The Lord of Opium(33)

“No! I won’t let it happen!” the boy shouted, sweeping dinner plates off the table. Mirasol observed him placidly. “I’m not him! I won’t be like him! He’s dead and I’m alive! I’ll cut the cord that binds us together!” Matt grabbed a carving knife and stabbed at the damask tablecloth, slashing until he was so exhausted the knife fell from his hand. He knelt on the floor, sobbing. He’d been alone for years, but it was nothing like this. Then, he hadn’t known what friendship was.

He missed the boys, and it wasn’t enough to see them on a screen. He missed María, who was moving beyond his reach. “Please! Please! Please! Bring them back. I will do anything for you, if only you tell me what it is,” cried Matt, not knowing of whom he asked the favor.

He came to his senses with his head on Mirasol’s lap and reeled back against a table leg. But she seemed not to have noticed anything strange. “Go to bed,” he ordered.

“Yes, mi patrón,” she replied.

He lay on the carpet after she left and shivered with fever. The pain in his head eclipsed everything. This isn’t a bad way to die, he thought in the brief moments he could form an idea, if only it didn’t hurt so much.

* * *

Cienfuegos, Celia, and Nurse Fiona were there, although Matt couldn’t remember calling them. Fiona said that his temperature was 104 and that the young master must have run barking, what with the tablecloth and dishes, oh my.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Celia, sounding very worried.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” admitted Fiona. “I’m not a full nurse, more like an aide, really.”

“He needs antibiotics,” Cienfuegos said.

“Not if it’s a virus,” said Fiona. “It’s no better than drinking tap water to take antibiotics for a virus. The doctors say you should let that kind of illness run its course, and anyhow I don’t know which ones to use or how much.”

“Can you bring his fever down?” Celia asked.

“Well, there’s aspirin, only he threw up gloriously when I gave it to him, so I don’t know—”

“¡Chis! Do something besides use up oxygen,” snarled Cienfuegos. “Get ice bags. Lots of them.” Fiona scurried off.

“You’ll be okay, mi vida,” Celia said, wiping Matt’s forehead with a wet cloth.

Matt’s throat was so raw he could hardly whisper. “What happened?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that. No, don’t strain yourself. I should have guessed you were getting sick at dinner, but I thought you were immunized against everything.”

Fiona came back and to her credit had a washtub full of ice bags. “My mum used to do this when we had a fever,” she said brightly. “She packed us up as neatly as mackerels going to market. Twenty minutes on and twenty off is the charm. Up with your arms, laddie.”

But Matt was so weak he couldn’t obey. Cienfuegos helped him, and Fiona and Celia put ice bags under his armpits, between his legs, and on either side of his neck. The cold was a shock, but after a while Matt’s pounding headache settled down to a dull ache.

“Twenty minutes off,” announced Fiona. Without the ice bags, the headache soon came back.

“The sides of his neck are swollen,” said Celia, feeling gently.

“I hope it isn’t mumps,” said Fiona. “Oh, look! His tongue is a funny shade of red.”

“All those years we were up to here in doctors,” raged Cienfuegos. “El Patrón couldn’t hiccup without someone rushing to take his pulse. Now there’s only one, and he’s on the other side of the country.”

“If Matt could open the border—” began Celia.

“He’s too weak. In fact, I’m wondering if the scanner is what lowered his immune system.”

The conversation faded into the background. Matt lay in a daze as his temperature went up and down. Gradually he was able to swallow when Fiona dripped water into his mouth.

“When did you come?” he managed to say.

“Around ten o’clock. It’s two in the morning now,” said Celia.

“How . . . ” Matt swallowed, and his throat burned. “How did you know?”

“It was Waitress. She came to the kitchen, and I told her to go to bed, but she didn’t. She hung around like a dog that wants to tell you something, and I even shouted at her. Then I realized that she wanted me to follow her. The minute I got here, she took off.”

“Celia sent a message to me,” Fiona added. “I can tell you it gave me the collywobbles to see all those broken dishes. I thought Waitress had gone mad—eejits do, sometimes, although mostly they wander off or lose coordination—”