Here is the story of the Messengers and their work. Of disease and death and the fight against them. And a new concept of fighting the war against the old enemy cancer that is as horribly fascinating as Stephen Leacock's proposal to pull the spinal column out of meningitis sufferers, wash it clean, then slip it back…
I will go into the core and, striking, take the sickness out. I will do this with humility because I am merely a messenger. My enemy is metastases, my cause their expulsion, my sin is the vanity of pride, my future the casting of burdens. I am a messenger.
THEIR OATH
Yeah, they fill you full of that crap. Oaths, pledges, procedures, the mask of spirituality. By the time you get out of the institute, if you're lucky, you can't think, much less feel. I'm one of the unlucky ones, of course. I don't believe a word of it.
No sir, I don't, and I challenge anyone to tell me that this is anything other than a menial job, mere hand-labor, and to hell with the pretensions. It's a vocational skill but, being the way they are outside, the less important you are, the more self-important they try to make you. It's a question of social control. The hell with them.
When I got through with lower school I had nothing to do, no mind to think with, no money to pay the difference. It was either the forces, of course, or tech training. I was wild for the forces—there's a whole incendiary MOS opening up which fascinates me—but my old man opted for the tech training. Cure cancer, he said. You don't have to be a slob all our lives, you can make something of yourself. You'll be a professional, if you're lucky enough to get into the Institute.
Lucky enough to get into the Institute! The Institute has a full-time recruiting staff doing nothing but scouring the inner cities for people like me; the Institute offers an enlistment bonus, no less, as my old man would have known perfectly well if he was, unfortunately, not literate. He found out, though. He appropriated the bonus himself, and took off. There is some moderate justice in the world, however. He died of cancer not six months ago and due to my manipulations he was refused treatment. I hear that it was an agonizing death. Although we are manual laborers, messengers have their small prerogatives to exercise.
So I went to the Institute. For two years, emerging with a drill and a diploma. Learned to stand the reduction of the Hulm Projector, learned to move with cunning, a minuscule hidden dwarf in the alleys of the veins, arteries, muscles, organs themselves. Learned how to burn it out, learned the strange quiescent beauty of the islands of metastases. Even took a little rhetoric and a little composition so that I could express myself decently. (But all the messengers, when they quit, are selling the rights to their stories. There's just no future in it, too much competition.) The technical aspects were easy to master. On the psychology they fell down a little. I didn't learn until I went into the practice myself about the depersonalizing effects of cancer, the way the victim becomes merely an extension of thie tumor, and the burning out is often an excision of self. When I told this to one of the interns he gave me a numb look, began to talk about my sticking to my function. A messenger is only a certain kind of orderly.
But when you get down in the pocket, you begin to think. How can you not think?
Listen: I know them, I know their scars and souls, I know what afflicts them. Body in their blood, form in their viscera, I have touched their dreary secrets, their dark possibilities, have wounded and restored them with the drill, have felt their convulsions, seen their thoughts swimming past me, clotted in the swollen blood. I know all there is to know about humanity: I wander into its intestines two or three times a day and, chuckling, dissemble it. How can I not think? And the projection hurts, the reduction pains. One does not go to two inches easily. The body needs space to contain the soul, this is a theory I have developed. How can one have a soul in tissue the component size of a small guppy? This too I think about.
This is the introduction to my story, the opening to my secret. Stay with me; stay with me. You will purchase rights to my story yet. I am an unusual messenger. I know all about the transference of guilt.
I want to tell you about Yancey, if I may. Listen to me. Yancey is eighty-three, eighty-four years old, as shriveled without as he is porous within and three days ago, I myself burned the metastases out of him, incurring the usual risks, the standard humiliations. I am entitled, therefore, to tell you about him; far more entitled than Yancey is to tell me about me. I have suffered. I am no usual messenger. But Yancey talks interminably, irresistibly, the drenching flow making almost impossible the clean incision of silence.
