Trix isn’t sure if she’s up to it. She checks a review: ‘Home-Grown Ebola Horror’. ‘Gripping… compelling real-life drama… reality TV at its finest… a must-see.’
Another option before sleep on this weird day would be to check global reaction to Sam and Bill. There’s still no personal message from the now-famous Bill Peters. Forgotten me already, she thinks. Just like that.
The documentary begins in a specially outfitted Ebola X ambulance in which a Red Cross medical team are driving to a small Waikato town to investigate a possible case. En route, the doctor in charge of the operation gives a quick run-down on the number of cases in New Zealand (12 confirmed in the last five weeks, with eight deaths) and the danger the disease poses if not eradicated—to the whole country, not just the uninsured in isolated rural locations. He says that the disease appears to be carried by native bats and possibly always has been, but the remarkable proliferation of bat colonies in parts of the North Island, on the back of exceptional insect growth, has increased bat–human interaction at food sites such as fruit trees, where the virus is spread by bat saliva.
Trix gets up and shuts the bedroom window. There are bats on the Mount now. A couple of times recently something blacker than night has flashed overhead, like a fat and confident moth, squeaking triumphantly.
The convoy of three ambulances arrives at the first bungalows marking the outskirts of a small town. It passes a squat brick pub, a little school with a cracked and weedy netball court, a few shops. Trix hasn’t been through it, as far as she can recall, not that there’s anything that memorable about it. Some previously neglected and depressed small communities like this are now attracting city leavers and immigrants. She’s read somewhere that the so-called revival of small town New Zealand is not all good news for locals. The traditional generational link to Place is missing, for one thing. Cashed-up newcomers in small towns outnumber the original inhabitants, are younger, and have different expectations and desires (including squeezing out the elderly and demolishing their modest houses).
The camera tracks down the paint-peeling side of a state house-type residence. The lawn is long and weedy and littered with plastic toys. A small vegetable patch at the back is unruly. The camera finds the victim on the back steps. Alicia, the narrator says, is a thirty-year-old mother of three boys aged ten, eight and six. Trix looks for them. They are not there with their mother behind the house. Alicia is alone, slumped on the back steps, listless in a pilled and baggy black tracksuit. The camera annoys the woman. She scowls and sighs. Why would she agree to this, Trix wonders, to being hounded? It soon becomes apparent in the way Alicia brushes flies from her face and pulls on her laceless shoes, that she is not just annoyed about the camera; that her annoyance runs deeper. When asked how she feels, the young woman replies as if the answer must be obvious. ‘Terrible.’ She squints against the light. ‘Hot and heavy. My bones ache.’
The way Alicia leaves strikes Trix as odd. She walks herself around to the front of the house, waving away with an irritated flourish the offers of help from the medical staff in their white suits, masks and gumboots. Before getting in the back of the ambulance, she turns around, peevishly, to the horseshoe of locals come to stand and look. They just stand and look, the people of her community, about 30 metres away, impassively, in their old clothes and self-cut hair, as if the woman is unpopular or a stranger. Then her husband steps forward. He is older by at least ten years, but fit and lean. The brief look the couple exchanges is inscrutable. Why so stoic and silent? Where are her children? Trix wonders if this is an example of community schism in small-town New Zealand, extending down to even the family level.
The three children stand in front of their house, well back from the cattle-like crowd but watching their mother with the same air of mute detachment. Trix hopes for a flicker of something from them, some recognition of the enormity of what is happening. Not even a wave goodbye? At last they look uncomfortable, embarrassed, but possibly only by the camera. It’s awful, Trix thinks. Awful that these people should be reduced to a trench warfare mentality; that they must harden themselves so to survive, to the degree that basic human qualities of sympathy and compassion are lost.
The house is already being sprayed, sterilised and cleared out by the medical team. Basic bedding, clothes and utensils are supplied to replace all those being taken away and burned. The doctor explains that the house has to be made habitable right away because locking it up and declaring it off-limits will not necessarily stop thieves or squatters entering. He says that if the woman had been exhibiting clear signs of infection, her family would have been taken back to the medical centre as well. It might just be the flu or Dengue fever, and probably is, but they can’t afford to take any risks. In the event of the woman testing positive for Ebola X or a new strain, in the next day or so the Red Cross, in coordination with other NGOs and stakeholders, will return to sterilise all the houses in town, quarantine the population, and attempt to find the Ebola transmission point. Extermination of bat colonies is problematic because they are an officially protected species. Colonies must be individually assessed and certified as Ebola X carriers.
After the house is declared safe and the medical staff have de-suited, following strict and careful procedure they climb into the two remaining ambulances and leave. The team drives back through the ragged countryside in silence. The setting sun flings red spokes though leafless trees. Two long-haired little girls in old knitted cardigans standing on a farm gate smile and wave as the ambulances pass. Probably expecting their mum or dad home any minute, Trix thinks. Like normal, healthy children.
