Across the Spectrum (47 page)

Then she moved into the light and became Mary Cooper. “Doc!”
An exhale, barely audible.

The room was small and close, one bed covered with a faded
quilt under a window and another along the opposite wall, a wooden chest and
the rocking chair where Mary had nursed her babies. The unfinished walls bore
pegs for clothing and a narrow shelf with handmade toys, bits of antler and
smooth-worn green glass.

Jacob remembered Peter as a whirlwind of freckles, impish
grin, always sporting a skinned knee or elbow. Now he’d shrunk, his skin
stretched over sharp-edged bones. Jacob leaned over him, noticing the
fever-bright eyes, the purpling bruise on one temple. Emmanuel Cooper might be
a stern man, but never one to strike his children.

Jacob slid his pack off, took off the coat and folded it
carefully, sat on the bed beside the boy’s legs. The child did not respond.
Jacob touched the pale cheek, felt the heat radiating from the boy’s body. He
pulled the patched quilt up around the thin shoulders.

Relentlessly his mind enumerated the symptoms. Fever,
pallor, easy bruisability. Rapid onset. Age between three and seven. Exposure
to mutagenic agents—who in the entire community had escaped that? He couldn’t
be sure without a microscopic examination of the boy’s blood.

Jacob sat back and ran his fingers over his beard. And if he
were correct, then what? He had a little pancillin left from the last batch
from Sanfran, some cephaloxin for resistant bacterial strains; he could make
tinctures of willow or foxglove or birth-ease for other conditions. Poppy syrup
to numb the pain. Straws, straws in the wind.

We cured leukemia
once.

He knew why no one had sent for him earlier, though he had
once lived as one of them. Now he saw what he had not wanted to see before,
their need to continue without him.

An idea germinated and took root in Jacob’s mind. It might
not work, for the malignancy arose from the bone marrow and not the blood
itself. It might do no more than buy the child a little more time. Victor might
refuse. But what choice did he have but to try?

∞

“Are there more like you?” Jacob asked me. We huddled
around a campfire somewhere near the old Oregon border, him for warmth and me
without any good reason. I had fed earlier on the blood of a chicken which
Jacob had drained and then salted for his own dinner.

The question was one I had been dreading. I could not
understand how Jacob could know what I was, could have seen what he had seen,
and still have no fear of me. And with every one of his interminable questions,
I feared the ending of that innocence.

Some streak of madness urged me to say, “What, should I
create another as cursed as I am?”

“Tell me, who has cursed you?”

I looked away into the night. The only sounds were the faint
crush of the falling embers. Images of the past, like flakes of light, sprang
up behind my eyes. I could not hold them. I no longer remembered a time before
I became evil or what sin placed me forever beyond redemption. I knew only
there had been such a time.

Jacob’s question echoed in my mind. Who had cursed me? Who?
Could it be that I had become only what I believed I must be?

The thought blew away in an instant. I was damned forever;
the priests had sworn it a thousand times over.

“I am what I am,” I said in a voice I hardly knew as my own.

I had had no choice but to drink the blood that changed me
forever. I never knew why the
nosferatu
forced it down my throat, mostly
likely to share his eternal damnation. But what if immortality were a gift
freely offered? What if there were two of us to share the long unbroken nights?

“A long time ago, a very long time ago,” Jacob said, his
voice settling into the musical rhythm of a storyteller’s, “a wise man named
Maimonides wrote that each man is both good and evil, in such balance that
perhaps his very next action could tip the scales and determine his fate. And
if a city contains both good and evil people, in equal proportion, then one
man’s choice might determine its course. And if an entire nation—”

“Stop!” I saw where this story was going. “What has any of
this to do with me?”

“I think it is Maimonides’s choice we all must make. Every
hour, every day. Even me, Victor. Even you.”

∞

Jacob settled on the porch with the children who were too
young to work in the fields. They crowded around him, their eyes shining. He
took each child on his lap in turn. At first they were stiff, for it had been
too long since he was here last. Then they softened to his words and touch. His
mood lifted. Through the afternoon he examined them individually, telling each
his favorite story. Aesop and Moses and Peter Pan.

