by Roy Freirich
Suddenly annoyed, she rushes out of the closet and past her boy into close-up again, hissing angrily, “Well, whoops, nobody needs to see this, anyway.” Her hands flash into and past the foreground, the camera tilts and—pffft—goes dark, and then bright with snow and white noise.
Sam and Chief look at each other now, neither breathing, a new dread taking hold. They turn to look at the closet door behind them, its cheap wooden slider doors shut now, revealing nothing.
Sam hesitates; he has no immediate jurisdiction over this new, imminent horror. It’s Chief’s move to make. Chief sighs and moves slowly to the closet, pauses nearly imperceptibly, and then slides a door open, scraping on rusted rails.
It’s empty, but for a few wire hangers swaying.
From the front doorway, Cort startles them both, wide-eyed, face blotchy with tears. How much has she seen? A wail emerges, of guilt and self-loathing, becoming words finally, as Sam and Chief stare at her: “I should have been here like I said I would . . . I should have!”
Sam puts placating palms up. “Hey, there’s no way you could’ve known—don’t—”
She shakes her head at him like he’s just too dumb to get it, and then she simply turns and runs—past the Jeep and into the dunes bordering the beach.
Sam shouts after her, “Cort!”
She just keeps on, lost to them beyond the dunes and a row of houses. The day suddenly seems endless, all the days.
Chief shakes his head. “Looks like we’re gonna need more volunteers.” He turns to Sam.
“What about this game they’re playing? Not so different than your theory, or could be a part of it?”
What if it is? Every thought dead-ends. “And do what?” Sam asks. “Confiscate everyone’s cell phones? Even if you could, there’s more than that happening here.”
Chief’s look is deadpan, cold. Is Sam up to the task here? Any task?
Enough at least for Sam to return Chief’s look, and to remind him: “Child Services?”
“Shorthanded, they promise somebody tomorrow.” Chief shrugs, his gaze sliding away.
Another night now looms, of the Boy in his makeshift bunk, just staring off, lost in his strange, animal stillness.
Sam’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He yanks it up and swipes it, an aggrieved voice crackling out at his ear: “It’s Howard. We’re getting low on Ambesta.”
Not good. “Substitute Lotosil, or Sonosol. No problem. Just no more than three per from here on. Okay?”
Howard’s silence is contrary enough, unmistakably petulant.
“Hello?” Sam presses.
“Sure, okay.” Click.
Sam avoids Chief’s inquisitive look and turns back to the Jeep. A deeper weariness begins, with a steady downward pull.
7
“It’s a scorcher today. But that sky will knock your eye out, not a cloud!” Kathy opens and shuts the little fridge, gathering jars and bread, filling the hours with chirpy chatter and snacks, fighting the heavy slowness that threatens to engulf her the second she stops.
In the dimness of the galley, she imagines the Boy sitting silently at their dinette table is much like any boy, waiting for his mom to cut the crusts from a sandwich while he grasps his glass with both hands, sipping, watching, barely listening to her.
She fusses at the counter, pulling a knife from the chock, lining up the square sandwiches. “Food of the gods, breakfast of champions, PBJ. I used to think peanut butter and jelly sandwiches grew in rows, like potatoes.”
Her back turned, she doesn’t notice him silently, thoughtlessly climb off the dinette bench and drift away, drawn up the companionway steps to pause there like someone listening for some distant sound.
“PBJ farms.” Kathy laughs as she cuts the sandwich—but then sucks in a breath, feeling the thin sharp pain of the blade along her thumb. “Damn!”
She drops the knife and yanks up her thumb: a fine pale line oozing blood, not so bad, really. She runs cold water on it, back to chattering, “Well, they didn’t call me klutz for nothing. We’ll get you that sandwich in a jiffy. More milk?”
Finally she turns, expecting see him waiting there, wide-eyed, a film of milk all that’s left on the side of the glass he grips with both hands, a telltale mustache of white on his upper lip.
Of course, he’s crept off into the head, and she crosses the two steps to the door and raps twice, not that he’s likely to reply. “Hey, you okay? Scared me!”
