Fever (26 page)

“Nurse?” he whispered again, and Dr. Mowbray leaned closer to him.

A patient was being wheeled past the door, returned from surgery, judging by the caps and gowns worn by the two nurses pushing the stretcher and by the bottle of plasma one of them was holding aloft as the patient sailed silently down the corridor, the only sound the whisper of the wheels, the rustle of the sheet as it brushed against the wall. I have work to do, the doctor reminded himself, and half-rose from the chair, halting in a crouched position as though his back had caught in a spasm or he was at the starting line of a race.

He hesitated, not knowing whether to sit down again or to go on out of the room and down the corridor to see Philip Monroe who would greet him cheerfully enough, though with frightened eyes. He thought of the man’s lean, athletic body, his thick, dark hair—he was only thirty—and of the yellowish tinge his skin had taken on. Dr. Mowbray had known at once it was cancer, although there had been no tests yet to show it, and no one else seemed to think so. Perhaps it was dread of seeing Philip Monroe that made him hang by the old man’s bed.

The old man had written so many books, simple books, so simple a child could read them. Perhaps he had written them for children, having given up on the adults of the world, who cut down trees and exposed the earth to the sun so that it grew parched and feverish, couldn’t hold the rain and thus no longer produced anything. So that climates changed, precipitation dwindled, the land became desert and the people crowded into cities where they starved.

Dr. Mowbray thought how St. Barbe Baker had walked
through the Douglas firs of Vancouver Island, through the poplars, birches, and pines of Saskatchewan, the scented orange groves of Palestine, the mahogany forests of Nigeria, and how wherever he had gone he sang the praises of trees, he planted trees, persuaded others to plant them, tried to save them from the loggers, the farmers, the developers. He had understood that winning out over nature is a hollow victory, one that leads only to the death of the planet, and its people.

While I have been concerned with microbes, bacteria, viruses, the systems of the body, with the tissue, the blood, the bones, and have found only disease and death and more death. He pondered, rising to look out his patient’s window over the roofs of other wings, other buildings, to the multi-storied, steel car park beyond.

Philip Monroe would die. Thinking about the old man and his trees, he knew it was so. He would open that flat belly and find again only deadness and disease. All my science, he thought, seeing white-coated people pass the windows of the floor across from him, all my science won’t save this old man or Philip Monroe. He put his hands in the pockets of his trousers and felt the coins he carried there, their hardness and how they had taken on the warmth from his body. He tried to understand what he had read the old man believed. He imagined himself walking with the old man through the redwood trees of California. He closed his eyes and concentrated, letting the coins drop, sinking into his imagining.

In it the forest lost its particularity, became merely a forest somewhere on the earth and he was walking in it by the old man’s side, feeling first the sun and then the cool shadow on his face, smelling the sweet, clean scent, listening to the silence that seemed always to be filled with something, so that he caught
himself always listening, as if when he held himself still enough, he would finally hear.

The spirits of the Maori leave this life to travel to the Underworld through the pohutukawa tree, the old man told him. And when the Maori have to cut down a tree, first they ask permission of the tree’s spirit, and after, they cover the stump with branches to protect it. When the Kikuyu of Africa cut down trees they always leave one tree standing to collect the spirits of all the other trees so that they should not wander about and be uneasy. I have seen three thousand warriors dancing around one sacred mugumu tree. Shinto teaches that spirit—
kami
—resides in nature and especially in trees, and thus practitioners of the religion revere trees.

I will give you a vision, the old man said to Dr. Mowbray. I will tell you what I have seen … Once I saw a broad highway lined with trees which radiated all the colours of the rainbow. Each of these trees bore fruit. I saw every fruit known to man hanging from their boughs and many I had never seen before. And at the end of this long avenue of trees, I saw a park, and a garden with many rare trees from all over the world growing there. And in the centre of that garden, dominating it, stood … The Tree of Life.

The doctor sighed. Where can an old man go when he dies, he wondered, who has already seen the Tree of Life? Who already understands what I never have, that the earth lives, that the trees, the sky, and humankind are one?

He turned away from the window and saw that while he had been dreaming, looking out over the rooftops and the walls of the hospital, the old man had died.

When death comes one knows it, one dies in peace, he remembered.

He thought of his father’s farm, drying up, blowing away, of the dying trees, and the empty creekbed behind the house, of the stench of the slime-covered weeds in its bottom, the white bellies of the dead fish, the waterbirds dead on its banks, the dryness of the air and the white-hot sun burning the pale, barren soil.

