Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (10 page)

He caught her hand and held it for a moment between both of his. When they started to walk again, he kept holding her hand.

“When I get well, we’ll have a vacation, won’t we? We’ll go to the shore and find pretty shells. Just us. You and me. Won’t we?”

“Yes. That would be nice.”

“Will they hurt me?”

“No. You remember. They’ll look at your throat, listen to your heart. Weigh you. Take your blood pressure. It won’t hurt.” He held the baby because he hadn’t dared leave it. They might be there all day. The baby cried very little now. It slept a lot more than it used to and when it was awake it didn’t do anything except suck its fingers and stare fixedly at whatever its gaze happened to focus on. Tillich thought he should cut down on the medicine for it, but he liked it better this way. He didn’t know what the medicine was for, if this effect was the expected one or not.

“You’ll stay with me! Promise!”

“If I can.”

“Let’s go home now.” She jumped up, smiling brightly at him.

“Sit down, Norma. We have to wait.” The waiting room held over a hundred people. More were in the corridor. In this section few of the patients were alone. Many of them looked normal, able, healthy. Almost all had someone nearby who watched closely, who made an obvious effort to remain calm, tolerant, not to excite the patients.

“I’m hungry. I feel so sick. I really feel sick. We should go now.” She stood up again. “I’ll go alone.”

He sighed, but didn’t reply. The baby stared at his shirt. He moved it. One eye had crossed that way. She went a few feet, walking sideways, through the chairs. She stopped and looked to see if he was coming.

“Don’t shriek,” he prayed silently. “Please don’t shriek.”

She took several more steps. Stopped. He could tell when the rush of panic hit her by the way she stiffened. She came back to him, terrified, her face a grey-white.

“I want to go. I want to…”

Over and over and over. Not loud, hardly more than a whisper. Until her number was called. They didn’t admit him with her. He had known they wouldn’t. She could undress and dress herself.

The trains came in from Chicago; from New York; from Atlanta. Fruit from the South. Meat from the West. Clothing from the East. A virulent strain of influenza from the Southwest. Tillich had guided it in.

“Cleanliness and rest, nature’s best protection.” The signs appeared overnight.

“If it gets worse,” the superintendent said, “well have to quarantine our people here at work.”

“But my wife is sick. And my child.”

The superintendent nodded. “Then you damn well better stay well, don’t you think?” He stomped off.

He thought of Louisa at the dispensary, in constant face-to-face contact with people. After work he was shaking by the time he reached gate ninety-six, and saw her standing there. He began to run toward her. She came forward to meet him. She looked frightened.

“Are you ill?” she asked.

“No. No. I’m all right. I got it in my head that you…” He took her face in his hands and examined her. Suddenly he pulled her to his chest and held her hard. Then he loosened his arms a bit, still without releasing her, and put his cheek on her hair, and they stayed that way for a long time, his cheek on her hair, her face against his chest, both with closed eyes.

He called the hospital about Norma. He told the recording about her shrieking fits after intercourse; about her sexuality that was as demanding as ever, about her neglect of self, of the baby. “Thank you for your cooperation. This is a recording.” He called back and told the recording to go fuck itself. It thanked him.

“You should have reported an adverse reaction immediately,” the nurse said. “Decrease the dosage from twenty drops to ten drops daily.” She read the prescription from a computer printout.

“And if that doesn’t help?”

“There are several procedures, Mr. Tillich. These are doctor’s orders. Report back in two weeks. You will be given a two-week supply of the medication.”

“Can’t someone just look at him?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Tillich.”

The baby wasn’t eating. He moved very little and slept sixteen hours or more a day.

“You’re killing him,” he told the nurse. He got up. She would merely summon an orderly if he didn’t leave. There was nothing she could do.

“Mr. Tillich, report to room twelve-oh-nine before you leave the building.” She was already looking past him at a woman with red eyes.

“My baby, she’s been vomiting ever since she took that new medicine. And her bowels, God, nothing but water!”

Tillich moved away, back to the dispensary for the baby’s medicine. He had been there for three hours already. The line was still as long as before. He took his place at the end.

