The Stand Read online

  Oh dear, I'm falling in love with him, I think I've got the world's most crushable crush, if only it wasn't for Harold I'd take my damn chances!

  Anyway (there's always an anyway, even tho by now my fingers are so numb they are just about falling off), that was when Stu told us for the first time that he wanted to go to Nebraska, that he wanted to check out his dream. He had a stubborn, sort of embarrassed look on his face, as if he knew he was going to have to take some more patronizing shit from Harold, but Harold was too unnerved from our "tour" of the Stovington facility to offer more than token resistance. And even that stopped when Glen said, in a very reticent way, that he had also dreamed of the old woman the night before.

  "Of course, it might only be because Stu told us about his dream," he said, kind of red in the face, "but it was remarkably similar."

  Harold said that of course that was it, but Stu said, "Wait a minute, Harold--I've got an idea."

  His idea was that we all take a sheet of paper and write down everything we could remember of our dreams over the last week, then compare notes. This was just scientific enough so that Harold couldn't grumble too much.

  Well, the only dream I've had is the one I've already written down, and I won't repeat it. I'll just say I wrote it down, leaving in the part about my father but leaving out the part about the baby and the coathanger he always has.

  The results when we compared our papers were rather amazing.

  Harold, Stu, and I had all dreamed about "the dark man," as I call him. Both Stu & I visualized him as a man in a monk's robe with no visible features--his face is always in a shadow. Harold's paper said that he was always standing in a dark doorway, beckoning to him "like a pimp." Sometimes he could just see his feet and the shine of his eyes-- "like weasel's eyes" is how he put it.

  Stu and Glen's dreams of the old woman are very similar. The points of similarity are almost too many to go into (which is my "literary" way of saying my fingers are going numb). Anyway, they both agree she is in Polk County, Nebraska, altho they couldn't get together on the actual name of the town--Stu says Hollingford Home, Glen says Hemingway Home. Close either way. They both seemed to feel they could find it. (Note Well, diary: My guess is "Hemingford Home.")

  Glen said, "This is really remarkable. We all seem to be sharing an authentic psychic experience." Harold pooh-poohed, of course, but he looked like he'd been given lots of food for thought. He would only agree to go on the basis of "we have to go somewhere." We leave in the morning. I'm scared, excited, and mostly happy to be leaving Stovington, which is a death-place. And I'll take that old woman over the dark man anytime.

  Things to Remember: "Hang loose" meant don't get upset. "Rad" and "gnarly" were ways of saying a thing was good. "No sweat" meant you weren't worried. To "boogie down" was to have a good time, and lots of people wore T-shirts which said SHIT HAPPENS, which it certainly did ... and still does. "I got grease" was a pretty current expression (I first heard it just this year) that meant everything was going well. "Digs," an old British expression, was just replacing "pad" or "crashpad" as an expression for the place you were living in before the superflu hit. It was very cool to say "I dig your digs." Stupid, huh? But that was life.

  It was just after twelve noon.

  Perion had fallen into an exhausted sleep beside Mark, who they had moved carefully into the shade two hours earlier. He was in and out of consciousness, and it was easier on all of them when he was out. He had held against the pain for the remainder of the night, but after daybreak he had finally given in to it and when he was conscious, his screams curdled their blood. They stood looking at each other, helpless. No one had wanted any lunch.

  "It's his appendix," Glen said. "I don't think there's any doubt about it."

  "Maybe we ought to try ... well, operating on him," Harold said. He was looking at Glen. "I don't suppose you ..."

  "We'd kill him," Glen said flatly. "You know that, Harold. If we could open him up without having him bleed to death, which we couldn't, we wouldn't know his appendix from his pancreas. The stuff in there isn't labeled, you know."

  "We'll kill him if we don't," Harold said.

  "Do you want to try?" Glen asked waspishly. "Sometimes I wonder about you, Harold."

  "I don't see that you're being much help in our current situation, either," Harold said, flushing.

