The Western Lands (9 page)

He is striding toward Surgery, Big Man On Complex now:

"It takes guts to practice surgery," he says. It certainly does. What would he do without guts? Striding toward Surgery, the patient is clearly terminal—he would operate on a mummy— and she is shambling along on her new prosthetic leg.

"Will you shake the lead out?"

"I'm doing the best I can, darling."

Why don't she go back to her crutches, he thinks irritably. Aloud he says, "Why don't you jet-propel on your stinking farts?"

Admittedly his words are somewhat unkind. But cancer does stink. Of course it's not her fault she is in this loathsome condition, or is it? His mother always said:

"Son, in this life everyone gets exactly what he wants and exactly what he deserves." People tend to believe it, so long as they are getting what they think they deserve.

Incongruously Mike thinks of an old joke. The eternal traveling salesman, protagonist of the eternal dirty joke, spots an attractive woman in the club car. As fate would have it, she is in the lower bunk just opposite his upper bunk. And he is eyeballing her. She takes off her wig. She pops out a glass eye. She spits out her false teeth. She unhooks her wooden legs, looks up at him pertly, and says, "Is there anything you want?"

"You know what I want. Take it off and throw it up here."

He starts laughing. She demands why. Finally he tells her, and she hits him with her prosthesis. Required five stitches.

So Joe has left a cloud of ink behind him like a retreating squid in the form of his Orgone Cancer Cure, like a cure for death itself, so closely is cancer linked with death. Exaltation sweeps through cancer wards and cancer-ridden outpatients, and with regained vitality comes anger: Why have doctors concealed this cure? Why did the FDA burn Reich's books and suppress his findings without a trial? (One judge refused to listen to
any
testimonials.)

The medical profession has suffered a horrific loss of prestige and credibility, compounded by frantic efforts to discredit the cure in the face of mounting evidence of its effectiveness. Time was when MD plates on a car afforded a measure of protection against vandalism. Now doctors are subject to find their tires slashed, MURDERING BASTARD written in soap on the windshield.

It stacked up and up. Unnecessary operations, patients dying in the emergency room. "We cannot accept medical admissions from emergency."

Woman with a heart attack. Her husband calls for an ambulance.

"I can't send an ambulance until I know what's wrong with her."

"I tell you she's having a HEART ATTACK!"

"I can't send an ambulance until I know what's wrong with her."

"SHE'S HAVING A CORONARY! A HEART ATTACK!"

"I can't send an ambulance until I know what's wrong with her."

Potentially beneficial and harmless products and treatments kept off the market . . . lethal products kept on the market. Recent example: the so-called nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs for arthritis. In England eight people died of liver failure caused by the drug Oraflex, and still they won't withdraw it— just change the trade name.

I saw a TV show where the company representative, the lies oozing and slithering out of him, tries to tell a woman her hepatitis could have been caused by something else.

"I know it was that medicine."

A vast bureaucratic conspiracy of mismanagement . . .

The Medical Riots of 1999: it all started in the Burn Unit of a midwestern hospital. It is policy in burn units to restrict the use of painkillers to the vanishing point, since burn cases may require weeks of healing and treatment. It was argued that to administer painkillers would frequently result in addiction. So the patient must endure baths in which the dead skin and flesh are scrubbed from the raw lesions with a stiff brush. You can hear them screaming all over the hospital and out into the parking lots.

A team of amateur astronauts who call themselves the Spacers landed in the Burn Unit when their homemade space rocket exploded, spattering them with burning rocket fuel and shards of white-hot metal.

Ten were admitted to the Burn Unit. They received 25 mg of Demerol on admission. After that, nothing but aspirin and Darvon. The Spacers didn't scream in the baths but they radiated such pain and rage that three nurses quit in one day. The only nurse left on duty was a tall, strikingly beautiful woman who was part black and part Chinese. "If I had my way, you boys would get all the junk you need. So what if you get a little habit? Boy your age can kick in five days."

After the first scrub they issued an ultimatum: "Morphine every four hours as long as we need it or we walk out."

"What is this nonsense? There will be no morphine and you are not going anywhere."

"Meet my brother, the lawyer-doctor."

"You propose to hold these people against their will?"

