My melatonin patch had been removed; the abyssal sleep it generated was too dangerous, now. But I couldn't begin to tell the difference between the erratic rhythms of melatonin withdrawal, and my otherwise natural state: long stretches of half-sensate paralytic stupor, broken up by brief, violent dreams—and moments of panic-stricken clarity each time I believed my intestines were about to rupture and wash out of me in a red and gray tide.
I told myself that I was stronger and more patient than the disease. Generations of bacteria could come and go; all I had to do was hang on. All I had to do was outlive them.
On the morning of the second day, Mosala and De Groot came to visit. They seemed like time travelers to me; my previous life on Stateless had already receded into the distant past.
Mosala seemed shocked by my appearance. She said gently, "I've taken your advice; I've been examined thoroughly. I'm not infected, Andrew. I've spoken to your doctor, and he thinks you must have caught this from food on the plane."
I croaked, "Has anyone else, on the same flight—?"
"No. But one sealed package might have missed being irradiated, and ended up imperfectly sterilized. It can happen."
I didn't have the strength to argue. And this theory made a certain amount of sense: a random glitch had breached the technological barrier between Third World and First, momentarily scrambling the impeccable free-market logic of employing the cheapest caterers on the planet and then blasting away the risks with an equally cheap burst of gamma rays.
That evening, my temperature began rising again. Michael—the Fijian man who'd greeted me when I first woke, and who'd since explained that he was "both doctor and nurse, if you insist on using those archaic foreign words here"—sat by my bed for most of the night… or at least, he was there in the flesh during every brief window of lucidity I experienced; the rest of the time, for all I knew, I hallucinated his presence.
I slept three straight hours from dawn to mid-morning—long enough for my first coherent dream. Clawing my way up toward consciousness, I clung defiantly to the happy ending:
I'd been woken by an intense cramp. I was soon expelling gray water full of intestinal mucus, gasping obscenities, wanting to die.
In the late afternoon, with the sunlit ward behind the screens as vague and luminous as heaven—re-enacting the same convulsions for the thousandth time, shitting out, yet again, every last drop of fluid the drip had fed into me—I found myself emitting a keening noise, baring my teeth and shivering, like a dog, like a sick hyena.
Early on the fourth day, my fever almost vanished. Everything which had come before seemed like an anesthetized nightmare, violent and frightening but inconsequential—a dream sequence shot through gauze.
A merciless gray solidity clung to everything in sight. The screens around me were caked with dust. The sheets were stained yellow from dried sweat. My skin was coated with slime. My lips, my tongue, my throat, were cracked and stinging, sloughing dead cells and seeping a thin discharge which tasted more like salt than blood. Every muscle from my diaphragm to my groin felt injured, useless, tortured beyond repair— but tensed like an animal flinching from a rain of blows, ready for more. The joints of my knees felt as if I'd been crouching for a week on cold, hard ground.
The cramps, the spasms, began again. I'd never been so lucid; they'd never been worse.
I had no patience left. All I wanted to do was rise to my feet and walk out of the hospital, leaving my body behind. Flesh and bacteria could fight it out between themselves; I'd lost interest.
I tried. I closed my eyes and pictured it. I willed it to happen, I wasn't delirious—but walking away from this pointless, ugly confrontation seemed like such a sensible choice, such an obvious solution, that for a moment I suspended all disbelief.
And I finally understood, as I never had before—not through sex, not through food, not through the lost exuberant physicality of childhood, not from the pinpricks of a hundred petty injuries and instantly cured diseases—that this vision of escape was meaningless, a false arithmetic, an idiot dream.
This diseased body was my whole self. It was not a temporary shelter for some tiny, indestructible man-god living in the safe warm dark behind my eyes. From skull to putrid arsehole, this was the instrument of everything I'd ever do, ever feel, ever be.
I'd never believed otherwise—but I'd never really felt it, never really known it. I'd never before been forced to embrace the whole sordid, twitching, visceral truth.
