Collected Short Fiction, page 994
The plane is comfortable—a wide rump-gripping cushion of a seat, plenty of leg room. Probably it is about twenty years old; certainly it is pre-Virus War. Many industries have disappeared since the war, and the aircraft industry is one of them. The greatly reduced postwar population can easily make do, given a proper maintenance program, with the planes it inherited from the crowded, hectic world of the 1980’s, when the old industrial economy was going through its last great period of convulsive expansion amid, paradoxically, dreadful shortages and dislocations. Not that the war and the organ-rot have brought an end to technological progress: in Shadrach’s time fusion power has rescued the world from its energy crisis, subterrene borers have created an entirely new mass-transit-tunnel system for most urban areas, communications systems have become immensely sophisticated, the computerization of civilization has been well-nigh completed, and so on. Progress continues. Things are different but not utterly different. Even corporations and stock exchanges have survived. There has not been a total break with the old days, merely because two thirds of the former population has perished and a wholly new quasi-dictatorial political structure has been imposed upon the remnant. But this is a contracting society, daily diminished by the inroads of organ-rot and oppressed by a certain sense of stagnation and futility that the regime of Genghis Mao does not appear to know how to dispel, and such a society does not need new jet transports while the old ones still can fly.
June 1, continued. If the ruler of the world is schizoid, doesn’t this have serious consequences for his subjects? I think not. I’ve studied history closely. Throughout all of history people have gotten the rulers they deserved, the appropriate rulers. A sovereign mirrors the spirit of his times and expresses the deepest traits of his people. Hitler, Napoleon, Attila, Augustus, Ch’in Shih Huang Ti, Genghis Khan, Robespierre: none of them accidents or anomalies, all of them organic outgrowths of the needs of the time. Even when a ruler imposes his will by conquest, as I have not, the historical imperative is at work: those people wanted to be conquered, needed to be conquered, or they would not have fallen to him. So too now. Schizoid times demand schizoid government. The people of the world are dying lingering deaths of organ-rot; an antidote exists but we do not put it into widespread distribution; the people of the world accept this situation. I define that as madness. A mad government, then, for a mad citizenry, a government that offers promises of antidotes but never delivers. Of course there isn’t enough antidote to go around. But there’s some to spare. We do not give priority to expanding the supply. We offer hope but no injections, and this somehow sustains our subjects. Madness. A world that destroys itself with cloud-borne antigens is mad; one that gives itself over to an oligarchy of strangers is mad; fitting then that the oligarchs themselves are mad.
But are we? Am I? I have done some research into the symptoms of schizophrenia this morning, consulting Shadrach’s medical library in Shadrach’s absence. Here I have a text that says that two of the most common symptoms are delusions and hallucinations. “A delusion,” I am told, “is a persistently held belief, contrary to reality as it is perceived by most people, that is not dispelled by logical arguments. Delusions in schizophrenia often have a grandiose or a persecutory theme: the individual may express a belief that he is Jesus Christ or that he is the object of a worldwide search by a supersecret organization.” I have never expressed the belief that I am Jesus Christ. I do frequently believe with great conviction that I am Genghis II Mao IV Khan. Is this belief delusive? I believe that this belief is congruent with reality as it is perceived by most people. I believe that my belief in this belief is founded in reality. I believe I genuinely am Genghis II Mao IV Khan, or that at least I have genuinely become Genghis II Mao IV Khan, and that therefore this belief is not schizophrenic, not delusive. On the other hand I also believe I am in imminent danger of assassination, that there is a worldwide conspiracy against my life. Classic schizoid delusion? But Mangu is really dead. They pushed Mangu from a window seventy-five stories above the ground. Do I imagine Mangu’s death? Mangu is really dead. Do I misconstrue it? I know there are those who believe he committed suicide. This is delusive. Mangu was murdered. They might come for me at any time. Despite all my precautions. Am I deluded? Then I accept my delusions. As appropriate to my position in history. And if the danger is real, how wise of me to have barricaded myself behind the Interfaces!