Bill still hasn’t texted.
The story resumes at first light with an establishing shot of the Central Ebola Clinic outside Taupo. ‘Next day,’ reads a subtitle. There isn’t a cloud in the sky behind the sprawling single-storey complex, which is constructed out of large units similar to shipping containers. Some are joined together, some stand alone.
The young mother sits down heavily in a glassed visiting cell, like those found in prisons. Her fierce eyes are bloodshot. She wears a white hospital gown.
There is no connecting phone. The interviewer must shout through the glass. ‘How do you feel?’
Too tired to shout back, she just shakes her head. Still prickly though, she looks around the floor of the visiting cell with the demeanour of a child being told off and waiting for the lecture to end.
The husband is produced.
Her bloodshot eyes appear like lasers. She smiles and stands. They touch fingers against the glass. He has something for her: three notes from their three children. There is a cut while they are transferred to her. She sits and reads and silently cries. Her face runs with tears. Are they happy tears or tears of despair? Trix can’t tell. The generationally poor are so hard to read.
On one of the pages, Trix catches a glimpse of a child’s drawing: a yellow sun and a house with a family of happy figures out front, together. One of the energetically scribbled figures has a woman’s long hair. Trix is relieved. It’s the youngest boy’s hope for the future, that they will be reunited at home. But she hopes the older boys’ messages for their dying mother aren’t shown on screen, fearing they will be flat and hurried or off-topic, cold. It’s better to believe that the boys wrote thoughtful and beautiful expressions of love which will be a comfort to their mother in her final hours. Anxious, Trix considers turning the doco off.
There’s no message from Bill. The notes from the older boys remain private for some reason.
‘Two days later’, announces a subtitle. Alicia sits on the chair in the visiting cell again. Her eyes are still bloodshot and she moves slowly, but she can speak loudly enough to be heard through the glass. ‘I’ve think I’ve turned the corner, thank God. I feel a little better. But now Jasper is sick.’
The woman stands and Jasper, her husband, enters the cell through the back and joins her behind the glass, also clad in a white gown. He limps the few steps slowly, squints throug
h bloodshot eyes. He looks ten years older, seems hardly aware of his surroundings. Alicia stands with comparative ease and eases him down into the chair. His leanness has become frailty.
‘He’s very sick.’
His red eyes crack open and shut.
A doctor in her office reviews the woman’s case. ‘Alicia’s hydrating,’ she says, ‘keeping fluids down. Her blood pressure is good and there have been no secondary infections. All signs are promising. Her husband,’ she flicks her eyes up meaningfully from the clipboard she’s reading, ‘is very sick. The children still show no signs of infection. Nor does anyone else from the town.’
Back in the glass visiting cell, Alicia helps her husband to stand. It’s hard for him. Walking is hard. He hobbles out of the cell with her hand on his back.
Trix wonders why no one put their hand on Alicia’s back when she left home, supposedly dying. Why the special cold treatment for her?
Jasper died that night, says a subtitle. Alicia made a full recovery. Their children did not contract Ebola. No other cases have occurred in the Waikato at the time of broadcast and the cause of infection remains unknown.
Trix recalls the newly arrived alien, unconscious in his bubble of Perspex; his left eye black and swollen; his mute and heavy mouth; the all-too-human vacancy of the long unconscious and permanently damaged.
Tears had gleamed in Bill’s eyes when the camera cut to him.
The alien wore a sleeveless white gown, too, like the Ebola X victims. His limbs were thin. His left leg was held in a cast; the right was under the covers.
Bill had spoken of a familiar feeling of connection with this alien, despite the circumstances; how the jaw was the same as Sam’s, and even the broken left leg. The swollen eye was different, of course. A doctor said the alien’s vital signs were good and that his brain was showing some increased signs of activity, which indicated he might soon regain consciousness. The final shot, a wide one, had Bill sitting at the bedside like a relative keeping vigil over a loved one. She forgives him his silence.
14
People keep giving Bill stuff, business cards mainly (he has dozens), but also tax-deductible gifts, corporate tokens of gratitude for interviews given and dinners attended. One of three tables in his deluxe hotel room in New Hokitika is given over to the growing pile. Among the hand-carved wooden ducks, gold-plated chopsticks, cashmere cardigans and sunglasses are a magnificent pair of Zeiss binoculars in a hand-tooled leather case and a brass and aluminium Bugatti espresso machine with dual boilers; two things he’s decided he’ll take to the vineyard.
