The Body Human

by Nancy Kress

  I wring out a towel in cold water and put it on his forehead. Then I find ice in the refrigerator in a corner of the lab and substitute that. He watches me, his breathing wheezy as old machinery.

  “Elizabeth. Bring me…syringe in a box on…that table.”

  I do it. “Who should I get for you, Randy? Where?”

  “Nobody. I’m not…as bad…as I sound. Yet. Just the initial…dyspnea.” He picks up the syringe.

  “Is there medicine for you in there? I thought you said endozine wouldn’t work on this new infection.” His color is a little better now.

  “Not medicine. And not for me. For you.”

  He looks at me steadily. And I see that Randy would never plead, never admit to helplessness. Never ever think of himself as helpless.

  He lowers the hand holding the syringe back to the floor. “Listen, Elizabeth. You have…almost certainly have…”

  Somewhere, distantly, a siren starts to wail. Randy ignores it. All of a sudden his voice becomes much firmer, even though he’s sweating again and his eyes burn bright with fever. Or something.

  “This staph is resistant to everything we can throw at it. We cultured it and tried. Cephalosporins and aminoglycosides and vancomycin, even endozine…I’ll go into gram-positive septic shock…” His eyes glaze, but after a moment he seems to find his thought again. “We exhausted all points of counterattack. Cell wall, bacterial ribosome, folic acid pathway. Microbes just evolve countermeasures. Like beta-lactamase.”

  I don’t understand this language. Even talking to himself, he’s making me feel stupid again. I ask something I do understand.

  “Why are people killing cows? Are the cows sick, too?”

  He focuses again. “Cows? No, they’re not sick. Farmers use massive doses of antibiotics to increase meat and milk production. Agricultural use of endozine has increased the rate of resistance development by over a thousand percent since—Elizabeth, this is irrelevant! Can’t you pay attention to what I’m saying for three minutes?”

  I stand up and look down at him, lying shivering on the floor. He doesn’t even seem to notice, just keeps on lecturing.

  “But antibiotics weren’t invented by humans. They were invented by the microbes themselves to use…against each other and…they had two billion years of evolution at it before we even showed up…We should have—where are you going?”

  “Home. Have a nice life, Randy.”

  He says quietly, “I probably will. But if…you leave now, you’re probably dead. And your husband and kids, too.”

  “Why? Damn it, stop lecturing and tell me why!”

  “Because you’re infected, and there’s no antibiotic for it, but there is another bacteria that will attack the drug-resistant staph.”

  I look at the syringe in his hand.

  “It’s a Trojan horse plasmid. That’s a…never mind. It can get into the staph in your blood and deliver a lethal gene. One that will kill the staph. It’s an incredible discovery. But the only way to deliver it so far is to deliver the whole bacteria.”

  My knees all of a sudden get shaky. Randy watches me from his position on the floor. He looks shakier himself. His breathing turns raspier again.

  “No, you’re not sick yet, Elizabeth. But you will be.”

  I snap, “From the staph germs or from the cure?”

  “Both.”

  “You want to make me sicker. With two bacteria. And hope one will kill the other.”

  “Not hope. I know. I actually saw…it on the electromicrograph…” His eyes roll, refocus. “…could package just the lethal plasmid on a transpon if we had time…no time. Has to be the whole bacteria.” And then, stronger, “The CDC team is working on it. But I actually caught it on the electromicrograph!”

  I say, before I know I’m going to, “Stop congratulating yourself and give me the syringe. Before you die.”

  I move across the floor toward him, put my arms around him to prop him in a sitting position against the table leg. His whole body feels on fire. But somehow he keeps his hands steady as he injects the syringe into the inside of my elbow. While it drains sickness into me I say, “You never actually wanted me, did you, Randy? Even before Sean?”

  “No,” he says. “Not really.” He drops the syringe.

  I bend my arm. “You’re a rotten human being. All you care about is yourself and your work.”

  He smiles the same cold smile. “So? My work is what matters. In a larger sense than you could possibly imagine. You were always a weak sentimentalist, Elizabeth. Now, go home.”

  “Go home? But you said…”

  “I said you’d infect everyone. And you will—with the bacteria that attacks staph. It should cause only a fairly mild illness. Jenner…smallpox…”

  “But you said I have the mutated staph, too!”

