Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (523 page)

Most nights, the three of us went to dinner in the Russian Tea Room. The staff doted on Toby; he got all the hamburgers he could eat, all the hot dogs, all the French fries, all the milkshakes. Nobody could say the Tea Room wasn’t doing its part to keep Toby cheerful, nobody could say it wasn’t putting him in a salubrious mood. The manager was a thin, wiry, exuberant man in his early fifties named Norbert Vore (evidently he did not partake of his own fattening and enervating menu), and upon sensing that from the boy’s viewpoint the restaurant was deficient in desserts, he immediately read up on the matter, soon learning how to prepare transcendent strawberry shortcake and ambrosial lemon-meringue pie. Herbert’s baked Alaska, fudge brownies, and Bing-cherry tarts kept Toby grinning ear to ear. His chocolate parfaits were so lush and uplifting they seemed in themselves a cure.

It was in the Russian Tea Room that Toby and I first noted a curious fashion among Satirevians. About a quarter of them wore sweatshirts emblazoned with a Valentine-style heart poised above the initials H.E.A.R.T. “HEART, what’s that?” my son asked Martina one evening as we were plowing through a particularly outrageous ice-cream treat—a concoction Norbert had dubbed “A Month of Sundaes.”

“It’s a kind of club—the members get together and talk about philosophy,” Martina replied. “You know what philosophy is, Toby?”

“No.”

“The
H
stands for Happiness, the
E
for Equals.”

“And the
A
,
R,
and
T
?”
asked Toby.

“Art, Reason, and Truth.”

H.E.A.R.T. It was, Martina explained after Toby went to bed, an organization the year-rounders had formed for the sake of, as she put it, “thinking good thoughts about your son and thereby hastening his cure.” HEART, the Healing and Ecstasy Association for the Recovery of Toby. They met every Tuesday evening. They were planning to start a newsletter.

I had never been so profoundly moved, so totally touched, in my life. My soul sang, my throat got hard as a crab apple. “Martina, that’s
terrific.
Why didn’t you tell me about HEART?”

“Because it gives me the creeps, that’s why.”

“The creeps?”

“Your son is sick, Jack.
Sick.
He’s going to need more than HEART. He’s going to need…well, a miracle.”

“HEART
is
a miracle, Martina. Don’t you get it? It
is
a miracle.”

* * * *

There is nothing quite so exhilarating as spending large amounts of time with your child, and nothing quite so tedious. I’ll be honest: when Martina offered to relieve me of Toby for an hour or two—she wanted to help him find specimens for his miniature zoo—I told her to take all day. Even Sleeping Beauty’s father, I’m sure, grew bored with her on occasion.

It was an hour past his bedtime when Toby returned to the Paradise, laden with the day’s haul—a dozen bottles and cages filled with rubbery newts, glutinous salamanders, spiky centipedes, and disgruntled tree frogs whose cries sounded like bicycle bells.

He could not enjoy them.

“Dad, I don’t feel so good,” he said, setting the various terrariums on the coffee table.

“Oh?” So here it comes, I thought. Now it begins. “What do you mean?”

“My head hurts.” Toby clutched his belly. “And my stomach. Is it those germs, Dad?”

“Just remember, in the long run they can’t hurt you.”

“ ’Cause of my immune system?”

“Smart boy.”

Toby woke up repeatedly that night, his temperature lurching toward 103, flesh trembling, bones rattling, teeth chattering. He sweated like a bill-picker laboring in the money orchards. I had to change the sheets four times. They stank of brine.

“I think we’d better drop by the hospital tomorrow,” I told him.

“Hospital? I thought I wasn’t really sick.”

“You
aren’t
really sick.” Oh, the power, the power. “Dr. Krakower wants to give you some medicine, that’s all.”

“I don’t think I can sleep, Dad. Will you read to me about Rumpelstiltskin or pirates or something?”

“Of course. Sure. Just stay happy, and you’ll be fine.”

The next morning, I took Toby to the Center for Creative Wellness, where he was assigned a place in the children’s ward, a large private room that despite its spaciousness quickly seemed to fill with my son’s disease, a sickly, sallow aura radiating from the bedframe, covering the nightstand, smothering the swaybacked parent’s cot in the far corner. His skin got bluer; his temperature climbed: 103, 104, 104.5, 105, 105.5. By nightfall the lymph nodes under his arm had grown to resemble clusters of ossified grapes.

