by Anne Stone
But Liz Greene is nowhere in sight.
Dany stopped off at home for a big box of disposable face masks, N95, and Liz is supposed to be here, drawing black beaks on each of them. Dany glances at the clock, and then to hell with it, the other students can draw their own damn plague masks.
“Draw a beak,” she mutters, tossing a mask down in front of one of her classmates. She goes table to table, throwing down masks on each.
By the time class starts, some of the kids have taken out Sharpies and pencil crayons and decorated the thin white face masks. A couple have drawn cartoonish versions of lips. One has etched in a few broken teeth. Eva has pencilled hers with sutures, set in a gruesome approximation of a smile.
But no beaks.
Eva is sitting up at the front today, by way of moral support. Her hair is in a messy bun – all but those signature rolled bangs – and she looks like she is half asleep. In front of her, filled to the brim with black synth, is the hideous orange sasquatch mug.
Dany puts her mask on. She toys with the elastic, eyes on her desk.
When the bell rings, she searches the room, but no Liz.
Her presentation partner – the one she worked with last night, while Bea and Mac played Scrabble; the one who promised to do all of the talking – has not just blown the presentation off, but Dany as well.
Mister Faraday, too, is scanning the faces in the classroom. When he gets to Dany, she glimpses a raised eyebrow. It is what it is, his look says.
Dany nods at her desk.
She should have known better than to count on Liz Greene.
Dany makes her way to the front, swishing the blackout curtains to a close on the way. In the dim light, she clicks on the remote. A figure from an old woodcut appears on the screen – wearing a black cape and a crow mask. She looks down at the notes, difficult to see in the dim light. Then she looks out at the faces in the class, which, by some perverse law of the universe, she can make out perfectly.
Sweat trickles down under her arms.
Finally, she seeks out Eva’s form and settles her gaze on the table just in front of her friend. She doesn’t think about the twenty history students. She doesn’t think about her teacher or his PhD from Cornell. Dany sees objects, not people. The hollow ceramic replica of a human-primate hybrid. The nub of a pencil, indented by human teeth.
“During the Black Plague,” Dany says, glancing at a pink eraser, “plague doctors, like this guy, tried to protect themselves. But they didn’t know about bacilli they, well, they couldn’t know about anything too small to see, like viruses. Or virii. Or whatever.”
Eva adjusts the mug in her hands, so that the orange sasquatch winks.
“Sorry,” Faraday says. “A little louder if you can.”
Dany looks at the knot of Faraday’s tie. Then she looks at the cue cards that hold her notes. She doesn’t need them, because she knows the words, knows them inside out. She inked each card – and has a perfect visual memory of each. It’s like that with the written word, with books. They stay with her forever, each page indelibly imprints on her brain, to be pulled up before her eyes in an instant. But it doesn’t matter if she can picture the cue cards. Because the words will not come out. Words get chewed up in her mouth, and she sounds like an idiot.
She is an idiot.
She belongs at her desk, where she can keep her eyes down, where she can go an entire period without speaking, where, at the back of the room, she can completely avoid all eye contact.
Eva is looking up at her from her seat in the front row. By way of encouragement, she yawns. Next to Eva, a girl is adding scrawls of ink to a page already filled with illegible doodles. Sonja, her name is. Sonja’s notes look like they are some kind of cross between a comic book and Linear B. She looks up at Dany and points a finger at her own temple.
“Pkow,” she says and falls dead on her desk.
Dany blinks at the corpse for a beat and then looks up at Faraday’s hands, clasped in a steeple under his chin.
“I could just give you me and Liz’s notes and you could, like, read them later,” Dany says quietly. “Or I could show you the pictures.”
“You’re doing just fine. Take a deep breath, you can do this.”
Faraday nods. An expression meant as encouragement forms on his face – but she can tell, Faraday knows it. Dany – the girl whose classroom participation is limited to a series of forced monosyllabic grunts – is leading the discussion for the next twenty-five minutes.
