I Read What?!

Chapter One | Chapter Two (Part II)

A good day, everyone, and welcome back to Lord Foul’s Bane! Last time, we were introduced to our protagonist in a way that very much failed to grab my attention. Let’s see if this time will be better.

Chapter Two: ‘You Cannot Hope’

That doesn’t sound very promising, but I know we’ll get more of Covenant’s backstory, so let’s get into it. We open with Covenant confused about the disappearance of the boy last chapter, who turns out to be completely gone. As he turns to look at the old beggar, he notices the door of the Telephone Company, and a “sudden twist of fear” makes him forget everything else. He worries a bit more about what if his bills are already paid and suppose… but then he shakes it off, since he’s a leper and he can’t “afford suppositions”. He puts the sheet of paper he got in his pocket, gives himself another VSE and then makes to go in.

It immediately goes wrong, as a man hurries out, nearly bumps into Covenant and then recognises him and backs away, his face “gray with apprehension”. Covenant stops again (after nearly shouting “Leper outcast unclean!” at the man), and remembers that the man was Joan’s lawyer during the divorce. He is a “short, fleshy individual full of the kind of bonhomie in which lawyers and ministers specialize”. If you say so, Covenant (and I’m sure any bitterness over the divorce doesn’t play a role in this). Well, he needs to pause to recover from the “dismay” that this meeting brought the lawyer, and he feels ashamed to have caused this, so he almost forgets his conviction.

But, since “[s]hame and rage” are bound in him, he gets angry and internally rants about how he won’t let “them” do this to him, and they don’t have the right to do so. Still, he can’t ignore the lawyer’s expression so easily, since that’s an “accomplished fact”, and since he’s a leper, he shouldn’t “forget the lethal reality of facts”. He then composes some poetry (on the spot, apparently), which we get to see:

These are the pale deaths

which men miscall their lives:

for all the scents of green things growing,

each breath is but an exhalation of the grave.

Bodies jerk like puppet corpses,

and hell walks laughing—

It would be just as fine as prose, really, and I don’t care much for the content, either. He then wonders if he did all the laughing of his life “in that little time”. So now we segue back into his backstory. He laughed when his novel was accepted, at “the shadows of deep and silent thoughts” in Roger’s face, over the end product of the novel, and at its presence on the best-seller lists. Everything filled him with glee, and when Joan asked him what he found so funny, he could only say that he was charged for the next novel with every breath.

But Roger was six months old when the novel became famous, and after six months, Covenant had not begun writing again, since he just has too many ideas. Joan didn’t approve of this “unproductive luxuriance”, so she took Roger to meet his relatives, and left him at home with “strict orders” to begin writing. Covenant took up his office in “a tiny, two-room hut overlooking a steam in the woods that fill[] the back of Haven Farm”. Fancy. Present Covenant tells us that that was the “pivot, the moment in which the rock had begun rolling toward his feet of clay”, and when the stroke which has cut him off began with “rumbled warnings”. Though he heard them, he ignored them, since he didn’t know what they meant.

Instead, he waved Joan goodbye, seeing that she was right, admiring “her ability to act” while he regretted her leaving. So he went back to Haven Farm, locked himself in the office, started the typewriter and typed the dedication for the novel (it was for Joan, who he calls his “keeper of the possible”). His fingers slipped and he needed “three tries” for a perfect copy. Well, that already seems like a bad sign!

He further ignored the “slow ache in his wrists and ankles”, and just stamped his feet against the numbness in them. When he eventually found the “numb purple spot” near the base of his right little finger, he put it out of his mind, too. Within a day of Joan departing, he was wholly absorbed in the book. His fingers “tangled themselves around the simplest words”, but his imagination is sure, and he has no thought for the suppurating wound which grows in the centre of the purple stain.

…I don’t think I wholly buy this. Sure, I can get him focussing on his book over his condition, but I really doubt he’d just ignore an unexplainable stain on his hand. I’d rather think he’d try to explain it away or come up with reasons to put off treating it; just ignoring everything is rather weird, and it does hurt his story. Well, after three weeks, Joan came home, and she only noticed anything was wrong that evening, when she sat in Covenant’s arms. The windows were closed against the “chill winter wind”, and in the “still air” of the living room, she smelled the “faint, sweet, sick smell” of his infection.

