‘Come on,’ says Milena. ‘Downstairs.’ Without thinking, she takes Thrawn’s hand. It is sticky.
‘Mmmwhoh!’ roars Thrawn, like a deaf-mute. Her nerves are beginning to feel what has happened. She jerks the hand away. The skin remains in Milena’s hand like a glove, translucent. Milena keeps holding it, as if the hand were in two places at the same time.
Thrawn stares at the hand. She is no longer smiling. She looks dazed. ‘Let’s give the little lady a big hand,’ she says, making a joke. She bobs as if floating.
Milena the director mews like a cat and throws the crisp and blistered skin away.
‘Downstairs,’ murmurs Thrawn. She walks ahead of Milena. She looks somehow ordinary, a quiet and somewhat muted person going for a leisurely stroll. Except for the hardened, flaking blackness of her head, Thrawn looks in some way normal for the first time. Her eyes are not bulging out with tension, her smile is not knife-edge sharp, she is not smiling at all. Her arms and legs move with a smooth and simple motion, and her fingers are not extended in a rictus of anger or unease.
Milena darts ahead of her, and pushes back the screens, one by one, the screens that lead through the Dead Space.
‘Thank you,’ says Thrawn, regally. She walks past Milena and out onto the varnished bamboo stairs. Outside the insulated flat, it is February freezing. Is it steam rising off her, or smoke? Milena wants to get her a coat but thinks: a coat on that skin? Her viruses tell her: third degree burns. Thrawn begins to trudge down the steps, like weary What Does at the end of a day.
‘Oooff!’ she says, as if exhausted from cleaning floors. She leans onto the handrail and the instant she touches it, she hisses and leaps back as if the rail were fiery hot.
Still hissing, Thrawn puts her arms over her head, and tries to pull off her vest. Blackened, the vest breaks up, falls away. Her back and shoulders are a mass of rising pink blisters, blackened streaks, and places that seemed to be covered with grit, as if it could be washed away.
It doesn’t look too bad, it doesn’t look too bad, Milena the director tells herself. The lower back is hardly touched at all. The breasts are beautiful, they have not been touched. She’ll survive. She’ll survive. Look, she is walking.
Thrawn takes another step and howls. Another step and she doubles up.
‘Thrawn,’ weeps Milena, helplessly.
Thrawn starts to scream. She starts to scream like a strangled cat, a harsh, meowing wail that moves in fits and starts but that doesn’t stop. Her hands weave over her head, wanting to hold something, finding only pain, moving in a dance of helplessness.
There is a sound of sliding panels. Ms Will steps out of a Dead Space, and stands below on the rush matting. She stops and stares.
‘There’s been a terrible accident,’ says Milena.
‘There’s been a terrible accident,’ says Milena.
‘There’s been a terrible accident,’ says Milena.
‘There’s been a terrible accident,’ says Milena.
‘She poured cooking alcohol over herself.’
Thrawn suddenly rolls forward. She tumbles down the steps, gathering speed, losing flesh, blackening the bamboo. She lies at the bottom of the step. Milena runs after her. Thrawn is on her back, gasping, breath coming in short agonised hops. She looks up at Milena, but does not seem to see her. She starts to shiver.
‘Thrawn,’ whispers Milena. ‘I’m sorry.’
And what are you sorry for, Milena? You’re sorry because you know you’ll be so sorry for the rest of your life. Are you mourning for her? Or mourning for yourself, for the anguish this will cost you?
Thrawn knows what you are. Thrawn focuses on you and smiles again, the demon smile, rearing up, in a frenzy, but paralysed, her hand a blackened claw, she looks up at you. ‘Saviour,’ she breathes out in a voice like the wind, smile blazing. She drags her hand along the floor, scraping layers of it away, leaving a blackened mark. ‘Saviour?’ she says, an angry, wheedling, bitter question. It is a rhetorical question. The answer is known.
She knows she has won.
We are coming Milena, says a voice in her head. Someone is coming to help.
The Consensus in her head.
The Angels soothe her. It’s not your fault, Milena, don’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault.
‘Isn’t it?’ asks Milena.
Do your work, Consensus. Rule the world, heal the sick, build the roads. Breed the viruses. Do anything that you consider to be good.
Only leave us alone.
From the top of the Tarty flats, a bell begins to toll. The emergency bell. Ms Will arrives with a blanket, and begins to wrap Thrawn in it. Thrawn’s teeth are clicking together as she quakes with cold. Milena winces. It goes against instinct to put rough blankets on skinless flesh.
The Fire Warden arrives. She is trained to give treatment. In summer, if there was a fire in the floating Ark, pumps would spray water from the Estuary. Fire tugs would arrive, great steam boats that shoot water from cannons. But all the water is frozen now. The pumps don’t work.
The Fire Warden kneels down and opens up her box of viruses and cream.
‘Leave her alone,’ says Milena, standing very still and quiet. The Fire Warden doesn’t seem to understand that she means it.
‘We’ll use open treatment,’ says the Fire Warden. She is a brisk and efficient Party Member. She has been trained to do good. She has been waiting for a chance to be needed. Her viruses are speaking, to the viruses of those who hear her, social viruses that know how to help the sick. ‘We need to clean the burns, then keep them open to dry. Here.’ The Fire Warden passes Milena a syringe. She wants Milena to take a blood sample. ‘Test for nitrogen, prothrombin time, electrolyte levels, blood gases, hematocrit…’
Milena brushes the syringe away.
‘Someone else is coming,’ says Milena again. She means someone who can give better treatment than us.
‘Don’t see who it could be,’ said the Fire Warden, getting out her creams. ‘The Estuary is frozen, the Fire Tugs can’t get here.’ This was her responsibility, this was why she was trained and designated, so she could do good in the world. It is impossible to do good in the world, impossible that is, without also doing harm. The creams, the swabbing, the painkillers will do harm, relative harm.
Milena kicks the box over. The creams scatter, the applicators spin. Something made of glass shatters.
‘What the… that is medicine!’ wails the woman outraged.
So are the viruses. Relative harm, relative good.
The What Does Lady slides back the hangar doors. ‘Come see, oh quick!’ she says, gesturing to Ms Will. ‘A wagon on the ice!’
Ms Will goes to the door. The Fire Warden bitterly gathers up her medicines. Milena watches over Thrawn. She looks at her shivering jaws and staring eyes.
And so I’m going to pass you over to them, Thrawn. You could have been beautiful. Maybe you will be. But you will still be theirs.
She hears the sound of galloping and looks up. Ms Will and the What Does are pushing back all of the great screens. There is a flood of cold air. Galloping across the ice, four great white horses, silvery as if frosted by the cold come pulling a fire wagon. Steam boils up as thick as cream from the boiler, and from the nostrils of the beasts. The wagon thunders up the bank of frozen mud and right into the Tarty flats, into the covered atrium, the horses reined in, snorting, half-turning and coming to a halt.
And Milena sees them. For the first time she sees the Men in White, the Garda. They are the masters. Their faces are screened by plastic, screened from the rest of us. For them, all of us are diseased.
‘Look at my kit!’ the Fire Warden says. ‘She kicked it!’
The Garda do not reply. One of them takes hold of the Fire Warden’s shoulders and moves her aside. He wears gloves. The other, with practised motion, peels back the blanket, slices through the clothes. Thrawn lies sad and exposed and barely breathing, looking back up at Milena, sadly, as if asking her a regretful, reasonable question. Why? Pads are stuffed into her nose and ears.
The Men in White start covering her with spray. Milena looks away, to the horses.
