Taji's Syndrome

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “It’s not bad,” was all Steven would say for it.

  “I’ll get you started,” offered Loren.

  “I will,” Dale corrected. “I told Irene Channing I’d make sure he was off to a good start here.”

  Loren shrugged. “Whatever you like. First stop is the lab.”

  “Oh no!” Steven wailed. “Not again!”

  “It won’t be as long as the other times. We just need a few things from you to compare with the records we already have,” said Jeff as he started up the three shallow steps to the door of the medical building. “The sooner you start, the sooner it’s over with.”

  “Come on, Steve,” said Dale, not quite dragging the boy into the building.

  The four staff nurses were quick and polite without being falsely cheerful and in less than forty minutes, an orderly was escorting Steven—with Dale in tow—through his quarters.

  “There’s an intercom and a buzzer. You can use either of them to call the main building, or to reach any of the other facilities. To call other rooms, use the phone.” The orderly was not dressed in lab whites but in khaki chinos and a Hawaiian shirt, and his nametag was embellished with a drawing of a unicorn. “I’m Ted Brazios; Ted for Edward and Theodore—that’s my first and middle name. I answer to Ted and Hey You.”

  Steven would not smile. “Thanks,” he muttered, taking the key that Ted held out to him.

  “Dinner’s in three hours in the main dining room, on the other side of the pool, the second door from the left end. If you want to have Doctor Reed come with you, that’s fine.” He gave Steven a thumbs-up sign and left.

  “How long am I going to have to stay here, Dale?” Steven asked, taking strange consolation in being able to call Reed by his first name.

  “I don’t know, Steve; I wish I did. Not long, I hope.” His sympathy was so strong that he felt tears well in his eyes; he blinked rapidly to control them.

  “Yeah.” He looked around the room, noting its pleasant furnishing. “He said there were fifteen apartments like this in this wing. I’m in junior high and I have my own apartment. I wonder who else they’re expecting.” He dropped onto the copper-colored sofa.

  “I don’t think they know, Steve,” Dale said, uncertain if he should remain standing.

  “They’re playing it by ear, huh?” His voice broke, going from alto to baritone and back again.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Dale decided to sit down and selected a low-slung Italian chair; he got into it awkwardly and found it very comfortable. “They’ve made mistakes with TS. We always make mistakes with new diseases. They don’t want to do it again if they can help it.”

  “So why fifteen rooms if there are only six of us, and two are twins?” He was nervous; his right foot, propped at the ankle on his left knee, was jiggling.

  “They may be more than six.”

  “And maybe they’re up to something.” He stared morosely at the TV and snapped his fingers a few times. “Well, at least there’s some girls coming. That’s something.” He was not as eager as he sounded, but he had just reached the age when girls were supposed to be less of a pest than they had been.

  “A dancer and a swimmer,” said Dale.

  “What if they like the other guys better? What am I going to do?” He got up abruptly and went to the sliding glass doors that led out to a tiny patio. “It isn’t like I can ask one of the nurses on a date.”

  “Worry about that when it happens,” Dale advised, then went on in another voice, “I know you’re worried about what’s going to happen to your family. Well, remember that for the time being, they’re safe. Your mother’s gotten over TS, and your brother isn’t old enough to catch it. I’ll keep my eye on both of them. If you want to talk to me about them, you can call me at any time. You have my private number and you can use it whenever you want to.”

  “Okay; yeah.” He stared down at his shoes. “You’re right, I am worried. I don’t like Brice being sent away like that, and I don’t like Mom being kept in a hospital like some kind of . . . of invalid.”

  “She won’t be. I’ll make sure that as soon as she’s ready, she gets out of there. I’ll look after her, Steve.” He had to work on sounding confident and undisturbed.

  Steven continued to look down, and then, quite suddenly, he asked, “Are you going to marry my Mom?”

  “If she’ll have me,” said Dale, taken off-guard by the unexpected question.

  “Okay.” Steven turned and gave Dale a hard look. “But while I’m in here, you’ve got to keep those shit-faced ESA guys away from her.”

  Dale nodded once. “You’ve got my word on it.”

  —Gail Harmmon and Loren Protheroe—

  Still dripping from her morning laps, Gail stood in the patio door of Loren’s office. “Why do you want to see me?” she asked when he did not respond to her presence.

  “It’s your second week here and you haven’t talked with me,” said Loren in his easiest conversational style.

  “So what?” She did not come one step farther into the room.

  “I thought you might like to talk, that’s all.” He looked toward the Sixties-fashion beanbag chairs scattered about the room like so many oversized soufflés.

  “I don’t need a shrink,” she said. “I just want them to do whatever they’re going to do and let us out of here.”

  “That’s what they’re trying to do,” Loren said in the same steady way.

  “Are they making any progress?” Her head angled up more sharply.

  “They think so,” he answered, telling the truth but withholding the doubts that plagued all the staff at the quarantine facility.

  “So how long will it take?” she asked.

  “There’s no way to tell— few months if we’re very lucky.” He cleared his throat. “I won’t kid you: it could be a lot longer.”

