worse than they used to be. What if this is it, the end? A shiver starts to build in the base of my spine but I flex my fingers, trying to follow the thought. “But why don’t we have records of the nymphs then?”
She looks at me thoughtfully. “Maybe we do. In 1337, the chronicler Heinrich of Herford began the Liber de rebus memorabilioribus, the Book of Things That Must Be Remembered.” Her gaze relaxes. She’s on safer ground here, citing her sources. “He recounted the birth of piglets with human faces. Babies born with teeth. Visions of fantasmata, ghosts, who caroused in churchyards and meadows.”
“So they existed.”
“Sophie, you’re jumping to conclusions. People thought they were superstitious.”
Bird bones in the graves of the Greeks. The carvings of doves, a gift from one child to another. I start to bounce my leg in excitement, my pulse racing. Maybe there were other signs too, we just didn’t know what they were. “But you don’t.”
“I don’t want to be reductive. They were intelligent people who were trying to make sense of the breakdown of their world. But their conceptual schema was different than ours.”
“So if they were seeing nymphs, what happened to them?”
“I don’t know,” she insists.
One possibility hits me hard and my leg stills. “They were wiped out.”
She jerks her head up.
“It’s what we’re doing now, isn’t it?” I whisper.
“The Centre has good reasons for the approach they’re taking, even if I don’t always like it. Sophie, above all, our souls—if we can call them that—live in our minds, our memories and experiences. But the structure of the human brain is delicate. It can’t survive the kind of trauma those bodies are going through. So whatever lives on, even if biologically it’s alive, it isn’t the same. Don’t you think I want to believe as well that something continues on? But that’s false hope, Sophie. It’s a trick. And it’s dangerous for you to think that way.”
“Why?”
“Because it means you might to do something stupid,” she says bluntly. “You can’t trust your instincts right now. What your body is telling you, it’s chemical. It isn’t real.” When she sees the stubborn look on my face she sighs. “Even if what you’re saying is true—even if this has happened before—then we still need to look at the evidence. Millions of people died from the Black Death. It’s hard to comprehend how terrible a loss of life that was. We need to prevent a global catastrophe. You understand that, don’t you?”