She goes still to listen and hears nothing, only her pulse beginning to pound harder and faster as she pushes open the door into the cramped empty little room and begins to understand that she has lost him, somehow, impossibly.
She shouts, “Hey!” the name of the nameless as she races up the creaking companionway steps and out into the day, where the placid marina greets her mockingly with the slow bobbing of yachts in their slips, the creaking of rigging, the lapping of the tide.
She leaps down onto the float, spinning left, right, scanning for human movement, but there’s no one, just a crusty sailor coiling line a few boats down, one who never fails to ogle her on her way to or from the showers.
“Hey, Walt, seen a kid around here?” She keeps her voice even, so desperately even.
Walt looks at her sleepily as she turns in place. “Sure, last night, one you and Sam came back with. He yours?”
She ignores him now and keeps spinning, shielding her eyes from the glare until she sees him, finally, a thin silhouette against flashing sun on water, nearly lost in its brightness.
She runs, feet and heart pounding, past dock boxes and coils of line and hoses and yachts, the seconds and yards interminable. “Don’t move! I’m right there! Don’t move!”
He doesn’t, just staring into the water, as if waiting for something to surface.
She grabs him, holding on, breathless, gasping, shrill. “Are you okay? You’re okay. Oh, you’re okay.”
His eyes never leave the water, and he lets himself be held, more entranced than afraid, it seems. Until he pushes back and offers her his little electronic game, a dead black rectangle.
“What?” She laughs. “You—need batteries? Come on, we’ve got some somewhere.”
He somberly offers his hand, and tears fill her eyes as she gently takes it and they start back to the boat.
What makes her turn back slowly to study the bright shifting surface, and then the row of boats and the float whose length she has crossed to the dock ramp and beyond, where motion makes her look again?
By the dock gate, a silver-haired man watches them impassively. He turns away, but not before hiding his hands in his shorts’ pockets, and not before Kathy catches a glimpse of inexplicable oddness: gloves. Some kind of latex meant to protect against germs or toxins, yellow, tight, unmistakable.
Sterile gloves.
−−−
Chief and Sam cut back through town, the patrol Jeep bouncing over a berm and onto the narrow service lane behind the storefronts bordering the marina. The shut passenger window gives Sam’s face back to him, a spectral reflection of a haggard man with distant eyes focused on too much elsewhere, on a boy and his mother out for an adventure before anyone else is up. On the stillness of the hour and their low voices as they step out into the damp, dim lane. The low, patient boom of the surf waiting a few lanes away, just a short boardwalk and a ramp away. Her last smile down at him.
A flash of movement brings him back, Chief slamming the brakes, swerving them almost sideways to avoid two kids running, shouting, “bright!” but no, it’s “fight!”—the ageless clarion call from grammar school, for all to crowd hooting around a brawl.
Chief is out the door without a look back, leaving Sam to follow at a run between two shops out into the wider marina, where a shoving, shouting group surrounds the ticket booth, dockside before the clanging, hollow hulk of the ferry, “Sea Mist 1.”
>
Bits of chatter reach him:
“—overheated, idling right there.”
“No way! I’ve been waiting!”
“Back off, huh? I have an emergency, okay?”
“Who doesn’t?”
The salesclerk looks familiar, a balding, stone-faced middle-ager whose name Sam has never learned. He quickly closes the rickety service window shutter to hang an oaktag sheet scrawled with Magic Marker:
FERRY CANCELED – ENGINE REPAIR
NEXT TOMORROW 7:45 PM
There’s a burst of complaint, incredulity, and derision as he fits and locks a padlock on the shutter and then turns, hesitating, looking for a quick way through the crowd and out of sight.
Chief raises his voice over the din: “People? Come back tomorrow, the other ferry’ll be here from the mainland. Everybody got it?”
Another group of families appears from around the corner, upscale vacationers from the pricey beachfront rental stretch of Pines Beach, crowding in with aggrieved faces. A few have cell phones pressed to their ears, spreading or receiving the news, voices already rising in argument, a few in outright anger.
