The Plague

Ethan Cade Varnado

“I saw Jesus on the cross, on a hill called Calvary.
‘Do you hate mankind for what they’ve done to you?’”
—Dick Blakeslee, “Passing Through”

Lucas was twenty-seven, Catholic, happy, in love, and then he found out he had the disease, and a year later he was twenty-eight.

His faith went first, and it went without any struggle. This was the final straw, he admitted to himself, there in the room where he was diagnosed. He had started having doubts the year before, after his childhood neighbor Leslie Sanchez died from a stroke. She was an elderly woman and had been so for as long as he’d known her, and as long as he’d known her, she’d always kept her purse full of butterscotch candy that she would hand out to the neighborhood children. She liked children, or at least she liked him. He always seemed to put a smile on her face when they crossed paths.

But by the time her family found her body, Leslie’s dog had eaten that face. They closed her casket at the funeral, but everyone in town knew why and inside themselves they were all unsettled by it—but no one more than Lucas.  For weeks he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing Leslie’s hidden face. He imagined it was simply a skull for the most part, a Death’s head white as pearl, with only a few hanks of hair and muscle clinging in stripes, pell-mell. A skull, a smiling skull. The thought chilled him, not because he was frightened or disgusted, but because it was a mockery. She’s still smiling, he’d think, everything wrong in the world has happened to her and now she just has to keep smiling about it, smiling forever. She’ll never be happy again and she’ll never stop smiling about it.

He’d managed to banish that smile for a time, but a month before his diagnosis his uncle Henry died in a car crash, and once again Leslie was in his thoughts, smiling at that, as she did at all things. She smiled for a third time when the doctor told Lucas he was sick, and that was all he could take. He decided then and there that God couldn’t exist if death could smile. It was obvious.

Everything else, Lucas lost slowly.

His girlfriend Monica had started as a co-worker, an analyst in the requisitions office, but she’d quickly become more than that—an “every night” kind of thing, Lucas told his buddies. No one was surprised when she moved in with him. They seemed a perfect match: both had been Falcons fans since birth, both of them voted Democrat, both took college Latin, loved the late Coppola, hated late Dylan, ate Korean food twice monthly. They grew up three miles away from each other and had never known it until now. These and other weird magnetisms bound them together.

Monica was svelte and tall, kept her fingernails short and her black hair long enough to drizzle down along her ribs. She claimed to be one quarter Greek and had a murky complexion. Lucas though she looked exotic and hoped she was the one. They dated for close to nineteen months before his diagnosis. She was there when he fainted and hit his head, during an argument they were having, about socks. She was in the ambulance, holding his hand. She was in the room when the doctor told him he was dying. Monica was the only one who cried.

At first, oddly enough, the disease seemed to strengthen their relationship. Monica fawned over him after the diagnosis, became as obliging as a hausfrau; in turn, he felt compelled to decline every offer for help, to scour all his messes clean, take out the trash, be on his best behavior. They put all their fighting aside. Never had they been so attentive to each other’s needs. The sex got amazing.

Neither of them spoke about death or sickness or even acknowledged the disease, except in the depths of the morning when Monica would slide her hand across his chest and whisper, “I’m here for you, whatever you need.” Her breath was hot in his ear.

Nothing changed until the day he shaved his head. Lucas had worn his hair long since high school, and he liked it that way, but he had decided he wanted to get rid of it himself, rather than watch it fall out slowly. So on a cold Saturday evening, while his girlfriend was shopping, he stood before his bathroom mirror and raked an electric razor straight across his scalp, again and again. It was not until he looked like a young Benjamin Franklin that Lucas paused to consider what he was doing. Two thoughts occurred, simultaneously: It’s only hair, it’ll grow back and I’m cutting myself. He finished the shave while staring into the washbasin, trying hard not to think.

When Monica came home that night, late, she screamed. “I thought you were a robber,” she said, after catching her breath. “You look completely different.” She frowned, then smoothed the length of his pate with the palm of her hand and kissed his forehead. Shortly thereafter, Lucas cooked dinner, teriyaki salmon. They each ate it in different rooms.

She didn’t speak to him for the rest of night, except to say, “I wish you had told me you were going to do that” while he was brushing his teeth. He did not respond, nor did he look at himself in the mirror. He stared at the washbasin again, before spitting into it.

The next morning, at breakfast, Monica told him she wanted to start going to his appointments with him. The following Thursday, they attended his first round of the new treatment together.

