Sometime- the Plague World
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Dan did try to distract himself once more with his game of Bible Bingo – opening the Bible with closed eyes, putting a finger on a random page, and opening his eyes to see what God had chosen to say to him. It was the game he had played many weeks earlier, in St. James Church, next to the stout Mrs. Stout, one of the first in Rockinam to die of the flu. Then, the text under Dan’s finger, from the prophet Zechariah, had proclaimed that the Lord would smite all who waged war against Jerusalem with a plague that would rot their flesh and eyes and tongues. Now, Dan found his finger to be resting on a familiar line from Psalm 90: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” My strength these days is labor and sorrow, Dan thought. Maybe I will go flying away soon. Today’s Biblical Bingo game seems to have told me so.
A week after Dr. Kahn’s visit to Dan Floyd’s house, the doctor called up Nat Floyd. Kahn’s manner – like that of many doctors – was straightforward rather than warm. He appeared to be a busy man – perhaps sufficiently busy that he had little, if any, time for personal warmth and friendliness. “My colleagues and I have run our tests on your father,” Kahn said to begin his call to Nat. “You may remember that the dead nuthatch was carrying West Nile virus, and the dead kestrel was carrying EEE?”
“That’s what you told my father, I believe.”
“Well, now CDC can tell you that your father has both West Nile virus and EEE virus, and we don’t have any magic bullets to stop either of those diseases in him. The West Nile isn’t as likely as the EEE is to result in severe illnesses, but it might – there’s a low percentage chance your father will get disorientation, convulsions, vision loss, and maybe paralysis. EEE is getting to be more common, thanks to the arrival in America of different kinds of mosquitoes that carry EEE not only to horses (hence the Equine part of the name), but also to people. People over 50 are the most likely to develop severe EEE disease – starting with headache, fever, vomiting, and chills, and sometimes moving into disorientation, seizures, coma, and encephalitis – that’s fancy for inflammation of the brain, that can mess up the mind. About one-third of the patients with EEE die.”
“How will you treat the disease?”
“It’s a hell of a challenge. So far, I’m not aware of any vaccine that works, and there isn’t any other cure. The best you can do, the best we at CDC can do, is to try to make the patient less uncomfortable – cleaning up, breathing support, the whole bit. That’s why I suggested you consider getting a hospice nurse for your father.”
“We’ve already got a name and a hospice nurse lined up. There are hospice nurses in Rockinam, and my brother Michael and I have lined up one of them. Any other thoughts?”
“Don’t move slowly. Your father’s diseases – especially the EEE – are likely to move fast and to be extremely painful.”
“My brother and I will be there soon, out of California, and going back out to Rockinam to see Dad.” Nat said.
Within two days Nat and Michael were at Dan’s bedside. Dan’s dog Don Carlos lay on the floor. The dog’s back was on the side of the bed that was nearest to Dan. The hospice nurse retained by Nat and Michael was a woman named Doreen Carrington, who had nursed Dan’s’s wife Elizabeth when she was dying. Now the nurse was taking care of Dan. She looked at Dan from a metal-bottomed hospital bed on the other side of Dan’s bed. The room smelled of the DEET the brothers had sprayed on themselves, to repel mosquitoes. The same smell was on the hospice nurse. Nat and Michael did not see any mosquitoes flying in the room, but a few were dead on the floor. Other smells came from their father’s bed, where Dan had thrown up and had diarrhea. Some of that was on the nurse’s uniform.
Dan looked at the two younger men who had come near his bed. “I don’t know who you are,” Dan said, looking at his sons. “I remember few things these days. But I do know that I like you both, and I always have. Make yourselves at home. It’s my home.”
“We’re your sons,” Nat said. “That one is Michael. I’m Nat. Michael and I are very glad to see you.”
Michael looked at the big black Bible in his father’s bed. “Are you reading the dirty parts?” he asked.
“I’m reading whatever the Bible tells me to read, by what’s there when I open the book. Most recently the Bible tells me in Psalm 90 that we live threescore years and ten. If we’re strong enough to live ten years more than that, our strength would be labor and sorrow, because we’d lose all our strength soon, and we’d fly away.”
“That book often isn’t very cheerful,” Michael said. “That’s one reason I am not a Bible-reading man.”
“That book is our strength,” Dan said. “I have lived now more than 70 years. I have lived 75 years.” Dan suddenly contorted himself in pain and grabbed his head. The nurse put a wet cloth on his face. “I am not going to live long. I am sure I’m not going to live fourscore years. I’m going to fly away soon. That means my hurting will be over. And I’m won’t have burned up all my money and your inheritance by paying it all away for drugs and doctors and nurses – forgive me, ma’am,” Dan said to the nurse, whose name he had forgotten, if he ever knew it. “You and your families will share my money, such as it is, boys” (this to men each of whom was close to fifty years old) “and my pain will go away.” Dan started coughing. He vomited food and blood. When the vomiting stopped, Dad said to his sons: “I gave you copies of my will and powers of attorney, just a year or two ago. Another set is in the drawer of my what-do-you-call-it, of my desk in my studying room, or whatever. I can’t think any more. I can’t remember anything; I puke; I piss and shit uncontrollably. Forgive my language, but I have forgotten many of the more poetic words. I hurt. I am still able to remember, and to use, the word “shit.” Don’t let me keep on hurting. Do whatever it takes to end it. Help me, please help me, kids, to finish me.” Dan shook in his bed, his forehead and his armpits wet with sweat. He then talked to the hospice nurse. “Ma’am, you heard what I said to these young men. And if you have some super-duper permanent painkiller pills, please give me some.”
