The Garden of Darkness

Clare was struck by the colossal indifference of the disease. Pest didn’t care that her father was a famous writer. Clare remembered that he used to joke that being famous meant that he could, finally, put a comma anywhere he damn well pleased. But commas didn’t matter anymore. And Clare thought it would probably be a long time before she read a new book.

Her father never got up again; he was too weak to move. Sometime during the afternoon the pustules from the Pest rash burst, and Clare mopped up the red and yellow fluid without saying anything. Near the end, Clare tried to spoon a little chicken bouillon between her father’s chapped lips. He gave her a wrecked smile. Then he died.

Marie stood in the doorway, weeping, which annoyed Clare.

“We should bury him,” Clare said, but she doubted they had the strength. And when Clare looked up at her stepmother, she noticed the beginning of a rosy glow on her face.

“We’ll cope,” said Marie. “We’ll get through this. Right, Clare?” As she spoke, Clare saw swollen lips and eyelids. The Pest rash had crept up Marie’s neck and deepened to an angry red. There were blisters on her throat.

They weren’t going to be able to cope at all. Clare knew better. Marie probably had no more than three days. People generally didn’t last longer than that.

Her father’s body remained on the bed; a fetid smell filled the room, but Clare didn’t have the strength or the time to do anything about it—open the windows, try to move the body. Marie needed her right away. Clare unfolded the sofa bed in the living room, covered it with the only clean sheet she could find—one with a pattern of bluebells and roses—and helped her stepmother lie down. The cheerful sheet seemed to mock them both.

Clare tended her stepmother as best she knew how, as if her ministrations could make up for all the dull anger she had felt towards Marie after the marriage to her father. She put wet washcloths on Marie’s wrists and neck; she brought her stepmother water and aspirin and more water and more aspirin. Lesions began to streak Marie’s face and more pustules began to form on her neck. At the end of the second day she got up and, without a word, lurched into the bedroom where Clare’s father lay. Marie lay down next to her husband, oblivious to the smell in the room, and so Clare tended her there. Unlike her husband, Marie was never entirely lucid again.

On the evening of the third day, she died.

She died with her eyes wide open. Clare tried to shut those staring eyes by passing her hand over Marie’s face the way people did in movies, but it didn’t work.

Then Clare curled up at the foot of their bed; she waited in the bedroom for a long time for someone to come. Because that’s what happened when you were a kid—even when you were a fifteen-year-old kid. When your parents died, someone came.

Later, on Sander’s Hill, Clare blinked in the strong light as Chupi pecked at the ground around her. She wondered if there was a lot of dying going on in the city that day. Clare knew that she was infected with Pest—the rash was enough to prove that. She knew that she was going to die of it, too. Eventually. She might even have a couple of years left, but, according to the scientists, she wasn’t going to live to adulthood. That’s what they had all said, all those scientists who were now dead. Those scientists had called delayed-onset of the disease the ‘Pest Syndrome.’ Syndrome. On a triple word score in Scrabble, it was seriously useful vocabulary.

In its own weird way, Clare thought the link between Pest and adolescence sounded logical. Adolescence had always been a bag of goodies: complexion problems, mood swings, unrequited love and now, Pest.

Her thoughts came back to the problems at hand. It was high summer. Not a good time to keep dead bodies above ground.

And if Clare couldn’t bury them—and she was sure the task was beyond her—she was going to have to go elsewhere. She was going to have to leave her father and Marie to the forces of time and nature, both of which, it seemed, were sublimely indifferent to Clare’s emotional state.

But it seemed to Clare now that she could deal with the grandeur of indifference, the blind workings of the universe. This was not the time for petty gods or the Thunder-roarer; death was insidious, irrational, arbitrary; now was the time of the beetle and the worm. And, for better or for worse, because there was no one else, it was her time too.





PEDIATRICS





IN THOSE LAST days, before it all broke down, he left his lab to work in the wards. They all thought he was a great humanitarian, but the truth was, he enjoyed watching SitkaAZ13 close-up. The disease, under a microscope, looked plump and innocent—right before it would enter a red blood cell and, in the metaphor his mind constructed, scatter the cell’s constituent limbs while feeding off its bloody heart.