Saint Eileithyia of Ctesiphon Hospital was the most prestigious and expensive medical center in the state of Alabama. The facilities were housed throughout several structures, with the primary care taking place in a sleek, twelve-story tower. Many of the walls inside were just giant panes of Plexiglas, which somehow made Lucas feel very clean and very cold.

At Saint Eileithyia, there were just as many nuns as there were doctors. They were attired classically in black and white, and the length of their robes made them seem to glide across the linoleum floor like chess pieces. The first time Lucas came to the hospital, he lost his way in the endless corridors, and one of the nuns—whose face looked like hundred-year-old parchment—approached him and silently pointed her bony arm where he needed to be.

Mostly though, they ignored the patients. They all seemed very busy.

The main waiting room was on the first floor, and it looked taller than all the other rooms, and there was very little furniture inside it, and all the couches looked like they had been made from recycled tires. “This is a cavern,” Monica had said, the first time she saw it, “an industrialized cavern.” They both spent a lot of time there, mostly just pointing at things they found in magazines.

A quarter-mile down from the main complex, there was a little garden grotto with brown-brick walls that Lucas liked to visit between doctors. It was deep December the first time he visited, so the hospital staff had made up for the pots of deathly ferns by surrounding them with red-ribboned poinsettias. The only other living thing was Spanish moss; the only other dead thing, the saint herself. She was gold-plated, dwarf-sized, standing in a brick alcove with the words Salve Sancta Eileithyia, Salvatrix Ctesiphonis, Defensor Fidei Christi! written above her in blue paint. Saint Eileithyia had a smiling face, but her ribcage was showing underneath her toga. She held a staff and a bowl of herbs.

One evening his treatment had been scheduled unusually late, and Monica told him to wait in the grotto while she went to the cafeteria for coffee. It was chilly out, and growing chillier as the sun went down. By the time he reached the grotto, it was almost too dark see the young nun huddled before the alcove, praying. When she rose at his approach, he apologized and offered to go elsewhere.

“That’s hardly necessary,” the nun replied. No older than thirty, she had a tiny, rosy head with a black habit blooming enormously around it, and altogether she looked like a face in a wall. “The sisters had this garden built for everyone to enjoy, although you wouldn’t know that from the condition it’s in. In any case, I think it would be grossly uncharitable of me to shoo you off.”

Lucas thanked her, and they had a little chat.

Eventually, and without provocation, the sister asked, “Do you know the story of Saint Eileithyia?” When he told her he didn’t, her eyes lit up.

“She was martyred by the Assyrians, skinned alive with oyster shells after healing lepers with a sliver of the true cross and a series of tinctures.” She paused and frowned, then smiled again. “I don’t know what it is about that story that makes me want to heal people, but it does. Several of her prescriptions survive, you know. She’s right up there with Galen, as far as ancient medicine goes.”

Lucas told her that no, he did not know that, and the conversation soon became banal again. By the time Monica arrived, it had grown too chilly and dark to remain outside, and so the three of them walked back to the hospital in silence.

Two months into his treatment, Lucas threw up on Monica while they were making love. It made her stop screaming, strangely enough, and she was very receptive to his apologies.

“It’s okay, I understand.” Very quickly, she slid out from under him. “We both know how sick you are.”

Monica slipped into the bathroom, and while she was cleaning herself, he finished on the sheets. She re-entered just in time to watch the main event.

“Oh. I guess we’re done then,” she said. Lucas thought her voice sounded unusually energetic.

When they got back under the covers together, he tried to think of something to say, something funny, something charming, disarming, but the words got stuck in his throat. He choked. It made Monica roll over to face him.

“Honey, if you’re going to throw up again, I think you should do it in the bathroom.”

He nodded and rose. He was halfway there when she asked, “Do you need me to come with you?” He did not.

Only once he was in the bathroom did he wonder why he’d gone there. Was he simply embarrassed? Or was he trying to run away? And was this as far as he could get?

Suddenly he had to throw up again. He got on his knees and aimed for the toilet and hit the mark, mostly. This time, the attack was longer, and when he was done his throat was pulsing and felt like it’d had a steel rake drug across it. Some of the vomit was red.

After a minute, he felt strong enough to stand. He drank several gulps of water from the sink, and it was good, because it was so cold, if a little metallic. It also hurt a bit going down, but that was good too somehow.

When he lifted his head from the basin, he shrieked. A skull was staring at him from the other side of the mirror. It was wrapped taut in sallow skin, and it had eyes that were full of blood and terror, but it was unmistakably a skull. It was hideous. It was undead.

