The 100 Year Miracle (25 page)

Woo had lived on Bay Drive with the Streatfields when they were still the Streatfields, and the three of them had been friends. After Harry and Tilda divorced and property values doubled, Woo, who had never married, sold his house and bought a one-bedroom condo not far from the hospital along with a condo in Seattle, where more and more of his practice had moved.

Harry visited him in his hospital-side condo once. All of his real furniture had been shipped to Seattle, and what was left on the island looked like the sort of mismatched leftovers people send off with their twenty-year-old children to their first apartment, furniture you know will end up soaked in spilled ramen and beer. Harry had found the place depressing, and the two men had found that Tilda had been more important to their friendship than they realized. All conversations had passed through her. She was the apex point in the V-shape of their friendship, and without her, they were just two points without connection. It was the only time Harry saw Woo until he got sick.

Harry had put it off as long as he could. There had been the tingle in his hands and feet for months. Then he started to lose his balance. He tried giving up wine, not that he’d been too much of a drinker anyway, but when that didn’t help and he’d started to fall, he called Woo and asked if he could have an appointment. And now here he was with monthly checkups. Harry didn’t even know if Woo still had that terrible condo. Maybe he just rode the ferry in before Harry arrived and took the next one out once Harry was gone. It wouldn’t surprise him, but he wouldn’t ask anything to confirm it. If it turned out he was coming to Olloo’et just for Harry then Harry would have to put a stop to it. It was too much for somebody to do for him. And if he couldn’t see a doctor on the island, he’d either have to sell his house and move or give up seeing doctors entirely, which would’ve been his choice, but with Tilda around, that got harder. So Harry never asked. Simple as that.

Also Woo always kept the good gowns, not those horrible paper ones that ripped every time you moved. Woo’s exam gowns were real fabric, soft like they’d been washed a hundred thousand times, and, best for Harry, they closed in the back with Velcro. Snaps or ties would’ve been impossible for the past six months, not even if Harry had turned the damned thing around and tried to do it up from the front. But that day was better. That day Harry could have done up some snaps, maybe even in the back.

When the nurse pointed to the gown and left Harry alone to change, he set his cane by the exam table and took off his pants standing up, the way he used to. Then he put on the gown and hopped up on the table, hopped right up there like Juno would do it, where he waited for Woo. Woo was probably waiting in the men’s room until a decent enough interval had passed so that he could knock on Harry’s door, which is what happened.

“How are you feeling, Harry?”

Woo held out his hand, and Harry shook it. Woo’s hands were soft but not too soft, cool but not cold. They were the least objectionable hands a man could have, which was a real bonus at exam time, as far as Harry was concerned.

“I’m feeling all right,” Harry said.

“What does ‘all right’ mean?” Woo asked.

He was looking at Harry’s chart and had taken a pen from the breast pocket of his white coat, settling himself on the rolling padded stool next to the counter with all the swabs and bandages. Under his coat, he wore a blue dress shirt, brown dress pants with a knife-edge crease, and a brown-ish/blue-ish tie with a small pattern Harry couldn’t quite discern.

Woo had gone almost all gray now with just a little of his old black hair underneath, like a silverback gorilla. But his face hadn’t changed at all, not since Harry and Tilda had bought the place on Bay Drive thirty years before. It was strange, and it made Harry realize just how much his own face had changed and that he didn’t really know how old Woo was. Sixties? Seventies? Harry could ask Tilda.

In response to his question, Harry shrugged as if to say “all right meant all right.” He hadn’t decided how much he should tell Woo, and now sitting there in the faded blue gown with the Velcro in the back, that seemed irresponsible. He should have spent the time in the car thinking this exam through rather than having such a stupid argument with Tilda. She had picked a fight with him, and he had let her, and now look where it had gotten him. Harry frowned.

Woo ran through a list of questions and exercises. “Squeeze my hand with your left hand. Tight as you can. Now your right. Can you stand unassisted? For how long? Show me.”

