The question almost made her laugh. “No.”
“Oh,” he said. “I was just wondering.”
“Okay.” She started to make her way around him. She needed to read Benjamin’s letter.
“No, wait!” he said, holding up both arms to block her. “Maybe you want to go. I mean, I’m on the dance committee. So I’m sort of supposed to make sure people want…you know, to go.”
When Janie was still a Grayson student, she might have become self-conscious and unsure about whether anyone—even awkward, brainy Tadpole—was inviting her to the dance. But in the last week her evasiveness had gotten such a workout that she didn’t have any of it left for the Winter Wonderland. “Are you inviting me to the dance?” she asked.
He blushed again. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, yes. I am.”
“I’ve been kicked out,” she said. “I’m not even supposed to be on campus. I can’t go.”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
“But thanks for inviting me. I’d go if I could.”
“Really?”
“Don’t tell anyone you saw me, okay?”
“Oh!” he said. “No. Of course. I won’t.” Blushing so furiously had made his glasses fog again, and he took them off. Janie took advantage of his nearsightedness to dart around him and escape.
CHAPTER 10
Contact
Janie tore open Benjamin’s envelope as soon as she got off campus. Something small and square slipped out of the letter, and she caught it before it fell.
The object was a flat glassine envelope that fit in her palm, and it was sealed with a double fold. She could see through the shiny, almost transparent paper to a coarse gray powder inside. She put the powder carefully in her pocket and read the letter, paying special attention to the first letter of each word.
Dear J.,
I’m sending you something we’ve just developed. Remember the homesickness remedy my father once gave you? Take a few grains like that. Make sure you’re alone. Then sit quietly and close your eyes and think about…well, me. If you can stand it. Give it a try.
Bx
The letter wasn’t stilted, but she tried the code anyway. Isyswjd. Rthrmfogy. Tafglt. Unless it was someplace in Iceland without many vowels, there was no code revealing where Benjamin was. She tried the last sentences, but there she found Msya. Tsqacyeatawm. Iycsi. Giat.
Nothing.
So maybe the instructions were all that the message was meant to convey. The apothecary, Benjamin’s father, had given her a homesickness remedy when she first arrived in London. It was a combination of two powders, aspen and honeysuckle, dissolved in water. She’d met Benjamin on her first day using it, so it had been hard to determine what, exactly, had conquered her homesickness: aspen and honeysuckle, or a new friend.
She needed privacy to try the powder, but there was no privacy. Raffaello was at Bruno’s when she got there, and she carefully tucked both envelopes away in her pocket.
“I auditioned!” Raffaello said.
He looked so proud that she had to laugh. “Congratulations,” she said. “Was it scary?”
“Not as scary as facing Aunt Giovanna. Is that what made you sick? Do you feel better?”
She’d forgotten she’d said that she didn’t feel well. The morning seemed so long ago. “Much better, thanks.”
“Good, because my dad needs us to do some prep in the kitchen. Have you ever chopped garlic?”
She shook her head.
“I’ll show you how,” he said. “They’ll put up the cast list over the weekend.”
He told her all about the audition as they peeled and chopped. So it wasn’t until late, when her fingers were pruned and the dishwater had soaked out all the garlic smell, and she had closed out the till and taken her tips, and the others had gone to bed in the apartment over the restaurant, that she was finally alone. Her hands felt clumsy from exhaustion or nervousness as she drew a glass of water. She tapped in a few grains of the coarse powder, letting it dissolve. Then she drank it down. Benjamin had said to think about him. Sitting cross-legged on the couch, she closed her eyes.
She thought about the first time she had seen him, a stubborn, sandy-haired boy arguing with the lunchroom matron at St. Beden’s during a bomb drill. Janie had crouched obediently under the lunchroom table, like all the other students, and from there she had seen Benjamin telling the matron that hiding under tables wasn’t going to protect them from an atomic bomb.
