If there was a particular stressor in the boy’s life, an audition for a school play, some kind of standardized testing, a visit from his French cousins, the younger Koo had often, in the past, repaired to the bathroom and to the paling salon that had come with the unit. In fact, the little booths that Jean-Paul had designed for his cosmetic surgery business bore a significant resemblance to the paling booths he had sometimes favored as a younger boy. An astute psychologist, with a copy of the DSM-VIII, might have diagnosed racial dysphoria, and this was a popular diagnosis in the era of the Sino-Indian Economic Compact. No one in NAFTA wanted to look like they could come from a Hindu nation.
Koo met the youngsters in the hall and followed them toward the bathroom. Vienna, still wearing her rubberized gloves, was attempting to help along Jean-Paul, whose legs were weak and, Koo supposed, ready to detach. Instead of greeting Dr. Woo Lee Koo, the young lovers proceeded as if in this end stage of their doomed romance, they no longer needed anyone besides themselves. Least of all parents. They shut the bathroom door behind themselves gently but firmly, and Koo found himself on the other side of the action. He dictated a few more notes while he was there, mumbling in Korean as he listened to the paling lamps going on in the bathroom. It was good they were paling now, what with the blackout only a few hours away.
If the question of self is an important marker in tertiary-stage infection, during which a rigid, human idea of self leaves the patient to be replaced by a more permeable sense of identity in which self and inanimate objects become interdependent and less distinguishable, it should be noted that even in this advanced stage, our patient is still inclined toward idiosyncrasies he exhibited from earliest childhood. For example, despite long having been told that he risked melanoma if he didn’t discontinue paling, patient nonetheless has expressed a fervent and consistent desire to be a different color. The affectation persists at this late stage of infection despite likely skin failure and sickly pallor.
There was some disturbance in the bathroom, some commotion, as if the two of them were moving about quite a bit, wrestling, or were engaged in some fully executed jitterbug of love, and the sound of it reminded Koo of those sequences in antiquated slapstick comedies when many more people were crammed into some tiny space than could actually fit. The recessed lighting flickered in the hall where he stood, as it always did when Jean-Paul was using the paling appliance in the bathroom. Wait! Koo was distracted by an incoming call on his digital assistant, which was, at this moment, looped around his brown plastic belt — Levy again, from Northwest Medical, with a note suggesting that isolating patients in a hyperbaric chamber had yet to produce results. In fact, Levy noted, they’d left one patient in there, and when they returned an hour later, he was in three different pieces. They had to stop one of the patient’s feet from attempting to escape into the general hospital population by crushing all the bones in it with a nearby fire ax. Koo passed a distracted moment lamenting the professional depths to which his colleagues had free-fallen in search of a quick fix for M. thanatobacillus. It was no better than the medieval responses to the buboes that wiped out so much of Europe — smoke, sex, pleasant smells, prayer, and inquisitions. Maybe these dark ages were not substantively different from those, and what was forgotten would again exceed what was remembered. But Koo found that his reveries, facing a scuffed and overdue-to-be-repainted bathroom door, beyond which was the humming of ultraviolet radiation, were suddenly interrupted by a braying that could only be one thing. It was like a familiar song, that sound, the sound of his son’s voice, his son’s voice saying a rather familiar thing:
“That feels fucking great!”
What? Unmistakably his son’s voice, audibly so, followed in turn by an unreserved giggling from Vienna Roberts, a laughter prompted, Koo assumed, by the sound of the patient speaking for the first time in a day or so.
“Fucking great!”
Koo began pounding on the door, and he was astonished to find with what enthusiasm he was pounding on the door, with what flooding relief he begged to be admitted, calling his son’s name, for here was a moment to be treasured, a moment when things seemed as though they were not quite as grim as he’d previously imagined. Under the margin of the door, in the hum of the paling salon, there was, for a minute at any rate, some hope.
The door swung back, and there was his son, his skin hanging like rags on his body, having lost quite a bit of weight already, a bit of clotted arterial gunk in the corners of his eyes, which were both bloodshot and slightly yellowy, but smiling, smiling.
Koo said, “What is it that’s going on?” And while the words may have had the ring of paternal injunction about them, Koo also felt giddy with the possibilities of the moment.
“Dad,” Jean-Paul said, struggling but articulating nonetheless, “I really feel better in here. Is it possible that I could feel better in here? Could this…”
So overpowering was the sense that something at last might have been going right for the infected young man, that Koo didn’t even notice at first, and neither did Jean-Paul, that Vienna Roberts had thrown herself around her contagious lover, encircling him. Without a mask or a hospital gown on, nor other protection, she encircled Jean-Paul, and she lay her face against his face, and then her breast against his breast, and there they were now, having conjoined their destinies, the lovers. Koo was moved enough that, at last, he felt unable to repel a conviction that it would be all right:
“My son,” he said, “I am so happy to hear your voice. You don’t know how happy I am to hear your voice. I am even happy to hear your cursing. I have not been so happy to hear your cursing in many years. In fact, I am rarely happy to hear your cursing, but today I am very happy. You should feel encouraged to curse some more. You should curse to your heart’s content. And I must say that this moment gives me some ideas, some ideas I must share with some of the other medical personnel who are working on this question of what to do about the disease. If you would be interested to know, the idea that I have is that there are two factors that worked to inhibit the growth of the bacteria M. thanatobacillus on the planet where it was incubating, and the first of these factors is the far greater impact of cosmic rays and other radiation on the planet Mars.”
“But Dad,” Jean-Paul said, slurring perceptibly, “what does that have to do with—”
“This machine for which we pay rather too much money, because of the amount of electrical energy it uses, aims to apply ultraviolet radiation to your skin, in order to cook away the upper layers of skin, the pigment manufacturing of the dermal cells. It is an apparatus that I have always deplored and found unnecessary, even barbaric, and yet it may be that in this case the radiation is duplicating the kinds of effects that were present on the surface of Mars. On the one hand, as I am thinking about it now, it is possible that the bacteria on Mars became irradiated by the surface conditions, the lack of atmosphere on the planet, and therefore became inured to low-level radiation, but the very same conditions kept it from duplicating effectively, and thus the slow rate of progression of the infection in those who were on the Mars mission.”
“And—”
“It means that you are going to stay in the bathroom under the paling lamps for a good portion of this day, I believe, at least until I see about radiation treatments at the hospital.”
The young man smiled, as perhaps he had not smiled for some time now, and the girl kissed him on the face. There was a kind of slurpy sound issuing from Jean-Paul’s skin when she applied herself to it. Some of it pulled away with her.