Showing posts with label The Fever. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Fever. Show all posts

Monday, April 27, 2020

HARD TIMES: The Fever


EXCERPT FROM HARD TIMES: THE WRATH OF AN ANGRY GOD BY JACK RANDOM



THE FEVER


I go to sleep early with Cinn snuggled at my side and awaken in the darkened, early hours of the morning with a cold sweat covering my body.  I struggle to get up and throw some water on my face but I lose the battle.  The next thing I know I’m in the community room on the cot that Oleander once occupied.  Suddenly, instead of caretaker I’m among the cared for.  I will learn firsthand the horrors of this virus that creeps into your body and holds it for as long as it can until it releases you.  One way or the other.  
At first I fight back as everyone else does, following a stubborn and irrational instinct, refusing to believe that I’ve fallen victim.  Again and again, as Jo or Zar try to talk me down, I try to get up but my body refuses.  The pain is so acute and runs so deep that any movement triggers a cascade of agony.  The fever takes hold of my mind so that I no longer know where I am or why or how I got here.  Often as not, I can’t remember who I am.  At times I think I’m being held hostage by people who want to enslave me or steal the organs of my body.  I’m being tortured.  I’m being held against my will.  I’m a soldier in the hands of an unknown enemy.  They inject me with drugs that stop me from moving or thinking or trying to escape.  They want answers but I have none.  I cannot understand their questions. 
The only thing that can bring me back to earth and reality is the worried gaze of my loyal friend and companion.  Cinn is with me constantly.  She lays her head and paws on my chest and I never doubt her purpose is to comfort and heal me.  When the mind suffers it takes little comfort.  It seizes it and casts it away.  When the body suffers it seizes pain, pulls it in and holds it like a toxic treasure.  She alone is my salvation and comfort.  She alone can ward off the unseen demons attacking my mind and body even as I sleep, even as I run, even as I hide in the darkest corners of my subconscious mind.  
The sickness comes in waves, washing over me, drowning me, dragging me through a dark landscape with shadow creatures, yellow eyes and snarling, scowling lips, surrounding and devouring me.  I’m blue flame hot and shivering cold.  Then, just as I think I can bear no more it releases me, offering a glimpse of wellness before it resumes its punishing march. 
My sickness takes a toll on everyone in the camp.  They are already numbed by the deaths they have endured and the struggle they have overcome.  I have become more than a friend.  I’m someone they have come to respect.  I’m part of their family.  I am a brother.  I never talked much about my own family before the sickness grabbed me.  I told them who they are and where they are and why I left them but that’s all.  I’m afraid that if I talk about them too much it will consume me.  I don’t want to go back until things are better, until I can be sure that my presence will not add to their hardship.  So I didn’t talk about them.  But now that I’m sick that’s all I talk about.  I fade in and out of consciousness and every time I awake I wonder where I am and I ask for Madge and Denim and Charlie.  I demand to know where they are and if they’re safe.  
Oleander holds herself personally responsible for my illness.  She believes she infected me.  Whether that’s true no one can say but she feels it.  Sooner or later what you feel becomes the truth.  She and Janis sit by my side around the clock and of course Cinn is there too.  That little dog just lies by my side with her head on my chest looking at my face for signs of life or the shadow of death.  When I wake up she licks my face and reminds me I’m loved. 
They send someone on a solar crawler to check up on my family.  They had a long discussion about whether or not to tell my wife that I’m sick and might die.  They decide not to tell her because they’re afraid she would come to care for me and the sickness would take hold of her too.  They don’t want to leave our children orphans.  They aren’t sure if it’s the right thing to do.  In her place most people would want to know.  Most of them would have wanted to know but it comes down to the children and that’s what they decided.  They just want to be able to tell me that my family is safe.  If they aren’t safe they will hold on to that knowledge until I’m fully recovered or until the end draws near.  None of them had faced such decisions in their prior lives and nothing about it comes easy.   It is the blessing and the curse of the times.  We’re not bound by the laws or the moral codes of the state, the nation or the media.  We make our own laws and live with the consequences. 
They faced the same decision regarding a professor from the university who came down to observe their progress and offer advice.  She was close to Jo and a number of other students.  Jo said that without Dr. Arakawa none of this would have happened.  She was a brilliant physicist with practical knowledge in energy systems – particularly solar energy.  She had a husband and two children who stayed behind in Davis.  She was more than pleased with what they had accomplished but she came at exactly the wrong time. 
It was the week the illness hit so no one knew how bad it would be.  She held on for a long time.  Like so many others it seemed she would recover.  She was up and walking around in late autumn.  But she had a relapse and it hit her hard.  They had already informed her family that she was ill.  They were frank about the seriousness of the illness though they were confident of her recovery chances at the time. 
Her family came immediately.  All of them.  Jo and a friend tried to stop them at the gate down the road but they wouldn’t listen.  They even had the professor write a letter to dissuade them but it seemed to have the opposite effect.  The father, a professor of sociology, tried to persuade his son and daughter to stay behind but they refused to hear it.  They were a family.  Their wife and mother was deathly ill and they would be there by her side just as she would if it was one of them.  It’s strange that intelligent and educated people, people who dedicate so much of their existence to reason, yield logic to emotion when it counts most.  I can’t say that I would do otherwise. 
Dr. Arakawa held on until Christmas.  The winter was mild but a storm came down from the mountains on Christmas Eve and held for three days.  It snowed.  The locals said it hadn’t snowed here for twenty years.  It was comforting.  Like chicken soup or fresh baked bread.  They stayed inside most of the time, sipping warm drinks and talking softly about everything that had happened and whether or not it was worth it. 
When Dr. Arakawa died Christmas morning there was a deep sense of loss.  They were gathered in the community room when the family came in and announced her passing.  Her husband said she was coherent in the last moments before her death.  She said that what we were doing was important.  Her last wish was that we should carry on and complete the work that she had helped give birth.  She said there would always be hardships but they would succeed as long as they refuse to fail.  Those were her last words:  Refuse to fail.  
Her family returned to Davis and they hadn’t heard a word since.  They could only hope and pray they hadn’t contracted the sickness. 

