The Blood Artists

She watched him for a smile. “Benjamin Something,” he said instead.

Her own smile fell away. “What did you say?”

“Can’t remember his last name. The ticket agency worker. Benjamin Something.” He spoke as though of a mutual acquaintance. “He seemed suitable. On paper, anyway.”

He was filling in the last few remaining gaps in her file. Any personal debacles she had tried to put behind her lived still and brightly in Maryk’s mind.

“I have a few rather disfiguring scars on my body,” she said, “which I’m a bit overly sensitive about. This tends to rule out any danger of intimacy with the opposite sex.”

She heard herself trying to pass off desperation as aloofness, denigrating that which was forbidden her. She was the poor, grumbling about the rich. With a shudder she realized that Maryk knew her better than anyone else. It reminded her again how much she resented him.

“You know what?” she said. “I think some people are like viruses. Some people just take, and if they give you anything at all, it’s something you don’t want.”

This seemed to register inside his muddled head, reflected in his eyes, which sharpened in their view over the lounge and held there a moment before retreating again. He hadn’t liked that comparison at all.

A bickering couple passed them, hot coffee dripping off the man’s jacket cuff. They thought of sitting nearby, but a shared glance at Maryk made them reconsider. They faded away and Melanie was all business again.

“Why ‘Milkmaid’?” she said.

He squinted. “That was about Jenner. Edward Jenner, who discovered the cure for smallpox. Wordplay. The ‘milkmaid’ who launched his work, the ‘lancet’ he used to open the boil, the cow named ‘Blossom.’ Inelegant. If I had to do it over again, I would use Pasteur instead.” He glanced at her then, as though having decided something, and leaned forward interrogationally. “I am going to tell you a story that will change your life,” he said.

She doubted that. “I could use a change.”

“Eighteen eighty-five. Alsace, France. A nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister, on his way to school, is mauled savagely by a rabid dog and barely survives. Rabies, what the French call la rage, was well feared in that day. Fever, depression, throat convulsions, progressing to mania, characteristic foaming at the mouth, eventual paralysis, and death. There was no cure and no treatment. A local doctor cauterized the worst of the boy’s wounds and, having reached the limits of his abilities, advised Madame Meister to travel to Paris to call upon Dr. Louis Pasteur. Pasteur was not a physician. Pasteur was a chemist, a scientist. The idea of germs fascinated him, and he was experimenting at the time with the germs of dead animals, ones he had weakened in the laboratory. His work would eventually lead to the discovery of viruses, but at that time, the idea of invisible particles causing disease was considered pure fancy. Meister became Pasteur’s first human trial. Pasteur inoculated him with a solution mixed from the spinal cords of rabbits recently dead from rabies. This was only the second human vaccine in history, after Jenner’s, but the first to be manufactured in a laboratory and derived from the same infective agent that caused the disease. The boy survived. He was spared the ravages of la rage. Modem human virology finds its genesis in Pasteur’s pioneering work, and yet he was misunderstood by many of his time. Most of his colleagues could not see the whole of the canvas upon which he was working.

“But that’s all regular history and well enough known. It is at this point that history abandons the boy. Joseph Meister never wavered in his devotion to the man who saved his life and, fittingly, grew up to become the gatekeeper at the Institute Pasteur years after his savior’s death. Joseph Meister was guarding the gate in 1940 when the Nazis marched into Paris. They ordered him to open Pasteur’s crypt, but Meister refused, and instead took his own life in protest.”

Melanie hung in the ensuing silence.

“He killed himself,” she said. “That’s your life changing story?”

For the first time that night, Maryk seemed fully awake. “Meister destroyed himself rather than be part of the desecration of the memory of the artist who had preserved his life. And history gives him nothing. Well — if seventy-six years can be considered history. In truth it is the blink of an eye.” He sat up again, interested. “Think of that. Seventy-six years ago, the first human being ever to be inoculated with a lab-prepared vaccine died. Three quarters of a century; it’s nothing. And penicillin: discovered by accident, less than one hundred years ago. People have already forgotten that strep throat was until only recently a fatal disease. We’ve had a century’s parole from bacterial slaughter — and now our time is running out again. Antibiotics are failing and diseases, are once again outpacing the remedies. Do you know how our time will be remembered?”

Melanie shook her head.

“As a flash of light between great periods of darkness. If our so-called modern age is remembered at all. Earth is something like three and a half billion years old; mankind, a few million. We are infants crawling upon this rock, protozoa from a pond, who crawled out of the oceans, who dropped down from the trees. Dinosaurs presumed the world was theirs as well. We are a fungus spreading over this planet, colonizing, warring, consuming. The Earth is a cell we are infecting. And nature is the Earth’s immune system, just now sensing the threat of our encroachment, and arming itself to fight back. Macro versus micro. Viruses are the Earth’s white blood cells. We are the Earth’s disease.”