Lord Foul's Bane (3 page)

For weeks the speeches were pounded into him until he began to dream them at night. Admonitions took over the ravaged playground of his mind. Instead of stories and passions, he dreamed perorations.

“Leprosy,” he heard night after night, “is perhaps the most inexplicable of all human afflictions. It is a mystery, just as the strange, thin difference between living and inert matter is a mystery. Oh, we know some things about it: it is not fatal; it is not contagious in any conventional way; it operates by destroying the nerves, typically in the extremities and in the cornea of the eye; it produces deformity, largely because it negates the body's ability to protect itself by feeling and reacting against pain; it may result in complete disability, extreme deformation of the face and limbs, and blindness; and it is irreversible, since the nerves that die cannot be restored. We also know that, in almost all cases, proper treatment using DDS - diamino-diphenyl-sulfone- and some of the new synthetic antibiotics can arrest the spread of the disease, and that, once the neural deterioration has been halted, the proper medication and therapy can keep the affliction under control for the rest of the patient's life. What we do not know is why or how any specific person contracts the illness. As far as we can prove, it comes out of nowhere for no reason. And once you get it, you cannot hope for a cure.”

The words he dreamed were not exaggerated- they could have come verbatim from any one of a score of lectures or conferences- but their tolling sounded like the tread of something so unbearable that it should never have been uttered. The impersonal voice of the doctor went on: "What we have learned from our years of study is that Hansen's disease creates two unique problems for the patient- interrelated difficulties that do not occur with any other illness, and that make the mental aspect of being a leprosy victim more crucial than the physical.

“The first involves your relationships with your fellow human beings. Unlike leukemia today, or tuberculosis in the last century, leprosy is not, and has never been, a “poetic” disease, a disease which can be romanticized. Just the reverse. Even in societies that hate their sick less than we Americans do, the leper has always been despised and feared- outcast even by his most-loved ones because of a rare bacillus no one can predict or control. Leprosy is not fatal, and the average patient can look forward to as much as thirty or fifty years of life as a leper. That fact, combined with the progressive disability which the disease inflicts, makes leprosy patients, of all sick people, the ones most desperately in need of human support. But virtually all societies condemn their lepers to isolation and despair- denounced as criminals and degenerates, as traitors and villains- cast out of the human race because science has failed to unlock the mystery of this affection. In country after country, culture after culture around the world, the leper has been considered the personification of everything people, privately and communally, fear and abhor.

“People react this way for several reasons. First, the disease produces an ugliness and a bad smell that are undeniably unpleasant. And second, generations of medical research notwithstanding, people fail to believe that something so obvious and- ugly and so mysterious is not contagious. The fact that we cannot answer questions about the bacillus reinforces their fear- we cannot be sure that touch or air or food or water or even compassion do not spread the disease. In the absence of any natural, provable explanation of the illness, people account for it in other ways, all bad- as proof of crime or filth or perversion, evidence of God's judgment, as the horrible sign of some psychological or spiritual or moral corruption or guilt. And they insist it's catching, despite evidence that it is minimally contagious, even to children. So many of you are going to have to live without one single human support to bear the burden with you.

“That is one reason why we place such an emphasis on counselling here; we want to help you learn to cope with loneliness. Many of the patients who leave this institution do not five out their full years. Under the shock of their severance, they lose their motivation; they let their self-treatments slide, and become either actively or passively suicidal; few of them come back here in time. The patients who survive find someone somewhere who is willing to help them want to live. Or they find somewhere inside themselves the strength to endure.

“Whichever way you go, however, one fact will remain constant: from now until you die, leprosy is the biggest single fact of your existence. It will control how you live in every particular. From the moment you awaken until the moment you sleep, you will have to give your undivided attention to all the hard corners and sharp edges of life. You can't take vacations from it. You can't try to rest yourself by daydreaming, lapsing. Anything that bruises, bumps, burns, breaks, scrapes, snags, pokes, or weakens you can maim, cripple, or even kill you. And thinking about all the kinds of life you can't have can drive you to despair and suicide. I've seen it happen.”

Covenant's pulse was racing, and his sweat made the sheets cling to his limbs. The voice of his nightmare had not changed- it made no effort to terrify him, took no pleasure in his fear- but now the words were as black as hate, and behind them stretched a great raw wound of emptiness.

“That brings us to the other problem. It sounds simple, but you will find it can be devastating. Most people depend heavily on their sense of touch. In fact, their whole structure of responses to reality is organized around their touch. They may doubt their eyes and ears, but when they touch something they know it's real. And it is not an accident that we describe the deepest parts of ourselves- our emotions- in terms of the sense of touch. Sad tales
touch
our
feelings
. Bad situations
irritate
us or
hurt
us. This is an inevitable result of the fact that we are biological organisms.

“You must fight and change this orientation. You're intelligent creatures- each of you has a brain. Use it. Use it to recognize your danger. Use it to train yourself to stay alive.”

Then he woke up alone in his bed drenched with sweat, eyes staring, lips taut with whimpers that tried to plead their way between his clenched teeth. Dream after dream, week after week, the pattern played itself out. Day after day, he had to lash himself with anger to make himself leave the ineffectual sanctuary of his cell.

