Bloodletting

by

Kate Wilhelm

I am sitting in my car, and A PERSON CAN nothing is visible, just the black night out there, the black night BECOME OLD IN inside; the only sound is of the sea, the waves crashing against the A DAY. MIKEY cliff with fierce regularity. I remember the one time my grandmother TURNED FIVE, came out here; she did not like the constant sea noise. She AND WARREN, complained, “Don’t it ever shut up?” She did not like the constant A HUNDRED. wind, either; worse than Kansas, she said on that trip. On my first visit to her farm in Kansas I marveled at the stars, and she took that to be a sign of a simple mind. But I knew then, and I think I still know, that they have more stars in Kansas than they do at the Oregon coast. Grandmother also said Warren was simple. But that was later, ten years ago.

The impenetrable darkness has made me think of her, I suppose. She talked about growing up on the prairies that were virtually uninhabited, of being out late when there wasn’t a light to be seen, of her fear of the dark then and forever after. When I said I wasn’t afraid of the dark, she muttered, “You don’t know dark, child. You don’t know.” I do now.

She came out of the kitchen muttering the day I took Warren home to meet my family. “That man ain’t as smart as he thinks,” she said. “He don’t know enough to open a can. Simple, that’s what he is.” I went to the kitchen to find Aunt Jewel showing Warren how to use an old can opener. He had never seen one like it. Simple. He was thirty, with a Ph.D., tenure at the University of Oregon, working with Gregory Oldhams. He had turned down other, better-paid, positions for the chance to work with Greg; he could have gone to Harvard, Stanford, almost anywhere he wanted.

It has started to rain, a soothing monotonous patter on the roof of the car, and now a wind has come up, rustling in the firs, in the vine maples, the broom that grows down the face of the cliff where nothing else can find enough dirt to sink roots. I am very tired.

I brought Warren up here before we were married; he was envious. “You grew up in a wilderness!” he said. He had grown up in Brooklyn.

“Well, you’re here now,” I said. “So it doesn’t really matter so much, does it?”

“It matters,” he said, gazing down at the ocean, then turning to look at the trees, and finally at the A-frame house below us and across a shallow ravine. I had lived in that house for the first twelve years of my life. “It matters,” he repeated. “You have things in your eyes I’ll never get. I have people and traffic and buildings, and people, more people, always more people, always more cars, more exhaust, more noise....” He stopped and I was glad. There was anguish in his voice, bitterness--I didn’t know what it was; I didn’t want to know it.

Greg Oldhams is the foremost researcher in hematology, the study of blood. He already was famous when Warren started working with him, and since then his research, and Warren’s, has become what the articles call legendary. At first, after I met Warren, I felt almost ashamed of my own field--medieval literature. What was the point in that, I wondered, compared to the importance of what they were doing? At first, Warren talked about his work with excitement, passion even, but then he stopped. I know to the day when it changed. On Mikey’s fifth birthday, five years ago. Warren didn’t come home in time for the party, and when he did get home, he was old.

A person can become old in a day, I learned then. Mikey turned five; Warren turned a hundred.

The wind is increasing; there may be a gale moving in. I had to roll up the window on my side when the rain started, and when I reached over to open the passenger side window, I realized I still had the seat belt fastened and then it seemed too hard to work the clasp and free myself. I began to laugh, and then I was crying and laughing. I don’t care if rain comes in the passenger side, but the wind makes a harsh whistling sound through the narrow opening near my head, and I have to decide, open the window more and get wet, or close it. I can’t bear the whistling noise. Finally I make the effort to undo the seat belt, reach over, and open the other window and close the driver-side one. Now I can hear the ocean, and the rain, and even the wind in the trees. So much exertion, I mock myself, but I have to lean back and rest.

This is where I told Warren yes, I would marry him, up here overlooking the sea. “No children,” he said. “The world has enough children.”

I backed away from him and we regarded each other. “But I want a family,” I said after a moment. “At least one child of ours, our genes. We can adopt another one or two.”