Present Covenant says tha t months later, when he was at “the leprosarium”, he curses himself for not having put iodine on his hand. Yeah, that was quite stupid of you, Covenant. He’s not really “galled” by losing two fingers, since that’s “only a small symbol” of the way he’s been removed from his own world like “some kind of malignant infestation”. And when he gets phantom pain, that’s “no more than it should be”, too. Instead, he berates himself because it’s “cheated him of one last embrace with Joan”.

But back then, he didn’t know about any of this, and instead talked about his book and enjoyed holding her close. Then she reacted to the infection, standing and pulling him up. She held his right hand between them, exposing his infection and asked “with anger and concern” why he doesn’t take care of himself. So she asked one of the neighbours to take care of Roger, and then drove Covenant through the “light February snow” to the hospital’s emergency room. She didn’t leave him until he was admitted and scheduled for surgery, which is nice of her.

Well, the first diagnosis was “gangrene”. Joan spent most of the next day with him when he was not being tested. At six in the morning in the next day, Covenant went into surgery, and he awoke three hours later, missing two fingers. He needed to recover for a while, and he didn’t miss Joan until noon. But she only appeared the following morning, pale and obviously not in a good state. She ignored his hand, and spoke in a “low, constrained” voice, as she had to “exert force” to reach out to him even this much. She stood as far away as she could, looking at the snowy streets, and said that the doctors discovered that he had leprosy.

Covenant was wholly surprised and said she was “kidding”. At that, Joan lost her self-control and said that she told this in stead of the doctor, because she was thinking of him, but she can’t stand it. She said that leprosy means that his “hands and feet are going to rot away, and [his] legs and arms will twist, and [his] face will turn ugly like a fungus”. Then his eyes will “get ulcers and go bad after a while”, and it “won’t make any difference” because he won’t be able to feel anything.

I get that Joan is quite stressed by this and that she might say some stupid things… but she’s had a whole day to prepare herself and this is what she comes up with? Blatant misinformation (no, he won’t rot away; that’s what he’s in the hospital for to prevent!!), making it all about herself, and the implication that Covenant won’t care about rotting away because he won’t feel it (like he won’t be bothered by getting blind, for example). Well, then she comes with the worst part: it’s “catching”. Covenant doesn’t get it, so Joan explains that most people get leprosy from when they were “exposed when they were kids”, and children are more vulnerable, so she needs to protect Roger from it.

With that, she flees the room. That was about the last thing Covenant needs right now, and I hope Covenant told the doctors about it, at least. As this happens, his mind is empty, and only until weeks later does he realise “how much of him [has] been blown out by the wind of Joan’s passion”, and then he’s just “appalled”. I can certainly understand. Divorcing Covenant and moving out I have no problems with, but she seems to have cut off all contact with him, which is not a great thing to do. There’s also Roger, who is only a year old, sure, but it’d be nice if she’d keep Covenant updated on this and inform Roger (I do think she does, but I’m not sure how). Finally, she doesn’t bother giving Covenant any support, even though he isn’t exactly in a position to make it himself now. But apparently misinformation and fear are more important. (I might expect Roger to hold some resentment over this later, but apparently that was not as attractive.)

Well, two days after his surgery, the surgeon declares him ready to depart, and he gets sent to “the leprosarium in Louisiana”. Once he gets off the plane, the doctor who drives him gives him some info on leprosy. It’s caused by Mycobacterium leprae, though by now it’s known Mycobacterium lepromatosis can cause it too, and “Armauer Hansen” first identified the bacteria in 1874. A quick peek tells me that he found the bacteria, though he didn’t know what it was, in 1873, actually. Well, study of it has been foiled because researches can’t meet “two of Koch’s four steps of analysis” (his postulates, actually): no one’s been able to grow it artificially, and no one’s discovered its method of transmission. The latter isn’t one of the postulates, I see, and these are just necessary to establish a causal relationship. Sure, they’d hinder research quite a bit, but the postulates have nothing to do with it. According to the doctor, research by a certain “Dr. O. A. Skinsnes of Hawaii” seems promising. …I can’t find anyone by that name, except from this book, so I guess Donaldson made it up?

