The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

COVER UP EACH COUGH OR SNEEZE…FOOLS AND TRAITORS SPREAD DISEASE.

Increase in Reports of Influenza. A masterpiece of understatement, as if it were only the reporting that had increased, or perhaps the pandemic was a figment of the collective imagination. I wondered whether it was the newspaper publisher’s decision to play down the danger or if he’d received orders from above.

As far as I could tell, the whole world was a machine grinding to a halt. Across the globe, in hundreds of languages, signs were going up urging people to cover their coughs. We had it no worse here than anywhere else; self-pity was as useless as panic.

This weird malady. It took months for the flu to defeat some patients, sneaking up on them by way of pneumoniac complications, battling for every inch of territory. Others succumbed to it in a matter of hours.

The bone man was making fools of us all. That was what we kids called death in my part of the country—the bone man, that skeletal rider who kept his grinning skull tucked under one arm as he rode from one victim’s house to the next.

What a peculiar job nursing was. Strangers to our patients but—by necessity—on the most intimate terms

Some placed their trust in treacle to ward off this flu, others in rhubarb, as if there had to be one household substance that could save us all. I’d even met fools who credited their safety to the wearing of red.

Ah, now I caught her drift. Human beings had killed so many at this point, some said nature was rebelling against us. Honor White breathed, God save us. It was a prayer of hope, but I all I could hear in this woman’s husky voice was mortification and loneliness.

Here we are in the golden age of medicine—making such great strides against rabies, typhoid fever, diphtheria—and a common or garden influenza is beating us hollow. No, you’re the ones who matter right now. Attentive nurses, I mean—tender loving care, that seems to be all that’s saving lives.

That’s what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle—the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed.

We all live in an unwalled city, that was it. I saw lines scored across the map of Ireland; carved all over the globe. Train tracks, roads, shipping channels, a web of human traffic that connected all nations into one great suffering body.

Nursing was like being under a spell: you went in very young and came out older than any span of years could make you.

But wasn’t it the whole world’s war now? Hadn’t we caught it from each other, as helpless against it as against other infections? No way to keep one’s distance; no island to hide on. Like the poor, maybe, the war would always be with us. Across the world, one lasting state of noise and terror under the bone man’s reign.

I’d never believed the future was inscribed for each of us the day we were born. If anything was written in the stars, it was we who joined those dots, and our lives were the writing.

Her eyes were so fond, they made me dizzy. It was as if this rooftop were an airship floating above the soiled world, and nothing could happen as long as we stayed up here gripping each other’s icy fingers so hard we didn’t know whose were whose.

The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life. Bridie

Bridie Sweeney! I roared the name so loudly that people hurrying by turned their heads. I added, more quietly: One of twenty slaves kept at your convent. The nun’s mouth opened and shut. Underfed, I said. Neglected. Brutalised all her life. What was Bridie to you but a dirty orphan—free labour, and you took the wages she earned too. Tell me, when you sent her to serve in my ward, did you even think to check whether she’d had this flu?

Maybe these hushed thoroughfares looked so foreign because I was showing them to Barnabas. A stranger come among us, unheralded; an emissary from a far star, reserving judgement. Breathe in the fresh air now, Barnabas, I whispered to the downy top of his head. It’s a while more till we’re home, but not too long. We’ll go to sleep then, very soon. That’s all we have to do for tonight. And then when we wake up tomorrow—we’ll see what we’ll see. So I carried him along through streets that looked like the end of the world.