by Jim Shepard
After a while Malik’s mother came back in and moved Aleq aside, and grabbed Malik and put her head to his chest and started wailing. Aleq knelt next to them, shocked, and then said, “He’s okay,” though he knew it was like Malik’s body had been trying and trying to get stronger and then had just stopped. He stood and circled the rooms and found himself in the bathroom. In the mirror he was open mouthed and teary.
He could hear Malik’s mother outside. It sounded like she was headed away from the house. He went back to where Malik was lying and slid his friend’s phone under an arm, and then sat on the lower bunk like he was waiting for something else. He could hear more crying coming from other parts of the settlement.
He’d taken off his boots at the door and his socks were as wet as his knees, so he pulled Malik’s beat-up summer Nikes out of the clothes box at the foot of the bed and held them in front of him, and then pulled them on. And then he decided that his feet felt better anyway.
Aveda Grooming Clay
Three days before that, on the morning all the sled dogs spent howling, the foreman for Bluejay Mining’s Rare Earth Elements Disko Bay II Mine, Christian Leine, and five of his crew were the last ones aboard an Air Greenland flight that after two stops dropped them exhausted at Keflavík International Airport in Reykjavík. They were each becoming histological messes. They had completed the verification drilling on schedule and had weathered their double shifts with the union’s blessing and had earned their paychecks and their two weeks home. It wasn’t clear yet whether the higher-ups were going to settle on ion exchange or multi-stage solvent extraction or what, but there’d be multiple steps in the separation process, and that wasn’t their worry, anyway, being a concern way above their pay grade, though it sounded like they would be doing some of that work onsite in order to save transportation costs on so many tons of permafrost.
Christian was so overheated that he was sweating on the plane, especially before they got moving, and the air nozzle above his seat didn’t seem to be working at all, and when he wiped himself down with the little napkins the stewardesses handed out, he apologized to the old lady sitting next to him. She seemed unwilling to accept his apology. He tried to read but he was having trouble concentrating, and his breath smelled unpleasant and odd even with the throat lozenges on which he’d been bingeing.
In Reykjavík their group stuck together for a little while before heading to their various gates, and at a pop-up hair products store, Global Grooming, outside Blue Lagoon “Icelandic Skin Care Products from the Depths of the Earth,” he bought some texturing wax while his buddies teased him about his relentlessness with the hair gel. The one he ended up with smelled mintier than he would have preferred and was expensive besides, but he bought it anyway. He tried seven different samples before he made his choice, and dropped each back into its rack. His friend Tom told him that this was the worst headache he had ever had, and Jussi kept coughing like a seal and wiping his face and dropping his handkerchief, grossing everyone out. They went into ELKO and horsed around hanging wireless Beats on each other’s ears, and then settled on sandwiches and sushi at Mathús, appreciating the no-fuss self-service after having handled and rejected packaged pastas and curries and salads and two different cold soups. Jussi’s connection was first, to Copenhagen, and Tom was off to London, and Willi to Frankfurt. Willem was staying in town overnight to meet some friends and then heading to Brussels, and Douglas was also going to London, and from there on to Bath.
All six, as they dawdled from one end of the Keflavík airport to the other, generated, with their sneezing and coughing and throat clearing, particle mists so fine that the microbe-laden aerosols could sail many hundreds of meters on the tiny air currents generated by the airport’s air-conditioning system until they settled and stuck. Then they hitched rides on the next hands to come along and encounter those surfaces, as part of a microbial passenger list so teeming that the bacteria along for those rides outnumbered in each individual their total sum of human cells.
The Worst Thing Ever
A bunch of people had piled down the stairs of the cement wharf into a boat, but it looked like they were having trouble starting the outboard. They were pushing and shoving and arguing about it. One of the Villadsens went running past Aleq toward them. Out past the offshore rocks he could see tracks on some of the sea ice, bluer in the afternoon light.
Back at his grandparents’ house, Hansenip from the next house over was standing at the foot of their bed. Aleq’s grandmother when she saw him closed her eyes and warned him not to come too close. Under the covers she was wearing her blue sweater with the white stars. Mosquitoes lifted off and settled near her head. Hansenip told them that his wife had gotten sick two days earlier and this morning had sat down in their doorway and died. He’d gone to tell his in-laws and had found them dead in bed. He said that some of the sickest people were wandering the streets like they owned them, and that the Rosbachs were dead on two benches outside their house. His grandfather said to calm down, and that everyone should stay inside, and Hansenip answered that the one time you went out for what you needed, medicine or water or whatever, the sickness came back with you. His grandmother said they didn’t want to give him their sickness, and he waved his hand in front of his face and told them he thought he already had it. He was crying and smoking, and they were crying along with him. Finally he said he should go check on his cousins, and they agreed with him.
