Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

You wrote that you are tired of being sick. Tired of your bones hurting and the mysterious bruises, and tired of Tercin. For someone so stupid his deprivations are clever, and he has a certain cruel genius. Sometimes I think he is not stupid after all, only distracted by laziness and spitefulness, and if he devoted but a quarter of the time he spends torturing you to studying, he would grow up to be President. But never mind him, dear friend, and never mind the fevers and the sores beneath your tongue. One day you will be free of him, and one day you will be free of this illness. Good or bad, brothers depart, and so must sickness. And I don’t mean either that we will be free of it in death .

We missed you in church yesterday. Or I did, anyway. . I do not think Wallop noticed your absence — for all that he prayed for us with increasing fervor all afternoon — Let this sickness be lifted, let it depart from them forever! — he hardly ever looked our way, as if it were catching at a glance, and as if it had made anybody sick yet who was older than nineteen years. I did miss you, though. All of us on two benches (Wallop said it was so the healing could find us all at once — does the hand of God need that help? I wanted to ask. We all knew it was quarantine). Eleanor sat between me and Sam Finch. We mortified her with our whispering, and she tried to quiet us with great vigorous shushes from out of the bottom of her belly, and made such a noise finally that Wallop turned to her and asked, “Ms. Crowley, can you tell me the meaning of this afflicting vision?”

Eleanor blushed so hard I could feel my own cheeks burning from the heat in her face. In her panic she looked at me and then at Sam, and then clear across the church at her mother, but the lady only stared into her lap. Then she looked back to Wallop and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer in a tiny, frightened voice. He let her finish and said, “Indeed. Is there any other answer but prayer, in the face of such a question, and in the face of such an affliction?” I’ve never liked the man but never hated him till then, because I understood all of a sudden that my life (and yours, and Sam’s and Edgar’s and Aaron’s and Lily’s and Elizabeth’s and Connor’s and even Eleanor’s — unless she is faking!) depends upon the answer to that question. Wallop would have us paternoster on it but I think the answer will require a more vigorous and dangerous pursuit. Yet he was right about that one thing. It doesn’t happen for nothing — we are not transported so fantastically for no reason. The vision is a challenge and its meaning is a cure .

“An upsetment in the blood,” said Dr. Herz, summoned all the way from Cleveland by Sara’s father. For her he prescribed opium and antimony and cinchona, and though Arthur Carter was the only man in town who could pay him, he visited every sick child — by August 20, a week after the Lammas feast, there were sixteen of them lying about in various states of torpor. He came to Peter last, and over the objection of his mother, who had already formulated and initiated a plan of treatment. “Does he know lady’s mantle?” she asked Peter, her captive audience, and anyone else who would listen. “Does he know motherwort or neem? And what’s a nettle to him but a weed and a nuisance?” But her husband insisted.

“A grand and severe upsetment,” the doctor continued, stoppering up the little glass vials he’d filled with specimens — every fluid or ichor he could coax from Peter he sampled and stored for analysis back in Cleveland. “That explains the visions. Heaps of blood in the brain block up the sinuses that usually drain away overheated thoughts — hence a vision of flame. Didn’t you mention a burning tree, my boy?”

“A tower,” Peter said, staring out the window at Tercin, seated on a rock and worrying a carrot with his nail.

“Ah — no doubt it’ll be a tree in a few days, and then the other children will see a tree. It propagates, you see, like a ripple in a pond.” He made a motion to illustrate the spreading effect, pushing out with his two hands and then sweeping them apart so it looked like he was trying to swim through the air. “Do you see?”

Peter said no, but his father nodded, and asked again, “How do we make it better?”

“That’s simple enough,” said Dr. Herz. “I’ll have my elixir made up in a few days, and be back with it by Friday. Mr. Carter has kindly agreed to purchase enough to supply the whole town, though I suspect if we treat Peter the other cases will resolve on their own.”

“God bless him,” his mother said blankly.

“God bless us all,” said Dr. Herz, “when we are subjected to trials, and sickness is always a trial. But what’s a trial but a test, and how else do we become perfect except through examination, and what’s perfection except the accumulation of mastered adversity?”

“We must wrap him in olibanum and meadowsweet flower,” his mother said, and Peter stopped paying attention when she and the doctor started to bicker back and forth. He watched Tercin instead, who suddenly ate his carrot in three huge bites, then leaped up to roll and tumble in the grass, turning cartwheels and somersaults and running to jump off the woodpile and turn a forward flip. It was a display of perfect health and freedom meant to gall, but it only made Peter sigh, and wonder at his brother’s malice. “It doesn’t hurt,” he’d tell him later. “You shouldn’t bother with it ’cause I don’t even notice.”

Something popped in the room — there was a noise like a whip snapping, and then a rustle like heavy curtains in a strong wind, and a stab of pain in Peter’s hip. He winced and drew up his legs. His mother opened her mouth and put a hand on his chest. She opened her mouth and spoke a question to him, and even though he couldn’t hear a word of it he could tell what it was by the shape of her lips—“Is it the pain again?”

“I’m deaf!” he said, looking to his father, who was moving his lips rapidly and silently. “But I’m not — I can hear me!” And when he knocked on the windowsill he could hear that, too, but his parents and the doctor were all jabbering at him silently, his parents’ faces twisted with worry and the doctor looking smugly calm. Peter thought he was saying, “Of course you are deaf! It’s all part of the upsetment, my boy!’

Another snap, another twinge in his hip and a stab in his back, and then he was immersed in noise — his mother and his father and Dr. Herz were speaking, but in voices that were not their voices — from his mother came a man’s voice that sounded like his father when you just woke him up after his Sunday nap, and his father spoke with a lady’s voice, and Dr. Herz sounded like a little girl.

“There’s a great deal of smoke billowing from the towers, Phil. We can see flame coming out from at least two sides of the building,” said his mother.

“That looks like a second plane has just — we just saw another plane coming in from the side,” said Dr. Herz.

“I don’t believe this!” said his father. “The second tower has exploded from about twenty stories below in a gargantuan explosion.” All of them were reaching now to steady Peter and calm him, because he was pressing himself against the wall and the window to get away from them.

“Be quiet!” he shouted at them. “Just hush up!” He felt a fever growing, and had the idea, with them pawing at him, and the fever coming on like it was reaching to gather him up, that he could get away from the vision before it came, if he only tried. So he launched himself off the wall, and rolled through them, out of the bed and onto the floor. And before his father could even turn around he was through the kitchen and out the door.