(urth) Short Story 75*: The Doctor of Death Island

[Marc Aramini]

*THE DOCTOR OF DEATH ISLAND*

“The Doctor of Death Island” first appeared in *Immortal* in 1978 and is
reprinted in *The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other
Stories.*

SUMMARY:

After an opening quote from *Oliver Twist* which states that in some cases
the outside covers are far better than the contents of books themselves,
prison orderlies halt to discuss Alan Alvard, who “used to be a big blond
guy” (and killed his business partner). One named Stan indicates that
Alvard got “the long string” and rode it all the way, clear out the gate.
The other asks if he is out now, and we flash back to the start of Alvard’s
story. Each section begins in a brief, relative present tense before
reverting to past tense.

“The beginning-end of the string, when it comes, is not readily
recognizable. It is cancer of the stomach; and it begins as a long
bellyache that hurts even when he and dark Jessica, no longer jealous,
tumble over one another on the big bed.” Alvard writes of shadows in his
journal as winter approaches and says he would like to read Dickens’ *Christmas
Carol* again, and mentions how his stomach hurts terribly as it never did
when he and Barry were partners. He is incarcerated, serving a life
sentence for the murder of Barry Seigle, but wants his attorney Glazer to
do something for him or lose him as a client.

The next section describes the gray blankets over inmates’ faces as the
orderlies and prison workers go about their business night and day. Alvard
works in the hospital by day. That night Dr. Baldwin, the night shift
physician, sees Dr. Margotte, the day physician. Baldwin asks if he ever
sleeps, and Margotte says “All the time. I nap. This is my excuse.” Yet
Margotte does not snooze. One of the prison orderlies comments that someone
must be dying, for Margotte is always there and knows when the time comes.
“They’ll take somebody off the top floor with a sheet on his face tonight.
You watch and see if I’m not right,” the orderly says.

Once again, the next part starts with a sheet over Alvard’s face, who
dreams of tinkering with his Genre Jinn invention and imagines himself
inside the box, dead (this merely presages Alvard in his cryogenic sleep …
and perhaps after the story ends). It flashes back slightly to a
conversation with his cellmate Riemer before he was frozen, when he talks
of his dream: he was working and Margotte was the boss. In his dream, the
boss was coming to see if he had done what he was supposed to do; he could
not breathe, and even though he was facing away, he could see Margotte’s
hand on the knob, with its two fingers gone. (This scene seems to describe
Alvard’s murder of Barry, doing the work of Margotte, whose hand creeps on
the knob to watch him, though it might also invoke working on his
invention.) Riemer changes his voice and says that, “It was Karajan. I
trust you know how it was done?” Then he laughs.

A newspaper clipping reveals that Alvard has been frozen at his own cost
since he was suffering a terminal illness. He was given a life sentence two
years before his freezing.

He awakes far into the future, and the woman briefing him says, “All your
life has been spent in a remote country – the past. Now you have to live
here.” She reveals doctors have used cell therapy to alter DNA, which
hastens the death of old body cells and stimulates new ones. There was a
revolution when the government tried to keep the treatment from people, and
now even clones are possible.

Alvard asks, “'You mean I’ll live forever?' Words in his mind became
fleeting pictures of a hillside covered with long, sweet grass. A hillside
smiling in the sun. Day always. No night ever.”

She warns that he is like a vase that can be broken at any time, but will
endure interminably otherwise. He has only been gone forty years, and
wanders at the thought of ten thousand years of existence. Then he realizes
that his orderly and the woman briefing him are inmates, and she says she
has been there for 18 years. When the orderly bumps into her, she shoves
him. After she leaves, he tells the orderly in the old days there were no
women in the prison. When he receives his food much of it is tasteless and
like sour milk made of straw, but some of it pleases him. He imagines
himself like Miss Havisham in bed from *Great Expectations.*

Alvard considers the top floor of the hospital and thinks of it as an abode
of death whose wind carries men away. (He perhaps wonders what the seventh
floor is used for with no need for a ward for incurables and hears another
voice yelling a question before he collapses below the window – though
later he considers that the United States and Kingdoms has adopted a
British floor labeling scheme ). A woman named Megan Carstensen brings him
a Bible – when he opens it, a voice asks “Who is the Son of Man?” and
Alvard reveals the speaking book was his invention. She is impatient and
offers to leave his file with him and asks about his state under the
window.

