The Blood Artists

He had no answer for her immediately, which buoyed her.

“What if I got sick again?” she said.

“Simple,” he said, sitting back now. “I would treat you.”

“And if I refused? Resisted?”

He said again, “I would treat you.”

“What if I ran? I told you before: I will never go through that treatment again.”

He looked at her with more than a glance now. He was taking her seriously. She wanted to be taken seriously.

“What if my blood was no longer any good to you,” she said, “and you knew that I would refuse treatment? What if I was going to run? Would you kill me too?”

His gaze was penetrating. “Where would you go?”

“Away. A remote island somewhere.”

“How would you get there without infecting others?”

She held her own. “I’d find some way.”

“There is no way. And no safe place to go. Either one contains one’s illness, or spreads it. There is no running away.”

“Then you would kill me.”

His arm went out as though sweeping a table clean. “My job is to protect the human race. To defend and preserve the species, and I’ll do it any way I have to. Because I’m the only one who can. I am the last line of defense.”

That raised her eyebrows. That was the cascade talking. It made him seem vulnerable somehow, and she decided to try to pick his brain while it was soft. “Where does someone like you come from?” she said.

“The same place everyone comes from.”

“I mean, where in the world?”

He was gazing ahead now, only half there. “Skagit Valley. Northern Washington State. An hour north of Seattle, near Vancouver.”

“And you were raised there by wolves?”

He nodded. “My father was a pediatrician,” he said. “Like yours.”

She could have done without that information. “And your mother?”

“She was a part-time church secretary. She called Bingo in the parochial school gymnasium Monday nights. She was blind.”

“She was blind and she called Bingo?”

“The nun who ran the game was pathologically shy. She would pull the Ping-Pong balls and whisper numbers into my mother’s ear, who would then announce them. It came out later that the nun was lying to my mother, routinely rigging the games for the poorest families of the parish to win. Bingo was canceled not long after that.”

“Was she born — you know — blind?”

“No. She remembered images. Toys, pillows’ chair legs. Linoleum floors. The unpainted undersides of tables. It was a childhood illness.”

Melanie’s only point of reference was the Little House books, and Mary, the older sister, who went so valiantly blind from scarlet fever, whose god-fearing ways Melanie tried to emulate as a child.

She thought she had something on him then. “That’s why you became a virologist,” she said.

He said nothing at first, looking only bemused.

“What?” she said.

“That’s something Stephen might have said. No, it was simpler than that. My father also had a tulip farm. One season, when I was eight or nine, the crop came up healthy in every way except the petals: reds and violets and yellows swirled together, similar to what you get when you stir one paint color into another. My mother always liked me to describe things to her, but those colors were one thing I could never get right. My father said a plant virus had caused it. Our crop sold for ten times the usual amount that year. I waited all summer and fall and winter, but next spring the tulips came up normal again. The virus never recurred.”

A nine-year-old Maryk in short pants, standing belt high among acres of psychedelic pastels. She grinned at the image, then remembered who she was dealing with. “No brothers, sisters?”

He looked oddly bemused again, a look so wrong for his piercing face. “Actually, my mother was to have had twins,” he said. “Her ultrasound showed two of us until her eighteenth week, when she experienced some complications. Her next test, taken her twenty-first week, showed only one fetus. This always bothered her. For some reason she thought it was significant, and told me this just before she died. All twins battle in the womb for space, nutrition. It starts that early — the pushing, the pulling. From what is now known about reproductive medicine, the most likely theory is that, whatever sibling I was to have, I absorbed in utero.”

He seemed to be not at all aware of how disturbing this bit of information was. “So you’re like a twin all by yourself, that’s what you’re saying?”