The Babylon rite

22

The American Christian Hospital, Trujillo, Peru

Dr Andrew Laraway, silver-haired, brisk and archly Bostonian, gazed sympathetically at Jessica.

‘You have no evidence of mercury poisoning, Miss Silverton.’

Jessica knew this. She’d always known this. Before she even got here she’d known this. But she just wanted to be here. To have a reason, however feeble and phoney, to escape from Zana. But she could not escape her fears, even as she ignored them. She had been pestering Laraway to explain her symptoms, even as she wanted to deny them.

‘I understand, Dr Laraway. I’m sorry for wasting your time. Asking all these questions.’

‘You’re not, Jessica, not at all…’ He hesitated, for a moment. ‘But I must ask — why did you come all the way here? I imagine you are aware that cinnabar is inert. After so long.’

‘Yes. I am.’

‘So what is it, Jessica? The mild diabetes we discussed when you were last here?’

‘No. Yes. No.’

An awkward silence intervened. The doctor sighed, delicately, and looked at her. ‘Can I ask you some personal questions, Jessica?’

‘Yes…’

‘You seem to suffer — and this is not meant to be insulting — a notable concern for your health, almost an obsession?’ He sat back, tutted at himself. ‘No, that’s not the mot juste. My sincere apologies. You are not hypochondriac, you are clearly very intelligent, determined, hard-working, even bold. Quite admirable. And yet… there is a hypersensitivity and a gentle neuroticism. Therefore, and before we go on, I’d like to know more about you and your life.’

This was strange, and a little unnerving. She said, ‘All right.’

‘Let’s start with your life now, your profession? How are things professionally? Is there anything in your career that has troubled you?’

Jessica knew she needed to talk about everything that was happening at Zana. But she didn’t want to. So she diverted, as always. ‘My last job was in Calcutta.’ She tried to seek Laraway’s eyes, like a truthful person. ‘That was tough. The anthropology of poverty.’

‘Please explain?’

‘We had to work with… these children, infants even. We had to research these poor kids that actually live under the platform at the railway station. This big British imperial railway station, you know. These street kids live there in utter poverty. They were attacked, molested, abused. I met one boy…’ Jess shook her head. She was being candid now. This memory was brutal. ‘He used to sleep under the platform, with a razor blade under his tongue. He showed me how to do it.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The razor was to ward off attackers: men, abusers. He was eight years old.’

Laraway sighed. ‘The world is too much with us. That’s awful.’

‘But, actually, you know, it wasn’t entirely bleak. There were people helping them, charities. Some of the stories were inspiring. Kids coming from nothing, from this dire poverty, and remaking themselves. The human spirit is really there, everywhere, indomitable. In Calcutta. India. It’s the best and the worst of places.’

The doctor leaned forward. ‘But what about Peru, Jessica? You never talk about what you are doing here.’

Jess didn’t really want to talk about Peru. But maybe, she thought, maybe she needed to talk about it. Maybe the perceptive Dr Laraway was just doing his job, and doing it well, and she needed to be honest.

‘There is something.’ Jessica inhaled, profoundly, as if she was on the stage of the Met and about to sing an aria: and maybe she was.

It took her ten minutes, fifteen, then twenty. But she told him everything. The Moche, the Muchika, the Museo Casinelli, the amputations, the intruder at Zana. Slowly and eloquently she recited the entire and recent demonology of her work in Zana.

At the end, for perhaps the only time in their acquaintanceship, Dr Laraway was entirely silenced.

It took him a long time to respond. ‘My God, that is quite a narrative. That is indubitably extreme. Anyone would be unsettled by such a sequence of events. Really. Astonishing. And very perturbing. I have never heard of the Moche. And this man McLintock. Goodness.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you believe the intrusion was linked to that awful explosion last month, here in Trujillo? The Texaco garage?’

‘Possibly.’

‘What do the police say?’

‘Not much, they’re looking into it. I reckon they think it is a bit far-fetched. Why should anyone be intent on destroying archaeological knowledge? It is bizarre.’

Another silent hiatus. The manioc trucks were hooting in the streets below. Now Laraway swivelled in his chair, and tried a new tack.

‘Very well, then. Now let’s talk about your background. I know some of it, but not all. Your father… ah… died of cancer.’

Jess felt her throat close against the words. This subject. This subject. ‘When I was seven. Yes.’

‘Your mother is still alive?’

‘She lives in Redondo, LA.’

Laraway nodded. Then he picked up, and put down, a pen. ‘You were witness to your father’s decline? I do not wish to sound glib or presumptuous. And I am not a psychologist. However, you must have been quite traumatized?’

Jess tried not to blink too fast. To give anything away. She wanted the Sechura sea fog to slide in through the windows and fill the room and wreath her, wrap her with phantasmic shrouds, hide her away from this.

‘I guess I was… Yep. Yes, of course it did. I was very young. My brother was much older. He took it better. Losing a father that young, like I did, I must, it must always affect a child.’

