The ward was clean, bright, spacious, quiet. I spent most of my time screened off from the other patients, but the white translucent partitions let the daylight through—and even when my skin was on fire, the faint touch of radiant warmth reaching my body was strangely comforting, like a familiar embrace.
By late afternoon on the first day, the antipyritics seemed to be working. I watched the graph on the bedside monitor; my temperature was still pathological, but the immediate risk of brain damage had passed. I tried to swallow liquids, but nothing stayed down—so I moistened my parched lips and throat, and let the intravenous drip do the rest.
Nothing could stop the cramps and the bowel spasms. When they came, it was like demonic possession, like being ridden by a voodoo god: an obscene bear-hug by something powerful and alien constricting inside my flesh. I couldn’t believe that any muscle in my own rag-doll body could still be so strong. I tried to stay calm—to accept each brutal convulsion as inevitable, to keep my mind fixed on the sure and certain knowledge that this too would pass—but every time, the surge of nausea swept away my laboriously composed stoicism like a house of matchsticks beneath a tidal wave, and left me shuddering and sobbing, convinced that I was finally dying, and half-believing that that was what I wanted more than anything else: instant release.
My melatonin patch had been removed; the abyssal sleep it generated was too dangerous, now. But I couldn’t begin to tell the difference between the erratic rhythms of melatonin withdrawal, and my otherwise natural state: long stretches of half-sensate paralytic stupor, broken up by brief, violent dreams—and moments of panic-stricken clarity each time I believed my intestines were about to rupture and wash out of me in a red and gray tide.
I told myself that I was stronger and more patient than the disease. Generations of bacteria could come and go; all I had to do was hang on. All I had to do was outlive them.
On the morning of the second day, Mosala and De Groot came to visit. They seemed like time travelers to me; my previous life on Stateless had already receded into the distant past.
Mosala seemed shocked by my appearance. She said gently, “I’ve taken your advice; I’ve been examined thoroughly. I'm not infected, Andrew. I’ve spoken to your doctor, and he thinks you must have caught this from food on the plane.”
I croaked, “Has anyone else, on the same flight—?”
“No. But one sealed package might have missed being irradiated, and ended up imperfectly sterilized. It can happen.”
I didn’t have the strength to argue. And this theory made a certain amount of sense: a random glitch had breached the technological barrier between Third World and First, momentarily scrambling the impeccable free-market logic of employing the cheapest caterers on the planet and then blasting away the risks with an equally cheap burst of gamma rays.
That evening, my temperature began rising again. Michael—the Fijian man who’d greeted me when I first woke, and who’d since explained that he was “both doctor and nurse, if you insist on using those archaic foreign words here"—sat by my bed for most of the night… or at least, he was there in the flesh during every brief window of lucidity I experienced; the rest of the time, for all I knew, I hallucinated his presence.
I slept three straight hours from dawn to mid-morning—long enough for my first coherent dream. Clawing my way up toward consciousness, I clung defiantly to the happy ending: The disease had run its course, it had burned itself out. My symptoms had vanished. Gina had even flown in overnight—to take me back, to take me home.
I’d been woken by an intense cramp. I was soon expelling gray water full of intestinal mucus, gasping obscenities, wanting to die.
In the late afternoon, with the sunlit ward behind the screens as vague and luminous as heaven—re-enacting the same convulsions for the thousandth time, shitting out, yet again, every last drop of fluid the drip had fed into me—I found myself emitting a keening noise, baring my teeth and shivering, like a dog, like a sick hyena.
Early on the fourth day, my fever almost vanished. Everything which had come before seemed like an anesthetized nightmare, violent and frightening but inconsequential—a dream sequence shot through gauze.
A merciless gray solidity clung to everything in sight. The screens around me were caked with dust. The sheets were stained yellow from dried sweat. My skin was coated with slime. My lips, my tongue, my throat, were cracked and stinging, sloughing dead cells and seeping a thin discharge which tasted more like salt than blood. Every muscle from my diaphragm to my groin felt injured, useless, tortured beyond repair— but tensed like an animal flinching from a rain of blows, ready for more. The joints of my knees felt as if I’d been crouching for a week on cold, hard ground.
The cramps, the spasms, began again. I’d never been so lucid; they’d never been worse.
I had no patience left. All I wanted to do was rise to my feet and walk out of the hospital, leaving my body behind. Flesh and bacteria could fight it out between themselves; I’d lost interest.
I tried. I closed my eyes and pictured it. I willed it to happen, I wasn’t delirious—but walking away from this pointless, ugly confrontation seemed like such a sensible choice, such an obvious solution, that for a moment I suspended all disbelief.
And I finally understood, as I never had before—not through sex, not through food, not through the lost exuberant physicality of childhood, not from the pinpricks of a hundred petty injuries and instantly cured diseases—that this vision of escape was meaningless, a false arithmetic, an idiot dream.
This diseased body was my whole self. It was not a temporary shelter for some tiny, indestructible man-god living in the safe warm dark behind my eyes. From skull to putrid arsehole, this was the instrument of everything I’d ever do, ever feel, ever be.
I’d never believed otherwise—but I’d never really felt it, never really known it. I’d never before been forced to embrace the whole sordid, twitching, visceral truth.
Was this what Daniel Cavolini had learned, when he tore away his blindfold? I stared up at the ceiling, tense and shivering, claustrophobic, all the nausea and pain spread across my abdomen hardening into rigid bands like metal embedded in the flesh.
By noon, my temperature started climbing again. I was glad: I wanted delirium, I wanted confusion. Sometimes the fever flayed every nerve, magnified and sharpened every sensation—but I still hoped it might erase this new understanding, which was worse than the pain.
It didn’t.
Mosala visited again. I smiled and nodded, but said nothing, and I couldn’t concentrate on her words. The two screens either side of the bed remained in place, but the third had been moved aside, and when I raised my head I could see the patient opposite me, a forlorn skinny boy with a drip, his parents beside him. His father was reading to him quietly; his mother held his hand. The whole tableau seemed impossibly distant, separated from me by an unbridgeable gulf; I couldn’t imagine ever again having the power to climb to my feet and walk five meters.
Mosala left. I drifted.
Then I noticed someone standing near the foot of the bed, and an electric jolt ran through my body. A shock of transcendental awe.
Striding through unforgiving reality: an angel.
Janet Walsh turned, half toward me. I raised myself up on my elbows and called out to her, terrified, enraptured. “I think I understand now. Why you do it. Not how… but why.”
She looked straight at me, mildly puzzled, but unperturbed.
I said, “Please talk to me. I'm ready to listen.”
Walsh frowned slightly, tolerant but uncomprehending, her wings fluttering patiently.