“We can get the fever down with acetaminophen and alcohol baths,” said Dr. Krakower as she guided me into her office. “And I think we should put him on pentamidine. It’s been known to work wonders against
Pneumocystis carinii.”

“Genuine wonders?”

“Oh, yes. We’d better set him up for intravenous feeding. I want to try pure oxygen too, maybe an inhalator. It’ll keep his mind clear.”

“Doctor, if there’s no remission…”

“We shouldn’t talk like that.”

“If there’s no remission, how long will he live?”

“Don’t know.”

“Two weeks?”

“Oh, yes, two weeks for sure, Jack. I can practically
promise
you two weeks.”

Although Martina’s speech-writing job for Borough Representative Doreen Hutter consumed all her mornings, she arranged to spend each afternoon at Toby’s bedside, infusing him with happy thoughts. She invited him to imagine he was gradually entering a state of suspended animation, so that he could become the first boy ever sent beyond our solar system in a spaceship: hence the inhalator squeezing and expanding his chest, conditioning his lungs for interstellar travel; hence the plastic tube flowing into his left arm, giving him enough food for a year in hibernation; hence the plastic mask—the “rocket jockey’s oxygen supply”—strapped over his mouth and nose.

“When you wake up, Toby, you’ll be on another planet—the magical world of Lulaloon!”

“Lulaloon?” The oxygen mask made him sound distant, as if he were already in space. “Is it as good as Satirev?”

“Better.”

“As good as summer camp?”

“Twice as good.”

Toby stretched out, putting a crimp in his glucose tube, stopping the flow of what Martina had told him were liquid French fries. “I like your games,” he said.

I stroked my son’s balding scalp. “How’s your imagination working?” I asked him.

“Pretty good, I guess.”

“Can you picture Mr. Medicine zapping
those nasty old Xavier’s germs?”

“Sure.”

“‘Zap ’em, Mr. Medicine. Zap ’em dead!’ Right, Toby?”

“Right,” he wheezed.

For over a week, Toby remained appropriately chipper, but then a strange Veritasian skepticism crept over him, darkening his spirits as relentlessly as the
Pneumocystis carinii
were darkening his lungs. “I feel sick,” he told Dr. Krakower one afternoon as she prepared to puncture him with a second IV needle, in the right arm this time. “I don’t think that medicine’s any good. I’m cold.”

“Well, Rainbow Boy,” she said, “Xavier’s isn’t any fun—I’ll be the first to admit that—but you’ll be up and running before you know it.”

“My head still hurts, and my—”

“When one medicine doesn’t work,” I hastily inserted, “there’s always another we can try—right, Dr. Krakower?”

“Oh, yes.”

Martina took Toby’s hand, giving it a hard squeeze as Krakower slid the needle into his vein.

Toby winced and asked, “Do children ever die?”

“That’s a strange question, Rainbow Boy,” said Krakower.

“Do they?”

“It’s very, very rare.” The doctor opened the stopcock on Toby’s meperidine drip.

“She means never,” I explained. “Don’t even think about it, Toby. It’s bad for your immune system.”

“He’s really cold,” said Martina, her hand still clasped in Toby’s. “Can we turn up the heat?”

“It’s up all the way,” said Krakower. “His electric blanket’s on full.”

The narcotic seeped into Toby’s neurons. “I’m cold,” he said woozily.

“You’ll be warm soon,” I lied. “Say, ‘Zap ’em, Mr. Medicine. Zap ’em.’”

“Zap ’em, Mr. Medicine,” said Toby, fading. “Zap…zap…zap…”

So it was time to get serious; it was time for Sleeping Beauty’s father to track down every last spinning wheel and chop it to bits. The minute Krakower left, I turned to Martina and asked her to put me in touch with the president of the Healing and Ecstasy Association for the Recovery of Toby.

Instead of complying, Martina merely snorted. “Jack, I can’t help feeling you’re riding for a fall.”

“What do you mean?”

“A fall, Jack.”

“Such pessimism. Don’t you know that psychoneuroimmunology is one of the key sciences of our age?”

“Just
look
at him, for Christ’s sake. Look at Toby. He’s living on borrowed time. You know that, don’t you?”