Let us go on. Hallucinations. “A hallucination is a perception of sight, sound, smell, or touch that is not ‘real.’ In schizophrenia, hallucinations most frequently take the form of voices.” Aha! “A patient may be tormented by voices ordering him to jump out of a window or accusing him of heinous crimes.” What’s this about windows? Could Mangu have been schizoid too? No. No. It doesn’t apply. Mangu wasn’t intelligent enough to be schizoid. I’m the one who hears voices, and my voices don’t advise lunacy. “Sometimes the hallucination consists only of noises or isolated words, or the patient may seem to ‘hear his thoughts.’ Other hallucinations include frightening visions, strange smells, and odd bodily sensations.”
I think this applies. If so, I accept it freely. But there’s more. “Delusions and hallucinations are not limited to schizophrenia,” it says. “They may occur in a wide range of organic conditions (e.g., infections of the brain substance or a decreased flow of blood to the brain caused by arteriosclerosis).” Is that the explanation? When Father Genghis whispers to me, it’s nothing but a bug in my cerebellum? When Mao whispers in my ear, it’s merely a clotted artery? I should speak to Shadrach about this when he returns. He worries about my arteries. He might want to do another transplant. After all, I still have some of my own original blood vessels, and they’re getting old. I’m, what, 87 years old? 89, 93? Yes, perhaps 93. So hard to keep the numbers straight. But old, very old.
Great Father Genghis, am I old!
In Nairobi the air is clear, dry, cool, not at all tropical although the city is only a degree or so from the Equator, just about the same latitude, indeed, as fiery Cotopaxi and ravaged Quito. Quito, high in mountainous country, was cool also, but that was only a dream, a transtemporal illusion. Whereas Shadrach actually is, so far as anything is actual, in Nairobi. “We are much above sea level,” explains the taxi driver. “It is never too hot here.” The taxi man is hearty, outgoing, talkative: a Kikuyu, he says, this being his tribe. He wears huge dark sunglasses and a blue uniform that looks fifty years old. He seems healthy, although Shadrach had been half expecting to find everyone outside Ulan Bator afflicted with organ-rot. “I speak six languages,” the driver announces. “Kikuyu, Masai, Swahili, German, French, English. You are British from England?”
“American,” Shadrach says, though the label sounds odd in his ears. What else is he to answer, though? Mongol?
“American? Ah! New York? Los Angeles? Once we had plenty Americans here. Before the big death, you know? That plane they come in, it was big, too big, it was always full, all those Americans! They come to see the animals, you know? Out in the bush. With cameras. Not anymore. Long time, no Americans here. No anybody here.” He laughs. “Different times, now. Too bad, these times. Except for the animals. Good times for the animals. You see, there, by the road? Hyena. Right by the road!” He points.
Yes, Shadrach sees: a lumpy, sinister beast, like a small ungainly bear, squatting at the edge of the highway. The driver tells him that there are wild animals everywhere now, ostriches strutting down Nairobi’s main streets, lions and cheetahs preying on the suburban farmers, gazelles moving in huge fluttery herds across the university campus. “Because there are not enough people now,” he says. “And most of them too sick. Not much hunting now. Last week, big elephant, ripped up thorn tree in front of New Stanley Hotel. Very old thorn tree, very famous. Very big elephant.” Of course. With the world’s population cut back now to early nineteenth century levels, the animals would be starting to reclaim their domain. The Virus War had left them unscathed, even the primates closest to man: only the unlucky human chromosomes could harbor the rot.
On the way to the city he sees more animals, two stunning zebras, some wart-hogs, and a group of heavy-humped spindle-shanked antelopes; these are wildebeests, the driver informs him. It pleases Shadrach to observe this resurgence of nature, but the pleasure is tainted by sadness, for if wildebeests graze on the margins of great highways and grass grows in city streets, it is because the time of man is coming to its end, and Shadrach is not ready for that.