Ninety minutes later he received the medicine. The dispensary nurse said, “Report to room twelve-oh-nine, Mr. Tillich.”

In 1209 there was a short line of people. It was a fast-moving line. When Tillich entered the room, a nurse asked his name. She checked it against a list, nodded, and told him to get in line. When he came to the head of the line, he was given a shot.

“What is it?” he asked.

The doctor looked at him in surprise. “Flu vaccine.”

He saw the nurse at the door motioning to him. She put her forefinger to her lips and shook her head.

As he went out she whispered, “Louisa slipped your name in. For God’s sake keep your mouth shut.”

A fast-moving freight from Detroit derailed when the locomotive’s wheels locked as it slowed for a curve. Sixty-four cars left the track, tearing up a section a quarter-mile long. It happened during the night, the specks of light were still motionless in that section when Tillich arrived.

“No more direct connection with Detroit,” the superintendent said, “We’re working on alternate routing now.”

“Aren’t they going to fix the tracks?”

“Can’t. No steel’s being allotted to any nonpriority work. Just keep a hold on section seven until the computer gives us new routing. What a goddamn mess.”

Detroit was out. Jacksonville was out. Memphis was out, Cleveland. St. Paul.

Tillich wondered what a high priority was. Syringes, he thought. Scalpels. Bone saws. He wondered if steel was still being produced.

“Can you get away at all?” he asked her desperately.

She shook her head. “No more than you can.”

“I’ll leave them. She isn’t helpless. It’s an act. If she got hungry enough, she’d get something.”

She continued to shake her head. “I looked her up. She is very ill, David. She isn’t malingering.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Primary schizophrenia. Acute depressions. Severe anemia, low blood sugar, renal dysfunction. There was more. I forget.”

“Why don’t they treat her? Try to cure her?”

She was silent.

“They know they can’t. Or it would take too long to be worthwhile. Is that it?
Is that it?
”

“I don’t know. They don’t put reasons on the cards.”

“Is there someplace we can go? Here, in the city?”

“I don’t have any money. Do you?”

He laughed bitterly. “Your apartment?”

“Father, Mother, my brother Jason. He has tuberculosis, one lung collapsed. We have two rooms.”

“I’ll get some money. I’ll get us a room somewhere.”

He heard the baby wailing halfway down the hall. It was making up for the weeks of drugged silence. As he got nearer he could hear the TV also. Norma was watching it, singing,
“I had a red canary, it wouldn’t fly.”
She didn’t look at him.

If it weren’t for them, he thought clearly, he could take another job. Able-bodied men could work around the clock if they wanted to. All those hours in lines waiting for her medicine, waiting for the baby’s medicine, waiting for her examination, the baby’s examinations. Shopping for them. Cleaning up after them. Cooking for them.

He shut his eyes, his back against the door. For a long time he didn’t move. He felt a soft tug on his shirt and opened his eyes. She was there, holding out the hairbrush.

“Would you like to do my hair?”

He brushed her pale silky hair. “After I’m well, we’ll have a vacation, won’t we. Just the two of us. We’ll go to the seashore and find pretty shells.”

The baby wailed. The TV played. She sat with tears on her cheeks and he brushed her pale silky hair.

• • •

The Scream

(Orbit 13 — 1974)

The sea had turned to copper; it rose and fell gently, the motion starting so deep that no ripple broke the surface of the slow swells. The sky was darkening to a deep blue-violet, with rose streaks in the west and a high cirrocumulus formation in the east that was a dazzling white mountain crowned with brilliant reds and touches of green. No wind stirred. The irregular dark strip that was Miami Beach separated the metallic sea from the fiery sky. We were at anchor eight miles offshore aboard the catamaran
Loretta
. She was a forty-foot, single-masted, inboard motorboat.

Evinson wanted to go on in, but Trainor, whose boat it was, said no. Too dangerous: sand, silt, wrecks, God knew what we might hit. We waited until morning.

