The Viral Epiphany

by Richard McSheehy

  During his usual workday Sam bathed the animals, cleaned their cages, fed them, and did whatever else was necessary to ensure that they had as healthy a life as possible while confined in a cage. Sam didn’t mind doing these menial tasks. No, not at all. He knew what they were experiencing: a mind-numbing life behind the bars of the zoo, the cruel punishments for misbehavior, and, for some, the frustration of trying to learn meaningless tricks. He understood this very well and so he did his best to make their lives a little more comfortable. Animals were his true friends. He knew that from long ago. It was people he couldn’t trust.

  Sam was waiting for Stephen at the locked gate to the elephant nursery. Now that the mammoth had been born no one was admitted to this part of the zoo without special permission and escort. Stephen had expected the mammal section manager to be there too, but it appeared that he was late. No doubt due to Tokyo’s horrendous traffic. Stephen didn’t hesitate a moment; he didn’t really need the manager anyway.

  “Let’s go in,” he said

  “Yes sir,” Sam replied and took the key from his pocket. They went in through the main door and then walked through a corridor to a changing room where employees could change into their work clothes. Sam was already wearing his zoo uniform, but Stephen decided to put on a coverall to protect his suit.

  They crossed to the other side of the changing room and Sam opened the heavy steel door in front of them. They entered the straw-strewn mammoth nursery. It was an old wooden structure that smelled of elephants, dung, and damp straw. It had three windowless walls that reached twenty feet up to a corrugated metal roof. The fourth side was open to the air except for a low iron gate that would prevent the baby from wandering into the main elephant compound. The mother elephant was across the room, chained by her right rear leg to a massive iron stanchion. The baby was calmly standing near her side. It had just finished nursing again and it looked curiously but without fear at the newcomers.

  Sam immediately walked over to the baby mammoth but Stephen hesitated a moment, unsure. Then he followed slowly, keeping an eye on the mother elephant. The mother elephant shook her head and stared at Stephen while ignoring Sam. Stephen stopped walking and decided to stay where he was for a few moments. He watched from a distance while Sam began stroking the hair on the baby mammoth. He was talking to it in a soft voice and the mammoth responded by curling its little trunk around his arm and seemingly caressing it. Sam continued talking and stroking the baby for a few more minutes then he turned and picked up a bucket and brush and began giving the baby a bath.

  Stephen stood watching with a mixture of emotions. The sight of the mammoth enraptured him, he felt almost giddy with excitement, he wanted to go over and hug the creature himself but the mother continued to look at him with a baleful look that was unmistakable. He looked at the chain that bound her and decided not to take the risk. He would speak to the mammal section manager about the problem later this morning. Maybe they could have the mother removed when he was visiting. Meanwhile, for now, he would content himself with watching Sam bathe the baby.

  Because one side of the building was open to the air, birds and insects occasionally flew inside the building but they didn’t usually stay and neither Sam nor Stephen paid any attention to those that did fly in. Mosquitoes are not very common at the Tokyo Zoo and neither Stephen nor Sam noticed the small Aedes mosquito that had flown in and was now circling the head of the baby mammoth. Perhaps it was something in the scent of the mammoth or maybe it was the baby’s skin temperature that was the attraction. Maybe both. The mosquito soon landed on the baby’s head, amidst the jungle of mammoth hair. It was, however, not a good location and it immediately took to the air again. It then landed beside the mammoth’s eyelid. Here there was soft tissue, moist with fluid from the baby’s eye. The mosquito inserted its needle sharp proboscis and released a flood of anticoagulants into the mammoth and blood began to flow into the mosquito. But only for a moment.

