Stark wanted to ask how she knew his name, or Rosangelica’s for that matter; but clearly Domenica and Pirate had already accelerated beyond the need for such questions, and he felt compelled to keep up with them. The church of insurgents hustling around him and breaking down their safe house added to the feeling that he was standing still in their presence. “I—I didn’t bring Rosangelica to harm anyone.”
Domenica suddenly looked at Stark as if he were a phantom bearing a message. “What are you doing here?”
The back of Stark’s neck felt icy cold. He had the distinct feeling that Domenica already knew what he was going to ask her. “I came to ask you a question. A favor.”
Pirate waved for Stark to be quiet. “Wait.” He motioned for Domenica and Stark to follow him. “Come.”
He led them past the bar and past another air lock. Beyond was an old kitchen, though now it served as a mini-hot lab. Through the kitchen door’s windows, Stark could see two people in suits analyzing slides beneath DA scopes set up next to an industrial dishwasher. Pirate hit an intercom switch, and said, “We’re breaking down! Finish up and start packing.”
Domenica and Pirate led Stark to what must have been an old office. It had been soundproofed with multiple layers of cardboard and Styrofoam. A small sat camera and several other pieces of equipment that Stark didn’t recognize sat with blinking green lights on a beat-up desk. A console near the camera had a memboard attached. Stark saw that it read, TRINITY BOOST = NO LINK.
Pirate took a hand-printed sign that read QUIET! and put it on the outside handle of the studio door, then shut it behind him as he left.
“All right, Dr. Stark, you’ve got my attention,” Domenica said. She sat down on the upholstered sage green couch positioned before the camera.
Stark looked at the camera. “We aren’t really uplinked, are we?”
She grinned the famous, too-wide smile. “No, Doctor. We’re alone, I promise.” She indicated a rolling chair with a wide seat and deeply curved back. “Now let’s talk about this favor you want to ask me.”
Stark sat. He folded his hands. He looked up into the nun’s face and saw that she was looking at him as if she were waiting for him to pronounce a death sentence. “You knew I was coming, didn’t you.”
“I was told something. But this is the wrong time, I thought.” She concentrated hard for a moment, then shook her head and clasped her hands between her knees like an awkward adolescent.
The cyborgs were bad enough; now he was dealing with someone who heard a whole different frequency of voices in her head. “I need you to help me end this outbreak,” Stark said. “You’re the only one who can do it.”
Domenica touched her chin. “Me? Why?”
Though there were moments of breakthrough and success, most of epidemiology was a statistical game, supported by the tedious examination of hard evidence. Stark had never strayed further from the game than he had in this outbreak, this moment. “Domenica, I haven’t told anyone what I’m about to tell you, but I swear to you that it’s the whole truth as I know it,” Stark said, “even though you may hear me say otherwise later. Do you understand?”
“You’re dealing with people like Rosangelica and El Jefe,” Domenica said. “Lying is a misdemeanor sin.”
“OK. Here it is. The virus was designed and wetcoded by a terrorist—a colleague and a former friend of mine. His name is Joaquin Delgado and he’s a Spaniard just as you—‘foresaw,’ I guess. His viruses attack a Native Mexican immune response and the pilone wetware, making your country about eighty percent susceptible to the virus. I am certain that Joaquin is still here, still walking through the streets of Ascensión, probably through this very hot zone, looking people in the eye and infecting them. For all I know he could be one of your people, in this very building.”
She sneered in disgust, her mouth agape. “Among my people? Why would you suggest such a thing?”
“Because Joaquin Delgado is after you, Domenica.” Stark went on to explain how early Big Bonebreaker patients had attended Domenica’s mass at the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. The Basilica workers. Father Gasapardo and the others. He explained how he had gone to Zapata Hospital himself based on all this information and found patient zero, despite the Holy Renaissance’s best efforts to thwart him. He explained how he and Isabel had discovered Generation Two with the information he stole from Zapata. “Now, that’s the truth as only I know it, Sister, and it’s as close as we’ve gotten to Joaquin without having the man himself. But it’s not enough. We need virus fresh from Joaquin’s body to end this outbreak. We need Joaquin.” Stark wanted to touch his injured lip. Healing nicely, it hurt when he spoke too much, and speaking Joaquin’s name aloud made him want to be quiet now.
