Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  He shook his head and his hair flowed as if he were drowning. “I am all out of opinions.”

  “A scientific opinion.”

  He straightened. “Perhaps, then.”

  “You’ve worked with fMRI scans, right? There’re some scans among Conroy’s results. I have no idea what he was doing.”

  He shrugged. “It has been a while, but I will look, if you would like.” He smiled with one side of his mouth.

  She slid onto a tall stool and handed Conroy’s notebooks to him. Dante settled himself on another stool beside her. She thumbed through manila folders to find the scans, comic book-colored images of brains magnified to a foot across. “Here.”

  Dante’s mouth opened, horror-struck. “What is wrong with these people?”

  Leila should give the man some context. “They’re mice.”

  “Oh,” he sat back and grinned. “Thank God. Their cerebrums and cerebellums were all wrong.” He shook his head and his hair brushed around his face. “All right, mice.”

  Leila flipped to a new page on her writing tablet and uncapped a pen. She hadn’t taken any neuroanatomy classes. She was pretty much a cell biologist and biochemist, so she needed a consult. When she wrote the paper, maybe she should include him on the masthead. Since his lab was disbanded, a publication might be good for him, if he ever went back into academia.

  Dante finished detailing the implications of the fMRI scans. They were all the same: horrific brain damage. The only difference was the extent of the viral violence.

  “How about this one?” She handed him a blossoming rotund cerebrum, imploded.

  “This is human,” he said.

  “Yeah, what do you make of it?”

  “It is terrible,” he said. “It is awful.” The scan swirled with malignant color, a plugged volcano ripping itself apart. “He is dying.”

  Leila knew that, but hearing it again was hard. “Yeah. She is.”

  Dante asked Leila, “Then all these mice were sick?”

  “Rabid,” Leila said. “They’re Conroy’s mice.”

  Dante pointed to Danna’s brain. “The same phenomenon is occurring here, with these structures heavily engaged in pathology.”

  Leila knew that, too, but it was good that he concurred. She nodded. “That’s it. That’s what I needed. Thanks for the help.”

  “Are they important, the scans?”

  Leila shrugged. “Phenomenological. No mechanisms. No grand unifying theories.”

  Dante stood to leave. “Sloan’s funeral is Friday.”

  “Yeah. Everyone else in the lab is going.”

  “But you aren’t?”

  “No.” Leila shook her head. She could not imagine being there, in that church, when they performed death theater and then planted Conroy.

  “You were his graduate student,” the priest said. “It will look odd if you do not go.”

  Leila added a drip of ligase to each cloning reaction, crammed the tubes in foam cushions, and floated the tubes in a body-temperature water bath. “Katherine Hepburn didn’t attend Spencer Tracy’s funeral. I don’t want to cause a scene.”

  He said, “I’ll make sure everyone is calm. It would look odd if you were not there.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see. Look, if you need something for the funeral or whatever,” and she couldn’t believe she was doing it but she wrote her number on a quarto-sized paper scrap, “call me on my cell.”

  The priest took the trembling scrap from her fingers.

