Hunting Midnight

burning and my pulse racing.

When we were alone, I told Mama what her mother had said. She never left me alone with Grandmother Rosa again.

*

The hallucinations began a few days later, when I was lying on my stomach in bed and clearly heard Daniel call my name from the street below. I rushed to the window and thought I saw him running down our street, near the jailhouse. I called out, but he had disappeared.

*

The following Saturday, I mustered what was left of my courage and approached Violeta in the marketplace.

“I am sorry,” I began. “So sorry. I did not mean to let him die. I tried … I tried very hard. But I was … I was too weak. I apologize, Violeta — ”

She reached out for my hand. My heart leapt as I sobbed in gratitude. But I was still too ashamed to confess that I had told Daniel she would go to America without him. Instead, I spoke again of the weakness of my arms.

“John, please, do not blame yourself.”

“So you do not despise me?” I croaked, my voice nothing but a whimper.

“Of course, not,” she said, kissing my brow.

“I cannot believe that he is really dead,” I said.

Tears slid down her cheeks. She was so very fragile.

When she had calmed, I said, “Will you still come to me sometimes at night? I am very worried about you.”

“Yes — yes, I’d like that.”

“You swear?”

“You have my word.”

*

Despite her promise, Violeta never again came to throw pebbles at my window. I would pass her stall from time to time and wave at her, but she would turn away from me as though I were filth. Eventually, I stopped looking for her, believing she had reconsidered her opinion and now found me contemptible.

I had murdered Daniel and there could be no reprieve.

*

Violeta disappeared nearly a year later. No one knew where she had gone. Once, Senhor Solomao the butcher told me that her uncle had returned secretly one night and killed her. But I knew a wee bit more about the world by now and was sure that she had escaped her fate in the only way that a lass without a farthing to her name might — by walking out of the city, never looking back, and earning a wage in whatever way she could. Just as I was certain that we would never meet again.

XI

Exhaustion laid claim to both my body and spirit, as I had suffered insomnia every night since Daniel’s death.

One morning Mama discovered I had a high fever. Over the next several days, I suffered throbbing headaches that made it too painful for me to even open my eyes. I was crawling with body lice as well and plagued by intermittent chills.

I still believed I heard Daniel calling to me occasionally. From my window I twice caught glimpses of him scrambling over the rooftops across our street.

My mother grabbed my arm when I told her this. “I don’t want to hear another word about that lad again!” she screamed. “You hear me, John? Never!” While Papa led her away, she burst into tears.

Mama’s theory was that Daniel’s soul had been unable to leave our earthly realm due to the violent nature of his death and his attachment to me.

“More likely a bewitchment” was the differing opinion of Senhora Beatriz, who tied a sprig of rosemary to the back of my hair. She also placed around my neck the talisman that had belonged to Daniel. I kept it hidden under my nightshirt.

When she had gone, Father came to my bedside and flicked my tail of rosemary. “All this superstition is rubbish,” he sighed, puffing at his pipe. “But it cannot hurt you, and if it makes Senhora Beatriz happy … All you need,” he declared, blowing out a snootful of sweet-smelling smoke, “is a few weeks of absolute quiet and Mama’s care to feel yourself again.”

*

A physician named Dr. Manuel came to see me the next afternoon. Papa explained that he had studied something called phrenology in the far-off city of Vienna — which meant, Mama told me, that he was able to diagnose illness and prescribe curatives based on his study of the skull.

When he took hold of my sore head with his meaty hands, I almost jumped, as they gripped me like a vise. He massaged my skull with his fingertips, then said, “You are a clever lad but reckless.”

“That he is,” Mother confirmed.

After several minutes of squeezing, tapping, and knocking, he located a telling curiosity at the back of my head. “Ah, yes,” he said in his odd Portuguese. “Most swollen and fluidaceous.”

“What in God’s name is he saying?” Father demanded of Mama.

“Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, your son has a much-translocated visual cortex — caused by his plethoric condition. He has a dangerous excess of blood in his head, making him far too attached to visual memories.”

“Yes, that sounds right,” Mother agreed again.

“I recommend application of sanguessugas,” the phrenologist declared, tapping my skull in the spot to be sucked dry by the little gargoyles. “Then we shall see.”

“Leeches,” he repeated in English, for my father’s benefit.

He took a beige-colored ceramic vase from his leather medical case, from which he lifted a small perforated tube. I was so nervous that when I saw the first leech dangling in his gloved hand, I shrieked for help. I have little recollection of what occurred next, save for the unpleasant feeling of being rendered wholly immobile. I have every reason to believe that my hands were bound with a ligature, since that is what I suffered during my later treatments.

I awoke at dawn to discover Mother and Father asleep in my room, fully clothed except for their bare feet, entangled together on a settee they had moved in from their bedroom. Papa was snoring a comical rat-tat-tat with his mouth open, his right arm resting on Mama’s shoulder, and she was curled like a cat, her head on his lap. Fanny had been let inside by them, and she was sprawled on her back at the foot of my bed, her feet in the air, her moist nostrils flexing in and out, as though she were dreaming of floating.

When I think of my parents and Fanny today, I like to remember that moment; I could not have felt more protected. I presumed that the worst of my treatment was over.

*

Success in a medical case is determined by the physician, however, and never the patient, who is much too subjectively minded to be trusted. In the case at hand, which unfortunately was my own, Dr. Manuel’s initial treatment was considered a stupendous victory over the putrid accumulation of my bile, which he discovered to be responsible for what he called my “plethoric skull transmigrations.” Many years later a far simpler explanation was given me by an English physician: typhus. It frequently causes the delirium, hallucinations, headaches, and high fever I suffered intermittently for weeks, and it is caused by lice.

Though I have thankfully forgotten most of the details, I know that over the next three days more bloodsuckers were applied to the back of my head, and I was also purged twice daily by my mother. By the end of the third day of treatment, Dr. Manuel pronounced me cured, by which he must have meant that I had lost enough