Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (2 page)

“Sunday midday.”

“That’s right. How’d you know?”

“I know a lot about you and Colin.”

“Then you know Colin’s not one for overstatement. He hadn’t said a word about . . . all this. When the evidence was in, he hit me with it all at once. It floored me. I’d got up that morning determined that I was through, that was
it
for cigarettes. I’d just thrown a near-full pack away.” She laughed shakily. “Looks like I picked a hell of a day to quit smoking.”

“That’s from
Airplane
. No points, I think your brother would say.”

“My God. You really do know a lot about us.”

“When it was clear to me that Colin might have a serious problem, I put him through my biggest battery of tests, checking his memory and his reflexes and his logical processes. We also went over all his background. As a result I know a great deal about you, too, your background, what you do.” He paused. “I even understood about the hedgehog, though it didn’t seem the best time and place to mention it. Anyway, how’s the paleontology business?”

“Just scratching out a living. Sorry. Programmed response. In a very interesting state. You see, every few years there’s a major upheaval—facts, or theories. New radioactive dating, punctuated equilibrium, Cretaceous extinctions, mitochondrial DNA tracking, the reinterpretation of the Burgess Shale. Well, it seems we’re in for another one. A biggie.”

“So I have heard.”

“You have? Well, not from Colin, that’s for sure.”

“True. I read it.”

“Fossils bore him stiff. He says that Megatherium was an Irish woman mathematician.”

A moment’s thought. “Meg O’Theorem?”

“That’s her. He was all set to be a mathematician or a physicist himself, ’til the drawing and painting bug took hold. He’s the talented one, you know—I’m just the one who wrote papers and stayed in college forever. Anyway, first he started to paint in the evenings, and then—” She stopped, drew breath, and shook her head. “Sorry, doctor. I’m babbling. Nerves. You wanted to talk.”

“I do. But I like to listen, too—unless you’re in a big hurry?”

“Nothing in the world to do but sit here and listen.”

Wollaston nodded. The wine had arrived and he was frowning at the label. “I hope this isn’t too lowbrow. It’s certainly not the
Grands Crus
that you and your brother like to sample. It’s a naive domestic burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused—”

“—by its presumption. No points. But I get one for finishing the line.”

“I need practice, or I’ll never be a match for the two of you.” He poured the first splash of wine, and in that instant seemed to become a younger and more vulnerable person. “A successful operation. That was the first stage. It is now behind us. Did your brother discuss with you what might happen next?”

Julia shook her head. Colin had not raised the subject, nor had she. Somehow it had not seemed significant before the operation. “Chemotherapy?”

“Not with the conventional antimetabolites. They have difficulty crossing the blood-brain barrier. The normal next step would be radiation. But a glioblastoma is fiercely malignant. Bad odds. I want to try something that I hope will be a lot better. However, I wanted to obtain your reaction before I discussed it with Colin.” Another pause, words chosen carefully. Julia nodded her internal approval. A good, cautious doctor. “I’d like to put him onto an experimental protocol,” continued Wollaston. “An implanted drug-release device inside the brain itself, with a completely new drug, a variable delivery rate, and an internal monitor sensitive enough to respond to selected ambient neurotransmitter levels. It’s tiny, and there will be no need to reopen the skull to install it.”

He was not looking at her. Why not? “Price isn’t an issue, Dr. Wollaston, unless it’s out of this world. We have insurance and money. What are the side effects?”

“No consistent patterns. This is too new. And the implant would be done free, since your brother would be part of a controlled experiment. But”—the kicker, here it came, he was finally looking into her eyes—“Colin would have to fly to Europe to get it. You see, it’s not yet FDA approved.”

“He’d have to
stay there?
”

His surprise was comical. “Stay there? Of course not. He could fly over one night, have the implant performed the next day, and as soon as the surgeon there approved his release he’d turn right around and come back. But I’m not sure how Colin will react to the idea. What do you think? It doesn’t have FDA approval, you see, so—”

“I don’t think. I
know.
Colin doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about the FDA. He’ll do it.” Julia stubbed out her cigarette, burned its whole length unnoticed in the ashtray. “Of course he’ll do it. Colin wants to live.”

