He tipped forward and slurred a few parting words before succumbing to the cascade slumber. "The tumor of the world," he said.
"You know I was right."
This was to be his apology. There are chapters to every life, though seldom are we aware at the time of a page being thumbed and turned.
This was one of those uncommon occasions.
Zero
I wish my tale of Africa ended there. There is however one more incident I must relate, a brief sequence of events to which, at the time, I was not privy. Even now, with the keenness of hindsight and every fact of consequence available before me, this singular event remains the most strange.
Seven days following the razing of the camp, the rainy season resumed in earnest. Oren Ridgeway, a botanist with Rainforest Ecology Conservation International, was out on the last night of a five-day field expedition into the rain forests of northern Congo, having circled back to within thirty kilometers of the RECI reserve. The night jungle is a haunted place, as I had found, where no man should venture alone. I can picture Ridgeway stretched out on his back, the rain spattering against the roof of his narrow nylon tent, listening to a BBC World Service broadcast on his radio, reporting on the current political climate in the United States, his home.
The pioneering enthusiasm he had arrived with eight months before was by then gone. He had journeyed to the central African rain forest in order to archive and preserve specimens of the tens of millions of uncharacterized species of tropical flora, before population demands and the big boot of human development stamped them out forever. But that night he was facing the futility of his efforts; millions of rare life forms were being willfully exterminated around him, and he was reexamining the merits of his crusade. What was the use, after all, of trying to salvage a representative sample of a species not strong enough to survive on its own? How much should be left to nature? And what of the senselessness of naming something just as it ceased to exist?
The fact that he was even deigning to entertain these questions must have depressed young Ridgeway all the more. The earth was suffocating worldwide under the weight of advancing Homo sapiens, and that night, as he lay alone in the pounding rain of the jungle, he must have felt himself its only witness.
Case in point: the jets he had heard streaking across the jungle sky seven nights before; he had reported them. And the black rain, which he at first thought was volcanic ash cycling back through the biosphere; he had reported that too. His reports went out over the airwaves among a million bursts of static, answered by no one, slipping the earth's orbit and pulsing into the galaxies, a lone human voice of protest.
The system had since purged itself, and the rain that night fell again sweet and clear. I see him reaching up and unzipping the tent fold, letting in some of the perfumed forest air, the scent of his smothered cooking fire, its lingering smoke. There would have been faint light from above, threads of silver angling off the waxing moon through the jeweled rain. Perhaps by the light of one of those lunar strands did he notice the branches bobbing in the trees across from his tent.
There was nothing unusual about a creature moving through the night jungle-until the creature emerged from the trees on two legs, walking erect. Ridgeway then sat up, repositioning himself to peer through the zipper folds and through the rain.
It was a human figure, too large to be a Pygmy, slipping from the cover of the trees and moving across a muddy path to a tree of surfboard-sized leaves.
Maybe Ridgeway thought it was someone trying to steal something from his camp. Did he turn up the volume on his radio, in hopes of scaring off the intruder? Or did he simply struggle into a plastic poncho and step out into the rain? "Yes?" he called out. "Hello?"
Not until the silhouette emerged from the cover of the leaves would he have known that it was a female. Ridgeway knew little of the local dialects, and no French, but he was a trusting soul, with plenty of food to share, and would have welcomed friendly company of any sort.
She started across the camp toward him, striding through the strands of silver light, and Ridgeway saw then that she was nude. Her body was young and firm, with branch scratches and other irregular marks covering much of her dark flesh. She walked right up to him, breaching even that radius of personal space generally respected by strangers, breathing deeply, as though after a long run. Her dark nipples brushed against the chest of his poncho with each gust. He opened his mouth to speak then, to ask her what she wanted, and her lips closed on, his in a firm kiss. She kissed him full-mouthed and sensually, without otherwise touching his body, and after the initial shock, Ridgeway's neck and back relaxed and he accommodated her passion without resistance. Perhaps he opened his eyes just once, buoyed by his raging pulse, and found her eyes were open too, but dark, her pupils flat and staring. Her tongue then swished the enamel of his front teeth-strangely cold, in his limited experience, colder than any other tongue he had ever tasted-and their lips parted and she stood facing him as before.
