Distress

had burned itself out. My symptoms had vanished. Gina had even flown in overnight—to take me back, to take me home.

I’d been woken by an intense cramp. I was soon expelling gray water full of intestinal mucus, gasping obscenities, wanting to die.

In the late afternoon, with the sunlit ward behind the screens as vague and luminous as heaven—re-enacting the same convulsions for the thousandth time, shitting out, yet again, every last drop of fluid the drip had fed into me—I found myself emitting a keening noise, baring my teeth and shivering, like a dog, like a sick hyena.

Early on the fourth day, my fever almost vanished. Everything which had come before seemed like an anesthetized nightmare, violent and frightening but inconsequential—a dream sequence shot through gauze.

A merciless gray solidity clung to everything in sight. The screens around me were caked with dust. The sheets were stained yellow from dried sweat. My skin was coated with slime. My lips, my tongue, my throat, were cracked and stinging, sloughing dead cells and seeping a thin discharge which tasted more like salt than blood. Every muscle from my diaphragm to my groin felt injured, useless, tortured beyond repair— but tensed like an animal flinching from a rain of blows, ready for more. The joints of my knees felt as if I’d been crouching for a week on cold, hard ground.

The cramps, the spasms, began again. I’d never been so lucid; they’d never been worse.

I had no patience left. All I wanted to do was rise to my feet and walk out of the hospital, leaving my body behind. Flesh and bacteria could fight it out between themselves; I’d lost interest.

I tried. I closed my eyes and pictured it. I willed it to happen, I wasn’t delirious—but walking away from this pointless, ugly confrontation seemed like such a sensible choice, such an obvious solution, that for a moment I suspended all disbelief.

And I finally understood, as I never had before—not through sex, not through food, not through the lost exuberant physicality of childhood, not from the pinpricks of a hundred petty injuries and instantly cured diseases— that this vision of escape was meaningless, a false arithmetic, an idiot dream.

This diseased body was my whole self. It was not a temporary shelter for some tiny, indestructible man-god living in the safe warm dark behind my eyes. From skull to putrid arsehole, this was the instrument of everything I’d ever do, ever feel, ever be.

I’d never believed otherwise—but I’d never really felt it, never really known it. I’d never before been forced to embrace the whole sordid, twitching, visceral truth.

Was this what Daniel Cavolini had learned, when he tore away his blindfold? I stared up at the ceiling, tense and shivering, claustrophobic, all the nausea and pain spread across my abdomen hardening into rigid bands like metal embedded in the flesh.

By noon, my temperature started climbing again. I was glad: I wanted delirium, I wanted confusion. Sometimes the fever flayed every nerve, magnified and sharpened every sensation—but I still hoped it might erase this new understanding, which was worse than the pain.

It didn’t.

Mosala visited again. I smiled and nodded, but said nothing, and I couldn’t concentrate on her words. The two screens either side of the bed remained in place, but the third had been moved aside, and when I raised my head I could see the patient opposite me, a forlorn skinny boy with a drip, his parents beside him. His father was reading to him quietly; his mother held his hand. The whole tableau seemed impossibly distant, separated from me by an unbridgeable gulf; I couldn’t imagine ever again having the power to climb to my feet and walk five meters.

Mosala left. I drifted.

Then I noticed someone standing near the foot of the bed, and an electric jolt ran through my body. A shock of transcendental awe.

Striding through unforgiving reality: an angel.

Janet Walsh turned, half toward me. I raised myself up on my elbows and called out to her, terrified, enraptured. “I think I understand now. Why you do it. Not how… but why.”

She looked straight at me, mildly puzzled, but unperturbed.

I said, “Please talk to me. I'm ready to listen.”

Walsh frowned slightly, tolerant but uncomprehending, her wings fluttering patiently.

“I know I’ve offended you. I'm sorry. Can’t you forgive me? I want to hear everything now. I want to understand how you make it work.”

She regarded me in silence.

I said, “How do you lie about the world? And how do you make yourself believe it? How can you see the whole truth, know the whole truth… and go on pretending that none of it matters? What’s the secret? What’s the trick? What’s the magic?”

My face was already burning white hot, but I leaned forward, hoping that her sheer radiance might infect me with her great transforming insight.

“I'm trying! You have to believe I'm trying!” I looked away, suddenly at a loss for words, struck dumb by the ineffable mystery of her presence. Then a cramp seized me; the thing I could no longer pretend was a demon snake constricted inside me.

I said, “But when the truth, the underworld, the TOE… reaches up, takes you in its fist, and squeezes…” I raised my own hand, meaning to demonstrate, but it was already clenched tight involuntarily. “How do you ignore it? How do you deny it? How do you go on fooling yourself that you’ve ever stood above it, ever pulled the strings, ever run the show?”

Sweat was running into my eyes, blinding me. I brushed it away with my clenched fist, laughing. “When every cell, every fucking atom in your body, burns the message into your skin: everything you value, everything you cherish, everything you live for… is just the scum on the surface of a vacuum thirty-five powers of ten deep—how do you go on lying? How do you close your eyes to that?'

I waited for her answer. Solace, redemption, were within my grasp. I held my arms out toward her in supplication.

Walsh smiled faintly, then walked on without saying a word.

I woke in the early hours of the morning. Burning up again, drenched in sweat.

Michael was sitting on the chair beside me, reading from his notepad. The whole ward was lit softly from above, but the light of the words shone up more brightly.

I whispered, “Today, I tried to become… everything I despise. But I couldn’t even manage that.”

He put the notepad down, and waited for me to continue.

“I'm lost. I really am lost.”

Michael glanced at the bedside monitor, and shook his head. “You’re going to live through this. In a week, you won’t even be able to imagine how you feel right now.”

“I'm not talking about the cholera. I'm having—” I laughed; it hurt. “I'm having what Mystical Renaissance would call a spiritual crisis. And I have nowhere to turn to for comfort. Nowhere to turn to for strength. No lover, no family, no nation. No religion, no ideology. Nothing.”

Michael said calmly, “Then you’re lucky. I envy you.”

I gaped at him, appalled by this heartlessness.

He said, “Nowhere to bury your head. Like an ostrich on reef-rock. I envy you. You might learn something.”

I had no reply to that. I started shivering; I was sweating and aching, but icy cold. “I take back what I said about the cholera. It’s fifty-fifty. I'm being equally fucked by both.”

Michael put his hands behind his neck and stretched, then rearranged himself on the chair. “You’re a journalist. Do you want to hear a story?”

“Don’t you have some vital medical work to do?”

“I'm doing it.”

Waves of nausea began sweeping up from my bowels. “Okay, I’ll listen. If you’ll let me record. What’s this story about?”

He grinned. “My own spiritual crisis, of course.”

“I should have guessed.” I closed my eyes and invoked Witness. The whole action was instinctive, and it was over in half a second—but when it was done, I was shocked. I felt like I was on the verge of