  If Conroy needed anything, she would be there for him. She couldn’t imagine what that would be, but she would be there.

  ~~~~~

  Later that afternoon, Bev was waiting by the front door when Dante returned. Her muscles slithered like wriggling worms all the way to her nervous toes. “Could we stop by the church before we pick up the girls?”

  Dante nodded. His eyes wandered over her and settled on her sweatshirt. She had slit the sleeve up to the shoulder to accommodate the ridiculous pins and cast. “I look terrible.”

  “You look fine,” he said. “That looks like it hurts.”

  “Oh, it’s okay.” She had lots of little pills to make it okay.

  In the car, Bev rested. Dante drove in silence.

  In the church, Dante genuflected with the blessed water by the door.

  Bev dipped her fingers toward the water and stopped, nervous. She believed, she really did, in all the magic of the Church. It wasn’t fashionable to believe in the miracles and the intercession of saints and the small, still voice of God anymore, but she did. The Church had kept her afloat when everything else in the world conspired to sink her. Flaunting her sin would be yet more sin, and she feared what might happen if she touched the shining surface of the water in the font.

  She mimed dipping her fingers in the water and pressed her dry fingers to her brow, sternum, and shoulders.

  Together, they teetered up the aisle toward the altar. Dante held her elbow and helped her kneel, then retreated to the front pew.

  Bev needed help. Telling her children that their father was dead would be too hard if she didn’t have some measure of divine grace. Just a taste, just a glimmer.

  The golden wood beams and pews echoed her breath in the transparent air. A wave of dust motes crested in a slanting beam of afternoon sunlight. She muttered the Lord’s Prayer and still felt only loneliness.

  She turned back. Dante’s head rested on his hands, bowed over the prayer rail. “Father Dante?”

  He stepped over to her, held her good elbow, and started hauling her up.

  “No, just a minute. Could you pray with me?”

  Dante blinked. Bloody light stained the black stubble that crept up his jawline. He rubbed his forehead as if warding off a headache. “All right.” He lowered himself to his knees and glanced up at the graven image of the Christ.

  Bev extended her unpinned hand and he held it. His cold fingers touched the swollen fingertips protruding from the bandage over her palm.

  “Our Father,” began Bev, and Dante recited aloud with her, his canorous baritone an octave below her alto. Near the end, “Forgive us our trespasses,” she choked. Her voice cracked as if she were a pubescent boy in the middle of the word trespasses.

  She grabbed her throat. The Lord wouldn’t even let her ask for forgiveness.

  “Bev?” Dante asked. “Are you all right?”

  “I can’t,” Bev said, and her throat closed up again.

  “I have a bottle of water in the library.” Dante stood and lifted her elbow. He held her arm until they got to the library door.

  “I can’t. I can’t say it.” She felt panicky, and the church felt empty to her.

  “You are dehydrated.” He unlocked the library door and helped her inside. From his desk drawer, Dante took a bottle of water and twisted the top open. “Drink this.”

  She sipped from the bottle. The lukewarm water seeped into her leathery tongue and gums. The water absorbed so fast that there wasn’t any of that first sip left to swallow. She sipped again, and some of that water ran to her throat, which closed, choking her. “I can’t swallow.”

  Dante’s mouth opened slightly. “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “What, for my arm?” She sipped again and choked less.

  “No, to start your vaccinations.”

  She had no idea what he was talking about. “I’m current on my tetanus shot.”

  He reached out, took her good right hand, and said, “We must go back to the hospital, right now.”

  ~~~~~

  Dante drove Bev to the emergency room carefully, calmly, because if they got in an accident it would delay them and they must not be delayed.

  There, he explained that Beverly, too, had been exposed to Dr. Sloan’s experiments, and then he explained to her what that meant.

  She seemed to not understand at first, but then took it as yet one more blow that Conroy had exposed her to a disease from his lab.

  The ER resident swabbed Bev’s tonsils for lab
tests and started the rabies inoculations. Dante badgered the terse resident until he called the neurology attending physician for a consult.

  Dr. Feiffer, a chubby blonde woman, ran through the neurological exam with Bev. She assured them that she had recently read up on rabies, considering the situation, and that Mrs. Sloan had no symptoms at all and was most likely not infected, but she had had the first of the vaccinations anyway. The throat spasms were probably not related and indeed, Bev sipped water while the attending examined her, tilted her head up, twisted her head to the side, until Dante was pretty sure he would have choked.

  “The agent of infectivity,” Dr. Feiffer lectured, “is more similar to the bat strain of rabies virus, which doesn’t cause hydrophobia, and no throat spasms had been in evidence in any of the presenting patients.”

  “Patients?” Dante only knew about Leila’s friend Danna. “Plural? There is more than one?”

  The neurologist had snapped her teeth shut and walked away, holding her white coat tightly around her.