It’s a solemn Christmas.  Zar comes to see me around midnight.  Oleander is asleep in a chair with an open book in her lap: McCarthy’s The Road.  He talks to me in soft tones for quite a while.  He tells me what happened and how sorrow had a grip on the camp.  He says they need me to pull through now more than ever or they might not make it.  He explains how important the professor had been to everyone.  He says he feels the same way about me and he thinks the others have the same feeling.  He asks me to think about it and if I can find a way back to them I should.  After that he just stands there looking at my face, wondering what I’m experiencing, wondering if it’s selfish to ask me to think of others, thinking that somehow I understand what he’s talking about.  I do.  Somewhere in my subconscious I hear every word and I understand. 
I die a thousand agonizing deaths before I finally find my footing.  When I do, Cinn is there, licking my face, welcoming me, and Janis is tending to me.  Only a handful of people are still sick.  The others have recovered and rejoined the outside world.  When they’re certain I’m well enough, I’m allowed to go outside as well.  A few days later Jo tells me about the professor who died.  The camp is in mourning and will remain so through the winter. 
At one point Zar asks me what I remember when I was under the spell of sickness.  Most of what I remember has no words.  There were times when I felt warmth and a sense of closeness to those around me.  I couldn’t recall what was said but I knew how it felt.  It felt like someone pulling me out of a hole, a deep dark hole.  I felt gratitude.  It gave me direction and fueled my will to fight back.  I told him I remember what he said on Christmas, that I heard and understood though I was unable to respond. 
Zar is deeply moved.  He says he doesn’t know if there is a God or another life after this one.  On so many levels it doesn’t make sense.  But he feels strongly that I had gone somewhere else and made a choice to come back.  He knows it’s irrational.  It goes against everything he’s been taught by people wiser, more educated and smarter than himself.  Still he’s come to the conclusion that an individual has a choice even in death.  Jo disagrees.  If wishes and prayers could bring a person back from death they would have worked on Dr. Arakawa.  She chooses to place her faith in science and her prayers are scientific inquiries.  She is no less grateful that I survived but she refuses to attribute it to anything but loving care and the laws of probability. 
It comes down to religion. No objective observer can doubt that religion is a mixed blessing at best and a scourge on humanity at worst.  The problem with religion is orthodoxy.  When people band together and recruit others on the condition that any knowledge that is not established in orthodox beliefs must be rejected it becomes the enemy of social and personal progress and growth.  It becomes the enemy of science and a threat to social order.  Jo and Zar agree that orthodox religion should have no part in their community but that all belief systems should be regarded with absolute tolerance as long as no one is harmed or hindered in any way.  That is the unspoken creed of the Sun Camp. 
I have missed Christmas but there’s good news: my family is safe.  They’re struggling like everyone else but they’re safe.  That’s all.  They did not make contact and when they explain why, I agree.  After all we’ve been through, it is not a risk I would have taken. 
The air seems fresher, the sunlight brighter and the whole world seems a better place.  I resolve to go home as soon as I’m able.  We would work it out.  For better or worse, we would find a way to work it out.  It takes a while for Zar and Jo and Holly and the rest to persuade me that I should wait until spring when I’m fully recovered and the weather is more forgiving. 

Hard Times is available at Amazon.com.  Google Jack Random. Amazon.