Consult Not the Physician, but the One Who Has Been Ill
Evie looked down at him from the threshold. She stood apart, appearing untroubled, as if she existed in a reality entirely different from the one in which he lay pinned on the ground with a soldier’s knee on his neck. Gloved hands held his limbs, and something cold and hard was pressed to the side of his head. But he was no longer struggling against the small army that had filled his sister’s apartment, and it seemed they no longer regarded him as a threat: hands and voices gradually softened. A soldier, almost completely obscured behind full armor, was leaning down to look into his face, asking questions. He couldn’t make out her words though she was shouting. ‘Sir what is your ... [ringing in his ears] ... Can you ... [a shout and hail of gunfire outside the apartment] ... relationship to the ...?’ The commotion outside got the attention of the two by the door. One of the soldiers quickly raised his weapon and moved toward the noise. Two concussive gunshots, far louder than the previous volley, and out of the silence that followed he heard Evie’s steady voice and knew that she was saying that he was her father, because that had been his instruction to her. From the way the soldiers looked at each other and the tone of the brief conversation that followed, he could tell that her mother and father were known to be dead. A man in civilian clothes began to survey the pile of bags near the door, easily identifying those belonging to the girl by the bright colors and cartoon branding of an earlier age.
There were more voices, but he couldn’t hear what was being said above the rising static in his head. He knew that he was losing her. He had really known for some time. But he wanted to believe that he had a right to steal her away and keep her to himself.
And she, in the middle of all this chaos, managed to look down at him with something like compassion. She was only 10 years old, but she was towering over him, and breaking his heart with a look that said ‘I understand, though I really don’t understand ... and it looks, Uncle, like it will have to be me that is brave in this moment.’ Her parents had both worked in the refugee camps; now they were gone, both dead from too much affection for the human race. He could see a similar nobility in her gaze. He wanted to scream at her to wipe that look away, to put on her war face, or she was going to be destroyed. They would eat her alive.
He himself was teetering on the edge of the abyss ... stuck between fighting, or falling into emptiness. Her kidnappers made sure that he understood the time for intervention was past. They would be taking her: she belonged to the world now, and he must stay, face down in the dust, or be destroyed.
Pale orange sunlight poured in from the street and outlined her form in the doorway. She appeared to be on fire, if only because he was looking through tear-flooded eyes; his mind allowed the effect to soften the sickening reality. In the moment it took for her to disappear from view, he also turned a corner, leaving his body behind. Everything from that moment onward was forgotten immediately after it happened, filtered out, so that he could hold onto her in the only way left to him. There were shouts, but he ignored them so that he could listen for her voice; a cough provoked a sharp stab of pain in his ribs, but he forgot about his own pain so that all his senses would be attuned to her diminishing presence; there was one final gunshot in the distance, but his mind let the shock of it slide easily into the past – he thought only of her, as if his attention could surround her and preserve her. There was the sound of a helicopter and a mob of shouts; he had no way of knowing whether they were connected, but each was fighting to be heard above the other. He struggled to keep her in his mind, but finally there was silence and he sensed that she was gone. He was alone. The fight was over. Everything was coming apart.
He had become the proverbial mother hen, foolishly hiding inside the shell with her chick; and now, because no one had kept watch, their world was cracked open like an egg by the devourer and only Arpaxos was left to contemplate the emptiness as it grew cold and dry. He knew that there was nothing left. There was nothing. She was gone.
He had been meant to adopt her. It was arranged after her parents got sick. They were working with migrants at the port when they became deathly ill, in the old sense. Nicola and Brahim had been much more comfortable living at the rough edge of the world than Arpaxos. His sister had reappeared in Athens some years after running away, with an ill-defined plan to confront their father, and try for some kind of peace. But the unhealed wounds of her own childhood (and the dry spring that was their dad – he couldn’t even look her in the eye) drove her to work with street kids in Piraeus, looking for something to fix, something to believe in. It was there she met Brahim, himself a refugee from an earlier time, and fell in love.
Unfortunately, a fondness for alcohol combined with the chaos of the border made them vulnerable to disease – both of them became sick with a particular drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. Now, Nicola was even more stubborn than her brother: she didn’t trust doctors and rarely acknowledged weakness of any kind. She and Brahim were vaccinated when that was still a thing, but drew the line when it came to being injected with an encoded swarm of little medical machines. So it was that when she got sick, she would be entirely on her own, a condition she was used to but never got any better at. Brahim dragged her to the hospital, unaware that he also was ill. There, a series of tests revealed that she was 1) likely to die from complications from TB, and 2) the possessor of a surprising resistance to the more significant affliction of the age. She was sick with disease, yes. But she was also not sick ... with that disease which had not, until this point, skipped over anyone. This more fearsome malady had traveled everywhere courtesy of the efficiencies of modern logistics, and had been hiding in the cells of the entire developed world, waiting with improbable patience for the conditions necessary to erupt almost all at once in what Arpaxos was calling the Incurable Cure for the disease that had been afflicting the planet for some years now; Humankind, that is.