Nothing was settled that day. We went back to the A-frame and banged pots and pans and argued and I told him to get lost, to get out of my life, and he said it would be criminal to bring another child into the world and I was being selfish, and the much-touted maternal urge was cultural, and I said people like us owed it to children to give them the same advantages we had, education, love, care.... It went on into the night, when I told him to sleep on the couch, and the next day, until I stomped out of the house and came up here to glare at the ocean and its incessant racket. He came after me. “Christ,” he said. “Jesus. One.” Two months later we were married and I was pregnant.

When Mikey was two he got a big sister, Sandra, who was three and a half, and a year later he got a bigger brother, Chris, who was five. Our family.

Mikey was four when they all had chicken pox at the same time. One night Warren was keeping them entertained, coloring with them at the table while I made dinner.

“Why did you make him green?” Chris demanded.

“Because he has artificial blood,” Warren said.

“Why?”

“Because something went wrong with his blood and they had to take it out and put in artificial blood.”

Mikey began to cry. “Is that what they’ll do to us?”

“Nope. You’re not sick enough. You’ve just got spots on your face. You call that sick? I call it kvetching.”

“What’s that?” Sandra asked. She had fallen in love with Warren the day we met her, and he loved all three children.

“That’s when you grow spots on your face, and itch, and pretend you’re sick so your mother will let you eat ice cream all day if you want. And your dad plays silly games with you when he should be at work. That’s kvetching.”

They liked kvetching. Later they got into my lipstick and tried to make it all happen again, spots, whining for ice cream, laughing.

Later it was funny, but that night, with my sick children at the table, itching, feverish, it was not funny. I froze at the sink with water running over lettuce. Artificial blood? We were still in the cold war; atomic war was still possible, anything was possible. Even artificial blood.

“Why?” I asked, after the children were in bed.

He had to start way back. “Remember in the movie Dracula how the good doctor transfused one of the women over and over with whole blood, and it took? Pure luck. Lucy was probably an A-group type, and so was the guy. If he had put blood from an O group in her, she probably would have died on him. That’s how it was. One took, another one, then bingo, it didn’t. Then they found out about the blood groups, and later on about how the agglutinogens combine with certain agglutinins, and not others. And we’ve been learning ever since. The body treats the wrong blood type just like any other invading organism, bacterium, virus, whatever, and rejects it. But in the case of a major catastrophe you can’t count on the lab facilities to handle the typing, the storage, all the mechanics of transfusions. The labs might not be there. We’ve got artificial blood now, you know, but it’s pretty high-tech stuff.”

I hadn’t known until then. I shuddered, and he grinned. “So what’s wrong with being green? Don’t worry, it’s still experimental, and very, very temporary. Anyway, if we could get away from some of the really high-tech stuff and simply transfuse from any healthy person to one who is ill ... see?”

“But wouldn’t that be just as high tech?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. There are genetic blood characteristics that get passed on from parent to child, you know. Sickle cell anemia, which, by the way, comes in a package that includes resistance to malaria. Hemophilia gets passed on....” Whatever expression my face was registering made him stop. “Hey,” he said softly. “I’m just spitballing.”

I jerked upright so fast, I bumped into the steering wheel. I must have been dozing, dreaming. How clear Warren was, his hair thinning just a touch, a little too long, the color of wet sand; that day he had a suntan and looked almost ruddy. A big-faced ruddy man who looked as if he should be out plowing, or putting a roof on a building, or something else physically demanding. A sailor, he would have made a fine sailor. I can’t see him now; my imagination is faulty in that I can’t see images with any sharp detail. Only my dreams re-create with exactitude the people I have loved. My parents live on in my dreams; Warren is there; the children, but they won’t show themselves to my waking mind. I have only feelings, impressions, nuances that have no names. Warren is a loving presence, a comforting presence, bigger in my mind than ever in person, stronger, more reassuring, strangely more vulnerable so that I feel I have to protect him. From what is as unclear as the visual image.

When I drove down here from the Portland airport, it was my intention to turn into the driveway to the house where I played out my childhood; instead, I kept driving, followed the road that became a track up to this lookout point. The end of the road. The place where the world disappears.

We came out here with Greg two years ago. His wife was gone by then, back to Indiana or somewhere with their two children, and he was lonely. Or so Warren said. I didn’t believe it, and still don’t believe Greg ever knew loneliness. His work was world enough. We built a fire on the beach and the children played in the surf and came near to get warm, then raced back to the frigid water.