But his fundamental decision held. He met patients who had been to the leprosarium several times before- haunted recidivists who could not satisfy the essential demand of their torment, the requirement that they cling to life without desiring any of the recompense which gave life value. Their cyclic degeneration taught him to see that his nightmare contained the raw materials for survival. Night after night, it battered him against the brutal and irremediable law of leprosy; blow by blow, it showed him that an entire devotion to that law was his only defence against suppuration and gnawing rot and blindness. In his fifth and sixth months at the leprosarium, he practiced his VSE and other drills with manic diligence. He stared at the blank antiseptic walls of his cell as if to hypnotize himself with them. In the back of his mind, he counted the hours between doses of his medication. And whenever he slipped, missed a beat of his defensive rhythm, he excoriated himself with curses.

In seven months, the doctors were convinced that his diligence was not a passing phase. They were reasonably sure that the progress of his illness had been arrested. They sent him home.

As he returned to his house on Haven Farm in late summer, he thought that he was prepared for everything. He had braced himself for the absence of any communication from Joan, the dismayed revulsions of his former friends and associates- though these assaults still afflicted him with a vertiginous nausea of rage and self-disgust. The sight of Joan's and Roger's belongings in the house, and the desertion of the stables where Joan had formerly kept her horses, stung his sore heart like a corrosive- but he had already set his heels against the pull of such pains.

Yet he was not prepared, not for everything. The next shock surpassed his readiness. After he had double- and triple-checked to be sure he had received no mail from Joan, after he had spoken on the phone with the lawyer who handled his business- he had heard the woman's discomfort throbbing across the metallic connection- he went to his but in the woods and sat down to read what he had written on his new book.

Its blind poverty left him aghast. To call it ridiculously naive would have been a compliment. He could hardly believe that he was responsible for such supercilious trash.

That night, he reread his first novel, the best-seller. Then, moving with extreme caution, he built a fire in his hearth and burned both the novel and the new manuscript. Fire! he thought. Purgation. If I do not write another word, I will at least rid my life of these lies. Imagination! How could I have been so complacent? And as he watched the pages crumble into grey ash, he threw in with them all thought of further writing. For the first time, he understood part of what the doctors had been saying; he needed to crush out his imagination. He could not afford to have an imagination, a faculty which could envision Joan, joy, health. If he tormented himself with unattainable desires, he would cripple his grasp on the law which enabled him to survive. His imagination could kill him, lead or seduce or trick him into suicide: seeing all the things he could not have would make him despair.

When the fire went out, he ground the ashes underfoot as if to make their consummation irrevocable.

The next morning, he set about organizing his life.

First, he found his old straight razor. Its long, stainless-steel blade gleamed like a leer in the fluorescent light of his bathroom; but he stropped it deliberately, lathered his face, braced his timorous bones against the sink, and set the edge to his throat. It felt like a cold line of fire across his jugular, a keen threat of blood and gangrene and reactivated leprosy. If his half-unfingered hand slipped or twitched, the consequences might be extreme. But he took the risk consciously to discipline himself, enforce his recognition of the raw terms of his survival, mortify his recalcitrance. He instituted shaving with that blade as a personal ritual, a daily confrontation with his condition.

For the same reason, he began carrying around a sharp penknife. Whenever he felt his discipline faltering, felt threatened by memories or hopes or love, he took out the knife and tested its edge on his wrist.

Then, after he had shaved, he worked on his house. He neatened it, rearranged the furniture to minimize the danger of protruding corners, hard edges, hidden obstacles; he eliminated everything which could trip, bruise, or deflect him, so that even in the dark his rooms would be navigable, safe; he made his house as much like his cell in the leprosarium as possible. Anything that was hazardous, he threw into the guest room; and when he was done he locked the guest room and threw away the key.

After that he went to his hut and locked it also. Then he pulled its fuses, so that there would be no risk of fire in the old wiring.

Finally he washed the sweat off his hands. He washed them grimly, obsessively; he could not help himself- the physical impression of uncleanness was too strong.

Leper outcast unclean.

He spent the autumn stumbling around the rims of madness. Dark violence throbbed in him like a
picar
thrust between his ribs, goading him aimlessly. He felt an insatiable need for sleep, but could not heed it because his dreams had changed to nightmares of gnawing; despite his numbness, he seemed to feel himself being eaten away. And wakefulness confronted him with a vicious and irreparable paradox. Without the support or encouragement of other people, he did not believe he could endure the burden of his struggle against horror and death; yet that horror and death explained, made comprehensible, almost vindicated the rejection which denied him support or encouragement. His struggle arose from the same passions which produced his outcasting. He hated what would happen to him if he failed to fight. He hated himself for having to fight such a winless and interminable war. But he could not hate the people who made his moral solitude so absolute. They only shared his own fear.

In the dizzy round of his dilemma, the only response which steadied him was vitriol. He clung to his bitter anger as to an anchor of sanity; he needed fury in order to survive, to keep his grip like a stranglehold on life. Some days he went from sun to sun without any rest from rage.

But in time even that passion began to falter. His outcasting was part of his law; it was an irreducible fact, as totally real and compulsory as gravity and pestilence and numbness. If he failed to crush himself to fit the mould of his facts, he would fail to survive.

When he looked out over the Farm, the trees which edged his property along the highway seemed so far away that nothing could bridge the gap.

The contradiction had no answer. It made his fingers twitch helplessly, so that he almost cut himself shaving. Without passion he could not fight- yet all his passions rebounded against him. As the autumn passed, he cast fewer and fewer curses at the impossibilities imprisoning him. He prowled through the woods behind Haven Farm- a tall, lean man a with haggard eyes, a mechanical stride, and two fingers gone from his right hand. Every cluttered trail, sharp rock, steep slope reminded him that he was keeping himself alive with caution, that he had only to let his surveillance slip to go quietly unmourned and painless out of his troubles.