In an instant, Monica was behind and in front of him. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He wasn’t.

The next morning, Lucas broke up with Monica over breakfast. She cried when he told her he couldn’t put her through this anymore. Ruddy-faced, she told him she was going to work and that they’d talk more when she got home. But she didn’t come home, and three days later showed up with her brother and a large truck and they moved a lot of her things out. Lucas tried to keep to a different room. He thought he heard them laugh from time to time, though that might just have been the heater kicking in or the walls distorting the sound of their voices.

Once they were gone, he tried to feel bad about what he’d done, but he couldn’t, so he tried to congratulate himself instead. Good job, you. It was all for the best, what you did. What you did, you did it well. When that didn’t work, he decided he’d take a long shower and get ready for his appointment earlier than usual.

On the day that the doctors told Lucas he had survived the disease, it rained. He’d needed to stay overnight while some tests were being run, and they had given him an eighth-floor room all to himself, and it had a wide window with a spectacular view of the grassy lawns. While the MDs babbled, smiled warmly, ignored him, he did not once take his eyes off of that window. All in a span of minutes, it seemed to him, the clear blue sky outside bloated purple and ruptured, flooding the hospital grounds. It made green things grey.

“April showers bring May flowers.” The nun from the grotto said this, after all the doctors left. As Lucas had grown better, they had become closer. Not friends, exactly—there was something preventing that, almost a wall, a moat, some invisible boundary, something uniquely nunnish about her—but she always took the time to chat with him about small matters if she met him in the hall, and she had memorized his name. He had never learned hers, and felt it was too late to ask; Lucas just called her “Sister.”

“I heard the good news,” said Sister, once she was done talking about the rain, “and just wanted to come in and say how happy I am for you.” She loomed above his bedside, as hard as a pillar of black marble.

He let her take his hand. He stood.

“Someone has to be happy.” A smile thinly bridged her wimple. “I kid, of course. This is something a lot of patients go through. You think you’re going to die, and so you make your peace. And then a man in a white lab coat appears—the same man, maybe, who told you you were going to die in the first place—and he says it’s all a ruse, that you’re going to live a long and happy life, meet your great-grandkids. The thought of death departs, but so does the peace you earned in the face of it.”

Lucas didn’t want to admit that she was right, but his eyes must have done it for him, and the Sister’s smile rippled in response. Her eyes shined with hospital light.

“Now, Lucas, now you have to earn your peace in living. It won’t be easy, and it will keep you up at night, and it’ll be just like starting over from birth—yes, that’s it, isn’t it? You’ve been reborn!—but nothing worthwhile was ever earned without struggle and sacrifice. And Lucas, there’s nothing more worthwhile than happiness. As difficult as your life has been thus far, as difficult as it will be, it’s your life, your very life, and it’s in your hands again.”

The sister squeezed his hand so tight that he felt the blood stir hot within it. He started and she released him.

“Don’t let it go.” She was crying softly, but she wore a hungry hyena smile.

Lucas promised her he would not, told her he would search for truth, said that each day he would be kinder than the last. All that Ebenezer Scrooge bullshit. It seemed to satisfy her.

“And whatever happens,” said Sister, leaving, “never forget that I am praying for you, and that God is listening. Never forget that. He’s always near you, inside you. Always listening, speaking, waiting for you to listen. He’s there for you Lucas. Don’t doubt that He healed you. He’s real.”

He nodded and she, her face wet and red, nodded back. After she closed the door, Lucas changed out of his hospital gown and began to gather up his things. He was ready to leave when a bright flash drew his gaze back to the window and the rain. A bolt of lightning had fallen out of the sky and landed on a nearby lawn. The sound it made was titanic, instantaneous. The whole room shook like a maraca.

Suddenly, Lucas was afraid that God was talking to him—and afraid of what He might have to say.

Lucas intended make his triumphant return to work the following Tuesday, but when he opened the office doors, everyone shouted, “Surprise!” Lucas was surprised all right—but not by the party.

No, he had suspected something along those lines. Of course they would want to welcome him back. Of course there would be yellow cake. This was a foregone conclusion. The whole office was there, wearing their best faces and even better suits, arms lifted high in the air.

No, what surprised him was that Monica wasn’t there. He hadn’t tried to contact her since the day she left, at first just because he was too busy pretending he didn’t want to do it. Then he was on the edge of death, so that settled that. And then, when it looked like he was about to come out of the woods, then he thought it would be awkward. Hey, guess what? I didn’t die after all. Everything’s back to normal. Love me tender.