We had to go in at Biscayne Bay; the Bal Harbour inlet was clogged with the remains of the bridge on old A1A. Trainor put in at the Port of Miami. All the while J.P. kept taking his water samples, not once glancing at the ruined city; Delia kept a running check for radiation, and Bernard took pictures. Corrie and I tried to keep out of the way, and Evinson didn’t. The ancient catamaran was clumsy, and Trainor was kept busy until we were tied up, then he bowed sarcastically to Evinson and went below.

Rusting ships were in the harbor, some of them on their sides half in water, half out. Some of them seemed afloat, but then we saw that without the constant dredging that had kept the port open, silt and sand had entered, and the bottom was no more than ten to fifteen feet down. The water was very clear. Some catfish lay unmoving on the bottom, and a school of big-eyed mullet circled at the surface, the first marine life we had seen. The terns were diving here, and sandpipers ran with the waves. J.P.’s eyes were shining as he watched the birds. We all had been afraid that there would be no life of any kind.

Our plan was to reconnoiter the first day, try to find transportation: bicycles, which none of us had ridden before, skates, canoes, anything. Miami and the beaches covered a lot of miles, and we had a lot of work; without transportation the work would be less valuable—if it had any value to begin with.

Bernard and Delia went ahead to find a place to set up our base, and the rest of us started to unload the boat. In half an hour we were drenched with sweat. At first glance the city had seemed perfectly habitable, just empty of people, but as we carried the boxes to the hotel that Bernard had found, the ruins dominated the scene. Walls were down, streets vanished under sand and palmettos and sea grapes. The hotel was five stories, the first floor covered with sand and junk: shells, driftwood, an aluminum oar eaten through with corrosion. Furniture was piled against walls haphazardly, like heaps of rotting compost. The water had risen and fallen more than once, rearranging floatables. It was hellishly hot, and the hotel stank of ocean and decay and dry rot and heat. No one talked much as we all worked, all but Trainor, who had worked to get us here and who now guzzled beer with his feet up. Evinson cursed him monotonously. We carried our stuff to the hotel, then to the second floor, where we put mosquito netting at the windows of three connecting rooms that would be used jointly. We separated to select our private rooms and clear them and secure them against the mosquitoes that would appear by the millions as soon as the sun went down.

After a quick lunch of soy wafers and beer we went out singly to get the feel of the city and try to locate any transportation we could.

I started with a map in my hand, and the first thing I did was put it back inside my pack. Except for the general areas, the map was worthless. This had been a seawalled city, and the seawalls had gone: a little break here, a crack somewhere else, a trickle of water during high tide, a flood during a storm, the pressure building behind the walls, on the land side, and inevitably the surrender to the sea. The water had undermined the road system and eaten away at foundations of buildings, and hurricane winds had done the rest. Some streets were completely filled in with rubble; others were pitted and undercut until shelves of concrete had shifted and slid and now rested crazily tilted. The white sand had claimed some streets so thoroughly that growth had had a chance to naturalize, and there were strip-forests of palm trees, straggly bushes with pink and yellow flowers, and sea grapes. I saw a mangrove copse claiming the water’s edge and stopped to stare at it for a long time, with curious thoughts flitting through my brain about the land and the sea in a survival struggle in which man was no more than an incidental observer, here, then gone. The afternoon storm broke abruptly, and I took shelter in a building that seemed to have
been a warehouse.

The stench of mold and decay drove me out again as soon as the storm abated. Outside, the sun had baked everything, the sun and rain sterilizing, neutralizing, keeping the mold at bay, but inside the cavernous buildings the soggy air was a culture for mold spores, and thirty years, forty, had not been long enough to deplete the rich source of nutrients. There was food available on the shelves, the shelves were food, the wood construction materials, the glues and grouts, the tiles and vinyls, the papers neatly filed, the folders that held them, pencils, everything finally was food for the mold.

I entered two more buildings, same thing, except that one of them had become a bat cave. They were the large fruit bats, not dangerous, and I knew they were not, but I left them the building without contest.

At the end of the first day we had three bicycles and a flat-bottomed rowboat with two oars. I hadn’t found anything of value. The boat was aluminum, and although badly corroded, it seemed intact enough. Trainor slouched in while J.P. was cooking dinner and the rest of us were planning our excursions for the next day.

“You folks want boats? Found a storehouse full of them.”