Ghosts of Infinity: and Nine More Stories of the Supernatural (2 page)

I tell Aling Marta I am tired and cannot make a proper diagnosis. It is a half-truth. The little girl’s disease is exhausting to behold, and may require intensive treatment. Aling Marta tells the congressman she is having some slight difficulty communicating with me. She advises him to return the next day, Friday, which, being the day of the Sorrowful Mystery will be a good day for healing.

“I have taken my daughter to all the best doctors in the world and they tell me nothing,” the congressman tells Aling Marta.

More of the black smudge has collected in the small of her back, and the smoky tentacles now reach all the way to the tips of her fingers. Not good, I tell her.

Aling Marta tells him that if the patient came to the clinic everyday for two weeks, there might be a chance of recovery. The congressman flashes her a suspicious glance, and she gives a flustered answer, explaining the difficulty of the procedure that must be undertaken. To do it all in one or two sessions would almost certainly cause more damage.

“You are our only hope,” he says, looking nervously at my chair.

Doctors must be, to a certain degree, cold-hearted. While their patients will readily lay open their bodies, minds, and histories to them, they must remain distant and painfully honest.

Recovery is difficult. The prognosis is not good. Yet I keep my silence and convince myself that my continuous treatment will put the patient on the road to recovery.

Sometimes I miss the cool air of home, the open, undisrupted roads, the quiet places above and below ground. If you know where to look, there are fields and caves untouched even from ancient times. We gather there, to discuss issues both human and our own. We are, after all, quite the realists, trusting gold and rock, keeping our feet firmly planted on the ground. We know how much human affairs can affect our own.

I catch the congressman on TV. He is exposing corrupt police officials who are making money off smuggling and prostitution rings. I cannot see his organs through the TV but I know he is under great pressure. The reporter asks him if he is not scared of retaliation, especially from the high-ranking policemen. He says he is scared, but that it is time for him to make a change, anyway, “for the good of the country.”

For all my doubt the congressman gives me his. Every time he comes for a visit, I see him looking over Karina’s shoulder at the empty space above the chair. He has made Aling Marta a promise: “If my child is cured I will owe you a debt for life.” While Aling Marta, of course, has learned never to trust politicians—no matter what they looked like, whether they were once basketball players, movie stars, or TV news reporters—she knows that they tightly hold debts of honor.

But even three weeks later, Karina’s condition does not show any signs of improvement. When she shows her back to me, all I can do is stare at the dark clump growing inside her. Her aura bears the shimmer of youth, but its inner surfaces have begun to turn dull and spotty, like an old man’s. When I touch its outer shell, cottony with static, I almost touch her skin and feel her physical warmth. But that would be unthinkable, impossible. While some might think Aling Marta a con-artist, or myself a figment of faith or the optimistic imagination, there are borders even we must not cross. After all, I am a physician.

I have begun to feel a heaviness in me, a sorrow that is only deepened when she turns once more and greets my invisible form with that shy smile. When I look at her searching eyes, tears immediately come to mine.

Tonight, Aling Marta is silent as she prepares dinner, but she turns each small effort into a labor, washing the fish with exhalations of mock fatigue, chopping the tomatoes and onions with a heavy hand, slamming the lid down on the pot. We eat silently, hers the salted food and mine the plain, hers the bowl and mine the teacup. This is the way we have done it for years, she seems to be saying. I did it for my father, and I did it for you. And when I found you, we had an understanding. This time I am the medium, gathering the message from her small expressions.

She finally speaks. “This should be easy for you, no? You’ve handled parasites, cancer, meningitis. You’ve dissolved tumors, you’ve widened arteries, you’ve purified kidneys. Even inborn things like Mang Lupe’s hearing!”

Aling Marta dares me to ask her how much money the congressman is offering for her recovery. I roll my eyes at her when she tells me it is enough to fix us for life, for us to go to Canada, where a new life is waiting. “Look at where we live! Look at us!” She makes an exhausted sweep of the room with her hands, indicating the water-stained ceiling, the chipped dishes, her worn clothes, her homely and tiresome face.

This is usually how the blame game begins. She tells me her state of affairs, and I remind her of where she came from. She tells me she provides food and shelter, and I tell her how I have willingly subjected myself to exploitation. She bows her head and weeps, knowing I can see her pressure rising in her arteries, the bile surging in her stomach, and that I will take pity.

This time I take part in the melodrama, that human specialty, and weep as well, and tell Aling Marta the truth, that the little girl might be beyond curing, beyond hope. My skill—or anybody else’s—cannot perform the extraction her disease requires. And even if I were foolish enough to try, it would most certainly kill her. The blood would ebb with the black, the punctured aura would be tainted, and Karina would be drained of all life.

She bristles at the mention of her name. I can see the jealousy trembling in her. The blood rushes to her head. “I think you’re prolonging it, Doc. I think you’re enjoying all this! You pervert! You’ve lost your integrity, your ideals. Or maybe you have lost your touch. All these years away from your kind!”