The party should have put them in the same room, forced them to be cordial to one another, given him a chance to reassess things. Maybe nothing would have come of it, but at least it would have given them a nicer, cleaner ending. What with the yellow cake and all.

But of all the faces he expected to see, hers was the only one missing. Even Janice was here, Janice, the Liaison to the General Manager in Charge of Sales, Janice who only came in on one Thursday out of every month, Janice was here. She rubbed her brittle hands across his scalp, where his hair was just coming back in, and she told him it looked good at that length. Tact was never part of Janice’s skill set.

But her remark was far from the most offensive thing about the party. What was intolerable was having to meet everyone on their own terms. It was a dance, that crowd, and he never got to lead, only got to answer vague compliment with vague compliment. Lucas hugged everyone in the room. Several times, he was kissed. All of it meaningless.

Finally, he had enough. He asked Fergus, the Marketing Development Specialist, where Monica was. The room hushed. Fergus twitched. When he said the words “maternity leave,” Lucas stopped listening entirely.

Lucas skipped work the next day. He did not bother to call in sick. Janice and Fergus, they all would understand.

When he returned the following day, he made a point to be kinder than ever before. He spoke to everyone on the way in, joked with them. It was as though he had never had the disease to begin with.

Monica told him to meet her at her home at 3:30 on Saturday, because she knew that Rodney wouldn’t be home. When Lucas asked her who that was, she said, “Never mind.”  He didn’t press the issue. She had only agreed to this after a week’s worth of spurned calls.  He knew he had worn her down.

The house that Rodney and Monica lived in was a classic American dream home (two stories, lime-green rain gutters), but it was in a part of town that had been hit hard by white flight. They must have got it for cheap. “We’re just renting,” Monica said when Lucas complimented the gutters. She was standing alone in the driveway when he arrived, waiting. Her hair was frizzy, and she had on an oversized T-shirt. The Never Ending Tour was advertised across it, so it must have been Rodney’s.

Monica’s lips cinched. “Let’s not waste time with small-talk. What do you want?”

Lucas told her that he was going to live.

“That isn’t what I asked. What do you want?”

Lucas told her he missed her, and what he wanted was to see how she was doing.

“Lousy,” she said. “I just gave birth to a seven-pound little boy who cries at odd hours. I live on the north side of town. Everything about my life is random now. I’m lousy. What do you want?”

She knew what he wanted.

Lucas wanted to see the baby.

“Well, you can’t. He isn’t yours.” Monica looked down at the driveway, at the silvery concrete pavement. “He isn’t yours.”

There was a silence, for a time, and the time felt long and the silence endless, because neither of them seemed to know how to break it. Eventually, it was a whisper that did it. Monica’s.

“You know, sometimes, when we were sleeping together, I’d dream about you. I’d dream about being near you, touching you, even though you were sleeping next to me the whole time. Once, not too long ago, you were all I ever thought about. I wanted you so badly that even after I had you, I couldn’t stop thinking, dreaming, about being with you. But then, somehow we grew apart. And then, you—”

He told her he was sorry. Told her he was a fool for breaking up with her at such a hectic part of both their lives. He told her he would love and cherish her this time, her and her baby both, hers or his, it didn’t matter. He would be kinder than ever before. He loved her. He broke up with her because he loved her. He wanted her back because he loved her. He was so sorry. He loved her.

She wept.

“And then, you got too fucking sick for me to leave you. I was going to do it, I had been planning it, over and over in my head, trying to get the words right. But they never would have, not after you got sick. So instead I waited, watched you sicken and die. I had to hold your hand on the way to the cemetery plot, Lucas. I didn’t even love you anymore, I was only pretending, but I still had to stay and watch you die. You were never cruel to me until you decided to die.”

There was silence again, and weeping.

Then, the sound of the baby crying inside the house roused them from their quiet.

“Oh,” Monica said, lifting her head up. Her cheeks were rosy. She wiped away their dampness using the folds of her T-shirt. Her eyes said it was time to go.

His eyes agreed with them. 

“I can’t give you what you want, Lucas, whatever that is. But, uh, either way, um,” Monica cleared her throat, “I’m glad you aren’t dead or dying. You’ve got a lot to, uh, live for.”

She shut the door to her house gently when she left him. He didn’t get back into his car until the he heard the baby stop crying. That silence, at least, was a comfort.

Somewhere on the drive home, Lucas decided he wouldn’t be in love with her anymore.

