“Oh, come on.” She was in no mood for guessing games. “I took the same oath you did.”
“I know.” He raised his hands as if to ward off her vexation. “I know. But it isn’t exactly that kind of confidence.”
She stared at him, momentarily nonplussed. Wasn’t he talking about a medical problem? “This sounds like it’s going to be quite a favor.”
“Could be. That’s up to you.” Before she could muster the words to ask him what he was talking about, Dr. Berenford said abruptly, “Have you ever heard of Thomas Covenant? He writes novels.”
She felt him watching her while she groped mentally. But she had no way of following his line of thought. She had not read a novel since she had finished her literature requirement in college. She had had so little time. Striving for detachment, she shook her head.
“He lives around here,” the doctor said. “Has a house outside town on an old property called Haven Farm. You turn right on Main.” He gestured vaguely toward the intersection. “Go through the middle of town, and about two miles later you’ll come to it. On the right. He’s a leper.”
At the word leper, her mind bifurcated. This was the result of her training—dedication which had made her a physician without resolving her attitude toward herself. She murmured inwardly, Hansen’s disease, and began reviewing information.
Mycobacterium lepra. Leprosy. It progressed by killing nerve tissue, typically in the extremities and in the cornea of the eye. In most cases, the disease could be arrested by means of a comprehensive treatment program pivoting around DDS: diamino-diphenyl-sulfone. If not arrested, the degeneration could produce muscular atrophy and deformation, changes in skin pigmentation, blindness. It also left the victim subject to a host of secondary afflictions, the most common of which was infection that destroyed other tissues, leaving the victim with the appearance—and consequences—of having been eaten alive. Incidence was extremely rare; leprosy was not contagious in any usual sense. Perhaps the only statistically significant way to contract it was to suffer prolonged exposure as a child in the tropics under crowded and unsanitary living conditions.
But while one part of her brain unwound its skein of knowledge, another was tangled in questions and emotions. A leper? Here? Why tell me? She was torn between visceral distaste and empathy. The disease itself attracted and repelled her because it was incurable—as immedicable as death. She had to take a deep breath before she could ask, “What do you want me to do about it?”
“Well—” He was studying her as if he thought there were indeed something she could do about it. “Nothing. That isn’t why I brought it up.” Abruptly he got to his feet, began measuring out his unease on the chipped floorboards. Though he was not heavy, they squeaked vaguely under him. “He was diagnosed early enough—only lost two fingers. One of our better lab technicians caught it, right here at County Hospital. He’s been stable for more than nine years now. The only reason I told you is to find out if you’re—squeamish. About lepers.” He spoke with a twisted expression. “I used to be. But I’ve had time to get over it.”
He did not give her a chance to reply. He went on as if he were confessing. “I’ve reached the point now where I don’t think of him as leprosy personified. But I never forget he’s a leper.” He was talking about something for which he had not been able to forgive himself. “Part of that’s his fault,” he said defensively. “He never forgets, either. He doesn’t think of himself as Thomas Covenant the writer—the man—the human being. He thinks of himself as Thomas Covenant the leper.”
When she continued to stare at him flatly, he dropped his gaze. “But that’s not the point. The point is, would it bother you to go see him?”
“No,” she said severely; but her severity was for herself rather than for him. I’m a doctor. Sick people are my business. “But I still don’t understand why you want me to go out there.”
The pouches under his eyes shook as if he were pleading with her. “I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t tell me.” The quietness of her tone belied the blackness of her mood. “What good do you think I can possibly do if I don’t even know why I’m talking to him?”
“You could get him to tell you.” Dr. Berenford’s voice sounded like the misery of an ineffectual old man. “That’s what I want. I want him to accept you—tell you what’s going on himself. So I won’t have to break any promises.”
“Let me get this straight,” She made no more effort to conceal her anger. “You want me to go out there, and ask him outright to tell me his secrets. A total stranger arrives at his door, and wants to know what’s bothering him—for no other reason than because Dr. Berenford would like a second opinion. I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t have me arrested for trespassing.”
For a moment, the doctor faced her sarcasm and indignation. Then he sighed. “I know. He’s like that—he’d never tell you. He’s been locked into himself so long—” The next instant, his voice became sharp with pain. “But I think he’s wrong.”
“Then tell me what it is,” insisted Linden.
His mouth opened and shut; his hands made supplicating gestures. But then he recovered himself. “No. That’s backward. First
I need to know which one of us is wrong. I owe him that. Mrs. Roman is no help. This is a medical decision. But I can’t make it. I’ve tried, and I can’t.”
The simplicity with which he admitted his inadequacy snared her. She was tired, dirty, and bitter, and her mind searched for an escape. But his need for assistance struck too close to the driving compulsions of her life. Her hands were knotted together like certainty. After a moment, she looked up at him. His features had sagged as if the muscles were exhausted by the weight of his mortality. In her flat professional voice, she said, “Give me some excuse I can use to go out there.”