  The mammoth’s eyelid came crashing down in response to the itch of the anticoagulant material and the mosquito flew away, barely escaping death. It flew far from the animal and then began circling back, still in need of nourishment. This time it landed on a more familiar type of host. It landed on Sam’s neck. A moment later – Slap! Sam took his hand away from his neck and looked at his palm. He saw the splattered remains of the dead mosquito and a smear of blood. He didn’t know it was a mixture. It was not only his blood that he saw but also the blood of the mammoth. He never gave it a moment’s thought. It was just part of life and nothing more, not even worth a shrug. He picked up the brush and continued washing the mammoth.

  Ten

  It can be a cold universe when one is autistic, even if only mildly so. Sam Tanigawa’s autism would have been diagnosed as mild. Perhaps one of his schoolteachers might have said something; maybe his parents should have noticed his preoccupation with animals to the exclusion of human friends and had him checked by a doctor. Maybe his employers at the zoo should have done something. But no one ever did. Nor did anyone ever realize that Sam’s private world was also a world of muted sepia tones. He was profoundly colorblind.

  The people around him had always been a sort of distant galaxy of bright lights and annoying sounds, but animal friends were different. They were quiet and intuitive; they didn’t say unintelligible words or write incomprehensible squiggles on paper. They were patient and kind to him and he, in turn, was patient and kind to them. Nevertheless, he knew there was something missing from his life, something important, and now he would get it. He hadn’t told anyone he was going, not even Doctor Itagaki - after all, why should he? Besides, he would be back to work on Monday.

  It was Saturday night, only four days after Sam began taking care of the baby mammoth, but it was also his twenty-first birthday. He had never been very excited about birthdays; they were, after all, just another day. His parents had never celebrated his birthday either, but it really didn’t matter to him. However, he was very aware that this birthday, becoming twenty-one years old, signified something very important. It was a threshold of some sort, a passage to adulthood. He had spent untold hours contemplating what he should do to mark the occasion, because, he knew, marking events was very important. Significant things always had to be marked.

  Six months ago Sam had decided that he would give himself a present in order to remember his most special birthday – a weekend in Bangkok, the sex capital of Southeast Asia. This would be the perfect way to mark the crossing of the greatest threshold in life, but it would also do more than that. He had never had a girlfriend. He had never gone on a date. He had virtually no social life, and he didn’t really care. However, he did watch movies on television, and he knew he was missing something he wanted. He had seen the sex in the movies, and that was certainly something he wanted. But most of the movies were clear about something else: to get sex you had to have a relationship with a woman, and that was something for which he had neither hope nor interest.

  He couldn’t quite grasp the concept of something as ethereal as a relationship. He couldn’t understand why anyone would want one. Sam liked concrete things, things he could be sure of. A relationship with a person was a gulf too wide for him to cross.

  Fortunately, one Saturday morning about six months ago he had seen a television ad by one of the ubiquitous, Japanese sex tour companies. In a moment of inspiration, he realized that a weekend sex tour to Bangkok would be the perfect gift to give himself for his twenty-first birthday. Bangkok was where he could sample what the movies were about, this was what life was truly about: concrete things, reality.

  Now Sam sat alone in his room at Bangkok’s First Hotel on Soi Somprasong and stared at the alarm clock. He watched the second hand as it went around. There was something about the passage of time and circular motion. It was fascinating how they were interconnected. He read the word Westclox on the face and noticed that the numbers were written in a heavy italic font. They had a shiny trim. The background was faded. It mu
st have been there a long time. Maybe ten years old, he thought.

  There were switches on the side of the clock labeled time set and alarm set, but he had no interest in using these. All alarm clocks seemed to have different knobs and switches. How could anyone ever determine how to use all the different kinds? he thought. I won’t touch these. Look, there are slide switches; and they’re dark, dark slide switches.

  At five minutes after nine there was a knock on the door. He quickly jumped off the bed, went to the door, and opened it so quickly that the two very young Thai girls jumped back half a step. There was a man, perhaps forty-five years old, standing beside them.

  “You Sam?” he asked.

  “Yes…yes,” Sam replied with an automatic bow.

