They were strangely silent wards. Full of the sound of tortured breath, the feeble scraping and shuffling of bodies that could move a little, but no groaning, no speech except among us who tried to care for them. When one died there was scant struggle; no convulsions or violent contractions of the muscle: you might not be sure until you stooped to feel the coldness. The smell of the wards was foul of course — two or three worn attendants can’t keep paralyzed patients clean, when there are sixty or seventy of them in a room meant to hold not more than twenty. Ten million are said to have died in the flu of 1918; that was nothing, Drozma, compared to this. There has been nothing like this since the fourteenth century. Statistical charts have gone into a fever like that of para. By this time, I suppose, technicians will have fed the nightmare figures into some of the electronic brains that have become so important in the last twenty years; but I don’t think the papers will publish what the machines have to say.
As night crawled into morning I found I was leaning more and more on the memory of how Abraham had done this same work with me the day before, and yet his way would be difficult for me to describe to you, Drozma. In actual work, perhaps he did no more than the other devoted attendants, although he seemed to: he was everywhere. There was what I must call some kind of communication between him and the conscious patients, even when the deafness of the disease prevented them from hearing anything he said. Sometimes I saw him shaping words carefully for them; sometimes he would scribble a note, or it might be only a smile or pressure of the hand or an almost telepathic understanding of an unspoken need. They knew it when he was there; those who could moved their heads to watch for him….
Most dreadful of all were those patients in the stage before unconsciousness, when their eyes glared at unknown images and their hands twitched frantically in a struggle to rise and push away some monster of the mind. Three times I saw Abraham achieve communication with such patients, making them aware of him so that his real and human face became a shield between them and the hallucinations. For one of these, a giant Negro who could have strangled a bull a few days earlier, Abraham lifted the straining hand and brought its fingers against his cheek to prove the reality; the wildness passed, and there was a kind of peace, a third victory. That man, and one of the other two, were still living when I went back Sunday night; their fevers were not very high, and the nurse had tagged their mattresses with a blue X, which was emergency shorthand for Good resistance, possible recovery. If Abraham lives, I can return soon to Northern City.
Mission accomplished. If Abraham lives…
I worked a twelve-hour shift that night, and it was ten o’clock in a rainy morning when I reached Sharon’s apartment in Brooklyn. She let me in, and cried in my arms. I could see Abraham sitting across the room frowning at the floor, and through an open door beyond him I saw Sophia’s room, and Sophia herself, already composed, her eyes shut, hands quiet. Abraham nodded, though it wasn’t necessary to tell me. Two men were coming up the stairs behind me. I had not closed the door because Sharon still clung to me, and one of the men tapped my shoulder gently. “You sent for us, sir?” They had gauze masks over mouth and nose, a singular futility. Sharon smothered a scream.
Abraham took charge, motioning Sharon and me to the studio. She was explaining to me: “You see, there can’t be any regular funerals—”
“I know, Sharon. Let Abraham—”
“Because the dead outnumber the living, do you see? Why, they always did, didn’t they? Oh yes.” She coughed and blew her nose and shivered. “And so they just come and take them, do you see?” She pulled the chair away from the piano and sat down facing me, lacing her hands together, wanting to explain. “Ben, she always liked a little ceremony. Oh, she was a very formal lady, I always tried to live up to it. I think she’d’ve liked me to play a Polonaise — not the Marche funèbre — no, no! But a Polonaise, only I don’t think I could, anyway she’s not here, is she? We have to think of it that way, don’t we?”
“Of course. Let yourself go, Sharon. You’re all wound up—”
“Oh no, because the dead outnumber us, and some of them like a little formality, I’m sure of it. It’s a matter of keeping up appearances.” I heard the front door softly close. “Would you get me a wrap, Ben? It’s miserably chilly in here, isn’t it?” It was somewhat chilly, but she was warmly dressed. “The janitor is sick, I heard. I suppose the furnace is out. I think I’d like to sit here awhile. Look at the keyboard, but I don’t think I could play anything. Would you like to, Ben?”
“No, I — I’ll get you a coat.”
Abraham came in then, and I went to look for a coat or blanket. I found her bunny fur in a closet, and as I was taking it down I heard the piano for a moment. Not playing, just an upward ripple of notes. She would be standing by it, moving the back of her finger up the keyboard, a kind of caress to a friend, as if she were saying — I hurried back with the coat, but Abraham was bringing her out of the studio then, and she smiled brilliantly. “Thanks, Ben. That’s what I wanted.” Putting out her arms for it, she stumbled. Abraham kept her from falling. I picked her up and carried her to her bedroom — cool it was, orderly and virginal, with white walls, a blue bedspread. Simplicity and innocence. She said carefully: “I’ve had a bit of a cold all morning, but I don’t think it’s anything. Feel my hand, Abe. See? I’m not feverish.” I had carried her; she was hot as a coal, and the hand that Abraham was not holding was restless at the finger ends.
“Of course you’re all right, Sharon,” he said. “Shoes off. I want you to get under the covers—”
“What did you say, Abe?”
“Shoes—”
“I can’t hear you.” She must have known it, must have been living with the thought for hours, but this was the first time that the shield of brave pretense had been torn away from her, and now she cried out: “Abe, I love you so! I wanted to live—”
After that she could not speak….
It must be near midnight. Abraham has never left her, of course. I spent some of the morning and afternoon trying to find a doctor who could come. A desperate waste of time: they are all red-eyed wrecks, working twenty-four hours a day at the hospitals and elsewhere. Not only with para: people still run their cars into lamp-posts, carve each other with knives, die of other diseases. There can be no home visits, and to send a victim to the hospital at this stage is merely to give him a more crowded place to die. I do not feel able to think of Union, Drozma. The end justifies the means, Joseph Max believed, following certain earlier theorists who should have died in infancy. I doubt if I ever knew before what it is to hate. Loving their best and hating their worst as I do, I can never go out again as an Observer. I am disqualified. I shall be old before I can look at this under the aspect of eternity.
I was right that what I saw Saturday was only a beginning. These streets are full of the dead; crews work with panel and half-ton trucks, taking them — I don’t know where. Such a crew is usually followed by a protecting patrol car. Other police cars cruise slowly, watching, I think, for any knot of citizens that might become a mob. I bought a paper. It was a Times, down to an eight-page skeleton with no advertising. Some foreign news, almost all of the spread of para. Nothing about Asia. The death of President Clifford — that, of course, is the long banner headline, and at any other time the front page would have held almost nothing else; but the story of his death reads as though the writer had done it with his left hand, or as though his own head were aching with the symptoms of the common cold…. The front page carries public notices, giving the telephone numbers of what they call Civil Defense Relief Crews — those are the men with the panel trucks. Statistics too — I’ve already forgotten most of them: over a million cases in the New York metropolitan area alone. In boldface type, standing instructions for treating victims who cannot be hospitalized. Supportive measures: keep the patient warm and quiet; don’t try to make him swallow, too likely that he will strangle; keep the head level with the body to avoid constriction of the windpipe; the room should be darkened, since the eyes are hypersensitive during the conscious phase….