Once he was gone they told Aleq again to keep back, but he sat as close as he could and got cold wet towels for their foreheads. It wasn’t that he thought he could help, but he did think it’d be better to die before everyone else he cared about did. After he’d been there a while, his grandmother asked if he thought this was that COVID thing, and he told her what Miss Paarma had told him. She said she was thirsty and asked for some of her special water. She was talking about an iceberg stuck in the sea ice that they’d raided for freshwater all winter. She preferred tea made with it because she said the minty flavor brought out the taste of the tea. He asked his grandfather if he wanted another beer and his grandfather didn’t answer, and his grandmother said no more beers for him because he’d thrown up the last one. She said what she always said about alcohol being most people’s way of spoiling the occasion for others. Aleq could smell the throw-up on the other side of the bed once she’d mentioned it.
He sat there until it got dark. His grandmother was awake for stretches, but he didn’t tell her about Malik. The cold towels he used on their foreheads felt a few minutes later like they’d come out of the oven. His grandmother pulled a hand out from under the blanket and felt his grandfather’s forehead herself. They both shook the way dogs who’d been run too hard trembled in their sleep. His grandfather turned and hung over the side of the bed, and it reminded Aleq of a day they’d spent waiting out a seal’s breathing hole, his grandfather bent over off to the side of the hole for an hour or more and not moving. His trick had been to rest a gull feather over the opening, and when the seal breathed out, the feather moved, and he had his shot.
There and Not There
During the night Aleq lay on top of the bed next to them because they were so hot under the covers. His grandmother called the name of the minister but she didn’t say whether to try to get him. She told her relatives who were not in the settlement that she went to church but she usually didn’t.
When he woke up again in the middle of the night he couldn’t hear his grandfather breathing. His grandmother was breathing through her mouth like she kept being shocked by something. He turned on the light to see better, but he could barely look at her because he couldn’t stand to see her in such pain. Her face was working at something, like she was trying to push her way through a crowd. She grabbed his hand, and squeezed it, and he told her that she’d done a good job of teaching him, and that he hadn’t learned everything but he’d learned enough, and that she didn’t need to worry.
> “Why do you make that face?” his grandmother wanted to know.
“I smelled something,” he said.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His eyes swam with tears. Why was he like this?
There was more wailing outside, out of nowhere, off in the distance. Lights were on all over the village, even as late as it was.
“What is that?” his grandmother asked, about the noise.
“Just some people,” he told her.
“Tell them to shut up,” she told him. “I’m tired of them.” And she dropped her head back against her husband’s, and breathed in three more times, and then stopped. Aleq waited, and then shook her hand where he was holding it. He shook it again. The noises outside stopped, too. He got up and turned off the light and sat back down with his grandmother and took her hand again. Now he was shaking, at being so alone.
Both their mouths were open. He let go of her hand, and lay on top of them, and kept them as warm as he could, and he finally fell asleep after it started to get lighter.
Wood
He spent the next day in the house with his grandparents, mostly on the bed. Outside there was shouting, and calling, and the sound of more boats leaving, and then it was quiet.
The morning after that it was sunny. He went outside again. Old man Geisler was near his house and his son was facedown on top of the rocks. The Joelsens’ mother was on her knees in a meltwater ditch with her hands out in front of her. Most of the dogs were tied up but a few had gotten loose and were trotting here and there and enraging the rest. One was digging holes and one kept rattling its long chains over the duckboards and rocks. In some places two or three people were piled together, and near Miss Paarma’s house a gang of ravens had staked out one of the piles. Near the front door, ATVs and handcarts were parked at all angles.
He walked to his mother and father’s house. They were on top of their bed together and he draped their blanket over their heads. Their feet stuck out. Their kids were all in their own beds.
At Malik’s house Malik’s mother was on her side in the kitchen. The baby was where she always was, on the mattress on the floor.
Down by the water a boy named Daavi he knew from school was shirtless and walking from house to house saying Oh God Oh God Oh God. Aleq headed down to the house he thought the boy had gone into, but he couldn’t find him.
It was the older Villadsen’s house. He used the bathroom and looked through the drawers and found pills and a jar of cream and a little pillow. In the kitchen there was a six-pack in the refrigerator and an egg and three blocks of cheese. When he came back outside, Villadsen’s dog chained up across the way looked at him as though nothing interesting ever happened as far as it was concerned.
He was still wearing Malik’s Nikes. He heard himself say, “I don’t have any water.” He didn’t know who he was talking to.
He checked some other houses for Daavi and found him wedged into a corner of the Rosbachs’ storage shed, panting and frantic. He shied away when Aleq leaned over him, and Aleq sat with him until he died. Then Aleq climbed up onto the shed roof, and from there onto the house roof, and sat with his elbows on his knees.
He felt like he hadn’t slept in days, though he knew that wasn’t true. After a while he got himself moving again, and climbed down, and walked over to Miss Paarma’s house, and looked inside. She was on one of her beds beside two of her patients. She’d written names on pieces of paper and stapled them to people’s shirts, but some weren’t stapled right and when he opened the door they blew off the bodies.
At some houses there were notes on the front doors telling relatives to stay away. In some, people were wrapped in sheets, and, in one, a rug.
By the time the wind picked up even the dogs were getting quieter. In a lot of the houses the doors were open. Shirts and sheets flapped on the clotheslines. Miss Paarma’s shed door kept squeaking and banging. He stepped where someone had burned some garbage near her water tank and it reminded him of his grandmother’s saying that even if your yesterday was ashes, your tomorrow is still just more wood.