  Dante wanted to run after her and demand that she tell him who else was symptomatic with rabies, but the American doctor-patient privilege would preclude her telling him anything.

  ~~~~~

  Christine and Dinah sat belted in the back seat of Father Dante’s car and each looked out their respective windows at the houses being sucked behind them, old Mrs. Trout’s house, young Mr. and Mrs. Trouts’ house, and the Witulskis’ (one boy, thirteen girls, and pregnant again).

  Dinah had been upset when she saw the pins sticking in Mom’s arm, but Christine had been relieved. She had thought they both were dead.

  ~~~~~

  Wednesday morning, Leila sat in Conroy’s chair where his skinny ass had dented the chair and read his lab notebook.

  Funny scents drifted like poltergeists: soapy antiperspirant, fruity phenol that he used to extract DNA the old-fashioned way because he didn’t trust kits, foot odor whiff from his running shoes in the bookcase behind her, and the pine needle powder that repressed it.

  His lab notebook was atrocious. The proper way to keep a lab notebook is to write down what you are going to do (the protocol, or recipe), what you did (actual weights of reagents, sample numbers, microscope settings), what happened (results and observations, like the cells all died) and what that means (conclusions, like that protocol didn’t work, or the protein killed the cells, or rabies virus kills people.)

  Conroy, however, obviously knew that his rabies experiments were illegal and couched his language in the most convoluted, abbreviated, bizarre statements. Nostradamus hadn’t obfuscated this much.

  On a legal pad, Leila listed his experiments, trying to figure out why the hell Conroy was using rabies virus in the first place. She flipped through his notebooks and found key words scratched into titles of experiments: Lyssavirus, rhabdovirus, neurotropic encephalitis virus.

