Jason, who knew none of this, demanded to hear what came next. “Did Theseus go on and stick old Minos with his sword just to show him? What about Daedalus, who made that maze in the first place? He had it coming. How about sticking him?”
“Well,” said his mama, “there’s only one way to find out.”
“What’s that?”
“Read it yourself.”
Jason smiled to himself as he looked around the library at Eliada. He had flown into such a rage. He told his mama she knew full well he could not read or write, and it was unkind of her to withhold important facts on account of his infirmity. His mama had gotten mad too, or pretended to, and took the book away until he came to his senses.
Jason had stayed mad for only a little while. And now, he knew that the only reason he could read the titles at least in this medical library was because of that night. No way he would have figured out reading and writing near as well if his mama had stuck him in a schoolhouse and made him learn his ABCs with chalk and slate at the foot of some stranger. The temptation of mythology was what did it for him, and she laid it out for him, like the Devil doing good.
Out in the hall, a door slammed, and as fast, the door to the examination room cracked open. Dr. Bergstrom stepped in. He was wearing a face mask like Aunt Germaine’s, and he had his rubber gloves back on.
“Well now, young Jason. I see you are a bibliophile.”
Jason didn’t know what that meant, but he nodded like he did.
“Splendid.” He walked over to the table, and pulled out one of the dried apples. He popped it in his mouth. As he chewed on it, he opened a drawer and took from there a box of matches. “Would you,” he said, approaching a wall-sconce, “be so kind as to strip off your shirt and trousers, Jason?” He struck the match, and lit the lamp with it. “Now, please?”
Jason unbuttoned his shirt. “What for?” he said.
Dr. Bergstrom turned to him, hands crossed before him. “It is the routine in Eliada,” he said. “We must make certain that you are as well as well can be, Jason. And then we must keep you that way.”
The doctor lit five more lamps, including one that had been hung in the middle of a bowl-shaped mirror, before he started in on Jason. The room took on a glow under all that flame; it turned everything the colour of gold.
Dr. Bergstrom demanded that Jason turn over his shirt and trousers, and he sniffed at them before setting them down on a chair by the door. Then he made Jason turn around in the light, with his arms out. He asked Jason how old he was and Jason told him seventeen, and Dr. Bergstrom nodded like that meant something. He took Jason by the arm then, and led him over to a big weight scale, and told Jason to stand on it. He moved weights along metal rods until they balanced, then looked at them and wrote down the number on a sheet of paper.
“Over here now,” he said, and motioned to a spot on the wall that had been marked off in feet and inches. He made Jason stand against it, and took a book from the shelf and measured Jason’s height, which Jason thought was five feet and seven inches but Dr. Bergstrom said was five feet and nine inches.
“Sit on the examination table,” he said, the mask puffing out with the wind of his speech.
Jason did as he was told. Dr. Bergstrom went over to the bench, and took something that looked like a hand-scythe, except that it was hinged like scissors and not sharp. Bergstrom told Jason to hold still, and he opened it like pincers on a bug, and set Jason’s head in the middle. The metal tips felt cold against his temples, and Jason worried it would poke into the soft skull there. It did not. He lifted it away, took it back to the bench, and set it against a ruler, and marked a notation. Then he repeated the procedure with the pincers at the back of Jason’s skull, at his jaw-line, his ears and the back of his neck.
“What are you measuring my head for?” asked Jason, but Dr. Bergstrom didn’t answer.
“Smile,” he said. And then added impatiently: “So I can see your teeth.” He examined those, and asked Jason if he ever had a toothache, and when Jason said no, he nodded. He went back to the bench, wrote more things down, then opened one of the glass-covered cabinets. This time he pulled out a thin metal cylinder, and a brown glass bottle.
“Lie on your stomach,” he ordered, not looking back.
“You goin’ to take my temperature?” asked Jason. When Dr. Bergstrom didn’t answer, Jason went on: “When I was small, the doctor in Cracked Wheel took my temperature with a thermometer up my behind, because he feared I’d bite it and poison myself if I put it in my mouth. Well I ain’t going to bite it, so you can just—”
“I am not taking your temperature, Jason,” said Dr. Bergstrom. He was coming across the floor. Jason could see that he was holding the cylinder between two fingers. On one end was a sharp needle. A bead of fluid gleamed like liquid gold on its tip.
“Now hold still,” he said.
Jason did as he was told.
Jason blinked and coughed. He was lying down, on a hard bed very different from the examination table. His arms hurt. His vision was blurry; as was his understanding of exactly how he’d got there.
Memory became fragmented up to the moment. He recalled a sharp pain in his behind, and then a cool feeling, like his foot had gone to sleep. He may have said something.
He may have gotten up off the table. Stumbled around a bit. He may have fallen to the floor. He may have even got up again, made it a short way down the hall, and then fallen over again before the world vanished.
Best Jason could say was that, next thing he knew, he was here. Lying on a table or a bed or, judging from its hardness, somewhere in between the two. His clothes were gone, replaced by a thin cotton sheet. The things that hurt his arms and legs were leather straps tied on top of that sheet. They were tying him down.
Jason had to fight to control his breathing as he put it together. He didn’t know much about doctoring—what little he’d seen of it happened at the barber shop in Cracked Wheel. But he knew that sometimes the barber would use the straps to hold a fellow still for awful things like amputating a leg or digging out a stone.
What in hell were they doing tying Jason down like this? What was Dr. Bergstrom doing, sticking him with a poisoned needle without asking him first? Jason pushed against the straps. He didn’t expect it to free him and so was not surprised when it didn’t. It still made him mad.
He blinked, and his eyes got some of their focus back. He looked side to side. He was in a long whitewashed room, with a high ceiling and windows only near the top. There were other beds in here—maybe ten of them. But the rest were empty. At the far end, he could see two figures, caught in the dim moonlight that cut down through the windows, silhouetted in the glow of candlelight. They were huddled around it, talking to one another, turned away from Jason.
“Hey!” he hollered. “Hey!”
They both turned to him.
“Jason!” It was Aunt Germaine. The other one didn’t speak, but Jason figured it for Dr. Bergstrom.
The two of them hurried across the room. Jason, to show his displeasure, struggled theatrically against the restraints. When they arrived, he noted that both were wearing white gowns and masks over their mouths. “What is the matter,” said Jason in a low, angry voice, “I got a smell about me?”