Doa Ii Read online

  “It’s still medicine.”

  “At least every one here seems very genuine. It’s weird to see no patients in some areas, but still a normally expected population in others.”

  “Dew is a complicated town to practice medicine in. They simply lack many of the diseases the rest of the world still has to contend with.” August changed subjects. “We have a common patient, by the way. Mr. Jordan.”

  “I saw your name on the chart. I thought there was no cancer in Dew.”

  “There isn’t.” August said. “Mr. Jordan did have cancer when he moved back here last year. He was born in Dew, and grew up here. He moved away a few years ago, thinking he could retire someplace else. Then he got Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He fled back to the cradle pretty quick. Now he is disease free, but his kidneys are messed up from renal toxicity. Side-effect of the chemo drugs he was on before he returned to us.”

  “How is it possible that cancer doesn’t flourish here?”

  “We’re working off the theory that the population has somehow selected themselves out of neoplastic events. That there is some underlying genetic explanation to the phenomenon.”

  Anna wondered why he was being so evasive with his answer. “But that wouldn’t explain Mr. Jordan’s cure.”

  “True. And that’s why we keep the statistics quiet. Dew doesn’t go blabbing about things it doesn’t understand. You take that advice, too, and you’ll go far here, learn a lot.”

  “When I was in undergrad, I took a job at a nature center,” Anna said. “Word was going around that an alligator at a local pond was eating the ducks. It was idle chatter, the sort of thing we gossiped about in the gift shop. One day I was working the phones, and a reporter called wanting me to confirm the story about the duck-eating alligator. It showed me the power of loose lips.”

  “They really do sink ships,” August said. “Mr. Jordan is a mess, by the way, and not the easiest patient to deal with. He’s not doing well. He’s not a good candidate for transplant, either. I don’t think he has long. Unless we find a miracle cure.” He checked his watch. “I have to get to clinic, now. Hey—I’ll buy you dinner sometime soon. Make up for the inimical introduction the town gave you.”

  “Sure,” she said, watching him wave goodbye. “Let’s do that.”

  ~

  As the months passed, Anna lost herself almost completely in her work. She saw patients and dutifully filled out paperwork. At first she found it difficult to walk alone outside; now she was at least guardedly comfortable in most parts of Dew.

  Today she felt she had finally garnered the courage to walk the street she had been assaulted on. It was a sunny morning; there were people around. That offered a sense of security.

  People seemed to look at her curiously as she walked swiftly past the entrance to the alleyway.

  The police had never really investigated. They seemed happy to let the case freeze, and she was too ashamed to find out why. She tried to talk herself out of the emotion, but the futility of ever solving her case seemed to make a part of it lodged deep inside of her only more humiliating. August’s attempts to find out more information had yielded no more answers.

  She stopped in a coffee shop; happy she had at least walked by the alleyway. It would be a very long time—perhaps never—before she stepped into it again.

  “Coffee, and one of those,” she said, sitting at the counter and pointing to a filled doughnut. The clerk handed the pastry over, filling a white Styrofoam cup with coffee.

  Anna pulled out a debit card to pay.

  The clerk shook her head. “You’re the doctor. The one they attacked, a few months ago?”

  Anna nodded her head. “I guess you saw my picture in the paper.” It was an unenviable call to celebrity.

  “Coffee and doughnut are on the house,” the woman said. “Least we can do.”

  Anna sat back, not commenting on the disproportionate exchange.

  She left a tip, anyway.

  As she exited the store, she saw the woman put the coins into a plastic box set up on the counter to collect money for a local charity.

  It was not the first time it had happened. Whenever she caught a glimpse of recognition in their eyes, people declined making her pay for anything. They seemed in awe of her, neither really afraid nor embarrassed, but something else, something she could not identify.

  As Anna walked toward the hospital, she thought she saw the old woman. The one who had kept her in the room the day the police threw away the evidence bag. Anna now felt almost as violated by the wasted swabbing and probing details of her interview as by the events that preceded them.

  The woman was a short distance ahead; she did not see Anna.

  Anna stopped, making sure of the identification. It was the same old woman.

  Anna followed, curiously drawn to her. She sensed that something she wanted to know was locked up in the old woman’s gray head. The woman disappeared into a church, located on a corner lot. Its limestone blocks were covered in a veil of marshy mold. The stained glass windows were covered in pollen.

  Anna slipped quietly into the church, hiding in the shadow of statues position near the front. Votive candles flickered in the corner, beneath a statue of the Virgin Mary. The old statue of St. Jude Thaddeus scarcely had any candles lit beneath it.

  Far ahead, the old woman sat down in a pew already occupied by a policeman—the same one who had discarded her evidence bag—and August.

  Anna couldn’t hear what they were saying; her confusion mounted by the presence of August, who seemed to be friends with the officer.

  “I know you from the bus,” a man whispered behind her.

  Anna turned around very quickly; she nearly let out a noise, but checked herself just in time. The old man from the bus was there. The scar on his forehead and the missing digits on his left hand served to identify him.

