“I’ve never felt better in my life. I sleep like a baby, food tastes wonderful, no aches or pains. An occasional itch in my skin. Oh… and sometimes I itch inside, in my abdomen, but I’m not sure where. Not very irritating.”
“A picture of health,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, finishing the short report on his clipboard. “Do you mind if we check your honesty?”
“Not much choice, is there?”
They gave him a complete medical twice a day, as regularly as his unpredictable sleep periods allowed. He submitted to them with a grim kind of patience; the novelty of an examination conducted by waldoes had long since worn off.
The large panel hummed open and a tray containing glassware and tools slid forward. Then four long metal and plastic arms unfolded, their grasping parts flexing experimentally. A woman standing in a booth behind the arms peered at Bernard through a double glass window. A television camera on the elbow of one of the arms spun around, its red light glowing. “Good afternoon, Dr. Bernard,” the woman said pleasantly. She was young, sternly attractive, with red-brown hair tied back in a stylishly compact bun.
“I love you, Dr. Schatz,” he said, lying on the low table which rolled out below the waldoes and the tray.
“Just for you, and just for today, I am Frieda. We love you, also, Doctor,” Schatz said. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t love me at all.”
“I’m starting to like this, Frieda.”
“Hmph.” Schatz used the fine-maneuver waldo to pick up a vacuum ampule from the tray. With uncanny expertise, she guided the needle into a vein and withdrew ten cc’s of blood. He noticed with some interest that the blood was purple-pink.
“Be careful they don’t bite back,” he warned her.
“We are very careful, Doctor,” she said. Bernard sensed tension behind her banter. There could be a number of things they weren’t telling him about his condition. But why hide anything? He already considered himself a doomed man.
“You’re not telling it to me straight, Frieda,” he said as she applied a skin culture tape to his back. The waldo removed the tape with a sticky rip and dropped it into a jar. Another arm quickly stoppered the jar and sealed it in a small bath of molten wax.
“Oh, I think we are,” she replied softly, concentrating on the remotes. “What questions do you have?”
“Are there any cells left in my body that haven’t been converted?”
“Not all are noocytes, Dr. Bernard, but most have been altered in some way, yes.”
“What do you do with them after you’ve analyzed them?”
“By that time, they are all dead, Doctor. Do not worry. We are very thorough.”
“I’m not worried, Frieda.”
“That is good. Now turn over, please.”
“Not the urethra again.”
“I am told this was once a very expensive indulgence among wealthy young gentlemen in the Weimar Republic. A rare experience in the brothels of Berlin.”
“Frieda, I am constantly amazed.”
“Yes. Now please turn over, Doctor.”
He turned over and closed his eyes.
24
Candles lined the long ground-floor lobby window facing the plaza. Suzy stood back and surveyed her handiwork. The day before, she had pulled her way through a wind-shredded stretch of brown sheet and found a candle shop. Using another cart stolen from an Armenian grocery on South Street, she had heisted a load of votive candles and taken them back to the World Trade Center, where she had established her camp in the ground floor of the north tower. She had seen the green light at the top of that building.
With all the candles, maybe the submarines or airplanes would find her. And there was another impulse, too, one so silly she giggled thinking about it. She was determined to answer the river. She stuck the candles onto the window ledge, lighted them one by one, and watched their warm glows become lost in the vaster darkness all around.
Now she arranged them in spirals along the floor, going back to space them out as her supply diminished. She lighted the candles and walked from flame to flame across the broad carpet, smiling at the light, feeling vaguely guilty about the dripping wax.
She ate a package of M&Ms and read by the light of five bunched candles a copy of Lady’s Home Journal stolen from a concourse newsstand. She was pretty good at reading– slow, but she knew many of the words. The magazine pages with their abundance of ads and tiny columns of words about clothes and cooking and family problems were welcome doses of anesthetic.
Lying on her back on the carpet with the food cart and the empty candle cart nearby, she wondered if she would ever be married—if there would be anybody to marry—and ever have a house where she could apply some of the hints she now pored over. “Probably not,” she told herself. “I’m a spinster for sure now.” She had never dated extensively, had never gone all the way with Gary, and had graduated from special classes in high school with the reputation of being nice… and dull. Some people like her were kind of wild, making up for not being too bright by doing lots of daring things.
“Well, I’m still here,” she said to the high dark ceiling, “and I’m still dull.”
She carried the magazine down the stairs back to the stand, candle in one hand, and picked out a Cosmopolitan to read next. Back on the lobby level, she fell asleep briefly, woke up with a start when the magazine fell across her stomach, and walked around from candle to candle, snuffing them out in case she wanted to use them again tomorrow night. Then she lay down on her side on the carpet, using Kenneth’s coat for a pillow, one candle still burning, and thought of the massive building above her. She couldn’t remember whether the twin towers were still the tallest in the world. She thought not. Each was like an ocean liner upended and stuck into the sky—taller than any ocean liner, actually; so the tourist brochure said.
It would be fun to explore all the shops on the concourse, but even half-asleep, Suzy knew what she would have to do, eventually. She would have to climb the stairs to the top, wherever the stairs were, find out what made the light, and look out across New York—she could see all of the city and much of the state from that vantage. She could see what had happened, and what was happening. The radio might receive more stations that high up. Besides, there was a restaurant on top, and that meant more food. And a bar. She suddenly wanted to get very drunk, something she had tried only twice before in her life.
It wouldn’t be easy. Climbing the stairs could take a day or longer, she knew.
She started up out of light sleep. Something had made a noise nearby, a squeaky, sliding scrape. Dawn was gray and dim outside. There was a motion in the plaza—things rolling, like dust-kittens under a bed, like tumbleweeds. She blinked and rubbed her eyes and got to her knees, squinting to see more clearly.
Feathery cartwheels blew in with the wind, sometimes spinning and falling over, crossing the five acres of the plaza, their wind-vane spokes flapping at the edges. They were gray and white and brown. The fallen ones disassembled on the concrete and flattened out, adhering to the pavement and lifting foot-high fronds. They were pouring into the plaza now, more as day brightened, running into the glass and smearing, spreading outward.
“No more going outside,” she told herself. “Uh-uh.”
She ate a granola bar and turned on the radio, hoping to still be able to receive the British station she had heard the day before. With a little tuning, the speaker produced a weak voice, cross-thatched with interference, like a man speaking through felt.
“…to say that the world economy will suffer is certainly an understatement. Who knows how much of the world’s resources—both in raw materials and manufactured goods, not to mention, financial records and capital—lies inaccessible in North America now? I realize most people worry more about their immediate survival, and wonder when the plague will cross the ocean, or whether it is already with us, biding its time—” Static overwhelmed the signal for several minutes. Suzy sat with crossed legs next to the radio, waiting patiently. She didn’t understand much, but the voice was comforting. “—yet my concern, as an economist, must be with what happens after the crisis passes. If it passes. Well, I’m an optimist. God in all His wisdom has some reason for this. Yes. So there has been no communication from the whole of North America, with the exception of the famous meteorological station on Afognak Island. The financiers are dead, then. The United States has always been the great bastion of private capital. Russia is now the dominant nation on the globe, militarily and perhaps financially. What can we expect?”