Megan leaves, and his file talks to him in his own voice, revealing he is a
patient in room 617 (at first he thinks that is a floor below Death Island,
the seventh floor). He asks what time it is and realizes that even though
it is only 6:30, there is no sun in the window. He interrogates his file
and tries to determine why Megan wanted to learn nothing about him. When an
orderly brings dinner, he questions him about the lack of sun in the
window, but notices that the artificial lights are brighter than he
thought. The file tells him his invention has been a great success, but the
patent is broken. An orderly offers to “dial” him down for the night.

The next day Megan tells him he will have three visitors (Jessica Alvard,
Lisa Stewart, and Jerome Glazer) after responding to his complement on her
looks with, “I poisoned a young man who was much prettier than I am … So
how do you like having me sit beside you while you eat?” He opens the Bible
and it says, “He makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of
fire.” (This, from Hebrews 1:7, is a passage which highlights the power and
importance of Christ over the angels).

An orderly takes Alvard up on the rooftop after he sleeps through his
guests’ visit, to see the sun. Their dialogue allows us to assume the
action takes place circa 2040 and that a life sentence will still last for
life. The United States is now called The United States and Kingdoms. The
birth rate has gone down as women are unwilling to risk their lives to have
children. He sees that the prison has grown immensely, and the walls
actually keep him from seeing the setting sun in his room. He ruminates,
“Now there was no longer that urge to achieve immortality through children.
Real immortality was at hand. Possibly that was why Catholic priests and
nuns, for so many hundreds of years, had not cared about having children –
they had felt immortality already, believing in the survival of the soul
after death.”

Jessica returns to visit him, and speaks of what has happened to her,
revealing that there have been men over the years (though his partner Barry
was before him), and that she will not be jealous of Lisa, her clone.
Alvard has a vision of Margotte outside his door when he pushes the call
button for the nurse – this vision of Margotte is juxtaposed next to
Jessica's presence in the prison, connecting the concept of death with
Jessica.

Alvard steals a knife from a meal and manages to conceal it from the
guard’s search in order to tamper with his books. It does not take long for
him to infect other talking books with Dickens' characters. Soon, Thomas
Wolfe's *You Can't Go Home Again *displays dialogue from Dickens' *Bleak
House. *The female warden and a man named Lon Matluck who serves on the
Advisory Commission on Technological Development offer him a chance to work
in his old field again, and he says he won't help them for anything less
than total freedom. He reveals that his murder of Barry Siegle was inspired
by Barry's belief that a useless suggestion actually made the Genre Jinn
work – that Barry saw himself as the creator when he understood nothing
about the work involved. Merely intending to smash Barry's head against the
wall, when the window on the 83rd floor broke, Alvard picked him up and
tossed him into the abyss, using the large belt buckle that represented
nostalgia for the 1980s.

Alvard is transferred to the main prison and is accepted by Megan Cartensen
as one of her lovers. While there, he discusses the increasingly hostile
relationships between men and women with a worker, a hostility which has
replaced the class strife between blacks and whites. Alvard receives a
letter from Jessica stating that she hears he has a lover, but implores her
not to tell him, and states that she looks forward to his freedom. The
letter includes an introduction to her clone Lisa Stewart, who tries to
sell herself as a model or for part time employment (before the voice of
Miss Snevellicci from *Nicholas Nickleby *interrupts her, asking, “I beg
your pardon, but did you ever play at Canterbury?”) When he asks to speak
to Snevellicci, knowing that his infestation of Dickens' characters has
been a success, instead the dying voice of William Dorritt from *Little
Dorritt* calls out for Bob, remembering his days in debtor's prison.

Alvard is called to the Presidential Center, floating six kilometers above
the city, where he meets Dr. Edith Pomme and Brenda Yarwood, a physicist.
Dr. Pomme is the chair of modern English Literature at Yale and says that
both minor and major Dickens characters have been infiltrating the talking
books of all manner, and the President is concerned that there will be no
way to return to true literacy – the plague of Dickens must be stopped.

