Margaret Atwood - The Year of the Flood

The cubicle stinks. Toby lifts Ren up, rolls her to the side, pulls out the soiled towels, wipes Ren off. She’s put on rubber gloves for the purpose: if dysentery’s going around she has no wish to catch it. She smoothes down clean towels, rolls Ren back. Her arms flop, her head wilts; she’s muttering.

This is going to be a lot of work, thinks Toby. And when Ren recovers – if she recovers – there will be two people eating instead of one. So the food stash will be gone twice as quickly. What’s left of it. Which isn’t much.

Maybe the fever will get the better of Ren. Maybe she’ll die in her sleep.

Toby considers the powdered Death Angels. It wouldn’t take much. Just a little, in Ren’s weakened condition. Put her out of her misery. Help her to fly away on white, white wings. Maybe it would be kinder. A blessing.

I am an unworthy person, Toby thinks. Merely to have such an idea. You’ve known this girl since she was a child, she’s come to you for help, she has every right to trust you. Adam One would say that Ren is a precious gift that has been given to Toby so that Toby may demonstrate unselfishness and sharing and those higher qualities the Gardeners had been so eager to bring out in her. Toby can’t quite see it that way, not at the moment. But she’ll have to keep trying.

Ren sighs and groans and flails. She’s having a bad dream.

When it’s dark, Toby lights a candle and sits beside her, listening to her breathe. In out, in out. Pause. In. Then out. Raggedy. At intervals she feels Ren’s forehead. Cooler? There must be a thermometer in the building; in the morning she’ll look for it. She takes her pulse: rapid, irregular.

Then she nods off in her chair, and the next thing she knows she wakes up in the dark with a smell of singeing. She winds up her flashlight: the candle has fallen over, and a corner of Ren’s pink sheet is smouldering. Luckily it’s damp.

That was terminally stupid, Toby tells herself. No more candles unless I’m fully awake.

In the morning Ren feels cooler. Her pulse is stronger, and she can even hold the cup of warm water in her own two trembling hands. Toby’s put mint in it this morning, as well as the honey and salt.

Once Ren has gone to sleep again, Toby hauls the dirty sheets and towels up to the roof to wash them. She’s brought her binoculars, and while the sheets and towels are soaking she scans the Spa grounds.

Pigs far away, over in the southwest corner of the meadow. Two Mo’Hairs, a blue one and a silver one, grazing quietly together. No liobams. Dogs barking somewhere. Vultures flapping around the pig funeral site.

“Get away from there, you archeologists,” says Toby. She’s feeling light-headed, almost giddy – in the mood to tell herself jokes. Three huge pink butterflies circle her head, alight on the damp sheets. Maybe they think they’ve found the biggest pink butterfly of all. Maybe it’s a love affair. Now they have their thin tongues unrolled, licking. Not love, then: salt.

Some will tell you Love is merely chemical, my Friends, said Adam One. Of course it is chemical: where would any of us be without chemistry? But Science is merely one way of describing the world. Another way of describing it would be to say: where would any of us be without Love?

Dear Adam One, thinks Toby. He must be dead. And Zeb – dead also, despite wishful thinking. Though maybe not; because if I’m alive – more to the point, if Ren’s alive – then anyone at all could be alive too.

She stopped listening on her wind-up radio months ago because the silence was so discouraging. But just because she’s heard no one doesn’t mean no one’s there. Which had been among Adam One’s hypothetical proofs for the existence of God.

Toby washes Ren’s infected leg, applies more honey. Ren eats a little, drinks a little. More mushroom elixir, more Willow. After much rummaging, Toby locates a Spa first-aid kit; there’s a tube of antibiotic cream, but it’s stale-dated. No thermometer. Who ordered this crap? she thinks. Oh yes. I did.

Anyway maggots are better.

In the afternoon she lifts the maggots from the plastic snap-top, rinses them in tepid water. Then she transfers them to a sheet of gauze from the first-aid kit, applies another sheet over the top, and tapes the maggot-filled envelope over the wound. It won’t take long for the maggots to eat through the gauze: they know what they like.

“This will tickle,” she tells Ren. “But they’ll make you better. Try not to move your leg.”

“What are they?” says Ren.

“They’re your friends,” says Toby. “But you don’t need to look.”

Her homicidal impulse of the night before is gone: she will not drag dead Ren out into the meadow for the pigs and vultures. Now she’d like to cure her, cherish her, for isn’t it miraculous that Ren is here? That she’s come through the Waterless Flood with only minor damage? Or fairly minor. Just to have a second person on the premises – even a feeble person, even a sick person who sleeps most of the time – just this makes the Spa seem like a cozy domestic dwelling rather than a haunted house.

I’ve been the ghost, thinks Toby.

It takes the maggots three days to clean the wound. Toby watches them carefully: if they run out of dead tissue, they’ll start in on living flesh.

By the second morning Ren’s fever has gone, though Toby continues the mushroom drops just to make sure. Ren’s eating more now. Toby helps her up the stairs to the roof and sits her down on the imitationwood bench, in the early morning light. The maggots are photophobic: light drives them into the deepest corners of the wound, which is where they need to be.

No movement out there in the meadow. No sounds from the forest.

Toby tries asking Ren where she’s been ever since the Flood hit, and how she escaped it, and how she got here, why she’d been dressed in those blue feathers; but she only tries once because Ren starts crying. All she’ll say is, “I’ve lost Amanda!”

“Never mind,” says Toby. “We’ll find her.”

On the fourth morning Toby removes the maggot plaster: the wound is clean, and healing. “Now to get your muscles back in shape,” she tells Ren.

Ren starts walking, up and down the stairs, along the corridors. She’s gained a little weight: Toby’s been feeding her the last few jars of AnooYoo Lemon Meringue Facial, which has a lot of sugar in it and nothing toxic that Toby can think of. She leads Ren through some exercises from Zeb’s old Urban Bloodshed Limitation classes – the satsuma, the unagi. Centred like a Fruit, sinuous like an Eel. She needs the refresher herself; she’s out of practice.

After a few days Ren tells her story, or a little of her story. It comes out in short clumps of words punctuated by long periods of staring into space. She tells about being locked in at Scales, and how Amanda came all the way from the Wisconsin desert and figured out the door code. Then Shackie and Croze and Oates appeared from nowhere, just like magic, and she was so happy – they’d been saved by being in Painball when the plague broke out. But then three horrible men from the Painball Gold Team came to Scales, and she and Amanda and the boys ran away. She’d said they should come to AnooYoo because Toby might be there, and they’d almost made it – they were walking along through the trees, and then blackout. She can’t get any farther than that.