Bobby was typing. "I'll punch up the budget numbers and shoot them on over to you."
"Good. Let's meet for lunch, see what we come up with." , Bobby looked out from my screen. "Lunch?" he said.
"Stephen, it's after six." So it was. It had grown dark outside, and my office lights had compensated, coming on dimly without my noticing.
The work day had gotten away from me.
I went home and opened the Special Path budget on my tablet, but as intense as my concentration had been at the BDC, I found it nearly impossible to focus at home. I got up and wandered throughout the downstairs area, the dim kitchen, the media room, and then, remembering the exuberance of that night in Stockholm, went to the bar and poured myself a drink. I found my way upstairs and patrolled the empty bedrooms of my unfinished house, pausing before one of the southwest-facing windows overlooking Diver Bridge to Atlanta. Darkness blanketed the glowing halo of the distant city.
Moving lights brightened the tree branches outside the window and directed shadows across the ceiling. Headlights in my driveway, though I expected no one. I left my glass on the sill and walked to my bedroom window for a better view, arriving just in time to see a car back out and pull away.
That second night was longer than the first. Sleep teased but never fully embraced me.
The next day's situation log noted that Peter Maryk had returned from Nevada and assumed on-site command of the Orangeburg investigation.
Neither one of us initiated communication with the other. I continued my own multipronged investigation, immersing myself in all aspects of Orangeburg, while simultaneously pursuing the code names and the Special Pathogens budget-which I found to be padded with overruns and blind outlays exceeding $17 million.
I left the office only once that morning, to drop in on Lab Safety in Building Four under some pretense in order to procure a Postprick Kit.
In the toilet stall of a nearby washroom, hiding like a junkie in a train station, I administered the preventive HIV and hepatitis series.
I was counting on this to relax my mind.
Peri Fields was waiting outside my office door when I returned.
"Hi," she said, and I stopped near. Her light brown hair was done up lightly in a loose bun, run through expertly with a pencil. "You weren't answering my pages, so I thought I'd just drop by."
"Orangeburg," I told her. I was having a difficult time meeting her eyes. "Were you just out for lunch? We could have-" "No. Just getting some air."
It was her turn to nod. She crossed one heeled shoe over the other and held her tablet in both hands at her waist. "You know I'm not asking for anything," she said, still smiling. "We can go as fast or as slow as you want."
"I know," I said. "But right now I need to give this investigation everything I . . ."
My words trailed off. She was studying me. She was looking at my hands. "You're wearing gloves," she said.
I looked at them myself, a worm of guilt starting up my back.
"And?"
"Nothing. Except that-you're one of the few here who didn't."
"My image." I nodded.
These words wounded her more deeply than I expected. They warranted an apology which, for some reason, I did not give. "I'm fine," I said.
She reached out to me as I started past her for my door, her hand brushing my bare forearm, just below my shirtsleeve. I jerked away.
She turned and stood in the doorway, stunned, as I shut the door.
1 did not leave my office the rest of the day. Updates from Orangeburg continued tonguing out of my printer. The White House press secretary had left three messages since my on-camera comments in Stockholm, but I did not respond. Everything else paled next to the outbreak.
My search under the "Dr. Christian" pseudonym led me to case reports corresponding to the mystery code names, buried in an unlabeled Special Pathogens file of year-old interdepartmental performance reviews. The files were encrypted for confidentiality, but all BDC documents were accessible to the director at his discretion.
Downloaded, the case reports contained detailed medical histories of the three apparently healthy subjects, BLOSSOM, LANCET, and MELKMAID, but going back only three years and listing only addresses, no names: Two of the subjects resided in the Atlanta area, the third outside Boston. My thirst for more information, coupled with a reluctance to return to my empty house, compelled me to pursue the matter, without further success, long into the evening.
That night back at Diver Bridge, I paced. My palms and the creases of my knuckles remained cloyingly moist; repetitively, I washed and dried my hands. The bruises on my stuck hand, the ones caused by my first scrubbing out the wound, were not going away. I wandered upstairs, dreading the night that was already upon me.
