Reif Larsen - I Am Radar

“However could I have lived without this?” Leila said to her husband as they prepared for bed one evening. “They feel like my own.”

Jean-Baptiste smiled. He reached for her hand.

“My dear,” he whispered.

“Thank you for being so patient with me,” she said. “I know I’m your burden.”

“You’re my gift. My wolf.”

“I haven’t been true to you.”

“We’re all trying. I know it isn’t easy. We’re all trying. It’s the best we can do.”

She extinguished the lantern and then she came to him, her hand moving quickly inside his pajama bottoms. He inhaled, sharply. Her forwardness caught him off guard, for they had not been together in some time. She shivered out of her chemise and rose up, white in the moonlight. He whispered a word and fell backwards into the bed. A dead lizard had dropped onto the mosquito net, its silhouette like a dark star against a white sky. He closed his eyes and raked his hands against her back. Beneath the skin, he could feel the heaving roll of her bones. Bones he knew better than his own.

• • •

LEILA’S COLLAPSE CAME just as the second semester was beginning. She was standing at the blackboard, writing the word l’honnêteté, applying the accent aigu on the third and final e, when she shuddered and fell, striking her chin on the edge of her desk. She lay on the ground, lifeless, a thin trickle of blood running from her nose and down to the point of her lips. The children crowded around her. They whispered to themselves, some held hands, a few began to cry. Then, from out of nowhere, Tien appeared. He held Leila’s head in his arms, wiping away the blood with his scarf.

“Khnhom sraleanh anak,” he said tenderly. “Sophanakha.” There was a growing pool of blood between her legs. He picked her up in his thin arms and carried her back to the house.

“She shouldn’t work so hard,” Eugenia later signed to her son in the hallway outside their bedroom. “Some people aren’t designed for the stress of the tropics.”

“Stop.” Jean-Baptiste signed.

“She doesn’t belong here.”

“Stop,” he said aloud, grabbing her hands. “She needs us. Please understand. I need you to understand.”

Eugenia’s diagnosis proved premature. Leila could barely rise from bed. It was not simply a matter of stress or jungle fatigue. Nor did it appear to be malaria or any of the more common tropical maladies. Her skin became translucent, her lips dull and grey. She developed large, pus-filled blisters up and down the length of her arms and legs. Her back began to peel in large sheets, making it extremely painful for her to lie supine.

The doctor was brought back in from Phnom Penh. The man spent some time examining her, taking notes, asking her questions. She was conscious but feverish. Her answers emerged as half sentences, words without tethers.

After some more prodding, the doctor came downstairs, shaking his head.

Jean-Baptiste offered him some brandy, an offer he refused, pondered, and then accepted. Eugenia watched as the two men sipped their drinks.

“What did you find?” asked Jean-Baptiste.

“She was pregnant,” the doctor said. “I couldn’t say for sure, but it was early in her term. Two months at most. The child’s gone. I’m sorry.”

“Pregnant?” Jean-Baptiste said, bewildered, nearly dropping his glass. “But she never told me.”

“I’m not sure she knew,” he said.

“So this is why she’s sick?”

The doctor shook his head. “There are a number of diagnoses I could give you. Smallpox, pemphigus, shingles. But none of these are quite right. Has she been exposed to anything unusual recently?”

“Only the children,” Jean-Baptiste said. “Maybe she contracted something from them.”

“But there have been no outbreaks in the population that you know of?”

Jean-Baptiste stared at him. “She was pregnant?” He put his head in his hands. “Good God. We were going to have a child?”

Eugenia touched the back of his neck. She made a small sign against his skin with her fingers. He was trembling.

The doctor walked through their house with his glass of spirits, rubbing his beard. He lifted up the arm of one of the marionettes and let it fall. He put a finger to the missing nose of the Sophanakha mask. He leafed through several of Jean-Baptiste’s science journals. At one point he stopped in front of a wall in the drawing room, where a framed X-ray of Leila’s radius hung in a golden frame.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“An arm,” said Jean-Baptiste.

“Your wife’s arm?”

“Yes. Why?”

The doctor left without pronouncing anything definitive, only that he had read about several cases of patients becoming sick after being exposed to high doses of radiation from an X-ray machine. Their symptoms were similar to Leila’s.

“I’m no expert,” the doctor said. “But there seems to be some destructive force hidden within the ray itself. An invisible killer.”

After he was gone, Eugenia sat with her son, whose eyes had lost all life.

“Your machine’s not what made her sick,” Eugenia signed. “I know it. She has a weak constitution.”

Jean-Baptiste shook his head. “She’s stronger than you will ever know, Mother.”

During the night, he went down to the cellar with a candle and directed its glow at the chassis of the defunct X-ray machine, now covered in a spectral scrim of spiderwebs and dust. There was a metallic scent of blood in the air. He ran his hands over the cool wires of the Tesla coil and then took a hammer and smashed the tubes one by one, the glass jumping and tearing at his wrists. He fell to the ground, weeping, wiping the blood from his hands across his eyes, nose, and mouth.

Upstairs, he knelt by his wife’s bedside. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never meant for it to be like this.”

“I’ve betrayed you,” she whispered. “I am the wolf.”

• • •

EUGENIA, WHETHER OUT of guilt or obligation, began tending to her daughter-in-law day and night, dabbing at the dark fluid that trickled from her nose, changing the dressings on the lesions, and reading to her from the lavish collection of novels that filled the house’s study. Her voice was at once too loud and too soft, the words helpless newborns, but Leila listened and smiled and held on tight to Eugenia’s hand.

Jean-Baptiste stalked the grounds like a ghost. Every part of the place now pointed to his folly, to his childish insistence on tinkering with the unknown. Everywhere he went, he could not escape his own shadow. With the telegraph line long dead, he was forced to write to a friend in Paris, Dr. Luc Jeunet, who he remembered had been one of the doctors to treat the great Madame Curie when she had become ill.

I fear I may have inadvertently poisoned my wife with the X-rays from my machine. I know now I was playing with an invisible kind of fire. The images were so brief. How could they have such a profound effect on her tissue? From what I understood, it takes prolonged exposure, years, to become dangerous. Nothing so fleeting. Yet words cannot describe the terror and shame that I now harbor in my soul if my actions are indeed the cause of her rapid decline. Please let me know what treatment course we should pursue and whether anything can be done.

I await your timely reply, JBdB

Desperate for any help, he once again sought the services of the kru Khmer. The shaman was a round man who seemed to smell unusually bad, but there was an air of wisdom in his movements that was both disquieting and comforting at the same time. The man had lived a thousand lives and had forgotten nothing.

He spent nearly ten minutes pressing at Leila’s skin, until she groaned. Eugenia, furious, sent him away.