She took a first sip of wine, then two big gulps. “What next?”

“On medical matters? Nothing. I’m done. More wine. Relax. Your turn to talk.” He was smiling again. “I hope you don’t have to run off right away.” Julia was staring all around her. His smile vanished. “Do you?”

Julia was still scanning the wine bar. “Where are all the waiters? You know, I didn’t eat one thing all day. I’m absolutely famished. How do you order food in this place?”

* * *

Walking back to Colin’s apartment through the mellow April evening, Julia Trantham was filled with guilt. Ten hours ago a malignant tumor the size and shape of a Bartlett pear had been removed from the brain of her brother. He was lying unconscious, gravely ill. While she . . .

For the past three hours she had managed to forget Colin’s condition—and in the company of James Wollaston she had enjoyed herself hugely.

* * *

Concorde, Heathrow to Dulles; seventy thousand feet, supersonic over open ocean.

Colin Trantham sat brooding in a left-side window seat, staring out at blue-black sky and sunlit cloud tops. The plane was half-empty, with no one between him and the aisle. Occasional curious looks from flight attendants and other passengers did not bother him. He was beyond that, accepting their stares as normal, just as he accepted the head bandages and bristly sprouting hair. If his appearance were enough to stir curiosity, what would people say if they knew what sat
inside
his head?

Maybe they would be as unimpressed as he had been. Colin had been shown the device before its insertion, and seen nothing to suggest its powers: a swollen iridescent disk no bigger than his fingernail, surrounded by the hollow legs of sensors and drug delivery system. Super-beetle. An unlikely candidate to be his savior. He felt nothing, but according to the London doctors it had set to work at once. The battle was going on now. Deep within his skull, bloated with slow poison, the scarab was stinging the crab’s microstases in silent conflict.

And the chance that it would succeed? No one would give him odds. Bad sign.

“Make a note of thoughts that strike you as unusual.”
Wollaston, on their last meeting before Colin flew to England, had maintained his imperturbability. “We can watch your stomach at work, or your gall bladder. But you’re the only one who knows how normally your brain is functioning. Record your dreams.”

“My
dreams?
Doctor Wollaston, even before I got sick, my dreams never made much sense.”

“They don’t have to. Remember what Havelock Ellis said: ‘Dreams are real while they last; can we say more of life?’ I want to know about them.”

Colin was beginning to agree. Dreams and life, life and dreams; he had felt like telling Wollaston that his whole life had become one waking dream, on that morning when a headache came and grew and would not go. Since then nothing had been real. The pain had gone with the operation, but in its place was a continuous foreboding.
Never glad confident morning again.
He did not recall a real dream of any kind since the operation. And he did not want to write notes on his condition; he wanted it never to have happened.

The flight attendant had paused by Colin’s row of seats and was staring at him questioningly. He did not want to talk to her; to avoid it he stared again out of the window. The sun was visible in the dark sky, farther toward the rear of the plane. At Mach Two they were outpacing it. Time was running backward.
Call back yesterday, bid time return.

Colin shivered at a slow stir of movement, deep within his brain. Something there was waking from long sleep. He stared straight at the sun. His pupils contracted, his hands relaxed. Fully awake, he began to dream.

* * *

I was standing on a flat shore, watching the sea. Or maybe I was sitting, I can’t tell because I had no sense of feeling of legs and arms. I just knew I was
there.
Enjoying the sunshine on my bare back, feeling good. More than good, absolutely terrific. Cold, perfect day, I could feel the blood running in my veins. Something must have died a mile or so offshore, or maybe it was a school of fish, because thousands of flying things were swooping and turning and settling. I decided I would swim out there and see for myself
 
. . .

Julia Trantham looked up from the third sheet. “Does it just go on like this for all the rest? Because if it does, I can’t help. It’s not specific enough.”

“I know.” Wollaston nodded. “It would have been nice if you could have said, hey, that’s where we spent my fourteenth summer. But I didn’t expect it would ring any particular bells. Keep reading, if you would—I want you to have the context for something else.”

“And I thought you asked me here for dinner.”

He did not reply. She went on in silence until she reached the last page, then looked up with raised eyebrows. “So?”

