‘Well?’ asked the doctor.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Charles, after a time. ‘Do germs ever get big? I mean in biology class they told us about one-celled animals, amoebas and things, and how, millions of years ago, they got together until there was a bunch and they made the first body. And more and more cells got together and got bigger and then finally maybe there was a fish and finally here we are, and all we are is a bunch of cells that decided to get together, to help each other out. Isn’t that right?’ Charles wet his feverish lips.
‘What’s all this about?’ The doctor bent over him.
‘I’ve got to tell you this. Doctor, oh. I’ve got to!’ he cried. ‘What would happen, oh just pretend, please pretend, that just like in the old days, a lot of microbes got together and wanted to make a bunch, and reproduced and made more –’
His white hands were on his chest now, crawling towards his throat.
‘And they decided to take over a person!’ cried Charles.
‘Take over a person?’
‘Yes, become a person. Me, my hands, my feet! What if a disease somehow knew how to kill a person and yet live after him?’
He screamed.
The hands were on his neck.
The doctor moved forward, shouting.
At nine o’clock the doctor was escorted out to his carriage by the mother and father, who handed him up his bag. They conversed in the cool night wind for a few minutes. ‘Just be sure his hands are kept strapped to his legs,’ said the doctor. ‘I don’t want him hurting himself!’
‘Will he be all right, Doctor?’ The mother held to his arm a moment.
He patted her shoulder. ‘Haven’t I been your family physician for thirty years? It’s the fever, he imagines things.’
‘But those bruises on his throat, he almost choked himself.’
‘Just you keep him strapped; he’ll be all right in the morning.’
The horse and carriage moved off down the dark September road.
At three in the morning, Charles was still awake in his small back room. The bed was damp under his head and his back. He was very warm. Now he no longer had any arms or legs, and his body was beginning to change. He did not move on the bed, but looked at the vast blank ceiling space with insane concentration. For a while he had screamed and thrashed but now he was weak and hoarse from it, and his mother had gotten up a number of times to soothe his brow with a wet towel. Now he was silent, his hands strapped to his legs.
He felt the walls of his body change, the organs shift, the lungs catch fire like burning bellows of pink alcohol. The room was lighted up as with the flickerings of a hearthplace.
Now he had no body. It was all gone.
It was under him, but it was filled with a vast pulse of some burning, lethargic drug. It was as if a guillotine had neatly lopped off his head and his head lay shining on a midnight pillow while the body, below, still alive, belonged to somebody else. The disease had eaten his body and from the eating had reproduced itself in feverish duplicate. There were the little hand-hairs and the fingernails and the scars and the toenails and the tiny mole on his right hip, all done again in perfect fashion.
I am dead, he thought. I’ve been killed, and yet I live. My body is dead, it is all disease and nobody will know. I will walk around and it will not be me, it will be something else. It will be something all bad, all evil, so big and so evil it’s hard to understand or think about. Something that will buy shoes and drink water and get married some day maybe and do more evil in the world than has ever been done.
Now the warmth was stealing up his neck, into his cheeks, like a hot wine. His lips burned, his eyelids, like leaves, caught fire. His nostrils breathed out blue flame, faintly, faintly.
This will be all, he thought. It’ll take my head and my brain and fix each eye and every tooth and all the marks in my brain, and every hair and every wrinkle in my ears, and there’ll be nothing left of me.
He felt his brain fill with a boiling mercury. He felt his left eye clench in upon itself and, like a snail, withdraw, shift. He was blind in his left eye. It no longer belonged to him. It was enemy territory. His tongue was gone, cut out. His left cheek was numbed, lost. His left ear stopped hearing. It belonged to someone else now. This thing that was being born, this mineral thing replacing the wooden log, this disease replacing healthy animal cell.
He tried to scream and he was able to scream loud and high and sharply in the room, just as his brain flooded down, his right eye and right ear were cut out, he was blind and deaf, all fire and terror, all panic, all death.
