The Four Fingers of Death (102 page)

Koo, if he were willing to make the journey into the dangerous outdoors, could probably obtain some other infected tissue sample for his own experiment. Was he willing to travel on this account? Koo preferred
not
to use his son for any experimentation, because it wasn’t ethically sound, because his family was in a dire condition. On the other hand, Jean-Paul’s blood type was a match, and his son was very nearly beyond the state when he, Koo, or anyone else could help him. Wouldn’t Jean-Paul, the brilliant and promising entrepreneur, the best son any father could have,
want
to participate in the experiment that Koo had in mind, the experiment having to do with the cryogenic freezer in his garage, especially in view of his illness? During the postmortem phase of
M. thanatobacillus
infection, Woo Lee Koo could plausibly begin implanting some of the infected tissue from Jean-Paul into the body of his wife, at least that was how the medical researcher in him thought about it.

There were as many ways of thinking about the medical ethics here as there were ways of thinking, and thus without arriving at any conclusion, Koo watched his son on the monitor in his study as the boy attempted to pry loose from Vienna Roberts some romantic reassurance. Was there nothing more he could do for Jean-Paul? The courses of antibiotics seemed to make no difference at all. Koo’s friend Ryan Levy over at the Northwest Medical Center had tried the same with his own patients, from the simplest organic compounds that still worked on syphilis, up through the newest synthetic antibiotics, without conclusive results. Even finding a vein for the intravenous drip was hard, since Jean-Paul’s arms now resembled gangrenous or decomposing tissue. It was impossible to tell whether oxygen-rich blood circulated through the boy’s sludgy vessels into that damaged, infected tissue. Koo’s ruminations on treatment ran to the far-fetched: transplantation of some extremities. Could they transplant into Jean-Paul? With the body in the state it was in, Jean-Paul was unlikely to have a problem with tissue rejection, and wouldn’t the elimination of some portions of the infected tissue slow the progress of the pathogen? At least for a few hours? This would be feasible only if Jean-Paul’s limbs were not yet in the advanced stages of detachment.

What else was there to do? Koo watched the video, trying to divine the meaning of symbolic locutions still possible for his son.
Patient seems able to understand language, but is unable to communicate well. Patient seems to be attempting to formulate some prolonged farewell with romantic partner, V. Roberts, despite limited linguistic skills
. Koo himself, as he watched, was unable to sit still. He couldn’t stop himself from getting up, crossing the room, wearing down a portion of wall-to-wall carpeting, stuffing some empty carbohydrate into his mouth, that bowl of peppermints he had on his desk, going back to the screen, trying to rethink his strategy, remembering about the peeling wallpaper in the office, dictating some more notes, castigating himself for his paucity of ideas, despairing, and it was in the course of this that he did suddenly hit on a possibility.

Perhaps it was only fair to let Jean-Paul know about the
reanimation experiment
, and to allow him to make some kind of farewell to his mother. Koo even dictated the thought into his recorder, and it was just then that he had his idea. If the infection took a more leisurely course on the planet Mars, if it was possible to slow the course of infection by
refrigerating
, why couldn’t he put Jean-Paul into the freezer for a few hours? Had no one explored this? Woo Lee Koo had trouble getting his thoughts to settle down, so worried was he about his difficult but lovable son, and when he tried to come up with his hypotheses, he found that he flitted around from idea to idea without being able to land.

At the same time, there was a rather moving speech taking place on the screen before him. Vienna Roberts had risen to the occasion and supported her boyfriend throughout his lurid ordeal. Koo also made a note that any theory of the bacteria had to take into account the fact that she showed no sign of infection.

“I get that you are not well, and maybe you think your time has come, but I want you to know that I don’t accept it, and you just shaking your head isn’t going to convince me. For me, your time just is
not
coming. If I were going to show the same symptoms as you, I’d already have the symptoms, which means I’m probably clean, so why don’t you just let me hug you?”

To which his son shook his head, again.

“Look at it another way”—wiping her eyes—“the day arrives for every lover, that day when she’s not a lover anymore, and it could be five days after she meets him, or five years, or fifty years, but no matter what that time is, the time when lovers are parted,
have to be
parted, no matter what has happened in all the intervening time, whether they have been unfaithful, or have taken each other for granted, or maybe they couldn’t really be intimate, or however they approached it, no matter what happened in all that time, there’s never a lover who doesn’t wish that she didn’t have
a few more minutes
. The end of love is when you can no longer see the possibility of a few more minutes, and when you start totaling up what’s lost. And that’s when you always wish you had done better talking through things, you know, because there was a time that was the last time you could express yourself, and you almost always wish you had expressed yourself better, because it’s the way people are, that they never get it all down in words, and in this case, if something is going to happen to you now, I really want to say that it’s partly because of me, because I—”

A cessation of the conversation at this point, by reason of a surfeit of feelings.

“—I was the one who had this selfish idea about us having to go out there, out into the canyon. If it all has something to do with that, with what I thought I wanted, and you didn’t even want it, then it’s up to me to be able to say it’s okay for me and I’m not worried about infection, or whatever you want to call it. It’s up to me to say whether it’s okay for me to hug you or be hugged by you, or whether I can kiss you or wrap my arms around you on the bed, or lie on top of you.”

Son, again, with the vigorous shaking of the head,
no
. It was clear to Koo that Jean-Paul was still able to indicate in the negative, and therefore the affirmative, but what of more complicated grammatical structures?

