Bio-Strike

As they reached it, Martin thought he heard noises from inside. The rasp of something scuffing against fabric, followed by a series of unrhythmical thumps. He waited beside the doctor, listening, and heard the sounds again.

He gave Alvarez a questioning look.

“The spasms can be violent,” Alvarez explained. His voice was muffled by the particulate mask covering the lower half of his face. “We’ve applied restraints to prevent his injury or the interruption of life support.”

He reached for the door handle, but Martin lightly touched his wrist to stop him.

“Wait,” he said. “I need a moment.”

He moved in front of Alvarez, conferred the ritual blessing upon the entryway, and, because there was no one to respond, gave answer in his own quiet voice.

“May peace reign over this place. ”

“It will enter by this route. ”

His prayer completed, Martin pushed open the door himself. His missal and a neatly folded white stole were tucked under the crook of his arm. A burse hung from a cord around his neck, its front embroidered with a large red crucifix. Strapped over his right shoulder was the canvas bag holding his candles, holy water, and a communion cloth, the latter brought in the event Colon proved able to receive the Host.

Martin entered the room. Inside, oxygen hissed through soft rubber tubes snaking from the artificial ventilation unit into the patient’s nostrils, then down behind his tongue into the pharynx. A female nurse stood at the foot of the bed, a clipboard in her gloved hands. A bouffant cap, mask, and isolation gown hid all her features except her eyes, which were visible through a pair of clear goggles. They were large, brown, pretty, and full of the same profound distress Alvarez had confided in the anteroom.

Martin looked at her for a second, then turned to the man he had come to see.

He was either unconscious or asleep, the lesions on his eyelids, cheeks, and lips showing in angry contrast to his waxen pallor. His blankets had been turned down to free his bare right arm for the intravenous drip lines. Patched with a scarlet rash, it was all taut skin and knobby bone, reminding Martin in an awful way of the mummified llama fetuses at the Mercado del Hechiceria. Three fingers of each hand were enclosed in open-mesh tubes to the second knuckle, the tubes connected to a strap looped around the bed frame. The blemishes on his wrists were dark and cuff-shaped.

“The finger restraints have been effective in reducing his skin trauma,” said Dr. Alvarez, standing behind Martin. “Any pressure causes blood to well up through the pores. We call it pinpoint bleeding. You can see the bruising that resulted from our use of conventional restraints earlier on.”

Martin’s eyes were still on the bracelets of discolored skin around Colon’s wrists.

“Yes,” he said. “I can see.”

A stand beside the bed had been cleared in advance of his arrival, and he stepped over to it now, donning his stole, taking the candles out of his satchel. Checking that they were secure in their holders, he mounted the candles on the stand and lighted them with a match. From his burse he extracted the pyx containing the wafer and put it on the bed stand in front of the candles. He covered this with the communion cloth and genuflected.

Rising from his knees, Martin reached into the satchel for the holy water, went around to the foot of the bed, and sprinkled the dying man according to the points of the cross — once to the front, once to the left, once to the right. His lips moving in prayer as they had in the police car, he performed further consecrations of the room with his sprinkler, extending it toward the walls and floor around him. At last he turned and shook droplets of holy water over the nurse and Dr. Alvarez.

He was walking back around to the bed stand when Colon went into another convulsion. All at once, his lips peeled back from his gums in a kind of rictus. The muscles of his neck and jaw began to quiver. A gargling sound escaped his mouth, his chest heaving and straining, the hiss of the ventilator growing louder as his demand for oxygen increased. He arched off the mattress, his right knee springing up to mound the blanket, his foot thrashing from side to side like a captured animal.

Martin gripped his missal closer to his chest and turned to Alvarez.

“Is there nothing you can do?”

The doctor shook his head. “The seizures are unpleasant to watch, but they will pass.” He was observing the life support monitors on the wall. “We give him muscle relaxers. Otherwise, it would be much worse.”

Martin wanted to turn away, but in his mind that would have been an act of selfishness and thus an abdication of his responsibility. In this room, charity was reserved for the dying.

He saw Colon’s right hand sweep across the linen sheet, jump stiffly into the air, then pound down on the mattress several times: rasp, thumpthump-thump. When the arm jerked, it pulled his intravenous lines up over the safety rail, but the finger tubes and strap had sufficiently restricted its movement to prevent the lines from tearing loose.

The spasms diminished after less than thirty seconds, his withered arm falling over the rail, dangling there limply for a moment until the nurse came around to readjust it at his side.

Martin stared down at him. His cheeks felt too hot, then too cold in the air-conditioning. He could hear the intake and expulsion of his own breath over the hiss of the ventilator.

He ordered his legs to move him toward the bed. “Senor Colon,” he said in a low voice. “It is Father Martin.”

There was no acknowledgment.

The priest leaned over the deathbed. The sores on Colon’s face were crusted with yellowish discharge. Martin could smell ointment on him and, underneath, the far more unpleasant odor of infection.

“Do you remember our discussions?” he said. “We have had many of them, about many subjects. About faith. And strength.”

He thought he saw Colon’s eyes twitch under their closed lids.

“Now we will ask God’s grace, and find renewed strength in our unity with his spirit,” he said. “You and I, together—”

Alvarez stepped forward. “Father, he is much too weak.”

Martin shot a hand out behind his back and waved him into silence.

“Mi presidente, ” he said. “Can you take Communion?”

A moment passed. Colon’s eyes flickered more rapidly. And then one of them opened and fastened on Martin.

Its white was swimming in blood.

Martin’s cheeks flushed hot and cold again. He realized they were wet with perspiration.

“Are you able to receive Communion?” he repeated, trying to smooth the tremor in his voice.

Colon strained to answer, managed nothing more than a croak.

“Enough,” the doctor protested. “He mustn’t be—”

This time Alvarez fell silent without any urging.

Colon had declared his wish with a weak but unmistakable nod, his red eye never leaving Martin’s face.

Martin turned to the bed stand, knelt before it a second time, and lifted the communion cloth off the pyx. If the heart of Alberto Colon was weighted with sin, he would have to unburden himself before God almighty; it was not humanly possible for him to give confession in his present state.

Moving to the bedside, Martin put the communion cloth under the dying man’s chin and recited the Confiteor, offering penance in his name, pleading for his absolution from worldly sin: “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. ”

When he had finished his petition, he took the Host from its receptacle, blessed it, and brought it over to Colon.

“Try to swallow,” he said. “If you have difficulty, a sip of water might help.”

Colon stared at him with his one open eye, the iris uncannily bright, as if all the passion and will that had gained him the presidency — an office he had won in a free election against a powerful league of corrupt influences — was blazing through it.

He produced a groan of effort. Then his cracked lips slowly parted.

The odor of sickness on his breath was even stronger than it had been coming off his pores. Crops of raised, purplish lesions marched across his tongue and palate. His front teeth were smeared with blood where it had leaked from the rim of his gums.