THE ICE PLAGUE

TIM LEES

I pick him up in x-ray. Forty-two years old, Hispanic male, balding and rail-thin, already laid out on the stretcher, waiting for me. He’s a talker. Maybe half of them are talkers, I’d say. Mostly they talk about themselves. Even when they ask a question, it’s still about them: How do I look? or, Will I be OK? Or else some piece of fractured nonsense from whatever bits of memory they still have access to, if they’re really far gone. A few will try and tell their life stories. As if they mean something. As if I’ll go away, remember them, maybe even write them down. As if I’ll care. But this guy’s different. I wheel him down the hallway and his voice is thin and scratchy and it sort of scrapes at me, just on and on, even when it gets so quiet I can hardly catch the words.

“He’s here,” he says. “He’s here. Look! Here…”

The guy is agitated, and I don’t know who he’s talking about. Don’t know, don’t even want to know. But he gets to me. He does. “Who?” I ask him. “Who?”

There’s no straight answer from him. No. Well, obviously not.

“In the night,” he says. “The day. Mostly the night…”

“Who?” I say again. “Who? Who?”

I wheel him to the elevator. I’ll be rid of him in two, three minutes, tops. Even so, he’s bugging me. Most days I’m not like this, most days I’m cool, I’m good. But something gets me now. And he won’t stop. He won’t shut up.

“He is beside.” His hands move, indicate a figure lying next to him, although it’s obvious there’s no-one there. “They cannot make him go. I ask for medication, but they – ah. They don’t give. I hear breathing, very slow, like this.” His face is fixed in concentration, and he demonstrates, carefully in and out, a long, slow, tidal whoosh. “There is no heat from him, no warmth. He is here. I call the nurses, they don’t see. They say, no-one. Go back to sleep, they say. But they leave, and he is here again. He is here now.”

“Do you know him?”

“I – ah.” He screws his face up, and his hands bat at the air. “He is – he is – close. So cold. I feel him all the time.”

“Who?” I ask, and the elevator door slides open. “You recognise him? What’s his name? He’s got to have a name.”

The man’s brow puckers.

“Future,” he says then.

“Future…? That’s not a name.”

“Next week. Next day. Future. I feel him. He is future for me.”

His face contorts as if he is about to cry. He reaches out, desperate for me to understand. He tries to take my hand and without thinking I pull back.

His own hand drops, flops on his belly.

“Future,” he sighs. His voice is small and barely audible. “The future is his name…”

***

On carts, on stretchers, we take them for their tests, their transfers and procedures; from ward to ward as different symptoms manifest, different doctors pick out different patterns to their illness, different theories come and go, and different treatments are proposed.

Among the patients, no two are the same. You learn that, working transport. No two are the same.

After the shift, I go up to the fourteenth floor and sit with Mary for a while. Her eyes are open and she lies there, staring at the ceiling, blinking only rarely now. She has drops to keep her eyes moist. The nurse comes in at intervals to give them. I sit there and she lies beside me and then, just once, she says my name, Paul, and I realise that she’s known I’m here this whole time. That shocks me, learning that. I feel a sudden spasm, twisting up inside, almost a pain, but no, not quite a pain, not real pain, not physical. It’s like a pain, the memory of a pain. I try to isolate it in my mind, this precise sensation, work out what it reminds me of, but already it’s begun to fade, to vanish from my mind. Instead I bend, and kiss her brow. Her skin is cool. The room is warm, but she is cool, and cooler every time I come.

I know what her prognosis is. I’ve known it now for months, suspected it for longer.

I leave early. I tell the ward clerk that I’m worried about getting home, the way the weather is, and she says, “You hurry. You have a good night.” But I don’t think she’s fooled, not for a moment.

***

The wind comes tearing down the street. Snow blows almost horizontal, hits the building fronts then flies up, like a wave against a sea wall. I see it in the nimbus of the street lamp, crashing on the concrete and the glass. Crashing, on and on, an endless flow of it. In ten minutes I’m on the El. Only then I realise that it’s Saturday, the train is full of clubbers, going out the exact same time I’m going home – girls in too-short skirts, girls who’ll freeze out on the streets tonight, and boys with tight, tight jeans and practiced, women’s walks, not sexy but unpinned from sex, released from gender. They laugh and gossip and high five each other and to me it’s all just movement, like I’m watching on TV. Like I’m not even here.

