"Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment...that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams...."
--Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
What if a man suddenly, mysteriously began to waste away?
I worked before as a registered nurse at Greylan Presbyterian Hospital. I collect flowers that I press dry between old encyclopedias and read the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. I have watched mankind slowly die in order to learn to live. I have stared into a dusty mirror and felt the sensation of impending death.
I was there when it all started; I only wonder whether I'll be here when it all ends.
It was flu season, damp and cool with a touch of fever in the air. People rushed their children in with complaints of the tiniest aches and coughs; it was one of those years rumored to breed a particularly nasty bug.
The first man was something like the rest, only different: thirty years of age, with a normal immune system and no medical conditions. I remember his name was Paul something-or-another, and names don't matter in this sort of situation, so I'll leave it at that. We'd have run him through the typical protocol and sent him home to sleep, but his case was different from ordinary flu cases. His weight had gone down by twenty pounds over the previous two days.
Or, at least, that's what he claimed. We had no reason to disbelieve him; after all, he looked almost skeletal. He once leaned on my shoulder with a steady hand, but his knees shook as those of an eighty-year-old cancer patient might. Staring into his face was like looking into a funhouse mirror that twisted reality, his pale face stretched like that of a man made of taffy, body twisted slightly, reminiscent of Munch's patented specter, as he gazed off blankly to one side.
We had classified this Paul as having an unknown digestive problem, or something of the nature. So no one was comforted when he lost another ten pounds the day he was admitted.
I had the morning shift the third day of his stay and went to check whether the feeding we'd started him on was making any difference. I almost lost my breakfast when I walked in.
Having already been reduced to the barest frame, his flesh and muscle had started wasting away in chunks. Quarter-sized holes that showed through to the bone were scattered like welts across his exposed skin, each gathering a small pool of blood, but he appeared to be breathing fairly easily. His vital signs were weak, he was basically in a coma, and lab results reported no bacterial infections...it was nothing like anyone on the staff had ever seen. Nothing indeed--no clues, no treatment, no help.
Within an hour of his death that evening, Paul was a skeleton dotted with remnants of organs and occasional muscle and connective tissue.
When what was left of his body was taken out of storage for autopsy the next afternoon, nothing remained on his bones. The ordinary process of decomposition had taken place at a phenomenal rate, but without the foul smell.
News of Paul's passing received only the attention of a three-line obituary in the local paper. Cause of death: unknown. His funeral was closed-coffin. The hospital kept samples of his bone.
What if the horrible disease spread and others also began to waste away?
It struck the ulcer-suffering patient in the room adjacent to Paul's next, then an orderly working on our floor. A doctor who watched the late news saw a fifteen-second story on how four men and five women in a county a hundred miles away had died suddenly of strange causes.
Patients piled into the small hospital too quickly for our staff to handle, but trained help was needed just as deperately everywhere else. Panic-stricken parents yanked their children from school, people grabbed canned food from the shelves and holed themselves up in their apartments. Our society was tense, as though a tiny added ripple of unrest would cause riots, anarchy. It was a plague, pure and simple, pulled from the fourteenth-century with the wiles to outsmart modern medical science. It was another smallpox, another polio, another ebola virus. Camus or Preston could have told you all about it without having ever seen it.
A medical researcher at a nearby university made a connection between it and a newly-discovered disorder found in horses. The Horseman Plague: It sounded like a grimly appropriate title then and sounds like a prophetic one now.
It struck home near the end of my shift twelve days after the first case. Pamela, the head nurse on our floor, shivered as she scribbled notations onto a form. "You need some rest," I told her.
"Yes, I'm just a little tired, that's all," she answered, her knees buckling under her.
She was admitted five minutes later, which was exactly half an hour before I officially quit my job. Inexplicably, I had no doubt that I was going to live for some years yet, but I quit anyway. Or did I quit because of the fact?
What if it continued and billions of men, women, and children were to die?
I found a message from my friend May on my answering machine when I got home. "I have a theory. Call me. Until then, God bless."
Instead of calling her, I decided to drive two hours to visit her. She was a medical student who had just moved into the 110-year-old house her old aunt had willed her when the plague began.
The drive gave me a great chance to think for the first time in a couple of busy weeks. ("Can't you see my headlights, man? Are you blind or something?") A radio commentator squawked that the plague had been infecting people on all the continents simultaneously. Worldwide, the death toll stood at an estimated five hundred thousand, though the numbers from third-world countries were highly uncertain. I turned it off.
All plagues had to end eventually, that had been proven by experience. No, not proven, but shown to be most logical. One just had to hope that the end wouldn't be concurrent with the conclusion of mankind's short and violent history.
