Across the Spectrum (46 page)

Gradually his heartbeat slowed and his breath came freely
instead of catching in his chest. His thoughts seemed unusually lucid. He had
gone to the hilltop for evening prayers, he had stayed too long, and in the
darkness strayed from the trail and fallen. A man of his years should rightly
have broken his neck. But something had preserved him from his own folly, to
arrive at this moment of wonder.

Above him, the dark outlines of the sides of the gully
melted away. The sky opened up and his vision came suddenly clear. Stars
swirled overhead in milky splendor, sweeping all the heavens with their
brilliance. Lying cradled by the earth, Jacob felt as if he could see forever.
The radiance which filled his eyes had left those stars hundreds, even millions
of years ago. He was witnessing the universe of Moses and of Abraham, the times
of miracles and deliverance, still going on, not in the unimaginable past, but
this very moment.

Then the moment passed. His left knee, bent under him,
twinged. Carefully he straightened it, visualizing the ligaments and tendons
that might be torn, the age-brittle cartilages that might be damaged, all the
injuries that he’d seen and treated over the years. The joint creaked and
smarted, then his kneecap gave a resounding
pop!
as it settled back into
place. The knee felt sound enough, even when he crawled to his feet and took a
few experimental steps.

His hands were empty, the flashlight and walking stick gone.
The
yarmulke
had flown off his head during his tumble. He ran his hands
over the ground but could not find his spectacles.

Since there was nothing else to do, no possible way he could
climb out of the gully in the darkness, he sat down, made himself as
comfortable as possible, and turned his thoughts to what had happened to him,
to that moment of awe. He didn’t expect to recapture it, only to remember that
it had indeed happened and in that remembering to hold at bay the question that
would not go away.

This night, it comes
for me?

∞

I do not know why I went back the next night, back to the
hospital loading deck where Jacob had found me. But I waited there, deep in the
shadows cast by the yellowed lights, tasting the despair, the grime and crusted
filth, searching for that faint whiff of sweetness, the last scent I had of
him.

At the emergency entrance, men with jumpy eyes greeted me
with submachine guns. I paused, for what could I say to them? What reason could
I give for my presence there? No hospital could give me healing, nor any priest
grant me absolution.

Wordless, I melted back into the night to wait the long
hours until I felt a shifting in the pall of death. At the staff entrance, I
caught sight of a figure slight and stoop-chested. Myopic, shambling. Anything
but heroic.

I knew him as I knew the silence of my own heart. But he no
longer reeked of pollution and slow decay. Something sang like music in his
blood. I followed it, powerless to turn away, knowing all the while it was not
thirst which drew me, but a feeling so disused and forgotten that I no longer
knew what it was.        

∞

Night chill seeped into Jacob’s bones, sharper than he’d
expected. He drew his coat more tightly around his shoulders and wished he had
a hat.

A lump of darkness appeared along the top of the gully, for
a moment as still as the rocky ground before it disappeared. The next instant
Jacob sensed a figure standing beside him, substance but no trace of warmth.
Against the night’s blackness, he caught the blurred paleness of teeth.

Fingers smooth as marble curled around his arm, chill even
through his coat sleeve. “You were not in the cabin when I woke,” a soft voice
said. “I thought you might have gone down to the village, but you were not
there, either.”

“Thank you, Victor.” Jacob accepted his spectacles, slightly
more battered than before. “You’ve been to the village and back? Already?”

“It is two hours past midnight.”

So late?
How long had he lain there, enraptured by
the stars? How long had they been waiting for him to truly see them? Years?
Centuries?

They reached the trail and climbed out of the shadowed gully.
Jacob’s chest tightened, squeezing the breath from his lungs. The grasses no
longer looked withered, but touched with silver. The hillsides shimmered with
light.        

∞

Jacob had built his cabin into the rocky hillside, a
single room with table, bed, bookshelves. Fireplace and kitchen area, hand-pump
for water. One door led outside, facing east, the other into the deep caves.
Victor lit the lantern and hung it on the hook above the table, where he placed
the flashlight and
yarmulke
, now covered with dust and bits of dry
grass.

