Herman was diagnosed at birth. The nurse was the one that drew the short straw and had to tell his parents the bad news.
“I’m sorry,” she told them. “It looks like he tests positive.”
Their faces drained away like spilled ice cream, and the father began to cry in that very tiny and sad way that extremely manly men do, much like babies.
“It can’t be!” said the mother. Normally she wouldn’t say things like that, but in her drained state she’d completely lost the will to put the effort into forming original sentences and had fallen back on quoting her favourite shows.
“I’m afraid so,” said the nurse. “Your son has contacted Life.”
The media got a good half-week of story out of the news, all told. A big article with a bigger headline, a followup, an interview, and then some petty debates in the reader’s letters column that devolved into ad hominem arguments and bickering. Several papers saw a slightly increase in readership and at least one intern was promoted.
Sometimes, when a very bad thing has happened, to know that it has helped someone else, somewhere, is not at all comforting in the slightest.
As Herman grew, his parents began to hope. He played listlessly with his toys, he cried monotonously through his nights, he stared blankly at anyone who spoke to him.
“Maybe they were wrong,” said his father hopefully.
“Maybe!” said the mother, something extremely deep-rooted within her cultural, social, and mental context suggesting that agreeing with an idea may very well make it true.
And then, right in front of their eyes, Herman reached out to fumble aimlessly with his blocks, made them into a neat little tower, and knocked it over. He laughed.
His father’s face crumpled up like thrice-used tinfoil, and his mother’s lip trembled.
“It’s all right, dear,” she said, patting him soothingly. “It’ll be okay.”
Herman was sent off to school with big smiles on faces and tiny worries scurrying under skins. He took a lunch, took a seat, got told off, and came back home.
“How was your day?” asked his father.
Herman told him that he’d made lots of friends and felt that he’d learned and experienced something in a manner that had made him alter and change as a person. Not exactly in those words.
His father gave him a hug and told him he loved him, then went away to drink beer until he could forget the awful things he’d just heard.
Herman’s school year was one big warning sign after another. He came home with new knowledge, he constructed and dismantled opinions, many times he was proven wrong and several more he was shown to be right.
“We think it would be best for everyone involved if he were to be homeschooled,” said the principal to his parents, listlessly.
“He’s a good boy,” said his mother defensively. “He can’t help his condition. We’ve told him to stop dozens of times, he’s very ashamed of it and tries his best.”
The principal shrugged with one-half of one shoulder. “He’s a possible health hazard for the other children. I know the stuff’s not supposed to be anywhere close to contagious in carriers, but he can definitely weaken their resistance to it if they’re exposed later on. I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to ask you to withdraw him.”
Herman’s parents did so – with tears, with bluster, with legal threats, but in the end they gave in. The boy was withdrawn (protesting) from his classes, books were purchased, and effort was made to transfer something from one to the other.
Herman used the spare time he’d acquired to go out and learn to play hockey. His parents despaired.
At last Herman was sent away to university. There, his parents hoped, he would learn to throttle back his condition. Despite an alarming tendency to have wild parties every few weeks and frantically finish projects at the absolute last-minute, he was as good as could be for his stay. He entered into the medical sciences, and graduated with extremely high marks, two majors, and at least one major disease cured (if in a somewhat costly manner) after a fit of inspiration and the shredding of more than two dozen cocktail napkins. His parents put on brave faces about it, but he knew they were disappointed with him. He didn’t want that, and so he crafted a small side-point in his valedictorian’s speech specifically to appease them.
Herman was a passionate speaker, but his audience suffered willingly through it. He spoke of the past, and the present, and the various futures to which he and his classmates were aiming for.
“It is my dream,” said Herman to a crowded auditorium, “to see no child live with what I have had to. I am going to cure Life.”
And, to the deep shame of all involved, the crowd erupted in genuinely enthusiastic applause.
Herman made good on his word. His marks were impressive, and soon his resume was too. A lab was formed, and staffed, and filled with hundreds of impractically devious projects, mounded upon mounding, funded upon funding. He slept seldom and worked as hard as he could, and some people began to say that maybe he’d found a cure after all – he was pale and haggard all day, and spoke curtly and incoherently when he could be bothered to open his mouth for anything beyond basic nourishment. His parents, now retired, felt a faint budding of hope.
Then a major source of Herman’s sleeplessness was discovered to be his embroilment in a somewhat scandalous and quite passionate affair with one of his assistants.
“Life, it seems,” he said ruefully to an interviewer, “is not so easily extinguished.” The reporter nodded solemnly and scribbled notes on the office’s wallpaper, for later use in working into a ham-handed metaphor.
The years went by. Herman grew greyer and wrinkled, and occasionally forgetful, yet always brilliant. He developed strange habits ranging from endearing to vexing to simply inexplicable. He theorized and recanted and reiterated and he produced great reams and wads of data.
Society wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. Herman, at least, still had his purpose in his mind.
“I’m close!” he said happily. “Close to the cure any week now!” The same thing he’d said for sixteen years, yet still optimistic. If anything was needed as proof of his syndrome, this was it. He had to pay his assistants double, then triple. His associates distanced themselves. Even the papers began to see him as more harm than help, and tried to muffle any news that came leaking out of his laboratory. Herman became a name-you-knew, not a name-you-heard. Not that he seemed to mind. He was far too busy.
And then it happened.
On one bright midday in midweek around the middle of the year, in his late middle ages, Herman was in the middle of a brief lecture on theory when he clutched his chest, turned grey and rather pleased, and fell over, stiff as a board and full of ten times as much cholesterol as was strictly necessary for anyone.
They waited for him to get up.
They waited a bit longer.
They waited a whole hour before someone – Clarence, his oldest and most unimaginatively loyal research assistant – worked up the nerve to touch him, and found no pulse.
“By god,” he said in awe. “He’s done it. He’s finally done it.”
Word spread across the nation. Herman had cured Life. The slapdash adventurism, the collection and discarding of identities and concepts like last-week’s fish, the remorseless onset of time shredding away at his facial features, all washed away in a flash with a simple imbalance of his body’s chemical content. It was so simple that it had to be genius, agreed everyone. One-of-a-kind, that’s for sure.
“Only imagine,” pontificated one of his old professors, now famous by correlation, “what he could have done if he were not preoccupied by his condition.”