Domenica’s hand rested on her chest, just below her throat for a long moment. Together, they listened to the faint, faraway sounds of mobilization beyond the badly soundproofed room, the crank of the freight elevators, and the shuffling of boots as men lifted heavy loads together. Stark watched Domenica closely. Her jaw clenched as she thought about everything Stark had told her. “You think he’s still after me?”
“If the statistics don’t lie, then they show—”
She shook her head frantically. “No. Tell me what you believe. You know him personally. Is he still after me?”
Stark sat still and realized that his upper body was nodding, not with affirmation, but with his pulse. “I don’t think he’ll stop searching for you until he finally lays a hand on you.” Stark smirked at himself. “How’s that for prophecy?”
Domenica examined Stark with her ink-drop eyes, so dark and wet that it seemed they would bleed down her cheeks in trails of black. Suddenly, her face hardened into a semblance of the queenly woman who had greeted him moments ago. “You want me to act as bait, don’t you, Dr. Stark?”
“Yes, I do. I want you to come with me back to Torre Cuauhtémoc.” Stark turned as if he might see the towers from this secret room. “I want you to appear on a netcast so that Joaquin can see where you are.”
She looked cornered. “Antonio and Los Hijos de Marcos won’t like that.”
“Antonio—who is he?” asked Stark.
“The old fellow who was counting the guns. He’s a Purépecha elder and leader of Los Hijos,” said Domenica. “Is there no other way? Can’t you make a cure? A vaccine?”
“Modern medicine is miraculous,” said Stark. “But Joaquin knows all our tricks. We need the virus to make a vaccine. We need Joaquin to get the virus.” He sighed deep, saying, “And we need you to get Joaquin.”
Domenica considered Stark for a long, uncomfortable moment, during which he felt certain she could see through him to the foam at the back of his antiviral helmet. Finally, she said, “You’re a farmer.”
Stark’s head shot back as if she’d jabbed him in the face. “Yes. That’s right. Well, I grew up on a farm.”
“You’re a farmer,” Domenica said. “I’ve worked with farmers from New Mexico to Nicaragua. It’s in the way you speak, your hands, the way you stand.”
Stark imagined Grandfather saying that American agriculture was doomed if Henry David was a farmer. “I grew up on a cooperative farm”—he smiled—“in Wisconsin.”
“I worked on a quop in New Mexico,” Domenica said. “All certified heirloom seed.”
“That was my grandfather’s initiative in the push for Land Reform,” Stark said, seizing the chance to brag.
“Oil and food are at a premium these days. Orbegón doesn’t hide his lust for the United States’ arable land,” Domenica said, “and if Mexico breaks through Tejas, they won’t waste time with your gold-mold-infested farms. They’ll come for the functioning cooperatives and Land Reform farms.” Those eyes. Those penetrating, damning eyes. “Why help them take your land, Dr. Stark?”
Stark lifted one shoulder, a shrug of defiance and dismissal. “I’m a dumb American. They don’t frighten me.”
“They frighten us, Doctor.” Domenica scooted f
orward and took his hand in hers. “What does frighten you?”
Stark felt sardonic, angry that she was playing nun with him, trying to “reach” him. “What if Joaquin has already left Mexico and we’re too late to do anything about it?” He raised his eyebrows at her. “How’s that for scary?”
Domenica looked so comically frightened with her dark eyes and large mouth that Stark laughed.
He took his hand back and pointed at her. “What scares me is you not coming back to La Alta with me, Domenica, because if you and I don’t stop Joaquin,” Stark said, “then he wins, and this is the end of Mexico.” He stood up and suddenly felt the pressing urge to flee this place and get back to the National Institute. He glanced at the soundproofed door, heard running outside, then gave Domenica his best urgent look. “Please, Sister. We don’t have time to talk about politics and farming anymore.”
She stood and looked wobbly, light-headed. Stark offered his hand but she refused it. “I can see that.” She went to the door and opened it. Outside, Pirate and old Antonio were talking and Pirate locked eyes with Domenica.