Jacob lowered himself to the bench. The pain in his chest
had steadily increased during the journey home. Now it subsided, leaving him
sweating hard. He had laid out his dinner before he left: a pitcher of water, a
sliver of goat cheese, herbed beans and bread, everything covered with a clean,
many-patched cloth. Candlesticks stood at the end of the table, unlit.

With the first bite, he felt nauseated. He forced himself to
eat a spoonful of beans. It took an effort to chew properly.

Victor moved closer and sat in his usual place on the second
bench. Jacob glanced up at the expressionless face and was struck, as he had
been so many times over the years, by its beauty—the arched lips, the brows
shaped like the wings of soaring gulls, the lines of jaw and cheekbone, the
skin as fine as alabaster.

“Stop hovering over me like an old grandmother,” Jacob
grumbled. “I’m fine.”

The perfect face inclined a fraction, lamplight gleaming on
the blue-black hair. Even when the light fell on the eyes, they seemed all
pupil, all emptiness.

“You are
not
fine, Jacob. Your angina is worse, your
cardiac function is compromised. The next infarction will kill you.”

Jacob stared at his half-eaten plate of beans. Victor could
hear his diseased old heart as it struggled and failed. Could taste the
imminence of his death.

“You might have died tonight,” Victor said, as Jacob knew he
would. “I might have come too late to save you. You stubborn old Jew, do you
want that? No? Then why won’t you take what I offer? Do you think your god
cares if you drink blood—
my
blood—any more than he cares if
I
take a man’s blood or a deer’s?”

“
I
care,” Jacob said quietly. “Blood then is not
merely blood, it is the symbol of life. I revere life, I do not consume it. The
word
kosher
means—”

“Nothing!” Victor exploded. “Superstitious nothing!”

Jacob shook his head, refusing to be drawn in. Victor was
angry at being lectured. “Nu, you went looking for me?”

For Victor to go near the town was remarkable in itself.
Since he had followed Jacob up to the mountain, he had avoided other human
contact.

“A boy is sick,” Victor said. “Some pathology in his
blood—not a pollutant, not any microbe in your books.”

“Which boy?”

A hesitation, a deepening of the stillness. For all the
years Jacob had known him, Victor resisted learning names. At first Jacob
thought it was because names bestowed individuality, identity; later, much
later, when he knew Victor no longer sought out human prey, the truth came to
him. Who could endure the memory of so many names?

“Never mind,” Jacob said gently. “I’ll go down tomorrow and
examine him.”

“Be sensible, old man. You’re tired, you’re bruised from one
end to the other, your heart requires rest. It’s too strenuous a journey for
you.”

Jacob lifted his chin. “I have a choice? This child is going
to diagnose himself?”

“At least let me carry the heavy things for you.”

He would come after dark, of course, and vanish just as
quickly. Jacob sighed. “The microscope, then.”

“I will not let you go so easily.” Victor rose to his feet.
Darkness swirled around him like a cloak. He placed his hands on the table and
leaned forward. “Once I would have hunted there, in the village. I would have
reveled in their terror. I would have been everything the priests said I was.”

On any other night, Jacob would have turned away. Now the
brilliance of the heavens lingered behind his vision. Everywhere, darkness gave
birth to mystery. When he looked at Victor, this night of all nights, he seemed
to be looking into a mirror.

∞

I stayed hidden from Jacob for a long time, months in the
city until the next big earthquake and the fires and then years afterward on
the road. Hunger and plague stalked the countryside. People turned in an
instant from friend to enemy, grateful to savage.

Once I threw a rock through the glassless window of a ranch
house where he was sleeping, to warn him. Other times I muddied his tracks or
left a half-exposed cache of supplies and a false trail in the other direction.
I argued with myself that this was madness, but still I watched.

I never knew why Jacob kept going, nor did I have any notion
of what he did or why he did it. Doctoring, to me, was just another kind of
priesthood with its own collection of smells and incantations.