Ergo, they are all in for a world of pain.
Dany’s essays are brilliant. Her presentations? A series of enormous, stinking hellholes into which she drags all who are forced to be witness.
After her first term paper for Mister Faraday – she wrote a treatise on Mary Mallon – he asked her to stay behind after class. As the others filed out, Dany sat in her seat, twisting a black lock of hair, knees jittering under the desk. She’d been ready for what was coming because it wasn’t the first time.
Math and science are easy. But arts courses are different. In arts courses, you have to talk. Dany tries, but in English and history, inevitably, her teachers think she’s more idiot than savant. Whenever she hands in the first paper of the semester, the teacher takes one look at her, the girl who can’t string together more than three words – at least, not out loud – and then looks down at the essay in front of them. Where did you buy this? is the next logical question. So, when Mister Faraday asked her to stay behind, Dany knew exactly what to expect.
“Your essay,” Mister Faraday said, swinging his chair around to face her.
She narrowed her eyes and stared a hole into her teacher’s neck. Bring it, Faraday, she thought. I know this shit inside out – right down to the peer-reviewed sources and their citations in APA.
Mister Faraday eyed her contemplatively. “It’s good,” he said.
Dany looked up in surprise. And even more surprisingly, he smiled.
“You think it’s good,” she repeated, looking for the flaw. She blew out a breath of air. The fact was, her paper was more than good.
Faraday smiled. “Yes,” he repeated. “Good.” The second time, he emphasized the word, as if he wanted her to reconsider its meaning.
Dany shrugged the word off. Okay, it’s like ‘good’ or whatever.
The teacher leaned forward. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to give you a book.” This had been even weirder. But yes, he opened his bag and pulled out a first edition, still in its dust jacket. Shrewsbury. A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles.
Dany stared at the pale green cover.
“It was foundational,” he added. “And still a good place to begin.”
He fingered the dust jacket for a moment and then offered the book to her.
Dany flipped open the cover and saw the inscription. His thesis supervisor had given the book to him, the day he earned his PhD at Cornell. But below that, scrawled in fresh ink, the book had been rededicated.
To Danielle-Jean Munday, a promising young scholar.
“It’s just Dany,” she told him. “Thanks,” she added roughly. Then, for the first time since entering the micro-school, Dany looked up and met a teacher’s eyes. Because he saw something. In her essay, he saw, what? Promise? So, yeah, that one time, she let him look her in the eye – let him glimpse the girl who lived behind a wall of glass.
| Chapter 0 = X + 9
The presentation is rough, but she gets through it. Barely. Only, probably, because it is for Faraday. But the presentation isn’t all of it. Then comes Q & A.
Still no Liz.
Faraday closes up his notes and makes his way to the front of the class. Dany is stuck front and centre – but, as always, he referees from the podium.
“You know what comes next,” Faraday says to her, and then he turns to the class. “Shoot,” he tells
them.
“Like, literally,” Sonja mumbles in the front row.
Dany tries to ignore her, but Sonja’s right. Faraday might as well stand her in front of a firing squad.
She knows how Faraday operates Q & As, but wonders if he’ll really let the clock run out in silence, the way he says he will. Dany looks at Eva, waiting for her to ask a question. But Eva doesn’t move. She may be sitting up, but her eyes are closed, and Dany suspects she’s fallen asleep upright in her chair.
Finally, after a small eternity, a kid in the back row half-raises a hand. George. Aside from Dany and Liz Greene, he’s the only other kid here from Brit elementary. Dany takes in the lettering on George’s shirt, but can’t quite make out the quote. Something about an Indigenous multiverse. Then a name printed underneath. Roanhorse.
In third grade, Dany and George had been partnered up in math, deriving pi from rusty old oil drums at the port. Even as a kid, he’d been utterly calm, a kid everybody liked. These days, though, as soon as the bell rang, he’d slide out of the micro-school and back to his old friends in the larger school’s gen pop.