  “These girls for you. OK? Two hours. OK? Good.” Sam looked at each of the girls and tried to guess their age. It was difficult with Thai girls; they always looked younger than Japanese girls. But these looked very young, and for some reason that pleased him.

  “OK,” he replied as he opened the door wider.

  “You pay now.” The man said. “One thousand baht for two, OK? Like you already told, OK?” the man smiled as he talked and held out his hand. “I come back two hours. OK, Sam?”

  Sam reached into his pocket and took out the thousand baht he had already prepared as payment, and then gave it to the man. Without another word the man left and Sam turned back to the girls. They were giggling while they glanced at him and then back at each other. One of them said something to the other in Thai that Sam couldn’t understand, and then they both stepped forward and each of them took one of his hands and led him into the room.

  Nearly three thousand miles away, Dr. Stephen Itagaki was sipping an after dinner cognac at the posh Jade Emperor restaurant in downtown Tokyo. He had taken his assistant Shaylin out to celebrate the secret birth of the mammoth, an event that was still only known to a handful of people. His face had turned a rather bright red color over the course of the evening, the result of drinking several glasses of wine, and he was feeling a mixture of emotions that he couldn’t quite explain to Shaylin, but he was trying nonetheless.

  “Elation, yes. But more than that. Very satisfied. Proud too. You too should be proud, you know.”

  Shaylin smiled in agreement, her perfect teeth sparkling in the flickering candlelight. She knew that whatever was said tonight might well be forgotten tomorrow; however, she had set her goal and was determined to achieve it nonetheless. She had worn her best dress: red silk, ankle length, and tight fitting; it seductively displayed every one of her beautiful curves. Tonight she wore her black, straight hair very long, far past her shoulders. She knew she was more than fifteen years younger than Stephen, and she looked even younger than that, but that didn’t concern her. Many desirable men were his age, or even older. It was something else, something she sensed but couldn’t quite put into words, that caused her to pause a moment and think about being more cautious. Then she thought, No, not this time. You can’t always listen to your inner voices. Sometimes you just have to be bold.

  “It is a great achievement Stephen, I agree. But all the credit goes to you…” Stephen’s cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID. It was from the zoo.

  “Excuse me a moment, Shaylin, I think it’s the mammal section manager from the Zoo. Probably worried about tomorrow. I’ve invited the newspapers and television reporters to come over in the afternoon. Didn’t tell them what it was about, just that it would be earthshaking. Now, I’ll bet the zoo management is worried something will go wrong and the zoo will have some liability issue or something like that.”

  “Hello, Tadao, how are you?”

  “Dr. Itagaki, you must come to the zoo quickly. Something is very wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The mammoth. It’s just lying on its side. All of a sudden! It’s barely breathing. I don’t know what’s wrong. Hurry!”

  Deep within the mammoth, inside the tissues and blood vessels, in its muscles and organs two competing life forces that had been frozen in time for 10,000 years had renewed their struggle to survive. DNA within the cell nuclei that carried the instructions for all the processes of life in the mammoth and the animal’s organs was now completely functioning. Cell division, a process needed for every organ to continue life had begun and as the cells divided each new cell carried a duplicate set of DNA in its nucleus. However, in many of these nucleic strands of DNA there was an ancient intruder, an imposter that looked like the mammal’s DNA but wasn’t. Like a living Trojan horse; it was a retrovirus. Really nothing more than a short strand of DNA material, the retrovirus had inserted itself into the DNA of the baby’s long dead ancestor and had multiplied and prospered ten thousand years ago, but in the end it’s success had killed its host. Then the virus had lain in a cold, deep, and perfectly preserved sleep until it had reawakened on that first day the baby mammoth had viewed the new dawn.

  Cell by cell, moment by moment, the retrovirus duplicated itself and the duplicated viruses duplicated until the cells were full to bursting with viral matter, and finally the cell walls had exploded. The virus raced through the bloodstream of the baby and soon had permeated every organ and tissue via the life giving blood itself and then the process of viral duplication continued again and then again and then again.

