“Please.”
“You have received this antidote yourself?”
Shadrach replies uneasily, after a moment’s consideration. “Yes. I have.”
“Ah. Because you are a doctor. Because we must keep the healers alive. I understand. It seemed to me you must have the antidote. There is something about you; you are like a man apart from us. You do not wake up every day wondering if this is the day when the rot will start in you. Ah. And someday we will have the antidote too.”
“Yes. Someday. The government is working on increasing the supply.” The lie sours his mouth. “I wish you could have your first injection today.”
“It is not important for me,” Das says calmly. “I am old and I have enjoyed good health, and my life has been a happy one even in the most troubled times. If the rot begins in me tomorrow, I will be ready for it. But my sons, and the sons of my sons, I would spare them. What do old wars mean to them? Why should they die horrible deaths for the sake of nations that were forgotten before they were born? I want them to live. My family has been in Kenya for a hundred fifty years, since we first came from Bombay, and we have been happy here, and why should we perish now? Sad, Doctor, sad. This curse on mankind. Will we ever cleanse ourselves of what we have done to ourselves?”
Shadrach shrugs. There is no way to comb the murderous new gene out of the genetic package; but in theory a permanent antidote is possible, a hybrid DNA that can be integrated into the contaminated genes to absorb or detoxify the lethal genetic material. Somewhere in the PRC organization they are at work on such an antidote, Shadrach has been told. Of course, the rumor may be false. The research group may be only a myth. The permanent antidote itself may be only a myth.
He says, “I think these last twenty years have been a purge that mankind necessarily had to undergo. A punishment for accumulated idiocies and foolishnesses, perhaps. The whole history of the twentieth century is like an arrow pointing straight to the Virus War and its aftermath. But I believe we’ll survive the ordeal.”
“And things will be again as they once were?”
Shadrach smiles. “I hope not. If we go back to where we were, we’ll only arrive again eventually at the same place we’ve reached now. And we may not survive the next version of the Virus War. No, I think we’ll build a better world out of the ruins, a quieter, less greedy world. It’ll take time. I’m not sure how we’re going to accomplish it. Many bad things will happen first. Millions will die needless, horrible deaths. But eventually—eventually—the suffering will be over, the dying will be done, and those who remain will live in happiness again.”
“How refreshing to hear such optimism.”
“Am I an optimist? I’ve never thought of myself that way. A realist, maybe. But not an optimist. How strange suddenly to find myself an apostle of faith and good cheer!”
“Your eyes were glowing when you said what you said. You were already living in that better world as you spoke. Do you want to withdraw your prophecy? Please, no. You believe that that happier world will come.”
“I hope it’ll come,” Shadrach says soberly.
“You know it will.”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps I sounded sure a moment ago, but—” He shakes his head. He makes a determined effort to recapture that unexpected strain of positive thinking that had come so surprisingly from him a moment ago. “Yes,” he says. “Things will get better.” Already there is something forced about it, but he goes on. “No trend continues downward forever. The organ-rot can be defeated. The smaller population that exists now will be able to live comfortably in a world that couldn’t support the numbers of people who lived before the War. Yes. A purge, an ordeal by fire, a necessary corrective to old abuses, leading to better things. Dawn after the long darkness.”
“Ah. You are an optimist!”
“Perhaps I am. Sometimes.”
“I would like to see a man like you as the leader of that new world,” Bhishma Das exclaims rapturously.
Shadrach recoils. “No, not me. Let me live in that world, yes. But don’t ask me to govern it.”
“You will change your mind when the moment comes. They will offer you the government, Doctor, because you are wise and good, and you will accept. Because you are wise and good.” Das pours more tea. His naive faith is touching. Shadrach takes a sip; then he has a sudden morbid vision of Bhishma Das, a year or two from now, crying out in surprise and delight as the new Chairman of the Permanent Revolutionary Committee appears for the first time on his television screen, and the face of the new Chairman is the finely wrought brown-skinned face of that wise and good American doctor who once visited his store. Shadrach coughs and sputters and nearly spills his cup. The face will be the face of Dr. Mordecai, yes, but the mind behind the warm searching eyes will be the cold dark mind of Genghis Mao. Shadrach has almost managed to forget Project Avatar, this day in Nairobi. Almost.
“I should be going,” Shadrach says. “It’s late in the day. You’ll want to close the shop.”
“Stay awhile. There is no hurry.” Then: “I invite you to my home for dinner this evening.”