  "No, stop, come on," Stu said. "What good are either of you doing? Unless one of you plans to saw him open with a jackknife, it's out of the question, anyway."

  "Stu!" Frannie almost gasped.

  "Well?" he asked, and shrugged. "The nearest hospital would be back in Maumee. We could never get him there. I don't even think we could get him back to the turnpike."

  "You're right, of course," Glen muttered, and ran a hand over his sandpapery cheek. "Harold, I apologize. I'm very upset. I knew this sort of thing could happen--pardon me, would happen--but I guess I only knew it in an academic way. This is a lot different than sitting in the old study, blue-skying things."

  Harold muttered an ungrateful acknowledgment and walked off with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. He looked like a sulky, overgrown ten-year-old.

  "Why can't we move him?" Fran asked desperately, looking from Stu to Glen.

  "Because of how much his appendix must have swelled by now," Glen said. "If it bursts, it's going to dump enough poison into his system to kill ten men."

  Stu nodded. "Peritonitis."

  Frannie's head whirled. Appendicitis? That was nothing these days. Nothing. Why sometimes, if you were in the hospital for gallstones or something, they would just lift out your appendix on general principles while they still had you open. She remembered that one of her grammar school friends, a boy named Charley Biggers whom everyone had called Biggy, had had his appendix out during the summer between fifth and sixth grades. He was only in the hospital for two or three days. Having your appendix out was just nothing, medically speaking.

  Just like having a baby was nothing, medically speaking.

  "But if you leave him alone," she asked, "won't it burst anyway?"

  Stu and Glen looked at each other uncomfortably and said nothing.

  "Then you're just as bad as Harold says!" she burst out wildly. "You've got to do something, even if it is with a jackknife! You've got to!"

  "Why us?" Glen asked angrily. "Why not you? We don't even have a medical book, for Christ's sweet sake!"

  "But you... he ... it can't happen this way! Having your appendix out is supposed to be nothing!"

  "Well, maybe not in the old days, but it's sure something now," Glen said, but by then she had blundered off, crying.

  She came back around three o'clock, ashamed of herself and ready to apologize. But neither Glen nor Stu was in camp. Harold was sitting dejectedly on the trunk of a fallen tree. Perion was sitting crosslegged by Mark, sponging his face with a cloth. She looked pale but composed.

  "Frannie!" Harold said, looking up and brightening visibly.

  "Hi, Harold." She went on to Peri. "How is he?"

  "Sleeping," Perion said, but he wasn't sleeping; even Fran could see that. He was unconscious.

  "Where have the others gone, Peri? Do you know?"

  It was Harold who answered her. He had come up behind her, and Fran could feel him wanting to touch her hair or put a hand on her shoulder. She didn't want him to. Harold had begun to make her acutely uncomfortable almost all of the time.

  "They've gone to Kunkle. To look for a doctor's office."

  "They thought they could get some books," Peri said. "And some ... some instruments." She swallowed and her throat made an audible click. She went on cooling Mark's face, occasionally dipping her cloth into one of the canteens and wringing it out.

  "We're really sorry," Harold said uncomfortably. "I guess that doesn't sound like jack shit, but we really are."

  Peri looked up and offered Harold a strained, sweet smile. "I know that," she said. "Thank you. This is no one's fault. Unless there's a God, of course.
If there's a God, then it's His fault. And when I see Him, I intend to kick Him in the balls."

  She had a horsey sort of face and a thick peasant's body. Fran, who saw everyone's best features long before she saw the less fortunate ones (Harold, for instance, had a lovely pair of hands for a boy), noticed that Peri's hair, a soft auburn shade, was almost gorgeous, and that her dark indigo eyes were fine and intelligent. She had taught anthropology at NYU, she had told them, and she had also been active in a number of political causes, including women's rights and equal treatment under the law for AIDS victims. She had never been married. Mark, she told Frannie once, had been better to her than she had ever expected a man to be. The others she had known had either ignored her or lumped her in with other girls as a "pig" or a "scag." She admitted Mark might have been in the group which had always just ignored her if conditions had been normal, but they hadn't been. They had met each other in Albany, where Perion had been summering with her parents, on the last day of June, and after some talk they had decided to get out of the city before all the germs incubating in all the decomposing bodies could do to them what the superflu hadn't been able to do.

