by Jim Shepard
“When it comes to what we do, it’s hard having any kind of life at all,” Jeannine said.
“On my ortho rotation there was only one other woman, and of course we were never on service together,” Danice said. “And still, whenever we could, we helped each other. I would do all the reading and tell her what she needed to know and she had all the people skills.”
“Weren’t you friends with her?” Jeannine asked.
“It was like I never saw what was in front of me until it was too late,” Danice lamented.
“Well, we learn as we go,” Jeannine finally said. It sounded lame.
“It’s just that sometimes, doing everything alone just wears you out,” Danice said.
“You’re not alone now,” Jeannine said. “You have a friend who loves you.”
“When I first got to Washington sometimes I got so lonely I used to call my apartment ‘the Bell Jar,’ ” Danice said. “But none of my girlfriends got the joke.”
“I get it,” Jeannine told her. “I think it’s funny.”
“Thanks,” Danice said. “I know you gotta get up soon. I just wanted to talk.”
“No, stay on,” Jeannine told her.
“I’ll rest too,” Danice assured her. “Then I’ll call back.”
Things That Wait Eons Probably Don’t Roll Over So Easily
An hour before dawn Jeannine was awake again and looking out the window in the dark. The first few texts from her mother had been screenshots of the front page of the Detroit Free Press with headlines like “DEARBORN GIRL HELPS FIND THE BUG” followed by her mother’s exclamation points, or “DAUGHTER OF ALGERIAN IMMIGRANTS HELPED SPOT WHAT THE REST OF THE WORLD MISSED,” and when she’d gotten a minute, Jeannine had texted back, Amazing, huh? Nothing certain yet. Crazy here. More soon, but that hadn’t mollified her mother, whose last four texts had been CALL ME!!!
She groped around for the phone on her bedside table and slid it over and found her mother’s text thread. Will soon, she texted back. Her mother immediately called, and Jeannine let it go to voicemail. The little red oval on her phone icon informed her that she now had 1,278 unread messages. She clicked on it and scrolled only a short way through the end of the list before she came to Madeline. She clicked on that, fearfully. She could barely make out the woman’s voice through her sobbing. She’d been calling to let Jeannine know that Jeannine’s supervisor was dead.
The phone buzzed again, and she answered it this time.
“I’ve been thinking about Q fever,” Danice told her. She was clearing her throat, loudly.
“You sound like Debra Winger,” Jeannine told her.
“I don’t know who that is,” Danice said impatiently.
“That actress with the really raspy voice,” Jeannine explained. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t know if you remember much about it, but they first noticed it what, in the early ’30s?” Danice guessed. “And it was reminding me about how everything might be up in the air with something this new.”
“Okay. All right,” Jeannine said.
“What’s wrong?” Danice asked. “You sound terrible.”
Jeannine told her about her supervisor.
“Oh, jeez,” Danice said. “I am so, so sorry.”
“Yeah,” Jeannine said. She started to cry.
Danice waited for her to get ahold of herself for a few minutes. It was getting a lot lighter outside.
“So this Q fever,” Danice finally said.
“It was pretty freaky, I remember,” Jeannine said, wiping her nose on her bedsheet. “Right?”
“They thought it was a virus, because it behaved like one, and it wasn’t like any other bacteria,” Danice said. She panted for a minute, and Jeannine waited, before she went on. “It turned out it was passing from one species or individual to another through super-tiny airborne particles and it was an intracellular bacterium and reproduced inside the cells of its host, like a virus, and not out in the bloodstream or gut where the immune system could more easily target it. And it existed as two different forms of bacterial particle, each with different characteristics: one for replicating and one for hunkering down. And it was resistant to desiccation, acids, high and low temperatures, and ultraviolet light. It was so weirdly dangerous that biowar researchers worked on it in the ’50s.”
“Yeah, there’s a lot we have to hope we’re still not totally in the dark about,” Jeannine agreed.
“Or what about Legionnaires’ disease?” Danice asked. “It turned out that its growth characteristics were almost nothing like any other bacteria’s. It turned out to be unbelievably slow-growing and unbelievably hardy. How long was it where all they knew about it was that it had been around for a long time, its most effective mode of transmission was through the air, and its natural home was somewhere else in nature?”
“Well, if the point here is to scare me…,” Jeannine said, and didn’t finish her sentence. “It wasn’t like I was sitting around here overconfident,” she added.
“I was just thinking,” Danice said. “That you know, things like this that wait eons for their opportunity: they probably don’t roll over so easily.”
“Are you feeling any better?” Jeannine asked her. “Your breathing sounds about the same.”
“What we all should have been doing was microbial impact assessments, like environmental impact assessments,” Danice told her.
“Maybe from here on in they will,” Jeannine said.
“From here on in,” Danice scoffed. “All of those pathogens that over time we’ve de-adapted to—we keep sticking our noses everywhere, they’re all coming back.”