Around the world, money and resources poured into finding a solution to this latter-day plague, and it was looking grim. In the search for a cure, all the tricks had been tried, some to the collective shame of the species. In a particularly heartbreaking footnote (in what would have been the very last history book), the zeal to find a solution drove a group of American pathologists to approach one of the last few isolated cultures in the world, one distinguished by their disconnection from the global network of goods and services, and more importantly, by their ancient and isolated gene pool. It was hoped, maybe foolishly, that if these peoples knew what was at stake, they would have offered themselves up for study, for the sake of the human race. However, when first contact is mediated from inside a sealed helmet and when your face is obscured behind thick plastic, there can be no efficient way to communicate your already questionable intentions. Or to warn your hosts about the dangers of shooting arrows at visitors wearing biohazard suits intended to prevent the spread of infectious disease.
In the end, as hope receded like the tide, what remained to be revealed like a submerged ruin, was the resilience of the Greeks, famous for last stands in the face of impossible odds as the proverbial clock runs out. One doctor in particular, in the search for answers, kept turning over stones until he met Nicola Evangeliou. His discovery of her resistance to the ultimate disease was considered a kind of miracle, though ultimately there would be no medical revival, no pilgrimages to take the healing waters at her shrine, because there would be no sharing in this miracle. That is, not for anyone except Eva, who had arisen from these waters, and thereby had been gifted with the resistance, a biological rebelliousness learned in the womb.
It was her mother’s biology that set off alarms around the world: Nicola was the first, but because she was already on death’s door, Evie herself would take on the mantle. She and two others, who were identified not long after. Only these few would be found who had any hope of survival. However, nobody could discern a way to make use of the miracle of the three. No one had been able to find in their cells a formula for salvation; so they were taken to be salvation themselves.
It was a minor miracle that Arpaxos had gotten her out of the hospital, but there was no way she would be allowed her independence. The machinery, of which she would soon be a critical part, was already in motion. Because, as efforts to find a cure diminished, and every other machine slowed to a halt, qualified survivors were rallying at the California bioscience concern that had until recently been gaining fame by promising a win in the fight against disease. This was not at first an empty promise: a single treatment of a plasma that carried an encoded swarm of little robots provided the ultimate treatment, boutique health care at the microscopic level, available to all. In the end, one disease had come along to subvert this towering achievement – and now the technology was being repurposed in a last-ditch, moonshot effort to preserve whatever life remained when the disease had run its course. By the time Arpaxos and Eva had said goodbye to her parents, the world had given up on conventional disease and would soon be solely concerned with the singular effort to preserve a single life for as long as possible. Researchers and thought leaders from every field of study were making their way west to spend thier remaining days solving the last problem
All talk of leaving the planet to colonize other worlds was ended. All talk of beating cancer (or any of the old diseases) was ended. All talk of extending the life-span of the rich and powerful was done (which desire the rich and powerful were no longer being shy about, though no amount of money in the world could rewrite your genetic code and save you from this Great Recession). All talk of lifehacking, of chasing your bliss, of Five Simple Tricks to Burn Off the Belly Fat ... of miracle drugs to end depression and anxiety ... all of this was done. Sure, everyone was depressed and anxious, but it does get easier when you know the exact reason why you feel the way you do.
Before Nicola’s immunity (and her daughter’s existence) came to the attention of the world’s scientists (and of the U.S. Military), Arpaxos was called to the hospital where both of Eva’s parents would spend their last days and recruited to be a father.
He loved the girl of course. She stayed with him whenever her parents traveled to the camps. He knew that she preferred his pure cynicism to her parent’s cynical idealism. This was not because she hadn’t learned compassion from her mom and dad, just that Arpaxos was the uncle who could make her laugh, and her parents rarely laughed any more. Now they were gone, and she was stuck with a cynic who would be witness to the end of all debate. Soon there would be nothing to be angry at anymore because everyone was dying, and nobody knew whom to blame. Evie would never get to see her parents let go of anger, because they did not live long enough. She did, however, get to see her uncle lose his sense of humor.
As it turned out, a legitimate adoption would be impossible. Though, in a private ceremony in her parent’s apartment two days after the death of her dad, a document was drawn up with a sparkly purple ball-point pen, wherein the two affirmed their decision before God and no other witnesses that Arpaxos would be father and caretaker to Eva until her 18th birthday, or until the end of time, whichever came first.
His niece had won (or lost) the last great global lottery, possibly to be the sole survivor of the human race, or perhaps to be witness to something new, somehow, sometime in the next hundred-thousand years. Whenever he thought back to the moment when he lost her, he felt a grief so great that his mind quickly fled to anger. If anybody had been near enough to hear him, he could be heard to mutter to himself, with a groan, Ω, Εύα, δεν ήσουν ποτέ υποτιθέμενη να είσαι η πρώτη ή τελευταία σε τίποτα ... Oh! Eva! You were never supposed to be the first or last of anything!