“So did the beaks do anything to protect doctors?” George asks. “Or are you thinking there’s another reason for them?”
Dany stops to think, because he’s right. The beaks do look like respirators.
Sometimes, crow doctors stuffed them with sponges soaked in vinegar or camphor, both of which are antimicrobial. And that’s when it happens. Dany is working through all of this out loud when she gets interested in the subject. She forgets about the kids who are whispering. Forgets about Sonja, drawing a picture of Dany’s head exploding.
Dany goes over what she knows. How, back then, they thought disease moved in the air. But not like an airborne virus. Because they didn’t know about viruses, not yet. But the smell of the disease, the stink of it – that everybody recognized. They called it the scourge. So, in a way, they mistook the smell, the symptom, for the cause.
Dany frowns, deep in thought.
“But then,” she says, “you have to ask who these doctors were. So, like, the bubonic plague spreads through Europe. Who gets hit hardest? Front line workers. So, what do the surviving doctors do? Run, a lot of them. So we have somebody pictured here, wearing the suit of a plague doctor, but is it a real doctor?” She shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. These crows don’t doctor. Because there’s no cure. So, their job is to identify the sick. You know, like the medicos do with virals. I mean, the infected. Sick people. Whatever. When the pilot light goes out, boom, under the Rodriguez act, people lose basic human rights, and they’re rounded up and sent to camps to, to … to die.”
Now the whole class is awake.
The teacher takes a deep breath. “We’re going to confine ourselves,” Faraday says, “to today’s topic, for now. But Dany has a point, one I want us to come back to. I want us to think about fear and stigma, about naming practices, about our use of language. I want us to ask the hard questions: What do our words carry? What do they allow? It’s something we’ll return to more than once in this course, as we see how language shapes perception and how perception, in turn, shapes practice… . But for now, let’s focus on the groundwork. So,” he says, bumping a question Dany’s way, “were these doctors or bureaucrats? And if these plague doctors could offer no treatment, why did they sort the sick from the well?”
Dany looks from Faraday to Eva’s sasquatch mug and thinks about it. Crow doctors didn’t help the sick, because that wasn’t their job. Their job was to keep the sick away from everyone else. Without a cure, what else could you do? And then she knows, all at once she knows – the MDC haven’t taken Jasper to treat him, because there is no cure for the virus. And the only treatments they have are failing. Badly.
The Ministry of Disease Control has contained him.
In some places, she remembers, they nailed the doors to houses closed, with the sick inside. “Isolation,” she says, finally.
“Back then, they might use nails in a door. Now, they use the prison-hospice up by Second Narrows. But it’s the same, really. If you’re on the wrong side of the line? You’ve got two choices: you survive or … you die.”
Dany looks out over the class, finds George. “I mean, what would you do?” she asks, slowly. “Like imagine you’ve got two kids. One of them has the plague. She’ll die no matter what. Do you stick with her, even if it means your other kid will probably catch it and die too? Do you do that, knowing that you can’t help? That it may kill all of you?”
Then Dany looks at Eva.
This is the question she’s been asking herself. Since yesterday. This question, and a billion variations of it, has risen up in her, again and again, beating under everything.
But right then, Faraday’s watch beeps, and she wonders if he’s set it off on purpose. “And that’s time,” Faraday says. “I’ll take the hot seat now.”
For the next thirty minutes, Faraday reminds her of why this is her favourite class. At one point, he even pulls out a replica of a plague doctor’s cane. The students use it to listen to each other’s heartbeats. The cane is hollow, like a sounding rod. Like a stethoscope. The cane carries the sound of one person’s pulse to another person’s ear, all while keeping a few feet of distance.
Then, the lights in the classroom flicker.
Dany glances up at the dying fluorescents. But what follows isn’t another brownout. What follows is the moment that sets everything in motion. The beginning of the end of the world.
The classroom door opens – and, for a moment, Dany closes her eyes, closes them tight. She senses some change in the air. The hairs on the back of her neck crawl with nervous electricity. She feels it. Danger.
