‘Of radiation sickness?’
‘Of shame. Survivor’s guilt, it’s called. To live through a disaster like this, where so many died – it’s a terrible burden on your psyche.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Home.’
‘Wildgrove?’
‘Antarctica.’
‘Please leave me alone.’
‘Here’s a straight opinion for you, Mr Paxton. That’s something you won’t often get from a psychotherapist – especially from a survivor’s guilt specialist – so listen carefully. I think you have a duty to learn why your name is in the McMurdo Sound Agreement. After you have found out – do what you will. Eat, drink, and be merry – or curse God, and die. I don’t especially care which.’
There were footsteps, and the distasteful psychotherapist melted away…
Curse God, and die. In the Book of Job, the Lord’s most pious follower is subjected to a kind of wager between God and Satan. With God’s sponsorship, Satan inflicts on Job everything short of a thermonuclear warhead. Job loses his oxen, sheep, camels, sheasses, servants, sons, and health.
‘Curse God, and die,’ his wife advises. Job is sitting on ashes at the time.
‘My bowels boil, and rest not,’ complains Job, who does not have the proverbial patience of Job. ‘I am a brother to jackals, and a companion to ostriches. My skin is black, and falleth from me, and my bones are burned with the heat. Therefore is my harp turned to mourning, and my pipe into the voice of them that weep.’
Curse God, and die. To George it seemed like remarkably sage and relevant advice.
If one had to say something good about acute radiation sickness, it would be this: either it kills you or it doesn’t. Knowing that success was a distinct possibility, the medical staff of the City of New York got busy. They cultured George’s mucus, blood, and stool, then loaded him up with appropriate antibiotics. They stuck a tube in his arm and gave him a new set of white blood cells. They bathed him in antiseptic solutions every twelve hours, shampooed him with chlorhexidine gluconate every twenty-four hours, and trimmed his fingernails and toenails every other day.
To the end of his life, George would be haunted by the notion that the onslaught of gamma rays had planted the seeds of God-knew-what diseases, but the United States Navy was still within its rights when they pronounced him well. His fever broke, his hair grew back, his purple spots vanished, his tonsils shrank, his lungs drained, his gums stopped bleeding, his platelet and white cell counts became exemplary. The paramedics assured him that he had inhaled very little fallout and that, thanks to his precipitous departure from ground zero via Operation Erebus, his cumulative dose had been well under three hundred rads.
‘More like two hundred and eighty rads, if you want my opinion,’ said the medical officer, a lieutenant senior-grade named Brust. ‘You’re in great shape, believe me. There’s only one thing we couldn’t fix.’
‘Oh?’ said George.
‘Your secondary spermatocytes are failing to become spermatids.’ Dr Brust was a small, tubby man with a face so incongruously gaunt it seemed to be on its own separate diet. ‘Blame the radiation.’
‘What are you talking about?’ George asked.
‘You’re sterile,’ said Dr Brust evenly.
‘Sterile?’
‘Sterile as a mule.’ Black stains covered Brust’s surgical gown. ‘I can’t imagine that it would make much difference to you at this point.’
‘My wife and I were planning…’ George closed his eyes.
‘Didn’t they tell you about your wife?’
‘Yes.’ When he opened his eyes, he saw only his tears.
‘I wouldn’t worry about my gonads if I were you,’ said Dr Brust. ‘You’re lucky to be alive.’
They moved George out of the radiation unit into an ordinary sick bay.
‘You in the McMurdo Sound Agreement?’ asked the patient in the next bed, a long, nervous, weasel-bodied man with an expression so intense George could not look at it without squinting.
‘Yes. George Paxton. You in it too?’
‘At the top of the list. Love to lean over and shake your hand, friend, but I’ve got this tube up my silo.’
‘Me too.’
‘Ever hear of Robert Wengernook?’
‘Haven’t I seen you on television?’
‘Ah, another one of those,’ said Wengernook with mock distress. ‘Here I am in the goddamn D-O-D, and everybody thinks of me as the guy who does the scopas suit commercials. For my hobby, I’m the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.’
‘My wife always wanted to be in a scopas suit commercial. The one with the lady knight.’
‘Really? Your wife was in that? Small world.’
‘No, she wanted to be. She would have been right for it too, because Justine was very pretty, everybody thought so. They say a warhead got her.’
‘You’ve got to believe me, George, I really thought the suits were good.’ Wengernook’s twitchy fingers knitted themselves into elaborate sculptures. His tongue, which was remarkably long, darted in and out like a chameleon’s. ‘I guess it’s Japan’s way of getting back at us.’
‘For Hiroshima?’
‘I was thinking more of import quotas.’ He lit a cigarette, puffed. ‘God, this is all so awful. You might suppose that on a submarine there wouldn’t be much to remind a man of his family, but that’s not true. I’ll see some fire extinguisher, and that gets me picturing the one I gave Janet last Christmas. You wouldn’t think a fire extinguisher would have such emotionalism attached to it.’
‘I’d like to talk about something else.’
‘Same here.’
But the tomb inscriber and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs had nothing more to say to each other.
At the end of the week they transferred George to a cabin more suggestive of a civilian ocean liner than of a military vessel. The luxury suffocated him. He wanted Justine to be there, making fun of the kitschy floral wallpaper and reveling in the cornucopia that was the City of New York’s galley – eggs Benedict breakfasts, steamer clam lunches, lobster dinners – all served up by cheerful, redfaced enlisted men who seemed to be auditioning for jobs in some unimaginably swank hotel. He wanted Holly to be there, delighting in the tank of live sea horses and giving them her favorite names, the ones she had already bestowed on dozens of dolls and stuffed animals. These names, for some reason, were Jennifer, Suzy, Jeremiah, Alfred, and Margaret.
And so, despite posh surroundings and great food, George still felt himself a brother to jackals. His pipe was still turned into the voice of them that weep. Sometimes he smashed things until his knuckles bled. The Navy sent a seaman third-class around to clean up the mess. At other times he contemplated his closet, where Holly’s golden scopas suit and its shattered glove hung as if on a gibbet. He stared at the suit for hours at a time.
It would have saved her life, he told himself, although he suspected this was not true.
‘I should have tried harder,’ he moaned aloud at odd moments.
A small bubble of consolation occasionally drifted into his thoughts. If death were as final and anesthetic as he had been taught, then his family had at least been granted the salvation of nothingness. Justine could not now be mourning the death of her daughter. Holly could not now be wondering whether all this chaos somehow precluded her getting a Mary Merlin doll for Christmas. Thank God for oblivion, ran his Unitarian prayer.