Chasing Orion (3 page)

Very severe symptoms:

Phase one was easy to check for. I mean, basically, throwing up is not a subtle thing. You do it, or you don’t do it. I did keep a thermometer, an extra one Mom had, in my bathroom and would check my temperature a lot, but no matter how hot I felt, my temperature was always a steady 98.6. The tricky one in phase one was “malaise.” I had to look up the word in the dictionary. The definition was truly a slippery slope. Mr. W. — that was what I called
Webster’s,
or sometimes Noah — described it as being “a condition of general bodily weakness or discomfort.” That was the first definition. I could live with that. It was the second definition that always got me: “an unfocused feeling of mental uneasiness or discomfort.” Now I ask you, what in Sam Hill is that? I felt mentally uneasy about twenty times a day, especially with the thought of going to a new school where I had zero friends.

I was very malaised. Sometimes I got so malaised that I really wanted to get in an ambulance and go straight to Saint Vincent’s. But what if I only came in with malaise and not the rest of it, the phase two stuff, like difficulty swallowing? A nasal voice (that seemed very weird to me. Bugs Bunny has a nasal voice, for crying out loud). I could imagine the nurse or doctor saying to me, “What hurts?” or, “What are your symptoms?” and I would say, “Malaise, real bad malaise.” Where do they go from there? It would be kind of embarrassing if I didn’t have polio. So the question was, how long would I suffer from malaise before I’d turn myself in? Or would I die of embarrassment? Truly terminal embarrassment, I thought.

The other symptoms of phase two were easy to check for. Stiff neck, muscle pain, high fever. I did this now as I read the list, which I didn’t really have to read, because after reading it for two years, I had memorized it.

But it was hard now to read these symptoms without thinking of the girl next door. I wondered how it had been with her. What had she actually felt? Headache? Mild fever? Most of all I wondered how she caught it — at a swimming pool? A movie theater? To me the scariest thing about polio was that you never knew who had the live germs until it was too late. By the time someone had the disease and you knew that person was sick, the actual germ could no longer be transmitted. But that didn’t mean that the sick person recovered, not the way a sick person did from, say, the flu. Those people recovered completely and went on to live their lives. Not the same with polio. Yes, some did recover, but for a lot of people who had polio, their lives were changed forever because the germ attacked the nerves in their spinal cord so they couldn’t breathe on their own, or it might paralyze their legs. In the beginning they called it “infantile paralysis.” They thought only babies got it. Not now. Anyone could get it. But oddly enough, I could not get it from the girl next door. She was no longer infectious. The germ had died in her and left her body as some kind of wrecked monument.

It was too depressing to think about, but I have to admit I had a kind of morbid curiosity. I wanted to meet her in the worst way. I was just tired of reading about polio, seeing the pictures in the paper, hearing the warnings on the news. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the most famous polio victim ever. He became president. But he had never been in an iron lung, just a wheelchair. Still, he’d accomplished an awful lot. I didn’t think this girl — this Phyllis — would have a chance at anything. A woman in an iron lung, president? Ha! Then I felt really terrible. I shouldn’t have made a joke. It wasn’t a real joke. I guess it was a desperate joke. Still kind of mean.

I had had enough of reading about polio symptoms, so I flipped to the movie section.

“Omigod! Emmett, you’re not going to believe this!” I yelled out.

“What?” he called from his bedroom.

“
Mrs. Randolph’s Brain
is opening at the Vogue Theater.”

He was in my room in a flash. “You’re kidding!”

I shook my head slowly. “Nooooo.”

“Ah, crap.”

“You’ll sneak out, won’t you? You’ll go with the guys from the basketball team.” I shook my head again. It seemed so unfair. Emmett had a car. He had freedom. Teenagers could do anything, or at least a lot that their parents wouldn’t ever find out about. But eleven-year-olds? It was too pathetic to even think about.

Emmett picked up the paper and started reading the review. “Rose Belton gives a subtle performance as Vivian Randolph, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who works with her unfaithful neurosurgeon husband, played by Donald Crenshaw, pursuing experimental brain research. His wife is more highly regarded as a scientist than he is and it is his jealousy that triggers his infidelity. His mistress is played by newcomer Laura Nolton. When the two are returning from a weekend tryst, they are involved in a terrible car crash. The mistress is critically injured, but he emerges unscathed.”

I held up my hand to stop Emmett. “Let me tell you what happens. He tries to save her, but she’s going to die. So he gets the idea of saving her brain. He wants to put it in his wife’s head, because he’s so threatened by his wife’s smarts but not his girlfriend’s. But he’s going to have to somehow get rid of his wife now.”

Emmett looked at me over the top of the paper. “Not exactly, but pretty close. How’d you know? Did you already read the review?”

“No, I didn’t read the review. It’s the old-brain-in-a-jar movie with romance and murder added. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to see it.” I paused. “So if you sneak out to see it, would you take me?”

“I’m not sneaking out, and I wouldn’t take you even if I did because that would get me into twice as much trouble. But hey, it gets better.” He scanned the review. “You see, he doesn’t exactly murder his wife, but he takes out her brain and puts the girlfriend’s brain in her head.”

I held up my hand again for him to stop.

“I’ve got it. But the brain doesn’t work quite right, and it gets in cahoots somehow with maybe some leftovers from Vivian, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist.”

Emmett’s jaw literally dropped. “You’re psychic. But it’s not exactly leftovers — that makes it sound like a cold meatloaf sandwich or something.”