  So they had left, and the next night they had become lovers, more out of desperate loneliness than any real attraction (this was girl-talk, and Frannie hadn't even written it down in her diary). He was good to her, Peri had told Fran in the soft and slightly amazed way of all plain women who have discovered a nice man in a hard world. She began to love him, a little more each day she had begun to love him.

  And now this.

  "It's funny," she said. "Everybody here but Stu and Harold are college graduates, and you certainly would have been if things had gone on in their normal course, Harold."

  "Yes, I guess that's true," Harold said.

  Peri turned back to Mark and began to sponge his forehead again, gently, with love. Frannie was reminded of a color plate in their family Bible, a picture that showed three women making the body of Jesus ready for burial--they were anointing him with oils and spices.

  "Frannie was studying English, Glen was a teacher of sociology, Mark was getting his doctorate in American history, Harold, you'd be in English, too, wanting to be a writer. We could sit around and have some wonderful bull sessions. We did, as a matter of fact, didn't we?"

  "Yes," Harold agreed. His voice, normally penetrating, was almost too low to hear.

  "A liberal arts education teaches you how to think--I read that somewhere. The hard facts you learn are secondary to that. The big thing you take away from school with you is how to induct and deduct in a constructive way."

  "That's good," Harold said. "I like that."

  Now his hand did drop on Fran's shoulder. She didn't shrug it away, but she was unhappily conscious of its presence.

  "But it isn't good," Peri said fiercely, and in his surprise, Harold took his hand off Fran's shoulder. She felt lighter immediately.

  "No?" he asked, rather timidly.

  "He's dying!" Peri said, not loudly but in an angry, helpless way. "He's dying because we've all been spending our time learning how to bullshit each other in dorms and the living rooms of cheap apartments in college towns. Oh, I could tell you about the Midi Indians of New Guinea, and Harold could explain the literary technique of the later English poets, but what good does any of that do my Mark?"

  "If we had somebody from med school--" Fran began tentatively.

  "Yes, if we did. But we don't. We don't even have a car mechanic with us, or someone who went to ag college and might have at least watched once when a vet was working on a cow or a horse." She looked at them, her indigo eyes growing even darker. "Much as I like you all, I think at this point I'd trade the whole bunch of you for Mr. Good-wrench. You're all so afraid to touch him, even though you know what's going to happen if you don't. And I'm the same way--I'm not excluding myself."

  "At least the two ..." Fran stopped. She had been about to say At least the two men went, then decided that might be unfortunate phrasing, with Harold still here. "At least Stu and Glen went. That's something, isn't it?"

  Peri sighed. "Yes--that's something. But it was Stu's decision to go, wasn't it? The only one of us who finally decided it would be better to try anything than to just stand around wringing our hands." She looked at Frannie. "Did he tell you what he did for a living before?"

  "He worked in a factory," Fran said promptly. She did not notice that Harold's brow clouded at how quickly she was able to come up with this information. "He put circuits in electronic calculators. I guess you could say he was a computer technician."

  "Ha!" Harold said, and smiled sourly.

  "He's the only one of us who understands taking things apart," Peri said. "What he and Mr. Bateman do will kill Mark, I'm almost sure it will, but it's better that he be killed while somebody is trying to make him well than it would be for him to die while we just stand around watching...as if he were a dog that had been run over in the street."

  Neither Harold nor Fran could find a reply to that. They only stood behind her and watched Mark's pale, still face. After a while Harold put his sweaty hand on Fran's shoulder again. It made her feel like screaming.

  Stu and Glen got back at quarter to four. They had taken one of the cycles. Tied behind it was a doctor's black bag of instruments and several large black books.

  "We'll try," was all Stu said.

  Peri looked up. Her face was white and strained, her voice calm. "Would you? Please. We both want you to," she said.