Downtown, they pour out of the doors. The carriage empties, suddenly. I feel the vacuum left behind.

We rattle through the city. I’m staring out the window, noting landmarks. I’m looking for a place, a place I saw last night, and the night before. I’m almost there now. Close, close, close.

It’s a run-down district. Pawn shops, windows barred, signs for checks cashed. Then there’s a little park, and in the corner, as we hurry by, three figures have collected. They don’t move. They haven’t moved now for a long time, could be a week or more. The tallest is a black man. He stands, the snow piled on his shoulders, crusting his face like moss. A woman hunches on a bench beside him. The snow has risen to her shins. A third man, smaller, younger, stands a few yards off, under a tree. Snow makes a white sash on his coat front.

Anywhere else, they’d have been gathered up and hospitalised. Not here. I see this more and more, in poor parts of town. People left. Abandoned. Like nobody knows what to do, or wants to know.

Like no-one can be bothered anymore.

***

I push open the door. There’s someone in the lobby. I see strings of thin grey hair, a long, beige coat, hanging on a slight frame. I nod to her. She blanks me for a moment till I say her name, and then she starts awake. Her lips peel back, a bit uncertainly, remembering the rituals, the gestures.

“Neighbour.”

This is what she calls me, though I’ve told her who I am a dozen times since I moved in. I say her name, again, “Jean.” I ask her how she’s doing. She doesn’t answer. She just nods. She smiles. Her skin creases like paper. She’s very pale. Even her eyes are pale, grey like her hair. I can see the bones under her skin. She lifts one fluttering hand, a bid for my attention.

“I was on my way—” But she can’t think where, and so the smile comes up again, instead.

“Which way?” I look towards the door, then back towards the elevator. “In or out?”

There’s no snow on her coat, but the fabric’s damp, dark at the shoulders, and I realise she’s been standing here a while.

“You going in? Yeah? Going home?”

Her lip twitches. “Is that all right?”

“Sure.”

“There’s something I had to do. Something…important. I can’t remember—”

She moves in little steps, coming out into the light. She’s smeared her mouth with bright pink lipstick. I can’t imagine why she’d choose that shade, why she’d even think that it might suit her.

“You look like you’ve been out. Perhaps you’ve done whatever you had to.”

She processes this, smiles again. “Good. I need to lie down…”

We ride up in the elevator together. I walk her to her apartment, which is two doors down from mine. I ask her if she’s eaten. Maybe that’s the thing she had to do…?

“Oh – I’m fine.” She beckons me inside. Reluctantly, I follow. There’s a thick, sweaty smell, like a badly-cured sheepskin rug. The heat’s on way too high. She leads me to the kitchen. She beams. “I have Triskets. See? They’re very good, you know,” and she picks up the nearest packet, reads me the ingredients.

There are perhaps a dozen boxes scattered on the work surface. Half of them are open. There are crumbs and fragments scattered everywhere, including on the floor.

“Is it cold in here? It’s cold, isn’t it?” She frowns. “I keep telling the management. They won’t do anything…”

I say I’m going to order pizza. Maybe I’ll bring her a few slices, in an hour or so? I’ll never eat it all, I say.

“Oh – if you like.” She’s still looking around, worrying about her heating trouble. Then, very firmly: “No anchovies.”

“No anchovies,” I say.

“No seafood! I don’t want seafood!”

“All right,” I say, and tell her that I’ll call back later.

***

Monitors ping. The printer at the clerk’s desk hums and buzzes. And here, before me in the hallway, the Ghost Doctor is lecturing.

“Returning, for a moment, to our lexicon of ailments – initial diagnosis would suggest some kind of neurodegenerative process, perhaps along the lines of Alzheimer’s, with parallel decline in body functions, and, most characteristically, a drop in body temperature, often to a startling degree. This last symptom has proved the benchmark for diagnosis in these cases. I am sure you are all familiar with the popular term for the disease.”

Faint murmuring, nodding of heads. No-one is sure whether to smile or tut and shake their heads. The failure of the world at large to grasp the implications of the things we deal with hangs, unspoken, over all the Doctor’s classes.

