I saw the Plague Doctor three times before she came for me. The first time I was only a girl of two or three, mortality a vague pressure lurking over the next horizon, and so my father passed the Doctor off as a fun animal friend. The long beak, glass goggles, and large hat the accoutrements of an imposing but ultimately caring character from a book he had read as a child and swore that he had shared with me. The look of horror that my grandfather gave to my father at my grandmother’s funeral when I asked him whether he too liked the book about the Plague Doctor surely is a false memory, my adult disgust at my father’s strategy displaced onto another authority figure. My grandfather’s ignorance, discernable even to a small child, laid bare the deception. When the Doctor visited again a year later to claim him, my father first tried to pass the whole thing off as the fancy of an overly imaginative child under stress. I might have believed him, my love of all things avian and the strain of caregivers focusing on their own fears and grief combining to create that spectral figure, were it not for the memories elicited by the unique scent of camphor, cloves, and basil (components I only identified as an adult) that the Doctor exhaled. My memory making me bold, I approached her as she paused to speak with my father outside my grandfather’s door.

“I remember you,” I said, tugging on her stiff black suit. My father broke off mid-sentence as the ivory beak swung down to point at me, goggle eyes flashing as they caught the hall light.

“And I remember you,” she responded, her voice cloaked in spices and dulled by her thick mask.

My father ushered me out then, apologizing for the interruption, fearing, it seemed, that I might draw too much of the Doctor’s attention.

Naturally I questioned my peers. Other children knew of doctors and masks and odd smells, but not the precise constellation represented by the Plague Doctor.

The third time the Plague Doctor visited, my father recovered. I assumed the Doctor had failed in her goal, having by that point made her out to be an odd incorporation of Death that ministered only to my family. Her absence surrounding my father’s death in a car crash in my twenties cast doubt on this theory, but the crash also removed my last source of information regarding her.

One morning a few years later, she knocked at my door. Not speaking, we looked at each other, then I peered outside to see if there were witnesses to the existence of a beak-masked, black-suited being on my porch, but we were alone.

“As we so often are,” she said.

“Come in,” I demanded. “I’m making tea. I have questions.”

We sat facing each other at my kitchen table, steam from my tea drifting up between us softening the hard curves of her mask and hat. Steam unstirred by her muffled fragrant speech.

“We come when we can,” she said.

“We do what we can.”

“It is seldom enough. This world is full of more pain and grief than we can stand or would want to quantify.”

“We offer comfort and healing.”

“We accept that fear is our traveling companion.”

“And so we choose our dress to set ourselves apart, to draw a line between mundane day-to-day existence and contact with mortality. In the same way that the costumes of Carnival and Halloween let people temporarily and safely embrace dissolution and death, we demarcate suffering. We do not all appear this way,” she said, breaking her stillness to raise a hand to her beak.

“Our costume is culturally derived but indelibly other. Some are more macabre than this. None blend in. The distance we provide is a luxury.” She had been speaking dispassionately, but this last line carried a note of sadness with it.  

“You are ill,” she said, with some compassion.

“You do not feel it fully yet, and I do not know—I never know—if you will survive. I cannot explain how I know that you are ill. But I am here with you, for a time.” Behind the mask, a pair of worn brown eyes smiled. The twinge I had been feeling in my lower back for a few weeks solidified and I gasped. She reached across the table and offered her hands to me.

Once I too had recovered from the same cancer that had claimed my grandmother, I awoke one morning to the scent of camphor, cloves, and basil. On my kitchen table a stiff black suit, large black hat, and goggled ivory beak mask sat waiting.

– Patrick M. Hare