Sometime- the Plague World

by Meredith Mason Brown

  10

  Three Wise Men?

  Michael Floyd, Liz, and their two sons stayed at Nat’s house until Christmas afternoon, when they left for Los Angeles. The full family spent Christmas morning in the living room, which was largely filled by a dried out Christmas tree that dropped countless pine needles. The youngest generation present ripped open and handed out crudely wrapped presents, and occasionally successfully deciphered the writing on labels, and who gave what to whom. The Persian rug on Nat’s floor was soon coated in crumbled paper and empty cardboard boxes.

  The messy present-opening was followed by a large and heavy lunch. Michael put a remarkable amount of food in his mouth, swallowed what was there, and belched with volume and authority.

  “That’s charming, Michael,” Nat said. “Merry Christmas to you as well. Looking at the growth in your waistline suggests that you would do yourself and your life expectancy a favor by minding your waist.”

  “A waist is a terrible thing to mind,” Michael said. There was no response. “That’s a joke,” Michael said, after a pause. “Didn’t you get it? Or should I say ‘Waist not, want not?’ ” The silence was pervasive and deathly, until Liz and Beth led the group into a discussion of Yorkshire pudding – always a Christmas topic of interest with the Floyd family.

  Michael and his wife and sons left soon after lunch had ended and goodbye hugs had been exchanged with all.

  “I confess I’m beat,” Beth said, watching Michael’s crowded car go down the driveway.

  “You did well, Beth” Nat said. “No food or presents were thrown by family members at other family members. Voices were rarely raised. And it was our turn to do Christmas.”

  “I’m grateful to you, Nat, for getting the whole family together,” Dan said. “And grateful for wonderful presents, and delicious meals, and carols and a midnight communion. I’m buoyed and, touch wood, I feel sustained. You gave us all a merry Christmas.”

  Early the next morning Nat drove Dan to the Los Angeles airport for the flight back east – a flight that promised to be exhausting, with two changes of plane before Dan could pick up his car and drive to his home in Rockinam. On the drive with Nat, Dan talked more about the deaths in Rockinam, including the two people who died on December 23. Nat’s face reflected concern. He muttered an uncontrolled “Dear Jesus.” “Don’t worry,” Dan said. “I never touched either of these two departed souls. But it might be a good idea for you to think back on your years at the Centers for Disease Control. You’ll remember from our pre-Christmas talks that one of the men who died recently, Kurt Starkherz, had a doctor father, Konrad Starkherz, who spent twelve or so years at CDC, before he left there and moved over to a New York hospital. While he was at CDC, he wrote some journal articles about H1N1, including something about how immunity against World War I types of H1N1 might be built up. Dr. Konrad Starkherz is still alive. I’m guessing he’s not much above 50. Maybe someone you knew at CDC could give you some background about him, and maybe even something about Konrad’s father, Kurt’s grandfather, Dr. Klaus Starkherz, who I’d guess is around 80 by this point – even older than I am! So until Kurt died there were three Starkherz medicos – Konrad and his father Klaus as full doctors, and youngish Kurt as an intern at the Rockinam hospital.”

  “What wisdom am I meant to draw from that, Dad?”

  “Not much, at the moment. But don’t many doctors like to discover major medical breakthroughs, and to end up with whatever might be the medical equivalent of an Olympic medal, or of a Nobel Prize? So before Christmas, maybe an Epiphany was already approaching, with three would-be wise men – the three Starkherzes – following a star. Perhaps you could figure out what star they were looking for, and whether the looking they undertook was a good idea.”

  “I’m guessing, based on the journal article from Konrad Starkherz you described, Dad, that the Starkherzes were trying to come up with a miracle immune system, that could handle World War I kinds of H1N1 – making the world safe for H1N1. That’s like making the future safe for something that worked almost a hundred years ago. I don’t like the odds of that working. I’m game to do some digging, but I’m not optimistic,” Nat said. “I can’t say my CDC links are shiny fresh, but I’ll nose about a bit, if I can remember or find the names of some of the people I worked with way back in my CDC days. I admit I’m puzzled by the deaths in Rockinam. Did the dead people get exposed to H1N1, without any effective immune protection? Take care, Dad, and stay away from crowds – stay away from almost everybody. It’s none of my business, but I suggest that you also skip going to church for a bit. You can always pray at home, if you want to talk to El. If Els are everywhere, God is everywhere. And I bet you could make a telephone call into a church service, so that you could listen to what was being said in the service, without yourself being able to being heard in the service, and without actually going into the church and being coughed on and covered in mucus.”

