Mysterium

The town of Two Rivers lacked a hospital. This building was the nearest thing: a cube of consulting rooms with windows of tinted glass and a wide tiled lobby. Dr. Eichorn would be here today, if her luck held. She identified herself to the soldier at the door and asked where she could find him. “First office left off the lobby,” he said, “last time I saw him, Miss.”

Dr. Eichorn was the medical archivist who had been called in, like Linneth, by the Proctors. He was a tall, hairless, patrician Southerner, a teaching physician with a degree in natural history. She found him at a desk in a consulting room. He was wrapped in two woolen sweaters and a scarf, frowning over the pages of a medical journal, eyeglasses thick as jeweler’s loupes riding the end of his nose. She tapped the open door. He looked up and his eyes narrowed in some combination of suspicion and annoyance. “Miss, is it, Stone? We met in the commissary—didn’t we?”

“Yes…” Now that she was here, she didn’t know how to begin.

“Is there something I can help you with?”

“Yes, there is.” Forge ahead, she thought. “Dr. Eichorn, I need a course of sulfa drugs.”

“You mean, you’re sick?”

“No. It’s for a friend.”

He was like a muddy pond. It took time for things to sink in. Eichorn pushed the journal aside and leaned back in his chair. “You’re that woman anthropologist from Boston.”

“I am.”

“I didn’t know you were also a medical prodigy.”

“Sir, I’m not. But I was trained by the Christian Renunciates and I know how to administer drugs.”

“And how to prescribe them?”

“The object is to ward off infection in a wound.”

“A wound, you say.”

“Yes.”

“One of your anthropological subjects?” The question was awkward, but Linneth nodded. “I see. Well, maybe the best thing would be if the patient came to me directly.”

“That would be difficult.”

“Or if you took me to the patient.”

“It isn’t necessary.” She worked to keep any hint of desperation out of her voice. “I know your time is valuable. I’m asking this favor as a colleague, Dr. Eichorn.”

“As a colleague? Am I the colleague of a woman who studies savages?” He shook his bald head ponderously. “Sulfanilamide. Well, that’s problematic. There was trouble last night—you may have heard of it.”

“Only rumors.”

“Shooting in the main street.”

“I see.”

“A fire.”

“If you say so.”

Eichorn studied her from his turgid depths. Linneth waited for his verdict. She counted silently to ten and was careful not to lower her gaze.

“In this building,” Eichorn said, “there are antibiotics the like of which I’ve never seen. I don’t know where this town came from or where it may be going, but there were some clever people here. We’ll be reaping the rewards for decades. We owe someone a debt, Miss Stone. I don’t know who.” He rubbed his scalp with a bony hand. “No one will miss a bottle of pills. But let’s keep this between us, yes?”

∞

Linneth knew that something inside her had changed, but the change had been gradual and she couldn’t be sure of its nature or degree. It was as if she had opened a familiar door and found a strange new landscape beyond it.

Maybe the change had begun when the Proctor Symeon Demarch invaded her home in Boston, or when she arrived in this impossible town. But the axis and emblem of that change was surely Dexter Graham—not only the man but the qualities she had espied in him: skepticism, courage, defiance.

She thought at first his virtues might be common American virtues, but the evidence for that was scant. Linneth had sampled the magazines and newspapers of his world and found them brash but often vulgar and concerned above all else with fashion: fashions in politics as much as fashions in dress; and fashion, Linneth thought, was only that drab whore Conformity in gaudier paint. Dexter Graham defied convention. He seemed to weigh everything—everything she said to him, her words, her presence—on an invisible scale. He had the bearing of a judge, but there was nothing imperious or awful in it. He did not exempt himself from judgment. She sensed that he had long ago passed some verdict on himself, and the verdict was far from favorable.

Obviously, she should have turned him over to the soldiers as soon as she saw his wound. But when she thought about it she remembered a passage in the book he had given her, Huckleberry Finn, by Mr. Mark Twain. Much of the book had been hard to decipher, but there was a pivotal moment when Huck debated whether he ought to turn over his friend, the Negro Jim, to authorities. By the standards of his time, giving up Jim was the right thing to do. Huckleberry Finn had been told he would go to Hell and suffer unspeakable torment if he abetted an escaped slave. Nevertheless, Huck helped his friend. If it meant going to Hell, then he’d go to Hell.

I’ll go to Hell, then, Linneth thought.