“It was assumed, at first, that such patients would just die. But this was not the case. To make a brief aside – as doctors and as medical professionals, we have long been in the business of extending life. Yet what we see now – and we are by no means at the limit of the process, I believe – is a blurring of the boundaries between life and death, unprecedented in medical records. Initially, these patients grow indifferent. They neglect themselves. Even clear discomforts are ignored. At this stage there may be delusions or hallucinations, although these will pass. In certain cases, physiologically—”

The Ghost Doctor holds court. He is a small, bald man, with broad, emphatic gestures. He believes his students need to see, as well as hear. A stethoscope is stuffed into his pocket like a badge of office. White-coated interns flock around him. They are standing in the middle of the hallway, and I call out, “Excuse me! Coming through!” as I push my cart towards them.

It’s a moment before anybody moves.

***

When I lose interest in the photos, then I’ll know it’s started. Forgetting, not the who and where, but the meaning.

I think about that sometimes – what it must be like to feel it starting in you. Knowing there’s no cure, no stopping it. With Mary, it was all denial. It could have been so many different things, so many illnesses. We didn’t know, back then. But I’ll know. I’ll know, sure enough.

Perhaps I’ll kill myself, and get it over with. Or maybe it won’t go like that. Maybe I’ll just forget, and that will be that. Or else I just won’t care.

I take the photo book and turn the pages. Every print I know by heart. Our first real holiday. Pictures of her, up to her knees in surf. A hundred yards away, the big grey pelicans come swooping down across the waves. Great clouds are piled up in the sky, but at the beach, it’s sunny, always sunny. So hot the sweat just oozed from my skin, like wringing out a wet rag. At night we kept the AC full on, a single bedsheet on us. We’d make love and roll apart, too hot to touch, no more than fingertips, quick kisses. Heat that seemed to burn us up, leave us worn out and exhausted. Heat that touched us like a flame.

Here: a picture of her, face eclipsed, the sun just peeping from behind her hair, sending a fan of bright rays over her.

So long ago.

Mary, Mary.

Everything’s changed since then.

***

He’s docile. His face is thin and pale; body long, stretched on the cart in front of me. Sandy stubble growing back over his skull, but it doesn’t hide the zipper-pattern scars. Brain surgery of some kind. Ineffective, I suppose.

I take him to the Crypt. That’s what we call it, off the record. Between ourselves. More and more, they end up here. I’m buzzed in through the airlock doors. Inside, they’re everywhere: they stand like zombies, cluttering the entrance hall. Grey wooden faces. I nudge the nearer ones out of the way. There’s a big guy right in my path and I have to edge him backwards with the front end of the cart. He stands there, swaying, like a big old tree about to fall. I offload the patient and when I look back the big guy is still rocking, steady as a pendulum.

“They weird me out,” the nurse confides. “I hate working down here. It’s like it’s all…bottled up inside of them. You know? You feel it. One day they’re going to blow. Feel that?”

No, I don’t. They look like shells to me. Like husks.

She sits there, squeezing her hands between her thighs. Stares at the patients, doesn’t dare let them out of her sight.

A rustle runs around the room, a faint sound like conspiracy. But no-one’s said a word.

***

“In here. Come on now. Don’t be shy.”

I’m at Jean’s again. It’s something of a habit. This time I’ve brought Chinese. I say it’s leftovers, but of course it’s not. She leads me to the lounge. It strikes me she’s the kind of woman who, back in the old days, would have kept cats, at least a dozen of them, piled up on the furniture, guarding the bureau, sprawled across the rug. But here there’s nothing. I sit down on an armchair, cushions thin and worn. She has posters on her wall, like a student. World’s Fair, Battleship Potemkin. Still, she seems a little brighter this time, more in touch with things. There’s a blush to her cheeks. The apartment is still hot, but she doesn’t moan about the cold now. She’s found a brandy bottle, still half full. It’s not been opened in so long the cap is stuck on tight. I have to struggle to unscrew it. Then, with a flourish like a conjuror, she passes me two shot glasses. They’re almost clean. I pour.

“To friendship,” she says then.