  By this time they were at the LAX airport. “Thanks for a lovely Christmas,” Dan said, getting out of the car. When he was about ten feet away from Nat, Dan hugged himself and called out: “Consider that I’m hugging you notionally, Nat. I’m not touching you. And I’m not breathing on you. I love you. Be well!” He waved to Nat and went inside the crowded terminal.

  The first leg of Dan’s flight went to Cincinnati, for a two hour layover before the second leg, which went to Boston. Dan had two full suitcases and a backpack – enough to exhaust him. In a restaurant in the Cincinnati airport, he grabbed a greasy panini with salami, tomatoes and lettuce. He had time to make one call before boarding the next plane. He called Carl Holmquist, the Rockinam undertaker who had handled the cremation and burial of Dan’s wife Elizabeth.

  “Mr. Holmquist?” Dan said. “Good morning, Mr. Holmquist.”

  “Good afternoon. It’s almost 1 PM. What can I do for you, sir?” The voice was professionally polite, and the cold tone made it clear that the speaker had no idea to whom he was speaking.

  “I’m Daniel Floyd, Mr. Holmquist.. You were in charge of the burial of my wife Elizabeth Floyd, a couple of years ago.”

  “Yes, sir. I remember it well. How may I help you?” By this time the undertaker had turned on his undertaker voice, and was talking as if he remembered Dan and Elizabeth, and respected them.

  “Well, I’ve been out of Rockinam over Christmas.” Dan said. “I’d like to catch up on what’s happening. Jimmy Madeiros told me about the death of Rebecca Templeton the other day, and about the death of her husband Rector William Templeton some time before that. As a long-time congregant at St. James Church in Rockinam, I knew both Templetons quite well. I was at St. James for the service and reception for Bill Templeton’s funeral, in early December. I’m flying on my way back to Rockinam today. I should be back home tonight. When and where will the service for Becky Templeton be?”

  “It’s going to be a private family service.”

  “A private service for the death of the Rector’s widow? That’s a surprise. The Rector’s funeral service was public. As I mentioned, I was at the Rector’s funeral.”

  “A lot of the recent services have been private ones, Mr. Floyd. As you probably know, there has been some kind of sickness going around. A lot of people don’t want to be connected with big public burials.”

  “Well, is there to be an open-casket viewing of Mrs. Templeton, maybe at your company, at Holmquist’s?”

  “No. The family didn’t want one.”

  “Did you recommend a viewing of the deceased?”

  “That’s not my call, Mr. Floyd. That was the family’s call.”

  “Did you think a viewing would have been a good idea? Becky Templeton and Rector Templeton both took sick and died. Maybe a viewing wouldn’t have looked at all like them, if the sickness was what killed them, especially if the sickness was H1N1 flu, or something like it.”

  Carl
Holmquist said nothing.

  Dan took a flier. “That dark blue-black look on the face of someone dying or dead from toxic influenza must be ghastly. I’ve heard people say that the darkness of that look on the dead people is the reason why the medieval plague was called the Black Death.”

  “I can’t comment on that, Mr. Floyd. Where did you hear that kind of thing? You’re a lawyer, aren’t you, not a doctor?”

  “One of my sons is a doctor, who spent years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, battling viruses and the like. He taught me what to read about flu. Scary stuff. And blue-black faces were what people saw on the dying and dead in the flu pandemic in 1918 and 1919. Terrifying.”

  Mr. Holmquist paused in silence for a time before he spoke. “As you can appreciate, Mr. Floyd, and as I have already said, I can’t – and I won’t – comment on the appearance of a client.”

  “I can, and I do, appreciate that, Mr. Holmquist.” By this time Dan was being pleasant-sounding to Mr. Holmquist, to the point of smarminess. “And I am confident that you will take extreme care in treatment and handling of your clients who have died of the flu. Thanks again for your excellent burial of my wife.”