When Dany opens her eyes she searches the classroom for a breach, sure she’ll find a long, lazy crack opening under her feet. A chasm for them all to tumble into.
Dany’s gut twists. If the kids in the room were dogs, they’d be barking right now, and running in terrified circles. But no, like her, they are all looking stupidly around, as if trying to think of a half-forgotten word, there, on the tip of the tongue.
And then Dany sees her.
In the doorway. A girl, her outline.
Liz.
Liz stands there, framed by the door, and something in Dany’s guts are telling her that something is wrong. That everything is wrong. Liz is clutching her backpack, and as she steps into the room, a rock falls out of her bag and clatters to the ground.
“We’re glad you could join us,” Faraday says.
Liz cocks her head at the teacher and goes still.
Under her desk, Dany’s hands are plucking at her shirt sleeves. Over the space of a half dozen heartbeats, Dany has moved from relief – that the ground is solid beneath her feet – to a deep bodily fear. “It’s all right,” Faraday is saying. “Come in.” But it isn’t all right.
It will never be all right again.
Liz takes one step, then another.
She presses against the concrete wall, inching along the side of the classroom. And for a second, Dany’s fear becomes something else. Because Liz looks like a scared five-year-old. Like a kid in the dark, blind-eyed with fear. Like a kid who is afraid there is a monster in the dark.
And then the pity is gone, and the fear doubles up like a stomach cramp.
She knows where Liz is headed. Her favourite seat at the back of the classroom. The one next to Dany.
Liz drops her bag under Dany’s desk – there is the clatter of more rocks – and then she flings herself into the seat. Dany slides a mask over to Liz. Dany doesn’t look at her friend, just pushes that mask over the table towards her desk mate.
Liz ignores it.
“Now,” says Faraday, “let’s close up this talk of plague. We need to discuss the final term papers you’re all working so hard on.”
| Chapter 0 = X + 10
&nbs
p; Next to her, Dany can hear Liz muttering. It’s no more than a ghostly whisper, the curling edges of her words falling just short of comprehension.
Her classmates aren’t looking at the teacher, not anymore.
The entire class, turning in their seats, is looking at Liz Greene.
All around Liz, they’re reacting. Like the rings that form on the surface of the water after it has swallowed a stone. Stiffening backs, half-turned faces, and there, in the centre of it all, Liz. She is hunched over the table, pulling at her hair. Sweaty strands hang over her eyes like a ragged curtain. Dany tries to look, to see why Liz is upset. But when she turns Liz’s way, her desk mate reacts instantly, turning in her seat, her shoulder shielding her notes.
Liz is scribbling so furiously that her pencil tears the page.
Dany can smell it in the air. Fear. A sour scent, astringent. Like the scent that, in her experience, precedes some small and half-ashamed act of violence. The teacher, up at the front, has abandoned his lecture and picked up his cell. And Dany, she sits very still, looking straight ahead – the only one in the classroom who doesn’t have eyes on Liz Greene.
At the front of the room, Faraday sets his cell phone down.
“We’re going to leave the classroom slowly,” he says. “Keep calm. Gather up in the hall – they’ll come and get you. All except for you, Liz,” he says, turning to Dany’s desk mate, who doesn’t seem to hear. “Paramedics are on their way to help.”
Liz Greene is muttering – but it’s gibberish, nonsense. As if language can be broken, as if words, like proteins, can be malformed. The disease does this? It does this to language? And what, then, is it doing to her brain?
Liz pulls at the zipper of her hoodie.
No one moves.
On the ground, by Dany’s feet, there is Liz’s backpack. The pack is open and Dany can make out, just inside, a few stones. Painted stones. A little kitten with human eyes. A frog with purple polka dots. And then, all at once, she sees the stones for what they are – can see the rough brushstrokes of little children. These stones have been taken from the little garden outside of the kindergarten class – where they were set down by the hands of little kids. By Mac. Maybe even, in their day, by Dany and Liz and George.