Across the Spectrum (48 page)

Weariness swept through Jacob. He felt worn out with a
lifetime’s struggle, as if he had given all that was in him to give. He turned
and walked to the door.

Victor started to follow him, then paused, as if hesitant.
Something shifted behind the darkness of his eyes, something disused and
half-forgotten. He turned, glanced down at the boy. With his free hand, he
brushed the boy’s hair back from his forehead and caressed his cheek. For an
instant, Jacob caught the expression on Victor’s face. What he saw there was
neither hunger nor desire, but the faintest shadow of hope.

Without a word, Victor opened the leather bag so that the
lantern lit its contents, needles wrapped in fine boiled cloth, lengths of
precious surgical tubing, disinfectant. Setting aside the bag of IV glucose
water, its use-date long expired, he began laying out the transfusion
equipment. He seemed to have forgotten Jacob’s presence.

The sleeping boy didn’t stir as Victor punctured his veins
and then his own, attached the tubing to the needles and checked for air
bubbles. Then Victor lay down and began slowly, rhythmically, to clench and
open his fist.

Jacob stood by the door and watched, but he could not bring
himself to lift the wooden latch. He lingered at the very edge of the light,
his eyes held by the pool of brightness cast by the lantern. Life seemed to
have gone on beyond him, as if it possessed a momentum of its own; he felt it
slipping through his fingers.

∞

Jacob woke to the clatter of goats. He pulled his coat
over his shoulders, shivering in the mild morning air. His joints ached and his
eyes stung as if from too little sleep. He felt a longing to be back in his own
house, away from all the noise and bustle.

The boy’s fever was down. He stirred and asked for breakfast
as Jacob re-examined him and called the parents in. People came by in response
to news spread by the older Cooper boys. They shook Jacob’s hand. He tried to
tell them about remissions and relapses and placebo effects.

What did it matter, he asked himself, if these country
people did not grasp the niceties of prognosis? They knew the taste and scent
of hope.

Jacob drank from the metal cup which hung beside the outdoor
pump. He took off his coat and folded it, noticing the shiny cuffs, the bits of
hair and dust, the grime along the collar. It smelled like an old man’s coat.

The day filled with light, the clouds thin and hazy.
Brightness drew him onward, up the trail to his mountain. He was already nine
parts gone into the hills, with only his physical body yet to follow. One step
and then another, he plodded and trudged, slowing to catch his breath, but
never stopping.

∞

His feet followed the trail out of old habit, but as he
went on, the familiar landmarks seemed increasingly wild and exotic, as if he
had somehow strayed across unimaginable distances, across centuries as well as
miles. He might be journeying with Moses out of Egypt, with the sun pouring
over his shoulders and the sky stretching overhead.

He thought of the medical instruments which he’d left behind.
There they would remain, safe, for Victor to find. It seemed fitting that he
set forth with no baggage, no provisions, alone into the wilderness.

Victor. He should have prepared him better or done more so
that the townspeople would accept him. He should not have held on so long.

At moments he seemed to pass through the steepening hills
without a trace. Hawks pierced the bright sky, lizards sunned themselves on
rocks, insects whirred. Sweat beaded his face. His breath came high and fast,
too fast.

Pain crept through his chest, tightening like a wire net
over his left shoulder and arm. Panting, he sat down on the tufts of dried
grass that lined the path. The angina would pass, he told himself, unbelieving
his own words. The warm air turned chill and the sky dimmed. His left hand
trembled. Then hillside slipped and faded.

∞

Jacob awoke in his own bed. Candles, his precious Sabbath
candles, burned on the nearby table. He thought he had never seen anything as
wondrous and as fragile as their flickering light.

Victor had drawn one of the benches beside the bed. His face
was very pale. He held a small knife in his hands, one Jacob had never seen
before. The metal glinted; it looked very sharp.

“You have run out of time,” Victor said. “It must be now, or
you will truly die and nothing I can do will bring you back.”

Jacob opened his mouth. For a moment, nothing came out, no
words, no breath. He shook his head.