“Tell Greg about the meals,” Warren said, grinning, contented that day, even though he was a hundred years old.

I had told him and the children about a typical meal during the time of Abelard and Heloise. Our children wanted to eat that way, too. A long board against the wall, food within reach of everyone, people sharing the same bowls, the same cups, eating with spoons or fingers. The beggars crowding about, and the dogs crowding everyone, snapping at each other, at the beggars, at the diners and the servers.

Greg laughed when I described it. He was lazy looking, relaxed, but if Warren had turned a hundred, Greg had turned two hundred. An old worried man, I thought. He was only forty-five according to the official records, but I knew he was ancient.

“Was that during the plague years?” he asked. He was leaning against a forty-foot-long tree that had crashed ashore, riding the waves to be stranded here, a memento of the power of the sea during a storm. The tree trunk was eight feet thick. It might have been alive in Abelard’s time.

“Not much plague yet, not in epidemic form in Europe at least, although plague was recorded back in the sixth century, you understand, and continued intermittently until it struck in pandemic force later, about the fifteenth century. This period was eleven hundred or so. Why?”

“The beggars were inside at the table?” he asked, bemused.

“They were kicked out shortly after that; the beggars had to stay beyond the door, but the dogs weren’t banished.”

The conversation ended there; the children found a starfish which we all went to examine, and the sun was going down by then.

Late that night we discussed when we would leave for home the following day. Traffic had been bumper to bumper coming out and it would be worse on Sunday.

“I may stay on a few days with the kids,” I said. Warren could go back with Greg early, what they were both inclined to do, but I knew the children would be disappointed at the short stay, as I was. It was summer; I had no classes, and this was the only kind of vacation we would have, a day now and then, two, three days at the coast.

“I wonder what it was like during the plague years,” Greg mused, reviving the subject we had left hours before. “Anywhere from one-third to half the people gone, just gone.”

“It wasn’t exactly like that,” I said. “It took three hundred years before it stopped sweeping the continent in epidemic form, and during that period the church became the power it is now. Superstition, heresies, empowerment for the church and state, fear for the public, that’s what was going on. Life was hell for most survivors.”

“And the Renaissance came about,” Greg said thoughtfully. “Would it have happened without the plague? No one really knows, do they?”

“That’s the romantic version,” I said, not quite snapping at him. “The silver-lining theory. Out of every evil thing comes something good. You believe that?”

Warren had been brooding, gazing at the fire in the fireplace, snapping and cracking, a many-hued fire burning off salts and minerals of dried wood scavenged from the beach. He sounded very tired when he spoke now. “The Renaissance came about because people had used up all the resources they had available to them; they were desperate for better ways to farm, to make clothing, to warm themselves. Better ways to survive. They had to invent the Renaissance. It had nothing to do with plague.”

I realized that they had had this conversation before; neither was saying anything the other had not already heard. I stood up.

“Are you going to tell me what you’re doing in your lab?”

Greg looked blank, and Warren shook his head. “Same old stuff,” he said after a long pause. “Just the same old stuff.”

If it was just the same old stuff--artificial blood, whole blood transfusions, work they had been publishing for years--why had they both become so old? Why were they both terrified? Why had Warren stopped talking about his work altogether, and refused to talk about it when I brought it up?

Greg got up abruptly and went to bed, and Warren shook his head when I asked him again what they were doing. “Go on to bed,” he said. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

What do you do if your husband holds the agent to destroy half the human race? You try not to know it; you don’t demand answers; you go to bed.

A gale has arrived finally. Now the trees are thrashing, and the broom is whipping about furiously, making its own eerie shrieking sound, and the rain is so hard it’s as if the sea has come up here and is raging against the car, pushing, pushing. I am getting very cold and think how strange that I was so reluctant to turn on the motor, use the heater. I can hardly even hear the engine when it starts, and as soon as I lift my foot from the accelerator, I can’t hear it at all.

Greg’s wife took her two children and ran when she learned. I wonder if that is why Warren refused to tell me anything for so long.

