Fever (25 page)

I lay motionless, hardly daring to breathe I was so bewildered, and I thought, in my surprise and aching disbelief, that he must be asleep and dreaming he was kissing someone else. I pretended I was asleep, too, and suffered his caresses, which were more painful to me than blows because they stirred in me echoes of our once perfect love. I didn’t move.

If he was awake, it was plain he didn’t want me to know that there was a part of him that still loved me; if he was asleep, woke, and realized what he had been doing, he would probably say something to me or do something that would cause me even worse pain. I lay in an agony of doubt, wondering if this demonstration of love was for me or not.

And all these years later, as I watched Rose’s taxi disappear down the street, I realized that I would never know. I would never know if Victor truly loved me, or if it was all only a dream of his, or, of mine.

To have come so far; to have found life so full of joy; to have seen the visions he had seen. The light on the wall opposite his bed was fading not into greys, but into pinks. He knew his room faced the west so perhaps he had got it wrong and it was dawn, the colour having turned more lemon now than pink, and morning, and he was waking and not falling into sleep.

He sank into a sleep full of forest, for everywhere there were shadows and light, and the scent of pine and cedar rose up and ferns waved their thick fronds at him; he sank onto a carpet of rich green moss, felt its softness press against the palms of his hands, felt the cool damp of the earth against his cheek where the trees protected the soil from the sun. He lay and felt himself cradled by the thick, aromatic roots that crept beneath his body, stretching out, searching for nourishment. He slept, and the forest dreamed him.

Someone was speaking to him. He opened his eyes and saw a young male face looking down on him through gold-framed spectacles. Another doctor, he supposed, or the same one as before.

“Yes?” he said. “Yes,” hearing his own voice once so robust, now fading to a quaver, an old man’s, a dying man’s voice. He
blinked and saw the light moving over the white wall behind the doctor’s head.

Dr. Mowbray looked down on the dying man, a great man, sometimes famous, now old and dying. He could hardly speak through the sadness that had seized and held him, not that he had known this good old man. He hadn’t even known of him, until the old man had arrived days before, a patient, weakened by and gasping with his pain. Even brought in on a stretcher the old man carried a few of his small books pressed against his thigh, and Dr. Mowbray, overhearing whispers of his fame, had claimed them and read them. Now he wanted to speak to the old man, to question him, to listen in intent silence to the answers.

For everywhere he looked Dr. Mowbray saw only death. He had an urge to kneel beside the narrow bed and beg the old man to tell him what it was he knew that had impelled him and then sustained him on his life-long journey through the forests of the earth. Instead, he drew in his breath, straightened his glasses over his thin nose and leaned forward again.

“Mr. Baker, are you having any pain?” he asked. “Are you …” He stopped, having given up, fell silent, thinking of the book the old man had written that sat at home under the lamp on his bedside table: thin, frayed, its simplicity of language.

The old man was bending again, turning sideways to make his way through the green and lucent light of the bamboo forest, the bamboos so thick that there was no other way to pass through, and they were lost, had been lost for days, God knew, might never find their way out again, for the bamboos, more than fifty feet high, couldn’t be climbed to get one’s directions and the bearers wanted to lie down neatly, side by side, to wait for death to come and claim them.

“Not ones to waste energy struggling against the insurmountable. When death comes, one knows it, one dies in peace.” The
doctor repeated to himself the old man’s words, for he was tired, sick of science, sick of his white coat and of the pain he walked through every day and the talk of golf in the doctors’ lounge. He dreaded even going into the lab where his senior students worked, loathed the steady hum of the fluorescent lights that seemed to pierce his very being and set his body vibrating with it. He loathed too, the smell of the chemicals, the disinfectants and preservatives and the drugs, even the white fingers of his own hands and the hands of all the men he worked with. No more of this, he said each morning, and every night, going to bed exhausted.

“Get me his chart,” he said to the nurse who stood beside him. She looked surprised, pursed her lips, picked the heavy chart up from the bed where he had just laid it.

“Oh—yes,” he said, took it, then in the act of opening it, failed to.