Then one suffocating summer night, Jacob walked down a
deserted side street of a little town, medical bag in hand. Following him,
keeping to the shadows, I saw the jackals waiting: shaved, tattooed heads,
black leather vests, back-sharpened knives. They had guns, too, but wouldn’t
use them. They wanted to savor this killing.

I took one from behind, breaking his neck with a jerk. A
slash and the nearest lay in a spurt of arterial blood.

Jacob turned, his eyes hidden behind twin moons of reflected
light.

“Get him!” yelled the tallest, the leader.

The world blurred as I darted in. Air rushed by me, though I
had no breath to steal. I spun and lashed out at another hunter with one foot.
Hand bones shattered and the knife went spinning in an elongated arc. I
back-handed the next across the jaw and his head snapped back, twisting. I
heard the
crack!
of his fractured spine. Felt the sudden, exhilarating
chill as his heart stuttered and froze.

Three of them left now. The leader raised his hand, aiming
the weapon he’d thought hidden. I caught the whiff of machine oil and
gunpowder. He screamed, “Bastard!” and pulled the trigger.

It would have taken me hours to die from such a belly wound,
if I had been a living man. He saw my eyes and knew me for what I was—the
template of evil beside which he was no more than the merest shadow. Wordless,
he turned and fled. The other two bolted after him into the night.

Jacob crouched beside one of the crumpled bodies. His gaze
took in the street, the clotting shadows. He straightened up and came toward
me. Behind the moonlit lenses, his eyes narrowed and then widened.

“I remember you,” he said, wondering. “From San Francisco.
The transfusion, it worked. You’re alive!” He paused, brows knotting. “But you
haven’t changed at all.”

But he had. The road had taken its toll, the nights birthing
babies in lonely ranch houses, the miles walked in sleet or blazing heat, the
poor food, the tainted water. I marked the lines around his eyes and mouth, the
shining dome of his forehead where the hairline had receded.

I closed my hand around his arm, this skinny weakling of a
man with no muscle to speak of, no strength, no fear. I could break him with a
single finger.

“Where are you taking me?” he said.

It was the wrong question. Not where was I taking him, but
where was he taking me?

∞

The river snaked along the valley floor, barely more than
a mud-banked trickle until the winter rains came again. A mule-drawn reaper
crawled across the squares of gold-ripe grain. The village itself centered
around a much-repaired farmhouse, barn and silo. A criss-cross of unpaved
streets led to a smithy, chicken coops, pigsties, pens for goats and milk cows,
a shed for the mules. The roofs were covered with water heaters, tubes of
age-whitened plastic.

Jacob trudged down the hill toward the village. His long
coat was now too warm and the pack weighed heavily. Thirst gnawed at him. He
knew he should have stopped, rested. There had not seemed enough time.

A woman’s voice hailed him from the cluster of houses.
Something white waved from one of the windows, a dish towel or apron. His eyes
were no longer keen enough to tell. When the woman emerged, he recognized
her—the elderly beekeeper, wearing faded denim overalls several sizes too big
for her. She offered him a dipper of water.

The water had a faint metallic taste. Jacob handed the cup
back to her. “I had word a child is sick. Whose is it?”

“The Coopers’ boy. Young Peter.”

And so, the town had gone on without him, kaleidoscopic
lives slipping through his fingers.

The Cooper family house lay to the north end of the
settlement. It was one of the newer buildings, pine from the scrub forest ten
miles seaward, simple and a bit dark because window glass was hard to come by.
The door stood open to reveal a wood-burning stove made from parts of gasoline
automobiles.

Jacob paused at the threshold. Perhaps Victor’s
sensitivities had rubbed off on him, that he could feel the fear hanging like a
pall in this house. These people remembered all too vividly the plagues, the
bloodrot and the fevers. Even a common cold might send whispers through the
community, “Will it begin again?”

This night, it comes
for me?

A chair leg scraped over the bare wood floor in the second,
smaller room. For a moment Jacob did not recognize the woman standing shadowed
there, one hand on the door frame, only the skull-shaped face, the eyes like
wells of darkness. In the texture of her bones, he read the certainty that her
child was dying.