Again, Dangerous Visions Part 51

"Close your eyes," he requested.

"Stretch out your arms sideways."

Elouise did as she was asked but tensed herself against an expected tickle beneath the arm.

"Bring your index fingers together rapidly." Elouise did.

The doctor stood up, putting away his toys. He turned toward the audience.

"She has nerves of steel and all her senses in working order!" And he surprised n.o.body with this information. Matron bustled onto the stage.

"Kindly leave the stage," she boomed at him. He floated away, defeated and disappointed.

"Next doctor please."

In the hush that fell on the spectators a wheezing could be heard, and the click of a gold pill-box as the next examining doctor took a dose of digitalis to stave off an acute heart attack. Purple-faced he fiddled with his stethoscope, his clubbed fingers having difficulty in grasping the rubber tube. He came to listen at her gently moving chest, tapped her sternum and ambled off, shaking his head. He drew no applause and little comment. Matron called the next doctor. Elouise looked out of the windows as she waited for the nurse to check a trolley of instruments. She noticed the small crowd of people drawing nearer.

"Swabs, vulsellum forceps, uterine sound, Cusco's v.a.g.i.n.al speculum, bivalve and duckbill specula, obstetric cream." Elouise winced with distaste for all the metal looked cold and unfriendly. Surely her cervical smears had revealed all that was necessary about her reproductive organs? But of course, this occasion was a kind of ritual, a public showing of her amazing health. She relaxed and watched the doctor specializing in gynecology approach. A thickset, bull-necked fellow, he shuffled down the pink plastic steps and heaved himself up the step onto the stage. He scratched his arms constantly, setting his teeth together, flexing his chin against the sensations of extreme irritation and the pain of tearing skin. White flakes of epidermis and then dermis, blood-spotted, fell, floated conspicuously in the bright light. And he muttered that at least his asthma had abated, the while psoriasis ate him up; he creamed his forearms from a little tube and looked around for his instruments and his patient. Elouise looked at his inflamed and oozing arms, and reminded herself that infection was not the cause of such sores. The doctor worked the lever at the side of the chair until it became a couch with Elouise lying on it. He took a clean folded sheet from the bottom shelf of the trolley and cast it across Elouise, then folded it back to cover all but that portion of her body from the naval down.

"Knees up. Let them fall apart."

Under the sheet Elouise examined her fingernails, gave a small sigh of impatience and boredom and cringed slightly as the cold metal speculum slid into her v.a.g.i.n.a. Painlessly she lay, ideas forming in her mind, stimulated by the cutting-off of visual impressions of any consequence. This was no way to live life, under a sterile sheet, with a lifeless instrument poking about inside one! There must be other better ways of existing!

The doctor pressed a heavy hand down flat on Elouise's belly and peered up his speculum with a curiosity more normally reserved for medical students taking their first look at a cervix. Nothing unusual met his eye excepting the moist and living glowing health of that smooth muscle. He turned a tiny wheel that opened her womb. Waiting walls, the perfect place to begin a life was all he saw. He left that place, too late for him, no business of his, there was nothing to cure. He packed his things and left it to musclely Matron to uncover Elouise, hoist the chair to an upright position. She saw through the windows that the crowd of people outside was now at the great doors, and at that moment someone banged to be let in. A murmur of annoyed disturbance came from the doctors who already knew the diagnosis of their patient and were anxious to get all the formal examinations over with quickly, so that they could go and play golf. Once it had been decided what was to be done with the illegally healthy girl, life could go on as usual. And now there was a disturbance at the door. Someone went to open the door, someone shouted that the examinations were in camera in camera, someone else said, "Oh what the h.e.l.l."

The doctors groaned aloud at the sight that met their eyes as the doors swung open. The Congenitals again! And marching on the Theatre, of all things. Oh dear!

Gibbering and murmuring, there they stood, the Congenitals' delegation, the annual bid for attention and help. Swaying and twitching, wheeling and crutching, there they helplessly stood, demanding. s...o...b..ring and jerking, moaning and hiccuping, leering and dragging, they had come once more for a subject to sacrifice to Good Luck, their only hope in life. They had heard of Elouise, and wanted her. Only the sacrifice of this perfect body could do anything for them, they had become convinced.

Elouise listened to the arguments going on at the door and began to realize what fate might be in store for her. She returned to her new idea, making efforts all the time not to become involved with fear. She did not know exactly what they would do with her, even if they got her; therefore she decided not to dwell on the subject. But there were drops of sweat between her eyebrows, and they shone like gla.s.s beads in the bright light. Poppy-head the nerve-specialist noticed them and marvelled. He had thought her steadier than that, although sweating was far from abnormal under the circ.u.mstances!

At the door the Congenitals were led by a man with a head almost as big as his own thorax, the skin on his face having the appearance of severe scalding. A woman came to stand by him, her method of locomotion consisting of sidewise leaps accompanied by upthrown arms and a glottal cry. Next to her came a blind man dragging a child on a wheeled trolley. The child howled constantly from ulcers caused by its own unceasing streams of urine and feces, and a quivering patch of spinal cord that grew outside its body. A youth with a cleft palate and hare-lip carried an infant girl whose spine continued joined to her flesh down to the backs of her knees, and that ended in a naked pink tail that bent out like a hook. Behind them a woman lay twitching and foaming in the throes of a severe epileptic fit and close by knelt an emaciated youth with a cyanotic complexion and vacant eyes who clutched a hairless dwarf of uncertain age and s.e.x. Deaf-mutes, blind, partially paralyzed, deformed and mentally deficient of every kind abounded. A man looking like a lemon on toothpicks, so thin his limbs so huge his trunk, stood there and stared in at Elouise, his dull eyes longing sadly for things he did not understand.

An officious looking doctor began to ask questions of the delegation, but Matron approached, pushed him behind her and began a formal interview.

"Why have you come?" she asked in a disapproving manner.

"We want you to give us the benefit of medical advances, comfort and money to live, not having had an answer to last year's question."

The words were spoken with little inflection as if learned by heart without understanding or hope.

"What was was last year's question?" asked Matron impatiently. last year's question?" asked Matron impatiently.

"Why did you let us live?"

"Oh that! We told you before. It is our duty to preserve life."

"But our lives are useless seas of pain and endurance. We are neither use nor ornament."

"Well, everyone is sick on Pergamon, it's the law. Don't be so self-pitying."

"But we can't earn our livings, we are a neglected group."

Cries of "Sacrifice" began to rise from the Congenitals, although many of them had no wit to know what it was they demanded. They only knew they had demands, so demanded. Rights, rights!

Elouise was evolving a plan out of her ideas. The more she saw of the Congenitals, the less she wished to be given to them, whether they would kill her, make her Queen, or both. Elouise was lonely, she had always been lonely, even her mother had been too sick at times to communicate with properly; Elouise wanted to go and live in a place where there were other perfectly healthy beings.

She thought of the distant past of Pergamon's history, the time when everyone had perfect health through annual doses of Ananias McCallister's Elixir. Ananias McCallister, the Devil himself. His elixir had been the turning point in Pergamon's way of life, for the planet had become so full of long-living healthy people that they had stood almost shoulder to shoulder, feeding themselves on artificial protein that caused foul flatus that nevertheless their healthy bowels dealt with so efficiently that the outer atmosphere had eventually become a dense ma.s.s of floating sewer-gas, exploding mightily as meteors ran white-hot through it; the planet was even yet covered with ma.s.sive circular marks like faery-rings where fire had come booming down out of the sky; inconsequential dragon-coughs turning people to potash and nitrogen: varoom varoom, uncandylike!

The new culture arisen out of those few remaining was disease-oriented; health led to death, obviously.

Elouise's mother had told stories of other planets where people managed to live healthy lives and provide real food for themselves and keep the air clean and pure. Neither did they quarrel or take advantage of each other. Elouise sighed and closed her eyes.

"I am a throwback to better times than these," she thought.

The Congenitals had been asked to wait outside until the examinations were over and an official decision reached. The doctors began to confer, shuffling reports in triplicate, glancing idly, knowing that each prognosis stated: "PERFECT HEALTH." Nurses brought in refreshments. c.o.c.ktail snacks and whiskey in cut-gla.s.s tumblers were pa.s.sed round, the atmosphere relaxed somewhat and epic tales of golf began. But one doctor insisted that he had not had his turn; he demanded the right to examine the patient personally, so Matron succ.u.mbed and allowed him the stage.

"I shall need a lighting technician," said the doctor, an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist.

Elouise was not pleased at this interruption to her meditations. To accomplish her plan she needed to be left alone. But there would be no use in grumbling, she had best cooperate.

The doctor dragged behind him a wheeled trolley like a golf-bag, and this he proceeded to fiddle with, trying to undo the buckles as best he could, but he was hampered by an unusual spinal stiffness. Elouise thought he probably wore surgical corsets to support a slipped disc or some crumbling bone disease, for every time he tried to bend he winced, drawing in air through rotten teeth.

"Nurse!" he blared out and the nurse drifted onto the stage, dressed as if for an operation, masked and gowned and s.e.xless. Between them the doctor and nurse set out all the instruments incongruously on the floor, and the audience chatted and drank. Elouise watched one doctor who was so twisted with arthritis that he had to lie on the floor every time he wished to refresh himself with whiskey; to put liquid in his mouth while standing was an impossibility. One of his colleagues rebuked him for drinking alcohol but the arthritic doctor said that while it worsened his disease it was a good a.n.a.lgesic. He countered also with the information that he never smoked tobacco as it was a carcinogen; the other doctor in a haze of pipe-smoke maintained it was not a carcinogen. Thus they made their heavy jokes and then the doctor on the stage called for the lights to be dimmed. The audience considered this to be an inconvenience but nurses came to draw blinds over the windows, and the Theatre lights went dim. Elouise saw the word "Exit" marked over a small door at the back of the auditorium, a door that she had never noticed before.

"d.a.m.n," said the doctor, unable to see anything at all. "Lights up." The lights came brighter, and between them the doctor and nurse fitted a new battery to his headlamp.

"Lights!" he called again, and in the cone of light that his own lamp shed he looked closely at Elouise.

"Open your mouth."

She opened her mouth only to find it clamped open with a Doyen's gag.

"Say 'Ah'."

"Aaaaaaggggghhhhh!"

Saliva dribbled down Elouise's chin and the nurse leapt forward to dab daintily with a bit of gauze. The doctor peered and poked around down Elouise's throat, and then, using a nasal speculum he performed a detailed anterior rhinoscopy.

"You've got a bogy up your nose," he announced.

"Aaaaagggghhhh!"

He began chanting a quiet liturgy which the nurse took down in shorthand on the areas of white starched linen and cotton available to him or her.

"No rhinitis, no sinusitis, no epistaxis, no polypi, no pharyngitis, no tonsillitis, no adenoidal hypertrophy." He stopped for a moment, hand to forehead. Then he picked up Eve's tonsil snare in one hand and Gottstein's adenoid curette in the other and threw them on the floor, turned stiffly around, bowed one inch to the audience and left the stage. The nurse unscrewed the clamp from Elouise's mouth and handed her a bunch of surgical gauze and sc.r.a.ped all the instruments into a heap and threw them into the wheeled bag. As the nurse left he or she turned to sneer at the patient from under the mask.

"Such beautiful instruments would be disused museum pieces if we were all like you." The whisper was bitter, the voice snagged up on negative emotion. Elouise rubbed her cheek where the clamp had bitten, blew her nose on the surgical gauze, disliking its scratchiness, and cleared her throat. She could now continue with her inner idea. Time was running short.

She relaxed every muscle, closed her eyes, mouth, ears. She began to say silently her newly invented formula.

"I want to be free. I want to go where there are others like me."

She repeated it slowly and rhythmically, this meaningful mantra, unperturbed by the sounds that came to her through her own wall of silence.

"Psychosomatic appeas.e.m.e.nt on a very high level," and much laughter.

"Well, stranger things have happened."

"Their luck might really improve if they got her..."

A cell in Elouise's head echoed with thoughts of what might happen if she was given.

Torn limb from limb and eaten.

Burnt alive.

Put out for wild dogs.

Left to starve on a guarded mountain.

Made Queen.

Put to breeding.

These thoughts disturbed her much and then she recalled her mother saying: "Don't let them get you down. Never fear a thing."

But her mother had not known a situation such as this, it was not the same, this was desperate, urgent, terrible. Yes, the plan must go through, somehow.

She got on with her idea, acquainting herself intimately with everything happening in her body at that time. It was very noisy, what with thundering and rushing and squeaking and drumming, so that she hardly heard the fresh banging at the door and the sounds of impatience from the doctors. A delegation of Starving had arrived, begging for money and food. Elouise had seen the Starving before; two large eyes, sometimes minus lenses, great belly with umbilical hernia from inward pressure of gas, sticks of arms and legs, ulcerated skin, blackpatched and grayflaky suppuration. There were many Starving and they lived in the dustbowls, scratching and whimpering day and night. The doctors and the normal sick gave charity quite often, but sometimes delegations came for more.

Elouise cut off her compa.s.sion, heard the doctors writing out checks and orders for food. If Ananias McCallister had been alive to see this scene...

In the forecourt.

The Congenitals and the Starving were mixing with each other, exchanging grief for grief, displaying their twisted and unfed children to one another, each father vying to be most deserving of sympathy for how little he could do to help his family. A wall was chosen for the banging of heads, and those that could not find a s.p.a.ce used the floor. Those that could not bend down rent their hair, and wailing and whimpering and beating of the air and b.r.e.a.s.t.s began at first chaotically and then in rhythm. Feeling was running high. Even with charity checks, what kind of a life was it? The question went up into the fetid air of the forecourt, rising and falling, pa.s.sed about, reiterated. The doctors would have worried at the atmosphere out there had it been caused by any other groups of people. But need they worry at enfeebled threats of people whose talents lay in basket-work and knitting, the making of felt pictures and the reading of Braille? Who among them could cast steel into sword, or spin a perfect gun-barrel? Which of them could lift a sword or aim straight?

Secure, the doctors drank their whiskey, argued lightly whether Elouise should be given to sacrifice or not, and aired their personal theories about what should happen to her otherwise.

Elouise heard nothing of what they said. She appeared to be asleep.

Encapsulated, capable of saying I I.

The rays of the sun lit up the scene in the forecourt, making it seem as if a Spring Festival were in full swing. A doctor predicted that no good would ensue from the happenings that day and a big man with a face like a bird said: "Don't lose your cool."

Enclosed in the cavern of her own immaculate body, Elouise began to examine the walls. In a corridor of ridges there were waving plants, cilia reaching and retracting, s.n.a.t.c.hing at the short white gown, trying to thrust her out. They banged at her knees.

"Back! Turn back! Foreign body!" they screeched at her, but she with her newfound Will swept on, and the floor heaved but still she slid in the slime toward a division in the corridor. The left-hand fork would do fine, she decided. On and on. Into smaller pa.s.sages she made her way and then stopped and fumbled in her handbag. Oh! Handbags! What a pest they were, one could never find anything. Paper and bottles and clips and mirrors and letters and make-up and manicure sets. She selected a nail file and a powder compact. Then, like many another freedom fighter before her she began her campaign by writing on the walls. Taking her nail file she scratched the words: "I WANT TO BE FREE. I WANT TO GO WHERE THERE ARE OTHERS LIKE ME.".

Mucus bubbled up around her feet, blood ran down the walls, she opened the powder compact and scattered the contents about in the air that blew first one way, then back. The walls closed in on her, there was a rush of wind echoing, and a mighty explosion.

