He chose his words carefully.
“I want you to consider that this effort might be futile. Worse, doomed. I want you to consider that the impressive people the JCS may have lined up are not the only impressive people in the country, military or civilian. There is still a powerful sentiment on behalf of representative government. Your uprising would not be unopposed and it would not be bloodless. And it would not be worthwhile.”
Charlie Boyle sat for a long time in the ticking silence. When at last he spoke, he spoke cautiously. “People say you’re in contact with the Artifact. They say you know something you’re not telling. And there are rumors about some kind of disease. There’s been a lid on the CDC since last week. You and the brass at the NIH and nobody’s talking.”
“Maybe I do know something. Maybe I’m preparing to communicate that knowledge in my own good time. That’s my prerogative, is it not?”
“You haven’t said one fucking word to the Cabinet. Even your own advisors, the NSC—”
“Given the climate of the times, is that surprising?”
“People want to know who’s governing the country.”
“Damn it, Charlie, I am!”
“People debate that. People think you might be a fifth-columnist.”
“People who are compelled to seek power are prone to say any damn thing. Political campaigns aren’t conducted without lies. Neither are military uprisings.”
“You could put these rumors to rest.”
“I’m addressing the nation in two days. Isn’t that sufficient?”
“Maybe not.” Lured into too many tacit admissions, Charlie sat stiffly in his chair—the offended Puritan. “You admit you know something.”
“That’s right. I know insubordination when I see it. And I know how to respond to it.”
Charlie wavered but did not quite abandon his hostile stare. “You have no allies. Sir.”
“Are you banking on that?” There was no response.
“Tell them I’m aware of what’s happening,” the President said. “That’s your task, Charlie. Tell General Chafee and General Weismann and that Pentagon cabal that their plans have been under scrutiny in this office for quite a while. Tell him they can’t get what they want without a great deal of bloodshed.” The President focused on the Secretary of Defense—caught his eyes and held them. “You’ve served this country faithfully for most of your life. Do you really want to plunge it into civil war? Do you really want to be the next Jefferson Davis—and go down the same way?”
The Secretary of Defense opened his mouth and closed it.
“Tell General Chafee—” This was the hardest part. “Tell him negotiation is not out of the question. But violence will be met with violence. And Charlie?”
“Sir?”
“Thank you for your time.”
* * *
The Secret Service contingent had been doubled in the halls of the White House. The President wondered if that was a good idea. Too many unfamiliar faces about. It was a risk in itself. And it created an atmosphere of crisis—but perhaps that was unavoidable. He thought of Lincoln arriving in disguise for his inauguration, sharpshooters stationed around the Capitol dome. Times were bad, but times had been worse. Though, it was true, times had never been stranger.
Much of what he had said to Charlie Boyle was bluff, and the generals would know it; but it might be enough to cast doubt in certain quarters. It was a delay he was after here, not a resolution. The next few days were vital. It would be tragic if internecine squabbles such as this one caused unnecessary bloodshed, because those lives… well, they would be unrecoverable.
If it came to that, the President had decided he would issue the necessary orders and surrender his office, minimizing losses. But there were those who would fight on, for the best of reasons; and fighting, they would die; and dead, they would not be resurrected.
The crises we administer, the President thought, are never the ones we expect.
He did not consider himself a man especially well-equipped to administer this one. His career had been enormously successful but in every other respect ordinary. Scion of a New England political family, groomed from childhood for public service, he had graduated from Harvard with a law degree, reliable connections, and enough ambition to light up a city block. But it was an ambition hoarded; he was not impatient. He had moved through the ranks of the Democratic Party with grace, made more friends than enemies. He had run for public office first in his home state, defeating an incumbent Republican so decisively that the Party seriously began to consider his presidential mettle. And still he bided his time. He cultivated acquaintances in the Party hierarchy and among the baronial eminences of oil, law, manufacturing.
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?”
“It might prolong her life. It might send the tumor into remission. We don’t use the word ‘cure.’ We would have to keep a close watch on her even in the best case.”
David Rhee nodded, a gesture not of acquiescence but of brokenhearted acknowledgment. His daughter might not get well. His daughter might die.
I could have been a plumber, Matt thought, an electrician, an accountant, anything, dear God, not to be in this room at this moment. He couldn’t meet Ellen’s eyes when she left with her husband. He was afraid she would see his craven helplessness.