  “A year? Two years?” For the first time she sounded distressed. “I can’t stay here for two years. That’s grotty.”

  “You and the others have to stay for as long as it takes.” He was still affable but there was a stern undertone that had not been present earlier.

  “And you guys? Does the staff have to stay here a long time, too?”

  “We all volunteered to be here,” he said. “We can ask to be transferred, or we can be ordered out.”

  “Because you get sick?” she guessed.

  “That’s one reason.” He let her consider that before he went on. “Some of us do get sick. It’s a risk we take. But if we didn’t think it was worth it—if we didn’t think you were worth it, we wouldn’t have volunteered. How’s the swimming?” he changed the subject without missing a beat.

  “Okay, mostly. It isn’t much fun without someone to swim against, and the other kids aren’t all that good.” She slouched forward. “That guy Mason is about the best, but I can beat him easy.”

  “Well, you were in pretty classy competition last fall,” Loren said, indicating the seat nearest his desk.

  “That was last fall.” She folded into the shapeless chair and leaned back enough so she could look at the ceiling instead of him. “Hey, you’ve got posters on the ceiling. That’s neat.”

  “For people like you, who’d rather look up.”

  “Yeah,” she said, glaring at him.

  Loren fiddled with a stack of papers—he did not mention they were the latest test results of the six kids in his care—and changed the subject again. “You been out to the barn? There’s a couple pretty good horses out there.”

  “I don’t know how to ride,” said Gail resentfully.

  “You can learn. Laurie is pretty good; she could teach you.” He began deliberately to doodle on his desk blotter.

  “You’re funny for a shrink.” She stared at him a while.

  “They said at dinner last ni
ght that there’s TS all over the country now. It was on the news.”

  “Not surprising,” Loren told her as he continued to let his pen travel over the blotter. “A disease like this makes news, unfortunately.”

  “It’s not right,” she stated.

  “You mean because of you? So far we’ve been able to keep you kids out of the news, and that hasn’t been easy. Your families’ names haven’t been mentioned and the information about initial carriers hasn’t come up. Think about that for a bit, will you?” He waited, knowing that she would eventually have questions for him.

  “Why’d you volunteer?” she asked him after a little time had gone by.

  “Oh, a number of reasons. My dad has TS. Two of my cousins have died from it—they got it early, last December. I want to do what I can to stop it.” He set his pen aside.

  “Like keeping us locked up?” she challenged.

  “More like keeping you in isolation so that the disease doesn’t spread and so you don’t become targets for a lot of very unpleasant attention.” He pushed his chair back and came around his desk; as he dragged one of the beanbag chairs close to hers, he continued, “I don’t like to think that there are people dying who don’t have to. And I don’t think any of you kids wants to have to—”

  “Dad said that I couldn’t have known about it. I couldn’t have known. It . . . I didn’t.” The last was pleading.

  “No, you couldn’t. But it’s natural for you to have trouble accepting that. You said when you arrived that you would rather TS had killed you than your brother. I want you to know that I understand how you feel that, and why you feel it.” He pulled his legs up tailor fashion and watched her. “Are there times you blame yourself even when you know it isn’t necessary?”

  “God, you sound just like a shrink now,” she complained.

  “That’s what I am.” He was content to wait for her to talk some more.

  Finally she gave in. “What am I supposed to say? That I feel guilty? That I hate myself?”

  “Do you?” he asked.

  “You’re corny. You’re like something out of a bad movie.” She folded her arms. “Do they teach you how to ask those questions in shrink school?”

  “Yes, among other things,” he said, and smiled impishly. Since he had a pixie face, this did not seem wrong, and in spite of herself, Gail smiled.

  “You look funny,” she said.

  “So they tell me,” he agreed, leaning back and staring at the ceiling as she had done. “I like the one of Alain Wilding,” he said, indicating the provocative young Canadian actor who had risen to astronomical heights in the last two years.

  “I like John Castle,” she said, choosing the middle-aged British actor rigged out in eighteenth-century laces and velvet. “I like it when he smiles.”

  “Why him?” Loren asked.

  “I told you: I like his smile. He doesn’t do it very much and when he does it’s special. Most of the time, he does a sly grin. His smile isn’t sly at all.” She cocked her head as she studied the poster, her face thoughtful. “I saw the movie that’s from. He was sneaky. I liked it.”

  “We can get it for the video equipment, if you like,” offered Loren.

  “I don’t know,” she said dreamily. “Sometimes remembering is better.” For a few seconds her eyes were far away, on scenes only she knew.

  Loren nodded. “Yes, sometimes it is.”

  Gail was quiet again for a short while; then, while she continued to stare absently at John Castle’s picture, she said distantly, “My mother’s best friend—Erin Donnell?—two of her kids died of TS, and now she’s got it. She told my mother that I’m worse than a murderer.”

  “When did this happen?” Loren asked, keeping his voice level. He had been prepared from the beginning to hear this and worse; though it distressed him, there was no reflection of that in his manner.

  “The day before I left to come here. Mom was upset and she yelled at me and at Erin and then she called Dad and yelled at him, too. She’s been yelling a lot since he moved out.” It was as if she were talking about something slightly boring that had happened long ago, not the disintegration of her family. “Mom’s tested positive for TS, too, hasn’t she?”