She could hardly bear the sight of his relief. “That I can do,” he said with a show of briskness. Reaching into a jacket pocket, he pulled out a paperback and handed it to her. The lettering across the drab cover said:
Or I Will Sell My Soul for Guilt
a novel by
THOMAS COVENANT
“Ask for his autograph.” The older man had regained his sense of irony. “Try to get him talking. If you can get inside his defenses, something will happen.”
Silently she cursed herself. She knew nothing about novels, had never learned how to talk to strangers about anything except their symptoms. Anticipations of embarrassment filled her like shame. But she had been mortifying herself for so long that she had no respect left for the parts of her which could still feel shame. “After I see him,” she said dully, “I’ll want to talk to you. I don’t have a phone yet. Where do you live?”
Her acceptance restored his earlier manner; he became wry and solicitous again. He gave her directions to his house, repeated his offer of help, thanked her for her willingness to involve herself in Thomas Covenant’s affairs. When he left, she felt dimly astonished that he did not appear to resent the need which had forced him to display his futility in front of her.
And yet the sound of his feet descending the stairs gave her a sense of abandonment, as if she had been left to carry alone a burden that she would never be able to understand.
Foreboding nagged at her, but she ignored it. She had no acceptable alternatives. She sat where she was for a moment, glaring around the blind yellow walls, then went to take a shower.
After she had washed away as much of the blackness as she could reach with soap and water, she donned a dull gray dress that had the effect of minimizing her femininity, then spent a few minutes checking the contents of her medical bag. They always seemed insufficient—there were so many things she might conceivably need which she could not carry with her—and now they appeared to be a particularly improvident arsenal against the unknown. But she knew from experience that she would have felt naked without her bag. With a sigh of fatigue, she locked the apartment and went down the stairs to her car.
Driving slowly to give h
erself time to learn landmarks, she followed Dr. Berenford’s directions and soon found herself moving through the center of town.
The late afternoon sun and the thickness of the air made the buildings look as if they were sweating. The businesses seemed to lean away from the hot sidewalks, as if they had forgotten the enthusiasm, even the accessibility, that they needed to survive; and the courthouse, with its dull white marble and its roof supported by stone giant heads atop ersatz Greek columns, looked altogether unequal to its responsibilities.
The sidewalks were relatively busy—people were going home from work—but one small group in front of the courthouse caught Linden’s eye. A faded woman with three small children stood on the steps. She wore a shapeless shift which appeared to have been made from burlap; and the children were dressed in gunny sacks. Her face was gray and blank, as if she were inured by poverty and weariness to the emaciation of her children. All four of them held short wooden sticks bearing crude signs.
The signs were marked with red triangles. Inside each triangle was written one word: REPENT.
The woman and her children ignored the passersby. They stood dumbly on the steps as if they were engaged in a penance which stupefied them. Linden’s heart ached uselessly at the sight of their moral and physical penury. There was nothing she could do for such people.
Three minutes later, she was outside the municipal limits.
There the road began to run through tilled valleys, between wooded hills. Beyond the town, the unseasonable heat and humidity were kinder to what they touched; they made the air lambent, so that it lay like immanence across the new crops, up the tangled weed-and-grass hillsides, among the budding trees; and her mood lifted at the way the landscape glowed in the approach of evening. She had spent so much of her life in cities. She continued to drive slowly; she wanted to savor the faint hope that she had found something she would be able to enjoy.
After a couple of miles, she came to a wide field on her right, thickly overgrown with milkweed and wild mustard. Across the field, a quarter of a mile away against a wall of trees, stood a white frame house. Two or three other houses bordered the field, closer to the highway; but the white one drew her attention as if it were the only habitable structure in the area.
A dirt road ran into the field. Branches went to the other houses, but the main track led straight to the white one.
Beside the entrance stood a wooden sign. Despite faded paint and several old splintered holes like bullet scars, the lettering was still legible: Haven Farm.
Gripping her courage, Linden turned onto the dirt road.
Without warning, the periphery of her gaze caught a flick of ochre. A robed figure stood beside the sign.
What—?
He stood there as if he had just appeared out of the air. An instant ago, she had seen nothing except the sign.
Taken by surprise, she instinctively twitched the wheel, trying to evade a hazard she had already passed. At once, she righted the sedan, stepped on the brakes. Her eyes jumped to the rearview mirror.
She saw an old man in an ochre robe. He was tall and lean, barefoot, dirty. His long gray beard and thin hair flared about his head like frenzy.
He took one step into the road toward her, then clutched at his chest convulsively, and collapsed.
She barked a warning, though there was no one to hear it. Moving with a celerity that felt like slow-motion, she cut the ignition, grabbed for her bag, pushed open the door. Apprehension roiled in her, fear of death, of failure; but her training controlled it. In a moment, she was at the old man’s side.
He looked strangely out of place in the road, out of time in the world she knew. The robe was his only garment; it looked as if he had been living in it for years. His features were sharp, made fierce by destitution or fanaticism. The declining sunlight colored his withered skin like dead gold.
He was not breathing.
Her discipline made her move. She knelt beside him, felt for his pulse. But within her she wailed. He bore a sickening resemblance to her father. If her father had lived to become old and mad, he might have been this stricken, preterite figure.