“Think of it as job security,” Jeannine joked feebly.
Danice had a coughing fit as a response. “God,” she said when she was finished, probably in reference to the pain in her chest. “Who would you put your money on? Humans have been around for what, two hundred thousand years? And bacteria for like three and a half billion.”
The End of the Line Is Never a Good Place to Be
A few hours later they tried a Zoom call but the image kept freezing so they settled for a regular call.
“Is that your breathing?” Jeannine wanted to know. “What is that sound?”
“After you went to Montana, when I would call you, I would think to myself, What do you need now? Why are you always calling her?” Danice said.
“I’m always happy to hear from you,” Jeannine said. “What’s wrong with calling a friend? There’s nothing wrong with calling a friend.”
“Sometimes it’s like there’s not much more going on with me than needing to talk to you, and I’m okay with that,” Danice told her.
“So am I,” Jeannine said. “And we certainly have plenty to talk about. But you never answered: is that your breathing? You gotta call somebody.”
“I lie here working the problem, or wondering how you’re doing,” Danice said. “And I forget this thing for a minute. And then it reminds me that it hasn’t forgotten me.”
“Shouldn’t you be on a ventilator? Why aren’t you on a ventilator?” Jeannine asked.
“There aren’t quite enough to go around,” Danice said. “Plus you have to be sedated to be on one, and I have too much to do. And believe it or not, there are lots of people here in worse shape than me.”
“But who’s more important than the health care workers there?” Jeannine demanded. “What happens to everybody else if they can’t work?”
Danice took some measured breaths as a response.
“Do you want me to call somebody?” Jeannine said. “Do I have to do it?”
“No, I paged somebody,” Danice said. “They gave me a pager.”
“So someone should be there already,” Jeannine said.
“I’m sweating but I can’t g
et warm,” Danice complained.
“I’m calling,” Jeannine said. And she put Danice on hold and clicked on the number for the Ililussat hospital, but of course it was busy. She tried Jerry, too, and it went to voicemail.
“My feet are cold,” Danice added once they were both back on the line.
“Are they covered?” Jeannine asked.
“My grandmother always told me that cold traveled up your feet and that that was how girls went barren,” Danice told her.
“They should be there by this point,” Jeannine repeated.
Danice didn’t respond. They were both quiet, as if waiting for whoever had been paged to arrive and speak next.
“You’re going to be fine,” Jeannine finally insisted. “You just have to tell yourself that.”
“Maybe you could find some patience at this point for your old pal,” Danice suggested. “What do you think?”
Jeannine palmed her face, stung. “I’m sorry; I don’t want to sound like I’m blaming the victim, here,” she tried to joke. “I’d never forgive myself.”
Danice had a coughing fit and then did some more throat clearing. “You forgive yourself all the time,” she told Jeannine.
Jeannine had been about to get up, but balked, and recoiled a little against the headboard of her bed. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her free arm around them. “That hurts,” she told her friend, and her voice cracked, but Danice let it go.
Danice asked instead if there was anything new up on any of the data-sharing sites from the CDC, or anywhere else.
“I’m looking at some of them right now,” Jeannine said, waking her laptop. She kept it beside her on the double bed.
“So am I,” Danice said.
“It’s pretty early here,” Jeannine reminded her. “Should be something soon.”
Danice coughed and coughed and then finally stopped. Jeannine could hear her attempting deep breaths. “You don’t have many more friends than I do, do you?” Danice finally asked.
“Why are we talking about this? Hold on a sec,” Jeannine told her, and tried the hospital and Jerry again.
“You know what I wish?” Danice said, once they were connected again. “I wish I’d been kinder.”
“You might be the kindest person I’ve ever met,” Jeannine told her.
Danice made a skeptical sound. “Thank you,” she said.
“If I don’t get through to somebody soon there I’m going to fucking fly there myself,” Jeannine said.
“I always thought it was great that Greenlanders celebrate their birthdays and the birthdays of everyone they’re named after,” Danice said. “And they get gifts from those families as well. We went over to this widower’s house to bring him in because he was sick, and his whole house was decorated with taped-up pictures of all the kids in the settlement named after his wife.”
“You sound so sad,” Jeannine said.
“Oh, listen,” Danice told her. “The end of the line is never a good place to be.”
“Stop talking like that,” Jeannine told her.
“What was the one main thing they taught us about doing epidemiology globally?” Danice asked. “It was that successful coalitions involving organizations like ours had to share any number of characteristics, the first being a clear vision of the last stages of the journey.”
Jeannine couldn’t respond. Danice said, “Jerry and I refer to you as ‘Ms. Saqqaq,’ by the way.”
“Saqqaq?” Jeannine was able to ask. “What’s that?”
“Greenlandic for ‘the sunny side.’ The sunny side is south-facing land,” Danice told her.
“Get this motherfucker,” she added, with some vehemence. She coughed, even more violently than before. “Don’t give up on it now.”
