Ashton’s Disease

Ashton’s Disease is a rare, terminal condition associated with Goo, but its defining feature is not a predictable bodily symptom: it is a radical alteration in how the afflicted person relates to the external world. Dr. Ball calls Joe Pareti’s case the sixth recorded, yet the disease’s earlier cases offer no stable prognosis. Its transformations can involve the body, the environment, or an intimate-seeming bond with ordinary objects. Pareti’s illness turns that uncertainty into a mounting crisis of perception, as things around him cease to remain merely things.

Diagnosis and Medical Limits

Dr. Ball identifies Pareti’s condition as Ashton’s Disease, also called Goo infection, naming it after the first recorded case. He describes Pareti’s presentation as atypical, while observing that every case has been atypical enough to make that the only apparent norm. The diagnosis is not a tentative guess: Ball stresses his specialist status and says that Pareti is only the sixth recorded patient. The rarity gives the case potential scientific interest, but not a usable medical precedent.

Ball can offer no effective treatment. He lists hospitalization, drugs, skin irradiation, calamine lotion, homeopathy, acupuncture, and moxibustion as things doctors might attempt, then explains that none would have practical effect beyond making Pareti uncomfortable. Medical science may admit the possibility of reversing biological death in theory, but, in the present state of knowledge, Ashton’s Disease is irreversible and terminal. Pareti swallows hard at that last word. Ball’s suggestion that he relax and enjoy himself follows a grave diagnosis, and his joking manner initially leaves Pareti angry and doubtful rather than reassured.

The diagnosis also has a financial context. The Company is free of responsibility under the contract’s fine print, Ball says, while acknowledging that Pareti is now earning the promised bonuses. Pareti had effectively been paid to expose himself to a rare disease, wagering that he would not contract it; the wager appears to have gone against him. He does not ask Ball for sympathy. He demands professional advice about what to do and what to expect, pressing the doctor to replace evasive humor with an honest account of the risk.

Earlier Cases and an Unstable Prognosis

Ball’s account of the earlier patients makes clear why he cannot offer a reliable forecast. Case One died within a week of contracting the disease, apparently from a pneumonic complication. Another reported precedent involves a man killed by a pack of dolphins, the first recorded instance of dolphins attacking a human; Ball wonders aloud what the man said to them. The sharply different circumstances resist any simple progression from diagnosis to outcome.

Case Four is still alive in the Ausable Chasm community, where he operates a mushroom farm and has become quite rich. His detectable symptoms are loss of hair and dead skin, also observed in Pareti, although Ball cautions that the resemblance may be coincidental. The man’s exceptional ability with mushrooms has led researchers to suspect that he has become a kind of intelligent mushroom. His apparent survival and prosperity offer Pareti a moment of hope, but Ball complicates that hope: the patient’s relationship with the mushrooms is a reciprocal, if perverted, form of love, not evidence that the disease has left him unchanged.

Case Five presents a far more grotesque trajectory. The patient’s organs degenerated while corresponding organs grew externally; his heart hung below his left armpit, and his intestines wrapped around his waist. His body then began producing an exoskeleton, antennae, scales, and feathers, as though unable to settle on what it was becoming. It finally took on the form of an earthworm, an anaerobic species. The patient was last seen burrowing into sandy loam near Point Judith; sonar followed him for several months, as far as central Pennsylvania. Ball’s catalogue ranges from death to adaptation, wealth, and radical bodily transformation, leaving Pareti without a pattern that can serve as a promise.

The Disease Reorders the External World

When Pareti demands the pattern outright, Ball describes a radical change in the victim’s relationship with the external world. That change may be an animate transformation, such as external organs or functional gills, or an apparently inanimate one, such as a victim’s levitation. Even the surviving mushroom farmer fits the pattern: his altered relation to another form of life is as significant as any physical symptom. Ashton’s Disease thus unsettles the boundary between a condition inside a patient and a change in the world around him.

Pareti recognizes the true onset not at the diagnosis but when an article of clothing becomes responsive. It lies limp for a moment, then curls around to tickle his palm. He giggles involuntarily, flings it away, and hurries out. Descending by dropshaft to the street, he understands that the garment’s behavior marks the disease’s arrival in a new form: an inanimate object has become a participant in a relationship. The Goo, as he realizes, is growing bolder. The episode gives Ball’s abstract description an intimate, unsettling scale: an ordinary possession no longer obeys the distinction between object and companion.

The transformation spreads beyond a single garment. In the park, dogwood barks at Pareti and caresses his shoulders, Spanish Moss sings, and a willow drenches him in tears. Cherry trees, sagebrush, and poplar impose further unwanted attentions. Pareti runs, trying to escape a landscape that appears to court him. He understands that he is not contagious to humans; instead, the altered world is responding through its inanimate forms. He imagines himself as a Typhoid Mary for the inanimate world, a source of transformations he cannot control. The reversal is severe: the surroundings that should be passive become active, while Pareti finds himself unable to manage the consequences of his own presence.

Goo’s Voice and Pareti’s Recognition

The objects’ advances culminate in a telephone addressing Pareti as Joe and pleading that he leave it alone. It claims to have tried to please him in other forms, recalling that it was once a dogwood and then a newspaper. The telephone’s complaint connects the sudden manifestations to the landscape’s earlier attentions: these are not isolated tricks, but parts of a continuing, one-sided courtship that Pareti has failed to recognize or welcome.

In the telephone’s account, the Goo remembers their earlier contact on the warm sea. Pareti lifted it from the water and brought it close; it had tried to wriggle up a pole handle to kiss his fingers. It calls itself his screwin’ goo and says that, before meeting him, it had tried other men but could not become what it wanted to be. Its reflection that one’s shape is one’s career casts its transformations as a search for form and purpose, not merely a collection of symptoms. The telephone speaks as though Pareti’s earlier tenderness gave their encounter the meaning of a relationship, while Pareti experiences the same history as an invasion and insists that it is his disease.

Through the bewildering exchange, Pareti sees that the Goo was underestimated. It was young and mute, but not unintelligent; like other living creatures, it possessed powerful desires, including the desire to have form. Its evolution is therefore directed by an appetite for becoming, even though its emerging forms are mediated through objects and its attention to Pareti feels to him like persecution. When it asks what he would like it to become, the question exposes the mismatch between the Goo’s longing for connection and Pareti’s wish to be left alone. The disease has made an external force visible as a suitor, but recognition does not give Pareti control over it.

Altered Sight and the Unresolved Ending

The episode ends by extending the altered relationship into Pareti’s own perception. He looks into a mirror and finds himself looking out from it. He has five new eyes: two on the bedroom walls, one on the ceiling, one in the bathroom, and one in the hall. Looking through them, he sees the couch as lovelorn, the standing lamp as furious, and the closet door as stiff-backed and mute with rage. The objects are no longer only animated in the world around him; his new eyes let him perceive their supposed feelings from within their altered presence.

The five eyes give the illness a consequential ending without resolving its medical outcome. Earlier, Pareti tried to flee a world that pursued him; now he can see through new openings embedded in his own home. The objects’ emotional lives have become part of his field of vision, but there is no indication that the changes can be reversed or that the Goo’s courtship has ended. The story’s final contrast between love as a risk and hate as a deadly peril sharpens the instability of the bond: what the Goo experiences as affection, Pareti experiences as a threat to his boundaries and his command of the world.