He thought to continue with the other villagers, the women
who’d stayed behind and the others who returned early to prepare the evening
meal, but he felt too tired. His chest wavered on the border of pain, a
thrumming deep in his bones. He told himself it was only the long night, the
walk down the mountain—no, it was more than that.

This night, it comes
for me?

∞

We came to a town which had lost its doctor and pleaded
with Jacob to stay. There was a hunger in him, a weariness from all those
shiftless years. I saw it in the way he touched the dusty books, the exquisite
care with which he laid out the dead man’s instruments. He set the brass
microscope on the dining room table and lit an alcohol lamp.

I watched as he squeezed a drop of his own blood on a glass
slide. The rank, intoxicating perfume filled me. I held myself very still.

He gestured for me to come nearer. Warmth lingered on the
focusing wheels where he’d touched them. As I squinted through the aperture,
the image jumped and trembled, a phantasm of brilliance.

I sat back in astonishment, for although I knew the lamp
supplied the illumination, in that moment it seemed to me that the blood itself
gave rise to the light.

“Look again,” Jacob said. “Blood is not magic, but tiny
enucleated cells. Corpuscles, they were once called.”

I would have wept then, if I had been able, at the sight of those
swirling discs, pale as damask rose, in their silent, mystical dance. I knew
the darkness of blood—the hunger, the fever, the thousand intimate shades of
death. But of the light of blood, I knew nothing.

It wasn’t until Jacob laid one hand on my shoulder that I
tore myself away. He adjusted the lamp to shine on the pages of the book he
held. “Here is a stem cell, found in the bone marrow. It gives rise to these
immature cells, called erythroblasts, which lose their nuclei as they
synthesize the hemoglobin to carry oxygen to every part of the body. It’s not
so mysterious.”

Not so mysterious.

All through that night, I pored over the books and stared at
the circle of light with its ghostly shapes. I had seen books like this over
the years, the drawings of Vesalius and Michelangelo. They held no interest for
me, beyond a fleeting acknowledgment of the artistry involved.

But this—this orb of light-soaked blood, this remembrance of
the time I had brought healing instead of death—it drew me, excited me, sickened
me.

But Jacob was wrong. It
was
mysterious. Life itself
was mysterious. Mysterious and beautiful and terrible beyond bearing, because I
no longer had a part in it.

∞

Jacob awoke some time later, thirsty but steadier in his
thoughts. A pulse rippled through his chest. He got up, used the outhouse,
washed, and began his work again. The men presented the usual array of badly
healed wounds, minor infections, and arthritis. A cough that might be old
tuberculosis or one of the spore-borne lungrots or only a reaction to harvest
dust. He prescribed, dosed, warned, instructed in exercise and hygiene.

The Cooper parents nodded as Jacob explained his diagnosis.
It didn’t matter to them that he could not be certain. “We don’t want him to
suffer,” Emmanuel Cooper said, his voice rough.

The evening meal, communal because of the ongoing harvest,
was eaten on long tables outside the old farmhouse. Hand-carved wooden
trenchers alternated with stoneware plates, for the kiln was small. The women
served pies of smoked ham and rabbit, potatoes, beans and onions, stewed
apples, cornmeal cakes with honey. A chair instead of the usual benches was
brought up for Jacob.

They all settled in their places and even the children grew
still, watching Jacob with solemn eyes. The coming twilight carried an
expectant hush. Emmanuel Cooper turned to Jacob. “Will you lead us in grace,
Doc?”

Faces turned toward him, sun-reddened and weathered. He had
birthed many of them, treated them, held them when their loved ones died. How
could he throw this honor back in their faces?

“I will lead you,” he said in a scratchy voice. He paused,
waiting for words. Gentle as dew, they came.

“Blessed be Thou, Lord our God, Master of the Universe, who
brings forth bread from the earth. . .”

More, there should be more. His thoughts blurred. Phrases in
Hebrew came to him and blew away again, like dead leaves.

Stillness hung over the table. Jacob’s eyes focused on the
bowed heads. A wave of emotion—tenderness and awe and something he could not
put a name to—swept through him. Tears rose to his eyes; his heart fluttered
like a caged bird.