“I’m afraid I can’t—”
“Another engagement? Oh, how regrettable. We would provide a fine curry in your honor. We would open a fine wine. Some close friends—the most stimulating members of the Hindu community, professional people, teachers, philosophers—intelligent conversation—ah, yes, yes, a delightful evening, if you would grace our home!”
A temptation. Shadrach will dine alone, otherwise, at his hotel, a stranger in this strange city, lonely and in peril. But no: impossible. One of those stimulating Hindu professional persons will surely ask him where he lives, what kind of doctoring he does, and either he must lie, which is repugnant to him, or he must let it all spill out—member of privileged dictatorial elite, physician to the terrifying Genghis Mao, etc., etc., and so much for his new reputation as a humanitarian benefactor: the truth about him will sicken the friends of Bhishma Das and humiliate poor Das himself. Shadrach mumbles sincere-sounding excuses and regrets. As he edges to the door, Das follows him, saying, “At least accept a gift from me, a remembrance of this charming hour.” The merchant glances hastily about his shelves, searching among the spears, the beaded necklaces, the wooden statuettes, everything apparently too crude, too flimsy, too inexpensive, or too awkwardly large to make a fitting offering for such a distinguished guest, and it seems for an instant that Shadrach will get out of the place ungifted; but at the last moment Das snatches up a small antelope horn in which a hole has been drilled at the pointed end and plugged with wax. A cupping horn, Das explains, used by a tribe near the southern border to draw pain and evil spirits from the bodies of the sick: one applies the cup to the skin, sucks, creates a vacuum, seals it with the wax plug. He urges it on Shadrach, saying it is an appropriate gift for a healer, and Shadrach, after a conventional show of reluctance, accepts gladly. He has no East African medical devices in his collection. “They still use these,” Das informs him. “They use them very much just now, to draw forth the organ-rot spirit.” He bows Shadrach from the store, telling him again and again what an honor his visit has been, what pleasure has come from hearing the doctor’s words of hope.
On the seven-block journey back to the hotel Shadrach counts four dead bodies in the streets, and one that is not quite dead, but will be soon.
21
In the morning he flies onward, toward Jerusalem. He is aware of the curve of the planet below him, the enormous belly of the world, and he is amazed anew by its complexity, its richness, this globe that holds Athens and Samarkand, Lhasa and Rangoon, Timbuktu, Benares, Chartres, Ghent, all the fascinating works of vanishing mankind, and all the natural wonders, the Grand Canyon, the Amazon, the Himalayas, the Sahara—so much, so much, for one small cosmic lump, such variety, such magnificent multitudinousness. And it is all his, for whatever time remains before Genghis Mao calls upon him to yield up the world and go.
He is not, like Bhishma Das, ready
to go whenever his marching orders arrive. The world, now that he is again out in the midst of it, seems very beautiful, and he has seen so little of it. There are mountains to climb, rivers to cross, wines to taste. He who has been spared from organ-rot does not want to succumb to another man’s lust for immortality. Shadrach’s passivity has fallen from him: he does not accept the fate in store for him. Bhishma Das called him an optimist, a wise and good man whose face glows when he speaks of the better days that are coming, and though that was not how Shadrach had ever seen himself, he is pleased that Das saw him that way, pleased that those unexpectedly hopeful words tumbled from his lips. It is agreeable to be thought of as a man of sunny spirit, to be a source of hope and faith. He tries the image on and likes the fit. It is a little like smiling when one is not in a smiling mood, and feeling the smile work its way inward from the facial muscles to the soul: why not smile, why not live in the hope of a glorious resurrection? It costs nothing. It makes others happier. If one is proven wrong, as no doubt one will be, one has at least had the reward of having dwelled for a time in a warm little sphere of inner light rather than in dank dark despair.
But it is hard to put much conviction into one’s optimism when the threat of immediate doom hangs over one. I must deal somehow with the problem of Project Avatar, Shadrach resolves.
December 8, 2001
So I am not to suffer the organ-rot after all. Today I had my first dose of Roncevic’s drug. They say that if your smears have shown no trace of the virus in its active state before your first injection, you are safe, but the antidote can do nothing for you if the thing has already entered into the lethal phase. My smears were clean: I am safe. I never doubted that I would be spared. I was not meant to perish in the Virus War, but rather to endure, to survive the general holocaust and enter into my own true time. Which now has come. “You will live a hundred years,” Roncevic said to me this morning. Does he mean a hundred more years? Or a hundred all told? In which case I have only about twenty-five years left. Not enough, not enough.