All humans are mortal. All mortals must die. Therefore, all humans must die. Aristotle would have approved of the syllogism. Einstein would have affirmed, "The end comes sometime: Does it matter when?" Einstein wasn't an ancient Greek but had the wisdom of one.
I pulled up in front of May's house just as the eerie green glow of the clock in my Toyota shifted to midnight. White camellias, thick and silky, grew on a bush outside, and I plucked one to take home and dry, lingering outside her door. Perhaps I had a sudden desire to remain as blissfully isolated from her theories as possible.
She answered the door quickly after I knocked, which I had expected: Somehow, May never slept during the night. Her shoulder-length blonde hair camouflaged with the yellow summer dress she wore out-of-season, which matched the color of the light being softly emitted by the foyer lamp.
"I've been expecting you," she said. "Wait for me in the sitting room down the hall on the left. It's the one with the red shag carpeting, you can't miss it. I need to get a few things."
She hurried in the other direction and I slowly strolled in the direction she had pointed me in. I had seen the inside of the house only once before, when returning a book I had borrowed: Dean Koontz's "Fear Nothing," about a man who had lived his life in the literal dark.
A door to the right pointed inward, ajar, and I pushed it open in curiosity. The room was ancient and had obviously been neglected for years. The drapery was fluffy and black, adorning the window the way a comforter might cover a mattress. I stuck my head in and saw a mirror hanging on the wall to the left, its surface coated thickly with dust. I shuddered and closed the door.
Although the weather was fairly mild, the fireplace in the sitting room was crackling, a sound that created more anxiety than comfort. I flopped down on a sagging velvet sofa and waited.
May entered a few minutes later, a pile of large textbooks stacked in her arms, up to her chin. Biology, Organic Chemistry, Number Theory, Mechanical Physics: The backbone of a good scientific education. She dropped them unceremoniously on the carpet in front of the fireplace.
"The answer to this is so simple," she began, her voice soft and dreamy. "It's been in front of us for almost two thousand years, and yet we still neglect to seize it."
She opened the chem text and ripped a handful of pages out of it, and held her fist up for me to see. "This...is the delusion we've been living under, a delusion that we silly humans can comprehend the nature of this world. The delusion started with the Greeks and is so widespread now that God has decided to punish us for our presumptuousness...."
She threw the pages into the fire and reached for more. It went back to the Greeks again; everything seemed to. Everything seemed to begin with the rise of logical thinking, but was that the truth? Or did it then begin to fall?
Generations, centuries, eras of knowledge disappeared in the fireplace, consumed by the natural substance even our ape-like ancestors used. May's almost 20 years of education vanished faster than you could say, "The Apocalypse," blipping forever into oblivion when she left medical school, both physically and ideologically. If she were called a born-again Christian, her parents were God and the Horseman Plague.
What if people were to frantically seek answers?
I stayed over at May's house that night, in an upstairs guest bedroom that was considerably more contemporary than most of the rest of the house. The next morning she told me about the Bennis Center and the work they were doing. I made up my mind to visit it, and she didn't protest, so I figured her religious convictions were less definite than she wanted me to believe.
We turned off the expressway forty-five minutes later and drove along a two-lane dirt road until May suddenly clapped her hand down on my shoulder and said, "Right here."
My foot slammed instinctively on the brake and dust wafted up around the car. She pointed to a building in the distance, nested in a sea of green buffalo grass. "That's it."
May had apparently visited the place, a warehouse for local archaeological finds turned depository for the dead, before quitting school. As we approached, I saw that "warehouse" was too ambitious a term for the tiny rectangular building no more than twenty feet wide. A line of five blue jackets hung from the rain gutter, almost obscuring the doorway. A man with dark hair stood under an oak tree outside, took a last drag from his cigarette before grinding it behind the heel of his shoe, and walked inside.
We went up the two steps at the doorway and followed him in. The building was partitioned into three rooms of equal sizes, the walls of each covered with shelves holding tagged skeletons of people dead from the plague. (I idly wondered where the archaeological specimens once kept here had been taken.) The man stood in the center room, studying an ulna with a magnifying glass. He peered closely at it, face scrunched up in concentration, and compared what he saw to an enlarged color photo taken of another bone. Behind him, another latex-gloved man marked off sections of bone with a black, felt-tip marker and a ruler.
I had seen enough and went back outside, standing under the oak and staring into the plain of grass. The taste of death inside turned my stomach; worst was the sterile, scentless condition of the wasted bodies. If they reeked of decay, I would have felt less disgusted...this was too unnatural, too disturbingly false. After all, who wants to see "monocalcium phosphate" on the label of the crackers she's eating, harmless or not?