“No, I
don’t
know that.” I cast her a killing glance. “Even if the time
is
borrowed, Martina, that doesn’t mean it won’t be the best time a boy’s ever had.”

She gave me the facts I needed. Anthony Raines, Suite 42, Hotel Paradise.

I marched up the hill outside the Center for Creative Wellness and placed the call. HEART’s president answered on the first ring.

“Jack Sperry?” he gasped after I identified myself.
“The
Jack Sperry? Really? Goodness, what a coincidence. We’ve been hoping to interview you for
The Toby Times.”

“For the what?”

“Our first issue comes out tomorrow. We’ll be running stories about the fun you and Toby are having down here, his favorite toys and sports, what analgesics and antibiotics he’s taking—all the things our members want to hear about.”

The Toby Times.
I found the idea simultaneously inspiring and distasteful. “Mr. Raines, my son just entered the hospital, and I was hoping—”

“I know—it’s our lead story. A setback, sure, but no reason to give up hope. Listen, Jack—may I call you Jack?—we people of the HEART know you’re on the right track. Once Toby tunes in the cosmic pulse, his energy field will reintegrate, and then he’s home free.”

The more Anthony Raines spoke in his calm, mellow voice, the better I felt—and the sharper my image of him became: a tall, raffish, golden-haired bohemian with bright blue eyes and a drooping, slightly disreputable mustache. “Mr. Raines, I want you to mobilize your forces.”

“Call me Anthony. What’s up?”

“Just this—for the next two weeks, Toby Sperry’s going to be the happiest child on Earth.” No spinning wheel would escape my notice, ran my silent, solemn pledge. “Don’t worry about the cost,” I added. “We’ll put it on my MasterDebt card.”

I pictured Anthony Raines organizing his buddhalike features into a resolute smile. “Mr. Sperry, the HEART stands ready to help your cause in every way it can.”

* * * *

The next evening, Santa Claus visited the Center for Creative Wellness.

His red suit glowed like an ember. His white beard lay on his chest like a frozen waterfall.

“Who are
you?”
Toby asked, struggling to sit up amid the tangle of rubber. Every day he seemed to acquire yet another IV need: glucose, meperidine, saline, Ringer’s lactate, the various tubes swirling around him like an external circulatory system. “Do I know you?” With a bold flourish he pulled off his plastic mask, as if this bulbous saint’s mere presence had somehow unclogged his lungs.

“Hi, there, fella,” said Santa, chuckling heartily: Sebastian, of course—Sebastian Arboria—the fat and affable dissembler who’d led the meeting in the roundhouse; I’d empowered Anthony Raines to hire him for eighty dollars an hour. “Call me Santa Claus. Saint Nicholas, if you prefer. Know what, Toby? Christmas is coming. Ever heard of Christmas?”

“I think we studied that in school. Isn’t it supposed to be silly?”

“Silly?” said Sebastian with mock horror. “Christmas is the most wonderful thing there is. If I were a young lad, I’d feel absolutely great about Christmas. I’d be looking forward to it with every cell of my body. I’d be so full of happiness there wouldn’t be any room left for Xavier’s Plague.”

“Is Christmas a warm time?” Toby was wholly without hair now. He was bald as an egg.

“The night before Christmas, I fly around the world in my sleigh, visiting every boy and girl, leaving good things behind.”

“Will you visit
me
?”

“Of course I’ll visit you. What do you want for Christmas, Toby?”

“You can have
anything
,” I said. “Right, Santa?”

“Yep, anything,” said Sebastian.

“I want to see my mother,” said Toby.

Felicia Krakower shuddered. “That’s not exactly Santa’s department.”

“I want to get warm.”

Sebastian said, “What I
mean
is…like a toy. I’ll bring you a toy.”

“Pick something special,” I insisted. “Say, that Power Pony you’ve been asking about.”

“No, that’s for my
birthday
,”
Toby corrected me.

“Why don’t you get it for Christmas?” Martina suggested.

Toby slipped his rocket jockey’s oxygen supply back on. “Well…okay, I guess I
would
like a Power Pony.” His words bounced off the smooth green plastic.

Sebastian said, “A
Power Pony,
eh? Well, well—we’ll see what we can do. Any particular
kind
of Power Pony?”