He slapped his face to stop staring at stuff and do something. It didn’t feel like he’d live much longer but he also didn’t feel sick. He started putting food he found outside where the dogs could get it. Some of the chained-up dogs were mean enough that he just threw what he had where they could reach it. He was dragging out a big bag of dog food and the Johansens’ dogs were going crazy seeing it when he first heard the helicopter.
Countertops and Pump Bottles and Door Handles
And credit cards and credit card readers and escalator railings and elevator buttons and phones and pens and water bottles and zippers and wineglasses and coffee cups. Yusef Zaki’s nephew was getting married in Iceland and he wanted to be there and he’d convinced his girlfriend from Marseille to come along as well, and he stopped by Global Grooming out of boredom. Three American boys, Kenny Lee, Aaron Friedman, and Ben Stahl, heading home for spring break, considered upgrading their headphones before reminding themselves that there were no bargains at airports. A Chinese-Canadian family on their way to visit their son on his year abroad passed Jussi coughing and the father scolded him in Mandarin to cover his mouth. Five Scottish girls commandeered the miners’ table at Mathús and one cleared away the unbussed trays and dishes before eating her carrots and hummus with her hands. A Swiss couple with a baby took the table after that. Two Austrian lawyers whose connecting flights had been delayed used the men’s-room stalls after Christian and Willem. Anything the miners touched any number of people touched after them, and anything those people touched was available to any number of hands after that.
Old Relations Not Seen in Years
Well before COVID-19, a survey in Global Public Health in 2006 had caused a stir in the international medical community by revealing that 90 percent of the epidemiologists polled predicted a major pandemic—one that would kill more than 150 million people—in one of the next two generations, because of the rapidly increasing number of candidate pathogens, the unaddressed shortcomings in global public health infrastructure and modes of cooperation, and the ongoing explosion of global travel, to name just three contributing factors. And perhaps under the heading of piling on was the discovery that the pathogen-recognition genes in our genomes are in some cases thirty million years old, which means those pathogens have survived among us long before we even evolved into the recognizably human, and so as our companions have been reliably causing cataclysmic epidemics not only for centuries, but for eons.
II
The Junior Certain Death Squad
Jeannine Dziri and Danice Torrone had had to get up so early for their flight from Kangerlussaq to Ilulissat that they’d figured they might as well stay up, and so they’d spent the three hours mostly slumped blearily at the closed airport bar over a tiny curved counter in their high-backed stools, checking and rechecking their to-do lists and feeling sorry for themselves in minor ways before heading off to their gate. Their tomato-red Air Greenland plane was making an unscheduled early-morning departure, and though it had a capacity of thirty-nine, only five seats were occupied, and three of those held their strapped-in cargo. Twenty-one hours earlier they’d each been approached in their offices by their supervisors and told that Greenland’s Ministry of Health had granted permission for three outside investigators to look into an outbreak that had apparently spread from an eighty-person settlement on the western coast to a town of five thousand, and while no one was clear on the situation in the settlement, the town was already reporting at least eleven confirmed fatalities. The World Health Organization was sending its communicable disease expert for northern Europe, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Jeannine and Danice’s supervisors informed them, was sending them. Danice would be the lab wonk and doctor and Jeannine the epidemiologist, and their travel ord
ers and flights were being arranged while they gathered as much information as they could from their supervisors and colleagues and what little briefing materials there were. They had four hours to go home, pack a bag, and get to the airport.
Jeannine was part of that year’s class of new Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, and EIS officers were supposed to be on call twenty-four hours a day to respond to requests for CDC assistance with outbreaks or other public health emergencies. For her EIS assignment she’d chosen the Special Pathogens branch, partially for the anarchic appeal of its fighter pilot rep but also out of respect for the test pilot sensibility the work required: that Chuck Yeager–like unruffled absorption in the task at hand in situations in which anyone else would be freaking out. She’d been the center of every cocktail party conversation for a while following the COVID-19 pandemic. When she’d told Danice that her supervisor, who in cultural terms every so often seemed to reside in 1952, had merrily suggested that they call their pairing Team Estrogen, Danice had answered, “How about we call ourselves instead the Junior Certain Death Squad?” And Jeannine had laughed and told her that she might have scored the perfect partner.
First Things First
They didn’t talk much on the first half of the flight. Danice looked like she could barely keep her eyes open. The idea was to go over everything you could find on the subject of the outbreak en route. There were lots of possibilities, from some kind of meningitis all the way down to any number of other things—including some kind of delayed mutation of COVID-19—but the place to start was probably with the case clusters that had already been identified at the hospital and the elementary school, and Jeannine needed to be ready to manage the way it was going to be all over the news and social media. She’d been warned that she could expect anything upon arrival, all the way from a hero’s welcome to a version of “This is our investigation, so back off,” but her first overriding communications objective after hitting the ground was to isolate the sick and quarantine anyone who was believed to have been exposed. Her supervisor had also reminded her that, as of their briefing, they were now attached at the cell phone, and that he wanted to hear from her whenever she needed resources, whenever she found herself in a political clusterfuck, whenever she had something he needed to hear, and even when she didn’t.