“Raoul’s not totally incapable of insight.” She
laughed maliciously. “Seriously, Mr. Swope is a different kind of guy. Big
fellow, gray-haired with a beer gut and a little goatee. Kind of like Buffalo
Bill without the long hair. He’s really cut off from his feelings—I know it’s
denial and I know it’s not unheard of, but he goes beyond what we normally see.
His son’s diagnosed with cancer and he’s laughing and joking with the nurses,
trying to be one of the gang, talking about his orchard and his precious
plants, throwing around horticultural jargon. You know what can happen to guys
like that.”
“Sudden breakdown.”
“Exactly. All at once it hits them and pow!
Pathological grief reaction.”
“Doesn’t sound like the boy has much support.”
“The mother. She’s got to be the most unliberated
thing I’ve ever seen—Garland Swope is the
king
of his castle—but she
does seem to be a good mother—nurturant, gives lots of hugs and kisses, goes
into the unit a lot, and without any hesitation. You know how scary the
spacesuit can be for lots of parents.
She
jumped right in. The nurses
see her go off into the corner and cry when she thinks no one’s looking, but
when Garland comes around she puts on a great big smile, lots of ‘Yes, Dears’
and ‘No, Dears.’ It’s really sad.”
“Why do you think they want to pull the kid out?” I
asked.
“I know Raoul believes it was those people from the
Touch—he’s so paranoid about anything holistic—but how can he be so sure? Could
be he’s to blame for the whole thing. Maybe he screwed up communication with
them—he’s very aggressive when he describes the treatment protocols and lots of
people are put off.”
“He seemed to think the Fellow was at fault.”
“Augie Valcroix? Augie marches to his own drummer but
he’s a good guy. One of the few docs who actually takes time to sit down with
the families and act like a human being. He and Raoul hate each other’s guts,
which makes sense if you know them. Augie thinks Raoul’s a fascist and Raoul
sees him as a subversive influence. It’s been great fun working in this
department, Alex.”
“What about those cultists?”
She shrugged.
“What can I say? Another group of lost souls. I don’t
know much about them—there are so many fringe groups it would take a specialist
to understand all of them. Two of them showed up a couple of days ago. The guy
looked like a teacher—glasses, scuzzy beard, wimpy manner, brown oxfords. The
lady was older, in her forties or fifties, the kind who was probably a hot
number when she was younger but lost it. Both of them had that glazed look in
their eyes—the I-know-the-secret-of-the-universe-but-I-won’t-tell-you trance.
Moonies, Krishnas, esties, Touchers, they’re all the same.”
“You don’t think they turned the Swopes around?”
“They may have been the straw that broke it,” she
conceded, “but I don’t see how they could be entirely responsible. Raoul’s
looking for a scapegoat, for easy answers. That’s his style. Most of the docs
are like that. Instant fix-its for complex issues.”
She looked away and folded her arms across her chest.
“I’m really tired of all of it,” she said softly.
I steered her back to the Swopes.
“Raoul wondered if the parents’ being older had
anything to do with it. You pick up any hints the boy was an unwanted accident?”
“I didn’t get close enough to even touch on stuff like
that. I was lucky to get enough for a bare-bones intake. The father smiled and
called me “dear” and made sure I never got enough time alone with his wife to
develop a relationship. This family’s
armored.
Maybe they’ve got lots of
secrets they don’t want coming out.”
Maybe. Or maybe they’re terrified at being in a
strange environment so far from home with a gravely ill child and don’t want to
strip themselves bare in front of strangers. Maybe they don’t like social
workers. Maybe they’re simply private people. Lots of maybes…
“What about Woody?”
“A cutie pie. He’s been sick since he got here, so it’s
hard to judge what kind of kid he really is. Seems like a little sweetie—isn’t
it always the sweet ones who suffer?” She took out a tissue and blew her nose. “Can’t
stand the air in here. Woody’s a nice little boy who’s agreeable and kind of
passive. A people pleaser. He cries during procedures—the spinal tap really
hurt him—but he holds still and gives no serious problems.” She stopped for a
moment and fought tears.
“It’s a goddamn crime, their pulling him out of
treatment. I don’t like Melendez-Lynch, but goddamn it, he’s right this time!
They’re going to kill that little boy because somehow we screwed up, and it’s
driving me nuts.”
She pounded a small fist on the desk, snapped herself
to a standing position, and paced the cramped office. Her lower lip quivered.
I stood up and put my arms around her and she buried
her head in the warmth of my jacket.
“I feel like such a fool!”
“You’re not.” I held her tightly. “None if it is your
fault.”
She pulled away and dabbed at her eyes. When she
seemed composed I said, “I’d like to meet Woody.”
She nodded and led me to the Laminar Airflow Unit.
There were four modules, placed in series, like rooms
in a railroad flat, and shielded from one another by a wall of curtain that
could be opened or drawn by pushing buttons inside each room. The walls of the
units were transparent plastic and each room resembled an oversized ice cube,
eight feet square.
Three of the cubes were occupied. The fourth was
filled with supplies—toys, cots, bags of clothing. The interior side of the
curtained wall in each room was a perforated gray panel—the filter through
which air blew audibly. The doors of the modules were segmented, the bottom
half metal and closed, the top plastic, and left ajar. Microbes were kept out
of the opening by the high speed at which the air was expelled. Running
parallel to all four units were corridors on both sides, the rear passage for
visitors, the front for the medical staff.
Two feet in front of the doorway to each module was a
no-entry area marked off by red tape on the vinyl floor. I stood just outside
the tape at the entrance of Module Two and looked at Woody Swope.
