Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [88]
“That’s his normal temperature,” Charlie pointed out.
“What do you mean?” Anna said.
“He always charts high.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well it’s true. It happens every time I take him in for a checkup. I don’t think they’ve ever gotten a reading under 99 for him.”
“Hmm.” Anna let that go. She was pretty sure it wasn’t true, but she certainly didn’t want to get into an argument that could only be resolved by getting into medical records. She knew that Joe felt warmer now than he had before, in her arms and on the nipple. And his face was always flushed. “Maybe we should take him in to be checked anyway.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Well, when is he scheduled for a checkup?”
“I don’t know. It hasn’t been that long since the last one.”
Anna gave up on it, not wanting to seethe. She would wait and see how things went for a day or two more, then insist if necessary. Take him in herself if she had to.
After a fraught silence went on for quite a while, Charlie said, “Look, let’s see how he goes. If it still seems like there’s a problem I’ll take him in next week.”
“Okay, good.”
So it went in the world of Charlie and Anna, a world of telepathic negotiations made out of silence and gesture: a world in which the sharp words were usually felt in the air, or, if spoken in a burst of irritation, taken as one part of a mind reproving another, in the way one will easily snap at oneself for doing something foolish, knowing there is no one to misunderstand or get upset.
But of course even an old matrimonial mindmeld is never total, and for his part, Charlie did not articulate, indeed hid in one of the far reaches of his mind, outside the reach of Anna’s telepathy, his worries about what might be wrong with Joe. He knew that to Anna he seemed afraid of the idea of illness, ready always to ignore it or condemn it, and that to her this was inappropriate, craven, counterproductive. But first of all, mind-body studies of placebos and positive attitudes gave some support to the idea of not tolerating or ritually opposing the idea of illness; and second, if she knew what he was really worrying about, the whole Joe/Khembalung dynamic, she would have thought him foolish and maybe even a little naÏve and credulous, even though she respected the Khembalis and knew (he hoped) that they took this kind of thing seriously. How she managed to reconcile that he was not sure, but in regards to their own interaction, better for her to think he was still just in his old curse-the-disease mode. So he kept his thoughts to himself.
Thus there was a dissonance there palpable to both of them, an awareness that they were not as fully known to each other as they usually were. Which also would worry Anna; but Charlie judged that the lesser of two worries, and held his tongue. No way was he going to bring up the possibility of some kind of problem in Joe’s spiritual life. What the hell was that, after all? And how would you measure it?
So at work Anna spent her time trying to concentrate, over a persistent underlying turmoil of worry about her younger son. Work was absorbing, as always, and there was more to do than there was time to do it in, as always. And so it provided its partial refuge.
But it was harder to dive in, harder to stay under the surface in the deep sea of bioinformatics. Even the content of the work reminded her, on some subliminal level, that health was a state of dynamic balance almost inconceivably complex, a matter of juggling a thousand balls while unicycling on a tightrope over the abyss—in a gale—at night—such that any life was an astonishing miracle, brief and tenuous. But enough of that kind of thinking! Bear down on the fact, on the moment and the problem of the moment!
Frequently she found herself unable to concentrate no matter her exhortations, and she would spend an hour or two digging around on the internet, to see if she could find anything useful for Diane and Frank. Old things that had worked but been forgotten; new things that hadn’t yet been noticed or appreciated. This could be rather depressing, of course.