The Four Fingers of Death (103 page)

“That feels fucking
great!
”

What? Unmistakably his son’s voice, audibly so, followed in turn by an unreserved giggling from Vienna Roberts, a laughter prompted, Koo assumed, by the sound of the patient speaking for the first time in a day or so.

“Fucking great!”

Koo began pounding on the door, and he was astonished to find with what enthusiasm he was pounding on the door, with what flooding relief he begged to be admitted, calling his son’s name, for here was a moment to be treasured, a moment when things seemed as though they were not quite as grim as he’d previously imagined. Under the margin of the door, in the hum of the paling salon, there was, for a minute at any rate, some hope.

The door swung back, and there was his son, his skin hanging like rags on his body, having lost quite a bit of weight already, a bit of clotted arterial gunk in the corners of his eyes, which were both bloodshot and slightly yellowy, but smiling,
smiling
.

Koo said, “What is it that’s going on?” And while the words may have had the ring of paternal injunction about them, Koo also felt giddy with the possibilities of the moment.

“Dad,” Jean-Paul said, struggling but articulating nonetheless, “I really feel better in here. Is it possible that I could feel better in here? Could this…”

So overpowering was the sense that something at last might have been going
right
for the infected young man, that Koo didn’t even notice at first, and neither did Jean-Paul, that Vienna Roberts had thrown herself around her contagious lover, encircling him. Without a mask or a hospital gown on, nor other protection, she encircled Jean-Paul, and she lay her face against his face, and then her breast against his breast, and there they were now, having conjoined their destinies, the lovers. Koo was moved enough that, at last, he felt unable to repel a conviction that it would be all right:

“My son,” he said, “I am so happy to hear your voice. You don’t know how happy I am to hear your voice. I am even happy to hear your cursing. I have not been so happy to hear your cursing in many years. In fact, I am rarely happy to hear your cursing, but today I am very happy. You should feel encouraged to curse some more. You should curse to your heart’s content. And I must say that this moment gives me some ideas, some ideas I must share with some of the other medical personnel who are working on this question of what to do about the disease. If you would be interested to know, the idea that I have is that there are two factors that worked to inhibit the growth of the bacteria
M. thanatobacillus
on the planet where it was incubating, and the first of these factors is the far greater impact of cosmic rays and other radiation on the planet Mars.”

“But Dad,” Jean-Paul said, slurring perceptibly, “what does that have to do with—”

“This machine for which we pay rather too much money, because of the amount of electrical energy it uses, aims to apply ultraviolet radiation to your skin, in order to cook away the upper layers of skin, the pigment manufacturing of the dermal cells. It is an apparatus that I have always deplored and found unnecessary, even barbaric, and yet it may be that in this case the radiation is duplicating the kinds of effects that were present on the surface of Mars. On the one hand, as I am thinking about it now, it is possible that the bacteria on Mars became irradiated by the surface conditions, the lack of atmosphere on the planet, and therefore became inured to low-level radiation, but the very same conditions kept it from duplicating effectively, and thus the slow rate of progression of the infection in those who were on the Mars mission.”

“And—”

“It means that you are going to stay in the bathroom under the paling lamps for a good portion of this day, I believe, at least until I see about radiation treatments at the hospital.”

The young man smiled, as perhaps he had not smiled for some time now, and the girl kissed him on the face. There was a kind of slurpy sound issuing from Jean-Paul’s skin when she applied herself to it. Some of it pulled away with her.

“Still, there is another factor,” Koo went on, “that must be considered. That is the temperature issue. The surface of the planet Mars is extremely cold, as you know, and such air as exists there is all but anaerobic, and so it’s more than possible that lowering your body temperature would effectively slow down the rate of infection.”

“Are you going to put me in the freezer in the garage? And leave me there to freeze?”

Woo Lee Koo, without realizing the error he was about to make, said, “There is not room in the freezer in the garage, because there is already someone in there.”

“There’s…”

“Perhaps this is not the best time to discuss this.” As if Koo had become suddenly faint of heart, as if the rebuses that made up his mostly concealed personality, the compartments secreted away in other compartments, had now eased into view.

“I believe that the number of male cases of infection is greatly larger than the number of female cases,” he went on, “and I had not earlier concentrated much attention on this issue, but it is possible that we should look at estrogen as some kind of natural suppressor of the infection. Perhaps hormones play an important role in this process. Perhaps the bacteria first targets the endocrines—”

“Dad, what the fuck do you mean that there’s already someone in the freezer? I mean, I know there is a lot of other stuff going on right now. But is there some reason why you said what I think you just said?”

“Perhaps if Miss Roberts continues to be free of symptoms, we would be able to take a blood test from her in order to look at it under the microscope? If it isn’t the estrogen, it’s possible that she has some kind of—”

“Dad!”

“—resistance—”

The timer on the paling lamps went off, and Vienna Roberts, ignoring the turn of events, cranked the timer around again, in the clockwise direction.