Overall, this whole bit is off. It’s much too technical for most readers to get a good introduction, which is presumably what Donaldson wants, and his research failure (and making a name up!) don’t suggest to me that he gives Covenant’s leprosy quite the gravity he wants to. Well, Covenant is barely affected, outside of some “abstract vibrations of horror”, and he doesn’t reply. So he gets set up in his room, “a square cell with a white blank bed and antiseptic walls”, and the doctor tries something else. He says that Covenant seems not to understand “what’s at stake here”, and he tells him to come along, so he can show Covenant something.

As they walk, the doctor exposits further. Covenant has a “primary case of Hansen’s disease” (as the doctor calls it), which means that he doesn’t seem to have received it from anyone else. Eighty percent of the cases in the US involve people like immigrants who were exposed to it as children “in foreign countries—tropical climates” (I almost feel like he’s holding back from saying something racist here). At least they know where the patients got it, he says. Of course, no matter where it comes from, the patients can “take the same general path”, but, as a rule, people with secondary cases grow up in places where leprosy is “less arcane”, so they realise what they have and so have a better chance of seeking timely help.

The doctor then explains that he wants Covenant to meet another of their patients, who is now the only other primary case they have. This man used to be a kind of hermit, who lived out in the “West Virginia mountains”. He didn’t know what was happening until the army tried to reach him to say his son was killed in the Vietnam War. When the officer saw the man, the Public Health Service sent him to the leprosarium. The doctor then stops in front of a cell like Covenant’s and invites himself in. He grabs Covenant by the elbow and steers him in. Really now, doctor?

Well, as Covenant goes in, he smells a terrible reek, “a smell like that of rotten flesh lying in a latrine”, which comes from a “shrunken figure” on the bed. The doctor greets the man, and introduces Covenant as having a primary case of leprosy and not seeming to understand “the danger he’s in”. We get a description of the man:

His hands were swollen stumps, fingerless lumps of pink, sick meat marked by cracks and ulcerations from which a yellow exudation ooze[s] through the medication. They [hang] on thin, hooped arms like awkward sticks. [His legs] look[] like gnarled wood. Half of one foot [is] gone, gnawed away, and in the place of the other [is] nothing but an unhealable wound.

[] His dull, cataractal eyes [sit] in his face as if they [are] the center of an eruption. The skin of his cheeks [is] as white-pink as an albino’s; it bulge[s] and pour[s] away from his eyes in waves, runnulets, as if it [has] been heated to the melting point; and these waves [are] edged with thick tubercular nodes.

The man tells Covenant to kill himself, since it’s better than this. Covenant breaks free of the doctor, runs out into the hall and vomits profusely. “In that way, he decided to survive.”

Well, this was handled very badly! This man gets used as an example of what may happen to Covenant, when we don’t even know if he asked for it, and Covenant vomits at the sight of him. I can’t exactly blame him for that, but I do think it’s little wonder this man is suicidal if people treat him like this! For Covenant’s part… yeah, I guess it makes him realise how serious this is, though maybe the doctor could have tried telling him that, not to mention that having another patient telling him to kill himself isn’t great either. Is this doctor not supposed to care for his patients, instead of pulling off a stunt like this?

For the description of the man, I also do have to complain about how flowery it is. It’s supposed to be from Covenant’s perspective, after all, so why is he using words like “runnulets”? Further, it really doesn’t bring across the horror that it probably should (like, what does his eyes being “the center of an eruption” mean? I imagine him with lava shooting from his face). To be fair, even if it were more effective, I doubt I’d be feeling much more horror at this; I mostly just think this sucks for the man, especially since his son has died, too.