Harry was standing in his bare feet on the cold, blue-flecked linoleum floor. He faced Woo, who was watching him for whatever Woo watched for in these exercises. Woo placed his hand on Harry’s shoulder and applied light pressure. Harry resisted and stayed upright. That was good, Harry thought, but Woo’s face was as unresponsive to Harry’s successes as it was to the passage of time.

Something was stuck to the bottom of Harry’s left foot. A lot of somethings. It felt like sand, which wasn’t surprising. People had been out on the beach this week far more than any winter in, it was safe to say, a hundred years. Woo was back to sitting on his padded stool, making notes in Harry’s file, so Harry picked up his foot and brushed the sand off the bottom, feeling some relief that it did turn out to be sand and not some unspeakable thing only found on the floors of hospital exam rooms. When he straightened up, he wiped his hands off on the sides of his gown and caught sight of Woo.

“How did you do that?” Woo’s face was impassive, but his voice had gone up an octave.

Harry tried to be nonchalant. “How did I do what?”

“You balanced on one leg.”

“I was leaning on the table a little,” Harry said.

“No, you weren’t. I was watching.”

“It’s no big deal.”

Woo flipped through some pages in Harry’s file. “Last time I saw you, you had significant loss of mobility in your right arm, hand, leg, and foot. You were dependent on your cane for balance, and when asked to walk the length of the hall, I observed you beginning to drag your right foot. You reported difficulty at the piano and at other fine motor activities involving your fingers.”

Woo looked at Harry for an explanation.

“Some days are better than others. I’m not sure what to tell you.”

Harry was getting frustrated. Was he in trouble for not being a consistent-enough patient? For not continuing to decline right along the little red line on the little chart in one of Woo’s textbooks? So what if he’d managed to help himself? Helping yourself was a good thing. Although the way things were going, maybe that had changed somewhere along the way, too. Maybe you were just supposed to lie around helpless.

Woo opened his mouth, changed his mind, and shut it again. They both sat in silence for a moment. Woo sat. Harry was still standing unassisted. He thought about reaching for his cane but didn’t. There was a clock with too-large numbers on the face above the door and one of those too-loud second hands. It ticked so loudly Harry could imagine it echoing.

“I don’t know what this means, Harry.”

Woo looked like he wanted to take off his glasses and pinch the bridge of his nose, except that Woo had never worn glasses. Instead he put his elbow on the counter with the cotton ball and Q-tip jars and covered his mouth with his palm.

The prickly feeling of discomfort over this whole exam was getting worse and worse. Harry could feel it like stickum burs under his skin. He wanted to get out of there. His clothes were folded up on the rigid little guest chair, and he reached for them.

“I’d like to take some blood samples.”

The last thing Harry wanted was to give a blood sample. He didn’t know what Rachel had given him, but whatever it was was bound to show up floating around with the platelets and cells and whatever else was in blood. Bits from last Tuesday’s sandwich, maybe.

He shook out his pants and stepped into them. This time he really did lean on the table for support before pulling them up under the gown.

“Harry?”

Harry pulled on the gown, and the Velcro gave way with little ripping sounds at each tab. It was like being in some sort of middle-aged, sick-guy version of a striptease.

“No more tests, Woo.”

Harry stood there. The muscles in his arms were sagging. He was skinny, but still his stomach pooched just a little over his pants like maybe he was smuggling a large grapefruit in there, and his pecs had slid down a couple of inches, making the skin look deflated. It was cold. He reached for his T-shirt and his sweater. It was one of his plain gray ones that he liked and had been wearing for years.

“Harry, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Harry pulled the white T-shirt over his head.

“Your disease—it’s a very difficult one. In all cases, it is progressive.”

Harry pulled his sweater on over the T-shirt. He could feel his hair standing up from the static electricity.

“We administer medications to try to slow the progression, but that’s all we can do.”

Harry dropped into the seat where his clothes had been and reached under his butt to remove the socks he’d just sat on.

“I need you to listen to me, Harry.”

“I am listening.”