And then it is my turn to be angry. I hop off the chair, leave the table and step out into the city, walking unseen among the crowds, where everyone is sick and dying.

They are not used to different notions of time and of things. They become lost in our world, as I have been in theirs.

That was how our friendship began, in their world, Aling Marta’s old home, where boredom and loneliness were found in great amounts.

It is no secret that we are conservative types, keeping close to our place of dwelling, staying among our kind and taking no unnecessary risks. Perhaps that’s why we live to be centuries old. But there are those among us who have found their world fascinating and intriguing, a world of exotic delights.

When it was dark at night, I often stayed in Marta’s room, exploring the surroundings and playing with her toys. In time her room became a familiar place for me, and she a most familiar companion. But seeing her one night, curled upon her bed, legs entwined around her favorite pillow, foot sticking out from under a blanket, I simply could not resist the temptation. I ran a finger lightly along the long, soft sole of her exposed foot, listening carefully to her breathing, ready to pull myself back into the shadows.

We are mostly harmless, and if we are mischievous it is only because we are curious, or bored, or lonely. After all, it was going to be another long, uneventful night. Her father had fallen asleep at his usual post, bent over bottles of gin in the living room. She had turned in early, as it had been a tiring day, with a long, uninterrupted stretch of work and an afternoon of water games at the river with her friends. They had been playing
habulan-taya
and she was
taya
for most of the time because the others had conspired against her.

But now she was laughing sharply, first in her sleep. Then her head snapped up from the pillow and her eyes opened wide. She let out a wail so loud and so shrill that I had to clap my hands over my ears. Before I knew it, there was the reek of gin and her father was in the room, brandishing an old revolver.

It was a near miss; the bullet tore past my shoulder. But as she continued screaming “Dwende! Dwende!” Marta kept a finger pointed at me, and it took all my strength and jumping powers to avoid getting shot. I only remembered to seek cover in the room’s dark corner after all six bullets had been fired.

I realized that I was visible to her, that she could see all of me, from my hat to my boots. And at that moment I felt an exhilaration that I had never felt in all my life.

By this time, the old man had collapsed on the floor out of drunken exhaustion, and Aling Marta was crying, not out of panic, but of pain. I saw that a bullet had clipped her in the ear, and a rivulet of blood was pouring from it.

It was her fault, anyway, for wanting to kill me. I must admit, there are those among us who take their mischief to the far end, who like to impose things upon those who have wronged them: tumors, rashes and welts, neurological and psychological disorders. But the truth is, we are mostly kind and forgiving toward humans, perhaps out of some strange pity.

I gathered my courage, came into the light and made the bleeding stop. I thus established my career as a doctor. Soon I would be Marta’s business partner.

The congressman has begun to accept my presence in the room, roughly the two-foot space above the chair. I have caught him looking at me sometimes, vainly searching for a clue to my presence. But I see the acceptance and the belief growing in his heart, turning into a sort of gentleness and kindness.

I have also seen his eyes shine briefly with hope. He mentions to Aling Marta that he is positive everything is working—the treatment, the prayers, the positive thinking. If he could only see her organs suffering in the grasp of the black smoke, the way her ravaged aura flickers like a candle flame. All I can do is look deep into her eyes and murmur incantations to calm her soul.

I also want to tell her that she makes me forget who I am. I want to go beyond the aura that she can never see, to touch her in a way that humans feel and understand. But it would be the most selfish thing. I look at the red plastic bracelet on her arm and I want to exchange that treasure, so close to her skin, so suffused with her scent, with a string of rubies. But it would be so wrong.

How I long to reverse the course of blackness and send it back to its void, where, nurtured by the sins of her father, it had calmly awaited her birth. How I wish I could tweak time and make her live eight hundred years, as our folk often do, and ask her to spend a long and uneventful life with me, lying low, in the underground. If she could only see me.

People are curiously able to accomplish much in their weak and short lives. The congressman has been a mayor, a practicing lawyer, a businessman, plus many other things he wishes to conceal. Today he is a born-again preacher. He sings a song and offers a prayer, his low, calm voice, warm and familiar like an old friend’s, reaching the far edges of the crowd: “The doctors gave her two months to live and God gave her eight. Thank you, Lord, for Karina.”

And Karina, barely thirteen when she is finally consumed by the disease, draws a crowd of thousands at her funeral, where I am lost in a forest of ulcers, angina, and black trousers.

When Aling Marta and I finally speak, it is to exchange good-byes. I didn’t realize that we’ve been doing this for decades. Today she is as old as her father was when I first met her.

Aling Marta closes up the clinic, packs her things and prepares for the boatride back home. She looks at me with a sad look, as if she were trying to understand me all these years, as if she were telling me that she loved me all her life, all the same. I cannot bear to look at her, to see the color of her aura and the trembling of her heart.