No matter what, I’ll outlive poor Roncevic. He has the rot already. It glistens and blazes in his belly. How hard he worked to develop his drug, how eager he was to save himself! But not in time. The disease went active in him too soon, and he will go. He goes, I stay: he plays his appointed role in the drama and leaves the stage. While I live on, perhaps another hundred years. My physical vitality has always been extraordinary. No doubt my bodily energies are of superior order, for here I am, past seventy, with the vigor of a young man. Resisting disease, deflecting fatigue. They say that Chairman Mao, when he was past seventy, swam eight miles in the Yangtze in an hour and five minutes. Swimming is of no interest to me; yet I know that if there were need, I could swim ten miles in those sixty-five minutes; I could swim twenty.
Jerusalem is colder than Shadrach expects—almost as chilly as Ulan Bator on this late spring morning—and smaller, too, amazingly compact for a place where so much history has been made. He settles in at the International, a sprawling old mid-twentieth-century hotel stunningly located high on the Mount of Olives. From his balcony he has a superb view of the old walled city. Awe and excitement rise in him as he looks out upon it. Those two great glittering domes down there—his map tells him the huge gold one is the Dome of the Rock, on the site of Solomon’s Temple, and the silver one is the Aqsa Mosque—and that formidable battlemented wall, and the ancient stone towers, and the tangle of winding streets, all speak to him of human endurance, of the slow steady tides of history, the arrivals and departures of monarchs and empires. The city of Abraham and Isaac, of David and Solomon, the city Nebuchadnezzar destroyed and Nehemiah rebuilt, the city of the Maccabees, of Herod, the city where Jesus suffered and died and rose from the dead, the city where Mohammed, in a vision, ascended into heaven, the city of the Crusaders, the city of legend, of fantasy, of pilgrimages, of conquests, of layer upon layer of event, layers deeper and more intricate than those of Troy—that little city of low buildings of tawny stone just across the swooping valley from him counsels him that apocalyptic hours are followed by rebirth and reconstruction, that no disaster is eternal. The mood that came upon him when he was with Bhishma Das has survived the journey out of Africa. Jerusalem is truly a city of light, a city of joy. He remembers his hymn-singing great-aunts Ellie and Hattie clapping their hands and chanting—
Jerusalem, my happy home
When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end?
Thy joys when shall I see?
—and suddenly he is again a boy of six or seven, wearing tight blue trousers and a starched white shirt, standing between those two colossal black women in their Sunday finery, singing with them, clapping his hands, humming or making up words where he does not know the right ones, oh, yes, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, lead me unto Jerusalem, Lord! That promised land, long ago, far away, that city of prophets and kings, Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest, and here he is at its gates, trembling with anticipation. He calls for a cab.
But when he actually enters the city, passing through St. Stephen’s Gate and stepping forth onto the Via Dolorosa, that romance and fantasy begins unexpectedly to evaporate, and he wonders how he could have babbled so blithely to Das of the good times a-coming. Jerusalem is undeniably picturesque, yes—but to call a place picturesque is to damn it—with its narrow steep streets and sturdy age-old masonry, its crowded stalls piled high with pots and pans, fish and apples, pastries and flayed lambs, its scents of strange spices, its hawk-faced old men in Bedouin regalia, but a cold wind whistles through the filthy alleyways and everyone he sees, children and beggars and merchants and shoppers and porters and workmen alike, has that same look of dull despair, that same hollow-eyed broken-souled expression that is the mark not of endurance but of anticipated defeat and surrender: The Assyrians are coming, the Romans are coining, the Persians are coming, the Saracens are coming, the Turks are coming, the organ-rot is coming, and we will be crushed, we will be everlastingly annihilated.
It is impossible to escape the twenty-first century even within these medieval walls. Climbing toward Golgotha, Shadrach sees the standard mourning poster of Mangu pasted up all over, the bland young face against the brilliant yellow background. Mangu’s presence was not absent from Nairobi, naturally, but in that spacious and airy city the posters were less oppressive, easily obscured by the dazzle of the bougainvilleas and the jacarandas. Here the heavy stone walls sweat garish images of Mangu over passageways barely wide enough for three to go abreast, yellow blotches impossible to escape, and, seeing them, one feels the malign hand of Genghis Mao passing over the city, imposing on it an unfelt grief for the dead viceroy. Genghis Mao is more immediately present, too, the familiar sinister leathery features glowering from breeze-bellied banners at every major intersection. The natives take these alien images as casually as, no doubt, they once took the posters and banners of Nebuchadnezzar, Ptolemy, Titus, Chosroes, Saladin, Suleiman the Magnificent, and all the other transient intruders, but to Shadrach these reduplicated Mongol faces loll against his consciousness like so many leaden bells counting out his dwindling hours.