From the other end of the table, someone murmured, “In
Jesus’s name, Amen.” A moment later, they were laughing and handing round the
platters of food.

∞

Half-drowsing, Jacob sat on a chair drawn up beside the
Cooper boy’s bed. Around him, the house lay still and quiet. The two older
children who usually shared the second bed spent the night with friends so that
he could stay near his patient. From outside came the small noises of the
animals, the barely audible cries of hunting bats.

A soft tap and Victor entered, carrying a leather satchel
and a large pack. He moved warily, his eyes never still. Emmanuel Cooper waited
inside the door. He smelled faintly of cut hay. Jacob laid one hand on his arm
and said, “We will do our best for him.”

Emmanuel Cooper started for the door, every line of his body
expressing reluctance. Teeth glimmered in a fleeting smile. “I’ll pray for
you.” A nod. “Doc, Doc Victor.”

The door closed.

“
Oy.
Did you hear that, Victor? Now you’re included
in his prayers.” Without waiting for a reply, Jacob described the results of
his earlier examination.

Victor listened, his eyes fixed on the boy’s pale face.
“Acute myelogenous leukemia. Diagnosis confirmed by the presence of leukemic
blast cells in peripheral blood smears.”

“Let’s take a look then, you and I.”

Victor’s pack contained the sturdy wooden box which housed
Jacob’s microscope, alcohol lamp and light-focusing mirrors. At Jacob’s command,
Victor set up the apparatus on the clothes chest.

Jacob smeared a drop of the boy’s blood on a clean glass
slide, added stain and a cover slip. Ignoring the ache in his knee, he crouched
beside the chest and positioned the slide on the microscope stage. The eyepiece
showed him a circle of brightness. Then, as he adjusted the fine focus, detail
became apparent—the reddish biconcave discs, a single mature white cell.

He wet his lips as his eyes scanned the field, marking the
primitive, undifferentiated cells which should not be there.

Victor bent over the microscope, adjusting the focus and
scanning the slide. He spent a long time looking. “Those are the blast cells?”

“Yes,” Jacob answered. “They’ll be all through his bone
marrow, crowding out the normal blood-forming elements. Liver, spleen, lymph
nodes, too.”

“The sickness rages in his blood.” Victor knew the technical
terminology; he remembered everything Jacob had taught him, everything he’d
read in the medical texts. It was not his intellect which responded so
powerfully to the boy’s illness.

“Do you remember how you cured me?” Jacob asked. “How my
blood flowed into your body and then you reversed it? My blood—through your
body—and back to mine. Like dialysis, only better. Deeper. Permanent.”

“Dialysis,” Victor said, as if tasting the word. “You mean
to try it with this child. You think it will work?”

“I think we must find out.”

Victor placed one hand on the faded quilt, not quite
touching the boy’s arm. “Why should I do such a thing?”

“You must answer that question yourself,” Jacob said.
Even
as I must.

“You mean Maimonides’s choice? You mean the single action
which will tip the balance between good and evil in my soul?” His voice
roughened into a whisper. “There is no balance, Jacob.”

Behind Victor’s quiet statement, Jacob thought he heard the
echoes of despair. “No balance, Victor?” he said gently. “Yesterday that might
have been true. But today or tomorrow, perhaps there will be.”

“There
will
be? You mean that if I save this boy’s
life now, it will somehow make a difference?”

Jacob laid one hand on Victor’s shoulder. “Was it evil to
save my life?”

“I had no choice. Not that first time.”

“And afterwards?”

Victor looked up with his lightless eyes. “That was many
years ago. And this boy, what is he to me?”

Jacob recalled the moment he truly acknowledged what Victor
was. He had asked himself almost the same question,
What is this creature to
me? He is not a Jew. He is not even a man.
He’d spent the rest of his life
searching for the answer.

“What you are to me, or I to you. What any one of us is to
another, a fellow human being in need of our help.”

With feral quickness, Victor leapt to his feet. His lips
drew back over his teeth and his face went ashen. His legs trembled. He cried
out, “
I cannot change what I am!”