I discovered an empty bar glass on the windowsill in one of the bedrooms, and for a few frantic minutes believed a stranger was inside the house with me. Headlights appeared in my driveway again, and I rushed down the hallway to my bedroom to look. I watched a car slow nearly to a stop at the bottom of the drive, then strangely pull away.
I remembered my behavior toward Peri, and tried to call her, but had some difficulty using my tablet. A vague sense of uneasiness overcame me like a chill.
I went to bed, and watched the ceiling for headlights. I rolled the Orangeburg investigation over and over in my head, but could not get it straight; fragments from my own life kept intruding, as though like electrical wires the two concerns had somehow become crossed.
I dozed briefly, on and off, each time awakening to the shaded room as though summoned by name. In the dark corners of my bedroom and the furls of the curtains hanging off my windows, faces appeared, watching me, trying to speak. They were the faces of the camp workers.
Something terrible was happening to me.
The next day I took care to encounter no one, arriving at work well before seven. Rescheduled appointments were stacking up, jamming my calendar into the weeks and months ahead, but without consequence, as my future now was clear: Once free of Orangeburg, I would tender my resignation to the president. There was relief in this decision-the impending resumption of my life's work, a return to the sterile safety of the BDC labs-which freed me to further indulge the worm of my consuming obsession with Orangeburg, poring over the scores of updates and summaries flowing hourly from South Carolina.
The outbreak once again, by hard work, a miracle, or a combination of both, had been successfully contained. Only two cases had been reported outside the hospital, and both were discovered through contact tracing of recent visitors and duty isolated. Hopes soared, but neither visitor was found to be the source of the outbreak, and rather each had become infected inside the hospital like all the rest. The disease was running its course, and there was still no indication of how Plainville had reemerged among a bedridden group of catatonics.
The virus confounded me. My notes from that morning, scribbled shakingly in black felt pen on the back of a hard copy of an autopsy photograph: Latency period between infection and symptom onset 2-4 days; immuno-compromised develop to termination in as few as one day total. Plainville growing more destructive to blood in final stages, breaking down platelets and albumin, flooding organs with mush. Virus in constant flux. LS. excited to overload, profound autoimmune response. Symptomatological spiral Win 2-4 days, to termination wlin 4-6 days total. Cause of death: grand mal seizure or pulmonary edema, if no opportunistic injection-pneumonia, staph, septicemia, others.
Transmission via: blood contact, respiration, urine spatter, w1trace survival in sputum, saliva-even tears. 1. How, in limited exposure, do dramatic genetic mutations still occur-all virus-beneficial? (Still no link to previous outbreaks, and no spread outside hospital: Luck??
Missing something??) And 2. How to account for P-ville growing more virulent AND more deadly at same time? Unprecedented.
The only bright points of the outbreak were the prognoses of two of the four patients, the ones receiving the MILKMAID sera protocol.
<
br /> Astonishingly, each appeared to be successfully staving off the effects of full-blown Plainville. Equally provocative was the attention paid this development in the reporting materials generated by the Special Pathogens Section: none. I established a new file on my personal tablet, "Investigation.Maryk," and copied into it all information relevant to the mystery sera, including the budget discrepancies and Peter's dummied reports.
At midmorning, a blistering headache overtook me. I medicated myself with caffeine and vitamins and successive half liters of water from my office kitchen suite. It was lack of sleep, certainly; I was exhausted but unable to nap or even sit still. This deficit also seemed to affect my thinking. It was as though time were unraveling.
The pain soon faded and I felt much improved; in truth, I felt relieved.