Domenica said, “I’m going with Dr. Stark.”
Pirate lowered his head and closed his eyes.
“What? Where are you going?” Antonio asked, his voice hard and resonant.
Domenica put her hands on Antonio’s and Pirate’s shoulders, and they walked down the black hallway together, with Stark walking slowly behind. “I have to explain something to you two.”
SATURDAY, MAY 21. 11:00 A.M.
NO ONE LIVED in the Villa anymore. That was the family’s old name for the house of walls painted bright yellow, of hydrangea gardens and potted rubber trees. An open roof and three floors of balconies looked down on a patio of rust-red tiles—a sunny peaceful retreat in what was once the banking district of downtown Mexico City.
Joaquin Delgado came to the Villa after stumbling down highways jammed with cars fleeing the city and lined with dazed penitents holding, as he did, heavy whips in one hand. The priest with the black-wool robes and deep eye sockets called to those in the cars, begging them to join the procession. The sound of lashing and gasps of pain became the whole world. The magic number was thirty-nine. Thirty-nine Aves. Thirty-nine lashes.
But each member of that mad procession died, either from blood loss, or with buboes bulging like clumps of poisonous mushrooms in their armpits and necks. Soon, even the insane priest who had guided them, screaming his bizarre chant of Spanish and Latin, lay down to die on the side of the highway. The fanning skirts of his cape were spread like black wings, his final Ave a wet, coughing prayer.
Walking. Walking. Walking. Walking in a life-circle.
Back to the Villa.
Congested downtown life had vanished, and now traffic rivered in every direction from the city. Whole neighborhoods, like this one, were lonely with the sound of wind blowing newspapers in somersaults up empty streets. The lock on the Villa’s door was easily forced. Someone had recently abandoned the house, leaving with it pictures of a family of four children, three indígena housekeepers, a mother. Not Joaquin’s family, but a comforting nucleus nonetheless. The furniture in the living room was lustrous mundo-baroque of dark, hard rain-forest wood. The rubber trees nodded in desultory breezes—bigger, broader in leaf, but somehow true to memory. They leaned toward Joaquin as he walked onto the patio. The red-ceramic floor tiles were the same. He lay down and pressed his hot body against their cool surfaces.
Then the dreams came again. Walking. A colonnade of doors and an angry snap of leather and wire. Thirty-nine times. Then a prayer to San Felipe, Patron of Ascensión.
Joaquin scalded the smooth tiles with his body. When he shifted to find a cool spot, the shell of scabs on his back cracked open.
“Virus y veneno y virus y veneno,” the mad, dead priest intoned, taking Joaquin’s good hand, dragging him to his feet, and guiding him down the colonnade of doors. Cape swirling, he stopped and opened one to reveal a small sailboat tossing on a river of lava, coursing down a mountain slope. “You are different from all the others,” the vampire priest said. “You understand that immunity is a matriarchy. That you are poison.”
“Virus sum,” Joaquin agreed and wrote it on the wall of his childhood bedroom.
“Wrote” it? No, he would write it. That hadn’t happened yet.
Joaquin pushed his body away from the tiled patio floor. The sun had extinguished itself, and his body shivered in the cold, mountain night. He had never seen stars from his childhood home before, but with this part of Ascensión powerless, he could see a spray of silver overhead. More cracks opened in the scabs upon his back, and he felt breeze on fresh blood as he went into the Villa. He walked upstairs, found that his old room had a child’s bed in it, and fell asleep on its cold sheets.
Another door, down the colonnade. Turquoise sky vaulted over a hill of lion-colored grass, and the smell of sagebrush scorched the wind. Like the center of a flaming jet, the sun became a crown of spikes jutting from the heavens. Joaquin stood looking at the sky through the magic door.
A woman stood on the hill’s dry hay, looking up at the shining corona. Over her head she wore a light blue shawl with a yellow hem, embroidered with stars. Her smile was bright against her dark skin, a swath of cream in coffee. She lifted her hand, beckoning him. “Do you know who I am?” she asked in her musical voice.
