The World as We Know It Page 16

“Don’t eat me.”

  “What?”

  “I have a letter to my wife. I wrote it in the mountains. Will you at least send it to her?”

  “Where is she?”

  “East,” I mumbled, my voice struggling to produce words.

  “Winter is coming. We can hold it until spring.”

  I pulled the letter from my pocket and handed it to her.

  “You didn’t have a horse, did you?” she asked.

  Then everything went black.

  11

  “THE DOCTOR OF THE FUTURE”

  The bed in which I awoke was soft and comfortable. I was tucked cozily under a warm down blanket, and I could hear wind chimes outside one of two open windows in the timber-framed room. An enchanting aroma of some sort of incense floated in the air, blending with the smell of the fire burning in the stone fireplace. There were soft voices drifting in from outside, and I could hear doors opening and closing elsewhere in the building. Bright tapestries hung about everywhere I looked, and potted greenery brought the whole ambience to life. It was raining gently, one of those rains that still let the sun through. There were thin drapes on the windows, and the sunlight made the room glow a warm orange as it bounced from the wooden walls, though the bed was situated in such a way that the sun never shone directly upon me.

  I was too weak to move more than half an arm’s stretch, but next to the bed stood a small table just within my reach. There sat a glowing plate full of ripe, fresh produce, and beside that, a glass of crystal clear water.

  In walked a young woman in a colorful gown that matched the tapestries on the wall. She was petite with bright, happy eyes and a smile so gentle that just looking at her made me feel safe.

  “Let me help you with that,” she said, slicing an apple for me as I took a handful of blueberries from the plate. “Now that you’re awake, I’ll have some salmon and eggs brought in. Let’s make you strong again.”

  “Where am I?” I asked, barely able to utter the words.

  “A good place,” she said. “I’m Mary.”

  “My wife was Maria.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is. My wife is Maria.”

  “Well, we’re in good company. I’ll be back in a bit. Drink some water.”

  She returned shortly as promised, taking a seat beside the bed. I did not yet have the strength to sit up, and she stayed and fed me, helping to lift my head. She spoke softly in a voice so welcome to my ears. I was joyful to finally be in the comforting presence of another person, even if I lacked the energy to express it at that moment.

  “Some people carried you in here a couple of days ago,” she said.

  “Is this a hospital?”

  “No, you don’t need a hospital.”

  “I’m not dying?”

  “Well, you need health care, that’s for sure. Now eat up.”

  “I had a horse,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, we were wondering about him. He followed the ones who brought you here. Don’t worry, we’ve got him tied up outside. Apparently, he had come to them and waited for days before you arrived.”

  “Thank God,” I sighed as she lifted another bite of fresh fish to my mouth.

  I rested there for several days before I was healthy enough to get out of bed and move around. It was a wonderful place, and Mary was attentive to my needs. The first thing I did when I was strong enough to walk was to visit Nomad, who was elated and whinnied at the mere sight of me. At first, though, that was the extent of my travels from the room. My body was painfully tight and frail, and my joints and bones ached. As the condition of my muscles had deteriorated, my skeleton had fallen under great strain. Slowly but surely, as we had traveled through the north, I had been creeping toward death with every step. Had the villagers not saved me, I was told, I would likely not have lived through the day.

  In addition to nourishment, Mary provided me with physical therapy to get all of my bodily systems functional again. The nature of her work kept her close in my company, and ultimately, our resulting relationship was as much to the benefit of my mental and emotional health as the personal care was to my physical state. Though I still had nightmares on occasion, they became less frequent. Mary and I spoke often and became good friends. I told her all about my journey, of course, and about my wife and family back home. She had a family of her own there, with far more children than I would ever care to have myself, but it was clear that they were the great joy of her life.

  The place was located within the urban limits of the city that used to be called Seattle. They called it a center for healing. It was separate from the hospital, which was only a short distance away. Mary’s husband, Marcus, who happened to be a surgical oncologist at the hospital, would visit her from time to time at the healing center, and during my stay, I got to know him well.

  Eventually, my short walks became long ones, and I began to explore the city. I found myself gravitating toward this new generation of medical people who’d had no choice but to adapt quickly once their state-of-the-art technology and equipment had become the most expensive collection of paperweights in history.

  “What did you do before, Joe?” Mary asked me.

  “I was a financial advisor.”

  “So you sat at a desk all day.”

  “Yes.”

  “And let me guess,” she said. “You’d come home after nine or ten hours of sitting, have a big meal, and loaf on the couch until bedtime?”

  “That sounds about right.” I laughed.

  “I bet you didn’t get enough sleep either. Exercise much?”

  “Not usually.”

  “See, most people were just like you,” she went on. “Is it any wonder why people were sick all the time or why we had an obesity epidemic?”

  “Maria’s always had more of a concern for our health than I have,” I said. I remembered her ridiculing me for choking down a meal-sized piece of chocolate cake after two helpings of dinner on my birthday.

  “What kind of regime are you running?” I had asked her.

  “I just want to keep you healthy,” my wife had replied. “I need you around for a while.”