“Why do you persist in this folly?” Victor sounded more
desperate than angry. “It’s not a sin—you must see that. The exchange of blood
between brothers is sacred, an ancient and honorable tradition. Listen to me!
The priests of my homeland make blood out of wine—Christ’s holy blood, they
call it. They make it every day and thrice on Sundays. If they can do that with
their words and hand-wavings, then why can’t you turn my blood into holy wine?”

Jacob reached out, grasped the hand that held the knife. It
was like trying to hold steel with paper. “It would still be blood.”

Victor freed himself from Jacob’s grasp and, with a single
movement, slashed across his own wrist. Black fluid welled up along the cut.

“You need not die,” Victor said. “Even now, you need not
die. Why can’t you accept my gift, even as I accepted yours?”

Jacob lay back. Night closed in around him and cold seeped
into his marrow. He remembered another story his own father had told him. Once,
a long time ago, wise and holy men had asked God to put an end to death. God
had agreed, but on this condition: that everyone would remain forever exactly
as they were. That there would be no more death, but no more birth, no youth,
no discovery, no first awakening of love.

No moment of breathless silence beneath the stars.

Jacob had never been able to understand why the wise men had
chosen death when every instinct urged otherwise. Perhaps God had been right
all along. For something new to be born into the world, something old must
pass.

Victor put down the knife. His hair swept back from a
widow’s peak to fall around his face like a mourner’s shawl. Within his endless
eyes, a flicker of light battled against shadow.

“I shall remember you, Jacob Rosenberg, you stubborn old
Jew. Every time I make Maimonides’s choice, every time I go among those people
to heal them, every time I turn toward life, then shall I remember you.”

Victor picked up Jacob’s hand in his marble-smooth fingers.
For the first time, his touch felt warm and Jacob realized that was because his
own flesh had grown so cold. Jacob’s sight went milky, as if the color had
bleached out of the candlelight.

“Yis-gadal
ve-yis-kadash she-may rabbo be-lmo deeve-ro chiroosay . . . “

Slowly, but without any hesitation, Victor began reciting
the
Kaddish
, the prayer for the dead. Jacob had never spoken it aloud,
for the ritual required a community. Over the centuries, the words had not
changed—not Hebrew but Aramaic, from the time of the Babylonian captivity.
Victor might have heard it in a Warsaw ghetto, a Palestinian oasis, a New York
cemetery, engraved forever on his perfect memory. The same phrases of faith and
continuation might have been spoken anywhere, were still being spoken
everywhere.

“Magnified and sanctified be His great name in the world
which He created . . . “

Jacob’s lips moved with the words, his voice an echo to
Victor’s, yet somehow it sounded as if there were other voices joined to
theirs, spilling out of the room over the hillside. Their music filled him
utterly. He felt an answering presence, a pressure growing deep within him,
strangely painless, like an immense bubble pushing outward.

“May He who makes peace in the heavens, make peace for us . . .
“

Galactic light inundated the bubble, each mote of brilliance
apart and separate, each effortlessly bound to the swirling immensity. In his
very heart and core, the last stubborn stronghold opened itself, released its
grasp. The light swept through him, fading and ecstatic with the final
whispered
Amen
.

I love this story for a lot of reasons. It was the story I
wrote during my first week at Clarion West and was the first one of my Clarion
stories to sell. I also love that I predicted the economic crash during a boom
time—it’s probably the closest thing to predictive SF I’ll ever write. But
mostly I love it because it tells a story about why guns are not the solution
to most problems, even violent ones. I didn’t start out with the moral when I
wrote it—I started out with the man, the boy, and the gun—but it worked its way
into the story, which pleased me enormously.

∞ ∞ ∞

“Yeah, it’s a great gun, all right. Fifth generation Uzi.
Light, compact. And never jams.” I took the gun off the shelf, handed it to the
kid.

As he reached for it, his dirty sweatshirt rode up, exposing
a knife handle in the waistband of his jeans. He grabbed the gun quickly and
tugged his shirt down, glancing over at me to see whether I’d noticed the
knife.

I tried to look as if I hadn’t.