Alvard uses this opportunity to secure his freedom, and on the way down he
flirts with Brenda Yarwood, who resembles Megan Cartensen. On his way to
liberty, pressed close to Brenda, he encounters Dr. Margotte, who exclaims
that he has been waiting for him, and was frozen for a time. When he
introduces Brenda to Margotte, Alvard “only then, despite all his aversion
to Margotte, learns why he fears him. His eyes are precisely the
protuberant eyes of Barry Seigle, going over the edge, going down to the
pavement eighty-three floors below.” He sees Jessica steadying a gun on the
top of a nearby car and drops the book from his arm, where he hears the
voice of a peddler pursuing the murderer Bill Sikes from *Oliver Twist*.

Alvard thinks that it must be a camera rather than a gun, for he saw the
flash, the book at his head, calling out “Mud-stain or blood-stain--”

COMMENTARY:

The fragmentary nature of the text is not intentionally obfuscating. The
first feature we should note about the short sections is of course that the
start of each is in present tense, and this is mirrored in the entire set
up – the first section is in the “present”, the rest of the story in the
past. In many ways, the story does play with its first in text Dickens
reference quite a bit, with the ghosts of past, present and future – we
have a man from the past brought into the future world, and the occasional
sections written in present tense as if they were still occurring.

It is quite easy to establish that the entire beginning section, when the
orderlies talk, actually occurs after the final scene of the novella
(symbolically mirroring the present tense transitioning to past tense of
every section), though this placement is somewhat ambiguous and perhaps on
a first reading we are tempted to place it during Alvard’s cryogenic sleep,
but it is clearly after Alvard has coerced the government into freeing him.
Orderlies discuss Alvard, the older asking if the younger knew him, and the
younger asks “What were they doing?” The older orderly, Stan, doesn’t know
and discusses an “it” – “He got it – the long string – and he rode it all
the way. Clear out the gate. Only a couple years ago, I think it was.” The
question “Is he out now?” isn’t answered – because Alvard is dead. [Borski
erroneously sees Margotte’s presence at the end as hopeful for mankind here
and also astonishingly tries to, in effect, link Little Nell with Helen of
Troy onomastically – see Resources below.]

We are immediately reintroduced to the older man, Stan, as 19 year old
Stanley Johnson in the very next section, in Greyhame for killing a little
girl during a robbery, though he wants to be called Snake there, to show
how much time has passed.

All of Alvard’s hopes are crushed when he “awakens”, and the symbols of
death are unrelenting. Even when he thinks he has made it off the seventh
floor, the island of death, because of his room number (617), it is just a
temporary illusion – the British numbering system for floors assures us he
is still on the American seventh floor. Just as he thinks he is walking out
of his prison, he is only going to his own death.

Alvards writings of shadows in the opening section after his conjugal visit
with Jessica eventually culminates in stating they are “like tall and
beautiful women, drawing an old gray blanket over the dead.” This presages
not only the stillness of his cryogenic sleep, but also the stagnation of
the culture that has finally received immortality and lost all vitality
(and the final scene, where the “dark Jessica” will be jealous once again
and end Alvard’s immortal life.)

Several other images contribute to the overwhelming impression that even
though mankind is immortal, it is also dead: the repetition of shadows like
dark women covering a dead body, the idea that Alvard’s cryogenic sleep was
a kind of death, and the lack of joy and art in the new world, where the
art has returned to haunt humanity like a malevolent spirit (no
coincidence, as already stated, that the first Dickens referenced is “A
Christmas Carol” with its visiting ghosts – though the opening quote of the
entire story emphasizes that sometimes the covers can be the very best
parts of books.)

All creation has become vile – women and men are at war, jealousy will kill
Alvard and resentful pride prompted him to murder his own partner – all the
advancements have led to total stagnation and a death-like life, so even
though we end the book with Alvard still technically alive, his death, and
the eventual death of everything that was human is all but assured
thematically. The “cover” of the society is far better than its actuality –
immortality for man, while everything worthwhile is dead.

Even early in the story, the idea of a sheet over Alvard’s head is already
there: “Alan Alvard lies sweating in his bed. The sheet has gotten over his
face somehow, and perhaps it has lent his dream a character of suffocation.”