  It seemed, increasingly, that it was I who needed her.

  “That’s what I mean,” said Mary. “So instead of pro-actively fixing our lifestyles, we reactively treated with chemicals that often did more harm than good. Television commercials for medications spent more time listing the potential side effects than the benefits, such that an advertisement for an insomnia drug sounded more like a volunteer recruitment effort for chemical weapons testing.

  “And as for the hospitals,” she continued, “did it really make sense to cram patients into little rooms with strangers and surround them with stark walls and cold machinery, then feed them a diet devoid of real nutrition? That was the way it worked: load patients up with drugs and send them right back to the lifestyle that put them in the hospital in the first place.”

  On the wall of my room in the healing center hung a framed quotation from Thomas Edison: “The doctor of the future will give no medication, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.” I wondered if, when he said that, he had any inkling of the chain of events that would lead to this revolution in the medical industry over a century later.

  The hospital and the medical doctor were no longer the first line of defense against illness and disease. Instead, they took a holistic approach that didn’t prescribe medicine or demand invasive procedures as treatment for every ailment. Good health began with proper physical activity and nutrition. In the healing center, I had salmon and eggs regularly. Almonds, kale, broccoli, spinach, carrots, tomatoes, apples, and berries: all of those were regular parts of my diet. They cooked with ginger, Echinacea, and turmeric, and they often served various herbal teas and other natural remedies. I wondered how some of those provisions were even available in the Pacific Northwest.

  Though the healing center usually saw a patient befor
e the hospital, there were of course some conditions that required more intensive care. The first time Marcus invited me to tour his facility, I stepped into the hospital, and the electric lights filled me with such awe and elation that I froze in the doorway to marvel at them.

  “Yes, we have electricity,” said Marcus, patiently waiting for me to regain control of my senses. “It’s very limited right now, and only a few facilities have access. Mainly the hospital and medical laboratories, water treatment—the necessities.”

  “How?” I stuttered.

  “Fortunately, we were already a predominantly hydro-power city. When it all crashed down, people made a real mess of things, but the infrastructure was already there. The energy source in the Skagit River never changed. It only took people to get it working again. With some maintenance to repair all the damage to the grid that occurred during the chaos, eventually we’ll be back to full capacity.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  He laughed. “I’ve got a surgery in a little while, Joe. Do you want to wander around a bit, and we’ll catch up later?”

  “Uh huh,” I muttered, taking a seat on a bench in the lobby. I sat there for a time, staring up at the glorious white lights in the ceiling. People walked past me in all directions, but they occupied only the periphery of my sight and my consciousness. I was entranced—hypnotized as if it were the first time I had ever seen an electric light. I was sweating with excitement as I imagine Edison had been when he had finally produced that first functional masterpiece after thousands of failed attempts. It was a while before I took to my feet again, wandering the hospital as Marcus had said and absorbing the beautiful radiance around every turn.

  The institution was well staffed, but the patient population was relatively sparse. Many of them had been moved to the healing center for recovery. There were nurses and orderlies working on computers again. Of course the Internet was still not operational, but the hospital’s internal network was functioning as it had before. Babies were being delivered. Broken bones were being mended. Tumors were being removed. The hospital was running at nearly the same capacity as it had before, but with less strain on the staff. Not only was the electricity on, but the indoor plumbing was also functional. I must have stood at the drinking fountain for ten minutes, irrigating myself as though I had been lost in the desert.

  Down a hallway lined with soothing natural art, I came across a crew of people rolling carts of supplies into the building that had been unloaded from a large horse-drawn wagon outside. On some of the boxes, “San Francisco” was stamped in ink. I followed them back out the door and onto a brick path that forked, leading in one direction to the roundabout where their wagon was parked and in the other to a beautiful, colorful garden where I took a seat on an old wooden bench to watch the birds and butterflies. There was a pond with a small waterfall flowing into it and dozens of koi swimming just below the surface. The bright foliage permitted just a peek of the surrounding city.

  The new urban ambience was different. It wasn’t cold and stiff. Even where humans hadn’t placed them, there were elements of nature all around. When we had fled the cities, we had left the earth to do its work, and it had wasted no time. Flora had grown everywhere. When the people moved back, they built upon it with urban farms and gardens. Cities and homes were gradually fusing with the earth beneath them. The fragrance of flowers was everywhere. Sustenance flourished in abundance.

  After a while, a child about four years old came into the garden and sat at the edge of the pond, dipping his feet into the water. He laughed as the koi nibbled on his toes. A few minutes later, Marcus arrived and joined me on the bench.

  “You’ve found my favorite spot,” he said.

  “How was surgery?” I asked.

  “Very well, thank you. I think she’ll be around for some time yet.”

  At the sound of Marcus’s voice, the child turned around to look and then cried excitedly, “Dr. Mark!”

  “Hey, Timmy, how’s life treating you?”

  “It’s wonderful!”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Marcus laughed. “Did you meet my friend, Joe?”

  “No. Hi, Joe.”

  “Hi, Timmy.”

  “Timmy had a tumor monster,” Marcus said, “but we got that all taken care of, didn’t we, Timmy.”