He had no pulse.
He revolted her. Her father had committed suicide. People who killed themselves deserved to die. The old man’s appearance brought back memories of her own screaming which echoed in her ears as if it could never be silenced.
But he was dying. Already his muscles had slackened, relaxing the pain of his seizure. And she was a doctor.
With the sureness of hard training, self-abnegation which mastered revulsion, her hands snapped open her bag. She took out her penlight, checked his pupils.
They were equal and reactive.
It was still possible to save him.
Quickly she adjusted his head, tilted it back to clear his throat. Then she folded her hands together over his sternum, leaned her weight on her arms, and began to apply CPR.
The rhythm of cardiopulmonary resuscitation was so deeply ingrained in her that she followed it automatically: fifteen firm heels of her hands to his sternum; then two deep exhalations into his mouth, blocking his nose as she did so. But his mouth was foul—carious and vile, as if his teeth were rotten, or his palate gangrenous. She almost faltered. Instantly her revulsion became an acute physical nausea, as if she were tasting the exudation of a boil. But she was a doctor; this was her work.
Fifteen. Two.
Fifteen. Two.
She did not permit herself to miss a beat.
But fear surged through her nausea. Exhaustion. Failure. CPR was so demanding that no one person could sustain it alone for more than a few minutes. If he did not come back to life soon—
Breathe, damn you, she muttered along the beats. Fifteen. Two. Damn you. Breathe. There was still no pulse.
Her own breathing became ragged; giddiness welled up in her like a tide of darkness. The air seemed to resist her lungs. Heat and the approach of sunset dimmed the old man. He had lost all muscle-tone, all appearance of life.
Breathe!
Abruptly she stopped her rhythm, snatched at her bag. Her arms trembled; she clenched them still as she broke open a disposable syringe, a vial of adrenaline, a cardiac needle. Fighting for steadiness, she filled the syringe, cleared out the air. In spite of her urgency, she took a moment to swab clean a patch of the man’s thin chest with alcohol. Then she slid the needle delicately past his ribs, injected adrenaline into his heart.
Setting aside the syringe, she risked pounding her fist once against his sternum. But the blow had no effect.
Cursing, she resumed her CPR.
She needed help. But she could not do anything about that. If she stopped to take him into town, or to go in search of a phone, he would die. Yet if she exhausted herself alone he would still die.
Breathe!
He did not breathe. His heart did not beat. His mouth was as fetid as the maw of a corpse. The whole ordeal was hopeless.
She did not relent.
All the blackness of her life was in her. She had spent too many years teaching herself to be effective against death; she could not surrender now. She had been too young, weak, and ignorant to save her father, could not have saved her mother; now that she knew what to do and could do it, she would never quit, never falsify her life by quitting.
Dark motes began to dance across her vision; the air swarmed with moisture and inadequacy. Her arms felt leaden; her lungs cried out every time she forced breath down the old man’s throat. He lay inert. Tears of rage and need ran hotly down her face. Yet she did not relent.
She was still half conscious when a tremor ran through him, and he took a hoarse gulp of air.
At once, her will snapped. Blood rushed to her head. She did not feel herself fall away to the side.
When she regained enough self-command to raise her head, her sight was a smear of pain and her face was slick with sweat. The old man was standing over her. His eyes were on her; the intense blue of his gaze held her like a hand of compass
ion. He looked impossibly tall and healthy; his very posture seemed to deny that he had ever been close to death. Gently he reached down to her, drew her to her feet. As he put his arms around her, she slumped against him, unable to resist his embrace.
“Ah, my daughter, do not fear.”
His voice was husky with regret and tenderness.
“You will not fail, however he may assail you. There is also love in the world.”
Then he released her, stepped back. His eyes became commandments.
“Be true.”
She watched him dumbly as he turned, walked away from her into the field. Milkweed and wild mustard whipped against his robe for a moment. She could hardly see him through the blurring of her vision. A musky breeze stirred his hair, made it a nimbus around his head as the sun began to set. Then he faded into the humidity, and was gone.
She wanted to call out after him, but the memory of his eyes stopped her.
Be true.
Deep in her chest, her heart began to tremble.
TWO: Something Broken
After a moment, the trembling spread to her limbs. The surface of her skin felt fiery, as if the rays of the sun were concentrated on her. The muscles of her abdomen knotted.
The old man had vanished. He had put his arms around her as if he had the right, and then he had vanished.
She feared that her guts were going to rebel.
But then her gaze lurched toward the dirt where the old man had lain. There she saw the used hypodermic, the sterile wrappings, the empty vial. The dust bore the faint imprint of a body.
A shudder ran through her, and she began to relax.
So he had been real. He had only appeared to vanish. Her eyes had tricked her.
She scanned the area for him. He should not be walking around; he needed care, observation, until his condition stabilized. But she saw no sign of him. Fighting an odd reluctance, she waded out into the wild mustard after him. But when she reached the place where her eyes had lost him, she found nothing.
Baffled, she returned to the roadway. She did not like to give him up; but she appeared to have no choice in the matter. Muttering under her breath, she went to retrieve her bag.