But not his son.
I went through the back rooms, having a certain need to know with my own senses that Joseph Max was dead.
I found him in a bedroom at the back. He was quite dead, lying in pallid dignity; someone had had the courtesy to close his mouth and eyes — Miriam, I think, for she was not dead, not yet. She sat beside him on the bed, her hand moving aimlessly through his hair and over his cheek. Her nose was reddened, but not from tears: her eyes were dry and somewhat feverish. The first symptoms are those of the common cold….
It was of interest (to state it in the coldest way) to note that as a woman she had loved Joseph Max, perhaps a great deal; that her engagement to Abraham had been on her side a matter of politics, a device of Keller and Nicholas to bind Abraham into the Party in the hope of using his abilities. I had guessed that, much earlier; now it was hardly even of academic importance. When history moves swiftly it leaves us all behind, men and Martians. She said something to me, hoarsely and with difficulty. I think it was: “Go away….” I could not speak to her, as one cannot speak to an insect forced to live a while after its body is crushed. In this room, para was and would be merciful.
Abraham had not returned. It was early afternoon when I got back to the apartment. The subway was still functioning and there were more passengers, though nothing like the normal crowds. In the walk from the subway to my apartment I saw nothing more that I want to record. Other Observers, Drozma, will be telling you of these things. I knew, as I came home, that I had seen only the small beginnings of the disaster. Before long — a day, a week — there will be, not one old man dead in the gutter and waiting for a wagon that can’t come quickly, but many more. There will not be a wall in the city that doesn’t hide a human loss. There will be breakdown of communication, transport — for New York and most other modern cities, that means starvation. There will be riots; some will die even while throwing stones at what they believe to be some enemy. There will be lime pits. If even the rats die of it…
Abraham did not come home all afternoon. At three I telephoned Sharon, and she answered quickly, asking at once whether I was well. Abraham had been there in the morning, she said, and had left a little before noon. She took it for granted that he would be going home, though he hadn’t said so. She was well, Sharon told me; she and Sophia were well….
Never mind the next six hours. I lived through them. Abraham came home at nine, and limped to the sofa, taking off the prosthetic shoe and nursing his left foot on his knee. “Just standing on the damn thing too much,” he said. “I wanted to call you from the hospital, but every line was jammed all day.”
“Hospital—”
“Working there. Cornell Center. Impulse — one I should’ve had sooner, only that brain you say I have wasn’t operating. Sure, just walked in, volunteered. Maybe it takes a pestilence to slice the red tape. They’ll use anybody who can still crawl, run errands, carry a bedpan. I’m to go back at 3 a.m. — bit of sleep and something to eat.” He gulped the drink I brought him, half blind with an exhaustion more than physical. “Will, I didn’t know — you couldn’t imagine — the babies, the old, the great husky men who look as if nothing could hurt ’em — down like the corn in a hailstorm. There aren’t any beds left, you know. We’ll use the floor while the extra mattresses last, and then — go on using the floor. We try to be sure they’re really dead before we—”
“I’ll go along with you at three.”
This was not the first time that human nature has put me to shame, but it is the time I shall always remember best.
9
Sophia Wilkanowska died this morning. So did President Clifford, but I think of Sophia, and one other.
Yes, the President of the United States died this morning. According to the newspaper, he went out like a gentleman, after some seventy-two hours without sleep, upholding the massive burden of duties and decisions even after the cold symptoms began and he knew the virus was in him. Disaster, as human beings would say, always does separate the men from the boys. He was still quite young — fifty-nine. Rest in peace. Vice-President Borden is the usual political unknown; time enough to worry about him if he survives the siege. I am thinking of Sophia and one other.
Abraham and I came home at one o’clock Sunday, after ten hours at the hospital. We were to return at eight in the evening. Sharon’s telephone did not answer. I think that for Abraham the hours had become a black tunnel with a light at the end, the light of the moment when he could talk to Sharon. Now the telephone did not answer, and I had to watch the light go out. I heard the dead impersonal rings. He broke the connection. “Maybe I dialed wrong.” He tried again. He hadn’t dialed wrong. “I’ll go over,” he said. “You’d better get some sleep.”
“What about that leg?” His left leg had swollen at the ankle. He had not stumbled at the hospital; now he did, a little, as he crossed the room to retrieve a wet raincoat. There was a sorry drizzle on the streets, and March chill had returned.
“That? Oh, the hell with it, it works. You’re going back at eight, Will?”
“I think I’d better. But you should stay with Sharon. You’ll find she’s just stepped out somewhere, but — stay with her anyhow.”
“Sophia — almost never goes out, Sharon said: her blindness.”
“I know. You stay with them. It’s more important.”
“Yes — ‘importance’ is a word” — he was reeling with fatigue — “and you taught me not to be used by words.”
“Besides, another ten hours on that leg and you couldn’t walk, Abraham — better admit it.”
He found second wind — or third, or fourth. It was not to steady himself that he turned in the doorway and caught hold of my coat lapel. “Will — thanks for everything.”
I tried to look irritated. “Cut that out — this isn’t good-by. I’m coming over to Brooklyn myself tomorrow, soon as I’m through at the hospital. You stay with them, and keep off that leg as much as you can.”
“All the same, thanks.” His dark eyes were upturned, inescapable, blazing with the unsayable. “Sharon told me how it happened that Mrs. Wilks started her school. I was thinking about the woods too — the woods in Latimer.” He grinned suddenly, and shook my coat lapel, and limped hurriedly for the elevator, leaving me — not exactly alone.
He called back in the late afternoon, but found it difficult to talk. I asked: “Sharon—”
“She’s all right. She’s all right, Will, but—”
“Sophia?”
“Has it…. Sharon had gone out, when I was trying to call, out to find a doctor. There aren’t any available. Not one.”
“Yes, it would have come to that by now. Better to keep her there, I think. Better than a hospital.”
“Yes, we’ve seen that.” Sophia would die. We both knew it; both remembered a statement in a newspaper we read on the way home from the hospitaclass="underline" So far, all patients showing signs of recovery are under thirty-five years of age. “They say, Will, they say two Brooklyn hospitals are turning them away — simply no place to put them.”
“I’ll come tomorrow, soon as I’m through. You stay there.”
“Yes,” he said.
“You’re certain that Sharon—”
“I’m certain,” said Abraham, and his voice cracked all to pieces as if someone had struck him in the chest. “I’m certain.” He hung up.
Abraham had not stumbled there at the hospital. I did, a few times, that night, not so much from fatigue as from a sense of helplessness that became physical, as if I were trying to swim in molasses. They came in so fast! There was no such thing as separating the light cases from the severe — there were no light cases, not there at the Center. My duties were to fetch and carry on three wards, lend a hand wherever I was at anything the nurses or doctors thought I could do. I did my best, but it was not like Abraham’s best, and now and then I stumbled.