In the past two years Warren became a stranger to us, his family. We saw him rarely, and only when he was so fatigued he could hardly stay awake long enough to eat, to bathe. I didn’t see Greg at all after that day at the coast, not until two weeks ago.

Warren came home late. I was already undressed for bed, in my robe. He was so pale he looked very ill. “I blew the whistle,” he said, standing just inside the door, water running off his jacket, down his hands, down his face. I went to him and pulled the jacket off his shoulders. “It’s going to be out of our hands by tomorrow,” he said, and walked stiffly into the living room to sit on the sofa.

I hurried to the bathroom and came back with a towel, sat beside him, and began to dry his hair, his face.

“Will you tell me about it now?”

He told me. They had found a viroid that had an affinity for some blood groups, he said. Not even a whole virus, not a killed virus, a piece of a virus. They had combined it with the O group first and nothing happened, but when they then combined the O blood with A blood, the viroid changed, it became whole, replicative, and the A blood was destroyed, consumed. He said it in a monotone, almost absently, as if it were of no real consequence, after all. And then he buried his face in his hands and cried.

Forty-five percent of Caucasians have A-group blood; five percent have AB. Thirty percent of Blacks have A or AB. Thirty percent of Amerinds have A or AB.... And the virus they created could destroy all of them.

I held him as he wept and the words tumbled incoherently. They would both go to Atlanta, he said that night, he and Greg, and someone would come to oversee the packing of the material, the decontamination of the lab.

“Greg came in while I was on the phone,” he said at some point. “He tried to stop me. I hit him. God, I hit him, knocked him down! I took him home and we talked it over.”

“Does he agree, then?”

“Yes,” he said tiredly. “It was like hitting your father, your god.”

“Why didn’t you stop when you knew what it was?”

“We couldn’t,” he said. He was as pale as death, with red-rimmed eyes, a haunted look. “If we did it, then so will someone else, if they haven’t already. We kept trying to find an out, an antidote, a cure, something.”

We were still on the sofa side by side. He drew away from me and got to his feet, an old man laboriously rising; he staggered when he started to walk. “I need a drink.”

I followed him to the kitchen and watched him pour bourbon into a glass and drink it down. If he and Greg couldn’t find the cure, I was thinking, then who could? They were the best in the field.

I keep thinking of what Greg said that day on the coast: The plague killed off one-third to half the population of Europe, the same numbers that make up the A, the AB, the AO blood groups. And out of that horror, he thought, had come the Renaissance.

I know so much more about blood groups and complexes now than I did two weeks ago; I put in a period of cramming, as if for an examination. I am in the A group. Mikey is AO. Warren is O. Sandra is A, and Chris is O.

I drove Warren to the lab the next morning, where we were met by a middle-aged man who introduced himself to Warren and ignored me: They went inside without a backward glance. When they were out of sight, Greg appeared, coming from the corner of the brick building, walking toward me. He had a Band-Aid on his jaw; Warren had one on his middle knuckle.

“At the last minute,” Greg said, “I found I didn’t want to see anyone, not Warren, not the hot-shot epidemiologist. Just tell Warren I’m taking off for a few days’ rest, will you?”

I nodded, and he turned and walked away, old, old, defeated, sagging shoulders, slouching walk, his hair down over the collar of a faded gray ski jacket that gleamed with rain, sneakers squishing through puddles.

Such a clear picture of him, I marvel, coming wide awake again. The car is much too warm now; it has a very efficient heater. I want to sink back down into dreams, but instead I force myself up straighter in order to reach the key, to turn off the ignition. My hand feels encased in lead.

I packed for Warren and later that day he dashed in, brushed my cheek with his lips, snatched up his bag, and ran out again. He would call, he said, and he did several times, but never with anything real to say. I was as guarded on the phone as he was. Anything new? I asked, and he said no, same old stuff. I clutched the phone harder and talked about the children, about the rain, about nothing.

I did the things I always did: I braided Sandra’s hair, and made Mikey do his homework; I talked to my own class about The Canterbury Tales; I shopped and made dinners; I washed my hair and shaved my legs.... Mikey had a cold and Chris caught it, and I was headachy and dull feeling. Late fall things, I told Warren over the phone. He said it was rather warm in Atlanta and sunny. And, he said tiredly, he would be on the seven-o’clock flight due in Portland on Friday. We made soft thankful noises at each other; I had tears in my eyes when I hung up.