Actually not much grass is growing in the streets of Nairobi, at least not on the broad, elegant boulevard on which the taxi enters town. Flowering shrubs erupt in beauty on all sides. After monochromatic Ulan Bator, Nairobi is a visual delight. Bougainvillea, red and purple and orange, cascades over every wall; some creeping succulent with densely packed lavender blossoms carpets the islands in the roadway; thick, many-tentacled aloe trees stand like sentinels at streetcorners; he recognizes hibiscus and jacaranda, but most of the bushes and trees that fill the streets with such gaudy masses of color are unknown to him. The effect is gay and sparkling and unexpectedly moving: who could feel despair, he wonders, in a world that offers such intensity of beauty? But in that moment of transcendent joy that the glowing flowers of neatly manicured Nairobi create comes its own instant negation, for Shadrach asks himself also how, having been turned loose in this beautiful world, we could have contrived to make such a woeful mess out of so much of it. Nevertheless this serendipitous city inspires more pleasure than gloom in him.
Through flowery sun-loved Nairobi rides Shadrach Mordecai in an old rump sprung taxi to his hotel, the Hilton, an aging cavernous place where he may well be the only guest. The hotel staff treats him with extraordinary deference, as though he is some visiting prince. In a way he is, to these people. They know he lives at the capital and travels on a PRC passport; probably they conclude from that that he must sit at the right hand of Genghis Mao, which in truth he does, though he is not a part of the government at all. Yet even those who have not seen his passport regard him with awe, here. They pause at their work in corridors, and turn and look. They whisper among themselves. They nod, they point. Shadrach is reminded again of what he tends often to forget: that he is a man of great presence and dignity, capable and self-assured and of striking physical appearance, who radiates an aura that leads others to defer to him. It is hard, living in the shadow of Genghis Mao, to remember that one is a person oneself, even a considerable person, and not merely an extension of the Chairman. In Nairobi he learns it anew.
Strolling about the city half an hour after checking in, he makes another discovery of the obvious: everyone here is black. Almost everyone, at any rate. He notices a few Chinese shopkeepers, a couple of Indians, a few elderly whites, but they are exceptions, and they stand out as clearly as he does in Ulan Bator. Why should the negritude here surprise him? This is Africa; this is where people are black. And it was the same, really, when he was a boy in Philadelphia—whites rarely ventured into his neighborhood, and at least in early childhood it was easy for him to assume that the ghetto was the world, that black was the norm, that those occasional creatures with pink faces and blue eyes and loose, lank hair were freakish rarities, like the giraffes in his picture-book. But this is no ghetto. It is a nation, a universe, where the policemen and the schoolteachers and the Committee delegates and the firemen are black, the engineers at the fusion plant are black, the brain surgeons and the optometrists are black, black through and through. Brothers and sisters everywhere, and yet he is apart from them, he feels not kinship but surprise at the universality of the blackness. Possibly he has lived in Mongolia too long. Living in that polyglot multiracial amalgam that surrounds Genghis Mao, he has lost some degree of his own racial identity; and, living in the midst of millions of Mongols, he has developed some heightened sense of himself as outsider, as freak, that leaves him alienated even among his own kind. If these people, speakers of Swahili, intimates of ostrich and cheetah, bloodlines undiluted by slavemaster genes, can be said to be his own kind.
He discovers yet another obviousness: that Nairobi is not just beautiful boulevards and clear vibrant air, not just bowers of bougainvillea and hibiscus. This place is, however lovely it may be, still very much a part of the Trauma Ward, and he does not need to walk far from the precincts of his hotel to find the sufferers. They straggle through the streets, scores of them, in all phases of the disease, some merely pallid and sluggish, showing the first bafflement at the onrushing crumbling of their bodies, and some bowed and shrunken and dazed, some already hemorrhaging, dizzy with pain and flecked with the shiny sweat of imminent death. Those in the late stages travel in solitary orbits, each shambling alone through the streets, God knows why, struggling with incomprehensible determination to reach some unattainable destination before the final breakdown overtakes them. Often the organ-rot victims pause and stare at Shadrach, as if they know he is immune and want from him some gift of strength, some charismatic infusion, that will clothe them in the same immunity, that will heal their lesions and make their bodies whole. But there is nothing particularly reproachful or envious in their gaze: it is the calm, steady, equable look that one sometimes gets from grazing cattle, unreadable but not threatening, with no hint in it that they hold you guilty of the slaughterhouse.
