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smoke or otherwise debilitate myself, which seemed to surprise some personnel. They X-rayed me,
EKG'd me, blood-pressured me, took blood samples (ouch!) for tissue cultures to find the bug in my
system: nothing. I was completely healthy, except that my system was waging a raging battle with an
invisible enemy. There was simply no handle on this illness.
I think the doctor's hair was thinning: was he tugging out handfuls in frustration? He wasn't used to
dealing with science-fiction illnesses. "Do you have cats?" he asked irrelevantly, betraying how
greatly his mind had deteriorated out of strain. I replied gently that we had two horses, five dogs,
twelve chickens, two children, and no cats. "Then you couldn't have been scratched by a cat," he
grumbled.
Oh? As it happened, two and a half months ago when God punished the Skyway Bridge...
And so the diagnosis was reached at last: I had contracted cat scratch disease, normally a rare
childhood malady. It is unresponsive to medication, shows no bacteria in cultures, and simply has to
run its ornery month-long course. It's not too serious, it just takes time-a bit like a writer working on a
novel, or a woman shopping for a hat.
So here I was: my exercise program destroyed at its height, my once-proud muscles melting into glop,
my novel halted dead in space-for the first time in forty novels, I was destined to be late on a contract
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deadline-medical bills piling on (I carry no medical insurance-this is not lack of foresight so much as
ire over the time they tried to rider me for mental disease), my wife wearing down to a frazzle-all
because I fed one hungry cat on the morning an Act of God was scheduled.
And do you want to know what happened to that cat? That cat died. No, I know you're thinking of
Goldsmith's poem An Elegy On the Death of a Mad Dog, wherein the dog bit the saintly man and the
dog died. It wasn't like that. My blood may be potent, but not poisonous. What happened was the cat
got into an altercation with a larger cat and got chomped and gave up its ninth life. (Then again: you
don't suppose that my blood could have made that cat crazy enough to pick that fight?)
The hospital let me go, still with my fever and swelling and mad science fiction brain; there was
nothing they could do for me. Freed of all this attention and medication, I began to improve. I finally
turned the corner in early August, on my forty-sixth birthday: my month-long fever stayed down. But
the swelling persisted, so a few days later the doctor stuck a brute needle into it and drew out a vial of
mudwater. Viscous ugh, of course. He called this "aspiration"-a fancy term for a hellishly painful
process. But it reduced the swelling to half-golf-ball size and freed my arm somewhat, and my armpit
began to reappear. A few days later the puncture started leaking chocolate syrup onto my T-shirt:
messy, but a relief, since it meant I would not have to suffer that dread needle again. Things continued
to improve. In late August I resumed cautious exercise, my performance down to roughly a third what
it had been, but improving rapidly.
My writing never came to a complete standstill, for I am, as claimed, a disciplined cuss. I did a great
deal of research reading on World War Two, and in the hospital started writing the first chapters of
Volk, my projected WWII novel. Thus I actually got a head start on a new project, thanks to my
pencil-and-clipboard technique. Now I resumed typing on a limited basis, though it did somewhat
aggravate the swelling. I completed the second draft of the novel in the middle of August, typing in
the mornings and resting, often sleeping, in the hot afternoons. I also typed second draft on my WWII
chapters, since I had them on hand. Then I typed the submission draft on Volk, extending my limits on
the fifty-page small project before tackling the three-hundred-fifty-page big one, just in case. All
seemed well. Gradually I worked back up to a full schedule, typing twenty or more pages a day, and
completed the submission draft of Viscous Circle on September 20, just two days after the doctor
cleared me as cured.
So the novel was done almost entirely in the gradual course of the illness. If it seems sick, blame it on
that cat. My clean living, wholesome diet, avoidance of vices, and vigorous exercise, a supposedly
sure formula for health, did not preserve me from this experience. Perhaps I will never know the
meaning of it, if there is one. But still there lurks the hope that, in some devious way, this ordeal does
have meaning. For a while there was one hope: when they drew the sludge out of my swelling and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]