  Conroy might have thought that he could win the Nobel Prize, but she was beginning to suspect that he had only been a paranoid idiot.

  ~~~~~

  Dante was writing counseling notes in the library—John Williams refuses to be candid concerning salient details but is forthcoming with tangential matters. N tasked him with vacuuming the library and asked the boy to perform chores without his shirt and later only in underpants. (Grooming behavior.)

  A shy knock rattled the door.

  “Come in,” Dante said and flipped the file folder closed.

  Bev, who was wearing black pants and a black shirt with the arm cut off for the cast, wove around the heavy door like thick smoke and pressed the door closed behind her. “Father, I need to talk,” she said.

  Father? He gestured to the chair where she sat for counseling and seated himself in the other chair as he had that first day when she was distraught, when she had clung to his hand and he should have recognized her brittle fragility.

  She settled herself in the chair and laid her black pocketbook on the carpet by her slim, black shoes. “I need to discuss God.”

  “God.” Dante shifted back onto his complaining left leg. Too much flapped around his head right now, and theology was yet another fluttering thing, slapping at him.

  Bev said, “When I pray, when I’m in the church, I can’t feel God.”

  Depression is common after the death of a spouse, especially an unexpected death, and Bev seemed to be following the stages of mourning. In the hospital, she had used the present tense about Conroy, so she had been in denial. There had been no sign that she had reached bargaining yet, though some people skipped stages and the order was hypothetical, but perhaps that was what she meant by the inability to feel God. God wasn’t properly negotiating with her to bring her husband back.

  Dante’s sore jaw clicked. “So God is not doing what you ask Him to do.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said and shook her head. Her brown silk hair fell in tumbles on her shoulder. “I just can’t feel anything, like the church is empty, like I can’t even breathe the air.”

  Panic attacks, perhaps. “Do you feel anxious?”

  “No.” She scratched the chair arm.

  He shouldn’t be guessing anyway. Leading a patient was detrimental. “Then what?”

  “I used to be able to feel God’s presence. I can’t anymore.” She toyed with the fraying plaster edge of her cast. “I was afraid to mention it.”

  Ah, a motivation for hiding an emotion was something a psychiatrist could work with. “And why did you feel as if you need to hide this?”

  She tapped the table between the chairs. All those gestures, the petting, the tapping, focused her eyes away from him, which either meant that she didn’t want to look at Dante due to embarrassment or sadness, or that she might be averting her gaze because she was lying.

  Bev scraped her fingernail on the edge of her chair. “Because if God has turned away from me, that means I committed a mortal sin, and that might mean,” she swallowed hard, “that I did something to Conroy.” She scratched her elbow above the white cast. “If I can’t remember a sin, if I can’t remember committing it, deciding to commit it, actually doing it, is it on my soul?”

  Surely she didn’t mean the night that Sloan died. “This scenario didn’t come up in the seminary.”

  “I suppose it would be easier if I’d merely poisoned his communion wine.” Bev tucked the frayed edges of her sweater into the arm. “I’ve always felt a Presence before,” she said, and she emphasized the capital. “Whenever I’ve needed reconciliation, there’s been a hole in my stomach like a bleeding ulcer, like when you were in the confessional. The hatred was eating me. I knew it was sin. But now I don’t feel anything.”

  “You are feeling grief for your husband’s death.” An ache wedged in his ribs. He didn’t know what that ache was, at first.

  “Well, of course,” she said.

  Dante clutched the arms of his chair as the ache drove deeper. He asked, even though he didn’t want to know the answer, “Do you miss him?”

  “All the time,” she said. “Last night, in bed, I couldn’t sleep. I finally moved down to the couch.” She nodded as she said this, a sign that she believed what she said.

  No one would miss Dante like that. Even when he had been a young man in Roma, hopping between women’s beds, he was temporary for them. Dante had insisted upon it. The women had insisted on it.

  He clutched his left side. The impulse to drop to his knees pounded his shoulders lower.

  Indignation that Bev hadn’t picked him, that she loved that cheating Sloan bastard so much that she ran to him and, in her rage, killed him, yanked Dante. “He was cheating on you, with Peggy and Leila.”

  “Who’s Peggy?” Bev turned, looking at him.

  It was still all Sloan for her.

  Dante crossed the room and sat in the chair beside her. “And he drove you to have an affair, with me, with me, and he abandoned you and Christina and Dinah.” He was drowning. “He crushed your arm. He destroyed your family. How could you miss him? How could you
grieve for him?”

  She whispered, “He was my husband.”

  “I tried to help you.” Even though his own corporal form, his flesh, had propelled him, there had been something good in it when he had been driven into her arms. There must be a reason. The world and their lives and his vows were not meaningless. The affair, breaking his vows, even Sloan’s death, surely all this had been prescribed and it meant something. “I could not stop you from going to him. You would not stop.” She looked shocked, horrified at what he was saying, but he couldn’t quit talking. “You wanted him.”

  “He was my husband.”

  Wind-driven rage blew him. “You wanted him back.”

  “Yes!” Her eyes, caramel like toffee, flickered as she tried to see all of his too-angry face.

  He wanted to drag her to face him but the plaster cast on her arm was heavy and he didn’t want to hurt her. He whispered, “You wanted to go there and fight with him.”

  “I wanted to hold my marriage together.”

  “Do you feel remorse?” The need to shake her, slam her, screw her against a wall quaked in his biceps and forearms. He was flailing at her because he was drowning.

  She said, “I don’t remember what happened.”

  “So you feel no remorse,” he badgered. This was wrong. He was wrong.

  She cringed. “I’m not sure what happened.”

  Everything in his head crashed down. “Then you cannot confess.” Opposing instincts—to beg her to love him and to run away from yet another woman who had used him—battered him. “Then you went there of your own free will, then you wanted to go there and fight with him and that was your sin, and you cannot confess.”

  “But I can’t feel God. There’s something wrong. Something else.”

  “That makes no difference. It might be depression. It might be grief. If it is sin, and you cannot feel remorse for the sin, then you cannot confess it. It would not be a true confession. It would not be under the seal of confession and you would not be forgiven.”

  He stood and the chair fell over behind him. “You should go.”