  “Sure did, Dr. Mark,” he replied, laughing and turning back to the fish.

  “He’s a good kid,” Marcus said to me.

  “He has cancer?”

  “Well, not anymore, as far as we can tell. After we removed what we could, we sent him over to Mary, and she got to work on his diet. Loaded him up with antioxidants. We think it’s all gone now. She’s like an angel.”

  “But you still keep him here?”

  “No, he’s living back at home with his family. He just likes it here.”

  I smiled and looked back toward the child splashing innocently in the water.

  “He’s not the only case we’ve had like that,” Marcus went on. “We’ve got a lot more healthy people out there than we used to. Of course, we’ve always known ways to prevent things like heart disease and diabetes, but we’re learning that even conditions we used to call incurable are not quite so hopeless. MS, RA, even cancer can often be reversed with a few dietary and lifestyle changes. Speaking of which, how are you feeling, Joe? Mary taking good care of you over there?”

  “Quite,” I said.

  “Well you sure look a lot better than you did when I first saw you.”

  Once I was healthy again, I had a job to get back to. Conveniently, the hospital was located adjacent to the postal center that had been restored to serve the place, and the logistics had already been ironed out. Their postmaster watched in silence as I mapped out all of the locations of the eastern half of the New World Mail Network for them.

  “So you rode all this way on that horse out there?” he asked.

  “I did.”

  He paused for a moment as if calculating in his head. Then he said, “You know, that’s like five and a half thousand miles.”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “OK,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  They began to dispatch carriers immediately. My next course, though, was south. Regular shipping routes had already been established between the Pacific Northwest and the Bay Area, and I wanted to hitch a ride with one of the conveyance crews on their next trip out. The presence of people would keep me sane enough on the road, and soon I would be headed home.

  That was what I told myself and what I needed to believe in order to press on. But “soon” is a relative term. In comparison to the trip I had already made, what remained of my journey was shorter. On horseback, however, it was far from over.

  Sometimes ignorance truly is bliss. Eventually, I would be passing through the Rockies again, but my planning was more of an immediate nature. I was always thinking of either my next stop or my ultimate destination—home—but never anything in between. There was, however, a reason the villagers who had brought me into the city would not venture east in winter, and I would come to understand that reason with intimacy.

  I met the crew who had been delivering supplies to the hospital. They were loading another shipment into their wagon to be sent back down south to the Bay Area, and they offered to have me join them. There was room in the wagon for me to ride, and I thought Nomad could use the break for a while. God knew I could.

  My last night in that place was bittersweet. I was anxious to get back on the road and to get home to my wife, but I liked the way the world looked from where I was. It was comfortable. There was electricity, indoor plumbing, and all the nourishment I would ever need. I wasn’t quite ready to leave those things behind again, but my yearning for home would always outweigh the convenience of such comforts.

  Mary brought a full dinner into my room and sat to join me while I dined as though it were my last meal. “You won’t be eating like this for a while,” she said.

  “I
know,” I replied. “I’ll miss it, but we’ll be fine.”

  She smiled. “I know what you’re thinking about.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Don’t ever give up, Joe. You’ll be with her soon.”

  “She almost doesn’t seem real anymore—nothing from my old life does. But I miss her deeply. More than I miss anything else. I feel empty.”

  “Sometimes faith is more important than memories.”

  12

  LEAVING A WAKE

  The nightmares returned. It happened almost immediately when we got on the road headed down the Pacific coast in a convoy of wagons and horses. The saving grace was that at least I had some company for that leg of the journey, so when I awoke from those midnight haunts I wasn’t entirely alone.

  I dreamed that I was mowing a field of chest-high wild grass around my old house in the suburbs, but there was nothing else in sight. The city was gone. The house was dilapidated and collapsing. Maria was sitting on the grayed front porch with a glass of iced lemonade, covered in filth but wearing a myriad of gaudy jewelry—layers of gold necklaces, pearls, rows of earrings, diamonds, and glimmering stones of every color. Her face showed no expression. She just sat there, sipping her lemonade, watching me mow the infinite field.

  That was the latest recurring dream, among others that became increasingly dark as we traveled. Since we had begun moving again, I missed home immensely. Beyond the cliffs beside us, the deep blue Pacific Ocean spread endlessly into the distance. I’ve been told that the human eye cannot detect such minute measurements from a single point so near sea level, but I felt as though I could see the subtle curve of the earth when I looked to the west. It gave me hope that perhaps home was not as far away as it felt. The tide snaked in behind white shields, approaching in rhythm with relentless perseverance like rows of soldiers into battle. Waves crashed off of the ancient sea stacks, each chiseling its signature into the rock of history and sending a chilling spray into the air that disappeared into the fog.

  I felt so frail, constantly awakened at night and haunted during the day, and I was sure my weakness was obvious to my companions. What must they have thought of me? Who is this homesick coward we allowed to ride along with us? We, too, spend our lives on the road, a job fit only for a person of great mental and physical strength. What business did he have setting off on this journey so ill prepared in every way?