He took four pages of 20” x 14” unlined paper from a folder and slid them across the table. “Colin found what he had written as unsatisfactory as you do. He says he’s an artist, not a writer. Pictures, not words. What do you make of these?”

The drawings were sepia ink on white background. Julia glanced for a few seconds at the first couple of sheets and put them aside, but the other two occupied her for a long time. James Wollaston watched her closely but did not speak or move.

“If you tell me these are all Colin’s, I’ll have to accept that they are.” She tapped the first two pages, spread out on the table of Wollaston’s dining room. “But these ones sure don’t look like it.”

“Why not?”

“Not detailed enough.” She picked up one of the sheets. “When you ask Colin to draw something, he draws it
exactly
. It’s not that he lacks imagination, but he never cheats. Once he’s seen it, he can draw it. And he sees more than you or I.”

“He didn’t see these. He dreamed them.”

“You’re the one who’s been telling me that dreams are as real as anything else. Anyway, compare the first two pages with the others. These must be birds, because they’re flying. But they’re cartoon birds, vague wings and bodies and heads, almost as though Colin didn’t care what they looked like. And now look at these other two, the tidal shellfish and crabs and worms. Precise. Every joint and every hair drawn in. See this? It’s
Pecten jacobaeus
—a scallop. Look at the eyes on the fringed mantle. You could use it as a textbook illustration. That’s Colin’s trademark. Same with the two lugworms. You can tell they’re different species. But those first two pages are just
wrong
.” She paused. “You don’t see it, do you?”

“I can’t argue with you.” Wollaston stared at the pages as though he were seeing them for the first time. He had taken off his tie and draped it over a chair back, and now he picked it up and rolled it around his forefingers.

“But you don’t like it,” said Julia, “what I said about the first two sheets?”

“I do not.”

“It’s a bad sign?”

“I don’t know. I know it’s not a
good
sign. In Colin’s situation best change in behavior is no change.”

“Do you think it’s coming back?”

“I’d love to say, no, of course not. But I don’t know. God, I hate to keep saying it to you. I don’t know, I don’t know. But it’s the truth.” He came closer, half a step nearer than convention permitted. “Julia, I wish I
could
say something more definite. It could be the treatment—new drug, new protocol, new delivery system.”

“But you don’t think it is.”

“I think these drawings may be the effects of the treatment.” He slid the sheets back into the folder. “But they’re not the whole story. I go more by look and sound and sense. My gut feel says it’s something more than side effects. I think Colin has problems. How long are you staying?”

“I’ve been wondering. I could stay the whole summer. It’s late to do it, but if I moved fast I could even make part of next year a sabbatical. Should I?”

She was tense, hearing the question behind the question, not sure she wanted to hear the answer.

“I think you should.” James Wollaston looked more miserable than an objective physician had a right to look. “I think you should stay, until—well, stay as long as you can.”

* * *

The northern bedroom of the ground floor apartment had been converted to a studio, its bare expanse of window looking out onto a paved courtyard where weeds pushed up between cracked stones. The studio lay at the end of a corridor, far from the entrance to the apartment. Julia stood and listened as she came through the front door.

Total silence. That was odd. For the past three months her arrival had always produced a call of “Hi!” and a quick appearance in the kitchen to discuss dinner plans. He must be really deep into his work.

She slipped off her shoes and stole along the corridor.

Colin was in the studio, standing at the easel with his back half-turned to her. He was working in acrylics, and she saw a vivid flash of colors on the big board. She studied him as she came in. The hair on the back of his head had regrown completely, it must be two inches long now; but he was terribly thin, just gaunt bones, and the skin on his temple had a pale, translucent look. She saw that the food on the tray table beyond the easel was untouched. He must have eaten nothing since she left, over ten hours ago.

“Col?”

He did not seem to hear. He was painting furiously, brush strokes as rapid and sure as they had ever been. She came to his shoulder to examine the picture, but before she reached the easel she glanced up at his face. His gray eyes were unnaturally bright, and there was a smile of exquisite pleasure on his gaunt face. But it was not for Julia. He did not know that she was there. He was smiling away into some private space.