At first Shadrach cannot meet that level stare. He was taught, long ago, that a doctor must be able to look at a patient without feeling apologetic for his own good health, but this is a different case. They are not his patients, and he is healthy only because his political connections give him access to-protection they cannot have. He is curious about organ-rot—it is the great medical phenomenon of the age, the latter-day Black Death, the most terrible plague in history, and he studies its effects wherever he encounters them—but neither his curiosity nor his medical detachment is enough to let him look straight at these people. He gives them only darting sidewise glances until he realizes that his feelings of guilt are irrelevant. These lurching wrecks don’t care if he looks at them. They are beyond caring about anything. They are dying, right out here in public; their bellies are ablaze, their minds are fogged; what does it matter to them if some stranger stares? They look at him; he looks at them. Invisible barriers screen him from them.
Then the barriers are breached. Shadrach turns away momentarily from the procession of the damned to investigate the window of a curio shop—grotesque wood carvings, zebra-skin drums, elephant’s-foot ashtrays, Masai spears and shields, all manner of native artifacts mass-produced for the tourists who no longer come—and someone gives his elbow a sharp stinging blow. He whirls, instantly on guard. The only person at all near him is a small withered old man, chalky-skinned, rag-clad, white-haired, fleshless, who is moving back and forth in front of him in an erratic semicircle, making little harsh clicking noises deep in his throat.
A terminal case. Eyes blotched and dim. belly distended. The disease eats slowly through epithelial tissue, indiscriminately ulcerating any flesh in its path; the lucky ones are those whose vital organs are pierced quickly, but only a few are lucky. Eighteen years have passed since the Virus War launched the organ-rot upon mankind; Shadrach has read that many who were infected in the first onslaught are still waiting for the end to come. This man looks like one of those eighteen-year cases, but he can’t have long to wait now. Every interior mechanism must be seared and corroded; he must be nothing but a mass of holes held together by frail ropes of living fabric, and the next erosion, wherever it strikes, will surely be fatal.
He seems to want Shadrach’s attention. But he is unable to come to a halt in the proper place. Like a robot with rusty contacts he keeps overshooting, going by Shadrach in jerky convulsive motions, stopping, clashing internal gears, pivoting with a wild flapping of slack dangling arms, coming back for another try. At last on one desperate pass he succeeds in clapping his hand around Shadrach’s forearm and anchors himself that way, standing close by him, leaning on him, rocking gently in place.
Shadrach does not pull away. If he can do no more for this maimed creature than give him support, he will at least do that.
In a terrible apocalyptic caw of a voice, a sort of whispered shriek, the old man says something to him that appears to be of high importance.
“I’m sorry,” Shadrach murmurs. “I can’t understand you.”
The old man leans closer, straining to reach his face up to Shadrach’s, and repeats his words with even greater urgency.
“But I don’t speak Swahili,” Shadrach says sadly. “Is that Swahili? I don’t understand.”
The old man searches for a word, wrinkled lips moving, throat bobbing, face taut with concentration. There is a sweet, dry odor about him, the odor of faded lilies. A lesion in one cheek seems nearly to go completely through the flesh from inside to out; probably he could thrust the tip of his tongue through it.
“Dead,” the old man says finally, in English, delivering the word like a monstrous weight that he drops at Shadrach’s feet.
“Dead?”
“Dead. You—make—me—dead—”
The words fall one after another from the ravaged throat without expression, without inflection, without emphasis. You. Make. Me. Dead. Is he accusing me of having given him the disease, Shadrach wonders, or is he asking for euthanasia?
“Dead! You! Make! Me! Dead!”
Then more Swahili. Then some strained rheumy coughs. Then tears, amazingly copious, flooding in deep channels down the dusty cheeks. The hand that grips Shadrach’s forearm tightens with sudden incredible strength, crushing bone against bone and wringing a sharp yelp of pain from him. Then the unexpected pressure is withdrawn; the old man stands free for a moment, tottering; from him comes a hoarse clucking noise, an unmistakable death rattle, and life leaves him so instantly and completely that Shadrach has a quasi-hallucinatory vision of a skull and bones within the old man’s tattered clothes. As the body falls Shadrach catches it and eases it to the pavement. It weighs no more than forty kilos, he guesses.