Then she thought about standing with him on the deck of an icebreaker at sea, heading north under a brilliant scattering of stars. He had reached out and touched her hair. She had known there was danger ahead, and still there was nowhere else in the world she had wanted to be.
Then something else happened. In that imagined space behind her eyelids, the inky sea faded away, and she saw lush green trees. She was no longer on the sea at night. It was day, but the sunlight filtered through dense foliage. She was crouched against a muddy slope in some kind of tropical jungle. The roots of a huge fallen tree, still hung with clods of dirt, provided shelter. She could smell the damp earth.
A blast of gunfire went off surprisingly close, and Janie flinched. Then she realized that the gunfire was steady and continuous, just over the rise.
She wanted to turn her head to look, but the imagining wasn’t the kind she could control. It was like a vivid, uncontrollable dream, and it made her a little dizzy. Now there were two hands in front of her, not her own hands, rubbing some kind of liquid between them. The sharp smell of alcohol reached her nose.
A man’s voice spoke nearby, and Janie’s field of vision swung to take in the speaker. She gasped and nearly opened her eyes. Crouched next to her was the apothecary—Benjamin’s father, Mr. Burrows. He wore a dark cotton shirt and a sweat-soaked blue bandana around his neck. “The firing’s dying down,” he said. “It won’t be long.”
Janie listened to the gunfire. Soon she only heard a distant, random shot every few seconds.
“Let’s go,” the apothecary said.
Janie seemed to be clambering up behind him, around the roots of the tree. Then her vision began to swim and break up. It was as if the illusion couldn’t stand movement. The effect could only work when Benjamin kept still.
For it was Benjamin, she was sure of it. It was his hands she had seen, in place of her own. She had been seeing through his eyes. She sat very still on the couch, trying to bring the vision back. It was like trying to recover the fragments of a lost dream. But there was only darkness. She opened her eyes and saw Bruno and Giovanna’s dim living room. When she turned her head, her vision spun, and she thought she might throw up, so she kept still. The curtains and books that had once seemed cozy and welcoming now seemed only dull and disappointing, after Benjamin’s lush, dangerous world.
Benjamin’s world! She closed her eyes to try to go back, but saw nothing. Where was he? Why was he in the jungle? Were they going into battle? How had he made the gray powder? Had he taken some? He must have.
And another question: Could Benjamin see through her eyes also, or did the effect only go one way? Did he know when she was doing it? She thought he must not, or he would have spoken to her. But maybe she could have spoken to him!
“Benjamin!” she called softly, in the empty living room.
Nothing. She had to try again.
She stood and moved carefully to the kitchen. The room didn’t spin so much now. She filled her glass with water, tapped in a few more grains of powder, and drank it down. Her stomach seized, cramping, and she had to sit down on the kitchen floor to keep from falling over. She tried to be quiet, not to wake the others. She closed her eyes to find Benjamin again, but saw nothing, and felt only the disorienting dizziness and the pain in her stomach.
So maybe she wasn’t supposed to take the stuff again so soon. The avian elixir, which had turned them into birds, worked like that: Benjamin had fallen from the sky after taking it too quickly a second time.
She waited for the
nausea to pass, and tried to breathe, and thought about what jungle Benjamin might be in. She wished he had thought to write his location or some message on his shirtsleeves, just in case she looked in unexpectedly. “HI, JANIE, I’M IN ________.” Or he could have used his old code in the letter, in some meaningless first sentence, to tell her where he was.
She remembered the arguments they’d had in London over how to use the Pharmacopoeia, and how to anticipate the hazards of whatever they were planning. She could imagine Benjamin retorting that he hadn’t included a coded nonsense sentence because he wanted to be very clear about what she was supposed to do. And it was dangerous to keep using the same code, as someone might break it. And he didn’t know exactly how the powder would work over such a great distance.
She smiled, imagining his indignant voice and his explanations. Benjamin was clearer to her now that she had seen his world through his eyes. She could try to reach him later, when it seemed safe to try again. She would look harder for signs of where he might be.