“We will also have to make sure that we have enough generator power available to run the paling lamps twenty-four hours if we need to do so. Perhaps if you stay in this room for a long enough period, then some of the skin’s regenerative capabilities will begin their work, and instead of just arresting the disease you can begin to recover some of your former appearance.”

Jean-Paul turned to Vienna Roberts. “Did you hear what I heard?”

And then the elder felt that he had no choice but to say what he had to say, what he had prepared for so long to say, in so many different ways. No matter what father-and-son conversation they shared, no matter what father-and-son conversation was
not
going according to Koo’s intentions, no matter what chastisements he was meting out, or what paternal advice, there was always in the limbic portion of Woo Lee Koo’s neural net the moment when this conversation would take place, the conversation in which it was revealed that Koo was not the man that he seemed, not the good man, the generous man, the family man, but rather a man who was afraid to let go of certain things, a man who was afraid to face up to certain facts, a man who could not accept
death
, after all, though death was accepted by other people bravely every day. Why was it that he was this man? Koo had formulated myriad answers to the question, or, at least, he had imagined many times over the moment in which he composed a brave accounting of his actions, and his son simply
forgave him
. Koo never sat at a keyboard and typed in the words
Because I believe that the love of the family is the only love that a man will have in this world, and should you chance upon this love, you must do what you can to preserve it, you must sacrifice whatever you have to preserve this family, because I believe these things without reservation, I have done what I have done
. Koo didn’t write down the words; he didn’t consider which was the best way of delivering these dicta in his second language. But he considered that his point of view was just and right, and that his son, eventually, would see that he was just and right, because there was no other way to think about these issues. And yet now that Koo was about to have the conversation with his son, he understood that perhaps he was not so right as all that. At least, he was not sure how his son was going to react, because indeed he could think of no elegant way to say “Your mother is in the freezer in the garage.” Although this was better than, for example, “Your mother is in this soup.”

“I feel certain that I cannot adequately present what I am about to tell you without seeming as though I am insufficiently preparing you for the revelation. But I should tell you that your mother is in the freezer in the garage.”

“I thought you… Aren’t there… experimental vaccines in the—”

“That’s true. But I also have your mother’s body in there.”

A silence of great length, as came to pass, was perhaps natural.

“Her dead body?”

“I prefer,” Koo said, “to think of death as a temporary repose in the evolution of the human species. A design flaw, if you will. I know that death is, so to speak, popular, and that virtually every organic individual must live through this rather upsetting transition. I also know that most everyone, excepting the mortally ill who are in a great deal of pain, would prefer to avoid the business of death. I believe that this is a transient condition, and that the advances currently taking place in the medical world suffice to make the condition unnecessary. Consider the illness, Jean-Paul, with which you are suffering now. One of the very difficult to understand features of this illness is that people who are at death’s door, or people who have gone
through
that immemorial door, are able to continue to move and function as though they were not dead at all.”

“So what gave
you
the right to keep Mom’s body in a freezer all these years? Your research?”

“I did not think of what you are referring to as requiring any kind of justification. My area of expertise has been in questions of death and the cellular changes that take place in death and after, and if I believe, as I most certainly do, that this end-stage process is no end at all but is just another opportunity for medical intervention, if I believe that death may therefore be reversed or even cured, then why would I refrain from using every technique available to me to reverse or cure the death of the person who—”

It was true that in the greater part of this speech Koo observed the kind of affable demeanor that he considered the most responsible and professional. He felt that he had nothing to hide, though he had long been hiding the fact that he had nothing to hide, and as a result it was important that he should not become upset, nor express any kind of irritation, because, after all, it had now been many years that his son believed that a simple urn full of leavings from a fireplace was in fact the cremains of his mother, when nothing could have been further from the truth. Koo understood that he needed to give his son the additional time and space that would allow him to feel his feelings, and perhaps these feelings were somehow bound up with his son’s worries about his own mortality, which must have been on his mind owing to his dangerous illness, and yet Koo, coming to the end of the speech, found that suddenly he was himself temporarily distraught, and waves of shame overcame him, and he recognized that he was now doing what no self-respecting man of his age and station should do, which was finding himself unable to continue. His smudged eyeglasses slid from their perch on the bridge of his nose. And there was in Koo a burning sensation, or several kinds of burning sensations, followed by something near to the headache category, almost meningeal.

“You do not understand what this has meant to me, to have her here with me, and to be able to talk with her about the ups and downs, as I have often done. Many nights when you were asleep I spoke with her, and I wrote her many letters, hundreds upon hundreds of letters, and I have had her here with me, when no other woman would keep me company in the lonely adventure that is my work. And often I expected that I would tell you, but then I believed that you would not understand. Now you
must
understand; you can see that I have wept these shameful tears, and you know that my ambitions for your mother may not have been your own wishes, but that they were sincere.”