Harry wasn’t really listening. He was putting on his socks. It had been several hours since his last dose from Rachel, and while he could still perform the standing magic trick for Woo, he could feel his right hand getting stiff. His symptoms were coming back. That’s all her medicine did. It wasn’t a cure. It was just like Woo had said. But what did it matter? What did it matter if he still had the disease as long as he could control the symptoms?

Harry would tell Rachel about this. He wasn’t selfish. There were others who needed the medication. He knew it probably hadn’t gone through all the trials that such things go through, the approval process, which was horrible and long and littered with the bodies of the waiting. Surely, there were trials, though. Maybe they had already started back at her university. He would ask her to add other patients like him. But he would not rat her out to Woo. He would not say anything, and he would not consent to any tests.

“You are not progressing. You are regressing. You couldn’t do that a month ago.”

“I probably won’t be able to do it tomorrow, Woo. It doesn’t mean anything. Like I said, some days are just easier.”

“That’s the thing.” Woo was so excited that he scooted to the edge of his stool. He was leaning forward and gesturing with both hands. He really did have a sort of immovably plastic face. It was like a Ken doll.

“No one else has good days.” Woo was still talking. “No one I have ever seen. It could be the combination of medications. It could be an environmental factor. It could be you have some sort of mutant form of this thing. Who knows? It could be anything. We must do tests.”

Woo was so beside himself that Harry expected him to pull at his own hair. Maybe he was. Harry was doing his best not to look at his old friend. Instead, he concentrated on smoothing out the bottom of his sock, so it wouldn’t crumple up inside his shoe. He had taken to wearing Velcro sneakers like the ones they give to toddlers. He had to special order them off the Internet. How would he function without Velcro? It seemed to be holding his life together these days.

When he got like this, all turned to the inside, Tilda thought he wasn’t listening, that he had gone away to some other secret place that only he knew about. If there were people who could do that, he wanted to meet them and learn their secrets. When Harry did it, he was trying to pull into a turtle shell he didn’t have. So instead he just rolled up like an armadillo and hoped whatever onslaught was happening would pass. He hadn’t gone anywhere any more than a child goes somewhere when he covers his eyes and insists, “I can’t see you,” to make you go away.

“No more tests, Woo.” Harry stood up and reached for his cane. “Like I said, it’ll be back the way it was tomorrow.”

Woo did not follow him into the hallway, which suited Harry as much as it surprised him. He needed to get going. He needed to collect Tilda. It was time to go home.

29.

“Goddammit,” Rachel said to herself and then louder to the person knocking on her door, “Just a minute!”

Rachel went back to grinding another dose for herself. She had bandages on both arms from the cuts she’d been testing. She had taken a dose within the hour, just after coming home from the hardware store. That dose had been ground from the flash-frozen specimens, but the active compound had decayed. She experienced a mild analgesic effect, reducing her pain from a four to a two-point-five out of five. Not enough. Not nearly enough. The specimens needed to be fresh to be effective.

Rachel’s doorknob rattled but did not give. The old one was in the trash can, along with the plastic bag and receipt. The new doorknob she had installed herself. The new key was already on her key chain. No one could get in now. No one.

There was a pause, and then the rattling started up again.

“I said ‘Just a minute!’”

Rachel finished grinding and then used a plastic spoon to scrape up the dose, a little larger than before. She had learned to swallow the whole thing in a ball without smearing it all over the inside of her mouth. It did a lot for the taste. Once it was down, she shook her head to center herself and pulled the sleeves of her shirt down over her bandages.

“Who is it?” she called, wishing she had a peephole.

“It’s me.”

“Mr. Streatfield?” Rachel unlocked the door, opened it just enough, and then pushed her head out into the hall. She was holding on to the knob from the inside and had her foot jammed up against the bottom of the door. It would be nearly impossible for someone to push their way in. Someone like John. He could be anywhere. You couldn’t know.

“You put a lock on the door?” Harry asked.

Rachel didn’t answer him. Obviously she had, and obviously it was necessary. He had just tried to barge in without permission. There was no one in the house or outside of it who didn’t want to get at her equipment and specimens.

“Do you need something?” Rachel asked.