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Aidann was wrong about one thing. Those other girls whom Dr. Woolthersham had embarrassed never sought me out to commiserate. I woke the next day and every day after that and found myself universally shunned. At least I had Bhenji Nealingson's kind pity.
One afternoon, Bhenji Nealingson had one of the oldest runners conduct our class, so she could take me to the north part of town, closer to the river. In that neighborhood, the air's dank humidity became almost a living smoke that picked blistering blossoms of paint off of walls. This vapor thickened in the basement of the tinker's shop where Bhenji Nealingson introduced me to a withered old man named Mr. Rubal.
Mr. Rubal perched me on a rotating stool with a cracked pleather cushioned top. He twirled me by the shoulders until I could rest my face in a cold metal mask that reached well above the top of my head and down towards my collarbone. The mask had eyeholes that, upon leaning one's face completely into the mask, lit up with side-by-side half-fields of contrasting colors. In Punjabi he asked me what colors I saw. In what Punjabi I had mastered by that time, I answered him. He tapped my answers into a HandRight.
After this went on for two hours’ worth of rainbows and browns and grays, Mr. Rubal pulled me from the mask. Bhenji Nealingson was sitting at my side. She and I waited another hour. Old Rubal hid in a dusky corner of this workshop, stretching flat PLED material into thick spectacle frames like a skin over a drum. He muttered to himself throughout this whole process, and he continued to mutter after the PLED was properly stretched and he connected a thin, clear wire between the glasses and his HandRight. For another hour, he programmed.
At last, he disconnected the wire, brought the glasses over to me and hooked them behind my ears. They were lighter than standard-gauge warp thread, but the PLED dimmed my view. I tried turning to Bhenji Nealingson to ask her what was happening, but before I could, Rubal-ji directed my face back into the mask. Again the colors flashed before my eyes through the mask, but this time it looked like there were tiny dots swimming westward over one half and eastward over the other.
“Dots go to the left,” Rubal-ji said, “green. The more dots covering what you see, the more green it is. Dots to the right, red. More dots, more red. Do you understand, miss?”
“Test it out more,” Bhenji Nealingson said. “I'm not paying until I know they work.”
Old Rubal began laughing under his breath, a laugh that quickly disintegrated into loose, liquid coughing. “This is the best that can be done without re-keying her.” Then in English he added, “Beggars can't be choosers.”
I pulled away from the mask and successfully turned my head to look at Bhenji Nealingson. She had draped her striped duppetta scarf over her hair. I noticed that some of the stripes were now covered in faint dots, all going right. Faint dots. Pink stripes. I said as much.
We did test the filters for a while longer until Bhenji Nealingson was happy enough to trade the pair of PLED glasses for a tightly rolled scroll from Naomi's sweatshop. Payment. Our scrolls were equivalent to currency in these dark circles.
Bhenji Nealingson and I returned to our lives at Naomi. Now I could more easily differentiate between shades of colors, thanks to the PLEDs, but I still found myself isolated. I could function almost as well as everyone else, but no one was willing to forget that day at the well. I had allied myself with Aidann and thus with illness even worse than my own. At least colorblindness was not contagious.
I could have chosen not to wear the glasses Bhenji Nealingson had worked so hard to procure for me. My Naomi “sisters” might then have had an opportunity to forget that I was so far from genetic perfection. However, since neither I nor Naomi could afford my re-keying, even in another back alley lab, I had a choice: wear those glasses when working a color-specific contract and remind everyone of my defect, or stay a warper forever. No choice at all, really. Runners had contact with the outside world. Runners could make connections to get jobs for themselves that would take them out of the Naomi life. Most of all, runners had freedom. Somewhat.
So I worked hard. At the next exam, Dr. Woolthersham gave me a contract to weave. I wore my glasses, wove it perfectly and presented it to his sneering self. Another half-year passed. I worked into the night to improve my memory and calculation skills. In this time I made a discovery: I'd always complained that math was my weakness. I was wrong. Calculation was my weakness; math was a delight. Multiplying the square root of pi by the coefficient of friction did not come naturally to me, but inviting my imagination to make such multidimensional turns did. So I drilled long calculations without the aid of a HandRight or paper much in the same way a tennis player practices her serve. I already understood the game. I just needed to convince my flesh to play along.