The bastard. He is full, full of statements, platitudes, small explosions of pique and all he must share with me. Mostly, they have to do with the newfound purity of his body (which, monstrously, he equates with a purification of soul). When he came in last week, he had neither soul nor body but lay staring at the ceiling with eyes the shape of doors, working out the slow beat of his mortality, ignorant of what I was going to do for him.
Those were the good times, of course, although I was not permitted to know that. I was his orderly as well, of course, and chose to ask him how he was and all he would say was terrible, just terrible, son; leave me sleep, leave the flesh crumble. But I woke up that morning in September and went before the projector, dwindled and went inside his inert form to clean him out right proper. It was in his liver, yellow and orange, busy as death. I took care of it; I took out the lovely metastasis, clutching it to my tiny chest, and dropped it in the intern's tray. Now Yancey is full of rhetoric. What does this prove?
It must prove something. This is what I hold to myself tighter than metastases: there is some purpose in this leyond what I see. But what can it possibly come to? He comes in, like all of them, even the women, riddled cheek-through-jowl and I take care of him nicely and all of a sudden I become an object of his reformation. As if an impure man could possibly perform my tasks!
I'm going to kill the son of a bitch.
There's no alternative to it. They permit me one death a year under the contract, possessed of an understanding that staggers me. We must kill to live. I thought this was not true. But I see it now. One cannot excise without giving back to the good, gold earth.
Yes, yes, I am his orderly and after hours tonight I may creep into his dark with the drill reversed, restore where I laid waste, restore a thousandfold. Then I will emerge, go before the projector again and sit by his side, waiting for the morning. When they come they will see what I have done, clear it on their records to make sure that I have not exceeded my quota (I have not, Yancey is my first) and remove the corpus. He has no relatives.
He's next. I think they know it already, these doctors and nurses and administrators, because they are staying away from me with a look that connotes surprised respect. They know when a messenger is about to go over the line. There have been no conversations in these halls today, no sarcasm, none of that easy, feigned viciousness with which the living (they think) discharge themselves from the dead (they think). So they must know.
Yancey doesn't, of course. He lacks the intimation as all of them do, pre- or post-operative. Locked in his condition or its release. He calls it the "twitchings of recovery."
"Clean in God's hands, son?" he asks me, "or does the filth and decay of your function possess your soul; is your mind raddled and ruined? Corruption, corruption; but remember that the mind breaks first and only then the body; boy, you may be dying inside already with your filthy job and like that. Untenant your soul, throw away your drill, resign and let the breezes go free before you are incurable." This is what he says to me.
(I know he is senile; I know, I know. This has nothing to do with it. His cancer was not senile. It was bright, quivering, reaching for the heart's moon, full of joy and first seeking. I am not concerned with the condition of the container.)
Oh God, stay with me; oh God, I'm almost through now and ready for the photographs. Listen, listen, it is night, darkest night: in that cunning I steal upon Yancey. It is late in his corridors as well; illuminated in the metastatic loss only by phosphorescent dust and faint refractions from quarters below. In his loom, in his night littered with prefiguration and doom, murky to the sounds of his stirring, Yancey's gut is where I laid it last, turned slightly to the side. I hear murmurs, the blood's whiskey travels home. It bathes my knife.
I do it with the miniature knife rather than drill-reversal, it is the soundest, most painful way. One thrust into the stomach, another turn past the arteries, finally into the pancreas itself, hearing the panicked recession of the blood. When I am quite done I emerge, perch on his pillow, look at him. He has fallen heavily on. his back, his eyes diminishing.
"Why do, son?" he says, with what I suppose is his last breath. "Could you not escape your own corruption?"
I try to point out that it is the other way; that, in fact, it was my unassailabilitv which, broke his corruption but my tiny lungs least as inflation takes over. By the time I can speak again he is dead on the floor. I am pleased; pleased.
And then, from deeply within, I feel my own new tumor full-come and now dancing for joy.