Trish Oldhams called the following evening. She wanted Warren and when I said he was out of town, there was a long pause.

“What is it, Trish? Anything I can do?” I hoped it was nothing; my headache was worse and now I was afraid it was flu, not simply a cold.

“It’s Greg,” she said at last. “I was going to ask Warren to go check on him. He called, and he sounded ... I don’t know, just strange.”

“What do you mean, strange?”

“He said he wanted to tell me goodbye,” she said in a low voice. “I ... is he sick?”

“Not that I know. I’ll drop in on him and call you back. Okay?”

Time is a muddle for me now. I can’t remember when Trish called, but I didn’t call her back. I found Greg loading boxes into his truck that he had backed up partway into the garage. His house was surrounded by unkempt gardens and bushes and a lot of trees, two or three acres that he ignored. Trish used to maintain it all. I remember thinking what a wilderness he had let it become.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, when I stopped behind his truck and got out of my car.

“Trish called. She’s worried about you.”

“You’re shivering. Come on inside.”

The inside was a shambles, things strewn about, drawers open, boxes everywhere. He led me to the kitchen where it was more of the same. The table was piled high with books and notebooks; others were on the floor, on chairs.

“Sit down,” he said. “You’re shaking, you’re so cold.” He poured us both whiskey with a drop of water, and he sat opposite me, with the piles of stuff between us. “Trish,” he said after a moment. “I shouldn’t have called her, I guess. She was surprised. I made her leave, you know.”

I shook my head. “Why?”

“Because I was dangerous for her and the boys,” he said, gazing past me. “A menace to her. I told her that and she would have hung on, but I told her I was a menace to the boys, too, and she left, just like I knew she would.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” My glass rattled against the table when I tried to put it down. He took it and refilled it.

“I’m contaminated,” he said. “Four, five years ago I nicked myself in the lab and got some of the viroid material in the cut. We thought I would die, Warren and I thought that, but as you can see....” He drained his glass and put it down hard. “But it’s there, the viroid, waiting to meet up with A-type blood, fulfill its destiny. Trish is A, and the boys are AO. It was just a matter of time before something happened, no matter how careful was. I sent her away.”

It is all muddled. He said he would not be a guinea pig, live in quarantine. No one knew about him yet, but he would tell them soon. He had made Warren promise to let him tell them in his own time, his own way. I was drinking his liquor and having trouble following his words, but I finally had become warm, and even drowsy as he talked on. He couldn’t infect me, he said, driving me home, and Warren was all right. I was safe. He insisted that I couldn’t drive, and he called a cab to return home afterward. Blood contact was necessary he said, between a contaminated O and anyone else. Alone, the viroid was inert. And the virus? I asked. “Oh, that,” he said grimly. “That’s one of the things they’ll be finding out in Atlanta. We, Warren and I, think it might be passed by any contact, or it could be airborne. They’ll find out.”

Today, Friday. I braided Sandra’s hair and made Mikey brush his teeth, and told Chris that he couldn’t go to a football game after school, not with his cold. Sandra was sneezing. I dragged into my one class, and then a committee meeting, and a late lunch with my friend Dora who told me to go home and to bed because I looked like hell. I felt like hell, I admitted, but I had to go to Portland to meet Warren. I wanted to go early enough to miss the traffic rush. I would have a snack in the restaurant and read and wait for his plane.

I heard the news bulletin on the car radio. Dr. Gregory Oldhams had died in a fire at his house. There were no details. I pulled off the road onto the shoulder and stared ahead through tears. He had called Trish to tell her goodbye. He had packed up things he couldn’t bear to have burned. A guinea pig, live in quarantine, in isolation, his own time, his own way....

Lights have come on in the house across the ravine. They are looking for me; Warren must have told them this is where I would come. Home. I wonder if he is with them; if he is, he may think to come up here. I rather imagine that they have him in a high-security lab somewhere, drawing blood, testing it, or packaging it to send to Atlanta.