In another half-year, I was granted the privilege of learning the key knot: the intense braided twist I'd seen Aidann create when she first had brought me to the Naomi compound that dark, humid night. Now I knew the knot. Now I had the freedom to come and go—not necessarily as I pleased, of course. Thanks to Naomi's tight customer network, a deserter would find herself trapped out of all profitable society faster than she could toss a waxed shuttle through a loom's shed. Gossip needs no satellite links to help it spread.
Regardless, I had become the youngest runner on the Naomi team. I left the Naomi compound for the first time since my arrival nearly two years earlier. My current legal counsel has advised me that I am not to share with you, dear reader, most details of that first run or any others, because it may incriminate me in some way, despite my having been a minor under compulsion at the time. For the confidentiality of our customers, of course.
Here, however, I am free to share my part in that which has been made public, as you will see shortly, as well some generalizations. For instance, I can say that I saw grimy cities and glorious ruins. I touched mountaintop clouds and slept in mildewed doorways. I saw the holy places of many cultures—almost all of which were being fought in and over. The holier the land, the bloodier the fighting, as Bhenji Nealingson would say ruefully. I smelled the perfumes of humanity. When customers took pity on me and my partners and fed us, I would dine sumptuously on the banquet of the world's street vendors and skyport food franchises.
I also was exposed to a feast of ideas: scientific, social, spiritual. I was not like Aidann, especially regarding that last category: I could not adopt any one religion or ideology as my own. Oh, I appreciated some of the sentiments expressed in, say, the Jain respect for all living creatures, or the Muslim care for the poor, but there was always something in each brand of religion that didn't sit right with me, even at that tender age—besides the apparent injustice of polygamy or strange obligations not to eat meat on Fridays.
According to some scrolls I coded, I was unnatural, just like Clinton VanDeer had said, a soulless thing not born of woman, and I was afraid they were right. According to others—those who had given Aidann her Memorare scroll, for instance—I was a child of God, worthy of more respect than the “selfish” science that had borne me. And I was afraid they were wrong.
Mine was not an entirely comfortable or safe childhood, but it was an experience I consider myself blessed to have had. What twelve year-old could have boasted such an education, such a knowledge of physical and cultural geography?
I made no lasting friends of the other girls. My run partners tolerated me and my filter glasses. Some of them would blatantly shoulder me out of the way when it came time to report back at Naomi with the contract specs, telling Bhenji Roth things like, “It's color specific.” Roth would nod and ignore me. Nothing more needed to be said.
I had my brushes with security forces, government payroll and private sector alike. My partner and I would have a sidewalk run-in with some thugs trying to prevent their bosses' competition from making a certain transaction through Naomi's services. Then we would arrive at the next skyport only to be pulled aside by security and quizzed on where our parents were, why they would let us travel alone so young, were we really part of a school exchange program? Dodging, flips, balance and confident talk could pull us through. Most of us, anyway.
I never made a run with Aidann. I saw her infrequently, then only rarely in the dojo on nights between runs. Each time I saw her, her face had grown more dun, her shoulders more slumped. The smudge on her cheek grew into a blotch, then it bore children. Now I realize more and more of her dermal tissue was necrotizing. However, when I did not see her around, I just told myself she was on a run, that she'd show up again. Whether it was naiveté or denial, my preteen eyes did not recognize the terminality of her illness. My eyes were not to remain so closed for much longer.
Naomi's hard-fought and won customers sometimes turned on each other and, as a result, on the Naomi Foundation itself. On one such occasion, as my partner and I were returning to Naomi just before dusk, we could tell that something was wrong.
In the cool season's damp evening darkness, the back streets' usual buzzing silence was an uncharacteristically high mix of emergency vehicle sirens, whirring skycraft, and drunken Punjabi shouts. In the narrow alleyway between the cycle factory and the biopharmaceutical plant (the alley in which Aidann and I had been jumped, if you recall), we had to flatten ourselves against a dumpster so as not to be hit by the live newsnet vans careening through the capillary-sized passage.