Then too the organ-rot is here. Not as conspicuously as in Nairobi, perhaps, for on the broad avenues of that city the terminal cases walked alone, stumbling and lurching through private zones of vacant space. Old Jerusalem is too congested for that. But there is no scarcity of victims, shivering and sweating and groping along the Via Dolorosa. Occasionally one halts, sags against a wall, digs his fingers between the stones for support. The Stations of the Cross are indicated by marble plaques set into walls: here Jesus received the cross, here He fell the first time, here He encountered His Mother, and so on. And here, up the Via Dolorosa, go the dying, lost in their own crucifixions. As in Nairobi, they stare without seeming to see. But a few stretch their hands toward him as if imploring his blessing. This is a town where miracles have not been uncommon, and the black stranger is a man of dignity and stature: who knows, pe
rhaps a new Savior walks these streets? But Shadrach has no miracles to offer, none. He is helpless. He is as much a dead man as they are, though he still walks about. As they do.
He feels much too conspicuous, too tall, too black, too alien, too healthy. Beggars, mostly children, cluster about him like flies. “Dol-lar,” they implore. “Dol-lar, dol-lar, dol-lar!” He carries no coins—he uses a government credit planchet to cover all expenses—and so there is no way he can get rid of them. He scoops one five-year-old into the air, hoping to make a piggyback ride serve in lieu of baksheesh, but the expression of terror in the child’s huge eyes is so pitiful that Shadrach quickly puts him down, and kneels, trying to give comfort. The child’s fright passes at once: “Dol-lar,” he demands. Shadrach shrugs and the child spits at him and runs. There are too many children here, too many everywhere, unattended, running in packs through the cities of the world. They are orphans, running wild, a feral generation. Shadrach has seen Donna Labile’s demographic surveys: the worst impact of the organ-rot has fallen upon those who would now be between the ages of twenty-five and forty, Shadrach’s own contemporaries, those who were children during the Virus War. Slower to succumb than their parents were, they survived into adulthood—just long enough, most of them, to marry and bring forth young; then they died, having seeded the world with little savages. The PRC has begun to establish camps for these abandoned children, but they are not much more attractive than prisons, and the system is not working well.
It is too much for Shadrach—the fierce children, the woeful staggerers, the dirt, the unfamiliar density of the populace that throngs this tiny walled city. There is no way to escape the overwhelming sadness of the place. He should never have entered it; it would have been better by far to look out from his hotel balcony and think romantic thoughts of Solomon and Saladin. He is pushed, prodded, pawed, and elbowed; harsh-sounding things are said to him in languages he does not understand; he is beleaguered by offers to buy his clothing, to sell him jewelry, to take him on tours of the great religious sites. Without the help of guides he makes his way to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a grimy and graceless building, but he does not go in, for some kind of pitched battle seems to be under way at its main entrance between priests of different sects, who shout and shake fists and tug one another’s beards and shred one another’s cassocks. Turning aside, he finds, just back of the church, a busy bazaar—more accurately a flea market—where sherds and tatters of the former era are for sale: broken radios, antique television tubes, outboard engines, a miscellany of gears and wheels and cameras and electric shavers and telephones and pumps and gyroscopes and vacuum cleaners and batteries and lasers and gauges and tape recorders and calculators and microscopes and phonographs and washing machines and prisms and amplifiers, all the debris of the affluent twentieth century washed up on this strange shore. Everything is seemingly broken or defective, but the traders are doing a brisk business anyway. Shadrach is unable even to guess what uses these remnants and fragments may now be finding in the Palestinian hinterlands. He actually spies something he wants for his own medical collection, a gleaming little ultramicrotome once used to prepare tissue sections for the electron microscope, but when he produces his credit planchet rather than haggle, the trader merely gives him a blank, sullen stare. The PRC has decreed that government planchets must be accepted as legal tender everywhere, but the old Arab, after examining the glossy strip of plastic without much interest, hands it silently back to Shadrach and turns away. There is a Citpol at the edge of the marketplace who appears to be watching the aborted transaction. Shadrach could call the policeman over and get him to make the trader honor the planchet, but he decides against it; perhaps there will be unforeseeable complications, even dangers, and he does not want to attract attention in this place. He abandons the microtome and walks off to the south, through quieter streets, a residential district.