“Well, it’s the ‘or something.’ A spiritual thing, right? So that the wife and the girlfriend gang up against the evil surgeon.”

“Wow! Georgie, maybe you should go to Hollywood and start writing movies.”

“No, I just read a lot of science fiction like you. Oh, jeez, I really want to see it.” I looked up at him with a pleading look.

“Don’t do the puppy eyes thing with me, Georgie. We’re not doing this. I don’t want you to get polio.”

“What about yourself? You want to get it?”

“Of course not. Don’t be stupid.”

“You won’t die, Nora, my love. You won’t die. I swear, whatever I have to do, you shall live.”

Dr. Randolph was saying this to his mistress, who was in a deep coma. The bleeps of an array of monitors became intermittent. The lines on the display screens began to flatten out.

An attending nurse enters the room and looks at the monitors, then to Dr. Randolph. “She’s gone.”

“I would like to be alone with her for a while, please,” Dr. Randolph says.

The nurse leaves the room.

I leaned forward to tap my mother’s shoulder. “It’s coming, Mom. You better shut your eyes. He’s going in for the brain.”

“Oh, Lord!” Mom gasped and quickly assumed her standard position for watching the scary, gory parts of movies: hands clamped over her ears and eyes shut tight. Dad sat with his hands clutching the steering wheel, and Emmett and I were in the backseat of the car not getting polio. We were at a drive-in movie theater watching
Mrs. Randolph’s Brain,
or right now it was about to be Nora’s brain. In the next scene, we’d probably see Mrs. Randolph’s gray matter when dear old Lester, Dr. Randolph, swapped them. This scene closed with the buzz of a surgical saw and a creepy shot of what looked like an oversize jelly jar waiting on a table.

“They would never use glass,” Emmett said. “They have to use something that could be thermally controlled better and have a cryo-protectant solution.”

“Picky, picky!” I muttered.

The fact that we were with our parents was certainly a sign of how desperate Emmett and I were to see it, because there was nothing, absolutely nothing on earth more square than going to a drive-in movie with your parents. Around us, car windows were steamy from couples making out like crazy. Some of the cars even shook a little! Emmett just kept slouching down farther in the backseat. Not me. I had to sit with my legs folded back underneath me to raise me up a little bit higher. I wanted to see everything: the brain in the jar, the teenagers smooching away.

I did think, however, if anything good came out of this experience, aside from getting to see the movie, it might jump-start Emmett’s social life. Maybe he would be inspired to get an actual date to come to the movies, rather than his family. He was slow socially, to put it mildly. Smart as anything in school, but he’d never had a date, which bugged me. How was I ever going to learn anything about being a teenager if my big brother didn’t start acting like one? I was tired of having to anticipate my entire future teenage life through Archie comic books.

“Is it over yet?” Mom asked from her see-no-evil, hear-no-evil position.

“There’s hardly any blood, Mom,” Emmett said.

“I don’t want to see any,” Mom replied.

“It’s only catsup,” I said. “Oh, that reminds me. Could we go to Northview for a hamburger afterward?”

“No!” Emmett barked.

“Sweet Jesus!” my father muttered. Dad hardly ever used the Lord’s name.

From their reaction you would have thought that I had said, “Let’s all go and have brain surgery just for the heck of it.” But actually going to Northview, the drive-in restaurant, with your parents was just a fraction less square than going to a drive-in movie with them.

When we got home, Emmett brought one of his telescopes outside and we looked to see if we could find anything interesting.

“What’s to look for, Emmett?” I asked. My Fudgsicle was melting faster than I could eat it.

“Neptune. Should be at its closest approach to Earth now, first week in August. You got to look for a little blue dot. Won’t see much more than that —
if
that — with this telescope.”

“Let me look?” I walked over.

“Eat your Fudgsicle first. I don’t want you dripping all over my scope. Go rinse your hands in the hose. I don’t want everything all sticky.”

“Good grief,” I muttered. Emmett was so bossy about his telescopes. Astronomy was Emmett’s passion even before basketball. He knew more about the stars than anybody, even his high-school science teacher. Emmett was really smart in math and science and all that stuff. He’d read stuff by Albert Einstein and all sorts of scientists and astrophysicists.

I pressed my eye to the lens cup. People think that the night sky is just black and white. They don’t realize that the brighter stars have color. It’s very hard to see it, and only rarely can one ever see it with a naked eye. We both tried for the next hour to spot it. I yawned. “Let’s turn in,” Emmett said.

I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept thinking about brain transplants. Then I thought about the steamy windows in the other cars at the drive-in. Then I thought about the car that was shaking. Then I thought about people doing it. Then I thought about my parents doing it! Oh,
ick
! Then I thought about the girl next door. The girl in the iron lung, and how she would probably never do it. Never ever.

I guess I finally did fall asleep, because something woke me up. It was the
thwup-thwup
sound of a basketball being dribbled. I guessed Emmett couldn’t sleep either. I went to my bedroom window that looked out on our driveway. There he was, hammering down the asphalt, playing a game with phantom players. A shaft of moonlight poured down on the drive, and Emmett weaved in and out of it like liquid, like quicksilver through the moon’s light. He was here; he was there, everywhere. He was so fast, and he could jump like nobody’s business. He did that now, spiking into the night, at the top, with his red hair about to graze the moon; he rolled the ball to his shooting arm and then laid that ball into the hoop as softly as if it were a baby.