Drought had come, the trees were dying, the old man was dead. Soon, in a minute now, he would have to go down the hall and try not to show Philip Monroe by the look in his eyes that he was condemned. Although, it seemed to him, that in his heart the man knew this already.

And it seemed suddenly to Dr. Mowbray that he was the one who brought the death that surrounded him, that he in his white coat with his instruments and his head full of science, with his skillful hands and his remote eyes, it was he who carried death with him. He thought of throwing himself from the window to the concrete far below.

Shuddering, he turned to the nurse who was taking the old man’s pulse.

“He’s gone,” he said, and she padded out of the room angrily, then with resignation, relinquishing her red bathing suit and the sun, to go and write things down, to telephone, to prepare papers for the doctor to sign saying the old man was surely dead.

Who will redeem me? the doctor asked. Who will make me again that innocent farm boy I was once so long ago? Who will journey with me through the forests of the world, into the heart of the universe?

No one, the old man said, no one, take your courage in your hands and go alone. They were covering the old man’s face with a sheet and wheeling his body from the room.

And Philip Monroe? the doctor asked.

Go to him and hold his hand, the old man said. And somehow, that was enough.

The publicist checks them in at the desk, then leads them down a narrow corridor and up a flight of stairs. Alexis follows her and Jamie brings up the rear. They reach a small lounge with worn sofas on each wall and a coffee table between them that is so low a midget would have to kneel to use it. The outside wall is glass and looks out on the dark harbour and the rain. The opposite wall is glass too, but it looks into the studio where the host of the radio show with the biggest listening audience in that half of the province is smoking, gesturing with his cigarette, and talking into the haze to a male guest who is seated with his back to the three of them. Although they can’t see the guest’s face, they can hear his voice over the speaker system that is tuned to the show. They sit down, Alexis with her back to the harbour facing Jamie and Sheila, whose backs are to the studio.

Alexis can’t concentrate on what the two men are saying. She has no idea what their conversation is about, it is that kind of radio, although she is aware that they seem to be enjoying themselves. She turns and looks out at the rain running silently down the thick panes of glass. Jamie, her son, says something to Sheila, who stands and waves mutely to the host on the other side of the glass wall. The host nods back and sticks up seven fingers. Sheila
nods agreement and sits again. The voices of the two men, broken now and then by chuckles, murmur on.

Alexis turns again to look out to the black expanse of water spreading itself out below and behind her. Through the rain streaking down the window she can see the lights of a small vessel crossing the harbour and by its steady, angled course, she recognizes it as the sea bus nearing the downtown side. She had ridden on it a couple of years before when she had come to Vancouver to see Jamie in a play at his theatre school. Once they were under way the lights were shut off and they could see the north shore growing smaller behind them, and ahead of them, the lights of the downtown skyline approaching. With Jamie seated beside her, tired after his performance and now remote and thoughtful, the few passengers scattered silently about the cabin, it had seemed as if they could ride forever in that muted, gently rocking capsule across the black waters and through the endless night. Night sea journey, she thinks now, remembering, and grows silent.

“I thought you’d like it,” Jamie said, smug, and grinned at her, not shy anymore as he had been at the airport when he’d said he wanted to bring her here. He had been standing at the top of the escalator waiting for her, smiling both eagerly and shyly as she approached. She could tell at once that he really was glad to see her and a small knot that she hadn’t realized was there inside her let go. He had a small gold earring in one ear that hadn’t been there when she had last seen him a year before, he was wearing a baggy, crumpled cotton shirt and pants that had been washed to near white and his hair was so short that she had wondered, startled, if his head had been shaved. But none of this mattered to
her, she was so glad to see him again. “Isn’t it big?” he said. “You can see why it’s called Casa Grande. Come on.”

The path the guidebook led them along wound its way among the mesquite and cactus. At each marked point Jamie stopped and solemnly read aloud what the book had to say about it, while she drank in the sight of him, knowing she was probably smiling like a fool and not caring. It was so hot that sweat beaded his forehead, trickled down his neck, and dampened his chest. He took off his shirt, balled it, and used it to mop his face and torso.

Casa Grande, the big house, had once been at the centre of a walled village, although now there was nothing left of the other buildings or the wall but foot-high ridges which they stepped over casually. The big building looked as if it had been made out of the sand it was standing on, compressed somehow and baked to a lovely, warm, pink-brown colour.