‘Especially a daughter, vis-a-vis the father.’ Andrew Laraway smiled, distantly. ‘I do understand. My own father lost his father when he was just nine. I believe it affected him all his life. When you lose a parent at an untimely age, it is fundamentally destabilizing, you forever have the sensation that even the world beneath your feet cannot be relied upon. My father used to compare it to living in an earthquake zone, the Pacific rim of the emotions. Like here in Peru!’ He leaned forward, spoke more quietly. ‘Could you describe your father’s symptoms? As much as you remember them? I know it might be hard but it would be beneficial.’

Jessica felt the sick dread of something hideous approaching. Faltering, she gave her answer. For several minutes she recalled, as best she could, her father’s trembling; perhaps a fit; his anger and fear; his terrible decline at the end.

‘I was seven, like I say. Maybe I’ve blocked some of it out, maybe I am totally wrong.’

The next silence was the worst of all.

‘No. I don’t think you are wrong, Miss Silverton.’ Suddenly Andrew Laraway’s expression had gone from avuncular concern to something much, much darker. He cleared his throat. ‘Jessica. This is very difficult to say. I want you to prepare yourself.’

The panic was rising in her throat.

Laraway spoke very softly, his words like a soothing prayer in a silent chapel. ‘I wouldn’t normally do this but you have been demanding answers, any answers-’

‘Go on!’

‘Well. Here it is. The symptoms you describe in your father don’t sound like any cancer I know. They sound like Huntington’s Disease. And that is…’ He took a deep breath, and continued. ‘That is a very evil way to die. It begins, innocently enough, with a slight loss of coordination, maybe an unsteady gait, and… fine trembling in the hands. As the disease advances, the body movements become repetitive and jerky: spasticated; this is accompanied by wasting of the muscles, heart decay, and many other symptoms. Violent episodes, terrible depressions. Then comes the terrible darkness of pure dementia.’ Laraway’s gaze was unblinking. ‘There is, of course, no cure. Moreover, Huntington’s Disease is genetic. Many people who might have inherited the disease actively refuse a genetic test to see whether they are carriers. Why? Because it is incurable — therefore they don’t want to know. Likewise, some parents keep the knowledge of the disease from their children, so their lives won’t be blighted by the fear. As the poet said, “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof”.’

The panic in Jessica’s throat had been replaced by an icy cold. She was swallowing coldness. ‘You think I am a carrier?’

His smile was bleak, yet empathetic. ‘There are certain early indications. You have some symptoms which are otherwise rather contrary. The only way we can know for sure is if you have a genetic test. But that… well that is something many people resist.’

Her heart was pounding now.

‘Do I have all the symptoms?’

‘One of the crucial early presentations is epileptic fits, that’s a clinching diagnostic sign. The beginning of the real decline. You’ve not had any of those?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then we do not know. As I say, only a genetic test can tell us.’ He stood. ‘I am so very sorry. One is never sure whether to impart a frightening and potentially false diagnosis like this… However, you seemed distressed and confused, and very much wanting to know. And now it is up to you to decide. You might also consider calling your mother, and asking for the truth.’

He was reaching out a hand. After delivering this possible death sentence, he was just reaching out a hand.

Jessica stood, and shook his hand.

‘Jess, you must call me any time you like, you must feel free to come here whenever.’

‘Thank you.’

She walked to the door, looking at her feet as she did so. Was she stumbling? She was not stumbling. She was dazed, that was all.

At the door she turned; she had to ask one more question. ‘Dr Laraway, if you were me, would you have the test?’

His smile was sadly sincere. ‘I really don’t know, Jessica, I really don’t know. And that’s the truth.’

Closing the door behind her, she walked past the receptionist and took the elevator to the ground floor.

Outside, the thrumming, grimy, fervent and slummy city seemed the same as ever. Bewilderingly normal and scruffy; and yet everything had changed. Jessica stared at her cellphone. She could maybe call her mother right now and get the truth: did her father have that disease? Had she been lied to, to protect her from the fear? If they had lied to her, the lie was no longer working: she had the fear. She was too scared to even call.

Instead, and for a reason she could not fathom in herself, Jessica took a taxi from the centre of town to the Texaco garage, and the Museo Casinelli. Or where they used to be.

Climbing out of the taxi, she stared. She was glad she had come here. The charred and ruined buildings were a fittingly melancholy sight: a temporary wooden fence had been erected around the shell of the building, but it was rickety and already broken. She could see, through the gaps, the black spars of burned concrete, the spoil heaps of ash and dust.

At first she tried not to think of poor Pablo, down there, consumed in the fire. But she couldn’t resist: maybe she wanted to think of him. Maybe that was a good way to go. Burned to death, a few minutes of pain. Better than months and years of decline and terror, then madness and agony.

Jessica felt sick, right down to her lungs, sick and somehow guilty. Maybe she had brought this on herself. Perhaps she had dug up something horrible, an ancient evil, the god of death and killing.

She had woken the sleeping gods of the Moche, and now they would not be dismissed.