An hour later I experienced a sensation like ice water being poured down the back of my neck. The chills that followed straightened me in my office chair and held me rigid through deepening waves of nausea as papers slipped from my grasp to the floor and my gloved hands began to quiver, the trembling soon spreading to my arms and legs. My neck muscles cramped until I could no longer move my head, and I began to panic. I was tipped back and could only see the ceiling lights, quaking and bluffing in my view. I tried to yell for help but the sound was trapped in my throat. Eventually the spasms subsided, releasing me, my tendons aching as though run through with needles. I used my desk to stand. Crushing head pain lingered as I reached for my tablet. At the door I righted myself I practiced speaking in the event that I encountered anyone, then exited unseen and unmet down a fire stairwell to the parking lot.
I rode out in search of the highway. Steering was difficult but manageable and I sustained a kind of equilibrium by keeping my arms low in my lap and my timorous hands light on the wheel. The joints in my elbows and knees and ankles felt like eggshells slowly breaking open.
But overall the driving seemed to help. It was as though I were seated just behind myself, my arms and hands pushed through the empty shirtsleeves; of a puppet operating a car. Cruise control was set at sixty miles per hour, and I can remember a red lap-belt light winking at me from the instrument panel. I remained on the highway, not heading home, instead turning north onto Interstate 85 and finding myself soon leaving Georgia, pushing ahead through South Carolina and into North Carolina. I drove on and on, trapped in a dream. I concentrated on the road lines flowing past and found it oddly soothing to be in the middle lane of the great American highway, flowing forth as though on a raft, the cars on either side of me passing and receding, passing and receding.
At one point my tablet chirped on the seat next to me, but rather than answer it, I managed to open the screen and deactivate the Hailing function so that it would not bother me again. I needed only to drive, and not to think.
I slowed only for tolls, which detected the government vehicle and debited the appropriate fee. I feared stopping, certain that it would kill my momentum, but the drive was longer than I could bear.
Somewhere in Maryland I pulled off into a service area, parked in the last space, turned off the engine and lay a while sideways across the front seats. I do not believe I slept. After a while I sat up again, feeling watched. I refueled at the service station but did not get out of the car or even roll down my window.
The pain in my head expanded with a force that was nearly crippling, until all at once it was gone, replaced only by a dull ringing tone.
The veins in my extremities all throbbed; it had been some time since I had actually felt the wheel beneath my hands. Still, on I drove. I piloted the last leg of the journey slumped against the armrest, too weak to sit up on my own.
Finally I was off the highway and circling Manhattan, its towers looming in my window. I turned off and continued on the road toward Long Island, knowing then that I was heading home.
I reached the familiar town of Amagansett and drifted along the old streets out to the shore. The mailbox and the driveway.
Flagstones curling to the brick steps. The door with the golden horse head knocker, and at once I was inside the great house: cavernous, dreamlike, dark. The chandelier was gone from the foyer, a chain and bare copper wire hanging insolently from the high cathedral ceiling.
Pale dust outlines of removed frames marked the walls, the remaining furniture draped in thick plastic, all things I should have taken care of after my mother's funeral. I felt my way along the walls to the kitchen, empty and quiet. In the cabinet over the sink, four or five glasses stood mouths-down, orphans of mismatched sets. I reached for a plastic tumbler of swirling colors, which to me signified summertime in the late 1980s, Hawaiian Punch and television laughter from the back porch, sand in my sandwiches and fireflies winking at night. The faucet spat pockets of air, then garbled brown water, then flowed clear. It hurt very much to swallow. There was something wrong with the mechanics of my throat.
I gripped my tablet to my chest and took the tumbler of water and started up the stairs. The task was daunting and I rested frequently, slumping with one knee against the next highest step, the handrail always seeming to twist just out of reach. I gripped the side wall and water shook out of the tumbler and over my gloved hand down to my forearm.
I mounted the top landing and sat there sweating, huffing, leaning on my elbow on the familiar beige carpet. The tumbler was empty now and I let it go. Fatigue overcame me. Something told me that if I did not move now, I might never move again.
I found the railing and hauled myself up, legs bandy and reluctant to respond. I felt sick to my stomach. Bathroom or bedroom: a choice.