  Pulling his suitcases and weighed down by his backpack, Dan ran, sweating and short of breath, to make the plane for Boston. He made it, barely. The flight was packed and far from comfortable. Dan’s seat was in the back of the airplane, just before the toilets. A long lanky man sitting in the row before Dan leaned back as the plane taxied to take off, pushing the back of his seat against Dan’s knees. To Dan’s right was a man whose weight must have exceeded 250 pounds. Rolls of shirted belly-fat pushed against Dan’s right elbow. When the plane was airborne, Dan closed his eyes, hoping for a restorative sleep. He did not achieve that result. The fat man to the right got up three times during the flight to go to the bathroom. On two of those trips, the fat man stepped on Dan’s foot, inflicting much pain. The toilet behind Dan smelled bad. Dan sought to distract himself by thinking how best to develop information about the Starkherz doctors, and how best to combat the flu. In the last forty minutes of the fight, Dan slept, his head leaning towards the fat man. Dan’s neck hurt. He slept briefly in the ill-smelling darkness. He thought he saw a mirror before him, a mirror that showed his face to be bluish-black, far darker than the darkened interior of the plane. Hearing a man screaming, he jerked up his upper body and opened his eyes. When he closed his mouth, the screaming stopped. Dan realized the screaming had come from him.

  “You OK?” asked the fat man.

  “Just a bad dream. Sorry about that. I apologize. I’ve never before screamed as a result of a sleeping dream on a plane.”

  “Must have been one of the worst dreams,” the fat man said. “Do me a favor and don’t tell me about it.”

  Dan stayed silent. He took out his notebook and summarized in it his conversation with Holmquist the undertaker. The conversation had been unsettling.

  The flight from Cincinnati to Boston was not a good flight. The air was turbulent during the descent to the Boston airport. Several children wailed and wept. Two children vomited. The landing went smoothly, nevertheless. Dan stopped in the men’s room on the way out of the airport. He was pleased to see that the bathroom mirror showed his face to be of normal pale red color, not blue-black. Dan managed to find his car in the garage –something he sometimes failed to be able to do. Though darkness had fallen, he was able to drive back to Rockinam without getting lost and without falling asleep. He had a long shower and a full bottle of red wine before he fell asleep.

  “He that keepeth his mouth keepeth his life: but he that openeth wide his lips shall have destruction.” (Proverb 13:3, King James Version).

  11

  Helping Can Be Fatal

  After getting back to Rockinam, Dan waited two days before calling Nat.

  “Thanks again for a great Christmas, Nat,” Dan said. “I may have something imprecise to report to you, but let me ask you first whether, despite your crowded plate at the hospital, you had time to find out anything interesting about the three generations of Starkherz men and the death of Kurt, the youngest adult in their family.”

  “Maybe I’ve found something,” Nat said. Bear in mind it’s still holiday time, so the ranks of the CDC are diminished. And because it’s still holiday time, I need to spend time with my own family. And it’s been years since I was working in the CDC myself, and I’m sure there have been lots of people leaving and coming since then.”

  “You’ve prepared me for your not having discovered a whole lot, Nat. “Your disclaimers have been duly noted. What do you know about the Starkherz medicos?”

  “I’ve kept my copies of the CDC alumni directories. They didn’t tell me anything about Kurt, the young man who died, because Kurt never worked in the CDC; he was only an intern in the Rockinam hospital. I didn’t see anything connecting him with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And I didn’t see anything in the CDC directories about Klaus Starkherz (who is now an aged grandfather) ever having worked for the CDC. If Dr. Klaus never worked for the CDC, he, like Kurt Starkherz, would never have shown up in the CDC directories.”

  “I’m still listening,” Dan said.

  “We’re left with Kurt’s father Konrad Starkherz, who is a doctor in New York, and is the son of Dr. Klaus Starkherz. I looked Dr. Konrad up in Wikipedia. He apparently spent quite a lot of time at the CDC – 12 years – before moving to a hospital in New York, where he’s listed as an epidemiologist.”