  Stephen’s mind raced as he drove towards the zoo. What can be wrong so soon? he said to himself. Lost in thought as he drove, he was oblivious to Shaylin as she sat beside him and Shaylin kept silent, knowing better than to say anything now.

  While Stephen’s mind frantically leaped from possibility to possibility, Sam’s mind was calm and extremely focused. The first girl, she said her name was Suchin, had been truly amazing. Sam had never imagined such pleasure was possible and he was in awe of her. Suchin, however, didn’t seem to think anything remarkable had happened. He was looking at her with reverence, but she only giggled something to her friend and made hand gestures that he didn’t understand. Then, her friend, Boon-mee, nonchalantly removed her clothes and walked towards him. In a moment he forgot Suchin. His mind was filled with the sight of Boon-mee and her stunningly perfect body as she pushed him down and straddled him. He was truly overwhelmed by the sight of Boon-mee, the physical pleasure he felt, the feminine laughter of Suchin somewhere in the distance. He looked upward at the ceiling and saw the speckled pattern of swirls of the plastered ceiling and he smiled a smile of exquisite pleasure.

  It was the swirls that drew him in. The way they flowed always around and around and inward to the center. Each one was almost perfect but then he would note a slight flaw but then there would be another one beside it and they were always flowing clockwise, always clockwise. It was like the true motion of the universe he felt in his body now. Boon-mee felt different from Suchin, different but still so good just like the spirals. He looked up to the right for more spirals but the right was becoming dark and cloudy, like the sky before it rains. He looked to the left and saw the same dimness in the room. His central vision was clear, but why were the sides so cloudy? And then even the center started to dim. For a moment Sam thought something might be wrong, was it something about the air? Yes, there wasn’t enough air to breath – and it was getting dark. He opened his mouth to call out to Boon-mee. She needed to get off now! He couldn’t breathe!

  Boon-mee looked down and her eyes widened in horror as she screamed. “Blood!…Blood!… Suchin!!”

  Sam couldn’t understand. She was screaming. He could see that, but he couldn’t hear her. Air…he needed air! His mouth was very wet and he could taste something salty. Even his cheek felt wet. Was the bed wet beneath him? Why was it getting cold? Why couldn’t he hear her anymore?

  Suchin looked at the two of them and screamed along with Boon-mee. The bed was rapidly becoming covered in Sam’s blood. He was bleeding from his mouth and nose. There was blood underneath him seeping into the bed linens. It even looked like there might be blood coming from one of his eyes. He was staring at th
e ceiling now, staring but not moving.

  Boon-mee rolled off the bed and fell to the floor in horror. “Suchin! Help me!”

  Suchin couldn’t move, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “This must be a dream.” She heard herself mutter, “A dream.” From somewhere a voice called her. It seemed to come from a thousand miles away, “Suchin!! Help me!!”

  Meanwhile, as midnight softly approached in Tokyo, and the crescent of a new moon cast a thin light upon the elephant hut at the zoo, Stephen Itagaki stood gaping, unable to speak. The baby mammoth, the embodied spirit of a long extinguished life that he had so brilliantly rekindled, had died only moments ago in a pool of darkening red blood.

  Eleven

  “Tommy” Lim Pai Seng was a genius. Everyone knew it; which was why he was alone at his desk today. Everyone else from the Thai Department of Disease Control was at the international bird flu conference at the Sheraton Bangkok. Tommy had been excused from attending because of the growing concern about the recent, and very deadly, outbreak of dengue hemorrhagic fever in the city. He stopped typing for a moment and looked up from his computer screen. For a few moments he simply gazed at the empty desks around him. I love this, he thought, perfect isolation. No people, no noise, no idle chitchat from the wannabes – just me by myself. He took a deep breath, held it, and then exhaled slowly and luxuriously; then he started typing again.