Dying Isn’t Just for the Young
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.
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 on The 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’t really bath 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 people die, but somehow don’t stay 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 in The New 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 state doesn’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, a vampire, like Dracula or Sesame 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.
Nigel woke up disoriented, and while I was trying to quiet him down, a nurse rushed into the room and locked the door behind her.
“Get down,” she said.
I am ashamed to say that I just stared at her. It was only when she hit the floor that I understood and slowly got to my knees. At my age that’s not easy.
“What’s going on?” Nigel complained.
“One of them got loose,” the nurse said. “Shhhhh.”
“What are you talking about? What got loose?” I demanded, trying out all the possibilities running through my head. A lion. A serial killer. One of the monsters from the television.
Nigel began coughing.
I could see the tension in the nurse’s expression. She clearly wanted to tell him to stop but was enough of a professional to understand that would be useless. He couldn’t.
“One of the infected ones,” she told me, now that quiet was off the table.
“Why would one be here?” I hissed at her.
She made a gesture of exasperation. “Because some of them have money. A lot of money. They put her in a coma and—”
I heard the crash of a door opening so hard it hit the wall.
Footsteps. Our doorknob turned before catching on the lock.
I caught my breath. Nigel coughed harder, tears leaking out of his eyes.
His hand covered his mouth, trying to muffle the sound.
The nurse moved toward the attached bathroom, and I could tell that bitch was clearly planning on locking herself inside if our door opened.
The doorknob rattled. It rattled again. Then the steps went on, looking for doors that hadn’t been barred.
From the room beside ours, there came a scream so horrible that it made the hairs on my arms stand up.
I wish I could say that was the end, but it wasn’t.
The man pleaded for help, then screamed some more, cries that went on and on and on.
The nurse wept, while Nigel and I looked at one another in shared horror and grotesque relief.
April 9, 2004
Despite death passing us by that night, Nigel’s lungs still failed him.
By the time he died, the Times reported that one whole floor of our hospital had been devoted to locking up infected people.
It was a terrible scandal—front-page news week after week—but what did that matter to me? Nigel was gone.
Curfews had started by then too—no one was supposed to go out after dark—and burials of intact bodies had become fraught. I was sent back to our Upper West Side apartment with a box of ashes.
April 11, 2004
Our daughter, Diane, came down from Massachusetts, with a story about passing a mall beside the Springfield “Coldtown” that rebranded itself as the Dead Last Rest Stop.
Although many people were trying to get out of the Coldtown, it seemed that some were trying to get in.
To them, vampirism meant living forever.
Vampirism meant never having to be afraid.
Our son, David, flew in from Florida, where there hadn’t been any reported outbreaks yet.
He was terrified to be in New York, and told Diane and me so, many times.
He said that anyone who’d nearly been attacked by one of the infected was insane to stick around and I was just lucky that he was such a dutiful son.
For her part, Diane informed me that she’d left her three-year-old daughter and eighteen-month-old twins with her husband, so whatever we were doing for her dad couldn’t take long. Diane takes after Nigel; she has no time for sentimentality.
April 12, 2004
We held a celebration of life in Central Park at midday, swiftly assembled, but full of touching speeches.
In addition to writing his own plays, Nigel taught at the New School, and so, along with actors, rival playwrights, directors, costume designers, and all of the people involved in a production, there were a whole host of devoted students ready to mourn Nigel and hold forth on his lost wisdom.
It turned out that no one enjoyed making a tragic speech like an actor, except for a playwright yet to stage their first production and who hoped to catch the attention of someone important.
“Nigel once told me that we create not for the people who’ve come before or after, not for our friends or lovers, but to tell the truth,” declaimed a curvy actor who’d been in several of Nigel’s plays and with whom I suspected him of having an affair.
“He believed that it was the small moments that conveyed the greatest emotional weight.”
“Nigel explained that if I didn’t stop writing scenes with close-ups that were supposed to be performed on a stage, he would smash his coffee cup and cut my throat with the jagged remains,” said a former student. I had to admit, that did seem much more like something Nigel would have said.
“Dad said that living well is the best revenge,” said David, heaping clichés on his poor father’s grave. “And he sure did that.”
Afterward, half of them took the subway to my apartment and we drank wine for an hour or two and cried.
I cried a lot, I am not ashamed to say. I drank a good deal as well.
The curvy actor who had probably, maybe, almost certainly had an affair with Nigel put her arms around me, and I sobbed on her blouse.
People are complicated. Relationships are complicated.
Nigel’s death felt horribly, monstrously uncomplicated.
April 15, 2004
Two days later, David and Diane sat on either side of the couch and told me how they saw my future.