“My brother Nat and I love you, Dad,” Michael said. “We’re here to help you. We don’t want you hurting.” Nat added: “We flew here from California. We’re bushed. With your permission, Michael and I will spend the night in the guest rooms downstairs, and we’ll see you in the morning. We’re glad to see you. Goodnight, Dad. Goodnight, Miss Carrington. We hope you both get some sleep. You too, Don Carlos.” The dog lifted his head at the sound of his name, but did not move from where he was, near where Dan lay in his bed.
When they got to the guest rooms, Dan and Michael scrubbed themselves thoroughly in the showers. Each sprayed themselves with Off!, before each donned his pajamas and went to bed.
At 7:00 in the morning, Rockinam time, the brothers heard pounding on the doors of their rooms. With difficulty, they pulled themselves out of their sleep, though the time to them as Californians was 4:00 in the morning. The door pounder was Miss Carrington. “Sorry to wake you up,” she said. “You must be exhausted, what with all your travel from California. But I think your dad has passed on.”
Nat and Michael climbed the stairs quickly, in their pajamas. Dan’s bedroom smelled as it had before. Dan’s body lay motionless in his bed. Miss Carrington had a stethoscope. “I don’t hear any heartbeat,” she said. Nat borrowed the stethoscope and held the bell against Dan’s chest, neck, back, and stomach. “I don’t hear anything,” he said. “Dad’s gone. Dad has flown away. Dad doesn’t hurt anymore.”
Don Carlos, without moving, stayed by Dan’s bed, near where Dan’s body was. The dog looked out at the nurse and at Don’s two sons.
“Jesus,” Michael said.
“Jesus,” said Nat. “Jesus knows Dad’s death had to be better than continuing the pain, the lost mind, the incontinence. That prom
pt death is what Dad wanted. Thank you, Lord Jesus.”
“The cycles of the other species can be destroyed, and the biosphere corrupted. But for each careful step we take, our species will ultimately pay an unwelcome price – always.” Edward O. Wilson, Anthill: A Novel (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.), p. 16.
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Afterword
This book is a work of fiction, about fictional people. Meredith Brown, the author of the book, is interested in plagues, but he is not a doctor or a medical expert. What is real, underlying the book, is the likelihood that there are now, for many thousands of years have been, and in the future there will be, plagues and pestilences, which have, off and on over the centuries, caused massive human deaths. Viruses and germs change. So do defenses like vaccines and immune systems. Changes also occur in how viruses are spread. In some years, for example, influenza can be spread by pigs (swine flu) or by birds (avian flu) – in many instances, spreading among the animals or among the birds; in some instances or years, spreading to humans. Exposure to viruses can cause people to become sick – in many cases, fatally so – but it is also true that people frequently are more susceptible to a disease if they have had no exposure to the disease, and as a result have not developed any immunity to it. The back-and-forth between plague and cure is real and appears to be never-ending, and it calls for careful, and often very different, approaches to dealing with viruses and with immune systems.
We should not assume that pandemics will not reappear in the future. As John Barry has noted, such organizations as WHO (the World Health Organization) and the CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) agree that influenza pandemics are virtually certain to recur – particularly as pigs, birds, camels, and mosquitoes, to name a few, have become more likely to infect humans.3
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Bibliographical Note
As we have seen, people have been writing about plagues at least as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Mesopotamia more than 4,000 years ago. Books on the subject keep on coming, as pandemics occur and new kinds of plague break out. In recent years, experts on Neanderthals have published some evidence that has indicated that many thousands of years before 4,000 years ago, at least some Neanderthals appear to have had immune genomes that defended against some diseases.
Here are some of the books and articles on plagues that I have found most helpful:
Barry, John M., The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
Camus, Albert, La Peste. Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1947.
Carroll, Michael C., Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory. New York, William Morrow, 2004.
Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Garrett, Laurie, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.
Gottfried, Robert S., The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe. New York and London: The Free Press, 1983.
Guterl, Fred, The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2012.
Hobbes, Thomas (translator), Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War (1629). In paperback, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Kolata, Gina, Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2001.
Lipsitch, Marc, The Deadliest Virus. Harvard Magazine, March-April 2013, pp. 9-10.
Mason, Herbert. Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative. New York: New American Library, 1970.
McNeil, Wm. H., Plagues and People. New York, Knopf Doubleday, 1977.
Mitchell, Stephen, Gilgamesh: A New English Version. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Preston, Richard, The Demon in the Freezer: A True Story. New York: Random House, 2002.
Spellburg, Brad, and Gilbert, David, Rising Plague: The Global Threat from Deadly Bacteria and Our Dwindling Arsenal To Fight Them. Prometheus Books, 2009.
Warner, Rex (translator), Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1954.
Zinsser, Hans, Rats, Lice and History. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1935.
Endnotes
1 Barry, The Great Influenza, 187-192.
2 Barry, The Great Influenza, 187-88.
3 Barry, The Great Influenza, pp. 450-51.