Each step brought us closer to Naomi but also brought us more confusion. What could these sounds mean? Was one of the other businesses around Naomi on fire? Was there some sort of standoff occurring? My partner and I exchanged bewildered expressions—the first time she had deigned to look at me during the entire run. We rounded the corner to Naomi. The sight that greeted us was a shock.
The door that held the key-knot was wide open. The netcasters, their vehicles and their techies; the emergency response vehicles; the police in their drab green uniforms (though they looked gray to me—I was not wearing my glasses at the time) and matching masked helmets; the curious and mostly homeless denizens of the warehouse wilderness clogged the street round Naomi's facade.
Worse yet, tall figures dressed head to toe in hooded, oxygenated, protective white suits were coming and going through the front door without even glancing at the key-knot, now just a loose, meaningless tassel. Between them they carried Naomi girls, heaped on stretchers, sometimes three or four at a time, for loading into the emergency response vehicles. Some of the girls cried out in pain and terror. I could hear many coughing. It sounded like steel tacks and petroleum oil being rattled together in a blender.
Police had constructed a hasty barricade to keep the media out of the way as much as possible. The netcast teams clogged the streets and made their reports in a feast of languages, snatches of which I could understand as I walked closer to the building, deeper into the chaos.
“—two bio-terroristic factions based out of Palermo and Lvov—”
“—war over which would be the first to sell the polypeptide to the Kamchatkan Diaspora Reunion League—”
My feet froze on the pavement. I listened more intently.
“—Palermo group caught wind of the offered price and—”
“—motive is still unclear, but what appears to be a girls' school—”
“—a sharpshooter took aim—”
A sharpshooter? I quickened my steps towards the door.
“—the capsule fired into the well contained the polypeptide weapon—”
“—poisoning the school's drinking water—”
Bhenji Nealingson and Aidann, the only two people who cared about me, were in that building. I broke into a run.
“—rescuers discovered sweatshop conditions in violation of UN—”
I dodged the adults blocking my way back to Naomi with their varying degrees of prosperity and/or authority. I hunkered down and scooted under the barricade. Two cops saw and dove for me. I stretched out one leg and swept one off balance onto his back. I surprised the other by throwing myself into his grip only to grab his forearms. Kataguruma. I pulled hard, felt something snap tight in my own muscles, and wheeled his shoulder hard into the ground.
Free of them both, I was five meters from the entrance, then three. I could feel others approaching from the back, reaching out to stop me. I pumped my legs and arms harder. I was nearly there. Then, the door itself was blocked by two pillars of white. The pillars held a bridge between them. I stopped short.
“Jane?” a weak voice called from that bridge.
The bridge was a stretcher. The stretcher held Bhenji Nealingson.
Seeing my beloved teacher lying there on that stretcher, gray-faced and pale-lipped, brought immediate tears to my eyes. “Teacher-ji,” I choked. I reached for her limp, outstretched hand but could not grasp it as she was carried past.
“Jane,” she cried, struggling to prop herself up on her elbow, still reaching for me. “Aidann—”
Bhenji Nealingson wheezed, her lips blue. I scrambled for her hand, but they were moving too quickly.
“Aidann—hospital...” was all she could manage before she fell back. Her eyes closed.
I was too stung to care when a cop at last successfully grabbed me by the waist, lifted me into the air and set me down on the other side of the barricade. He turned me by the shoulders to face him and shouted something at me in Punjabi. I just blinked at him.
“Miss?” Again he asked more slowly, more loudly, and with remarkable patience, considering I had just swept him flat onto his bum. “Are you a student here?”
I nodded. “But I have been out of town for three days, officer-ji.”
“Out of town?” he remarked, incredulous. He reached up under his face visor with one hand and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Who sends little girls off alone like that?”
I started to tell him that I hadn't been alone, but just as quickly I pinched my mouth shut. Just because I had been caught didn't mean my partner had to be, too. I looked over the officer's shoulder through the crowd for my erstwhile companion. She was gone.
“Miss, then you are not contaminated,” the officer shouted, “since the incident occurred sometime in the night. But, Miss, you still must stay nearby for questioning and a full medical exam. Do you understand, Miss?”
