Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 2, May 2013 (21 page)

He was not looking at her. Why not? “Price isn’t an issue, Dr. Wollaston, unless it’s out of this world. We have insurance and money. What are the side effects?”

“No consistent patterns. This is too new. And the implant would be done free, since your brother would be part of a controlled experiment. But”—the kicker, here it came, he was finally looking into her eyes—

“Colin would have to fly to Europe to get it. You see, it’s not yet FDA approved.”

“He’d have to stay there?”

His surprise was comical. “Stay there? Of course not. He could fly over one night, have the implant performed the next day, and as soon as the surgeon there approved his release he’d turn right around and come back. But I’m not sure how Colin will react to the idea. What do you think? It doesn’t have FDA approval, you see, so—”

“I don’t think. I know. Colin doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about the FDA. He’ll do it.” Julia stubbed out her cigarette, burned its whole length unnoticed in the ashtray. “Of course he’ll do it. Colin wants to live.”

She took a first sip of wine, then two big gulps. “What next?”

“On medical matters? Nothing. I’m done. More wine. Relax. Your turn to talk.” He was smiling again. “I hope you don’t have to run off right away.” Julia was staring all around her. His smile vanished. “Do you?”

Julia was still scanning the wine bar. “Where are all the waiters? You know, I didn’t eat one thing all day. I’m absolutely famished. How do you order food in this place?”

***

Walking back to Colin’s apartment through the mellow April evening, Julia Trantham was filled with guilt. Ten hours ago a malignant tumor the size and shape of a Bartlett pear had been removed from the brain of her brother. He was lying unconscious, gravely ill. While she…

For the past three hours she had managed to forget Colin’s condition—and in the company of James Wollaston she had enjoyed herself hugely.

***

Concorde, Heathrow to Dulles; seventy thousand feet, supersonic over open ocean.

Colin Trantham sat brooding in a left-side window seat, staring out at blue-black sky and sunlit cloud tops. The plane was half-empty, with no one between him and the aisle. Occasional curious looks from flight attendants and other passengers did not bother him. He was beyond that, accepting their stares as normal, just as he accepted the head bandages and bristly sprouting hair. If his appearance were enough to stir curiosity, what would people say if they knew what sat inside his head?

Maybe they would be as unimpressed as he had been. Colin had been shown the device before its insertion, and seen nothing to suggest its powers: a swollen iridescent disk no bigger than his fingernail, surrounded by the hollow legs of sensors and drug delivery system. Super-beetle. An unlikely candidate to be his savior. He felt nothing, but according to the London doctors it had set to work at once. The battle was going on now. Deep within his skull, bloated with slow poison, the scarab was stinging the crab’s microstases in silent conflict.

And the chance that it would succeed? No one would give him odds. Bad sign.

“Make a note of thoughts that strike you as unusual.” Wollaston, on their last meeting before Colin flew to England, had maintained his imperturbability. “We can watch your stomach at work, or your gall bladder. But you’re the only one who knows how normally your brain is functioning. Record your dreams.”

“My dreams? Doctor Wollaston, even before I got sick, my dreams never made much sense.”

“They don’t have to. Remember what Havelock Ellis said: ‘Dreams are real while they last; can we say more of life?’ I want to know about them.”

Colin was beginning to agree. Dreams and life, life and dreams; he had felt like telling Wollaston that his whole life had become one waking dream, on that morning when a headache came and grew and would not go. Since then nothing had been real. The pain had gone with the operation, but in its place was a continuous foreboding. Never glad confident morning again. He did not recall a real dream of any kind since the operation. And he did not want to write notes on his condition; he wanted it never to have happened.

The flight attendant had paused by Colin’s row of seats and was staring at him questioningly. He did not want to talk to her; to avoid it he stared again out of the window. The sun was visible in the dark sky, farther toward the rear of the plane. At Mach Two they were outpacing it. Time was running backward. Call back yesterday, bid time return.

Colin shivered at a slow stir of movement, deep within his brain. Something there was waking from long sleep. He stared straight at the sun. His pupils contracted, his hands relaxed. Fully awake, he began to dream.

***

I was standing on a flat shore, watching the sea. Or maybe I was sitting, I can’t tell because I had no sense of feeling of legs and arms. I just knew I was there. Enjoying the sunshine on my bare back, feeling good. More than good, absolutely terrific. Cold, perfect day, I could feel the blood running in my veins. Something must have died a mile or so offshore, or maybe it was a school of fish, because thousands of flying things were swooping and turning and settling. I decided I would swim out there and see for myself …

Julia Trantham looked up from the third sheet. “Does it just go on like this for all the rest? Because if it does, I can’t help. It’s not specific enough.”

“I know.” Wollaston nodded. “It would have been nice if you could have said, hey, that’s where we spent my fourteenth summer. But I didn’t expect it would ring any particular bells. Keep reading, if you would—I want you to have the context for something else.”

“And I thought you asked me here for dinner.”

He did not reply. She went on in silence until she reached the last page, then looked up with raised eyebrows. “So?”

He took four pages of 20” x 14” unlined paper from a folder and slid them across the table. “Colin found what he had written as unsatisfactory as you do. He says he’s an artist, not a writer. Pictures, not words. What do you make of these?”

The drawings were sepia ink on white background. Julia glanced for a few seconds at the first couple of sheets and put them aside, but the other two occupied her for a long time. James Wollaston watched her closely but did not speak or move.

“If you tell me these are all Colin’s, I’ll have to accept that they are.” She tapped the first two pages, spread out on the table of Wollaston’s dining room. “But these ones sure don’t look like it.”

“Why not?”