Sam turns at more shouting. He edges past a group of teenagers, sidesteps a family bristling with coolers and umbrellas and half-zipped luggage, to see the combatants: a mom whose face is contorted and patchy with rage, dad alternately beseeching and finger-pointing with a squinty, hateful glare. Their little girl tugs at her mom’s legs, stretching a single incomprehensible syllable of bewilderment into a wail.
“I paid for the whole week! We won’t get a dime back if we go!” Dad’s dark wet mouth gapes with incredulity.
Her eyes bulge, her voice climbs, shrill. “Stay, I don’t give a fuck! We’re not! I’m right here, online, first thing tomorrow!”
Chief steps forward with his palms up, but they ignore him.
The hapless clerk tries to edge through the throng, also ignored.
Dad stabs the air with a finger. “You’ve lost it—take a nap, okay? There’s no—”
“Just listen to yourself, always the fucking expert on everything. All night, you keep moving around, moving around, you think I don’t know you do it on purpose? A little cough, a scratch, a little innocent sigh. Always something, why?”
“Easy now,” Chief begins, but now a stocky vacationer in a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops points at an older couple in golf clothes, all rayon pastels. “But this guy’s ticket from today is good for tomorrow? He’s good to go?”
“So buy them, like I did!” Golf Clothes shoots back.
Hawaiian Shirt points at the shuttered ticket booth. “They’re. Not. Selling them!”
Golf Wife chimes in now, mimicking, “But. Tomorrow. They will!”
Hawaiian Shirt’s wife blinks at her, eyes swollen. “But see, right now, some have and some can’t have, and how is that fair? My kids are scared and tired and need to go home.”
The women step closer, as if about to exchange pleasantries. “I’m sorry for that, but . . .”
“Oh, you’re sorry! It’s always easy for you. You were always bitches, stuck-up, judging. But you know what?” Her little girl starts wailing, grabbing at her knees. “You were all cheap inside. I know how you got where you are.”
Golf Wife gasps and lifts a hand to slap her, but Hawaiian Shirt grabs her arm. Golf Clothes shoves him away, another tries to stop him. A melee begins, ineffectual, absurd, just ugly.
Two teenage kids in dopey calf-length jams trade looks and test the hasp on the ticket booth window padlock, while two others bookend the wary clerk, who has tried and failed to edge away unnoticed. One grabs the man’s shoulder even while he tries to cringe away: “Keys, man. It’s not fair.”
A tourist steps in, bald pate sunburned an angry red, blinking furiously. “Whoa, now, back off.”
The kid takes a wild swing, face contorted, connecting a glancing blow the tourist ignores as he lunges for him, grabbing and gripping him bent in a schoolyard bully’s headlock.
Chief gives a taxi whistle, wading in, pulling combatants apart. “Enough! I need you to step over this way, right now. Let’s have a talk.”
Sam watches them slow, stop, move away, like chastened bitter children. The crowd backs up, muttering.
A gaggle of college girls comforts one of their own, who gawks at them, her tear-stained face hectic with outrage: “ . . . another night? No, no, fuck this.”
“We wouldn’t mind cutting it short, either. Nantucket can’t be this bad,” a patrician Connecticut-type opines, his tall, sleek wife nodding beside him.
“You know what it is? It’s the fuckin’ noise, seagulls all day, crickets at night.” This from a sage high-schooler.
His friends guffaw, swaying, staggering as if dizzy with mirth. “Take a chill pill!”
Eyes seem to glance at Sam, away and back again.
He backs up a step. The clinic’s just a few blocks away; there’s no percentage in being buttonholed here. He moves sideways to fade behind a gawking family, a woman with a yapping dog, a clutch of girls giggling like drunks, to make his way quickly back.
8
In his waiting area, the dozen new tourists are more than a harbinger of worse to come, but worse here already: faces sallow and drawn, skin under the eyes bruised like shiners. They laugh and chatter in little groups, loud with manic bonhomie, like fans waiting in line for a rock concert.