I had my wits about me again. Fall and roll like water. I nodded.
“That's a good girl.” The officer presented me with his retreating back.
My eyes swept in all directions, looking for where Bhenji Nealingson might have been taken. Then, hospital, my mind clamored over the melee both within and without. Hospital, Bhenji Nealingson had said. I pivoted on my leg and headed for the nearest emergency vehicle, assuming its driver and I had a common goal. It began to pull away. It had a chrome bumper, heavily dented and scratched. Its back double doors had handles. My sandals slapped the street in rapid fire. Chasing.
I had the advantage. The crowd's random density slowed the lumbering van's retreat, while I was small and nimble. I hopped, jumped, strove for the handles with my fingers. I missed once, twice. On the third time, I made contact. I gripped the left handle with both white-knuckled hands. My feet slipped, kicked, slid, jerked me down. Exhaust heated my shins. I kicked harder and pulled my knees to my chest until the balls of my feet hit the bumper, and I was standing, squatting, my hind swaying like a whip-end as I clung like a tick to my ride.
Between the vehicle's passengers and myself was a window. Inside was a nurse with a white hat that looked like a bird perched on her brown hair. She peeked through the window and saw me clinging. Freeloaders like myself were not uncommon in this region of the world. She did not panic or call for assistance. She just shook her head and turned away. I just hung on, pressing my ears into my shoulders to block out the siren that seemed intent on rattling my teeth out of their gums.
We barged through the traffic, nicking side-view mirrors and scraping chrome when other drivers were unwilling to make way. With each bump, sway and acceleration, my Naomi purse slapped my hip. Once we bore right so unexpectedly that it was all I could do to keep myself from being catapulted off to the left. My arms were starting to hurt, like someone had injected liquid fire into the veins threaded under my forearms. I must have pulled something during kataguruma. Bhenji Fleuvbleu would be ashamed, if she were still alive. I gritted my humming teeth and tightened my grip.
I looked up, and the sky was turning gray-purple. I chanced a glance over one shoulder. A manual car was tailgating us, its headlights practically blinding me. I hid my face back in the knot of my forearms and pulled my feet as flat against the doors as I could.
My eyes and mouth were drying with the speed. I finally began questioning the wisdom of this decision when the driver hit the brakes so hard that my face mushed sideways into the window, streaking my jaw, cheek and temple with grime. I stepped backwards just in time to avoid being swept off of the bumper by the opening door. I hopped down, and my feet met brick driveway. We were under a masonry canopy. To the right, a double-set of glass doors beckoned. Both Hindi and English read “Emergency.”
Another similar vehicle was being disemboweled of its passengers. More stretchers heaped with Naomi inmates were being carried towards the glass doors. I dashed over and searched their faces for Aidann's. My search was unsuccessful. I followed inside to a waiting room, where we parted ways.
The floors were a dull if sanitized gloss of one-inch square black and white ceramic tiles. The walls were painted eggshell, peeling only at adult elbow height and in spots on the ceiling. The waiting room was all but empty, and that was no surprise. The girls and teachers being carted in would have had no relatives or friends waiting for them. A little girl barely older than myself waited at a desk that was tucked into a corner just beside the set of double-swinging tiled doors through which all the stretchers were being carried.
I ran to the girl at the desk. Swallowing so I could wet my throat in order to speak, I then rasped, “Aidann Parrish.”
The girl gaped at me. Her disdain was clear: my broad accent and direct address branded me as another ugly American. Still American, I remembered Aidann saying to me so long ago.
“Miss,” I tried again, mindful of proper cultural protocol, “please could you do the needful and help me find a patient who was very likely brought to this hospital? Miss, her name is Aidann Parrish.”
“Miss, please spell the last name?”
I obliged. The terminal she used to access patient information was so old she needed to use a keyboard to manually spell Aidann's name. While she tapped the keys, I tapped impatient fingers and feet. She sent the request to the network, and her face blanched. Her eyes shot from me to the screen then back to me.
“They will not let you in to see her, Miss,” the girl said.
My heart dropped. “Why not?”
“She is in the Rozbeh-Bedros Charities Immunosuppressed Ward, miss. They will not let you through without proper clearance and precautions.”