For some reason, Koo suddenly noticed that Vienna Roberts was actually wearing trousers. An unlikely garment for the slut. Had there been some kind of costume change? These denim trousers were sitting low on her hips in a way that revealed some of her pale belly and her bony hips, and it occurred to Koo that the pants belonged to his son. Perhaps she was wearing these low-slung slacks because she was already appropriating clothing from him, fetishizing his clothes, the clothes from the former Jean-Paul. Before he could halt the proceedings, the girl began removing her particle mask, unhooking it from her dainty little ears, as if this was somehow to express more emphatically her romantic thoughts, and Koo knew now that he should march across the unit and intercede, and yet he was unable, for the moment, to stop watching. It was as if this were some kind of perma-cam web broadcast, such as you might see on the independent or pirate channels, where everything was about
how realistic
were its means of production, which really meant: how tiresome, how shattering, for example, that program,
Prima
, about the first family on Mars.

Jean-Paul made a gesture, laying ahold of each elbow, as if to indicate that he was
cold
, and the girl took note.

“Do you want a—”

Pointing to a stack of wool blankets that Koo himself had brought into the room to deal with temperature extremes. But Jean-Paul shook his head vigorously. He didn’t want the blanket. Any blanket.

“Well, then, do you want me to hold you? Would you just, like, let me—”

Another vigorous shake of the head in the negative, so vigorous, in fact, that there was a tiny crimson spattering across the pillow and on the bedclothes.

“What, then?”

Jean-Paul pointed out into the hall. And thus the drama of Jean-Paul’s illness would temporarily recede from the view of omnipresent video cameras. His father had an idea where the young lovers were going, because it was a place in the unit that had often appealed to Jean-Paul when he was a boy: the bathroom, with its paling lamps. Why a boy from Asia, by way of France, had been so enamored with the brutish and homely pigmentary affectation of the paling salon was unclear to his father. Paling, in general, was no better than sniffing glue, in terms of the kinds of difficulties it so effectively promoted. But Jean-Paul had always liked it as a child, and when he could not go into an actual paling salon to soak up the ultrahigh-frequency transmissions of the irradiators, then he would apply the caramel dyes of would-be Bollywood actresses, those trying to make it big in the Sino-Indian musical espionage film circuit.

If there was a particular stressor in the boy’s life, an audition for a school play, some kind of standardized testing, a visit from his French cousins, the younger Koo had often, in the past, repaired to the bathroom and to the paling salon that had come with the unit. In fact, the little booths that Jean-Paul had designed for his cosmetic surgery business bore a significant resemblance to the paling booths he had sometimes favored as a younger boy. An astute psychologist, with a copy of the
DSM-VIII
, might have diagnosed
racial dysphoria
, and this was a popular diagnosis in the era of the Sino-Indian Economic Compact. No one in NAFTA wanted to look like they could come from a Hindu nation.

Koo met the youngsters in the hall and followed them toward the bathroom. Vienna, still wearing her rubberized gloves, was attempting to help along Jean-Paul, whose legs were weak and, Koo supposed, ready to detach. Instead of greeting Dr. Woo Lee Koo, the young lovers proceeded as if in this end stage of their doomed romance, they no longer needed anyone besides themselves. Least of all parents. They shut the bathroom door behind themselves gently but firmly, and Koo found himself on the other side of the action. He dictated a few more notes while he was there, mumbling in Korean as he listened to the paling lamps going on in the bathroom. It was good they were paling
now
, what with the blackout only a few hours away.

If the question of self is an important marker in tertiary-stage infection, during which a rigid, human idea of self leaves the patient to be replaced by a more permeable sense of identity in which self and inanimate objects become interdependent and less distinguishable, it should be noted that even in this advanced stage, our patient is still inclined toward idiosyncrasies he exhibited from earliest childhood. For example, despite long having been told that he risked melanoma if he didn’t discontinue paling, patient nonetheless has expressed a fervent and consistent desire to be a different color. The affectation persists at this late stage of infection despite likely skin failure and sickly pallor
.

There was some disturbance in the bathroom, some commotion, as if the two of them were moving about quite a bit, wrestling, or were engaged in some fully executed jitterbug of love, and the sound of it reminded Koo of those sequences in antiquated slapstick comedies when many more people were crammed into some tiny space than could actually fit. The recessed lighting flickered in the hall where he stood, as it always did when Jean-Paul was using the paling appliance in the bathroom. Wait! Koo was distracted by an incoming call on his digital assistant, which was, at this moment, looped around his brown plastic belt—Levy again, from Northwest Medical, with a note suggesting that isolating patients in a hyperbaric chamber had yet to produce results. In fact, Levy noted, they’d left one patient in there, and when they returned an hour later, he was in three different pieces. They had to stop one of the patient’s feet from attempting to escape into the general hospital population by crushing all the bones in it with a nearby fire ax. Koo passed a distracted moment lamenting the professional depths to which his colleagues had free-fallen in search of a quick fix for
M. thanatobacillus
. It was no better than the medieval responses to the buboes that wiped out so much of Europe—smoke, sex, pleasant smells, prayer, and inquisitions. Maybe these dark ages were not substantively different from those, and what was forgotten would again exceed what was remembered. But Koo found that his reveries, facing a scuffed and overdue-to-be-repainted bathroom door, beyond which was the humming of ultraviolet radiation, were suddenly interrupted by a braying that could only be one thing. It was like a familiar song, that sound, the sound of his son’s voice, his son’s voice saying a rather familiar thing: