NightScape Part 21

"Can't understand what got into them. Accusing Marion. Outrageous," Bingaman said.

He managed to open his eyes and focus his aching vision. He saw Marion's worried face. And Powell's, which had a reluctant expression.

"What is it? What aren't you telling me?" Bingaman asked.

"This isn't the first time."

"I don't understand."

"People are frightened," Powell said. "They can't accept that it's random and meaningless. They want easy explanations. Something specific."

"I still don't understand."

"Someone to blame. The Germans. Marion."

"But that's preposterous. How could they be so foolish as to think that Marion would..."

The discomfited look on Marion's face made Bingaman frown. "You've been aware of this?"

"Yes."

"How long has this been going on?"

"Several days."

"And yet you still volunteered to come down here and help? I'm amazed." But then Bingaman thought about it, and he wasn't amazed. Marion always did what was right, even when it was difficult.

"Don't get the wrong impression," Powell said. "It's not like everyone feels that way. Only a minority. A small minority. But they've certainly made their opinions known."

"I'm going to have to stay home," Marion said.

"No," Powell said. "You can't let them bully you."

"It isn't because of them. I have a more important job. Feeljonas's forehead. Touch the glands in his throat. Put your hand on his chest. You don't need a stethoscope. You can feel the congestion. He has it."

The jolt of wheels into potholes and the noxious fumes of the Model T aggravated Bingaman's excruciating headache, making him nauseous as Marion drove him home. His injuries seemed to have broken the resolve with which he'd subdued the symptoms that he'd attributed only to fatigue. Now, as delirium took control of him, his last lucid thought was an echo of what he'd said to Dr. Bennett after seeing the nurse's corpse: How could this have happened so quickly ? By the time Marion brought him home, the pain in his swollen lips and nostrils was insignificant compared to the soul-deep aching of his joints and limbs. He was so light-headed that he felt disa.s.sociated from himself, seeming to hover, watching Marion struggle to get him out of the car and up the steps into the house.

He did his best to cough away from her, grateful that he'd insisted she put a new mask on him. But the moment she eased him onto the bed, exhaling with effort, she loosened his shirt collar and took off the mask, which had become blood-soaked on the ride home.

"No," he murmured.

"Don't argue with me, Jonas. I have to get you cleaned up."

"Should have left me in the hospital."

"Not when you have a trained nurse to give you constant care at home."

She took off his shoes, his socks, his pants, his b.l.o.o.d.y suit coat and vest and shirt. She stripped off his underwear. Shivering, naked on the bed, clutching his arms across his chest, teeth chattering, he watched the ceiling ripple as Marion bathed him from head to toe. She used warm water and soap, dried him thoroughly, then made him sit up and slipped his nightshirt over his head, pulling it down to his knees. She tugged long woolen socks over his feet. She covered him with a sheet and three blankets. When that still wasn't enough and his shivering worsened, she brought him a hot-water bottle and put on the down-filled comforter.

Bingaman coughed and murmured about a face mask.

"It interferes with your breathing," Marion said.

" Might contaminate..."

"I don't think it does any good. Besides, I've already been exposed to it." Working, Marion breathed harder.

Minutes, perhaps hours later, she was spooning hot tea into him, and when the chills suddenly turned into alarming amounts of sweat oozing from him, she tore off the covers, stripped him again, bathed him with rubbing alcohol, ignored his coughing, and eased him out of bed onto the floor. He had lost control of his bowels and fouled the bed. She had to change the sheets, then clean him and change his nightshirt, then tug him up onto the bed, and pull blankets over him again because the chills had returned. She covered his brow with a steaming washcloth and spooned more hot tea into him, trying to make him swallow pieces of warm bread soaked in the tea.

He lost all external impressions and floated away into darkness. His mind was like a boat on an increasingly choppy sea. A night sea. Storm-tossed. Spinning.

He had no idea how long he was away, but gradually the spinning stopped, the weather calmed, and when he came back, slowly, dimly, he didn't think that his throat had ever felt so dry or that he had ever been so weak. His eyes hurt as if they had sunk into his skull. His skin was tight from dehydration, greasy from repeated sweating frenzies. At the same time, it seemed loose, as if he had lost weight.

These sensations came to him gradually. He lay pa.s.sively, watching a beam of sunlight enter the bedroom window on his left. Then it went away, and eventually the sunbeam entered through the window on his right, and he realized that he'd been in a semi-stupor while the sun pa.s.sed from east to west. But he wasn't so stupefied that he failed to realize that nothing in the room had changed, that his nightshirt and covers were the same as in the morning, that no one had been in the room, that Marion hadn't been in the room.

He tried to call to her, but his lungs were too weak, his throat too dry, and nothing came out. He tried again and managed to produce only an animallike whimper.

Marion! he thought desperately. His fear was not for himself, not that he had been left alone, helpless. His terror was for Marion. If she wasn't taking care of him, that meant she wasn't able to, and that meant...

The effort to move made him cough. Congestion rattled in his chest. Breath wheezed past his swollen bronchial pa.s.sages and up his raw throat. But despite his pain and lethargy, he had the sense that he was better, not as feverish. His headache didn't threaten to cause his skull to explode. His muscles ached, but not as if he were being stretched on a rack.

When he squirmed to the side of the bed and tried to stand, his legs wobbled. He slumped to the floor. Marion! he kept thinking. He crawled. The hand-over-hand movement reminded him of the fear and determination he had felt when learning to swim. A pitcher on a table attracted his attention, and he grasped a chair beside the table, struggling to raise himself, to tilt the pitcher toward his lips. Water trickled into his mouth, over his scabbed cracked parched lips, down his chin, onto his nightshirt. He clumsily set the pitcher back down, apprehensive about dropping it, the water tasting too precious for him to risk wasting it. But as precious as it tasted, it was also tepid, stale, with a slight grit of dust. It had obviously been there a while, and with his premonition mounting, filling him with terror, he tried to call Marion's name, shuddered at the weak sound of his croaky voice, and crawled again.

He found her downstairs on the floor in the kitchen. His immediate panicked thought was that she was dead. But when he moaned, he thought he heard an echo, only to realize that the second moan had come from her, weak, faint, a moan nonetheless, and he fought to increase the effort with which he crawled to her. He touched her brow and felt the terrible heat coming off it. Yes! Alive! But the depth of her cough and the sluggishness of her response when he tried to rouse her filled him with dread, and he knew that his first priority was to get fluid into her. He gripped the top of a kitchen counter, pulled himself up, and sweated while he worked the pump handle in the sink, filling a bowl with water from the house's well. He almost spilled the bowl and barely remembered to bring a spoon, but at last he sat exhausted next to Marion on the kitchen floor, cradled her head, and spooned water between her dry, swollen lips. The heat coming off her was overwhelming. He struggled to the icebox, used an ice pick, and clumsily chipped off chunks from the half-melted block in the upper compartment. With the chunks of ice wrapped in a dish towel, he slumped yet again beside Marion and wiped the cool cloth over her beet-red face. He set the cloth on her forehead, spooned more water into her mouth, then gave in to his own thirst and drank from the bowl, only to have it slip from his grasp and topple onto the floor, soaking Marion and himself. He moaned, felt dizzy again, and lowered his head to the floor.

Time blurred. When he regained consciousness, he found himself on a chair in the parlor. Marion was on the couch across from him, a throw rug over her. Her chest rose and fell. She coughed. A plate of stale bread and a pitcher of water were on a side table. Someone found us, Bingaman thought, coughing. Someone came in and helped. But during the next few effort-filled hours, he was forced to realize that he was mistaken, that no one had come, that somehow he had shifted Marion into the parlor, that he had brought the bread and the pitcher of water.

The bread was so old and hard that he had to soak it in the water before he could gently insert it into Marion's mouth and encourage her to eat. He breathed a prayer of thanks when she swallowed. When she coughed, he feared that she would expel the food, but it stayed down, and then he, too, was eating, rinsing a crust of bread down with the unbelievably delicious water.

Again time blurred. It wasn't bread but strawberry jam and a spoon that he now found on the table beside the couch. He remembered having seen the jam in the ice box. Marion was coughing. He was rubbing her fiery brow with a towel that held the last of the ice. He was spooning the jam into her mouth. He was raising a gla.s.s to her lips. He was drinking from another gla.s.s, feeling his parched mouth and throat seeming to absorb the water.

Darkness. Light.

Darkness again. The cellar. Stumbling. Opening the door to the root cellar. Despite the coolness, sweating. Groping for two jars of Marion's preserves on a shelf. Coughing. Swaying. Stumbling up the cellar steps, reaching the kitchen, squinting from the painful brilliance of blazing sunset, discovering that the preserves he had expended so much effort to get were dill pickles.

Darkness. Light.

Darkness. Light.

Light again. Marion was no longer coughing. Bingaman later concluded that what saved her life was her robust const.i.tution, although when she was alert enough she insisted that he had been the reason she stayed alive. Because of his ministrations, she called them. She told him not to be so modest.

"Hush," he told her lovingly. "Don't waste your strength."

In the reverse, however, he had no doubt that Marion's own ministrations in the initial stage of his illness had been what saved him. The ruthless disease could be attacked only on the basis of its symptoms. After that, the patient would live or die strictly on the basis of his or her own resources, and now that Bingaman had endured the intimate experience of the influenza's devastating power, he marveled that anyone had the strength to resist it.

Perhaps strength was not the determining factor. Perhaps it was luck. Or Fate. Or G.o.d's will. But if the latter was indeed the case, G.o.d certainly must have turned against a great many people. To a Presbyterian such as Bingaman, who believed in a contract that linked hard work and prosperity with salvation, the notion that the influenza might be G.o.d's display of worldwide disapproval was disquieting. Surely, even taking the war into account, the world couldn't be that bad a place. Or was the so-called world war, with its machine guns and tear gas, chlorine gas, phosgene gas, mustard gas, the mounting horrors, the millions of needless casualties, in fact the problem?

But in that case, did it make sense for G.o.d in turn to inflict millions of other casualties?

"Dr. Bingaman." The nurse stepped back in fear, her face suddenly drained of color, almost as white as her uniform. "It can't be!"

"What on earth?"

"I was told you were dead!"

"Dead?"

Bingaman took another step toward the nurse in the hospital corridor.

She almost backed away. "After Dr. Powell died and Dr. Talbot, I-"

"Wait a second. Dr. Powell is dead?"

"Yes, and Dr. Talbot and - "

"Dead." Shock overwhelmed him. Dizzy, he feared that he was having a relapse and placed a hand against the wall to steady himself. He took a deep breath, repressed a cough, and studied her. "What made you think I was dead?"

"That's what I was told!"

"Who told you?"

"A lot of people. I don't know. I don't remember. It's been so terrible. So many people have gotten sick. So many people have died. I can't remember who's alive and who isn't. I can't remember when I slept last or when.

Bingaman's fatigue and his preoccupation when he entered the hospital had prevented him from realizing how exhausted the nurse looked. "Sit down," he said, realizing something else - the reason no one had come to his house to find out if he needed help. Why would anyone have bothered if everyone thought I was dead? And there must be a lot of people who have died.

"You need to go home," Bingaman said. "Get some food. Rest."

"I can't. So many patients. I can't keep the living straight from the dying. They keep going out and others come in. There's so much to do. I..."

"It's all right. I'm giving you permission. Go home. I'll speak to Elizabeth." He referred to the head of the nursing staff. "I'm sure she'll agree."

"You can't."

"What?"

"Speak to her."

"I don't understand."

"Elizabeth's dead."

He found himself speechless, staring at her, horrified by the thought of being told that whoever else he referred to would also be dead. So much had happened so quickly. Stretcher bearers pa.s.sed him, carrying the corpse of Mayor Halloway.

A further horrifying thought occurred to him. "How long?" he managed to ask.

The weary nurse shook her head in confusion.

"What I mean is..." His brow felt warm again. "What day is it?"

Confused, she answered, "Wednesday."

He rubbed his forehead. "What I'm trying to ask is - the date."

"October ninth." The nurse frowned in bewilderment.

"October ninth?" He felt as he had when he'd been struck in the face. He lurched backward.

"Dr. Bingaman, do you feel all right?"

"A month."

"I don't understand."

"The last thing I recall it was early September."

"I still don't-"

"I've lost the rest of September and...A month. I've lost a whole month." Frightened, he tried to explain, to give the nurse a sense of what it was like to spend so many weeks fighting to breathe through congested lungs, all the while enduring a storm-tossed black sea of delirium. He strained to describe the unbelievable thirst, the torture of aching limbs, the suffocating heaviness on his chest.

The disturbed way the nurse looked at him gave him the sense that he was babbling. He didn't care. Because all the time he struggled to account for how he'd lost a month of his life, he realized that if it had happened to him, it must have happened to others. Dear G.o.d, he thought, how many others are trapped inside their houses, too weak to answer their phone if they have one, or to respond to someone knocking on their door? When he'd left his house an hour earlier, he'd knocked on the doors of his neighbors to his right and left. No one had answered. He had been troubled by how deserted his elm-lined street looked, a cool breeze blowing leaves that had turned from green to autumnal yellow with amazing rapidity in just a few days - except that he now realized it had been a month. And those neighbors hadn't gone away somewhere. He had a heart-pounding, dreadful certainty that they were inside, helpless or dead.

"Jonas, you look terrible. You've got to rest," Dr. Bennett said. "Go home. Take care of Marion."

"She's doing fine. Others are worse. She insisted I help take care of them."

"But-"

"You and I are the only physicians left in town! People are dying! I can't go home! I'm needed!"

Every church in town had been converted into a hospital. All of them were full. The cemeteries no longer had room for all the corpses. Gravediggers could not keep up the labor of shoveling dirt from fresh pits. Corpses lay in rows in a pasture at the edge of town. Armed sentries were posted to stop animals from eating them, each man wearing a gauze mask and praying that he wouldn't catch the disease from the corpses. Funerals were limited to family members wearing masks, ministers rushing as fast as dignity would allow while they read the prayers for the dead.