“Friendship,” I say.

There’s lipstick on her teeth. She looks genuinely sad when I announce I have to leave. “See you soon,” she sing-songs. I struggle with a smile. “Soon,” I say. “Soon-ish.”

***

Walking, aimless now. Icy cold. I tag along behind a bunch of kids, and when they slip into a club, I follow. The heat and noise just wrap me round, swallow me up. There’s a moment when it’s too much. I can’t breathe. I lean against a wall, feeling my head’s about to burst, feeling a sudden swell of nausea – and then it’s gone. The crowds flow round me, and I ease my way into the midst of them. I’ve got a hollow in my belly, a catch in my throat.

At the bar, I have to yell and point. I get a smear of whisky in a plastic glass for ten bucks. I don’t care about the drink, I’m not interested. I leave it on a table somewhere, and I don’t sit down. I’m drawn into the crowd. Arms, backs, breasts, brushing my body, and I press on, deeper, onto the dancefloor. There’s no music here, only the bass drum, booming, roaring like a heartbeat. Everything is moving round me. I’m the centre of it all. I stand here on the dancefloor, throw my head back. Rhythm hammers through my feet, throbs through my thighs, my hips, ringing in my chest. My hands are open. Lights flash across my face. The bodies press around me, loving, warm. They move while I stand still. They swing around me, I’m their axle, I’m the centre round which all things turn.

There is a moment when I could be anyone. Or everyone. A moment when it seems that we are all one person, all the same.

It’s beautiful here. Beautiful.

He shines a light into my eyes. He checks my tongue. He taps my knee.

“You’re fine.” The Ghost Doctor’s abrupt. I’m well, he says. I’m wasting his time. Only the sick intrigue him. He’s lost interest now.

“I don’t feel fine.”

“Trust me, you’re fine.”

He stands. He takes the stethoscope from round his neck, stuffs it back untidily into his pocket.

“Doctor—” I say.

He’s closed my file. He’s ready to dismiss me.

“It’s about loneliness, isn’t it? The plague. It’s about being lonely.”

“I’d say that’s…over-simplifying things. And when we find the cause, I think that I can guarantee it will be physical, not—” a rapid, patronising smile “—metaphysical.”

He is about to go. I touch his wrist. For a moment I am shocked by the warmth of his skin, the softness of it. It’s like the heat’s just radiating out of him.

“Doc,” I say. “Do you have a family?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Are they well? I hope they’re well. I want them to be well forever.”

He tells me I am very kind, but I’m not. The more of us are well, the safer we will be. That’s what I believe, that there’s a crux, a percentage, and when we tip past that, we’ll all fall. When more of us are isolated, more of us alone. When the ice plague sweeps across the world, freezing us all: cold, not dead. When the sick outnumber the well…

“Look after them,” I call as I am leaving. He glances up from his papers. “Your family,” I say. “They need you.”

Snow against the windows. You can’t even tell the wind direction from up here. Snowflakes, from all angles, like bugs against a windshield.

She’s colder now. I should have made more effort. In our marriage. In our life. Perhaps I could have saved her. Kept her safe, kept her warm. Perhaps it’s all my fault. Or it was going to happen anyway, regardless of what I did. What any of us do. I don’t know. I take her hand between the two of mine and press it, rub it slowly, trying to squeeze the warmth out of my own hands, into hers.

Something flickers in her face. A movement at the corners of her mouth.

“We’ll find a way,” I say. “We’ll find a way.”

I don’t believe it. Even as I say it I still don’t believe it. But her fingers wrap round mine, and though she doesn’t speak, she doesn’t look at me, she smiles.

She smiles.

It’s there for just a moment, like a brief change in the light, and then the muscles seem to give out and relax, expression neutral once again.

She is asleep. Outside, the long winter rolls on, and I hold her hand in mine, and that is how we stay then, for the longest time.

***

A long-time contributor to TTA Press, Tim Lees is a British author now living in Chicago. If ‘The Counterweight’ (Black Static #29) was his vampire story, ‘The Ice Plague’ is his zombie apocalypse, and a response to the general madness of Midwestern winters. Tim is the author of the Field Ops novels The God Hunter and Devil in the Wires, available from HarperVoyager.