“Not detailed enough.” She picked up one of the sheets. “When you ask Colin to draw something, he draws it exactly. It’s not that he lacks imagination, but he never cheats. Once he’s seen it, he can draw it. And he sees more than you or I.”

“He didn’t see these. He dreamed them.”

“You’re the one who’s been telling me that dreams are as real as anything else. Anyway, compare the first two pages with the others. These must be birds, because they’re flying. But they’re cartoon birds, vague wings and bodies and heads, almost as though Colin didn’t care what they looked like. And now look at these other two, the tidal shellfish and crabs and worms. Precise. Every joint and every hair drawn in. See this? It’s Pecten jacobaeus—a scallop. Look at the eyes on the fringed mantle. You could use it as a textbook illustration. That’s Colin’s trademark. Same with the two lugworms. You can tell they’re different species. But those first two pages are just wrong.” She paused. “You don’t see it, do you?”

“I can’t argue with you.” Wollaston stared at the pages as though he were seeing them for the first time. He had taken off his tie and draped it over a chair back, and now he picked it up and rolled it around his forefingers.

“But you don’t like it,” said Julia, “what I said about the first two sheets?”

“I do not.”

“It’s a bad sign?”

“I don’t know. I know it’s not a good sign. In Colin’s situation the best change in behavior is no change.”

“Do you think it’s coming back?”

“I’d love to say, no, of course not. But I don’t know. God, I hate to keep saying it to you. I don’t know, I don’t know. But it’s the truth.” He came closer, half a step nearer than convention permitted. “Julia, I wish I could say something more definite. It could be the treatment—new drug, new protocol, new delivery system.”

“But you don’t think it is.”

“I think these drawings may be the effects of the treatment.” He slid the sheets back into the folder. “But they’re not the whole story. I go more by look and sound and sense. My gut feel says it’s something more than side effects. I think Colin has problems. How long are you staying?”

“I’ve been wondering. I could stay the whole summer. It’s late to do it, but if I moved fast I could even make part of next year a sabbatical. Should I?”

She was tense, hearing the question behind the question, not sure she wanted to hear the answer.

“I think you should.” James Wollaston looked more miserable than an objective physician had a right to look. “I think you should stay, until—well, stay as long as you can.”

***

The northern bedroom of the ground floor apartment had been converted to a studio, its bare expanse of window looking out onto a paved courtyard where weeds pushed up between cracked stones. The studio lay at the end of a corridor, far from the entrance to the apartment. Julia stood and listened as she came through the front door.

Total silence. That was odd. For the past three months her arrival had always produced a call of “Hi!” and a quick appearance in the kitchen to discuss dinner plans. He must be really deep into his work.

She slipped off her shoes and stole along the corridor.

Colin was in the studio, standing at the easel with his back half-turned to her. He was working in acrylics, and she saw a vivid flash of colors on the big board. She studied him as she came in. The hair on the back of his head had regrown completely, it must be two inches long now; but he was terribly thin, just gaunt bones, and the skin on his temple had a pale, translucent look. She saw that the food on the tray table beyond the easel was untouched. He must have eaten nothing since she left, over ten hours ago.

“Col?”

He did not seem to hear. He was painting furiously, brush strokes as rapid and sure as they had ever been. She came to his shoulder to examine the picture, but before she reached the easel she glanced up at his face. His gray eyes were unnaturally bright, and there was a smile of exquisite pleasure on his gaunt face. But it was not for Julia. He did not know that she was there. He was smiling away into some private space.

“Colin!” She touched his arm, suddenly frightened. The brush strokes faltered, the moving hand slowed. He blinked, frowned, and turned toward her. “Julie—” he said. “I’m through one barrier. It’s wonderful, but now there’s another. Bigger. I can’t see a way past it yet.” His hand jerked up and down, a quick chopping movement with the paint brush. “Like a wall. If I can just get through this one…”

The expression of ecstasy was replaced by surprise. He swayed and groaned, his lips drawing back from his teeth. Julia saw his gums, pale and bloodless, and the veinless white of his eyes. The brush fell to the floor. She grabbed for his arm, but before she could catch him he had crumpled forward, pawing at the painting and easel before falling heavily on top of them.

***

“I don’t care what you tell Colin. I want your prognosis, no matter how bad it looks.”

It was long after working hours. Julia Trantham was sitting at one end of the uncomfortable vinyl-covered couch in the doctor’s reception room. Her face was as pale as her brother’s had been, twenty-four hours earlier.

“At the moment Colin doesn’t want to hear anything. Doesn’t seem to care. That’s not as unusual as you might think.” Wollaston had been standing, but now he came to sit next to her. “People hide from bad news.”

“And it is bad news. Isn’t it?”

“It’s very bad. And it’s not a surprise.” He sighed and leaned his head on the smooth yellow seat back. At dinner he had switched to martinis instead of the usual wine. Julia could see the difference. He was more talkative than usual, and he needed her to be an audience.

“I wonder what it will be like a hundred years from now,” he went on. “The physicians will look back and think we were like medieval barbers, trying to practice medicine without the tools. All the cancer treatments except surgery are based on the same principle: do something that kills the patient, and hope it kills the cancer a bit faster. The antimetabolite drugs—like the ones in Colin’s implant—kill cancer cells when the cells divide. But a few resistant ones survive, and they go on and multiply. I’ve seen it a thousand times. You start chemotherapy, and at first the patient does well, wonderfully well. Then over the months…the slip back starts.”

“That’s what’s happened to Colin—even with this new experimental treatment?”

He was nodding, eyes closed and the back of his head still against the couch. “Experimental treatments are like lotteries. You have to play to win. But you don’t win very often.” He reached out blind and groped for her hand. “I’m sorry, Julia. We’re not winning. It’s back. Growing fast. I can’t believe the change since the last CAT scan.”