“This stuff is called
caliche,”
Jamie said, placing his palm flat on its granular surface. The building’s highest remaining points rose thirty feet above the ground, much of its top storey had eroded away, and the walls were a good three feet thick. She leaned against the foundation at an opening, chest-high on her, which led into a passageway on what was the building’s ground floor. How cool it must have been inside, she thought. When she had gotten off the plane in Phoenix and the hundred degree heat had rolled over her, she had thought, this is unbearable, I’ll never be able to stand it, but here in the desert, even though it was much hotter, the heat seemed more natural.

“It says they don’t know for sure who built it …” Jamie paused and turned a page, “maybe some people called the Hohokam who are extinct now. And they aren’t sure what the building was for.” He glanced up from the book to the huge structure looming over them, and she saw that he had forgotten
her, was absorbed in the mystery. She thought how it would have been the biggest thing within the knowledge of any living creature, how its size, towering over the desert, must have impressed the people who saw it. “They figure it might have been a sacred building like a temple, or that maybe it was for astronomy.” He wiped a trickle of sweat off the end of his nose. “You see those rectangular openings near the top? I guess they line up with the sun on certain days or something.”

“What happened to them? The people, I mean the … Hohokam,” she asked, hesitating over the name. Jamie flipped back a couple of pages, searching.

“They don’t say. They don’t know. They just disappeared.”

Alexis peered into the narrow, shadowed passage as if she were looking for something. Impulsively, she said, “I’m so glad you brought me here,” although this was not quite what she meant, and even though she knew their visit here was for Jamie a way of delaying what she had come all this way for and which both of them, for different reasons, dreaded.

And the heat, oh the heat, she was from the prairie herself, she knew dry heat, but not like this, never like this. It was incredible, it was a marvel. She wanted to lift her face to the sky, but she didn’t dare, the sky was all sun, it would burn her to a cinder, and she thought of the Diving God of the Toltecs, or was it the Mayans, the red sun sinking into the sea at the end of each day. She turned to Jamie again.

“Do they know how old it is?”

“About 1300,” Jamie read. “Not so old, but still, isn’t it amazing to think that a building made of sand could last almost seven centuries?”

“Caliche,” she said, raising one finger to make him laugh. “The elusive Hohokam,” deepening her voice, making a joke of it. “This is all that’s left of them,” Jamie said, serious, gesturing to
the building. “This and a few broken pots and baskets. Incredible, isn’t it, that a whole tribe of people who … believed something, who must have had a vision of what things are, should just disappear from the face of the earth.” His voice was perplexed, she thought she could hear the hint of something deeper.

But Alexis wanted to stand still, to touch the building with the length of her body, to hold herself motionless, to clear her head of all thoughts or ideas, to open her consciousness to that knowing blackness till something always just out of her reach finally came: a vision, a word, a feeling. They stood silently side by side, not quite touching.

“That their God would let them die.” He said this softly, as if to himself, and in the midst of the appalling heat, Alexis was, for an instant, chilled. He turned away suddenly, speaking over his shoulder to her. “Tomorrow the Grand Canyon.”

“No,” she said, smiling so he wouldn’t think she was being harsh, “tomorrow the ashram.”

Across from her the man whose face she hasn’t seen is standing, shaking hands with the talk show’s host. They’re laughing, it seems to her that she can feel the male camaraderie oozing through the panes of glass between them. She steels herself to face what might well be the host’s hostility, for she suspects there is undeniable audacity in what she and her son have done and it was her idea and her energy that had kept it going in the initial stages.

Sheila is rising now and Jamie is too, and she follows them into the studio as the previous guest squeezes past them on his way out. Alexis feels prickly with uneasiness, not knowing what to expect, suspecting, from the interview she has watched but not heard, that this is the wrong venue for her and her sensitive,
actor son. Or at least the wrong venue for her. ‘I an artist,’ she repeats to herself, and can’t help but grin one more time over what is a joke so old—a line Mickey Rooney once said in a movie—that nobody would still get it but she and Jamie’s father. But as the publicist introduces them, Alexis sees she is pleased with herself for having gotten them on this show. And well she should be, Alexis reminds herself, it’s no mean feat.