“Immunosuppressed? Is that what happened to all the Naomi girls? The police officer said it wasn't contagious!”
Apparently my rudeness was not as shocking as my desperation to visit an immunosuppresed patient. She shook her head, still wide-eyed. “Miss Aidann Parrish was admitted a week ago yesterday.”
Over a week ago. I stumbled backwards just as if Fleuvbleu-san had slapped me. I had been at Naomi last week and hadn't noticed that Aidann had gone to hospital? And in the immunosuppressed ward? I began to think about her smudges, her coughing, her gradually increasing absences from the dojo. I began to remember watching specials on HealthUpdate casts and the like back at the VanDeers' about immunosuppressive disorders. I recalled learning in health class that many of those disorders were spread through sexual contact; and I recalled the terrible story Aidann had told me that day by the well. Whether I wanted them to or not, the scales fell from my eyes. Tears began to well in their place. Aidann was dying.
I backed away, carrying the ashes of hope in my heart. I stumbled out of the foyer, back through the entrance, and ran out beneath the stone canopy. In my agonized haste, I was nearly run over by another emergency vehicle as I crossed blindly back to the sidewalk. I ran away with the driver's curses in my ears, caring little for once about others' hatred of me. My mind and heart were better occupied. I needed to find another entrance.
I kept to the sidewalk, kept the hospital building on my left, the street on my right, until I turned two corners onto a wider, busier, more brightly lit street. Halfway down the block was the hospital's main entrance; comings and goings through it were less rushed and more pedestrian than on the opposite side of the colonial-leftover building.
I watched the people entering, waiting for someone to provide me with suitable camouflage. A young married couple in standard Punjabi dress—Sikhs like Bhenji Nealingson, I could tell by his turban, her uncut braid, the tiny jeweled daggers at their waists—approached the ingress. My hair was long and dark enough to pass for their child's. I merged in behind them and followed them through the tiled foyer. No one stopped me.
I swung my eyes left and right, up and down in search of directions to a stairwell. Finding signs for “West Stairs,” I followed and took one floor at a time. The floor one sign said medical genetics. Floor two, diagnostic imaging. Critical care wards on floors three and four. I had to climb seven flights before I saw a plaque fixed to a wall: IMMUNOSUPPRESSED WARD—PROVIDED BY A GENEROUS DONATION FROM ROZBEH-BEDROS PHARMACEUTICALS.
Immediately, citrus scents filled my nostrils, masking a deeper smell of stale chemicals and mustiness. The door eased shut behind me and met its frame with a muffled thud. Afraid the sound would have disturbed someone who could have removed me, I made visual evaluation of the scene as well.
At another reception-like desk several meters to the left of the stairwell sat another girl. I supposed her job was to keep watch, but by all intents and purposes she was not up to peak performance: her face was propped up with one hand, all of that propped up on her elbow, with sleep drool running down her forearm. Other than this valiant centurion, no other living soul was in obvious attendance. I say “obvious attendance” because one would need to know what the rest of the room contained to know where to find the patients.
The floor obviously once had been the hospital's attic. There were no real rooms, per se. Posts placed at even intervals supported the naked ceiling, which stretched the block-area of the entire building with no other interruption. The walls had once been sterile white, and someone in more recent times had attempted to cover that with a cheery sky blue, but said coat of brightness was curling, graying with neglect.
And what of the patients? You, dear reader, may wonder. I have described the walls, the ceiling, and the guardian at the desk, but not yet the floor. I shall do so now. The floor was slashed with an even distribution of matching at-home capsules, all bearing the RBP logo: Rozbeh-Bedros Pharmaceuticals. Many capsules were open and unoccupied. Most of those that were closed held spending packets of inhaled treatments, nutrition supplements, painkillers, sedatives. The air whirred with the homeostatic drone of numerous oxygenation fans.
Still American, I had not expected this. I had expected the kind of hospital scenes the VanDeers watched on their cast novellas: clean, private rooms filled with flowers and tortured, loving visitors. I saw this, however, and understood on a deep, personal level why vork clinics are so well patronized.