There are several passages in the story which state the main ideas of the
text far more powerfully and effectively than I ever could:

“Not frozen, not sleeping, not hibernating. Dead. … What was death? The
cessation of breath? They had waited for that. The end of heart action?
They had that too. The termination of cellular processes? That had occurred
on freezing. Where had he been then? Or was he only a wind-up toy, equipped
now with the near miraculous battery (originally intended for wristwatches)
with which he had equipped his books. If only a toy did it matter – even to
him – if he was wound up or not, if there was no child to see? A book then.
He was a book, of course. … And this, this was a bookcase. This prison. How
could it have taken so long for him to understand?”

These are the themes – his life is a colorless and repetitive drive, with
no new creation, simply reliving the same pages, stored up in an unchanging
prison without color. The story posits the idea that if a person doesn’t
end, all new creation and meaningful change becomes impossible. Alvard is
already dead, going through the motions of life in this world, and the
world is doing exactly the same thing.

Having said that, we should note that the figure of death, looming Dr.
Margotte with his three fingered hands, has not been physically tangible in
the text for some time, but will return when needed to bring an end to
life. An orderly says that when someone is passing over, “Doc Margotte
knows. He comes in to see them go – or maybe they go when he comes in.
They’ll take somebody off the top floor with a sheet on his face tonight.”
This is made even more explicit later, when Alvard thinks of a mountain
inside a gold fish tank that he and Jessica had – its bottom part submerged
and imprisoned, its peak an island of death, and compares it to Grayham
prison:

There was no difference between the ornament and the hospital in which he
had worked but size. Like the ornament, the hospital had its lower
six-sevenths thrust in the teeming life of the prison. Only its highest
floor, Margotte’s ward, higher than all the surrounding buildings, was free
to look out over the countryside … but the highest floor was the abode of
Death, and the wind that breathed through its open windows carried away
men.

The equation of Margotte and Death could not be more overt. Indeed, when
Alvard is transferred to the general prison, the mail man there says, “Up
at the hospital, everybody's askin' if we killed you yet. Especially one
guy, the brain surgeon”, at which point he makes a hand with three fingers
extended. Three fingered Margotte knows that Alvard is soon doomed to be
killed by the people. Here, Alvard speculates that Margotte must be dead,
and thinks, “Maybe there are a whole line of them, the doctors with blasted
hands. Maybe they don't know themselves.” Here, he cries – something even a
life sentence and cancer could not prompt.

In this future, the only freedom from a stultifying existence is the
release of death. Indeed, the young women who brings him a Bible comments
that he was frozen before a work called *The Death of Love* by Kinglake.
Love has died – the text dismisses class differences between white and
black constituents of society and says that the new struggle is between men
and women.

Indeed, this struggle is what kills Alvard at the end, when Jessica's
jealousy (Alvard remarked that she once pulled a gun on his partner, Barry)
comes to the fore, even though the blond beside him is not the one she
should be jealous of. (The metaphor of the books passing their diseases
cover to cover “socially” expands this idea as well – just as Megan
Cartensen says she poisoned a young man, when Yarwood and Alvard descend
next to a woman named Dr. Pomme (which means apple), we see the fall
through temptation repeated once again – the relationships between men and
women in this novella are fatal and poisonous.)

One of the most inexplicable sections comes early in the text, when Alvard
is talking to another inmate and says he is sure that he sees a hand on the
door (during his murder of his partner transposed with the creation of the
Genre Jinn in a dream). His cell mate changes his voice and says it was
Karajan. This is a rather odd non sequitur and can perhaps be explained by
the identity of Herbert von Karajan, a prominent master conductor of the
Berlin Philharmonic. The text hints that all of this is masterminded and
orchestrated by someone, in this case, the hand on the door – that of the
titular character, almost never seen in the story: the doctor of Death
Island. (There is another possible reason for the allusion to Karajan – he
was related to the Slovene composer Hugo Wolf.)

What of the “beginning end of the string” mentioned in the start of the
novella, which is cancer? It seems likely that this is an association with
the idea of the string of a man's life (despite the orderlies' opening
conversation) – Alvard's is about to be cut, and the cancer the disease
that propels him into the future of unchanging destitution, which will lead
to his own demise and a rather problematic horde of Dickens' characters set
free after his death. Perhaps no one else will be able to stop them from
infiltrating the world of knowledge, science, and all attempts to
communicate - given the widespread illiteracy and the attitude towards
actual reading even those in important positions maintain.