Anyway, Covenant has decided to survive! We learn he stays there for “more than six months”. During that time he practices VSE and other “survival drills”, has lots of conferences with the doctors (which he “glare[s] his way through”) and listens to “lectures on leprosy and therapy and rehabilitation”. Soon, he learns that the doctors believe that “patient psychology” is key to treating leprosy, and that they want to counsel him, but Covenant refuses to talk. Well, then don’t complain when this doesn’t work.

Deep within him, he says, a “hard core of intransigent fury” is growing. He brings up that his missing fingers seem more present than the remaining ones, and he expects them to find them there, and then finds they’re gone, which he compares to the doctors’ help. The “few sterile images of hope” the doctors give him he compares to “the gropings of an unfingered imagination”. Then come up with your own sources of hope; sneering at how bad they’re doing won’t help you any. So the conferences and the lectures end with “long speeches” about the problems he faces. These speeches are given for weeks until he dreams them at night.

So we get to see a speech, of course. The speaker begins by saying that leprosy is “perhaps the most inexplicable of all human afflictions”, and it’s a mystery, just like what separates living matter from inert matter. Based on the information the doctor gives, there’s still quite a bit more known about it than with some rarer diseases, so I don’t think it’s all that mysterious. The doctor gives some information:

- Leprosy isn’t fatal.

- It’s “not contagious in any conventional way”.

- It destroys the nerves, typically “in the extremities and in the cornea of the eye”.

- It causes deformity, mostly because the patient can’t feel pain in the affected areas.

- It can result in “complete disability, extreme deformation of the face and limbs, and blindness”.

- It’s irreversible, since the dead nerves don’t regenerate.

- In almost all cases, “DDS” (now also called Dapsone) and some “new synthetic antibiotics” can stop the spread of the disease.

- Once it’s been halted, medication and therapy can keep it “under control for the rest of the patient’s life”.

What they don’t know is “why or how” any person contracts it, and, as far as they can prove, “it comes out of nowhere for no reason”. …You do know that a bacteria causes it, don’t you? And, once you get it, “you cannot hope for a cure”. Well, there’s the chapter title, then. It doesn’t have quite the impact it’s probably supposed to have, because this doesn’t sound too bad. Yes, you’re dependent on medicines, and you certainly can’t always get those, but if you do, life really won’t be that bad for someone like Covenant. It’ll be a chronic disease, sure, but that doesn’t have to be as horrible as this doctor is making it out to be.

Well, then we’re told that what he hears isn’t exaggerated, since it could have “come verbatim” from a lecture. So it’s not actually from one? Then I’ll give it more leeway, but it would have been nice to have heard earlier. Covenant finds all this sounds “like the tread of something so unbearable that it should never have been uttered”. The dream doctor goes on, saying that their years of experience have taught them that leprosy creates two “unique” and intertwined difficulties for the patients, which make the mental aspect “more crucial” than the physical.

The first is his “relationships with [his] fellow human beings”. Unlike leukaemia in the present or tuberculosis in the last century, leprosy isn’t a “poetic” disease. (I wasn’t aware that leukaemia has been considered one, but the more you know, I guess.) Well, even is societies “that hate their sick less than we Americans do”, the leper “has always been despised and feared”. Leprosy isn’t fatal, of course, and the average patient has a life expectancy of “as much as thirty or fifty years”. That, combined with the “progressive disability” that it brings, makes leprosy patients the people the very most in need of human support.

Still, nearly all societies cast out their lepers because “science has failed to unlock the mystery of this affection”. In country after country and culture after culture, lepers have been considered “the personification of everything people, privately and communally, fear and abhor”. The doctor then exposits on way people react this way. The first reason is that it produces “an ugliness and a bad smell that are undeniably unpleasant”. The second is that, despite quite some research, people do not believe that “something so obvious and ugly” isn’t contagious. The fact that they apparently can’t answer questions about it only reinforces the fear, since they can’t be sure that “touch or air or food or water or even compassion” don’t spread it. Never mind that you could run experiments on the family of the people you get here, apparently.