I stepped to the closest closed capsule. I looked through the oval window at the top. Inside was a shriveled man, not Aidann. I looked for a PLED screen that might have given information about the patient, about the ward, about anything at all. I found none. There was, however, a fossil of a dry-erase on an easel perched towards the foot of the capsule. On that was written what appeared to be a name, followed by Roman letters abbreviating the kind of IDS from which this man suffered.
I tiptoed from capsule to capsule, reading the names, ignoring the initials. One-quarter through the sprawling room, I found her name on a capsule's board. Beneath it were the letters “GIDS.” “G” for “generalized.” There were no packets of sedatives or supplements dispensing into her capsule. I took a deep breath and stepped closer to the capsule's window, desperate to see her but afraid of what I'd find.
Beneath the plassein, her face was ash-gray and mottled. Her lips were parted, cracked and peeling like the paint on the walls. Her eyes were closed. Fright froze me for an instant, and then grief took over. I was too late.
I fell to my knees and pressed my fists against the capsule just below its window, quietly, not wanting to wake the sleeping vigil-keeper at the front desk. I pressed my temple to the cold plassein and closed my eyes. I felt like I had swallowed a plum whole and it had lodged in my throat. The folds of my salawar kameeze brushed against each other as I curled up against the capsule, the movement of cloth sounding like exclamation points against the even hum of the fans and the rhythm of the desk keeper's snores.
And then Aidann stirred.
My eyes flew open. I pulled back, my palms staying flat against the capsule's hull. I inched back towards the capsule for a better look.
“Jane.” Her whisper was made even more hoarse through the speaker. “What are you doing here?”
“Aidann!” I cried. In my relief I forgot to care about the desk attendant, who snored on anyway. “You're alive!”
Her eyes closed slightly, and though I could not hear I could see her chuckling softly until her lungs began to spasm again. She rolled onto her side, squeezing her eyes shut as she coughed, the whole capsule rocking.
“I'm alive,” she said once she had the strength to speak. The capsule's sound transfer made her breathing sounded like gravel scraping across sandpaper. “I'm here.”
“Does—does your father—” I faltered, afraid that asking might hurt her. “He knows you're here, right?”
Her lashes lowered against her cheeks, and she gave another of her almost-smiles. “He knows,” she said, so softly I had to press my ear to the plassein to hear.
“Well, where is he? Shouldn't he be here with you? I thought you said he's coming to get you?”
“Not yet. But,” she said, grimacing as she shifted to a more comfortable position, “He's on his way.”
“How do you know? Have you talked to him? Did you text him before you got here?”
Her smile grew but her eyes remained blissfully closed. On another rattling breath she said, “I was just talking to him when you got here. Then I opened my eyes, and here you were.”
“But there was nobody—” I halted, as I remembered a sentence on that scroll she had given me to decode nearly two years ago. Something about a father in heaven. That plum-sized lump in my throat became the size of a pomegranate.
“Uh-uh,” I said vehemently, “no, Aidann, you have to live.”
She smiled again. “Silly. I am going to live. Remember.”
“You are?” My heart leapt. “Is somebody coming to re-key you? Can they get the GIDS out of you? I thought that re-keying was too risky for IDS patients. They'd have to make you sick so the new genes'll take, and if they make you any sicker than you already are—”
“Jane,” she interrupted, “did you lose that scroll I gave you back when you were still just a little newbie?”
“No!” I half-scoffed, half-sobbed. I reached into the purse I always kept by my side and rummaged past my glasses and trades until I found it, my strained forearms burning afresh with the effort. I produced the rolled fabric strip, now gray with two years of my grubby-fingered decrypting efforts, and held it up for Aidann to see through the barrier protecting her from me and my germs. “I've been decoding it. I have that first prayer memorized, and some of the others, too.”
She opened her eyes, and her smile grew, but not enough to show teeth. “How did you get the decrypt key?”
Now it was my turn to smile. “I had to try a few languages, but Bhenji Nealingson helped me find it. Roman Catholic, so it had to be—”
“—Latin,” we said together. “Memorare.”
“Remember,” I said, the English translation of the key. Just then, that word sounded so barren.
“I'm glad you have it,” Aidann said after letting the fan fill our silence for what seemed like too long.