His scream stopped before his mother ran through the door to his side.
It was a good, clear morning, with a brisk wind that helped carry doctor, horse and carriage along the road to halt before the house. In the window above, the boy stood, fully dressed. He did not wave when the doctor waved and called, ‘What’s this? Up? My God!’
The doctor almost ran upstairs. He came gasping into the bedroom.
‘What are you doing out of bed?’ he demanded of the boy. He tapped his thin chest, took his pulse and temperature. ‘Absolutely amazing! Normal. Normal, by God !’
‘I shall never be sick again in my life,’ declared the boy, quietly, standing there, looking out of the wide window. ‘Never.’
‘I hope not. Why, you’re looking fine, Charles.’
‘Doctor?’
‘Yes, Charles?’
‘Can I go to school now?’ asked Charles.
‘Tomorrow will be time enough. You sound positively eager.’
‘I am. I like school. All the kids. I want to play with them and wrestle with them, and spit on them and play with the girls’ pigtails and shake the teacher’s hand, and rub my hands on all the cloaks in the cloakroom, and I want to grow up and travel and shake hands with people all over the world, and be married and have lots of children, and go to libraries and handle books and – all of that I want to!’ said the boy, looking off into the September morning. ‘What’s the name you called me?’
‘What?’ The doctor puzzled. ‘I called you nothing but Charles.’
‘It’s better than no name at all, I guess,’ Charles shrugged.
‘I’m glad you want to go back to school,’ said the doctor.
‘I really anticipate it,’ smiled the boy. ‘Thank you for your help, Doctor. Shake hands.’
‘Glad to.’
They shook hands gravely, and the clear wind blew through the open window. They shook hands for almost a minute, the boy smiling up at the old man and thanking him.
Then, laughing, the boy raced the doctor downstairs and out to his carriage. His mother and father followed for the happy farewell.
‘Fit as a fiddle!’ said the doctor. ‘Incredible!’
‘And strong,’ said the father. ‘He got out of his straps himself during the night. Didn’t you, Charles?’
‘Did I?’ said the boy.
‘You did! How?’
‘Oh,’ the boy said, ‘that was a long time ago.’
‘A long time ago!’
They all laughed, and while they were laughing, the quiet boy moved his bare foot on the sidewalk and brushed against a number of red ants that were scurrying about on the sidewalk.
Secretly, his eyes shining, while his parents chatted with the old man, he saw the ants hesitate, quiver, and lie still on the cement. He knew they were cold now.
‘Good-bye!’
The doctor drove away, waving.
The boy walked ahead of his parents. As he walked he looked away towards the town and began to hum ‘School Days’ under his breath.
‘It’s good to have him well again,’ said the father.
‘Listen to him. He’s so looking forward to school!’
The boy turned quietly. He gave each of his parents a crushing hug. He kissed them both several times.
Then, without a word, he bounded up the steps into the house.
In the parlour, before the others entered, he quickly opened the birdcage, thrust his hand in, and petted the yellow canary, once.
Then he shut the cage door, stood back, and waited.
Referent
ROBY MORRISON fidgeted. Walking in the tropical heat he heard the wet thunder of waves on the shore. There was a green silence on Orthopaedic Island.
It was the year 1997, but Roby did not care.
All around him was the garden where he prowled, all ten years of him. This was Meditation Hour. Beyond the garden wall, to the north, were the High I.Q. Cubicles where he and the other boys slept in special beds.
With morning they popped up like bottle-corks, dashed into showers, gulped food, and were sucked down vacuum-tubes half across the island to Semantics School. Then to Physiology. After Physiology he was blown back underground and released through a seal in the great garden wall to spend this silly hour of meditative frustration, as prescribed by the island Psychologists.
Roby had his opinion of it. ‘Damned silly.’
Today, he was in furious rebellion. He glared at the sea, wishing he had the sea’s freedom to
