The last picture
The catalyst in this strange formula was the plague. When it suddenly broke out the whole might of our medical industry was rallied against it and in the first few months there was some hope of a vaccine. But the swiftness with which the first wave of this disease overspread and decimated and disorganized us soon put most of our best laboratories out of commission forever.
At first it assailed, like every disease, the old, the weak, and the very young. It was an airborne virus and highly contagious. Before it was even identified under the microscope it had travelled around the globe. But we didn't need doctors to tell us that. Through our children it spread and raged like a fire through a field of dry grass. The mortality rate among infants in the first month was above ninety-five percent. For those under five it was eighty percent and just as deadly among the old, the weak and the malnourished, in whatever mansion or mud hut they lay.
With the rest of us it took a more diabolical course. The thing came on in waves, like malaria. For a healthy adult the first onslaught was no worse than a bad case of the flu, though it left its signature in one or more black marks on the skin, usually near the neck. But the disease was insidious in its recurrences, striking at irregular intervals, each time harder than the last, soon leaving not sores but permanent debility.
It always announced itself, I was told, by a mild ringing in the ears. Within a few days there would be a noticeable swelling in the neck, discomfort swallowing and a lack of appetite. Then fevers would begin, alternating with cold chills, while the body's defences struggled against it. Depending on the severity of the attack the victim would be bedridden for days or weeks and then seem to grow well again, with only a few new sores left to mark its passing.
But then in a week or a month or a half-year it would come again, in a mild or severe bout and renew its attack against a weakened frame. The fevers were so intense they always left some degree of nerve damage, finally rendering each patient crippled or blind and permanently bedridden. It especially assailed the brain and shattered minds even before it crippled bodies.
These sad particulars resulted in a burden on the whole fabric of society, for the healthy had to tend to the sick and stand in for them at all critical posts. It was an exhausting business and only got worse as time went on. Hardly a year went by before our whole, gigantic ship began to creak and crack and then break apart in one great crash.
Throughout this first year we were told by our politicians to keep up hope, bury our dead, and live on to the day when medicine and our own indomitable spirit would prevail. So we struggled on in a gray, twilight existence with hours of public service work each week in makeshift hospitals and in all the vital industries.
I don't know why they left me and the rest of my healthy colleagues at the university. All non-essential businesses were closed one by one, their employees reassigned to keep our food and power and transportation networks intact. Most schools were abandoned. There were almost no pupils left to attend them. But our one university, in its glory, was kept going, I suppose as a symbol that the best in our civilization was still alive.
Perhaps a more cogent reason was that our professors were not really competent at anything else and not yet vitally needed. About a third of the adult work force was gone by the end of the first year. Another third was sick, or busy tending to the sick. The rest were sufficient to run factories and distribute food and bury the dead.
It was about the sixth or seventh month of the crisis when our president fell victim to the plague. A much diminished Congress took over and set up a supposedly temporary system that operated without money. Everyone who could was expected to work and all would be fed and supplied with whatever they needed at designated centers. Those with no family left would receive public care and shelter.
Most of us still lived in our old homes and tended to our own sick. There was nothing any hospitals could do that we couldn’t. There were no medicines to alleviate the symptoms, except aspirin and morphine, which was now freely distributed to any and all. It was not uncommon to give lethal dosages to those in the final, raving stages of the disease.
I took several months off that year to attend to the last needs of my own family. But I returned to my post and presented one more lecture series. Apropos of our crisis I chose as my subject the plagues of the Middle Ages and the changes it engendered in those dark times. I enjoyed a good attendance, considering the small number of students still around. My own health was unbroken and in my office each evening I charted out other corollary topics of interest in history as if I had years of teaching ahead of me, until the first of the anti-science riots broke out and put a sudden end to all such thoughts, and all such types of thoughts.
It was on the day of my last lecture that a new development was unearthed and blazoned across our media networks, concerning the almost forgotten disappearance of Herbert Luke. They only have themselves to blame for the ruin that followed. It was their own foolish, trivializing programming that led them to pursue such a story in our darkening hours.
