James Gardner: Vigilant

"If you understand the protocol," I told Zillif, "do you understand the risks?"

"Yes, Faye Smallwood. There are many ways an untried substance could harm me, and only one that could do me good. Still," she said, jockeying her head clumsily to nestle down into the pillow, "I admire the idea of joining a medical experiment. Especially a grand one. There’s a chance I shall be instrumental in discovering a cure."

A miniscule chance. But I wished Dads was there with me. A whiff of Zillif’s optimism might have perked him up.

My father arrived ten minutes later, his hair mussed wild and his clothes askew.

That’s how I’ll always remember him — never quite tucked in, as if one emergency after another kept him from pulling himself together. Even in the quiet days before the epidemic, he always managed an air of too-rushed-to-brush. And once the outbreak struck… well, precious little difference actually, unless it was a touch of smugness, now that he’d got a gold-plated excuse for looking like something the cat sicked up.

Not that my mother accepted any excuse. Since the plague began, she’d gotten daily more snappish about Dads’s tousled state — he was a doctor, for Christ’s sake, he should make a decent impression. She was especially infuriated by his beard. Six weeks earlier it had been bold and bushy, teddy-bear brown with just five teasy threads of gray. Then Mother declared the beard was lopsided, wretchedly in need of a trim. Each day she worried at it with embroidery scissors while Dads stood stoic but impatient to get away. By the morning Zillif arrived, my father’s beard had been reduced to a five o’clock shadow, clutched tight and dark to his face.

Dads didn’t care. He only grew the beard in the first place because he couldn’t be bothered to shave.

"This is Tur Zillif," I told him. Tur was the Oolom politeword for a woman of venerable age. "Tur Zillif of the Vigil."

"An honor, Proctor Zillif…" Dads began.

"No," she interrupted. "You mustn’t address me by that title. Not when I’m unable to fulfill a proctor’s duties."

My father’s face curdled with his "difficult-at-times" miffiness; he hated to be corrected by anyone. Since it was undignified to grump at a patient, he turned on me. "I assume you’ve gathered Tur Zillif’s medical history?"

"No charts in the bin," I answered straightaway. In a more honest universe, I might have confessed I hadn’t even checked the bin as I carried Zillif past the admitting table; but Eden this isn’t, and anyway Pook would have handed me a chart if we’d had any available. Our spare chart-pads tended to pile on my father’s desk till he downloaded their contents into the house-soul’s permanent storage. Dads avoided that task as long as he could, sometimes covering the heap of charts with a bath towel so he wouldn’t have to look at them. Each "completed" chart in the stack meant we’d lost another patient.

Dads glared at me, just on general humphy principles, then turned back to Zillif. "We start by getting as much information about you as we can — your health history, personal details…"

"Names of my next of kin?" she asked.

My father chewed on that a second, obviously reconsidering whatever tack he’d intended to take. If he could help it, he never flat out talked to patients about the possibility of death; he’d assembled a thesaurus full of phrases that gave the required message when absolutely necessary ("prepare for the worst." "put your affairs in order") without actually having to admit he couldn’t save everybody from the Abyss. Dads hated patients who wanted to contemplate their own mortality.

"All right," he told Zillif in a low voice, "we both know the prognosis is unfavorable." Unfavorable: another willy-word from the Dads book of euphemisms. "But," he continued, "people are working on this. We never know when there’ll be a breakthrough."

"In the next two weeks, do you think?"

I bit my lip. Once again, Zillif proved she had canny sources of information: two weeks was the median survival time for an Oolom with her degree of paralysis.

"No one can guess when a breakthrough might come," Dads answered, his voice all prickly. "It could take some time; but then again, it might have happened this very second, somewhere in the world. In the meantime, we’re doing our best. We’ll put you on an experimental medication—"

"What medication?" Zillif interrupted.

Dads glowered at me as if I were the one who’d annoyed him, then undipped a notepad from his belt. He pressed a touch-square on the pad, but I could tell he didn’t need to look at the result; he always knew what "treatment" he’d scheduled for the next patient to come in. "You’ll be trying a terrestrial substance called cinnamon," he told Zillif. "It’s the bark from an Earth-native tree." Dads gave me a look, as if I’d accused him of something. "Humans have a rare long tradition of obtaining medicine from tree bark. Quinine…" He stopped and waved his hand airily, trying to make it look as if there were too many to list. More likely, he couldn’t think of any others.

"Cinnamon," Zillif said slowly. "Cinnamon." Speaking like a woman who’s been told the name of her grandchild and wants to hear how it sounds on her own tongue. "Will I be the first patient to try this cinnamon?"

"The first Oolom," I replied, before Dads concocted some gollygosh story about promising clinical tests all over the planet. Lately, he’d shown a fondness for manufacturing unjustified optimism in patients — at least I hoped that’s why he made such wild-eyed claims, and not that he really believed them. I told Zillif, "We coordinate our tests with other hospitals to avoid unwanted duplication."

"A tree bark named cinnamon," she murmured. As if she was pleased to know her place in the worldwide medical experiment — how she’d make her global contribution to finding a cure, even while lying mud-still in Sallysweet River. "My people enjoy many types of native bark," she said. "You can make a nice salad, just from the trees in this neighborhood. Bluebarrels, whitespots, paper-peels… and of course, chillslaps for color…"

My father and I let her talk — slurry words spoken with putty-muscled lips. After a while, Dads sent me to grate fresh cinnamon while he got the names of Zillif’s next of kin.

Here’s the thing: fifteen-year-olds can fall crazy in love faster than a sigh. In love with a singer, in love with a song, in love with kittens or cookies or Coleridge or Christ, and deeply-ecstatically-drunkenly.

Cynics will say the love never lasts — that you adore impressionist painters for a week, programming your walls with blowups from Monet and Degas, then suddenly, under all those water lilies and po-faced ballerinas, you stumble across a verse of Sufi poetry and boom, you’re a Muslim mystic, memorizing parables and meditating on the Ineffable Garden.

Yes, some teenage passions are superficial; but some are boundlessly-breathlessly- ardently transformative. In the blink of an eye or as slow as ice melting, your heart can be changed/lost/found forever.

The way I fell in love with Zillif over the following days. Evolving from apprehension about a woman on my roof, to casual interest in the patient I’d dropped off at the Circus, then metamorphosing into love, love, love.

Not sexual love. Not puppy love. Capital-R Romantic love, longing to vanquish enemies in her name, hanging on her slur-tongued words as if they were perfume that went straight to my brain.

What did we talk about? The sun when it shone, the moons when they rose, my friends, her grandchildren, the wildflowers I picked one afternoon near the town’s dump of mine tailings…

But mostly we talked about the Vigil. I wanted to hear everything. (Everything all at once.)