The Web

Putting his hands behind his back, he laced his fingers.

Long arms. Spidery arms.

'I was in the Marshalls during the blast,' he said. 'Perhaps that's why I'm dying.' Looking down. 'How have I lied?'

'You didn't participate in the payoffs. I know. I spoke to a man who did.'

'True,' he said.

'So what's the point? What were the blasts a metaphor for?'

'Yes,' he said. 'Exactly. A metaphor.'

He sat back down. Retrieved the grapefruit. Rolled it.

'Injections, son.'

'Medical injections?'

Long slow nod. 'We'll never know exactly what they used, but my guess is some combination of toxic mutagens, radioactive isotopes, perhaps cytotoxic viruses. Things the military was experimenting with for decades.'

'Who's they?'

He jerked forward, bony chest pressing against the table edge.

'Me. I put the needle in their arms. When I was chief medical officer at Stanton. I was told it was a vaccination research program- confidential, voluntary- and that as chief medical officer, I was responsible for carrying it out. Trial doses of live and killed viruses and bacteria and spirochetes developed in Washington for civil defense in the event of nuclear war. The ostensible goal was to develop a single supervaccine against virtually every infectious disease. The 'paradise needle' they called it. They claimed to have gotten it down to a series of four shots. Provided me experimental data. Pilot studies done at other bases. All false.'

He took hold of the white puffs over his ears. Compared to the soft people, his hair was luxuriant.

'Hoffman,' he said. 'He gave me the data. Brought the vials and the hypodermics to my office, personally. The patient list. Seventy-eight people- twenty families from the base. Sailors, their wives and children. He told me they'd agreed to participate secretly in return for special pay and privileges. Safe study, but classified because of the strategic value of such a powerful medical tool. It was imperative the Russians never get hold of it. Military people could be trusted to be obedient. And they were. Showing up for their injections right on time, rolling up their sleeves without complaint. The children were afraid, of course, but their parents held them still and told them it was for their own good.'

He pulled at his hair again and strands came loose.

'When exactly did this happen?' I said.

'The winter of sixty-three. I was six months from discharge, had fallen in love with Aruk. Barbara and I decided to buy some property and build a house on the water. She wanted to paint the sea. She told Hoffman, and he informed us the Navy was planning to sell the estate. It wasn't waterfront, but it was magnificent. He'd make sure we got priority, a bargain price.'

'In return for conducting the vaccination program secretly.'

'He never stated it as a quid pro quo, but he got the message across and I was eager to receive it. Blissful, stupid ignorance until a month after the injections, when one of the women who'd been pregnant gave birth prematurely to a limbless, anencephalic stillborn baby. At that point, I really didn't suspect anything. Those things happen. But I felt we should be doing some monitoring.'

'Pregnant women were included in the experiment?'

He looked down at the table. 'I had doubts about that from the beginning, was reassured by Hoffman. When I reported the stillbirth, he insisted the paradise needle was safe- the data proved it was.'

He bent low, talking to the table: 'That baby… no brain, limp as a jellyfish. It reminded me of things I'd seen on the Marshalls. Then one of the children got sick. A four-year-old. Lymphoma. From perfect health to terminally ill nearly overnight.'

He raised his head. His eyes had filled with tears.

'Next came a sailor. Grossly enlarged thyroid and neurofibromas, then rapid conversion to anaplastic carcinoma- it's a rare tumor, you generally only see it in old people. A week later he had myelogenous leukemia as well. The rapidity was astonishing. I started to think more about the nuclear tests in the Marshalls. I knew the symptoms of poisoning.'

'Why'd you tell me you were part of the payoff?'

'Couching my own guilt… actually, I was asked by my superior to participate, but managed to get out of it. The idea of placing a monetary value on human life was repulsive. In the end, the people who did participate were clerks and such. I'm not sure they had a clear notion of the damage.'

Craving confession for years, wanting some sort of absolution from me.

But not trusting me enough to go all the way. Instead, he'd used me the way a defensive patient uses a brand-new therapist: dropping hints, exploiting nuance and symbol, embedding facts in layers of deceit.

'I suppose,' he said, sounding puzzled, 'I was hoping this moment would arrive eventually. That you'd be someone I could… communicate with.'

His eyes begged for acceptance.

My tongue felt frozen.

'I'm sorry for lying to you, son, but I'd do it all over again if it meant getting to this point. Everything in its time- everything has a time and place. Life may seem random, but patterns emanate. Like a child tossing stones in a pond. The waves form predictably. Something sets off events, they acquire a rhythm of their own… Time is like a dog chasing its tail- more finite than we can imagine, yet infinite.'

He wiped his eyes and bit back more tears.

I took Robin's hand. 'After the other illnesses did you go back to Hoffman?'

'Of course. And I expected him to become alarmed, take some action. Instead, he smiled. Thirty years old but he had an evil old man's smile. A filthy little smile. Sipping a martini. I said, 'Perhaps you don't understand, Nick: something we did to these people is making them deathly ill- killing them.' He patted me on the back, told me not to worry, people got sick all the time.'

He gave a sudden, hateful look.

'A baby without a brain,' he said. 'A toddler with end-stage cancer, that poor sailor with an old person's disease, but he could have been dismissing a case of the sniffles. He said he was sure it had nothing to do with the vaccines, they'd been tested comprehensively. Then he smiled again. The same smile he gave when he cheated at cards and thought he was getting away with it. Wanting me to understand that he'd known all along.

'I'd planned to conduct an autopsy on the baby the next day, decided to do it right then. But when I got to the base mortuary, the body was gone. All the records were gone, too, and the sailor who'd been my assistant had been replaced by a new man- from Hoffman's staff. I stormed back to Hoffman and demanded to know what was going on. He said the baby's parents had requested a quick burial, so he'd granted compassionate leave and flown them to Guam the previous night. I went over to the flight tower to see if any planes had left. None had for seventy-two hours. When I got back to my office, Hoffman was there. He took me for a walk around the base and began talking about the estate. It seemed all of a sudden some other buyers had surfaced, but he'd managed to keep my name at the top of the list and to lower the price. It was all I could do not to rip out his throat.'

He put on his glasses.

'Instead,' he said. The word tapered off. He put a hand on his chest and inhaled several times. 'Instead, I thanked him and smiled back. Invited the bastard and his wife to my quarters the next night for bridge. Now that I knew what he was capable of, I felt I needed to protect Barbara. And Pam- she was only a baby herself. But on the sly, I began checking the others who'd been injected. Most looked fine, but a few of the adults weren't feeling well- vague malaise, low-grade fevers. Then some of the children began spiking high fevers.'

He dug a nail into his temple. 'There I was, the kindly doctor, reassuring them. Dispensing analgesics and ordering them to drink as much as they could in the hope some of the toxins would be flushed out. But unable to tell them the truth-what good would it have done? What curse is worse than knowing your