And there it was—the light. He had persevered, he had not given up, had walked four days and four nights, urging his bearers on, wouldn’t let them lie down to die, made them carry their packs onward around the steaming, waist-high mounds of elephant dung, listening breathless with fear to the distant rumblings of the herds, knowing how swiftly they could move, trampling everything before them. It seemed to him that the watery, greenish light filtering down through the tops of the bamboo canes was changing, growing light, a cleaner, whiter light. He had found the edge of the forest.

“He keeps drifting in and out of consciousness,” the nurse said softly, not that it wasn’t obvious, but because she wanted to call the doctor’s attention to the task at hand. So very old a man, she could see that he would die soon. She felt no regret, wished to go home as soon as her shift was over and change into her new red bathing suit and sun herself in the hour left to her, on the lawn of
her apartment building. She could feel the sun on her face, how its heat would melt her bones; hoped he wouldn’t die near the end of her shift, keeping her late with paperwork.

The doctor thought of all the other patients he had to see, but still he didn’t move. The air conditioning hummed insistently, its icy, artificial breath touching the top of his head where his hair had begun to thin. He thought for no reason of the small farm he had come from fifteen years before, of its dusty brown fields, its thin, short crops of wheat, failing again this year in this heat, he supposed. He would send his father money.

The old man was crossing the Sahara in his jeep under the stars, the air so cold his teeth chattered. The sand was orange here, packed hard and slippery as ice. He shouted for his companion to stop, they jumped out, they dug and unearthed a small piece of petrified wood. Joy soared through him, claimed him: it was the petrified remains of an ancient tree. You see, he shouted, you see,
there was once a forest here!

They got back in the jeep and drove on, skirting the dirty white pools of quicksand, running the hard-packed ridges, racing into the rising sun, into the hundred and thirty degree heat of noon, for days and days, suffering the bitter temperatures of the clear, hard nights, finding here and there more bits of petrified wood.

His dream grew, lying in the hospital bed; dying, his dream overtook him once again, one day to reclaim two million acres of the Sahara Desert, to plant trees and more trees where his evidence showed there had been forest, where today there was only hard-packed sand or giant, glittering dunes that shifted and changed even as he watched. A forest: tall green trees, the cloud of cool, moist air which the forest created and in which it lived, the lessening of the terrible cold and the terrible heat; the trapping of water, then the return of birds and small forest animals.

He couldn’t remember how or when, but his dream of a reclaimed Sahara was born long ago, and now he had the evidence to show others. He moaned with joy and turned his head fretfully on his hard, white pillow.

The young nurse had been glancing with a puzzled look at the doctor as he stood at the foot of the bed staring down, not really seeing the old man, seeing instead the thick, sighing forests of the old man’s dreams. The doctor turned toward her. At last, she thought, we can move on to the others, to Philip Monroe, who had arrived the night before. But again the doctor paused, forgetting her, and stood still.

“I’m going to watch him for a bit,” he said, without looking at her, aware of the mixture of bafflement and irritation emanating from her. She turned and rustled quickly out of the room. He heard her say something to someone out in the hall, but couldn’t make out her words. He moved to the high-backed leather chair at the side of the bed and sat down in it, leaning back tentatively.

The old man’s cheeks were mottled, the skin reddened and leathery from eighty-odd years out-of-doors in all weather. The doctor was again reminded of his father. The trees are dying, his father wrote, and the creek’s dried up, we can’t get enough water from the well or the dugout to water them. It’s too bad, his father wrote, to see them die.

Dr. Mowbray knew he was no longer kind to his patients, out of absent-mindedness rather than ill will; he had become abstracted, caught himself not listening when they spoke to him, forgot to give them medicine that would help the pain, until he was reminded by his nurse or they asked for it. Doctor, how much time has she left? What? he’d say, vaguely, his mind somewhere else, though he couldn’t have said where if he’d been asked. I can’t tell, I don’t know, and he’d tap his fingers on his desk, his eyes gone vague again.

The old man had come back to his redwoods. So many years away from them in Africa, New Zealand, England, in northern Canada camping in the Peace River district. All of it fell away, was as if it had never happened, to be walking again, to be nearing, to be here in his sacred grove of
sequoia sempevirens
that stood three hundred and more feet high.