NAMES:

The Genre Jinn that Alvard creates works almost exactly like a genie or
djinn would in granting an impossible wish – talking to our favorite books
and living with them, but in a backhanded way – killing the need for
literacy, without which new creations are impossible. Alvard will also use
the powers of his creation of corrupt the other books of the world and gain
his freedom. Like most wishes granted by the djinn, stepping outside of the
prison walls will have immediate negative consequences.

Alan Alvard: Borski notes that the word alvary implies “womb”, and that the
alliterative qualities of his name would be typical of Dickens. Alan means
“fair or handsome.”

Brenda Yarwood: The name Brenda means “sword” , Yarwood is a combination of
“eagle” and “wood”. A mistaken resemblance to Megan Cartensen costs Alan
his life.

Margotte: He is the titular character, though he only appears in a few
scenes, briefly. His methaphorical association with death becomes literal –
there doesn't seem a way for him to have survived long enough for the
immortality process to have been administered to him. As a first name it
implies “Pearl”.

Dr. Edith Pomme: As previously stated, Pomme implies “apple” - the future
of humanity seems to have eaten fully of the apple of temptation. Edith can
imply “rich”, “happy”, and even “war”.

Lon Matluck: The chairman for advancing technology, his first name Lon
implies “fierce”, though the family name is more difficult to identify.
Perhaps it signifies fierce luck.

Barry Seigle: Barry means “spear. The last name is an occupational name for
a maker of seals or signets.

Jessica and Lisa Stewart: Jessica means “rich” or “God beholds” - when she
sees Alvard's behavior, she strikes. Lisa means “devoted to God” - Alvard
never gets to meet her face to face. Stewart can mean “guardian” or
“warden” of a hall. When the prison releases Alvard, she serves as his
warden.

Megan Cartensen: Megan also means “Pearl”, as does Margotte. Becoming
involved with her is the death of Alvard – thus the association through a
pearl. (The story also argues that death is perhaps the agency which grants
life meaning – a pearl of infinite value). Her last name may imply that she
is the descendent of a carton or container (a coffin?), unless the last
name is a derivative of Carstensen.

Greyhame: In addition to meaning a home, hame can imply a covering, which
matches the imagery of the grey sheet covering everything in this bleak
dead but immortal future.

LITERARY ALLUSIONS:

The most powerful and allusive Dickens reference occurs at the very end
when the explosively tempered murderer Bill Sikes, from *Oliver Twist*, who
brutally kills his girlfriend Nancy when he thinks she has betrayed him in
one of the most graphic scenes in Dickens, is being pursued by the peddler
calling out, “mud-stains and blood-stains”. If this isn’t enough to let us
know Jessica has murder on her mind, the presence of death, Margotte,
certainly is.

Otherwise, the Dickens references serve to set the tone for plot
throughout: when Alvard is first awakened to the future, he thinks of being
Miss Havisham – he has great expectations of the future. Before that, when
he is dying of cancer, we see “A Christmas Carol” with its evocation of
ghosts, for he is something of the past about to be thrust into the future.
At the very start, the quote from *Oliver Twist* indicates that the covers
are sometimes the best parts of books, and so it is in the future: the idea
of eternal life so much better than its bleak reality. When Dr. Porter is
looking him over after Jessica sees him for the first time in the future,
he quotes *Martin Chuzzlewitt:* “What we’ve got to do, is to keep up our
spirits, and be neighborly … We shall come out right in the end, never
fear.” Unfortunately, he fails in this and seeks revenge on his neighbors
for stealing his patent, unleashing his hordes of Dickens upon them.

Thomas Wolfe’s *You Can’t go Home Again* is already invaded by Dickens when
it begins speaking – from *Bleak House:* Mr. Bagnet says of Mrs. Bagnet
“She’s color sergeant of the Nonpareil battalion, and there’s not such
another.” The titles of these two works of course illustrate what has
occurred to Alvard – he has arrived at a place of unrelenting bleakness,
with no possible return to a living and vital world.

