CV

40

After Jacobs, no more of the staff were attacked. Bliss kept up the five-foot rule just the same; it was a nuisance, almost unenforceable, but he could not see what else to do. Patients were still coming in to the hospital annex, five or six a day. About half of them were stewards, and the problem there was serious. Some of the remaining stewards were flatly refusing to work, and Skolnik had been forced to offer them stupendous bonuses.

The horrifying thing was that the parasite had got off the lifeboat in spite of all their precautions. If it could do that, then perhaps everything they thought they knew about it was false. Bliss realized for the first time how much they had all depended on McNulty. Now there was nobody to take the strain but Bliss himself, and he alone knew how inadequate he was.

He saw very clearly that his failure might mean the collapse of civilization. It was all very well to say that bad behavior was due to irrational instincts, but if it weren't for instincts nobody would do anything at all. Nations would break down, the family would break down— Who would get married and have children, for instance, if they were guided only by reason?

So he had to find the way to eliminate the parasite. He knew there must be a way, but although he squeezed his brain like a damp sponge, for the life of him he couldn’t see what it was.

After Emily got out of the hospital, the world began to seem very strange. Things around her were less frightening and at the same time, in some indefinable way, less interesting. The lifeboats, for example, were merely lifeboats and not wells of tenor. She saw now why Jim had been so impatient with her; he could not understand why she was frightened of so many things, and now she could not understand it herself. She was not frightened of Jim, either, and that was a hard thing for both of them to get used to. He looked at her in bafflement sometimes, as if she were a stranger. They were extraordinarily polite to each other. She saw that in a way he missed the old Emily, because that Emily had needed him.

No matter where they went, she never heard the sound of the grocery cart now, and she knew it was gone forever. It was as if a kind of vacuum cleaner had taken the fuzz out of her brain. And she was grateful for that, but she saw now that her fears and delusions had been all she had. Sometimes lying awake at night she tried to summon one of them up again like a familiar old ache. But they were gone, and she didn’t know who she was.

Phil and Rodney Thurston were twins, eighteen years old, red-haired and green-eyed. Phil was the taller one; Rodney was a little heavier and rounder-faced. They were traveling with their father; their mother was dead. The trip, their father said, was a reward for their having graduated from the Stowe School without disgrace and having successfully crammed for Harvard. Phil and Rodney would have preferred a month in Paris, or even Denver. Half the time they walked around with SeeMan headgear on, watching the frantic images on the screen and listening to the earphones. They went to plays and concerts with their father when they had to—the old man was a bear on culture—and commented politely, because if they didn’t he would go into his berserk mode. To each other, in moments of privacy, they said, “Bor-ing.”

When their father collapsed in the Sports Deck Lounge and was carried away to hospital, things began to look up. The new atmosphere of Sea Venture was exciting, and it was wonderful to be absolutely free. At first they only stayed up all night and got drunk on whisky. Later they tried other things.

A branch whipped at his eyes as he stood up, and he jericed away with a feeling of anger and resentment, as if it was somebody’s fault that he hadn’t seen the branch, or had misjudged the distance. It was the kind of feeling that made you go down to City Hall and complain. What was he sore about, that his eyes wouldn’t focus that close? And where was that anyway, in the woods behind his parents’ house, or where?—and when had it happened? It was gone, just that little bit complete in itself but with nothing before or after.

“Put it down over there,” her voice said. “It” was a stoneware jug, sweating cold, and “there” was an enamel-topped table in the potting shed. That was all, a crisp little bit of memory or desire—it could have happened, they had spent a lot of time in that potting shed, but he did not recognize it, had never thought it important enough to save, and he had no idea what came on either side of it. He spoke her name, trying to bring her back, to turn around so he could see her, and at the same time he knew that was all there was: just the coolness of the white jug in his hands, and the voice, unemphatic, not laden with any message—just “Put it down over there.”

He remembered how he had thought he was prepared for Nita’s death, and more than prepared—impatient for it, as an end to her pain and his. When she died, he was unready for the depth of his grief. Grief wasn’t even the word; he did not perceive himself as grieving, or mourning; it was more as if he were trying to come to terms with some inarguable fact that made everything else meaningless.

It was only his work that had pulled him through it, and for months, even after he thought he was over it and was fooling everybody, there would be absolutely unexpected tidal waves of sorrow.

And he had been a better physician for it, after a while, and it had even occurred to him that every doctor who had to deal with people’s pain ought to have to undergo something like this himself, maybe as part of the internship. You couldn’t kill off the intern’s wife, and if he was as poor as most of them he didn’t have one anyway, but you could give him something he greatly desired and let him get used to it and then take it away. That would do something, maybe, for the habit of reducing patients to parts of the body—“this liver,” or “this melanoma,” the way so many doctors did.

He dimly knew that he was a patient himself right now, must be, this' sense of floating around not quite bodiless but almost, and it had the comforting feel of being too sick to go to school when he was a kid, bundled up safe and warm in bed in the little room behind the kitchen, with his mother somewhere out there ready to bring him aspirins and tea. It was that kind of feeling of not having any problems or responsibilities, just having to be sick, which was easy and pleasant to do. And drift from one place to another.

Here now was one of those places in Disneyland or wherever it was, with green stick-people climbing around in their network of spikes the color of mole fur. Their faces weren’t human, but that didn’t bother him the way it had before, it was just interesting, and he knew it would be easier to understand them later on—“when we are all brothers and sisters.”