The burning man watched him, gaze intent.
“Such fires, Jerome, waiting to be lit.”
“I know…” Jerome replied. “Believe me… I know”
“You and I, we are the end of the world.”
The wretched monster pondered this for a while, and then nodded slowly. Welles softly exhaled a sigh of relief. The deathbed diplomacy was working. But he had little time to waste with talk. If Jerome was here, could the authorities be far behind?
“I have urgent work to do, my friend,” he said calmly. “Would you think me uncivil if I continued with it?”
Without waiting for a reply he unlatched another cage and hauled the condemned monkey out, expertly turning its body around to facilitate the injection. The animal convulsed in his arms for a few moments, then died. Welles disengaged its wizened fingers from his shirt and tossed the corpse and the discharged hypodermic on to the bench, turning with an executioner’s economy to claim his next victim.
“Why?” Jerome asked, staring at the animal’s open eyes.
“Act of mercy,” Welles replied, picking up another primed hypodermic. “You can see how they’re suffering.” He reached to unlatch the next cage.
“Don’t,” Jerome said.
“No time for sentiment,” Welles replied. “I beg you, an end to that.”
Sentiment, Jerome thought, muddily remembering the songs on the radio that had first rewoken the fire in him. Didn’t Welles understand that the processes of heart and head and groin were indivisible? That sentiment, however trite, might lead to undiscovered regions? He wanted to tell the doctor that, to explain all that he had seen and all that he had loved in these desperate hours. But somewhere between mind and tongue the explanations absconded. All he could say, to state the empathy he felt for all the suffering world, was: “Don’t,” as Welles unlocked the next cage. The doctor ignored him and reached into the wire-mesh cell. It contained three animals. He took hold of the nearest and drew it, protesting, from its companions’ embraces. Without doubt it knew what fate awaited it; a flurry of screeches signaled its terror.
Jerome couldn’t stomach this casual disposal. He moved, the wound in his side a torment, to prevent the killing. Welles, distracted by Jerome’s advance, lost hold of his wriggling charge. The monkey scampered away across the bench tops. As he went to recapture it the prisoners in the cage behind him took their chance and slipped out.
“Damn you,” Welles yelled at Jerome, “don’t you see we’ve no time? Don’t you understand?”
Jerome understood everything, and yet nothing. The fever he and the animals shared he understood; its purpose, to transform the world, he understood too. But why it should end like this-that joy, that vision-why it should all come down to a sordid room filled with smoke and pain, to frailty, to despair? That he did not comprehend. Nor, he now realized, did Welles, who had been the architect of these contradictions.
As the doctor made a snatch for one of the escaping monkeys, Jerome crossed swiftly to the remaining cages and unlatched them all. The animals leaped to their freedom. Welles had succeeded with his recapture, however, and had the protesting monkey in his grip, about to deliver the panacea. Jerome made toward him.
“Let it be,” he yelled.
Welles pressed the hypodermic into the monkey’s body, but before he could depress the plunger Jerome had pulled at his wrist. The hypodermic spat its poison into the air and then fell to the ground. The monkey, wresting itself free, followed.
Jerome pulled Welles close. “I told you to let it be,” he said.
Welles’s response was to drive his fist into Jerome’s wounded flank. Tears of pain spurted from his eyes, but he didn’t release the doctor. The stimulus, unpleasant as it was, could not dissuade him from holding that beating heart close. He wished, embracing Welles like a prodigal, that he could ignite himself, that the dream of burning flesh he had endured would now become a reality, consuming maker and made in one cleansing flame. But his flesh was only flesh; his bone, bone. What miracles he had seen had been a private revelation, and now there was no time to communicate their glories or their horrors. What he had seen would die with him, to be rediscovered (perhaps) by some future self, only to be forgotten and discovered again. Like the story of love the radio had told; the same joy lost and found, found and lost. He stared at Welles with new comprehension dawning, hearing still the terrified beat of the man’s heart. The doctor was wrong. If he left the man to live, he would come to know his error. They were not presagers of the millennium. They had both been dreaming.