They may send him back. He will be so tired. Would I scream at him if we met now? Probably, and he doesn’t need it; he knows, and he will know for the rest of his life. If we met, and if I had a gun, would I shoot him? I can imagine doing it, and I would want to do it, but would I?

Warren’s plane was going to be an hour late. It was five when I got inside the terminal; three hours stretched like eternity. I was too tired to do more than buy a book and a newspaper and then find a place where I could sit in peace. No food, I thought, shivering again. Orange juice. I sat in the restaurant thinking about Greg, about yesterday, how he had driven me home. What he had said. Blood contact between an O and anyone else, airborne possibly after an A became infected. I remembered the Band-Aid on his chin, another Band-Aid on Warren’s knuckle. How Warren had wept, not because of the work, but because he had struck Greg, his mentor, his father, his god.

I knocked over my orange juice when I attempted to lift the glass, and I stared at the spreading pool until the waitress’s voice made me start. “You want another one?” she asked.

I fled to the restroom and studied my face in the mirror. Bloodless. It’s the flu, I told myself. Just the flu. My fingers were tinged with blue under my finger-nails, my palms were drained of color.

I know I talked to someone in Atlanta, but I can’t remember how it came about. There’s a vague memory of someone else punching numbers from my credit card. I must have asked for help. I had to go through so many people, wait so long before someone who knew something came on the line. “Is it airborne?” I asked, and he had many questions, which I must have answered. He kept asking, “Are you there? Are you all right? Can you hear me?” I know he said, “Stay right where you are. Don’t move from the phone. We’ll send someone to help you.”

Why didn’t I wait for Warren? I should have waited for him, but I didn’t, and then I remember, they would have come for me, and someone else would have met him and taken him somewhere. I think of all the people I was with in the restaurant, in the lounge, in the vast waiting room, buying a newspaper, a book, the shop where I bought the tape recorder I’m using, just walking around, in the parking lot.... I forgot to tell the voice on the phone that I had stopped to buy gas, another contact.

I had to leave the phone because someone else wanted to use it, an angry man who told me to move my ass. I walked away from the phone and I stopped to buy the tape recorder, and then I kept walking, out to the lot, to my car, and I drove here. That much is clear in my head. As long as I don’t try to move, or lift anything, I don’t even feel too bad, just so tired, and so heavy. The oddest thing is the lack of coordination in my hands. I fumble with things, drop them; I can’t even manage the key in the ignition any longer.

I told the man how it happened. Warren got the viroid when he hit Greg. He used my razor the next morning and I used it later; we both always nick ourselves shaving. So simple.

They will spread their nets and try to catch everyone who was in the airport this evening, people flying off to Denver, Chicago, England, Hawaii.... They will scoop up everyone at school, all my classes, my friends, committee members. My children.

I can’t weep now. I must be dehydrating too much. At first I thought Greg’s way would be mine. I would drive to my old house and arrange a great fire and at the last minute set it off, but I won’t burn myself. They’ll want to know what damage was done; they may even find a clue to help someone. Or maybe, without even thinking it through, I realized they would come to the house. The house lights appear to be dancing through waves of water. The storm is so intense now my voice sounds faint to my own ears. I don’t even know how much I’ve said for the tape recorder, how much I have dreamed. The dreams are more real than reality. The car rocks, and the trees thrash about. I wish I could see them, but it’s enough to know they’ve seen this before many times. Maybe they like it as much as I do.

“Can we sleep in the loft, Mom?” Mikey yelled, racing to the stairs.

“Well, sure. That’s where I slept. Good enough for me, good enough for you.”

I shooed them all ahead of me and lay down on the built-in bed. “Look, if you put your head right here, as soon as the moon reaches that tallest fir tree, the shadow of the tree will come in and kiss you good night.”

Chris snorted in disbelief, but Sandra and Mikey lunged for the right spot, which I quickly vacated. Reluctantly Chris stayed close enough to see if it would really happen.

Later, Warren and I listened to them giggling and playing overhead. “Remember?” I asked. “You gave in and said okay to one.”

There was a thump and silence and we both tensed, then renewed giggling floated down, and we relaxed. My legs were cramping from the position we were in, but I didn’t tell him. I closed my eyes and listened to the laughing children.