There was a metaphysical force in the world, Joaquin knew. He had jokingly called it the “Matriarch,” in his days as a graduate student in Monterrey, but, in lecture, he alternately called it the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mother Mary, or even Tonanzin, an Aztec mother goddess. The name was arbitrary to the young Joaquin; the Matriarch’s power was not: Immunity. “Yes,” Joaquin whispered, “I know you.”
Joaquin smelled roses as she lifted her shawl and draped it over her shoulders. She pulled him into her arms and they looked at the magnificent sun together. The Matriarch was selfless, existing only to protect and defend. But she was utterly self-indulgent, too, an enclosed soul. She was fearful of foreigners and fiercely tribal—reactionary, slumbering in repose when there was no enemy, but crushing in her response when a foe intruded on her sacred earth. “You can always call on me,” she whispered, stroking Joaquin’s arm, “whether you have a wish or a problem. Call, and I shall come.”
Joaquin twisted in her arms and looked into her oval face. She was the greatest advocate of humanity. In Joaquin’s work as a viral therapist, however, the Matriarch was ever his adversary. “You would help even me, señorita?”
The beautiful woman looked up at the heavenly display. But when she looked back, she had a white visage with hollow eyes, lascivious tongue, and snapping fangs. “Oh, oh, yes, especially you, my dearest.” Scowling into his face, a word was written backwards on her forehead.
Joaquin recoiled, but she had him in her arms now. “No!” cried Joaquin, trying to pull away. This woman was a petty advocate for humanity, at best. She stood at the body’s gate, the high priestess of a destructrix cult, standing against the virus, never understanding the irony of her existence, never learning from the exchange between her precious self and the viral enemy, except to catalog its DNA in the sacred scrolls of her memory.
The Matriarch held Joaquin in her iron embrace, yelling, an operatic scream rising in vaulted thirds, and her breath was fetid with the smell of viruses and death devoured. She squeezed him until Joaquin’s breath escaped in a heave. “You’re killing me,” he gasped.
She laughed a husky, aroused laugh. “I must know you.” Suddenly he recognized the backward word on her forehead: It was his own name. “Never fear. Am I not here, I that am your Mother?”
Fever dreams, Joaquin thought, surfacing from sleep’s lava. The Matriarch comes for me when I’m weak. Joaquin would never dethrone her with his work, for her power was a legacy. She was all mothers, from across time. She was a list of the viruses killed, bacteria eradicated. The sum tally of a mother’s active immunity was logged in the memory of her lymphocytes. Wh
en those cells crossed the placenta into the fetal bloodstream, a pregnant mother conferred this bestiary of viruses and bacteria to her child—along with the bestiary from her mother before, and her mother’s mother in an ancient litany. Without this matriarchy, Joaquin knew, there would be no immunity in the world. Mother to daughter, mother to daughter—here is what our bodies know. Here is what we have fought and killed, for generations before you were born. Take my blood. There. Now you are protected.
She was strong and he was too weak. He could never overthrow her and she would never abdicate.
But she could be fooled.
“Help me,” wheezed Joaquin into her ear. “Ave Madre.”
The Matriarch faltered. Her grip slackened. The rotten breath exhausted and that kind voice of shimmering arpeggios and incense returned. “Oh, my poor child.”
Far away, a rhythm of codons infected an old Spaniard in London, like a tune played in another room. The old scientist sat bent before the gel screens in his workroom, scrolling through genomes, J. S. Bach tolling his uniform measures from the computer.
“My poor, poor baby,” cooed the Matriarch, coddling Joaquin. “Come to me.”
Searching for a viral vehicle in which to mount tools to aid patients in postsurgical recovery, the old scientist examined the genome for the fourth serotype of dengue, found nothing of use, then moved on to the Potosi virus, then the Machupo. Green Bay flu. Adenovirus. But as he searched, an unexpressed code rattled in the old man’s mind, railing against the orderliness of the other viruses and the perfection of Bach’s concertos. What was it? Was it from a natural genome, dengue perhaps, or a code of his own design? Where had he heard it before? He pulled up that genome again, dengue-4, and watched it cascade down his liquid screen, but couldn’t find the sequence that haunted him. Codons beat like drums in a song whose name escaped, but whose rhythm snagged the memory, the body.
The Patron Saint of Plagues Page 29