The kid—he might have been sixteen—aimed the gun at the tiny
window at the top of the basement wall. “Money in the bank,” he said.

When I was his age I’d have said “Far out.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Back in ninety-nine when I bought it I
figured it made me a real man, that nobody’d ever mess with me again. Goes to
show the difference a few years can make.”

He handed it back, reluctantly, and slumped down into the
orange easy chair I’d found abandoned on the street a couple of months ago. His
right hand rested at his waist and played with the edge of his shirt. He hadn’t
told me his name.

I laid the gun casually on the table, and opened the bottle
of whisky I’d brought home with me. The label said it contained Scotch, but I
didn’t much think so when I poured it into a cracked mug and a yellow plastic
glass. It looked wrong, smelled even wronger. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have touched
anything but Macallan single malt. Like I said, things change.

I handed the boy the glass. He took it with his left hand.
His face wore a puzzled frown. He’d been looking at me funny since I’d invited
him in.

I’d found him hiding behind the sickly rhododendron that
sits beside my front door. He must not have heard me walk up, because he’d
jumped when I said, “Kind of damp and cold back there, isn’t it, son? Why don’t
you come in and warm up a little?”

He’d stared at me at first, like a deer caught in
headlights, but then he’d shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

The heat in my basement room filtered out the November
chill. The kid took a big slug of the so-called Scotch, coughed, and then took
another one.

I said, “Yeah, I was on top of the world back in the nineties.
Made so much in the stock market I didn’t even have to work. Guess you wouldn’t
think it to look around this place.”

The boy looked around the room. A sneer replaced the frown
for a brief moment.

I knew what he saw. Sink in one corner, microwave sitting on
top of a two-foot-high refrigerator—that was my kitchen. Stained futon rolled
up against the wall—bedroom. I dined at the table that currently held the
whisky and the gun, and we were sitting in the two chairs that constituted the
living room. A trail of extension cords crisscrossed the room to the
jerry-rigged jumble of outlets stealing power from Pepco. They fueled the
kitchen appliances and a couple of lamps.

“Nice place,” he said. He tried to maintain the sneer, but
his voice held the faintest note of envy.

“I’ve lived in worse. After Black Thursday—you know, when
the Worldwide Stock Market crashed back in twenty oh four—I ended up on the
street. How old were you back when all that happened? Nine, ten?”

“Seven,” he said.

“Old enough to know things went bad. But you probably didn’t
understand why. They teach you kids about that stuff in school these days?”

“I haven’t been to school in awhile,” he said.

“Figures. You ought to learn something about it, son.”

He gave me his signature shrug.

“The market ran on-line twenty-four/seven, so you could buy
or sell from anywhere, anytime. The tech existed, so they set it up. Just like
the atomic bomb or asbestos—we used it before we understood what we had. And
all it took to bring it down was a couple of million people panicking.”

“My dad jumped out a window. On K Street.” The boy said it
matter-of-factly, as if it didn’t really mean anything.

“Jesus.” No wonder he’d ended up on the street. “Lost
everything, I’d guess.” How could a man do that to his kid? I almost felt sorry
for the boy. “Losing everything makes people crazy. I went off the deep end
myself.” But I didn’t jump.

I drank some of the whisky. It was a few steps up from grain
alcohol. “Yeah, I got pretty nuts living on the street, trying to keep myself
alive. Carried that Uzi everywhere, waved it in people’s faces.”

The kid grinned. I figured he knew something about waving
guns in people’s faces. Or at least knives.

“Enya Sensei—my Aikido teacher—she laughed at me when I
bought this gun.”

“You learned to fight from a girl?” The sneer had definitely
reappeared.

“What, you don’t think a woman can show a man how to fight?
Those tough broads out on the streets these days—they probably got a few things
to teach you.”

“Well, some of them, I guess. But you’re talking about a
long time ago.”

Kids always think anything that happened before they were
born occurred in the dark ages. “Yeah, I took martial arts from a woman.
Learned a lot, too. That’s why I always called her ‘Sensei.’ That’s the
Japanese word for teacher. It’s a respect thing.”