Then she remembered the gunfire, and Benjamin running out of their shelter. She hoped he and his father were safe, wherever they were.
PART TWO
Opposition
1. resistance or dissent, expressed in action or argument
2. (the opposition) a group of adversaries or competitors or political rivals
3. a contrast or antithesis (in Chinese philosophy and medicine, contrary forces are interdependent and connected in the natural world)
Chapter 11
Field Medics
Benjamin Burrows and his father were huddled in a makeshift foxhole, beneath the exposed roots of a fallen tree, waiting for the shooting to stop. Benjamin kept his arms protectively over his head and tried not to think about the grenade that could come flying into their shelter at any moment. He reminded himself that he had wanted a life of adventure. He had not wanted to run an apothecary shop in London. To keep his mind off the bullets flying through the air, he made a mental list of all the things that he had not wanted to make his living selling:
Aspirin
Hot-water bottles
Epsom salts
Milk of magnesia
Cod-liver oil
Cotton gauze
That last item brought him back to reality, and he reached for his satchel to be sure he still had plenty of gauze bandages. They were going to need them when the fighting stopped. A grenade exploded not far away, and Benjamin rolled into the wall of earth beneath the upended tree roots. A spray of dirt and small rocks hit his back. He looked up at his father. “You all right?” he asked.
“Yes, yes, fine.”
His father seemed to have shrunk in their weeks in the jungle. Benjamin was skinnier, too. They were living on rice, mostly, and green shoots his father found, and occasional bowls of stewed pork from the grateful families of men they had saved. But the villagers could barely feed themselves, let alone share with two hungry foreigners.
One night, Benjamin had woken with an itching head, his scalp crawling with something. He had leaped up shouting, clawing at his hair, and brought away dried blood and writhing ants beneath his fingernails. He woke his father, whose calm diagnosis had been that a leech had found its way onto Benjamin’s head as he slept, injecting an anticoagulant to prevent blood clotting. When it had drunk its fill and dropped off, it left Benjamin’s scalp bleeding freely. The ants had been attracted by the blood. “This whole jungle’s out to get me!” Benjamin had cried. But his father had said that was a fallacy. The ants and the leech weren’t out to get him. They didn’t even recognize him as a particular individual. They were only doing what ants and leeches do: seeking nourishment.
“We need to get out of here,” Benjamin said now, beneath the fallen tree.
“Not yet,” his father said. “They’re still firing.”
“I mean out of this whole country. This place. We’re not cut out for this kind of war.”
“The people here need us,” his father said. “We have an obligation to help them.”
Benjamin sighed and settled back into the damp earth. They had come to Vietnam because his father had been looking for a particular plant with unusual medicinal qualities. But the Vietminh, who had fought the Japanese with the support of the United States, and defeated the French in a bid for independence, were now supported by Communist China. One day while Benjamin and his father were out collecting, Vietminh soldiers overran the rural village where they had been staying. The local people put up a fight and were slaughtered or captured. When Benjamin and his father returned, they treated the survivors. As soon as they were finished, a messenger begged them to come to the next village, where the same thing had taken place.
Now Benjamin’s father wouldn’t leave, and they were stuck in a place that seemed hotter, more humid, and more murderous every day. The Pharmacopoeia, the priceless leather-bound book stuffed with medical and magical secrets that their ancestors had passed down so carefully, was wrapped in oilcloth in his father’s backpack. The oilcloth was a feeble barrier against mildew, paper-eating insects, bullets, and grenades. It was no way to protect a seven-hundred-year legacy.
The sound of gunfire was becoming less frequent. Benjamin was hungry. “This war isn’t going to end,” he said.
“So we should let these men die?”
“No! But we should—I don’t know. Go back to thinking about the bigger picture.” And eating real food, he thought. Benjamin was sixteen and would have been hungry a lot even if they were back in England, but here there was a gnawing emptiness in his stomach that wouldn’t go away. The rice balls he carried, wrapped in a waxy leaf in his pocket, didn’t help.