In a minute, the dark-haired man was also out. I didn't turn to face him. "Patterns?"
He glanced over and fiddled in his pocket for a smoke. "Yeah, that's what I'm looking for, patterns."
I looked at him with a raised eyebrow. He changed his mind and returned the cigarette. "You don't think it's possible, do you? Tell the truth, neither do I. But I'm looking for something, anything...it can be a sign from God, or a tessalation, or a Spiral of Archimedes. It can be divine or mathematical, I don't care either way."
He said this in an even, almost languid tone, not a hint of anger rising into his voice. "I understand," I said casually. He was killing time just as the rest of us were, waiting for the blade to fall on his neck and end it all painlessly. Even kings end up feeding the fish. Or the worms.
May came out the door, her face neutral. The man eyed her and his attitude seemed to change. "Hi there, I'm Adam. How'd you like to come to my place later and talk a bit?"
As expected, May eyed him suspiciously and gave him a cold retort. They were acting out the parts of a play, whiling the time away, but what was wrong with that? Besides, wasn't that what I was doing, as much as anyone else?
Destiny existed if one could look deep enough, but was knowing and thinking too much far more dangerous? Perhaps May was correct in saying that some knowledge was not for us to know, but reserved for the divine. If we were all puppets in a tragedy written by a higher force, being tortured by an unsolvable puzzle, did any of it matter? Even if we had a chance, miraculously, to continue living, did it matter? Does anything matter to helpless robotic sheep?
What if someone, somehow, managed to find a cure?
Five point nine nine seven billion people were dead when it ended, or that was the approximation--excepting those who lost hope and took their own lives--based on how many of us were left. Are left.
May and I, along with four others, moved into an upscale condominium building where Adam stayed. The few of us remaining who lived in the area just gravitated to a central location, and this happened to be it.
Life is strange, though...any of us can walk into any store and take items off shelves, but we don't, we live sparsely. As cliched as it sounds, the designer clothes and sports cars do nothing to help us, as we found out in the beginning; I'm numb to almost everything around me, and the others must be too. I wonder whether the plague will start again but worry more about surviving another day. The people like us, who need joy desperately to survive, have the most trouble manufacturing it. That and hope.
The man downstairs committed suicide last week. When he didn't come to breakfast, we found him lying dead in his bed from an overdose of alcohol and valium. Or rather, I found him; I told the others that he drove off erratically, and they chose to believe it. I wrapped him in trash bags and dumped him in the nearest river as soon as I could make a decent excuse.
We've communicated with people in other parts of the country and the world a few times already, and we may meet eventually, somewhere, to discuss what we should do with everything we have. Nature is already reclaiming our roads and buildings, taking us back to where we were before. Back to before the Greeks.
May lives at the condo down the hall from me, and she's been more reclusive of late. She smiles knowingly at the rest of us, and I wonder whether she hasn't found the answer, deceptively simple, in one of her ancient texts or scriptures. We should be able to find our answers, now that everything's behind us and the fog and dust have cleared.... We should be brighter, more experienced, more wise since we've lived through it.
I think of Plato's cave. Are we, the few "lucky" survivors, the prisoners who were brought out into the light, to be blinded by the truth, then enlightened? Or have we already seen the light but are forced back into the darkness, unable to cope with what we once lived contentedly?
"The answer, my friends," rasped Dylan, and we all know the rest. But the wind only blows dust through the streets, that and the fragments of our civilizations.
Sometimes I don't sleep well at night, and when I wake up, I find myself in the next condo wrapped in Adam's arms. Sometimes I wake up and see him, and mistake him for a skeleton, and wake him and all the neighbors with my screaming. It doesn't help that he's gotten pale and thin lately, even without those cigarettes he's thrown out.
Adam says that we'll all adjust soon, and that we'll create a new culture and society from what we have around us. It's just another obstacle in history we'll have to overcome, like the fall of Rome or the Cleveland Indians' loss in the World Series.
But I'm no social scientist. I worked before as a registered nurse. I collect flowers that I press dry between old encyclopedias and read the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. I have watched mankind slowly die in order to learn to live. I have stared into a dusty mirror and seen the figure of impending death.
I was there when it started; I only wonder whether I'll be here when it all ends. I have learned to move on.
"One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are merely a statistic."
--Josef Stalin
The End
Jolene is currently a senior at Downey High School who gets too much of her writing inspiration from apocalyptic or otherwise eerie nightmares (her muse is defective). Someday, she hopes to electrocute lab rats for a living and complete a fantasy novel or two
E-mail: cilamene@netzero.net
URL: http://www.geocities.com/cilamene
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