All things arrive in the So there is no beginning or end, only the waters fiow, eb mptying and returning, salt seas and rivers and tain and miss and blood. the sun drowning in an occan of nig darkness from our eyes. This city is held in the water's palm. ht, wet shoen of dawn washing A captive as surely as I am captive. Long fingers of giver Schuylkill, Delaware the rest of the hand invisible; underground streams and channels feed the soggy Cesa of marsh, clay pit, sink, gutter, stagnant pool. What's not seen is heard in the sysk. of footsteps through spring mud of unpaved streets. Noxious vapors that sting your eyes, cause you to spit, and wince are evidence of a presence, the dead hand cupping this city, the poisons ugh it, the sweat on its No one has asked my opinion. he will Yet I have seen this fever before, and though I can prescribe no cure, 1 could tell stories of other visitations, how it came and stayed and left us, the progress of disaster, litigations. My words would not save one life, but those mortally affrighted by the fever, by the prospect of universal doom, might find solace in knowing there are limits to the power of this scourge that has befallen us, that some, yea, most will survive, that this condition is temporary, a scason, that the fever must disappear with the first deep frosts and its disappearance is as certain as the fact it will come again. They say the rat's-nest ships from Santo Domingo, brought the fever. Frenchmen and their black slaves fleeing black insurrection. Those who've seen Barbados')distemper say our fever is its twin born in the tropical climate of the hellish Indies. I know better. I bear the drun n, the forest's | heartbeat, pulse of the goa, that chains the moon's wandering, the spirit's journey, Its throb is source and promise of all things being connected, a mirror storing everything, forgetting nothing. To explain the fever we need no boatloads of @fugees,@gged and wracked with killing fevers, bringing death to our shores. We have bred the afliction within our breasts. Each solitary heart contains all the world's tribes, and its precarious dance echoes the We are our ancestors and our children, neighbors and strangers to ourselves. Fever descends when the waters that connect us are clogged with filth. When our seasure garbage. The wat * cannot come and go when we are shut off one from the other, each in his frock coat, wig, bonnet, apron, shop, shoes, skin, behind locks, doors, sealed faces, our blood grows thick and sluggish. Our bodies void infected fluids: Then we are dry and cracked as a desert country, vital parts wither, all dust and dry bones inside. Fever is a drou us from within. Discolored skin caves in upon itself, 6 "speaker "tegned there is so little comfort in this explanation. It takes into account neither climatists nor contagionists, flies in the face of logic and reason, the good doctors of the Colla cec of Physicians who would bleed us, purge us, quara cod us clixirs of bark 35| and wine, sprinkle us with gunpowder, drown us in vinegar according to the dictates of their various healing sciences. Who, then, is this foolish, old man who receives his wisdom from pagan arums in pagan forests? Are these the del usions of one whose brain the fever has already begun tol but while it prowis this city, im in jeopardy again as you are, The messenger who 40| stroke determined when it was determined I should tumble from the void and taste air the first time. ng is an accident. Fever one of us decided to sell one of us to