  “You almost certainly do. Yes…And so will everyone else, before long. Deaths…in New York State alone…passed one million this morning. Six and a half percent of the…the population…Did you really think you could hide on your side of…the…river…”

  “Randy!”

  “Go…home.”

  I strip off his lab coat and wad it up for a pillow, bring more ice from the refrigerator, try to get him to drink some water.

  “Go…home. Kiss everybody.” He smiles to himself, and starts to shake with fever. His eyes close.

  I stand up again. Should I go? Stay? If I could find someone in the hospital to take care of him—

  The phone rings. I seize it. “Hello? Hello?”

  “Randy? Excuse me, can I talk to Dr. Satler? This is Cameron Witt.”

  I try to sound professional. “Dr. Satler can’t come to the phone right now. But if you’re calling about Sean Pulaski, Dr. Satler asked me to take the message.”

  “I don’t…oh, all right. Just tell Randy the Pulaski boy is with Richard and Sylvia James. He’ll understand.” The line clicks.

  I replace the receiver and stare at Randy, fighting for breath on the floor, his face as gray as Sean’s when Sean realized it was murder he’d gotten involved with. No, not as gray. Because Sean had been terrified, and Randy is only sick.

  My work is what matters.

  But how had Sean known to go to Sylvia? Even if he knew from Ceci who was on the other side, how did he know which people would hide him, would protect him when I could not, Jack could not? Sylvia-and-Elizabeth. How much did Sean actually know about the past I’d tried so hard to keep from touching him?

  I reach the elevator, my finger almost touching the button, when the first explosion rocks the hospital.

  It’s in the west wing. Through the windows opposite the elevator banks I see windows in the far end of the building explode outward. Thick greasy black smoke billows out the holes. Alarms begin to screech.

  Don’t touch the elevators. Instructions remembered from high school, from grade-school fire drills. I race along the hall to the fire stairs. What if they put a bomb in the stairwell? What if who put a bomb in the stairwell? A lot of people in dark clothing cross the back lawn and quietly enter Dan and Ceci’s house next door, carrying bulky packages wrapped in black cloth.

  A last glimpse through a window by the door to the fire stairs. People are running out of the building, not many, but the ones I see are pushing gurneys. A nurse staggers outside, three small children in her arms, on her hip, clinging to her back.

  They aren’t setting off any more bombs until people have a chance to get out.

  I let the fire door close. Alarms scream. I run back to Pathology and shove open the heavy door.

  Randy lies on the floor, sweating and shivering. His lips move but if he’s muttering aloud, I can’t hear it over the alarm. I tug on his arm. He doesn’t resist and he doesn’t help, just lies like a heavy dead cow.

  There are no gurneys in Pathology. I slap him across the face, yelling “Randy! Randy! Get up!” Even now, even here, a small part of my mind thrills at hitting him.

  His eyes open. For a second, I think
he knows me. It goes away, then returns. He tries to get up. The effort is enough to let me hoist him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry. I could never have carried Jack, but Randy is much slighter, and I’m very strong.

  But I can’t carry him down three flights of stairs. I get him to the top, prop him up on his ass, and shove. He slides down one flight, bumping and flailing, and glares at me for a minute. “For…God’s sake…Janet!”

  His wife’s name. I don’t think about this tiny glimpse of his marriage. I give him another shove, but he grabs the railing and refuses to fall. He hauls himself—I’ll never know how—back to a sitting position, and I sit next to him. Together, my arm around his waist, tugging and pulling, we both descend the stairs the way two-year-olds do, on our asses. Every second I’m waiting for the stairwell to blow up. Sean’s gray face at dinner: Fucking vigilantes’ll get us all.

  The stairs don’t blow up. The fire door at the bottom gives out on a sidewalk on the side of the hospital away from both street and parking lot. As soon as we’re outside, Randy blacks out.

  This time I do what I should have done upstairs and grab him under the armpits. I drag him over the grass as far as I can. Sweat and hair fall in my eyes, and my vision keeps blurring. Dimly I’m aware of someone running toward us.

  “It’s Dr. Satler! Oh my God!”