“We’ll get it together,” Jeannine responded, but she could barely make herself understood.
Danice rested for a little while, and they were quiet, lingering on the line. She said she’d heard this great thing from one of the male nurses. She said that he’d told her that during open-water season, once a seal dove down, all you could do was switch off the outboard and wait. The idea was to imagine it swimming and to think your way to the spot where it was going to come back up for air.
“Don’t leave me,” Jeannine told her. “I’m not going to be able to do this without you.”
“I’m toasting you right now,” Danice said hoarsely. “With my little water bottle.”
“I’m toasting you, too,” Jeannine told her, holding up a hotel glass. Her eyes were so teary she couldn’t see. “Here’s to you.”
“Here’s to you,” Danice said.
The Tunnel at the End of the Light
A few hours later, Jerry called her to tell her that Danice was dead. Jeannine had fallen back asleep, and didn’t even feel fully awake while he was telling her. He said he didn’t think he should text, and she kept crying No.
She got louder after he hung up, and after a few minutes her neighbor in the next room over pounded on the wall.
The sun was a little higher by the time she got more of a hold on herself. She didn’t go in to work. She spent some time standing by the paper bags holding her things on the coffee table.
Why had she gone to sleep? Why had she let her friend off the line? Why hadn’t she been there for that instant when Danice had been the most frightened and alone?
She climbed back into bed and sat there like someone who was going to carry on that day, like the worst could happen to her and she could still just roll up her sleeves and work.
It killed her to think of Danice unattended in those last moments all the way out in the middle of nowhere. It killed her to think that she hadn’t reacted more to the already-gone sound in Danice’s voice.
She realized she was stroking her cheek with her four spread fingers. What was that term for what babies did? she thought. Self-soothing.
It killed her to think that she was still paying attention to being alive.
Her phone buzzed. Her computer pinged.
She was going to be there for Aleq. Wherever this went, from here on in, he was going to know she was there for him.
She went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and then turned it off again. She dragged herself in front of her computer and got on her email and put her bleary face beside the screen, and cried out again at seeing Danice in her inbox. The subject line was OH FUCK.
Horrible horrible horrible thought: we’re assuming immunity for all those who’ve been infected and survived, but it’s possible their immunity won’t last forever. The same way we know now that immunity to cholera, for those who survived it, only lasts a couple of months. The same with syphilis, though it has a longer cycle. Suppose the convalescents and other people so far unaffected are asymptomatic carriers, like your friend the kid, and only TEMPORARILY immune?
The email’s time stamp was an hour after Jeannine had gotten off the phone. Even as agonized and unable to concentrate as she was, the force of what her friend was telling her pushed her physically back against the headboard again.
“Oh no no no,” she said. And some part of her was thinking that it couldn’t be this on top of everything else.
And what about the SPORES? Don’t know if you saw the reports from hospitals
Reykjavík and Rochester and I think Baltimore saying spores everywhere
Swabs from bedframes and walls all testing positive even after
all the bleach and cleaning and everything else. I was like, you KIDDING me? Thought of that German EColi outbreak where it turned out the variant was able to stick way better to things than EColi was supposed to. Everyone was like: how could all these people have gotten sick when EColi doesn’t stick to doorknobs? Except this version did
Th
ere was a second and final email, sent a few minutes later.
Or that other bug that passed through NIH hospitals that turned out to stick to respirators and survive all standard procedures for cleaning. We should
lu;p
She scrolled again through the rest of her emails but that was it.
She closed her eyes but she was still there when she opened them a minute later. She had that feeling she sometimes had in war movies when the guy has hit the trip wire but the booby trap hasn’t yet gone off. Like what animals probably felt under deadfall traps in the instant before everything was set into motion.
She didn’t know who to call first. She touched a finger to Danice’s email address on the screen.
She’d told herself the whole time she’d been in Montana that she wasn’t really expected to know what was going on with Danice from moment to moment. But she also knew that it had occurred to her as early as the flight out of Greenland that not being expected to know had been one of the main advantages of leaving. And now, whatever she’d imagined to be, in her taking-everything-for-granted way, the indispensability of what they’d made together, her memory of it was the only version remaining.
It Will Always Be the Microbes That Have the Last Word
The organism that kills too quickly creates a crisis for itself, since it requires a live host, but the effective super-pathogen doesn’t need to spare its host; it just needs to have not burned its bridges before it has crossed them.
In the case of a pathogen sporulating so efficiently, more and more seemingly healthy people might eventually be revealed to have been, in fact, infected. In a case like that, it would be as if the pathogen had figured out a way of making human beings amplifier hosts for one another. And if an outbreak is measured by multiplying the density of susceptible individuals by the density of the infectious, with the recovered and the immune not figuring into the equation, if the recovered and the immune were to reenter both of those categories—the susceptible and the infected—everything would then escalate exponentially.