So, since these people don’t have a “natural, provable explanation” for the illness, they come up with all kinds of bad reasons for it, like proof of crime or perversion, or a sign of some corruption or guilt, for example. They further insist it’s contagious, despite evidence to the contrary. This means that many of the patients will “have to live without one single human support to bear the burden with [them]”. It’s not like you could point them at some support groups, apparently? Also, if the life expectancy is thirty to fifty years, that’s more than long enough for social change to take place, something that the leprosarium could possibly have a hand in, too. Sure, the patients cannot count on it, but not even sending the message of “these stereotypes don’t have to exist” doesn’t help them either. (Of course, that’s assuming Covenant doesn’t just make it up.)

That’s one reason why such an emphasis is placed on counselling, we’re told; it’s to help patients “cope with loneliness”. Many of the patients who leave don’t “live out their full years”. Due to the shock of isolation, they lose their motivation, let their treatment go and “become either actively or passively suicidal”, and few of them come back in time. Those who survive either find someone who’s “willing to help them want to live” or find the strength to continue in themselves.

Well, whichever way Covenant goes, leprosy will be the “biggest single fact of his existence” for the rest of his life. It will control how he lives “in every particular”, and he’ll always have to give his “undivided attention” to all the “hard corners and sharp edges of life”. He can’t take a break from it in any way, because anything that “bruises, bumps, burns, breaks, scrapes, snags, pokes, or weakens [him] can maim, cripple or even kill [him]”. And thinking about “all the kinds of life [he] can’t have” can drive him to suicide, which the dream doctor has seen happen.

I really don’t think it’s as terrible as the dream doctor is presenting it. Yes, Covenant does have to be more vigilant, but that hardly means he can’t live a fulfilling life! And it’s not like he can’t make it easier on himself, either; he can certainly remove the sharp corners from his house, at least. He can wear gloves more often, or thick clothing, too. He also can take vacation from it, simply by staying in his rearranged house, which would be all the easier since no one wants him around. About everything that can hurt him… that’s also dangerous without leprosy, it’s just more so now.

By this time, Covenant’s heart is racing, and he’s sweating profusely. The voice of the nightmare hasn’t changed, as it doesn’t try to scare him and doesn’t take pleasure in his fear, but now “the words [are] as black as hate, and behind them stretche[s] a great raw wound of emptiness”. I don’t doubt he could have such a nightmare, but we need a bit more insight into his head for this. The doctor then brings up the second problem, the first being the rejection by people, saying that it is the loss of the sense of touch. Most people rely on it heavily, and in fact, “their whole structure of responses to reality” is structured around it. They may doubt their eyes and ears, but when they touch it, they know it’s real. The doctor then explains about words for touch being used for emotions, and says it’s “an inevitable result of the fact that we are biological organisms”. Never mind that lots of organisms don’t have any sense of touch, like the leprosy bacteria, for example.

He finishes by saying that you need to change this orientation. Everyone has a brain, and Covenant needs to use it to “recognize [his] danger” and to “train [him]self to stay alive”. Then Covenant wakes up, drenched in sweat, staring at the ceiling, and softly pleading. This pattern plays out over the weeks, and every day, Covenant needs to work himself into a fury to leave his cell. Still, his “fundamental decision” holds. He meets patients who have been to the leprosarium multiple times before, who he calls “haunted recidivists” who can’t fulfil the “essential demand” of leprosy, that they “cling to life without desiring any of the recompense which [gives] life value”. That’s something of Covenant’s invention, since we didn’t hear anything like that from the doctors; it also sounds like a recipe for suicide.

Well, this “cyclic degeneration” (way to be rude), teaches him that his nightmare has the “raw materials for survival”. Night after night, it pushes the law of leprosy at him, and it shows him that an “entire devotion” to that law is his only defence. In his fifth and sixth months there, he practices his VSE and other drills “with manic diligence”, and he counts the hours between taking his medication. Whenever he slips in this, he “excoriate[s] himself with curses”. Yes, that will help.

After seven months, the doctors are convinced he’ll keep up his diligence, and they’re quite sure his leprosy has been halted, so they send him home. And that’s where I’d like to stop for the time being. See me next time with the rest of Covenant’s backstory!