In the Valley of the Kings: Stories Read Free Page A

catalyst, and the disease itself immanent in humanity at large. He had deciphered a sequence, he claimed, in the human genome, which matched, in the repetitive arrangement of its amino acids, the structure of the word. It seemed the word, processed in the temporal lobe in the presence of sufficient quantities of norepinephrine—the quantities released at levels of anxiety commonly associated with imminent bodily harm—acted as a trigger for this hitherto unnoticed gene. The gene, once stimulated, distorted the chemical function of the cerebral cortex, and the result was the familiar progression of stigmata, hallucination, convulsion, death.
    It was, of course, palpable nonsense. I did not tell him so. Pity restrained me. He needed me, he went on, to spread the word. I chided him, gently, on his phraseology. His response was impatient to the point of fury. I had to help, he insisted: my own expertise in linguistics dovetailed so neatly with his findings. The two of us, he said, could broadcast the key needed to unlock a cure. I allowed him to speak as long as he needed to, until the ambulance arrived and the receiver was quietly set down. Triage, in those days, was performed upon the spot.
    The man’s ravings were, of course, merely one more instance of the paranoia that marks the final hours of the victims of the plague. But, like all paranoid fantasies, his had some germ of truth in them, and it tantalized me. If we accept that the disease came into this world without phenomenal cause, another possibility remains. The disease is, I grant, born in the brain. But it is not the product of any mechanism so vulgar as genetic coding. It is purely a product of the human mind.
    I offer this as a message of hope. For if the plague had its origins in the human mind, might it not be fought by the same powers that called it forth? Tabitha had been “playing with the newspapers,” her mother reported. So, this night, have I. I have before me the pages, already growing yellow, of the I—Journal in the first weeks of June. I visited the newspaper’s offices last night, forced to break in with a wrecking bar. The streets of the town were still, but for someone singing in the upper floor above a nearby shop. The words of the song were unintelligible: only the tune came through, a wandering melody, almost familiar.
    I have spread them out here before me, these pages from the morgue, my fingers trembling, the paper brittle, my breath unsteady in my chest. I read the stories there: they are the old familiar ones, always the same. Family burns in fire. Two held in convenience-store murder. Ultimatum issued over genocide. War in the Middle East. Old news: these portents and omens reduced to columns of fading ink.
    I know, of course, the risk I am taking. I know only too well how fragile has been the chain of circumstances that has protected me from the infection. I listen even now to the stillness outside my window, and am awed by the hush there, and what it says to me of my own great fortune. It is a mournful silence, broken only by the eternal singing of the katydids. They call, as they always have, of the coming of winter: mournful, and yet somehow pleasant, as all melancholy is.
    But before I digress again, I would report the last significant item I have in my possession, and then I must go back to my own work, which has been too long interrupted. The information is this. In the later stages of the plague, the word disappeared. Almost as if it were no longer necessary, the last victims sickened, raved, and died without any visible sign of illness. I have a theory, of course. And although there is no means at my disposal to prove it even to my own satisfaction, I am convinced it is true.
    The word, whatever it meant, whatever form it took in whatever language, was not the carrier of plague: not in any of the ways we sought to understand. Understanding was beside the point: for how could Tabitha, herself illiterate, have understood? The