Fever Dream

Now he had no body. It was all gone. It was under him, but it was filled with a vast pulse of some burning, lethargic drug. It was as if a guillotine had neatly lopped off his head and his head lay shining on a midnight pillow while the body, below, still alive, belonged to somebody else. The disease had eaten his body and from the eating had reproduced itself in feverish duplicate. There were the little hand-hairs and the finger-nails and the scars and the toenails and the tiny mole on his right hip, all done again in perfect fashion.

I am dead, he thought. I've been killed, and yet I live. My body is dead, it is all disease and nobody will know. I will walk around and it will not be me, it will be something else. It will be something all bad, all evil, so big and so evil it's hard to understand or think about. Something that will buy shoes and drink water and get married some day maybe and do more evil in the world than has ever been done.

Now the warmth was stealing up his neck, into his cheeks, like a hot wine. His lips burned, his eyelids, like leaves, caught fire. His nostrils breathed out blue flame, faintly, faintly.

This will be all, he thought. It'll take my head and my brain and fix each eye and every tooth and all the marks in y brain, and every hair and every wrinkle in my ears, and there'll be nothing left of me.

He felt his brain fill with a boiling mercury. He felt his left eye clench in upon itself and, like a snail, withdraw, shift. He was blind in his left eye. It no longer belonged to him. It was enemy territory. His tongue was gone, cut out. His left cheek was numbed, lost. His left ear stopped hearing. It belonged to someone else now. This thing that was born, this mineral thing replacing the wooden log, this disease replacing healthy animal cell.

He tried to scream and he was able to scream loud and high and sharply in the room, just as his brain flooded down, his right eye and right ear were cut out, he was blind and deaf, all fire and terror, all panic, all death.

His scream stopped before his mother ran through the door to his side.

It was a good, clear morning, with a brisk wind that

helped carry doctor, horse and carriage along the road to halt before the house. In the window above, the boy stood, fully dressed. He did not wave when the doctor waved and called, «What's this? Up? My God!» The doctor almost ran upstairs. He came gasping into the bedroom.

«What are you doing out of bed?» he demanded of the boy. He tapped his thin chest, took his pulse and temperature. «Absolutely amazing! Normal. Normal, by God!»

«I shall never be sick again in my life,» declared the boy, quietly, standing there, looking out of the window. «Never.»

«I hope not. Why, you're looking fine, Charles.»

«Doctor?»

«Yes, Charles?»

«Can I go to school now?» asked Charles.

«Tomorrow will be time enough. You sound positively eager.»

«I am. I like school. All the kids. I want to play with them and wrestle with them, and play with the girl's pigtails and shake the teacher's hand, and rub my hands on all the cloaks in the cloakroom, and I want to grow up and travel and shake hands with people all over the world, and be married and have lots of children, and go to libraries and handle books and — all of that I want to!» said the boy, looking off into the September morning. «What's the name you called me?»

«What?» The doctor puzzled. «I called you nothing but Charles.»

«It's better than no name at all, I guess,» Charles shrugged.

«I'm glad you want to go back to school,» said the doctor.

«I really anticipate it,» smiled the boy. «Thank you for your help, Doctor. Shake hands.»

«Glad to.»

They shook hands gravely, and the clear wind blew through the open window. They shook hands for almost a minute, the boy smiling up at the old man and thanking him.

Then, laughing, the boy raced the doctor downstairs and out to his carriage. His mother and father followed for the happy farewell.

«Fit as a fiddle!» said the doctor. «Incredible!»

«And strong,» said the father. «He got out of his straps himself during the night. Didn't you, Charles?»

«Did I?» said the boy.

«You did! How?»

«Oh,» the boy said, «that was a long time ago.»

«A long time ago!»

They all laughed, and while they were laughing, the quiet boy moved his bare foot on the sidewalk and brushed against a number of red ants that were scurrying about on the sidewalk. Secretly, his eyes shining, while his parents chatted with the old man, he saw the ants hesitate, quiver, and lie still on the cement. He knew they were cold now.

«Good bye!»

The doctor drove away, waving.

The boy walked ahead of his parents. As he walked he looked away towards the town and began to hum a song under his breath.

«It's good to have him well again,» said the father.

«Yes, he looks his normal self.»

The boy turned quietly. He gave each of his parents a crushing hug. He kissed them both several times.

Then, without a word, he bounded up the steps into the house.

In the parlour, before the others entered, he quickly opened the birdcage, thrust his hand in, and petted the yellow canary, once.

Then he shut the cage door, stood back, and waited.