He had lost the nomination by a narrow margin in one primary but won it handily four years later. Western oil interests had defected from the complacent Republicans that year, and the South, reeling from the flight of industry to Mexico, had come back into the Democratic fold. And at the level of the ballot box, perhaps personalities had something to do with it. The President was a large man, easy with a crowd, ebullient, humorous. His opponent had been lean to the point of emaciation, prim, and too easily confused. Television debates had amounted to a rout; the Republican campaign tried to withdraw from the last of the three.
There was no suspense on election night, only the pleasure of watching CNN commentators find new ways to repeat the basic datum, that a long Republican ascendancy over the White House had come to an end.
Then the Artifact had arrived in orbit and every other issue dissolved in the immediacies of that almost incomprehensible event. He had spent most of his time in office struggling with it. Ineffectually, of course. It was a crisis that couldn’t be addressed. Its secondary effects—the political instability, the sinking national morale—could. In that respect, he felt he had done some good. What an unexpected opportunity for a twentieth-century political figure: to do good. How Victorian. But he had grasped the unlikely nettle.
And there was still a chance to save some lives; and perhaps his interview with Charlie Boyle had helped. The next few days were critical. Well see, he thought.
Beyond that—
Well, it was a new world, wasn’t it?
He could feel the shape of the future, but only dimly. He suspected it did not contain a place for kings, conquerors, aristocrats; nor even parliaments, congresses, presidents.
Elizabeth was awake, reading a book as he entered the bedroom. She looked up sleepily. “How did it go?”
The President began to undress. “You know Charlie. Stiff-necked. A little dim. Self-preservation at all costs. But I think he’ll be more cautious now.”
“Is that good enough?”
He shrugged. “It’s good. It may not be enough.”
“Poor Charlie. He just doesn’t understand.”
“We’re privileged,” the President reminded his wife. “We were approached first. We’re among the few.” He had a curious thought. “The last aristocracy the world will see.”
“I suppose we are. But if we had Charlie, too, and General Chafee—”
“That will come. Though I wouldn’t count on Chafee. He strikes me as the type who might refuse.”
“I wish it would all happen faster.”
“It’s happening as fast as it can. I only hope that no one dies. Even the generals would come to regret that, I think.”
“They don’t realize what they’re fighting against. The death of Death.”
The President slipped into bed beside his wife. He had brought a slender intelligence document, this morning’s For The President Only, meaning to reread it—but what was the point? He took his wife’s hand and turned off the light.
When he married Elizabeth Bonner, she had been trim, attractive, connected to a powerful Eastern family. In the thirty years since, she had grown ebulliently fat. There had been jokes during the campaign—unkind jokes, cruel jokes. But Elizabeth had not seemed to mind—she did not deign to acknowledge such peccadilloes. And the President was only mildly perturbed. Perturbed because he loved her, not because he objected to her exuberant size. He understood the secret: She had gained weight as she had gained wisdom; it was the weight of their marriage, an alliance well-anchored and substantial.
The bedsheets were pleasingly cool. “The death of Death,’” he said. “That’s an odd thought.”
“But that’s what it is,” Elizabeth said.
The idea was comforting. And true, of course. Trust her to find the most succinct way of putting it.
And Death shall have no dominion. Was that the Bible? Tennyson? He couldn’t recall.
In any event, the President thought, the time has come.
Chapter 6
Fever
Matt was a doctor because he had been seduced by the idea of healing.
A dozen TV series and a handful of movies had convinced him that the heart of the practice of medicine was the act of healing. He managed to carry this fragile idea through med school, but it didn’t survive internship. His internship drove home the fact that a doctor’s purpose is bound up with death—its postponement, at best; its amelioration, often; its inevitability, always. Death was the gray eminence behind the caduceus. Healing was why people paid their doctors. Death was why they were afraid of them.
Contrary to myth, the med degree conferred no emotional invulnerability. Even doctors feared death—even successful doctors. Feared it and avoided it. Sometimes neurotically. During his residency, Matt had worked with an oncologist who hated his patients… He was a good doctor, unflaggingly professional, but in a lounge or a cafeteria or a bar—among colleagues—he would explain at length what weaklings people were. “They invite their tumors. They’re lazy or fat or they smoke, or they inebriate themselves with alcohol or lie in the sun with their skin exposed. Then they bring their abused bodies to me. ‘Cure this, please, doctor.’ Sickening.”
“Maybe they’re just unlucky,” Matt had ventured. “Some of them, at least.”
“The more time you spend on my floor, Dr. Wheeler, the less inclined you will be to believe that.”
Maybe so, Matt thought. The contempt was not reasonable, but it served a purpose. It kept death at arm’s length. Open the door to sympathy—even a crack—and grief might crowd in behind it.
It was not an attitude Matt could adopt, however, which helped steer him into family practice. His daily work was leavened with mumps, measles, minor wounds stitched, infections knocked out with antibiotics. Healing, in other words. Small benevolent acts. He was a bit player in the minor dramas of ordinary lives, a good guy, not a death angel presiding at the gateway to oblivion.
Seldom, at least.
But Cindy Rhee was dying, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He had told the Rhees he would stop in to see their daughter Friday morning.
David Rhee was a forklift driver at the mill south of town. His parents were Korean immigrants living in Portland ; David had married a pretty Buchanan girl named Ellen Drew and twelve years ago Ellen had borne him a daughter, Cindy.
Cindy was a delicate, thin child with just a touch of her father’s complexion. Her eyes were large, mysterious, brown. She was suffering from a neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nervous system.
She fell down walking to school one autumn morning. She stood up, brushed the leaf debris off her jacket, carried on. Next week, she fell again. And the week after. Then twice in a week. Twice in a day. Finally her mother brought her in to see Matt.
He found gross anomalies in her reflexes and a pronounced papilledema. He told Mrs. Rhee he couldn’t make a diagnosis and referred Cindy to a neurologist at the hospital, but his suspicions were grave. A benign and operable tumor of the brain might be the girl’s best hope. There were other possibilities, even less pleasant.
He attended her while she was admitted for tests. Cindy was immensely patient in the face of the unavoidable indignities, almost supernaturally so. It occurred to Matt to wonder where such people came from: the obviously good and decent souls who endure hardship without complaint and cause duty-hardened nurses to weep for them in the hallways.
He was with the Rhees when the neurologist explained that their daughter was suffering from a neuroblastoma. David and Ellen Rhee listened with ferocious concentration as the specialist described the hardships and benefits, the pluses and minuses, of chemotherapy. David spoke first: “But will it cure her?”