Alexis has done her share of three-minute interviews she suspects were never run, over rock-and-roll stations, with interviewers whose carefully honed styles made them sound to her merely crazed, and not one of who, she doesn’t think, had ever read one of her books. Once she had walked into a station for a scheduled interview and found the reception area empty and loud, muffled voices coming from behind a closed door. Then the receptionist had appeared with tears still streaming down her face and said only, “It’s off, it’s all off,” and waved Alexis away. Later that morning, at another station, the man who was to interview her told her that the first station had been sold to a new owner who had decided to go country-and-western and had walked in that morning and fired everybody. She remembers wondering if she would ever be well enough known not to have to do that humiliating and, it seemed to her, fruitless round.

“Do you remember that radio interview we did at CK-something-or-other? The one with the huge listening audience—in Vancouver, I mean? Let’s go this way.” Jamie followed her past the pen where the calves backed away, wide-eyed, before they turned and ran away, tossing their heads and kicking up their heels. With Jamie’s help she kicked the snow away from the bottom of the gate and took off her mitts to unhook the chain that held it
closed. Together they pulled back the gate, it creaked with the cold, far enough for each of them to squeeze through, and shut it behind them.

“Yeah,” he said. “I still listen to him sometimes. He’s pretty good at what he does, if you like that kind of confessional radio.” They crunched over the snow-covered rocks to the edge of the riverbed. Ever since the latest cold spell even the shallow spot where she crossed in summer and which was the last to freeze over, was frozen solid. She could imagine that by now the river had stopped flowing under the ice cover, was frozen solid down to its bed. Her cheeks had begun to burn with the cold, but she didn’t want to go back in yet, and knew he didn’t either. He was the one who had wanted this walk, eager to see the place he was rarely on, even though it had been his mother’s home for almost fifteen years now.

They turned and walked side by side along the bank following the path the cows had made in the snow. The air was very still, the only sound their feet crunching on the hard-packed surface of the path or, if one of them strayed off, brushing through the loose snow banked beside it. The sky rose on all sides around them, high and a perfect, clear blue, beginning to deepen now at the horizon. The sky made her forget the cold; on good days it made her feel she was soaring even if she was only walking along the riverbank.

“During that whole interview I felt off-balance. I couldn’t get a grip on what he wanted from me, I couldn’t seem to connect.” She kicked at the snow beside the path, slipped, and would have fallen, but coming up to her, he caught her elbow and steadied her. “But you caught on right away. I felt that you understood because you’re a different generation. I mean, I thought it was an example of the generation gap at work.”

“Naw,” Jamie said easily, his exhalation sending out a thin white plume against the blue-white of the snow. “It was the style of the show—speedy, that’s all.”

“He really liked you,” she said. “After a while he only talked to you. It was just as well. I didn’t know what to say anyway.”

“It was a hard thing to talk about,” he said. “After a while I just started saying whatever came into my head.” He laughed and stopped in the path, turning to her. “Now
that
was what he wanted. He wasn’t interested in the truth.”

Alexis laughed with him, but she was thinking how she couldn’t get the interview out of her head, how she still thought about it. And what puzzles me, she thought but didn’t say out loud, is what it was that I missed. What I didn’t know about you, what I didn’t know about us. That what he wanted me to say was that I was guilty. But I’m not, she said to herself. Then, maybe I am. Maybe I really did abandon you, my only child, and I could never admit it. Can’t, even now.

When the interviewer stands to shake hands with them, Alexis sees he is a big man, taller than Jamie. He has a rumpled, comfortable look and cigarette ashes have left a trail down his shirtfront. The big, flat ashtray by his microphone is full of crushed cigarette butts. She is surprised to find there is anybody left who smokes so unselfconsciously and so heavily.

“We’ll do twenty minutes or so,” he says, “depending on how it goes.” Alexis doesn’t like the sound of this and for some reason he doesn’t make her feel easy despite his affable air, the dim lights in the studio, the comfortable-looking sofa at one end where the publicist has seated herself, or even the blue haze of cigarette smoke that gives the room a cozy, intimate air. They sit down at microphones across from him and wait. He listens to
something in his headset, draws on his cigarette, nods, and begins.

“I hear this play is full of blood and murder and so on. Is that right?” Alexis is taken aback, as he meant her to be, and she laughs and says, “All of the above, but metaphorically, not literally,” and knows by the look the interviewer, Bill is his name, gives her, that she has caught the right spirit. He turns to Jamie.

“Now, I understand that this play is autobiographical. It’s about you and your mother—it’s your story, right?” Alexis turns to look at Jamie, nervous for him, a little frightened suddenly at what has been unleashed here. And, she reminds herself, it’s all her doing. Jamie swallows, then leans forward, a look of resolve that she’s known as part of him since he was a four-year-old, crossing his face.