James Tiptree Jr.: Up the Walls of the World

“Right.” He goes on to draw out enough symptomatology to support a classical migraine picture: the nausea, the throb, the visual phenomena, the advance “aura.” But he will not be facile—not here.

“May I ask when you had your last physical checkup from your own doctor?”

“I had a PHS check two years ago. I don’t have a personal doctor.” The tone is not hostile, but not friendly either. Mocking?

“In other words, you haven’t been examined since these started. Well, we can check the obvious. I’ll need a blood sample and a pressure reading.”

“Hypertension in the black female population?” she asks silkily. Hostility now, loud and clear. “Look, I don’t want to make a thing of this, Doctor. I merely have these headaches.”

She is about to leave. Panicked, he changes gear.

“Please, I know, Miss Omali. Please listen. Of course I’ll give you a prescription to relieve the pain. But you must realize that headaches can indicate other conditions. What if I sent you out of here with a pain-killer and a pocket of acute staph infection? Or an incipient vascular episode? I’m asking the bare minimum. The pressure reading won’t take a minute. The lab will have a white count for us Tuesday. A responsible doctor would insist on ah EKG too, with our equipment here it would be simple. I’m skipping all that for now. Please.”

She relaxes slightly. He hauls out his sphygnomamometer, trying not to watch her peel off the lab coat. Her dress is plain, severely neutral. Ravishing. She exposes a long blue-black arm of aching elegance; when he wraps the cuff onto it he feels he is touching the limb of some uncanny wild thing.

Her pressure is one-twenty over seventy, no problem. What his own is he doesn’t like to think. Is there an ironic curve on those Nefertiti lips? Has his face betrayed him? When he comes to draw the blood sample it takes all his strength to hold steady, probing the needle in her femoral vein. Okay, thank God. The rich red—her blood—comes out strongly.

“Pressure’s fine. You’re what, twenty-eight?”

“Twenty-five.”

So young. He should be writing all this down, but some echo in her voice distracts him. Pain under that perfect control. The ghost of the doctor he once was wakes in him.

“Miss Omali.” He finds his old slow smile, the gentle tone that had been open sesame to hurts. “Of course this isn’t my business, but have you been under some particular stress that could account for the emergence of these headaches?”

“No.”

No open sesame here. He feels chilled, as if he’d poked at some perilous substance.

“I see.” Smiling, busying himself with the handy prescription pad, burbling about his job being to keep them healthy and how much better to get at causes than to take drugs for symptoms. The hypocrisy of his voice sickens him. She sits like a statue.

“Drop in Tuesday morning for the lab report. Meanwhile, if you feel one starting, take these right away. It’s a caffeine-ergotarnine compound. If the pain develops anyway, take this.” Angry with everything, he has not given her the morphine derivative he’d planned but only a codeine compound.

“Thank you.” Her lab coat is over her arm like a queen’s furs. Exit queen. The office collapses in entropy, intolerably blank.

Dann throws everything out of sight and heads out, stopping at the second floor to leave her blood sample in the medical pickup station. Her blood, rich, bright, intimate. Blood sometimes affects him unprofessionally.

When he comes out of the building doors he glimpses her again. She is bending to step into a cream-colored Lincoln Continental. The driver is a golden-skinned young woman. Somehow this depresses him more than if it had been a man. How rich, how alien is her world. How locked to him. The cream Mark IV vanishes among ordinary earthly cars. Drop dead, Doctor Dann.

But he is not depressed, not really. It was all unreal. Only very beautiful. And there is Tuesday morning ahead.

The thought continues to sustain him through his evening torpors, his numb night: a silver fishling in the dead sea of his mind. It is still with him as he goes through the Friday morning test routines.

The subjects are excited about the forthcoming Big Test. Noah has told them they will go in a Navy plane, and Lieutenant Kirk makes an officious speech about security. Six will go: the Housewife, the tragic Ensign, R-95 (who is sullen with worry because his twin is going out in the submarine), two girls whom Dann thinks of as the Princess and the Frump, and K-30, a dwarfish little man. Dann wants only to ask who else is going; he does not dare. Surely they won’t need a computer wherever this silly place is. He feels vaguely sorry for Noah when all this will end, as it must, in ambiguous failure. Perhaps there will be enough ambiguity to save his face.

The morning’s results are very bad.

As he is debating lunch, or more accurately ritalin-and-lunch, his phone rings.

“What? I can’t hear you.”

An almost unrecognizable weak whisper.

“Miss Omali? What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t get… prescriptions… filled yet. I… need them.”

“The headache? When did it return?”

“Last… night.”

“Have you taken anything for it?”

“Seconal… two… no good. Vomiting so…”

“No, Seconal won’t help. Don’t take anything else. I’ll get something to you at once. Give me your address.” As soon as he says it he’s horrified. She may live fifty miles away, maybe in some dangerous black place no one will deliver to.

The whisper is directing him to the Woodland City complex right on the Beltway.

He has checked his pocket kit and is down in the parking garage before he realizes he intends to bring it to her himself.

It takes two drugstores to get what he wants, drugs which he no longer dares to keep on hand. Woodland City turns out to be about as exotic as the Congressional Library. Twenty-five minutes from her call he is striding down a long motel-elegant corridor, looking for Number 721. The doors are wood-painted steel.

At his second knock 721 opens a crack and stops with a chain-rattle.

“Miss Omali? It’s Doctor Dann.”

A thin black hand comes out the crack, pale palm up.

“… Thank you.”

“Won’t you let me in, please?”

“… No.” The hand remains, trembling faintly. He can hear her breathe.

Suspicion flares in him. What’s in there? Is she alone? Is this some ploy, is he a fool? The hand waits. He hears a retching catch in her breath. Maybe she’s afraid to let a strange man in.

“Miss Omali, I’m a doctor. I have here a controlled narcotic. I cannot and will not hand it over like this. If you’re, ah, worried, I’ll be gald to wait while you telephone a friend to come.”

Oh God, he thinks, what if it’s a man friend? But suddenly a woman is right behind him, calling, “Marge?”

It’s the golden-skinned woman from the car, grocery bags in her arms, staring at him suspiciously under a wild afro.

“Marge,” she calls again. “I’m back. What’s going on?”

Vague sound from behind the door—and then it slams, the chain rattles, and the door swings wide open. Inside is an empty confusion of blowing white gauzy stuff. An inner door closes.

The woman walks past him into the windy room, looking at him hostilely. Dann looks back, hoping that his grey hair, the plain unfashionable grey suit on his tall frame, will identify him as harmless. The June wind is blowing long white and grey curtains into the room like cloudy flames. Dann explains himself. “I gather you’re a friend of hers?”

“Yes. Where’s the medicine?”

Dann brings out the packet, stands there holding it while a toilet flushes offstage. Then the inner door opens and she is holding the door-jamb, peering at him with a wet white towel held to her forehead.