He saw more clearly then the dull glow behind her eyes, the thick drops of rain breaking upon her nose and cheeks, and the vague discoloration of her flesh. It was vitiligo, though this meant nothing to Ridgeway.
And then at once she turned and started away. She walked not quickly, not even purposefully, the bright glints of moonlight illuminating her buttocks, the sheen of her shoulder blades, and the dimpled small of her curved back, crossing through the rain back into the trees.
She would wander the jungle in this same stupor for some ten more hours before sitting down to rest against a dead tree in the middle of a wide clearing and succumbing to a series of swift, violent, massive strokes.
Creatures of the jungle came forward to nibble on her corpse, but did not like what they tasted, and none of them made it back out of the clearing before failing dead. The insects that fed upon the dead creatures also died, so many carcasses cooking under the bright, virus-killing sun. The animals deemed it a sacred place, and all stayed away. The girl's skeleton still sits there, partially intact, slumped next to the rotted tree, its skull fixed in an empty, meaningless grin.
As for Ridgeway, he ran after her that night, but no deeper than the first few forbidding trees. He returned and found her footprints in the soft mud of his camp, small and faint and disappearing in the hard rain-then gasped out a nervous laugh. She had been real enough, though there was precious little consolation in that. A beautiful woman of the jungle, exotic and nude, had walked out of the trees and kissed him once, as though delivering a passionate message dispatched from the heart of the rain forest, then disappeared again without a word. He shook his head underneath his poncho hood, and smiled.
He looked up and found the swelling moon above the thinning canopy.
The warm rain washed his face, smelling of the sky and of the fleeting bare feet of summer, and he stood there, the blood rush still tingling in his veins, perhaps dreaming of home.
This was Patient Zero.
My Own Story, Half-Told
Another page turned.
Stockholm, six years later. December tenth, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death, and traditionally the inauguration of Nobel Week, the end of a day that should have been the brightest yet of my thirty-seven years. The diploma and solid gold medal presented me by His Majesty the king of Sweden at the award ceremony at the Stockholms Konserthus lay securely in the safe behind the reception desk in the hotel lobby, while I lay seven floors above, deep in a strange bed like a heavy stone set upon a soft pillow. And for the first time in a long time, I was not alone.
Following clinical trials of varying degrees of success, and in light of Peter Maryk's increasing disdain for the project, I eventually directed our PeaMar research exclusively toward manufacturing a pure, whole blood alternative. The result, PeaMar23, was a certified disease-free, hemoglobin-based, synthetic blood substitute with a storage shelf life of nearly three times the forty-two-day limit of organic human blood.
Coming at a time when worldwide inventories of clean blood
were reaching a critical level, news of the discovery was hailed internationally as a triumph on the level of Salk's polio vaccine and, unexpectedly, made me something of a celebrity. PeaMar23 was currently in use in every health clinic in every province of every country in the world, all mass-produced in a plant in Chamblee, north of Atlanta, known as BDC Building Twenty, the Blood Services Section.
For this Peter Maryk and I shared the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. My acceptance speech at that day's ceremony had been well received (The governing principle of my professional life has been that we at the BDC must never let technology overshadow basic human care ... that we continue to reach out to the afflicted, if only with a gloved hand ... that we be scientists second, doctors first...), though as I returned to my seat, flushed with relief amid the applause filling the concert hall, I felt that something was missing.
It was not the ignominy of Peter Maryk's vacant seat next to me.
That I could have expected. The breach that first formed between us in Africa had widened during the development of the PeaMar sera, and culminated in the dissolution of our partnership following the unveiling of PeaMar23 four years before. Since our abrupt falling out, Peter had become something of an outlaw among the medical science community, while my professional career had moved in a diametrically opposite direction. For the past thirty months, I had held the dual federal posts of U.S. Surgeon General and Director of the Bureau for Disease Control. Though we both still worked for the BDC, Peter Maryk and I had not spoken to each other for almost four years.
