Queer Science, the Writer's Sorcery, and the Postcolonial Question

The third time I visited D. Carleton Gajdusek, an ambulance was blocking the street outside his apartment building in Amsterdam. It had been there some time, and the drivers of the cars behind it lounged about outside. Some shook their heads and muttered to themselves or talked loudly into their mobile phones; some walked up and down; some shrugged their shoulders; others smoked cigarettes and waited patiently. Although it was summer, a misty Dutch rain had started to fall. I went inside and quickly up the stairs to his room.

A large, thickset man, partly dressed, was arguing with the ambulance officers. It was Carleton, who did not want them to take him to the emergency room at the Amsterdam Medical Center. He shouted and waved his arms in the air and paced the room. A friend of his who was visiting had called them an hour earlier. She told me it seemed he was having a stroke, though the incident lasted only a few minutes. As he recovered, his speech slurred and he became angry and aggressive. I spoke with him, trying to calm him and persuade him to go to hospital, if only for a checkup. Eventually, he agreed.

I was with him in the ambulance when he suffered another attack. Always immensely talkative, he suddenly stopped speaking, initially unable to move at all, then shaking a little. He stared at me as he tried to make a sound. I had never noticed before how blue his eyes were and how penetrating his stare. It dawned on me that he was having another seizure. Gradually he came around again, and when he regained the ability to talk he denounced my stupid performance of compassion and concern.

At the medical center, a young doctor insisted that he first talk with the patient alone, despite our protests. He returned ten minutes later, frowning. He told us his new patient was obviously psychotic, claiming to have won a Nobel Prize and trained most of the world's leading neuroscientists. Agitated and angry, this crazy old man was demanding to go home so he could prepare for a flight to Siberia, where he was supposed to address an international conference on some mysterious brain disease! The young doctor wanted to start antipsychotic medication as soon as possible, but we assured him that Carleton was telling him the truth. His manner was odd, and his claims outlandish—but that, we said, was the "normal Carleton." Then in his eighties, Carleton had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976, some thirty years earlier, for his discovery of the first human "slow virus" disease, called kuru, which afflicted the Fore people in the eastern highlands of New Guinea. They attributed it to sorcery, but Carleton had demonstrated that the cause was some transmissible agent that could take years to become manifest—hence, a slow virus. The young doctor had heard of kuru—"the disease of the cannibals," as he recalled. But he remained convinced that his patient was mentally disturbed.

For the rest of the day the seizures continued, yet they elicited little interest from the Dutch doctors. The nurses seemed scared of their new patient. One of them suggested that we take him home to die and not waste their time. His visiting friend and I took turns reading aloud from a collection of Arthur Rimbaud's poems, hoping to soothe him, though my French accent seemed only to irritate him. At first Carleton blamed the attempts of the hospital staff to touch him for precipitating each attack—with the result that I had to insert the IV line. Later in the afternoon, he fixed his gaze on me, arguing that I was causing the seizures. He felt an attack come on every time I uttered the word kuru.

That night, Carleton discharged himself, but he never made it to Siberia to give his talk on Viliuisk encephalitis.

At some point the next day, at a wedding north of Amsterdam, it struck me that Carleton had been accusing me of sorcery. Much later, I realized...