  “Follow me,” he said, motioning her on. “Before they see you.” He lowered his head. “I mean you no harm. Please trust me.”

  “You were the one who told me not to come here,” she whispered.

  “Can anything good come from Dew?” he asked.

  She remained silent.

  He motioned to a small space hidden by a confessional. It was enough room to hide them both; the spot also offered a sufficient view to see through woven mesh. But it wasn’t close enough to hear everything the trio was saying.

  “It’s coming up to the spring healing season,” the old woman said loudly. “We have work to do.”

  “The timeframes need to be extended, doc,” the policeman said to August. “The current cure for Borna has to be done every six months. That’s gonna raise questions.”

  August nodded. But his words weren’t loud enough for Anna to hear. She leaned into the mesh of the confessional, trying to hear, hoping to understand why they were discussing hospital matters in a church…and with a police officer.

  The old woman and the policemen pulled up the sleeves from their right forearms. Each bore a little semi-circular wound, about an inch long. The wounds looked chronic, as if they kept them open intentionally.

  The officer raised his voice again. “My little girl has been normal for three years. I insist. It’s personal, doc.” He tapped the wound on his arm and rolled his sleeve back down over the mark.

  The old woman smiled sourly. “Jimmy says there are two new holes down at the Golden Horseshoe Gentlemen’s Club; Bob reports ten crack addicts in his house. And Fat P over at probation and parole says there are a few candidates desperate for paying work—but we need longer intervals. Our PD can only keep things so quiet.”

  “We need to get the whole team together,” August said. “To discuss planning, priorities.”

  Nods went around the group, a few last quiet exchanges, and then each one left the church’s sanctuary.

  Anna looked at the man with the scar, hoping he had an explanation.

  “Go to the cemetery, the one at the edge of town,” he told her. “Go in the evening
, as if you were taking a walk and just got curious as you were passing by. I’ll wait for you by the large statue of Our Lady of Sorrows.” His eyes looked pained as he spoke.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Good. Dew isn’t exactly a healing town for me. I need to get out as soon as I can.” He put his hand, the one missing all its fingers, gently on her arm. “I’ll show you everything,” he whispered.

  ~

  Anna checked Mr. Jordan’s condition in the afternoon.

  He teetered on the edge of death, his body struggling with the rising levels of toxins dialysis could no longer effectively extract from his bloodstream.

  “Anna?”

  She jumped back, startled by the voice.

  August stood immediately behind her.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “I guess I’m still a little jumpy.”

  “I was following up on those dinner plans.”

  She put the chart down, gently pulling the hospital blanket up around Mr. Jordan. “We’d have to coordinate schedules.”

  “How about Friday night?” August said. “Do you like Thai? Believe it or not, this town has incredible Thai food.”

  “That sounds great,” she said. “I’ll have to diet a little before then. I’ve been putting on a few pounds. I guess all my nervous eating is catching up to me.”

  “Make sure it’s not the start of a body perception disorder or a symptom of some underlying psychological response to your attack,” he said.

  August never liked to say anything concisely that he could say—what was the word he used?—prolixly, she remembered. At least that much was still familiar about him. She wondered what he had been doing with the old woman and the policeman.

  “I walk,” she told him. “To help clear my mind. I find myself analyzing my own progress too much. Having too much knowledge.”

  “Ah, the curse of propaedeatics,” he grinned. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  She was happy when he left to attend to his own duties.

  It left her in the comfortable company of the dying.

  ~

  Anna walked quickly, to warm herself up. She had expected milder weather this time of year, but as the wind blew from the north, it was clear that winter was refusing to leave.

  Anna arrived at the cemetery and walked toward its center. A large, gray marble statue of the bereaved Virgin Mary stood watch over a family plot. Anna sat down on the memorial bench.

  The man with the scar joined her moments later, his broken hands cradling a cup of coffee.

  “In Dew,” he said, looking over the cemetery, “you can find those who should be dead among the living. You find those who should be living among the dead.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “This city has no cancer, no influenza. It is answering every diseased call with a curative reply.”

  “I have colleagues here trying to figure out why. If we can figure out what makes you all so special, perhaps we can cure illness elsewhere.”

  He looked oddly haunted and hunted at the same time, as if he expected the shadows to engulf him and pull him into the ground if he spoke much more.

  “You know something,” she sensed. “Tell me.”

  “Once upon a time, tuberculosis had a stronghold here. You died of it, or at least they sent you away to not infect everyone else.”

  “We have cures for that now. Rifampin. Other drugs.”

  “Yes. You have real cures. Things you make out of chemicals and plants. Things that are right with the world. But Dew found another way to cure tuberculosis. Before the medications.”

  “Such as?”

  “There was a bride. Elissa Gruber. She was dying of TB. She was a beautiful woman, with long silken hair the color of the sunrise. She had just gotten married to Stephan Gruber. He was heartbroken to know she was in their honeymoon bed, dying.”