“Aidann,” I said, my voice cracking a new tear trickled from my eye. “Bhenji. Please. I don't want you to go.”
“Even if I'm going somewhere better?”
“I don't want you to leave me.”
Her face suddenly seemed so soft and even. The mottling looked somehow less edged. Her lips seemed less white with loss. “I'm not leaving you. I'll always be with you.”
“But how?” The question tore from me like a bandage from a clotting wound.
With a weak but articulated chin jerk, she indicated the scroll. “There's a prayer on there. It talks about 'the communion of saints.' You and I are the saints, and as long as we're saints, nothing can separate us. Not plassein. Not skyport security. Not life. Not even death.”
At the word 'death,' the crumbling dam behind my eyes surrendered its last.
“Jane, don't cry. I want you to be joyful.”
“Joyful? Joyful! Are you stupid?”
She chuckled again, which incited another coughing riot. When at last her lungs had quieted some, even if I had not, Aidann asked, “Are you still too American to accept a hand for guidance?”
I forced myself still. With every last ounce of inner strength I could muster, I shook my head. “I can't.”
“Why not? What I have—it's not—Jane, I'm not a danger to you.”
“But I'm a danger to you! If I'm carrying any germs or viruses, even if I'm not sick with them—”
“Jane, I have faith...” Her voice trailed off as she swallowed laboriously. “I have faith. That's all.”
Indecision froze me. I studied Aidann. Her face was as tranquil as a sunny day. I longed to reach for her, to let her take my hand and breathe her steadying faith into my violent, warring self. Exhaling my anxieties, I fumbled at the side lock of the capsule. It released, and the lid eased open with a hydraulic gasp.
Beneath her dingy white hospital-issue gown, Aidann looked like a skeleton dressed in a stocking of fake skin, blue with veins and brown-gray with necrotizations. But her dark eyes were open, clear and steady. I took her hand. It felt like a loose pouch of bones. That pomegranate became a coconut.
“Don't cry, Jane,” she said, but her guidance went unheeded. After a full minute of my weeping and her useless soothing, she stretched the fingers of her right hand for the fabric scroll I held in my left. I moved my other hand to hers, giving her the scroll, climbing into the open capsule with her, willing to share her deathbed.
With her eyes cast toward the scroll, she took its beginning in her fingers and began to read with their dehydration-puckered tips. Her lips moved lightly, like feathers in a gentle breeze, as she began the prayer.
“Remember, O Most Gracious Virgin Mary that never was it known—”
I joined in from memory. “—that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help or sought your intercession was left unaided.”
I rested my head in the hollow of her shoulder, and I could hear the weak beating of her heart. I could hear the shaking in her tired lungs and the thick blanket of peace that flowed from her thinning voice.
“Inspired by this confidence, I fly to thee, O Virgin of Virgins, my mother.”
She leaned her cheek against my hair. My tears fell against her gown and made shadows in the fabric. Plain weave. Low thread count.
“To you I come, before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful.”
When we finished the prayer, we started over again. We repeated it until at last my tears slowed, ceased, and my voice became a whisper that echoed Aidann's before fading all together. To this day, I believe she waited for me to sleep before she allowed herself to do the same.
“O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petition but in your mercy hear and answer me.”
In the morning, they found me asleep on Aidann's shoulder. They woke me, tore me away from her cold body. Kicking and screaming. Flailing. Elbowing. The orderlies carried me one way, Aidann another. I never saw her body again. In the night, her father had come for her. At last, he took her home.
Seventy-two girls were on the Naomi roll, plus seven additional women comprising teachers and staff. Two of the adults survived. Only eleven girls, myself included, survived, and that only because we were runners, out performing our duties. For the confidentiality of our customers, of course.
Had the bodies been buried, the polypeptide that killed each Naomi girl might have seeped into the groundwater, into the waters of the Satluj River. The only way to ensure the safety of the public drinking water was to denaturize the proteins with high heat applied for a sustained period of time.
As a matter of convenience, Aidann's body was burned with the others. She has no real grave. But today, in a churchyard in the most northern reaches of Eire's island, you will find a stone tablet upon which the following is inscribed:
Aidann
Memorare