  A man. A large man. He grabs Randy and hoists him over his shoulder, a fireman’s carry a lot smoother than mine, barely glancing at me. I stay behind them and, at the first buildings, run in a wide loop away from the hospital.

  My car is still in the deserted driveway across the street. Fire trucks add their sirens to the noise. When they’ve torn past, I back my car out of the driveway and push my foot to the floor, just as a second bomb blows in the east wing of the hospital, and then another, and the air is full of flying debris as thick and sharp as the noise that goes on and on and on.

  Three miles along the East River Road, it suddenly catches up with me. All of it. I pull the car off the road and I can’t stop shaking. Only a few trucks pass me, and nobody stops. It’s twenty minutes before I can start the engine again, and there has never been a twenty minutes like them in my life, not even in Bedford. At the end of them, I pray that there never will be again.

  I turn on the radio as soon as I’ve started the engine.

  “—in another hospital bombing in New York City, St. Clare’s Hospital in the heart of Manhattan. Beleaguered police officials say that a shortage of available officers make impossible the kind of protection called for by Mayor Thomas Flanagan. No group has claimed credit for the bombing, which caused fires that spread to nearby businesses and at least one apartment house.

  “Since the Centers for Disease Control’s announcement last night of a widespread staphylococcus resistant to endozine, and its simultaneous release of an emergency counterbacteria in twenty-five metropolitan areas around the country, the violence has worsened in every city transmitting reliable reports to Atlanta. A spokesperson for the national team of pathologists and scientists responsible for the drastic countermeasure released an additional set of guidelines for its use. The spokesperson declined to be identified, or to identify any of the doctors on the team, citing fear of reprisals if—”

  A burst of static. The voice disappears, replaced by a shrill hum.

  I turn the dial carefully, looking for another station with news.

  By the time I reach the west side of Emerton, the streets are deserted. Everyone has retreated inside. It looks like the neighborhoods around the hospital look. Had looked. My body still doesn’t feel sick.

  Instead of going straight home, I drive the deserted streets to the Food Mart.

  The parking lot is as empty as everywhere else. But the basket is still there, weighted with stones. Now the stones hold down a pile of letters. The top one is addressed in blue Magic Marker: TO DR. BENNETT. The half-buried wine bottle holds a fresh bouquet, chrysanthemums from somebody’s garden. Nearby a foot-high American flag sticks in the ground, beside a white candle on a styrofoam plate, a stone crucifix, and a Barbie doll dressed like an angel. Saran Wrap covers a leather-bound copy of The Prophet. There are also five anti-NRA stickers, a pile of seashells, and a battered peace sign on a gold chain like a necklace. The peace sign looks older than I am.

  When I get home, Jack is still asleep.

  I stand over him, as a few hours ago I stood over Randy Satler. I think about how Jack visited me in prison, week after week, making the long drive from Emerton even in the bad winter weather. About how he’d sit smiling at me through the thick glass in the visitors’ room, his hands with their grease-stained fingers resting on his knees, smiling even when we couldn’t think of anything to say to each other. About how he clutched my hand in the delivery room when Jackie was born, and the look on his face when he first held her. About the look on his face when I told him Sean was missing: the sly, secret, not-my-kid triumph. And I think about the two sets of germs in my body, readying for war.

  I bend over and kiss Jack full on the lips.

  He stirs a little, half wakes, reaches for me. I pull away and go into the bathroom, where I use his toothbrush. I don’t rinse it. When I return, he’s asleep again.

  I drive to Jackie’s school, to retrieve my daughter. Together, we will go to Sylvia Goddard’s—Sylvia James’s—and get Sean. I’ll visit with Sylvia, and shake her hand, and kiss her on the cheek, and touch everything I can. When the kids are safe at home, I’ll visit Ceci and tell her I’ve thought it over and I want to help fight the overuse of antibiotics that’s killing us. I’ll touch her, and anyone else there, and everyone that either Sylvia or Ceci introduces me to, until I get too sick to do that. If I get that sick. Randy said I wouldn’t, not as sick as he is. Of course, Randy has lied to me before. But I have to believe him now, on this.

  I don’t really have any choice. Yet.

  A month later, I am on my way to Albany to bring back another dose of the counterbacteria, which the news calls “a reengineered prokaryote.” They’re careful not to call it a germ.