  Anna pulled her jacket around her; the sun had disappeared below the horizon.

  “She died on a beautiful spring day. A few days later, while he was chopping wood, Stephen accidentally cut four of his fingers clean off.” The old man nodded sadly. “The next day, everyone in town with TB got better. Stephen Gruber was the first Dew cure.”

  “What are you saying?” Anna asked.

  “There are superstitions, outside of your big institutions,” the old man said. “And some superstitions need to be left where they live—not become part of the rest of the world. Let the Devil tempt us in our own places, Doctor Anna, so we know his mark.”

  She glanced at his hand. “Did you do that to yourself?” His fingers were chopped, almost as he described Stephen Gruber’s injuries.

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “See, the next year, people started getting sick again. So someone thought about the connection between Stephen Gruber losing his fingers and everyone being cured of the consumption. Sympathetic magic, I think you call it. But this was sympathetic magic that worked. There’s nothing more frightening than that.” The man paused, looking at the horizon. “Some townsfolk chopped off the fingers of a Mr. Wall, an attorney. They cut them off his left hand, figuring he would do alright in his profession, him being right handed and not having to do any manual labor for his living.”

  “What happened?” Anna asked.

  “The TB vanished again.” The man looked far away, into time more than space. “The year after, the same thing. At about twelve months, people began to get sick again. So they cut the fingers off of a farmer who had retired to make moonshine. The TB went away yet again. It set the pattern. Chop the fingers off of a Dew man, and TB goes away for twelve months.”

  “And your hand?”

  “I was a punk kid here in Dew. Drank too much, did too little. Spent my evenings watching women dance topless, spent my days swindling people out of money in the pool hall. They figured my left hand wasn’t worth much either when they came for me. That brought relief for the whole year of 1952.”

  “You need to see someone,” she said comfortingly. “Come by the hospital. I can make a referral. You’ve been carrying too much of something for far too long.”

  “You don’t believe me,” the old man smiled. “That’s okay. But look around the cemetery, Doctor. Read the tombstones and do the math. No one dies young here in Dew…except for those who serve as vehicles for the cures.” He stood up and walked to the edge of the cemetery, where the paupers’ graves were. Each bore a simple wooden marker, written on in an indelible ink marker. Some were tiny graves, barely big enough for a baby. Little popsicle sticks marked the spots, but there were no names; just a gender sign and a date. Anna knew of dear departed dogs that had better graves.

  He pointed. “Here are the runaways, the drug addicts, the homeless, the prisoners, the prostitutes, the aborted, the too poor, the euthanized, the rebels, the nameless, the hopeless, and the forgotten. The unpopular. Dew pays its blood money in what it considers worthless. That’s what keeps it healthy.”

  “You’re saying they actually kill people…that’s what the town thinks is keeping them healthy?”

  “Not every cure requires a life. Most, but not all. Cancer, for example.”

  “Cancer?”

  “Cancer requires a doctor to be brutalized every two years. Don’t ask me how they determine the cures—it takes your friend and his cronies a bit of trying to figure out what cures what and for how long. That alone should make you piss your pants. Dew isn’t healthy for everybody.”

  “Something strange is definitely going on here. I’ll figure it out, but what you’re say…well, that’s just crazy—”

  “Crazy is problematic. They haven’t found many cures for mental or emotional illness. Some convoluted cure for an animal virus keeps bipolar away. That’s about it. Maybe the problem with mental, emotional, and spiritual illnesses is that the healers are so sick with those themselves.”

  She started to back away.

  “Look at the graves,” h
e said. His voice was deep and serious.

  She looked. It was not just the extraordinarily large number of paupers’ graves, but something else that stood out about this part of the cemetery. It was already prepared for multitudes of more dead—there were pre-dug graves, each with very specific dimensions, in very specific places, as if the size and placement of the future dead was already known. Further beyond the dug graves, there were additional plots already marked out, little orange flags giving directions on the next set of graves to be prepared after the dug ones had been filled. The section went on beyond the cemetery trees for acres, the flags changing color, as if each season’s graves were already known. Orange flags gave way to green, to pink, to purple, to blue. That was as far as she could see. She sensed they went on for a hideous distance.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Magic doesn’t cure,” she said bluntly. “Science does.”

  “Sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself. But what were you promised to come here? And who did the promising? Would you have ever come to Dew without a trusted friend enticing you with a unique opportunity?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “If you don’t owe it to yourself, maybe you can see fit to owe it to these,” he waved his hand over the filled graves. “And if they do not cry out from beyond their graves, then perhaps those already marked to fill the earth can inspire you. Get out of Dew as fast as you can, Anna. You should never have come here.”

  ~

  Anna was at the hospital early the next morning. She had trouble sleeping and wanted sane thoughts to take the place of the old man’s wild conjecturing.

  The hospital was still sleepy, the late shift finishing up paperwork before the morning shift arrived. August caught up to her as she entered the hospital through the emergency room doors. “You’re an early bird,” he said.

  “I have some very sick patients.”