He paused, stood, the silence of the grove settled around him, seeped even into his bones, his blood, stilled his heart, calmed him, cleansed his spirit. Here was his cathedral, his temple of the gods, here he communed with the ancients, the trees themselves a thousand years old, growing already when his native England was ruled by the great king Athelstan, and the Mayan temples were being built in the jungles of Central America. And these trees had sprung from stool sheets thrown up by a parent tree back and so on, back as far as nine thousand years ago. The trees were so old that he saw that as living things, they reached toward immortality.

He walked among the shoulder-high lilies and wild irises, the violets and wild roses and the bracken. The trees stood tall, straight, slender, silent, the light striking them, here illuminating trunks and foliage, here leaving in rich forest shadow clumps of ferns, patches of treed distance. He walked slowly, gathering strength from them, sending out his spirit to mingle with their holiness.

This old man had saved the giant redwood trees of California that Dr. Mowbray had never seen, but vowed now he would the next time he took a vacation; he would take his wife and two teenage children to see them. No, he hardly knew his family anymore, he would leave them behind. He would walk alone in the groves, trace the old man’s footsteps, try to feel his ecstasy, and maybe then he would learn what the old man knew, that he had failed to learn from his practice of medicine or from his
patients, or from the other doctors in the lounge or the operating rooms with their bloody, irreverent interrogation of the human body.

He sighed, looked down at his hands again, despised them, so delicate and white. He thought of his father’s hands, thick from hard work and brown from the wind and sun. Even in the midst of the coldest winter his father’s hands were brown. His father who had never gotten past elementary school, whose reading was a few farm newspapers. His father who would lose the farm this year almost certainly. And what then? And the trees his grandfather had planted, the poplars and the maples, even the hardy carraganas dying in the drought.

The nurse walked briskly past the door and saw the doctor sitting motionless in the chair. She hesitated, annoyed, God knows there’s work to be done and a dozen more patients for him to see and all he does is sit there moping. Leave him, come and see Philip Monroe who only needs his appendix out or his bowel attended to and then he’ll be all right again. But Dr. Mowbray didn’t lift his head and she went on so quickly that the man in the stiff, khaki shirt and trousers mopping up some spilled medicine from the shiny floor hardly noticed that she’d hesitated.

“Nurse?” the old man said, not opening his eyes.

“I’m here,” the doctor said, “is there something I can do for you?”

“Nurse?” the old man repeated, more faintly this time.

The doctor placed his hand on the old man’s forehead as if testing for fever. The old man relaxed visibly, could be seen to sink back into dreams.

He was a small child again playing around the skirts of his nurse who was scrubbing clothes in a washtub on the grass at the edge of the forest near his childhood home. The forest beckoned to him, he longed to walk in it, to lose himself in its green
shadows, to feel its coolness on his face, to touch the rough bark of the oaks and he wandered off, leaving his nurse to her scrubbing, and entered the forest on a narrow path that grew narrower till it vanished. He made his way among the ferns and lilies and trod on mosses, soft and brilliant green, he wove among the solid, greying trunks of the oaks, yews, chestnuts, until he was lost.

The forest grew darker, the sunshine retreated, he could find no path at all. Shadows leaped at him, tried to swallow him. He ran, pushing back scented underbrush, ducking under branches, catching twigs in his hair, tripping over roots and falling headlong on the spongy forest floor. Panting, sweating, no longer searching, but running madly, tears smearing the dirt on his scratched cheeks, he broke through the underbrush and stopped suddenly in his flight.

He had found the sunlight; it was captured in this glade. It made the tall grasses that grew from its floor glow with soft green light and it softened and greened the leafy branches of the old trees that formed the glade and intertwined overhead. He had never in all his five years seen anything so beautiful.

He fell to the ground and sat in the grass, his small back cradled by the root of a giant tree, he breathed in the beauty of the glade; he saw then how the trees lived even as he did; he understood their age, that they had lived longer than his father, or grandfather, or even great-grandfather; that they were time itself and he was a fresh, new spirit, cradled by the spirits of other ages, an infant rocked in history of which he was himself, small and insignificant as he was, a part; he saw how he and the trees and grasses were one.

Time hesitated, stopped; perhaps he slept. At last he rose to his feet and found that the glade no longer quivered with sun, had collapsed back into itself, and that now he knew the way directly
back to his nurse. I shall dedicate my life to trees, he told himself, and the knowledge that this was so and would be so for all his life wove itself into the fabric of his being.