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At nine o’clock the doctor was escorted out to his car by the mother and father, who handed him his bag. They conversed in the cool night wind for a few minutes. “Just be sure his hands are kept strapped to his legs,” said the doctor. “I don’t want him hurting himself.”
“Will he be all right, Doctor?” The mother held to his arm a moment.
He patted her shoulder. “Haven’t I been your family physician for thirty years? It’s the fever. He imagines things.”
“But those bruises on his throat, he almost choked himself.”
“Just you keep him strapped; he’ll be all right in the morning.”
The car moved off down the dark September road.
At three in the morning, Charles was still awake in his small black room. The bed was damp under his head and his back. He was very warm. Now he no longer had any arms or legs, and his body was beginning to change. He did not move on the bed, but looked at the vast blank ceiling space with insane concentration. For a while he had screamed and thrashed, but now he was weak and hoarse from it, and his mother had gotten up a number of times to soothe his brow with a wet towel. Now he was silent, his hands strapped to his legs.
He felt the walls of his body change, the organs shift, the lungs catch fire like burning bellows of pink alcohol. The room was lighted up as with the flickerings of a hearth.
Now he had no body. It was all gone. It was under him, but it was filled with a vast pulse of some burning, lethargic drug. It was as if a guillotine had neatly lopped off his head, and his head lay shining on a midnight pillow while the body, below, still alive, belonged to somebody else. The disease had eaten his body and from the eating had reproduced itself in feverish duplicate.
There were the little hand hairs and the fingernails and the scars and the toenails and the tiny mole on his right hip, all done again in perfect fashion.
I am dead, he thought. I’ve been killed, and yet I live. My body is dead, it is all disease and nobody will know. I will walk around and it will not be me, it will be something else. It will be something all bad, all evil, so big and so evil it’s hard to understand or think about. Something that will buy shoes and drink water and get married some day maybe and do more evil in the world than has ever been done.
Now the warmth was stealing up his neck, into his cheeks, like a hot wine. His lips burned, his eyelids, like leaves, caught fire. His nostrils breathed out blue flame, faintly, faintly.
This will be all, he thought. It’ll take my head and my brain and fix each eye and every tooth and all the marks in my brain, and every hair and every wrinkle in my ears, and there’ll be nothing left of me.
He felt his brain fill with a boiling mercury. He felt his left eye clench in upon itself and, like a snail, withdraw, shift. He was blind in his left eye. It no longer belonged to him. It was enemy territory. His tongue was gone, cut out. His left cheek was numbed, lost. His left ear stopped hearing. It belonged to someone else now. This thing that was being born, this mineral thing replacing the wooden log, this disease replacing healthy animal cell.
He tried to scream and he was able to scream loud and high and sharply in the room, just as his brain flooded down, his right eye and right ear were cut out, he was blind and deaf, all fire, all terror, all panic, all death.
His scream stopped before his mother ran through the door to his side.
It was a good, clear morning, with a brisk wind that helped carry the doctor up the path before the house. In the window above, the boy stood, fully dressed. He did not wave when the doctor waved and called, “What’s this? Up? My God!”
The doctor almost ran upstairs. He came gasping into the bedroom.
“What are you doing out of bed?” he demanded of the boy. He tapped his thin chest, took his pulse and temperature. “Absolutely amazing! Normal. Normal, by God!”
“I shall never be sick again in my life,” declared the boy, quietly, standing there, looking out the wide window. “Never.”
“I hope not. Why, you’re looking fine, Charles.”
“Doctor?”
“Yes, Charles?”
“Can I go to school now?” asked Charles.
“Tomorrow will be time enough. You sound positively eager.”
“I am. I like school. All the kids. I want to play with them and wrestle with them, and spit on them and play with the girls’ pigtails and shake the teacher’s hand, and rub my hands on all the cloaks in the cloakroom, and I want to grow up and travel and shake hands with people all over the world, and be married and have lots of children, and go to libraries and handle books and—all of that I want to!” said the boy, looking off into the September morning. “What’s the name you called me?”
“What?” The doctor puzzled. “I called you nothing but Charles.”
“It’s better than no name at all, I guess.” The boy shrugged.
“I’m glad you want to go back to school,” said the doctor.
“I really anticipate it,” smiled the boy. “Thank you for your help, Doctor. Shake hands.”