So it was not Peter I was missing as I glanced around at my fellow laureates on the concert hall stage, in chemistry, literature, and economics, all joined on that milestone day by their families. I was unmarried and unattached. Both my parents had passed away that same year, and I found myself alone. When the ceremony ended and I stepped down off the concert stage with one hand in the pocket of my tuxedo pants, making polite conversation with His Majesty who, in an imperial gesture of pity, had seen fit to escort the lone bachelor to the floor, the only familiar face waiting there was Peri Fields's, head of the BDC's Public Affairs Section and my public relations liaison. Her congratulatory kiss as she pressed it into my cheek felt genuine rather than perfunctory, and raised my spirits a bit. Even this spin-weary sorceress of worldwide media was swayed by the authenticity of the Nobel.
Following the royal banquet, Peri and I repaired to the hotel bar for a champagne nightcap, the electricity of the day still coursing through us. My excitement I understood, but hers surprised me, and interested me. For two years in Atlanta, we had shared nothing more than a working relationship. I heard her shoes fall to the floor beneath the table, and watched her mouth as she laughed. I had not been drunk in years. The steady, interested blue of her eyes, moistened by the champagne, caught some of the magic of the chandelier.
The clumsy embrace that began in the mirrored elevator on the ride up to the top floor continued more gracefully behind the door to my top-floor suite. There was at first the revelatory exhilaration of intimacy with a close associate, like a hunger choking us both, followed by the fumbling of zippers and buttons and the culminate unveiling of each to the other as we stood beside the high bed. My hands found her warm hair, her neck, her crotch. The preliminary sacredness of touch accelerated to bold groping and grasping, and the sheets tangled around us, twisted and grew warm.
Afterward, I had found the release of orgasm to be rousing rather than narcotizing and lay staring at the thickly papered walls by the light of the city, diffuse through the lace-veiled window, as synapses fired within the charged nebula of my brain. The events of the day came flooding back, but the accolades felt empty again, the honor a cheat.
It was Africa, still haunting me. Within every doctor's psyche resides that patient from early in his career, the one who touched him and whom ultimately he failed, and who becomes the secret source of all his healing efforts. I lay there on that strange Nobel night not with Peri Fields, not in a hotel suite, and not even in Stockholm, but a world away, in a camp shanty in deepest Africa, next to the writhing form of a nine-year-old girl corrupted by a pitiless disease.
After a time I did sleep, and awoke to the sound of the door closing.
Peri's clothes were gone from the floor, -and I sank back against the pillow as remorse seized me all at once. That night seemed a terrible mistake suddenly, a selfish stab at my own loneliness that had perhaps sabotaged a perfect working relationship.
I arose and showered automatically, due that morning at a Nobel symposium arranged early to accommodate my schedule. I dressed alone in the solitude of the hotel suite, the tableau of bedsheets creased and tugged. out from beneath the mattress resembling the scene of some passionate crime, to be repaired by the proper authorities in the form of a humming chambermaid.
The symposium concerned the alarming spread of infectious disease around the globe. Before the questionand-answer period, a video program was played on the large screen behind me, entitled The Disease Dilemma, a one-hour documentary concerning recent health scares around the world and the Bureau for Disease Control's vanguard role in managing and preventing them. The program had been Peri's brainchild, having debuted on one of the global satellite networks that previous Monday and been available on-demand for downloading since. It was the highest-rated worldwide prime-time broadcast of that week, with tens of millions of viewer hits since, and I was the host.