"It's for their own good. If they leave the hospital they will be dead in a few days from infections."

They set up a private clinic in a loft. When police raided the clinic to search for unauthorized drugs, two patients died from police bullets and one police officer died from injuries. It was all on TV. Soon a nationwide walkout was underway. With the threat of cancer removed, the medical centers appear as a vast waste.

"Fifty years the fucking croakers kept the cure from the people."

Joe had a kidney stone but they wouldn't believe him at the hospital. Got his X ray mixed up with someone else's. They say a kidney stone is the worst pain a man can experience. Not surprising that Joe was a ringleader in the Medical Riots of 1999.

The walkout spreads to other hospitals:

"MORPHINE OR WALK!"

"MOW! MOW! MOW!"

The doctors paw the ground uneasily, like cattle scenting danger.

"What are we waiting for, a hospital bed?"

"Kill all the fucking croakers!"

Security steps nimbly aside and the crowds rush in.

"Got a hotshot
cutting
doc here."

"I think he needs an operation."

"Hell yes, a Gutectomy . . . fetch my scalpel."

"Paging Doctor Friedenhof and Doctor von Streusschnitt.
"

Enter Professor von Streusschnitt, flanked by his scalpel bearers carrying saws and knives two feet long.

"We must perform—how you say—the Gutectomy.
Two
kidneys? Sure, von is a Jew.
Rauschmit!"

It is estimated that ten thousand doctors, medical bureaucrats and directors of pharmaceutical companies were massacred in the week of the Long Scalpels. The killings were not by any means random. The rioters had lists: "There's the bastard let me pass a kidney stone in the emergency room."

And billions of dollars' worth of useless equipment was destroyed in great ether burnouts.

PANIC . . . MAYDAY . . . AMOK!

The day when the top came off. A time of incredible danger and ecstasy. Every wish, every dream, every nightmare is suddenly real as the grimy streets, the subways. A cop on the corner who clubs everyone in sight—smooth commuters with their briefcases, smart women from the pages of
Vogue
,
dogs on leads—screaming, "I don't like you and I don't know you / And now by God I'm going to show you!"

Famished leopards and tigers, released from the Central Park Zoo, invade Lutèce. An alert survivor throws his venison steak to a leopard, who gulps it down. He leaps over the disemboweled gourmands and streaks to safety.

A pilot bails out of a burning plane and gives his passengers the finger: "See you in Church!"

Doctor Benway rides again. He surveys a ward full of intensive-care patients killed by a Swedish nurse who bathes twice a day. Her put household ammonia and Mr. Clean into the IVs.

"I thought it would clean them out, doctor."

"Hmmm, yes, straight thinking, nurse. It's all in the day's work. Get these stiffs out of here and let them bury each other. This world's for the living and we need the beds. Bring on the next shift!"

He turns into the Herr Professor. His eyes glint with crazed dedication and purpose.

"An die Arbeit!"

Avenida Cinco de Mayo in Mexico City has the enigmatic surface of an area where obsolete trades survive, like stagnant pools at the margins of a river. At No. 23, Joe finds the plaque, in tarnished gold letters: 
HERNANDEZ DESAMPARADO, ABOGADO. ASUNTOS DE DOCUMENTOS Y EMIGRACIÓN.

Three stories up in a creaky, open elevator, at the end of a long corridor. Joe knocks, one long, two short. The door immediately opens as if the man were waiting just behind it, like a jack-in-the-box. He is elegantly dressed in a dark suit, with polished ankle-high black boots and a pearl-gray tie with pearl stick pin.

"Señor Hellbrandt?"

Desamparado holds out a thin brown hand, smooth and cool to the touch, like the underside of a lizard that has emerged from beneath a stone. He motions Joe into a small room with an old roll-top desk and a swivel chair in front of it. By the desk is an oak chair with leather cushion and back. Joe sits down.

The
abogado
sits in the swivel chair, then neatly crosses his thin legs and pivots to face Joe. He is an old man in his seventies, with a disdainful expression that is obviously chronic. He picks up four pages of legal-sized paper held together with a copper paper clip. Joe notices that the clip has stained the paper with verdigris. The paper is old and thick, like parchment. Looking down at the pages through his gold-rimmed bifocals, as if what he reads is both wearisome and distasteful, finally Desamparado speaks, in a silky, sibilant whisper.

