The real world opens on its own
and can’t be shut.
We certainly could not shut out the real world. But we could, for a small while, put on a scarf and make tiny corners of it cozy and safe. Especially when you had a sisterhood at your back. Babcia and I would have many happy teatimes ahead of us.
Dying Isn’t Just for the Young
Holly Black
Excerpted from the diary of Beryl Finch. Published with the permission of Nora Lee Amin, executor of Ms.Finch’s literary estate.
March 3, 2004
I sat by Nigel’s bedside at Mount Sinai Hospital all today, his papery hand in mine. His lungs were bad for years, then got much worse overnight. When he inhaled, I could hear them crackle, as though someone were wadding up a piece of wax paper. When he exhaled, there was a sound like a dog pouncing on a squeak toy. I told him we were going home in just a few more days.
Our marriage has always been full of polite lies, but this might be the final one.
March 4, 2004
“Beryl,” Nigel wheezed tonight, awake and conscious enough to want to talk. “What would you do differently if you had a chance to live your life over again?”
A dangerous question. Before I could even begin to answer it, he cut me off, his gaze on the screen above us.
“That can’t be real, can it?”
The news anchor was desperately trying to explain some outbreak of a new disease in Springfield, Massachusetts. There’s a Springfield in every state, isn’t there? Wasn’t that some kind of joke onThe Simpsons?
Going Cold, they called the illness, because chilly skin is an early symptom. Another is wanting to bite people. That’s how they think it spreads, like rabies.
The night nurse believes it has something to do with drugs. There was that whole thing with people becoming like zombies from doing something—snorting? smoking?—bath salts, so maybe she has a point.
I went and looked online and it wasn’treallybath salts, but some kind of drug nicknamed “bath salts,” which is very confusing. I feel foolish, but in my defense, in my day when people said they were sniffing glue, they were actually, for real, sniffing glue.
March 7, 2004
No new insight into Nigel’s condition, but the news is full of this Cold thing. They’re saying infected peopledie, but somehow don’tstay dead. The president of the United States addressed the nation using words like “undead” and “vampires” with complete seriousness.
Nigel and I watched together, then he dozed off again. Nigel was always a force of nature. It seems impossible to me that he can’t find a way to wriggle out of death when he’s managed to wriggle out of a bankruptcy, two heart attacks, and at least three scathing reviews of his plays inTheNew York Times.
The world is upside down and ridiculous, and I want to stomp my feet like a child until it stops.
March 23, 2004
I am left with the news as my companion most nights in the hospital.
The infection seems to be spreading. The National Guard is in Springfield, but instead of helping, they’re erecting a barricade around the outside. It’s awful. There are people inside taking video of what’s happening in there, and there is so much terror and heartbreak. And blood. There’s a lot of blood.
Although I shouldn’t admit it, the screams on the screen are still preferable to the bagpipes of Nigel’s lungs. That’s one of the terrible paradoxes of humanity. The suffering of one person can be inexpressibly painful to us, while we can feel so much less than we should about the collective suffering of thousands.
Nurses and doctors come through the hospital room and try to reassure us that the outbreak of whatever-it-really-was can be contained and will certainly never make it to New York. They prescribe new medicine for Nigel and reassure us about that too.
Oh, and one of the doctors finally explained how this Cold thing works. If you’re bitten by a vampire (yes, they’re calling them that officially now), you become infected, your temperature drops, and you crave blood. Biting someone in that infected statedoesn’t spread the infection—but it’s the trigger for the infected person to die and then be reborn as a vampire (again, yes, really, avampire, like Dracula orSesame Street’s Count). Then they can spread the Cold.
There is a growing belief that the body can shake off the infection, though, if blood is unavailable for long enough. Maybe there is a way to stem the tide of horror after all. Despite the efforts to wall off Springfield, new cases were discovered in Texas and Seattle just this week. Someone has to do something, and soon.
April 3, 2004
Alarm bells rang through the hospital tonight.