  "Stu?" Perion said.

  It was ten minutes past four. Stu was kneeling on a rubber sheet that had been spread under the tree. Sweat was pouring from his face in rivers. His eyes looked bright and haunted and frantic. Frannie was holding a book open in front of him, switching back and forth between two colored plates whenever Stu raised his eyes and nodded at her. Beside him, horribly white, Glen Bateman held a spool of fine white thread. Between them was an open case of stainless steel instruments. The case was now splashed with blood.

  "It's here!" Stu cried. His voice was suddenly high and hard and exultant. His eyes had narrowed to two points. "Here's the little bastard! Here! Right here!"

  "Stu?" Perion said.

  "Fran, show me that other plate again! Quick! Quick!"

  "Can you take it out?" Glen asked. "Jesus, East Texas, do you really think you can?"

  Harold was gone. He had left the party early, holding one hand cupped over his mouth. He had been standing in a small grove of trees to the east, his back to them, for the last fifteen minutes. Now he turned back, his large round face hopeful.

  "I don't know," Stu said, "but I might. I just might."

  He stared at the color plate Fran was showing him. He was wearing blood up to his elbows, like scarlet evening gloves.

  "Stu?" Perion said.

  "It's self-containing above and below," Stu whispered. His eyes glittered fantastically. "The appendix. It's its own little unit. It ... wipe my forehead, Frannie, Jesus, I'm sweating like a fucking pig ... thanks ... God, I don't want to cut his doins any worse than I have to ... that's his everfucking intestines... but Christ, I gotta. I gotta."

  "Stu?" Perion said.

  "Give me the scissors, Glen. No--not those. The small pair."

  "Stu."

  He looked at her at last.

  "You don't need to." Her voice was calm, soft. "He's dead."

  Stu looked at her, his narrowed eyes slowly widening.

  She nodded. "Almost two minutes ago. But thank you. Thank you for trying."

  Stu looked at her for a long time. "You're sure?" he whispered at last.

  She nodded again. Tears were spilling silently down her face.

  Stu turned away from them, dropping the small scalpel he had been holding, and put his hands over his eyes in a gesture of utter despair. Glen had already gotten up and walked off, not looking back, his shoulders hunched, as if from a blow.

  Frannie put her arms around Stu and hugged him.

  "That's that," he said
. He said it over and over again, speaking in a slow and toneless way that frightened her. "That's that. All over. That's that. That's that."

  "You did the best you could," she said, and hugged him even tighter, as if he might fly away.

  "That's that," he said again, with dull finality.

  Frannie hugged him. Despite all her thoughts of the last three and a half weeks, despite her "crushable crush," she had not made a single overt move. She had been almost painfully careful not to show the way she felt. The situation with Harold was just too much on a hair trigger. And she was not showing the true way she felt about Stu even now, not really. It was not a lover's hug she was bestowing on him. It was simply one survivor clinging to another. Stu seemed to understand this. His hands came up to her shoulders and pressed them firmly, leaving bloody handprints on her khaki shirt, marking her in a way which seemed to make them partners in some unhappy crime. Somewhere a jay cawed harshly, and closer at hand Perion began to weep.

  Harold Lauder, who did not know the difference between the hugs survivors and lovers may bestow on each other, gazed at Frannie and Stu with dawning suspicion and fear. After a long moment he crashed furiously off into the brush and didn't come back until long after supper.

  She woke up early the next morning. Someone was shaking her. I'll open my eyes and it'll be Glen or Harold, she thought sleepily. We're going to go through it again, and we'll keep going through it until we get it right. Those who do not learn from history--

  But it was Stu. And it was already daylight of a sort; creeping dawn, muffled in early mist like fresh gold wrapped in thin cotton. The others were sleeping humps.

  "What is it?" she asked, sitting up. "Is something wrong?"

  "I was dreaming again," he said. "Not the old woman, the ... the other one. The dark man. I was scared, so I ..."

  "Stop it," she said, frightened by the look on his face. "Say what you mean, please. "