“We aren’t very good at the bigger picture, you may have noticed,” his father said. “Medicine is the great aim, the true aim. Paracelsus said it four hundred years ago. I only lost sight of it for a time.”
Benjamin wanted to point out that Paracelsus didn’t know about atomic weapons, but he didn’t want to torture his father. After the war, in which Benjamin’s mother had been killed, his father had become alarmed by the world-destroying possibilities of the atomic bomb, and started working on an antidote. In Nova Zembla, they had succeeded, containing a blooming mushroom cloud and shrinking it back to nothing, while the Quintessence scrubbed the radiation from the air. But they had been lucky there: They knew the test was coming, and they could get close to the bomb at the right moment. The great hope was that they could improve their methods, and neutralize a bomb after it had been dropped in combat. But now they couldn’t even keep ahead of the escalating nuclear tests.
They had been late for two tests by the British in western Australia, and unable to get close to an American hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Atoll in March. An unlucky Japanese fishing boat had gotten close, though. The boat, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, was forty miles away from the atoll when the wind shifted, covering the fishermen with ash. They had stopped to bring in their fishing gear before fleeing the strange powdery mist. By the time they got to shore, the fishermen had burns and blisters on their skin. Their irradiated tuna went to market, to be sold and eaten. Benjamin’s father had followed the Lucky Dragon’s story with a tormented interest.
Then, in early September, the Soviets tested an atomic bomb in the Ural Mountains, in Russia. Benjamin’s father hadn’t even known that one was coming, and he cursed himself for his blindness. Three weeks later, the Japanese radioman of the Lucky Dragon died at the age of forty. He said, “I pray that I am the last victim of an atomic or hydrogen bomb.”
After the Soviet test and the radioman’s death, something happened to Benjamin’s father. He became obsessed with their failure. He developed a tic, a muscle near his left eye that twitched so violently sometimes that Benjamin could see it. He had never been convinced by “deterrence,” the idea that the great powers would keep each other from using nuclear weapons just by possessing them. But he had been convinced that a few idealistic scientists—and a teenage boy—could stop the great powers from
having them. That was the fallacy, as far as Benjamin was concerned. They were so few, and so isolated. They had no resources beyond their own strange and secret abilities. How could they follow the intelligence traffic of so many different countries, and cover so much ground, and stay hidden? Of course they had failed! Staying here and giving up wasn’t the answer.
Benjamin looked at his hands, which were dirty, and he wiped them down with alcohol from his bag. There would be casualties to deal with soon, and he would need clean hands. He thought of Janie, and wondered if she’d gotten his letter yet, with the little glassine envelope.
“The firing’s dying down,” his father said. “It won’t be long.”
Benjamin listened. There was a distant pop or two of gunfire, and the sound of men moaning, some of them surely dying. The Vietminh had retreated. They would return, of course. They had endless reinforcements and infusions of weapons from the Chinese. But for now they were gone.
“Let’s go,” his father said.
They crept out of their shelter and moved among the bodies. Benjamin had become good at triage, at knowing which men needed attention immediately, which could wait a little longer, and which were beyond help. He had learned useful first aid. He knelt beside a boy no older than he was, who was bleeding from an arterial leg wound, and he tied the boy’s handkerchief around his thigh to stop the pumping flow of blood. Then he cut open the cotton pant leg to expose the wound and reached in with a pair of tweezers to remove the bullet, wincing at the pain he was causing. The boy screamed. They needed a fast-acting anesthetic—Benjamin had to remind his father about that.
Tossing aside the bullet, he daubed a pasty blue salve onto the wound. It was his father’s latest concoction. Under the salve, the ragged edges of the wound re-knit themselves: Each torn piece of muscle and skin and artery wall sought the place it had been attached before. His father had mixed in something that made it sterilizing, so it devoured any bacteria that tried to colonize the wound. He had used it on Benjamin’s scalp on the night of the ants.