One woman’s face seems jaundiced, her hair matted, clothes awry. She flirts and rolls her eyes like an ingénue at two charter-boat crew who ogle her openly, nudging each other like junior high schoolers. A middle-aged man sits alone in nothing but white briefs, blinking politely at everyone. A handsome young couple cling, lost in each other’s mouths as they kiss wetly and obliviously, tongues and lips busy, faces shining with saliva.
Eyes front, Sam rushes through.
“Doctor—hey—”
“Excuse me—”
“Something to help my little girl?”
A palm up to acknowledge them all, he rounds the admittance counter and steps into his tiny office, already dialing his cell.
411 has the nearest office of Centers for Disease Control in Boston, close enough. Sam quickly navigates the voice menu, gives an assistant the gist, waits a brief moment, and then shuts his eyes in gratitude when an authoritative voice comes on the line:
“Yes, hello? Doctor Carlton?”
“Carlson, yes.” Sam exhales.
“Doctor Laris, Stan Laris. Okay, now you have cases of . . .?”
“Severe insomnia. Dozens, it’s creating a situation here. A few days, getting worse quickly . . .”
“Insom—any underlying illness?”
“No, not so far . . .”
“You have a means of transmission? Coughing, sneezing? Any other physical symptoms . . .?”
“No, but accidents . . . impairment . . . motor control, judgment, cognitive deficit. No etiology, blood and urine panels show nothing out of range. It’s hysteria. We need a team here. CDC has responded to these events before.”
“So no evidence of underlying . . . but, environmental causes? Have you ruled them out?”
Sam paces. “Like I said, blood panels and urinalysis show nothing.”
“Now you’re out on . . .” A rustling of papers, faint clicking of a keyboard. “Carratuck Island?”
“Yes, we—”
“So we’re taking about rudimentary testing, neighborhood clinic-style. EPA can be a bit more thorough, no doubt. What sorts of accidents, just to start to gauge the severity?”
“Burns, a finger cut off, bike spills—” He sighs at himself.
“Bike—”
“—a couple OD’d on Lotosil, another missing person, probable suicide . . .”
“Missing, probable. Well, now, this is a beach resort, pretty busy this time of year . . .?
”
“Of course, but it’s the number of incidents we’re seeing . . . Increasing, rapidly, with symptoms worsening. Impaired judgment, confusion, delusions, some panic beginning. Some violence.”
“Violence?”
“Tempers are flaring. An assault.”
“Have you had a summer without one? You have noise keeping people up? What’s the weather been like?” More rapid clicking of keys. Pausing, clicking.
Is Laris already Googling him? Seeing the DUI, the settled lawsuit? Enough to dismiss him so quickly? “Look, not the problem. I’m dealing with psychogenic illness here. Anomalous, I understand that, but not the first case, and well within CDC jurisdiction.”
“I’ll bring it up. Meanwhile, EPA, you should try them. Hey, sorry. Can you hold? It’s nonstop Zika today. We’re just slammed, and never not shorthanded.”
“Same here, I have patients waiting now. You have my information, can you get back?” Sam squints at the sudden, complete silence. “Hello?”
Nothing.
“Hello?”
He grits his teeth and stabs his cell off, turning in place.
Another voice intrudes; aide Andrew has somehow found time to hover in the hall outside Sam’s tiny office, gossiping on his own cell phone:
“—a pediatrician, used to be an epidemiologist, met him at Claude’s. Guy worked in Africa, okay? Said any contagious disease has to be stopped at the source, because otherwise people will just keep getting infected. Treat the cause.”
Annoyed, Sam moves to the door and steps out to confront Andrew, but he’s already pocketing his little cell and moving off.
“Sam?” Paula is there again, suddenly, a hand on his arm as she pulls open the sample drawer, rummaging through it. “We’re nearly out of samples, and Howard called, his stock is running out. Ambesta, Lotosil, Sonosol, any of it. People are lining up.”
“Jesus. Have him order more, stat. Next ferry.”
“Not due until tomorrow, late. They had to pull a replacement off Block Island and track down the other pilot.”