I don’t know by whose authority, but the news programs we watched to excess in this crisis became an organ not for the news, but for the most inane and rosy human-interest stories that could possibly be dredged up in a crumbling world. While our families were dying in front of us and governments slowly collapsed, with whole regions being declared uninhabitable, the news skipped over such statistics to feature stories of people strangely reunited with their pets, or some builder in Idaho still putting up an addition on his house, or the ever-hopeful doctors shaking test-tubes in our faces, promising miracles that were already too late to happen.
The soap operas still captivated mass audiences, even more now, with the number of bedridden. No hint of the disease ever muddied their plots, though the actors were necessarily replaced quite often. The re-runs were popular, being impervious to the present gloom; untouched, untainted, never changing things, beyond the pale of death. Game shows were also popular and all the sporting events still able to be drummed up, anything to get our minds off the real disaster.
To turn on the television those days was a grand lesson in human denial. But one of the forces operating within it, which claimed not to deny, was that of the television evangelists. They still harped on their old themes of the judgement hour, sin, repentance and divine wrath. They gained many converts, but they lusted for even more, and their shows slowly spread, like the plague itself, across the prime-time hours.
Deep in the mountains of a desolate corner of Utah, a tireless bounty hunter, not deterred by the abolition of hard currency, discovered the carved entrance to a strange crypt, and unfortunately reported it to the press. An anti-chamber was opened and there was solid evidence to suggest that Herbert Luke had built the thing. Two of his close, personal aides, who went missing with him, were found lying there, dead, in some Pharaoh-like scenario.
The cameras and the eyes of the world zoomed in, and for three days we watched and waited as one by one a series of thick metal doors were broken through. A narrow tunnel twisted and ran deep underground. Finally the media crews, which numbered in the hundreds, reached a large and richly ornamented room filled with fine furniture and all sorts of supplies. At the far end there was one more metal door, intricately engraved in a Gothic style. As the commentators babbled on, the cutting torches went to work.
When the door gave way camera lights blazed into a small, almost barren room, not at all responding to the magnificence of the doors. But in it was a sight that surprised everyone. In the center was a plain, wooden table and a single chair. Poised precariously on the edge of that chair and collapsed against the table was the pale, emaciated, lonely figure of Herbert Luke.
His head was turned towards the door, resting upon his right arm, and facing the cameras. His long, white hair and beard and his square face reminded me of a picture of Walt Whitman in old age. His eyes were open in a wild stare and he had a faint smile on his lips that hinted of some private joke. The cup that must have contained the fatal poison was still clenched tightly in his hand.
But the other hand was equally significant. It rested beside the cup in a clenched fist. The index finger stuck out and pointed to the far corner of the room. One reporter mentioned that the air reeked of rotting flesh.
At this point the cameras panned a little and focused in on the only other object in the room. In the far corner stood an easel. There appeared to be a portrait-sized canvass upon it draped in a splendid, white cloth embroidered in gold. A dignitary, now Secretary of State and formerly an employee of Luke, was brought forward to approach the object, but on the way he found a note half-concealed by the fist on the table. He carefully slipped the small sheet of paper from underneath and held up for the viewers around the globe a message containing three words: "See the Light."
This was a rather strange thought from one so deep under the earth. But we didn’t pause to ponder the matter. The Secretary quickly moved on to the easel in the bright illumination of the camera lights, and pinching the corner of the cloth, with one magnanimous sweep of his arm unveiled before the collective television networks of the planet: a blank canvass.
The thing was totally white, a screen of white bathed in bright lights and glaring back at us, naked and empty, baffling our expectations, and mocking us in our hour of need, as something either very profound or very pathetic, we couldn’t tell which. "Such an empty board will keep the critics talking a long time, to fill it in" I thought with grim humor. I was right in that, but wrong in assuming it would only be art critics doing the talking, or that any amount of talk could ever "fill it in".
