I was beginning the second week of the treatment, approaching the crisis. The Martian drug had accumulated to some critical level in my blood and tissues. Even when the fevers subsided I felt disoriented, confused. The purely physical side effects were no fun either. Joint pain. Jaundice. Rash, if by "rash" you mean the sensation of having your skin slough off, layer by layer, exposing flesh almost as raw as an open wound. Some nights I slept for four or five hours—five was my record, I think—and woke in a slurry of dander, which Diane would clean from the blood-pocked bed while I shifted arthritically to a bedside chair.
I came to distrust even my most lucid moments. Just as often what I felt was a purely hallucinatory clarity, the world overbright and hyperdefined, words and memory cogged like gears in a runaway engine.
Bad for me. Maybe worse for Diane, who had to do bedpan duty during the times I was incontinent. In a way she was returning a favor. I had been with her when she endured this phase of the struggle herself. But that had been many years ago.
* * * * *
Most nights she slept beside me, though I don't know how she stood it. She kept a careful distance between us—at times just the pressure of the cotton sheet was painful enough to make me weep—but the almost subliminal sense of her presence was soothing.
On the really bad nights, when in my thrashing I might have thrown out an arm and hurt her, she curled up on the flower-print settee by the balcony doors.
She didn't say much about her trips into Padang. I knew approximately what she was doing there: making connections with pursers and cargo masters, pricing out options for a transit of the Arch. Dangerous work. If anything made me feel worse than the effects of the drug it was watching Diane walk out the door into a potentially violent Asian demimonde with no more protection than a pocket-sized can of Mace and her own considerable courage.
But even that intolerable risk was better than getting caught.
They—and by "they" I mean agents of the Chaykin administration or their allies in Jakarta—were interested in us for a number of reasons. Because of the drug, of course, and more important the several digital copies of the Martian archives we were carrying. And they would have loved to interrogate us about Jason's last hours: the monologue I had witnessed and recorded, everything he had told me about the nature of the Hypotheticals and the Spin, knowledge only Jason had possessed.
* * * * *
I slept and woke, and she was gone.
I spent an hour watching the balcony curtains move, watching sunlight angle up the visible leg of the Arch, daydreaming about the Seychelles.
Ever been to the Seychelles? Me neither. What was running in my head was an old PBS documentary I had once seen. The Seychelles are tropical islands, home to tortoises and coco de mer and a dozen varieties of rare birds. Geologically, they're all that remains of an ancient continent that once linked Asia and South America, long before the evolution of modern humans.
Dreams, Diane once said, are metaphors gone feral. The reason I dreamed about the Seychelles (I imagined her telling me) was because I felt submerged, ancient, almost extinct.
Like a drowning continent, awash in the prospect of my own transformation.
* * * * *
I slept again. Woke, and she still wasn't there.
* * * * *
Woke in the dark, still alone and knowing that by now too much time had passed. Bad sign. In the past, Diane had always come back by nightfall.
I'd been thrashing in my sleep. The cotton sheet lay puddled on the floor, barely visible in the light reflected by the plaster ceiling from the street outside. I was chilly but too sore to reach over and retrieve it.
The sky outside was exquisitely clear. If I gritted my teeth and inclined my head to the left I could see a few bright stars through the glass balcony doors. I entertained myself with the idea that in absolute terms some of those stars might be younger than I was.
I tried not to think about Diane and where she might be and what might be happening to her.
And eventually I fell asleep with the starlight burning through my eyelids, phosphorescent ghosts floating in the reddish dark.
* * * * *
Morning.
At least I thought it was morning. There was daylight beyond the window now. Someone, most likely the maid, knocked twice and said something testy in Malay from the hall. And went away again.
Now I was genuinely worried, though in this particular phase of the treatment the anxiety came through as a muddled peevishness. What had possessed Diane to stay away so intolerably long, and why wasn't she here to hold my hand and sponge my forehead? The idea that she might have come to harm was unwelcome, unproven, inadmissible before the court.
Still, the plastic bottle of water by the bed had been empty since at least yesterday or longer, my lips were chapped to the point of cracking, and I couldn't remember the last time I had hobbled to the toilet. If I didn't want my kidneys to shut down altogether I'd have to fetch water from the bathroom tap.
But it was hard enough just sitting up without screaming. The act of levering my legs over the side of the mattress was nearly unendurable, as if my bones and cartilage had been replaced with broken glass and rusty razors.
And although I tried to distract myself by thinking of something else (the Seychelles, the sky), even that feeble anodyne was distorted by the lens of the fever. I imagined I heard Jason's voice behind me, Jason asking me to get him something—a rag, a chamois; his hands were dirty. I came out of the bathroom with a washcloth instead of a glass of water and was halfway back to bed before I realized my mistake. Stupid. Start again. Take the empty water bottle this time. Fill it all the way up. Fill it to brimming. Follow the drinking gourd.
Handing him a chamois in the garden shed behind the Big House where the landscapers kept their tools.
He would have been about twelve years old. Early summer, a couple of years before the Spin.
Sip water and taste time. Here comes memory again.
* * * * *
I was surprised when Jason suggested we try to fix the gardener's gas mower. The gardener at the Big House was an irritable Belgian named De Meyer, who chain-smoked Gauloises and would only shrug sourly when we spoke to him. He had been cursing the mower because it coughed smoke and stalled every few minutes. Why do him a favor? But it was the intellectual challenge that fascinated Jase. He told me he'd been up past midnight researching gasoline engines on the Internet. His curiosity was piqued. He said he wanted to see what one looked like in vivo. The fact that I didn't know what in vivo meant made the prospect sound doubly interesting. I said I'd be happy to help.
In fact I did little more than watch while he positioned the mower over a dozen sheets of yesterday's Washington Post and began his examination. This was inside the musty but private tool shed at the back of the lawn, where the air reeked of oil and gasoline, fertilizer and herbicide. Bags of lawn seed and bark mulch spilled from raw pine shelves among the spavined blades and splintered handles of garden tools. We weren't supposed to play in the tool shed. Usually it was locked. Jason had taken the key from a rack inside the basement door.
It was a hot Friday afternoon outside and I didn't mind being in there watching him work; it was both instructive and oddly soothing. First he inspected the machine, stretching his body along the floor beside it. He patiently ran his fingers over the cowling, locating the screw heads, and when he was satisfied he removed the screws and set them aside, in order, and the housing next to them when he lifted it off.
And so into the deep workings of the machine. Somehow Jason had taught himself or intuited the use of a ratchet driver and a torque wrench. His moves were sometimes tentative but never uncertain. He worked like an artist or an athlete— nuanced, knowing, conscious of his own limitations. He had disassembled every part he could reach and laid them all out on the grease-blackened pages of the Post like an anatomical illustration when the shed door squealed open and we both jumped.