Cindy responded to the chemotherapy. She lost some hair but recovered her sense of balance; she went home from the hospital skinny but optimistic.
She was back six months later. Her tumor, inoperable to begin with, had disseminated. Her speech was slurred and her eyesight had begun to tunnel. Matt canvassed the hospital’s specialists: surely some kind of operation… But the malignancy had colonized her brain too deeply; the X-rays were eloquent, merciless. Surgery, if anyone had been mad enough to attempt it, would have left her speechless, sightless, possibly soulless.
Now she was home to die. The Rhees understood this. In a way, the prognosis was kind; she was functional enough to leave the hospital and with any luck she wouldn’t end up DNR in some pitiless white room. Now Cindy was blind and could form only the most rudimentary words, but Ellen Rhee continued to care for her daughter with a relentless heroism that Matt found humbling.
He had promised he would stop by this morning, but he didn’t relish the task. It was hard not to care about Cindy Rhee, hard not to hate the disease that was torturing her to death. There was a state of mind Matt called “being the doctor machine,” in which he kept his emotions filed for later reference… but that was a difficult balancing act at the best of times, and this morning he was feverish and disoriented. He popped a decongestant and drove to the Rhees’ house in a grim mood.
There was the question, too, of what Jim Bix had told him. He carried it like a stone, a weight he could neither dislodge nor easily bear. Jim was sincere, but he might still be mistaken. Or crazy. Or maybe this really was the beginning of the end… in which case, as indecent as the thought sounded, maybe Cindy Rhee was the lucky one.
He parked in the driveway at the Rhees’ modest two-bedroom house. Ellen Rhee opened the door for him. She wore a yellow housedress with her hair tied away from her neck. The air in the living room smelled of Pine-Sol; an old upright vacuum cleaner stood sentinel on the carpet. It was Mart’s experience that in the homes of the dying, housework is performed religiously or not at all. Ellen Rhee had taken to frantic cleaning. In the last few months he had seldom seen her without her apron on.
But she was smiling. That was odd, Matt thought. And the radio was playing. Some AM station. Cheerful pop music.
“Come in, Matt,” Ellen said.
He stepped inside. The house was not as dim as he remembered it; she had opened all the blinds and pulled back all the drapes. A summer-morning breeze swept the odor of antiseptic past him, and a more delicate waft of roses from the backyard garden.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “The house is kind of chaotic. I’m in the middle of cleaning up. I guess I forgot you were coming.”
She sniffed and dabbed her nose with a Kleenex. The Taiwan Flu, Matt thought. Wasn’t that what the papers were calling it?
He said, “I can come back another time—”
“No. Please. Come in.” Her smile had not faded.
The clinical word
for this kind of behavior was “denial.” But maybe it was simply her way of coping. Carry on, smile, and welcome the guest. A new wrinkle in the etiology of Ellen Rhee’s grief. But it seemed to Matt she looked different. Less burdened. Was that possible?
“Is David home?”
“Early shift at the mill. Would you like a coffee?”
“No, thank you, Ellen.” He looked toward Cindy’s bedroom. “How is she today?”
“Better,” Ellen said. Mart’s surprise must have been too obvious. “No, really! She’s feeling much better. You can ask her yourself.” It was a macabre joke. “Ellen—”
Her smile softened. She touched his arm. “Go see her, Matt. Go ahead.”
* * *
Cindy was sitting up in bed, a small miracle in itself. Mart’s first astonished thought was: She did look better. She was still brutally thin—the delicate bone-and-parchment emaciation of the terminal cancer patient. But her eyes were wide and appeared lucid. The last time he stopped by, she hadn’t seemed to recognize him.
Matt parked his medical bag on the bedside table and told her hello. He made it a point to talk to her, though the neurologist had assured him she couldn’t understand. She might still take some solace from the tone of his voice. “I came by to see how you’re doing today.”
Cindy blinked. “Thank you, Dr. Wheeler,” she said. “I’m doing fine.”
* * *
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Ellen said when he emerged from the girl’s bedroom. “Come on. Sit down.”
He sat at the kitchen table and allowed Ellen to pour him a glass of 7-Up.
“She really is better,” Ellen said. “I told you so.” Matt struggled to form his thoughts.