James Gardner: Vigilant

On the afternoon of the fifth day, Zillif lost her ability to speak — tongue, lips, and jaw all went slack in the same second. Mid-sentence. "Faye Smallwood, why are you always so…" Then an ugly gargly sound, throat still pushing up noise with nothing to shape it. My friend Lynn called that sound "unloaded uvula exercise"… although Ooloms didn’t have uvulas, not big obvious ones like in Homo sap anatomy. "Aaaaah gaah gaaaaaaah hah kaaaaaaaa."

"Faye Smallwood, why are you always so aaaaah gaah gaaaaaaah hah kaaaaaaaa…"

I put my fingers soft to Zillif’s lips to stop her. It felt so fiercely, fiery, lonesomely intimate, that touch. Days before and after, I touched Zillif high up and low down, washing, swabbing every nook and cranny… but that was just playing nurse, doing a job with my hands. Only that one touch stays with me — my fingertips on her loose limp mouth, hush, it’s over.

She stopped trying to talk, stopped making the fraggly jaggly un-Zillif noise. I would have kissed her if I’d had any way to get her permission. But she was closed off now: eyes, face, hands, voice, everything mudpuddled but heart and lungs.

In the following days, I still sat with her when I had the chance… held her hand till her fragile fingers changed from bed-linen white to my own fairish tan; but I felt too tongue-tied to speak much on my own. What could I talk about to such a woman? The weather? The latest death statistics? Whatever vapid fiddly-dick dreams might pass through a backwater girl’s head?

Queer thing, that: how you can feel you’re blazing on the verge of radiance one day, then suddenly know for a fact you’re dog-puke banal.

When I told Dads that Zillif could no longer talk, he upped her dosage of cinnamon. I wept at the futility.

Zillif died on a bright autumn morning, with the sun beaming grandly detached through the stained yellow canvas. You’d think there’d be scarcely a difference between a limp paralyzed body and a dead one; but there is. One second there’s the Yes of life… then there’s meaningless meat. Something gone and something gone and something gone.

Three hours later, we discovered a cure for the disease.

Olive oil. So farcical, I wanted to scream. Later, I bellowed my head off… out in the tree-starved tundra, where the deep beds of carpet moss drank up the sound. Cool, sleek, stronger-than-real-life Faye Smallwood blubbering into her hands, wiping her nose on her sleeve, crying because the world was harder than she was.

Olive oil. Cloying, tongue-gucking stuff. Nothing a Sallysweet River family would ever spoon over its food.

One of my school friends saw the results first — Sharr Crosbie, daughter of two miners. Sweet girl, no harm in her, though I couldn’t stand being in the same room with her ever after. To my shame, I’ve inherited my father’s talent for sulks. But it rankled my heart, the witless way she told her story over and over, to me, to our parents, to the full news media.

"I was with this poor old man, in precious bad shape…" (False, Sharr-girl, false; he’d only just come in, and had some motion in his toes as well as a hint of bowel control — better condition than most of our patients.) "… and I was washing him off, you know, a sponge bath, the way he liked…" (All our Ooloms hated sponge baths; they grumbled and whined how the sponges tickled.) "… so I was wiping round his face when I spilled a dab of soap in his eye…" (The clumsy cow.) "… and he closed his eyes. He closed his eyes!"

Sharr squealed. People raced in, then went wild. Pook came close to breaking the patient’s chart, punching buttons to see what the man’s medication was.

Olive oil. Olive oil.

Dads came running from his office. "Who’s hurt, what’s wrong?" Then he ordered everybody to clear the hell back while he did some tests. Blood samples. Tissue grams. A needle-point biopsy into the man’s huge shoulder muscle.

By then, the whole town was standing nearby, watching, holding each other’s hands, crossing fingers or making a show of praying — everyone but me. I was sitting on Zillif’s empty cot, telling myself there was no blessed way I’d join that crowd of fools, believing anything important could happen in Sallysweet River, now or ever…

Shrieking cheers of victory. Bedlam. Piss-wetting hysteria. When people began to stampede, hugging and kissing everyone in sight, I scuttled to the angry sanctuary of my room.

We had no more deaths under the Big Top. Tur Zillif, my Lady Zillif, was the last.

Afterward, on tear-soaked sleepless nights, I told myself she could have been the last plague death on all Demoth. The idea was self-pitying rubbish: hundreds more must have died in the time it took to relay the news around the planet… the time it took to start food synthesizers pumping out olive oil… the time it took the olive oil to have an effect…

But our olive oil worked. It contained an enzyme hash that ripped the Pteromic microbe to protoplasmic tatters. With the microbe gone, Oolom muscles began to repair themselves.

My father was a hero.

I was so blind-raging furious with him.

One more memory of the day Zillif died: trying to lose myself in the forest at night. Looking for the blackest shadows. Pressing my weep-wrinkled face against the taut cool trunk of a bluebarrel tree. Damply kissing its cucumber-smooth bark, as a substitute for all the kisses, dreams, lives, redemptions that had been strangled for me in the instant of Zillif’s death.

Till a twig cracked behind me, and I wheeled around.

It was a young man in the black uniform of an Explorer cadet. Given the dark, I could barely make out his silhouette… but that was enough to show the man’s "pass-ticket" for becoming an Explorer. His left arm was only half the length of his right, and the hand on that arm was a pudgy babyish thing with too few fingers.

"Something wrong?" he asked.

Swiping at tears, I snapped, "I don’t need you."

"Few do," the man answered drily. "But I need you to go home now. We’re searching the woods for Oolom survivors, and you show up as hot as a bonfire on our scans. Compared to Ooloms anyway. You’re confusing our readouts."

He turned and slipped back into the darkness. Bristling with an attack of the stubborns, I stayed where I was, muttering, "Who does he think he is?" and occasionally aiming peevish kicks at the undergrowth.

Then an Admiralty skimmer flew overhead with loudspeakers blaring. "Greetings to all Ooloms. We have found a cure. Please go immediately to the nearest human settlement…"

I slouched back to our home compound and ordered the house-soul to turn my dome black.

Outside and inside.

Reading what I’ve just written about the plague — it makes me cringe. Too polite, too nice… as if, deary-dear, we were all a wee bit strained but coping.

We weren’t coping. Never think that. You have to understand what mass death does.

My mother flew into spitting slapping furies, accusing me of doing the dance with every boy/man/fence post in town (and half the girls/women/punch bowls). She’d invent the most graphic details of what I supposedly did, kinkies I scarce understood even after Ma shrieked explanations in my face.

Is that coping?

Another treat during the epidemic: my father hit me. And I hit him back. Not a fight, a ritual… one smack from him and one from me.

Desperation. A way of touching each other when hugs felt too puny.

Dads always hit me on the arm. Even today, I can close my eyes and bring back fresh memories of the sting, the burn, the surprised red flush on my skin.

I hit Dads on the face. His beard scratchy under my hand; me slapping hard enough to give my palm whisker burn. So it felt anyway.