I lurched toward my old bedroom, striking the doorjamb with my shoulder and knee, and feeling neither. My view of the room faded, a strange pressure behind my eyes sparking silver phosphenes that showered and bloomed. I stumbled inside, fumbling the tablet onto a small writing desk and falling across the twin bed, sizzling against the cold plastic wrap beneath me. I shrugged and pulled and eventually dumped the sheeting out onto the floor, and lay on my back on the bare mattress as the room filled with viscous glitter. The room smelled exactly as I remembered. It smelled of the sea.
Later I awoke to a roaring noise in a room of bare walls, a bureau, an empty bookcase, a child's desk: my old summer room in Amagansett.
Three trophies, small golden boys standing poised to dive, remained atop the low bureau, swimming awards, the smallest for holding my breath underwater the longest.
I looked through the skylight in the ceiling above. This was a wonderfully clear dream with no queer subconscious filters, no anomalous intrusions from other places, or other times. I was a boy again, back in my room at the old summer house, and life was bright and new. Everything lay ahead of me; nothing behind. I closed my eyes and rode out the sensation of somersault after somersault, backward, feet following head, and then changed direction at will, rolling forward and deeper, forward and deeper.
Shooting pain through my thighs, arms, abdomen, neck, thorax, feet, calves, shoulder blades, back. Rockets of pain. I was afire.
Thrashing atop the bed, being consumed.
Awake again. Vomit, mainly water coughed from my groaning throat, puddled on the stripped mattress beneath my head. Total apathy at the loss of control over my bodily functions. No embarrassment. No thought to it even. Such extraordinary lethargy, such leadenness, stuporous muscles and sandbag limbs. A wholesale lettinggo. Idly I watched as my feet twitched at the end of the bed-watched without the slightest concern. Hours were slipping away, and I knew it, and did not know it.
Night again: or still. My parents huddling outside the door.
Mother holding a Dixie cup full of tap water. They were going out.
The room and the hallway were dark but my parents were painted with light and faintly glowing. Dressed formally. "So proud," she said.
Over me now, her face before the skylight, smiling down. "Feeling better?"
"A little," I said. "Just rest. Raisin toast and tea in the morning."
An
d glasses of flat ginger ale; an uncapped bottle of Canada Dry set out overnight on the kitchen counter. And later, chicken soup.
My father remained on the landing in his tweed overcoat, fixing his collar, waiting to go. Flickering out.
Sunlight struck the trophies on the bureau. I was still in my summer room in Amagansett. Burning up and meaning to do something about it.
Open a window maybe. I was going to get up, soon. It hurt to swallow.
It hurt to be lying down.
Peri came to me later. She appeared in the middle of the room with her eyes closed and her arms out at her side, nude. I was terrified she would open her eyes and see me lying there, helpless, but I hadn't the strength to hide. When she did open her eyes, her orbits were hollow and black, and tears of toxic blood poured down her cheeks to her breasts and over her stomach and legs, burning through her spoiling flesh to the meat and bone beneath. She was rotting with her own blood and howling at me as, standing there, she decomposed.
Then she was gone. The bed was trembling. Vaccine? This way.
She cannot bear to be touched.
Burning She cannot bear even the pressure of a bedsheet. Maman Her name. The candle Vaccine. A cure. Two days ago. I buried them next to the house. I am floating You are a camp doctor. The others are much worse. It is death You're sick. The rain it stinks of death This will protect you. I am going with you If you tell me to do it I will I will go I looked out at the small writing desk next to my bed and saw the patient from bay twenty-six. Rather than junk the outgrown desk, my parents had moved it to the summer house, and now this wasted phantom sat large in the young child's chair, his flat legs tucked snugly under the desk, gnawing on his lips with destructive precision as he typed. Sideways I watched the ghoulish little man as he keyed through pages on my tablet. The file he stopped at looked familiar.
It appeared to be the title page of "Investigation.Maryk." When he turned his head toward me, his red eyes were kindled by the faint light of the screen and the night glow from the skylight above. "Pearse," he said, his ragged lips twisted into something like a smile.
Chuck Hogan Page 9