It had been Peri's strategy, which I had agreed to and signed off on, that as director of the world's preeminent health organization, I was to be promoted to the public as a spokesman for good health and clean living. This was done most expressly in the bureau's numerous Health Promotion campaigns for children, but The Disease Dilemma represented a quantum leap forward in terms of popular exposure, and at the time had struck me as a unique opportunity to educate the world about disease prevention. But now, as my voice carried over the heads of the luminaries assembled in the Royal Caroline Medico-Chirurgical Institute auditorium, the program felt dishonest. The role of health messiah seemed to me now a cheap part we could have hired an actor for, or even commissioned a cartoon mascot. I looked down at the day-old Nobel weighing heavily in my lap-it had been suggested that I wear it around my neck, in the manner of an Olympic athlete, which I had respectfully declined-and felt suddenly nothing, which was wrong. It was a significant award, conferred for advancements made in the interests of humanity; for me, there could be no higher praise. Yet the ghost of Africa, like a creeping stain, corTupted all. I was a fraud who had violated my oath by having been complicit in the expedient murders of dozens of camp workers, and though no one ever learned of the firebombing-Peter had seen to that-I felt somehow certain that the more accolades I received, the worse my ultimate retribution would be.
Part of the reason for this was the dark shadow that had followed us back from Africa. The lethal camp virus had inexplicably emerged in the United States fifteen months after our return, achieving worldwide infamy with a massive outbreak in the small town of Plainville, Massachusetts. The Plainville plague was a catastrophe unrivaled in the modern era of disease control, such that the term itself, "Plainville," not only came to denote the name of the virus, but entered the popular lexicon as a site of mass disaster, such as Chernobyl, or Bhopal. Plainville claimed more than twenty thousand human casualties, including entire neighborhoods of nearby townsthough, as far as the public knew, that had been the end of it. In fact there had been four subsequent isolated outbreaks. None was as devastating nor nearly as widespread as Plainville, thanks to the efforts of the BDC in containing the spread of the raging virus, and therefore, with no immediate threat to the public at large, the outbreaks were covered up in order to avoid hysteria and undue media scrutiny. The secret was closely held; even Peri Fields was not aware of the post-Plainville reemergences. Six times since Africa, the Plainville virus had materialized, poisoning every living thing it touched before vanishing without a trace, only to rise up again som
e months later in another state, with no discernible link between events. Enigmatically, there had been no connecting outbreaksno other victims of the disease-between the uranium camp in the Congo and Plainville, USA. Its incursion into North America remained a mystery.
Now the program was ending. I listened to myself embellishing the extent of my actual field participation, furthering the superhero image-and cringed, ashamed to know that my hubris had crossed the line into a lie. The truth was, I had not attended the site of any outbreak in the thirty months since I had become director. I had never even gone to Plainville.
The lights came back on and hands went up among the international press assembled in the hall. A British accent: "Dr. Pearse, simply put: Why are so many becoming so sick?"
I nodded, though the question itself was unanswerable. "One of the lessons of what we now call the 'antibiotic era' of the previous century was that as weaker microbes fall away, more resilient ones survive and emerge, and sometimes with a vengeance. We will never eradicate viruses or bacteria from the earth, nor should we. What we as a people must do is to seek to control viruses, as man has learned to control fire, as we control and continue to legislate against crime."
Another question. "Do you agree with your president's statement that 'America is no longer the world's policeman, it is its doctor'?"
"I do, but not as a slight to the other world international-disease-fighting organizations. Our world is shrinking, and the bureau has, for better or for worse-I think for the better-stepped to the forefront of global disease control."
"What do you think it means that your co-recipient, Dr. Peter Maryk, did not attend the award ceremony? Do you consider it a snub to the Nobel Foundation?"
"I can't speak for Dr. Maryk," I said, trying to move along. "You'll have to ask him that yourself."
I recalled The Disease Dilemma and its retelling of the Syn-Bank dedication at the White House four years before. Peter and I had both decided that we could not in good conscience profiteer from PeaMar23 and jointly signed over all patents and monetary claims to the BDC. It was perhaps the last thing we ever agreed upon. The revenue filled the bureau's coffers, and in what was known as the "blood dividend" the Bureau for Disease Control became, while still functioning as an arm of the government, a self-supporting philanthropy not funded by tax dollars. The reason I had accepted the more decorative position of surgeon general was to ensure the integrity of the cash-rich BDC, and to preserve its political autonomy.
Chuck Hogan Page 6