"Genetic research. When you have understood Race, you have understood everything."

He looked at Joe as if evaluating his ability to understand everything. Joe recognized a fellow corpse, a compendium of gestures, intonations and expressions painfully rehearsed and reenacted.

"You will have a free hand within the parameters of the project."

For a moment he seemed too weary to go on. His words hung like cold ashes in the air of the office, lit only by a grimy, barred window of wired glass that let in a dim gray-white light.

With an obvious effort, Hernandez Desamparado uncrossed his legs.

"There are papers to sign."

It took all of Joe's strength to get his pen out and glance through the various releases and agreement forms which the
abogado
placed in front of him. Then, taking a deep breath, he concentrated on the One Point, signed each document carefully and placed it face down on a blotting pad with leather corners. Desamparado retrieved the signed forms and filed them on a dark shelf deep in the old desk.

During this charade, which seemed to go on forever, Joe felt his carefully hoarded stash of vitality drain out of him into a cold gray fog. He shivered, recognizing a practitioner higher in the vampire hierarchy than himself. But Joe didn't have time to play politics.

There are many varieties of vampire. The old cloak-and-tomb vamps went out with Lugosi. Nowadays the vampires have got together and hired a good PR man to improve their public image. A chap named Winston has put forward the pregnant concept of benevolent vampirism: "enlightened interdependence" is the phrase he uses. Take a little, leave a little.

However, by the inexorable logistics of the vampiric process, they always take more than they leave. That's what vampires are about. And there are reverse vampires who give out energy, like fertilizer for a better long-term yield. At the top of the hierarchy are what might be called astronomical vampires, who approach the condition of black holes, sucking everything in and letting nothing back out. Joe hoped he wouldn't have to play his antimatter card.

Joe is alert, scanning the alley in front of him. Back in the front lines, back in Egypt. But this is a different time and place. He is breathing one-God poison here. The Muslim Arabs have taken over. The Pharaohs are dead, all their Gods crumbling to dust. Only the pyramids and temples and statues remain.  . . .

This is Cairo, and he belongs to the forbidden Ismailian sect. A traveling merchant with his two bodyguards. Keeping the guide in sight, through labyrinthine alleys and bazaars and markets, the sour stench of poverty and a snarling, doglike hate. He is carrying a short sword, a short ebony club and a poisoned dagger. A very important and, I may add, dangerous, assignment.

The Far Assembly was simply a small teahouse with benches along the walls, in an isolated section of the market. Since all the seats were full, a stranger would pass on by. Now, as they approach, three men get up and pay and walk out. That is their signal to come in and sit down.

This was his first meeting with Hassan i Sabbah, who was sitting directly opposite, six feet away. He wrote in his diary:

    I had an immediate impression of austerity and dedication, but it was a kind of dedication I had never seen before. There was nothing of the ordinary priest-fanatic here at all. A priest is a representative and, by the nature of his function, a conveyor of lies. Hassan i Sabbah is the Imam. It cannot be falsified. You notice his eyes, of a very pale blue, washing into white. His mind is clear and devious as underground water. You are not sure where it will emerge, but when it does, you realize it could only have been just there.

   Questions raised: How did the Egyptian Gods and Demons set up and activate an elaborate bureaucracy governing and controlling immortality and assigning it, on arbitrary grounds, to a chosen few? The fact that few could qualify is evidence that there was something to qualify for.

   Limited and precarious immortality actually existed. For this reason no one challenged the system. They wanted to become Gods themselves, under existing conditions. In other words, they prostrated themselves before the Pharaoh and the Gods that he represented and partook of.  . . .

  Then come the one-God religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, promising immortality to everyone simply for obeying a few simple rules. Just pray, and you can't go astray. Pray and believe—believe an obvious lie, and pray to a shameless swindler.

    Immortality is purpose and function. Obviously, few can qualify. And does this Christian God stand with his worshippers? He does not. Like a cowardly officer, he keeps himself well out of the war zone, bathed in the sniveling prayers of his groveling, shit-eating worshippers—his dogs.