Alvard associates Little Nell from *The Old Curiosity* Shop with his
mother, since she died when he was very young. In the Dickens novel, Nell
lives in poverty with her grandfather, who gambles to attempt to give her a
better life but loses everything. During the course of the novel, Nell
dies, and her grandfather refuses to recognize that she is gone forever,
waiting for her return until his own death.

After Alvard awakens and begins to see the emptiness of immortal life, he
thinks of his own mother's absence, something he has always associated with
Little Nell because of his father's love of Dickens. Perhaps the refusal to
recognize that the society is truly dead in its immortal holding pattern
reflects this allusion to Nell – it merely believes, as the grandfather
does, that there is some vitality left, when it fact it is long gone.

Jessica's clone Lisa's introduction and self-promotion have been invaded by
Miss Snevellicci from *Nicholas Nickleby,* and this makes Alvard “feel like
Mephistopheles”, with his army of Dickens (another word for devils). He
asks to speak to Miss Snevellicci (someone Nicholas Nickleby flirted with
heavily, from which nothing materialized – just like Alvard's fateful
flirting with Brenda Yarwood and the promise of meeting Lisa herself come
to nothing). Instead, he gets “Will you go and see if Bob is on the lock?
Send for Bob,” which is from *Little Dorritt* – the dying hallucinations of
William Dorritt, who was sent to debtor's prison and then wound up
inherited wealth to free himself from the prison, only to die while touring
Europe. The plot of *Little Dorritt *intersects the Wolfe story quite
effectively, as it involves imprisonment, a struggling inventor, and
William Dorritt's new found freedom curtailed by an early death. No
coincidence that his dying pleas accompany the presence of Lisa and
Jessica's letter, where she indicates she has heard he has been having an
affair with a female prisoner and begs him not to tell her if it is true.

The second to last Dickens character mentioned is Augustus Minns from
Dickens' first published story. In that story, those seeking to ingratiate
themselves to Augustus so that he will write them into his will so
effectively alienate them that he shuns them. In this scene, Alvard makes
his deal for freedom in agreeing to cure the world of the Dickens' plague,
but in reality he has only assured his destruction.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

While it seems to be fairly straightforward SF, the ominous and ubiquitous
presence of Dr. Margotte at the time of death invokes at least one
fantastic and supernatural element. Is the novella in some ways a fantasy?

Besides the hubris of both Alvard and his partner, is jealousy over Barry's
old relationship with Jessica one of Alvard’s motives for committing
murder? That doesn't seem likely.

Why does Margotte have only three fingers on one hand? Does this resonate
with any story or myth? (Three heads of Cerberus, etc).

CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:

For all that this novella seems allusive and tricky, the third person
narration has not yet achieved a significant level of destabilization and
uncertainty – we KNOW both Jessica is jealous and Alvard proud, and their
characters as well as the implications of this immortality for mankind are
about as clear as we can get. The technical stylistic innovation in this
novella is the transition from present tense to past tense in each
fragmented section. Isolation, mental sickness, and treatment are of course
under study here as they are in the other Archipelago stories, and for all
the pathos of Alvard’s affection for Dickens and Little Nell, this is
perhaps the least sympathetic and kind of the Island stories – everyone
deserves what they get.

We also see, as I have mentioned, some of the strain between genders that a
world without children brings: the tension between blacks and whites is
here overtly stated as being replaced by that between men and women, with
gangs of women abducting and bending men to their will. “In Looking Glass
Castle”, “Many Mansions”, “A Criminal Proceeding” with its female
president, and the feminine authority figures in “The Eyeflash Miracles”
all seem ideologically related to this gender gap, which flared up strongly
but actually quite briefly in Wolfe’s career. Before this point, the
hobgoblin seemed to be socialized monetary distributions and unjust
declassification in society leading to even more prejudice, but towards the
late 70s the redistribution of gender power is overtly explored (there is
even a line in “The Woman the Unicorn Loved” where Julie stands to greet
Anderson in his office, and the narrative states that it is as if the
gender roles had reversed).

Wolfe was supposedly working on a novel, *In Greyhame Prison*, which became
this novella – in a strange inversion, another novella that he began sprung
up into *The Shadow of the Torturer*, most fortuitously.

RESOURCES

Borski, Robert. “ “ Urth.net Mailing List.
<*http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0017/0056.shtml
<http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0017/0056.shtml>*>
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