The doctors had finished the whiskey, had come to a provisional decision about the patient. A doctor handed some papers to Matron who prepared to announce.

Suddenly Elouise coughed a great racking, whooping, echoing cough. A triumphal arch of sputum and blood leapt from between her parted lips followed by a cloud of fine powder. She coughed again, clutching her throat and a dribble of blood marred her chin. Sweat poured from her pallid skin and she trembled as if in a fever.

There was a short and profound silence before an immense uproar broke out in the auditorium with clattering and screaming and the breaking of gla.s.s and the sc.r.a.ping of feet. A colostomy bag burst onto the pink plastic floor and was ground and spread by a gouty foot. The great doors opened and in swept a crowd of Starving and Congenitals. They saw the blood on the short white gown and became enraged, Starving and Congenital alike catching the mood, breaking and scrambling, beating and flailing with their skin and bone. Crutches made fine skull-breakers, gla.s.s eyes beneath the foot broke legs and hips, leg-calipers broke calcified teeth and a hearing-aid choked effectively and doubtless sonorously one who would soon have died from cirrhosis of the liver.

Elouise became suddenly panic-stricken; it seemed that the sight of her self-induced sickness did not procure the acceptance into normal society that she had hoped. How had she judged wrong? The urge to cough was frightful but with all her strength she screamed out: "Someone release the force-field on this b.l.o.o.d.y chair!"

Poppy-head the nerve-specialist came wavering forward and threw the vital switch and she stood up to run but he stood grinning down at her, grotesquely pretty and obviously angered.

"You betrayed yourself!" he whinnied, lower teeth displayed in resentment.

"I don't know what you mean! I'm in mortal danger, can't you see?"

"But listen..."

She did not listen, saw only his face come near in earnest discourse; brought up her foot with force to his groin which made it seem that he fell beneath a blade, harvested along with the corn.

She ran breathless and retching across the stage and found herself in a small storeroom at the end of a corridor. Too late she saw that she should have made for the "Exit" door at the back of the Theatre. The shelves were stacked with rows of drugs and chemicals and cylinders and wads; she sorted blindly through them, shutting her ears to herself. Big action was what was called for; some sweeping, cleansing, final act!

Pota.s.sium cyanide capsules.

Oh! what a beautiful blue jar, what a fine decoration of skull and cross-bones. She clutched up the heavy jar as if it were her baby and left the storeroom and soon found the steps she hoped for; those that led up to the gantry in the flies. Up there she had a fine view of both stage and auditorium. The chaos and mess and smell and everything down there were utterly disgusting.

She shook out the little gla.s.s bubbles so that they fell cracking onto the floor beneath, dropped the jar and ran as fast as her failing breath would allow, gown clutched over nose and mouth until she finally found her way outside into the pure fresh air, having banged the door shut, close, behind her. The last sounds she heard from that place were screams of ma.s.s-death and an accusation against herself that she was in league with Ananias McCallister.

"Superst.i.tion! Corruption! Plotters!" she countered raspingly as she ran. How different the evening from the morning. The day had started calm and golden; the evening descended triumphant and scarlet.

She pa.s.sed the barren gravelly land and came to open fields where she lay down to rest; all her body was in pain and distress, every sensation of malfunctioning totally new so that much harder to bear. She was listening to her own confused thoughts of how perhaps she had done her job too well, scored the message too deep, and wondering what to do next and where to go; thinking that to rescue her mother and hide away would be futile. Her mother would soon die anyway, and had she not bid for freedom? Someone approached and flopped down on the gra.s.s beside her, startling her into terror and convulsions of coughing. It was Poppy-head the nerve-specialist.

"But you were in the..."

"No I was not. I rose from your attack and left the place immediately. I thought you might do something horrible, I foresaw it."

She was too fatigued to move, lay back instead weeping and pleading, explaining herself pitifully.

He ignored what she was saying and spoke over her.

"You realize of course that you would have come to no harm if you had remained calm and waited?"