He lay on the bed, under the covers, facing away from
us. There were plastic gloves attached to the front wall of the module, which
permitted manual entry into the germ-free environment. Beverly put her hands
inside them and patted him on the head gently.
“Good morning, sweetie.”
Slowly and with seeming effort, he rolled over and
stared at us.
“Hi.”
A week before Robin left for Japan, she and I went to
an exhibition of photographs by Roman Vishniac. The pictures had been a
chronicle of the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe just before the Holocaust.
Many of the portraits were of children, and the photographer’s lens had caught
their small faces unaware, flash-freezing the confusion and terror it found
there. The images were haunting, and afterward we cried.
Now, looking into the large dark eyes of the boy in
the plastic room, these same feelings came back in a rush.
His face was small and thin, the skin stretched across
delicate bone structure, translucently pale in the artificial light of the
module. His eyes, like those of his sister, were black, and glassy with fever.
The hair on his head was a thick mop of henna-colored curls. Chemotherapy, if
it ever happened, would take care of those curls in a brutal, though temporary,
reminder of the disease.
Beverly stopped stroking his hair and held out her
glove. The boy took it and managed a smile.
“How we doing this morning, doll?”
“Okay.” His voice was soft and barely audible through
the plastic.
“This is Dr. Delaware, Woody.”
At the mention of the title he flinched and moved back
on the bed.
“He’s not the kind of doctor who gives shots. He just
talks to kids, like I do.”
That relaxed him somewhat, but he continued to look at
me with apprehension.
“Hi, Woody,” I said. “Can we shake hands?”
“Okay.”
I put my hand into the glove Beverly relinquished. It
felt hot and dry—coated with talc, I recalled. Reaching into the module I
searched for his hand and found it, a small treasure. I held it for a moment
and let go.
“I see you’ve got some games in there. Which is your
favorite?”
“Checkers.”
“I like checkers, too. Do you play a lot?” “Kind of.”
“You must be very smart to know how to play checkers.”
“Kind of.” The hint of a smile.
“I bet you win a lot.”
The smile widened. His teeth were straight and white
but the gums surrounding them were swollen and inflamed.
“And you like to win.”
“Uh huh. I always win my mom.”
“How ’bout your dad?”
He gave a perplexed frown.
“He doesn’t play checkers.”
“I see. But if he did, you’d probably win.”
He digested that for a minute.
“Yeah, I pro’ly would. He doesn’t know much about
playing games.”
“Anyone else you play with besides Mom?”
“Jared—but he moved away.”
“Anybody besides Jared?”
“Michael and Kevin.”
“Are they guys at school?”
“Yeah. I finished K. Next year I go into one.”
He was alert and responsive but obviously weak.
Talking to me was taxing and his chest heaved with the effort.
“How about you and I play a game of checkers?”
“Okay.”
“I could play from out here with these gloves, or I
could put on one of those spacesuits and come in the room with you. Which would
you like better?”
“I dunno.”
“Well,
I’d
like to come in the room.” I turned
to Bev. “Could somebody help me suit up? It’s been a long time.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll be in there in a minute, Woody.” I smiled at him
and stepped away from the plastic wall. Rhythm-and-blues music blared from the
module next door. I glanced over and caught a glimpse of a pair of long brown
legs dangling over the foot of a bed. A black boy around seventeen was sprawled
atop the covers, staring at the ceiling and moving to the sounds that screamed
from the ghetto blaster on his nightstand, seemingly impervious to the I.V.
needles imbedded in the crooks of both arms.
“See,” said Bev, speaking up to be heard, “I told you.
A sweetie.”
“Nice kid,” I agreed. “He seems bright.”
“The parents describe him as having been very sharp.
The fevers have pretty much knocked him out but he still manages to communicate
very well. The nurses love him—this whole pullout thing is making everyone very
uptight.”
“I’ll do what I can. Let’s start by getting me in
there.”
She called for help and a tiny Filipino nurse appeared
bearing a package wrapped in heavy brown paper and marked STERILE.
“Take off your shoes and stand there,” ordered the
nurse, pintsized but authoritative. She pointed to a spot just outside the red
taped no-entry zone. After washing her hands with Betadyne, she unwrapped a
pair of sterile gloves and slipped them on her hands. Having inspected the
gloves and found them free from flaws, she removed a folded spacesuit from the
brown paper and placed it inside the red border. It took a bit of playing with
the suit—which, in a collapsed state, looked like a heavy paper accordion—but
she found the footholes and had me step inside them. Gingerly, she took hold of
the edges and pulled it up over me, tying the top seam around my neck. Being so
short, she had to stretch to do the job so I bent my knees to make it easier.
“Thanks,” she giggled. “Now your gloves—don’t touch
anything until they’re on.”
She worked quickly and soon my hands were sheathed in
surgical plastic, my mouth concealed behind a paper mask. The headpiece—a hood
fashioned of the same heavy paper as the suit attached to a plastic,
see-through visor—was slipped over my face and fastened to the suit with Velcro
strips.
“How does that feel?”
“Very stylish.” The suit was oppressively hot and I
knew that within minutes, despite the cool rapid airflow in the unit, I’d be
drenched with sweat.
“It’s our continental model.” She smiled. “You can go
in now. Half hour maximum time. The clock’s over there. We may be too busy to
remind you, so keep an eye on it and come out when the time’s up.”
“Will do.” I turned to Bev. “Thanks for your help. Any
idea when the parents will be in?”
“Vangie, did the Swopes say when they’d be in?”
The Filipino nurse shook her head. “Usually they’re
here in the morning—right around now. If they don’t come soon, I don’t know
when. I can leave a message for them to call you, Doctor—”
“Delaware. Why don’t you tell them I’ll be here
tomorrow at eight thirty and if they arrive earlier, please have them wait.”