  “I saw that in Wikipedia, too,” Dan said.

  “Well, here’s some gossip. I called a professor I had worked with at the CDC – a professor I think of as a friend. Forgive me if I don’t name him. He’s not someone I’ve forgotten, or who one I’m likely to forget soon. He’s someone who was a powerhouse after I had left the CDC, but when Konrad Starkherz was there. Well, I asked the professor whether he remembered Konrad Starkherz.”

  “And he said?”

  “The professor said ‘Unfortunately, I do remember him.’ I asked the professor what made the acquaintance with Konrad Starkherz an unfortunate one. The professor, whom I remember as having been a leader in the CDC, and as a gentle and wise scholar and epidemiologist, said – this is a quote from the professor: “Konrad Starkherz was a screaming asshole back then, and I bet he still is one.” That declaration startled me, because the unnamed professor did not normally talk that way. ‘In what way was Konrad an asshole?’ I asked. ‘In a variety of ways,’ the unnamed professor said. ‘Konrad was not smart, though he thought he was. He did not listen to advice from his elders and betters. He wanted to dazzle his aged father Dr. Klaus Starkherz, who had been a highly regarded doctor in Germany and in New York. Konrad disregarded the risks of starting a pandemic by contact with deadly viruses without first encasing himself in CDC-selected impermeable uniforms that looked like spacesuits. He indicated that he longed to become a hero in the CDC, by effecting some major cure of a dread disease, and getting the Nobel Prize or something similarly exalted for having done so. My professor friend also indicated that he and some other higher-ups at the CDC, working together, managed to bring about Konrad’s departure from CDC, for all of the above reasons – but I’m not meant to know that.”

  “Wait a minute, Nat,” Dan said. “I’ve got something about Konrad that looks pretty interesting. Right after I heard of Kurt’s death, I went online looking for articles by Dr. Konrad Starkherz, to see if I could get some sense of who he was. Here’s something I dug up, something Dr. Konrad wrote in one journal, dated close to the time when he left CDC. Konrad in his article discussed the influenza epidemic in 1918 and 1919, in terms similar to those you had used, Nat, in talking to me, on how the H1N1 flu antigens from those years were made up of new forms of hemagglutinin and neuraminidase– forms that mutated so rapidly that the immune system could not keep up with the mutations, and th
e virus (no longer being vulnerable to immune attack) could make itself at home in the patient’s body, often killing the patient. The article noted that soon after 1918, the lethal power of the H1N1 antigens vanished, probably as people’s immune systems became familiar with the antigens and learned how to immunize them. That much you already told me, Nat; I guess it was pretty much common knowledge among epidemiologists. But here’s how Konrad Starkherz ended the article he had written:

  ‘We should not think that the threat of a new H1N1 epidemic is behind us. Imagine, if you will, a case in which H1N1 of the 1918-1919 sort is released and spread – perhaps assisted in dissemination by birds. Will people be able to fight that kind of H1N1 with immune responses that do not destroy the lungs of people who have been exposed to the virus, but that instead destroy hemagglutinin 1 and neuraminidase 1? May we not work to develop effective immune responses to H1 and N1, and so save many millions of lives?’

  What does that article tell you about Dr. Konrad Starkherz, Nat?”

  “Well, I gather he wanted to find and to work with H1N1, an old lethal form of flu, in a world that by the time of Dr. Konrad’s article had little or no immunity to that dread disease. If Konrad had been able to come up with effective immune defenses to the H1N1, he might have looked look very good indeed. But what if the immune responses that worked at the end of World War I hadn’t been called into service for many decades, and no longer could control H1N1 of the 1918-1919 kind? If not, and if as a result powerful H1N1 could spread without effective immune defenses – and if my unnamed professor is right about the lack of adequate precautions taken by Konrad to guard against the World War I sort of HINI – then Dr. Konrad Starkherz is quintessentially a screaming asshole – and a very dangerous one, to boot. Hundreds of millions could be killed by that kind of flu, if coupled with lack of effective immune response. You’ve already told me that ten or so people have died, apparently of flu, in Rockinam in the past month. I don’t even want to think about it. You said you had something to report to me, Dad. Shoot.”