  I listen to the news every hour now, although Jack doesn’t like it. Or anything else I’m doing. I read, and I study, and now I know what prokaryotes are, and beta-lactamase, and plasmids. I know how bacteria fight to survive, evolving whatever they need to wipe out the competition and go on producing the next generation. That’s all that matters to bacteria. Survival by their own kind.

  And that’s what Randy Satler meant, too, when he said, “My work is what matters.” Triumph by his own kind. It’s what Ceci believes, too. And Jack.

  We bring in the reengineered prokaryotes in convoys of cars and trucks, because in some other places there’s been trouble. People who don’t understand, people who won’t understand. People whose family got a lot sicker than mine. The violence isn’t over, even though the CDC says the epidemic itself is starting to come under control.

  I’m early. The convoy hasn’t formed yet. We leave from a different place in town each time. This time we’re meeting behind the American Bowl. Sean is already there, with Sylvia. I take a short detour and drive, for the last time, to the Food Mart.

  The basket is gone, with all its letters to the dead man. So are the American flag and the peace sign. The crucifix is still there, but it’s broken in half. The latest flowers in the wine bottle are half wilted. Rain has muddied the Barbie doll’s dress, and her long blonde hair is a mess. Someone ripped up the anti-NRA stickers. The white candle on a styrofoam plate and the pile of seashells are untouched.

  We are not bacteria. More than survival matters to us, or should. The individual past, which we can’t escape, no matter how hard we try. The individual present, with its unsafe choices. The individual future. And the collective one.

  I search in my pockets. Nothing but keys, money clip, lipstick, tissues, a blue marble I must have stuck in my pocket when I cleaned behind the couch. Jackie likes marbles.

  I put the marble beside the candle, check my gun, and drive to j
oin the convoy for the city.

  FAULT LINES

  “If the truth shall kill them, let them die.”

  —Immanuel Kant

  The first day of school, we had assault-with-intent in Ms. Kelly’s room. I was in my room next door, 136, laying down the law to 7C math. The usual first-day bullshit: turn in homework every day, take your assigned seat as soon as you walk in, don’t bring a weapon or an abusive attitude into my classroom or you’ll wish you’d never been born. The kids would ignore the first, do the others—for me anyway. Apparently not for Jenny Kelly.

  “Mr. Shaunessy! Mr. Shaunessy! Come quick, they throwing chairs next door! The new teacher crying!” A pretty, tiny girl I recognized from last year: Lateesha Jefferson. Her round face glowed with excitement and satisfaction. A riot! Already! On the very first day!

  I looked over my class slowly, penetratingly, letting my gaze linger on each upturned face. I took my time about it. Most kids dropped their eyes. Next door, something heavy hit the wall. I lowered my voice, so everybody had to strain to hear me.

  “Nobody move while I’m gone. You all got that?”

  Some heads nodded. Some kids stared back, uncertain but cool. A few boys smirked and I brought my unsmiling gaze to their faces until they stopped. Shouts filtered through the wall.

  “Okay, Lateesha, tell Ms. Kelly I’m coming.” She took off like a shot, grinning, Paul Revere in purple leggings and silver shoes.

  I limped to the door and turned for a last look. My students all sat quietly, watching me. I saw Pedro Valesquez and Steven Cheung surreptitiously scanning my jacket for the bulge of a service revolver that of course wasn’t there. My reputation had become so inflated it rivaled the NYC budget. In the hall Lateesha screamed in a voice that could have deafened rock stars, “Mr. Shaunessy coming! You ho’s better stop!”

  In 134, two eighth-grade girls grappled in the middle of the floor. For a wonder, neither seemed to be armed, not even with keys. One girl’s nose streamed blood. The other’s blouse was torn. Both screamed incoherently, nonstop, like stuck sirens. Kids raced around the room. A chair had apparently been hurled at the chalkboard, or at somebody once standing in front of the chalkboard; chair and board had cracked. Jenny Kelly yelled and waved her arms. Lateesha was wrong; Ms. Kelly wasn’t crying. But neither was she helping things a hell of a lot. A few kids on the perimeter of the chaos saw me and fell silent, curious to see what came next.