  “Yes,” said Loren softly. He sensed rather than saw the powerful emotions behind Gail’s apparent lack of interest. Steven Channing behaved much the same way.

  “Does that mean she’s going to die?” Gail’s voice had shrunk to a whisper.

  “We’re all going to die. It’s merely a question of how and when.” He hesitated, uncertain of how best to proceed. Then he took a chance. “You know, for about fifty years, we forgot how vulnerable we are. We had vaccines and antibiotics and all the rest of the pharmacological weapons to stop things that used to kill regularly. We were getting somewhere with cancer and had a handle on heart disease. And then along came AIDS and reminded us that we can’t hold off dying forever. As soon as we got that under control, TS shows up, and the increase in such puzzling diseases as polyarteritis. The Tunis Flu Two and Three wasn’t in quite the same league, but it left its mark.” He waited to see what she would do. “Illness happens to people. No matter what we do, we can’t get rid of it.”

  Gail huddled more deeply in her beanbag chair. “So we’re part of a long string of disasters?” She flung the question at him like a gauntlet.

  “No,” he countered. “No. That’s not it at all. I was hoping to show that you aren’t responsible for the disease you carry, that disease is a fact of life.” He shrugged.

  She started to tremble as if she were suddenly very cold. “I don’t want to think about that. It makes me mad and sorry. I don’t like anything like that. I just want to get better and go home, and not have anyone else die from TS.”

  “That’s what we’d all like, Gail,” Loren said. “That’s what we’re trying for, all of us.”

  “But how can I go home if my Dad’s gone and my Mom’s dead?” she wailed. “What’s the use.”

  “Your Mom isn’t dead yet and your Dad hasn’t vanished.” He trusted that Brandon Harmmon would relent and call his daughter in the next few days. “When you talk to him, you can ask him how he’s doing. He cares about you, Gail, and he cares about your sister. You know how important he is to you—you’re important to him, too.” He devoutly hoped this was so.

  “He won’t call,” she said miserably. “He told Mom he didn’t want to have any contact with me. He said it’s my fault that Eric’s dead, and it is, it is. Eric had TS, and he had to get it from me. Maybe Adam and Axel are right, and this is God’s punishment on us.”

  “Why would God be punishing you?” Loren said, going warily now, for he was not having much success with the religiously rigid Barenssen twins.

  “Because of the wickedness of the world. That’s what they say. If the world wasn’t sinful and wicked, there wouldn’t be any TS or anything else bad. They said that the only way to get rid of TS is to repent and pray for all the sinners who have visited this on the world. They said praying is the only thing that can help. They prayed until ten o’clock last night. Four hours they prayed, and they said it isn’t enough.” She scrunched into a fetal ball, letting the chair surround her.

  “Do you think that having TS will cure wickedness?” Loren asked.

  She hitched up her shoulder, and did not answer directly. “Mason got mad at them. He said that it was bad enough that we carry a disease, but it doesn’t make any sense to confuse a disease with moral judgments.” She wiped her nose. “Sometimes Mason’s as strange as Adam and Axel are.”

  “And how does that make you feel?” he asked.

  “Will you stop those dumb shrink questions?” Her face turned more sullen. “What if they are right, and God is doing this to us? What if we can’t ever cure it, and almost everyone will die because of us?”

 
“That’s not going to happen,” said Loren, wanting it to be so. “We’re finding out more about TS every day, and we think we can slow it down, if not cure it completely. We developed the AIDS vaccine, didn’t we? Then we can develop a TS vaccine, too.”

  “Are you really sure?” Gail moved so that she no longer looked in Loren’s direction.

  “Yes. If I weren’t sure, I wouldn’t have volunteered to work with you.” He spoke calmly, but it was an effort. It had been agreed at the start that only those who tested positive for TS would be accepted to work with the carriers, and that they would have to sign a Public Benefit contract. Loren had wanted the carriers to know that, but a decision made higher up in the NCDC had vetoed his idea. He was more convinced than ever that the kids had the right to know.

  “What if you get it? What if you die?” She directed her question to the opposite wall. “I heard that Alain Wilding has TS. That’s why they’re doing reruns of his old shows all the time.”

  “Yes, he does,” said Loren after a slight hesitation. “He’s doing Public Benefit.”

  “That started during AIDS, didn’t it?” she asked, still facing away from him. “There was that big suit, wasn’t there? My Dad said that it was pressure politics and that . . . that no responsible adult . . .” She frowned, trying to recall her lawyer father’s explanation of something she had not understood at the time and only partially grasped now. “He said it was about individual rights and civic responsibility. That someone would have a civic duty to report contaminated water and if they didn’t, it would be their fault if people got sick and died. He said that people sick with AIDS had a responsibility to help in getting rid of it. He said the Supreme Court had done the right thing.”

  “Yes. It probably would have taken longer to get the vaccine if the Public Benefit contract hadn’t been okayed by the Supreme Court.” He paused. “Your parents all signed Public Benefit contracts for you and for themselves.”