Alex rose to his knees, clutching his prize, and slid with arthritic languor beneath the sheets again. He caught his breath, blew his nose, neatly placed two cold drops of medicated saline against the surface of each eyeball, then began combing the clinic's cable service with minimal twitches of his thumb. Weepy Mexican melodramas. A word-game show. Kids chasing robot dinosaurs in some massive underground mall. The ever-present Thai pop music.
And some English-language happytalk news. Spanish happytalk news. Japanese happytalk news. Alex, born in 20 10, had watched the news grow steadily more and cheerful for all of his twenty-one years. As a m~ he'd witnessed hundreds of hours of raw footage: plagues, mass death, desperate riot, unsanitary wreckage, all against a panicky backdrop of ominous and unrelenting environmental decline. All that stuff was still out there, just as every aspect of modern reality had its mirrored shadow in the Net somewhere, but nowadays you had to hunt hard to find it, and the people discussing it didn't seem to have much in the way of budgets. Somewhere along the line, the entire global village had slipped into neurotic denial.
Today, as an adult, Alex found the glass pipelines of the Net chockablock with jet-set glamour weddings and cute dog stories. Perky heroines and square-jawed heroes were still, somehow, getting rich quick. Starlets won lotteries and lottery winners became starlets. Little children, with their heads sealed in virtuality helmets, mimed delighted surprise as they waved their tiny gloved hands at enormous hallucinations. Alex had never been that big a fan of current events anyway, but he had now come to feel that the world's cheerful shiny-toothed bullshitters were the primal source of all true evil.
Alex collided and stuck in a Mexican docudrama about UFOs; they were known as los OVNIS in Spanish, and on 9 de mayo, 2031, a large fraction of the Latin American populace seemed afflicted with spectacular attacks of ozmimania. Long minutes of Alex's life seeped idly away as the screen pumped images at him: monster fireballs by night, puffball-headed dwarfs in jumpsuits of silver lame, and a video prophecy from some interstellar Virgen de Guadalupe with her owll Internet address and a toll-free phone number.
The day nurse tapped at the door and bustled in. The day nurse was named Concepcibn. She was a hefty, nononsense, fortyish individual with a taste for liposuction, face-lifts, and breast augmentation.
"~Ya le hicieron Ia prueba de Ia sattgre?" she said.
Alex turned off the television. "The blood test? Yeah, I had one this morning."
"~Le duele todcwia el ped.~o como anoche?"
"Pretty bad last night," Alex admitted. "Lots better, though, since I started using the mask."
"Un catarro atroz, complicado con una alergia," Concepción sympathized.
"No problem with pain, at least," Alex said. "I'm getting the best of treatment."
Concepciôn sighed and gestured him up. "Todavi~ no acabamos, muchacho, le falta la enema de los pulmones."
"A lung enema?" Alex said, puzzled.
"Today? Right now? ~Ahora?"
She nodded.
"Do I have to?"
Concepciôn looked stern. "jEl doctor Mirabi Ia recetd! Fue muy claro. 'Cuidado con una pulmonia.' El nuevo tipo de pulmonia es peor que eI SIDA, ban muerto ya centenares de personas.
"Okay, okay," Alex said. "Sure, no problem. I'm doing lots better lately, though. I don't even need the chair."
Concepción nodded and helped him out of bed, shoving her solid shoulder under his armpit. The two of them made it out the door of the suite and a good ten meters down the carpeted hall before Alex's knees buckled. The wheelchair, a machine of limited but highly specialized intelligence, was right behind Alex as he stumbled. He gave up the struggle gracefully and sat within the chrome-and-leather machine.
Concepciôn left Alex in the treatment room to wait for Dr. Mirabi. Alex was quite sure that Dr. Mirabi was doing nothing of consequence. Having Alex wait alone in a closed room was simply medical etiquette, a way to establish whose time was more important. Though Dr. Mirabi's employees were kept on the hustle-especially the hardworking retail pharmacists-Dr. Mirabi himself hardly seemed oppressed by his duties. As far as Alex could deduce from the staff schedules, there were only four long-term patients in the whole clinica. Alex was pretty sure most of the clinica's income came from yanquis on down from Laredo. Before he himself had ~ckecfin last April, he'd seen a line of Americans halfway down the block, eagerly picking up Mexican megadosage ~strums for the new ultraresistant strains of Th.
Dr. Mirabi's treatment room was long and rectangular and full of tall canvas-shrouded machinery. Like every place else in the clinica, it was air-conditioned to a deathly chill, and smelled of sharp and potent disinfectant. Alex wished that he had thought to snag a fotonovela on the way out of his room. Alex pretended distaste for the nave-las' clumsy and violence-soaked porn, but their comically distorted gutter-level Spanish was of a lot of philological interest.
Concepción opened the door and stepped in. Behind her, Dr. Mirabi arrived, his ever-present notepad in hand. Despite his vaguely Islamic surname, Alex suspected strongly that Dr. Mirabi was, in fact, Hungarian.
Dr. Mirabi tapped the glass face of his notepad with a neat black stylus and examined the result. "Well, Alex," he said briskly in accented English, "we seem to have defeated that dirty streptococcus once and for all."
"That's right," Alex said. "Haven't had a night sweat in ages."
"That's quite a good step, quite good," Dr. Mirabi encouraged. "Of course, that infection was only the crisis symptom of your syndrome. The next stage of your cure" -he examined the notepad-"is the chronic mucus congestion! We must deal with that chronic mucus, Alex. It might have been protective mucus at first, but now is your metabolic burden. Once the chronic mucus is gone, and the tubercles are entirely cleansed-cleaned..." He paused. "Is it 'cleaned,' or 'cleansed'?"
"Either one works," Alex said.
"Thank you," the doctor said. "Once the chronic mucu~ is scrubbed away from the lung surfaces, then we can treat the membranes directly. There is membrane damage in your lungs, of course, deep cellular damage, but we cannot get to the damaged surfaces until the mucus is removed." He looked at Alex seriously, over his glasses. "Your chronic mucus is full of many contaminations, you know' Years of bad gases and particles you have inhaled. Environmental pollutions, allergic pollens, smoke particles, virus, and bacteria. They have all adhered to the chronic mucus. When your lungs are scrubbed clean with the enema, the lungs will be as the lungs of a newborn child!" He smiled.
Alex nodded silently.
"It won't be pleasant at first, but afterward you will feel quite lovely."
"Do you have to knock me Out again?" Alex said.
"No, Alex. It's important that you breathe properly during the procedure. The detergent has to reach the very bottom of the lungs. You understand?" He paused, tapping his notepad. "Are you a good swimmer, Alex?"
"No," Alex said.
"Then you know that sensation when you swallow water down the wrong pipe," said the doctor, nodding triumphantly. "That choking reflex. You see, Alex, the reason Mother Nature makes you choke on water, is because there is no proper oxygen in water for your lungs. The enema liquid, though, which will be filling your lungs, is not water, Alex. It is a dense silicone fluid. It carries much oxygen dissolved inside it, plenty of oxygen." Dr. Mirabi chuckled. "If you lie still without breathing, you can live half an hour on the oxygen in a single lungful of enema fluid! It has so much oxygen that at first you will feel hyperventilated."