It was spring, and the apartment complex where Lucas was staying always had a terrible mayfly infestation during that season, and Lucas’ unit was no exception. When he arrived home from Monica’s that evening, he was greeted by a swarm.

He ignored them, even though they sparkled salt-and-pepper in the air. They had such short lifespans. Their season could not last much longer; all one had to do was wait, wait for whatever May flowers brought.

So Lucas shook his pants off, sat on his couch in his underwear and shirt, and waited. He had purchased a vanilla milkshake and a box of chicken on the way home, and he consumed the strips inside with lazy precision, the way a housecat picks apart a lizard. He binged TV. Channel-surfing was never his thing—he watched Colbert on occasion, and Top Gear, which was different, which was intentional—but now he needed color and noise, and when one channel went short on that order, there was always another stocked full.

He didn’t check the time until 2:39, while he was in the middle of watching a Southern Baptist preacher explain the Book of Exodus to a football stadium full of people in Busan. The preacher made two fists, boxed with the air. “Then the LORD sent frogs, then lice, then wild beasts, diseases, boils. Then the LORD made it rain down fire and ice.”

The preacher had thick glasses and an effortless comb-over, and Lucas couldn’t stand to look at him. His eyes were straining. It was time to call it a night.

He stood to go to bed, but instead something drew him to the window, to his living room window.  Lucas lived on the first story, but from that window he could see the whole town. There was the water tower across the street, next the fire station, and not far off his childhood home, and Leslie Sanchez’s house, and Monica’s, and the Chattahoochee river, and beyond it the diamond sands of the desert, vast.  Lucas watched the town until the moon set and the sun rose high in a noontime sky, and with it rose three pyramids, spinning out of the desert like masonic tops.

A million miles away, in Busan, the preacher spoke, his English clear. “Then, the Nile ran red with blood.”

Instantaneously, the Chattahoochee shifted cherry-red as gelatin. The desert gleamed. Lucas could feel his heartbeat.

“A plague of locusts came.”

All at once, across the yawning desert, the dunes erupted, spewing grasshoppers, black-winged, black of carapace. They sizzled on the wind, and the wind brought them close and far away at once, wove them through the air like skeins of black yarn.

They were everywhere; they ate the walls of his apartment. They grasped him.

“Not done, God sent a plague of darkness.”

His eyesight dimmed, though whether it was because of God or grasshopper, he did not know. He knew nothing but dark and cold and silence. Even the million tiny legs dancing on his skin went still.

 “The last plague was Death. Death descended nigh on the ancient kingdom, swept across the sands, and murdered all the firstborn sons in the span of one night. In matter of hours, all the heirs to Egypt were lost—”

Alone in the darkness, Lucas thought of Monica’s son, who was not, and never could be his. For five cruel seconds, ten, he thought they were with him—Monica in a toga, clutching the babe to a skeletal breast, letting it suckle—but there was only darkness all around.

“—and their fathers and mothers and even Pharaoh himself, in his monolithic palace, woke with the sun to stare Death in the face, none of them realizing they were looking into the very face of the LORD of hosts.”

Darkness all around, darkness still, but a sun, a white-gold sun came to drive it away and give Lucas eyes to watch the miracle with. He could see; he could breathe. Lucas stared into the sun, darkness swarming around him, and he screamed.

Rising, bubbling up from the center of all that molten light, came a skull.  It was a skull unlike any other, kingly, holy, gilded and glistening and glorious, absolutely glorious, and hideous, hideous in death. It looked at Lucas and smiled, making sure he understood where his life had come from and where it all would go.

Staring into the dazzling face of the LORD, Lucas, at last, understood the truth of the plagues—that they come and they come and they come from on high, where lives a God who always smiles, so pleased is he to be remembered by his children on Earth.

“For the LORD is a vengeful God.”

The darkness departed, and the sun shone brilliant over Chattahoochee and Nile alike.

The preacher was still speaking when he woke up, softer now. “Thus the land of Egypt was scourged, her Pharaoh humbled, brought to heel before God. Let us remember, then, the wrath of the LORD.”

Lucas remembered, in part because of the mayfly that had landed on his arm, and the others that were colonizing what remained of his chicken box. The only light was the dim blue of the television, so it wasn’t clear, but there seemed to be more of them than before. The dark room looked darker because of them. A plague of locusts, he thought. Almost. Not quite.

Still, he did not move, not even to shake the insect off of him, so terrified was he of the plague that was to follow.