Showered, shaved, clear-headed, rested and with a rare hour to himself, Bill casts his eye over this pile of booty and settles on the packet of Red Baron cigarettes a South African journalist gave him last night. Bill must not smoke. It was purely the red Fokker triplane and black gothic lettering that caught his eye. Bill’s protest to the journalist that he didn’t smoke had been ignored. ‘Please,’ the young man implored, thrusting the packet at him with two hands. It was easier to take the cigarettes and move on. The Red Baron. The packet is half full and contains the journalist’s lighter. Bill smiles to himself. The greatest gift by far, more than any material thing, is the regard of his colleagues. Every word he says about Sam in New Hokitika has been listened to with something like reverence. The long and baffling years of battling to convince people of Sam’s existence, let alone importance, are over. Sometimes at a conference, press release, dinner party, work meeting or drinks event, the sight of professional people looking and listening to him with rapt attention has filled him with an almost overwhelming sense of vindication and relief. The truth has loosened a very heavy load. He feels generous and positively disposed towards everyone he meets, all of his fellow travellers in New Hokitika.
Bill knows he must destroy the Red Baron. Bin him.
Black lungs on the back and the Von Richthofen coat of arms: thin-hipped lions and what, a stork? Slapping bright house paint on their wood and canvas planes in a French paddock while artillery rumbled like summer thunder. They probably smoked pipes or cigars. Stood around in razor-sharp creases, swirling brandy bowls. The Flying Circus. What a lark. Kaputt. He almost throws the pack away.
Things aren’t quite right. No, the endless and exhaustive accounts of Bill’s time with Sam always only ever leave out one thing, something he’d forgotten or had preferred forgotten, which he has only ever told one person: Marama McKenzie, in 1986, just before she decided it would be better if they were friends.
The quiet hour ahead of Bill is a spiked pit. Something significant must be done to negotiate the memory of the Sam secret he only ever told Marama. ‘Manfred, shall we?’ He dons his rain coat and takes the Red Baron out through the fire-escape door by the lift. The demands of international smokers have allowed this violation of health and safety regulations. For hotel management smokefree rooms trump the outside possibility of a ten-storey fall.
The hissing, misty, carbon-sick atmosphere. Light rain comes straight down. The faint whiff of mulch, even at this height. The sense of water as an agent patiently seeking entry. The view is unlovely. The dreary puddled roofs of lesser hotels lie below, with their air con units and pipes and storage sheds. The fire escape seems the wettest, slipperiest metal pedestrian structure Bill’s ever seen. ‘Aged man,’ he thinks, ‘faints and falls to death.’ He puffs as if the cigarette is a cigar, not inhaling, enjoying the meditative draw and release of smoke. Rushed by nicotine, his mind lifts away to Marama and that thing he must never mention. She was quick, funny, green-eyed, slim of waist and limb. Scathing. Reasonable. Gorgeous. He’d accepted her decision at the time—philosophically, as they say. Fair call, he’d told himself; his partial attention wasn’t enough for her. But she was a loss. Worth more than his other two girlfriends in Westport and Greymouth combined, he’d thought at the time, but she was way more than that. She was the best person he knew; the only person who made him forget Sam—and that was power. They’d parked up in his Morris Minor at Hokitika Beach for lunch when she told him it was over. The milkshake she slurped, the daylight public place: he should have known that something was up.
A couple of nights before she dumped him, while walking to a new pub with her, it had rained. Not unusual in Hokitika in high summer, even then. The run in the rain—and something else—transformed her. Or she was transformed upon arrival in the candle-lit pub. The power had cut out. Her short cotton dress stuck to her in the flickering dark, stained a darker green by the rain, and green was her colour. Her brown skin glowed. She was luminous, exultant. Yes, exultant, but also unusually silent. It felt like something important could happen at any moment, or that it would happen. Like maybe she’d cut him a break if he said something stupid. She waited at the wall, distant from the happy candle-lit scrum seeking service at the bar. As Bill peered closely at his money in the dark and joked with the others about overpaying, he turned a couple of times to peek at her, this vision which he turned away from shyly, a little incredulously, afraid that too much attention would uncover a flaw. He took her to a pool of darkest shadow.
To come to it, the thing he told Marama but no one else. Bill takes a proper drag of his Red Baron. He told her that Sam had advised him, telepathically, that he, Sam, was being deported from his home planet for a kind of crime or wrongdoing, when something unexpected had happened. There’d been an error, a glitch in the teleportation device, and Sam had found himself spat out on Earth rather than on the penal planet.
Marama’s sole comment before leaving had been, ‘Penal planet.’
The banana milkshake in his car the next day, in a public space and in daylight. It was too wholesome for Marama.
‘I think we should be friends.’ Slurp.
‘Okay, fair enough. I could use a friend.’
Oh, she was a major loss. The biggest! And Sam was the deal-breaker. Or at least the telepathic confession of his criminality was. And really, where had that confession of Sam’s come from? Sam communicated affection, w
armth and peace nonverbally, but actual information always came in writing. It wasn’t as if Bill had suddenly experienced words plunging letter by letter into his mind like stone tablets, nor had Sam activated a short film behind his eyes. It was simply an understanding Bill had arrived at, at some point, somehow.
‘You think I’m crazy?’
‘Yep.’ Slurp.
‘Okay, fair enough.’
Bill could laugh then. Maybe I should have cried, he thinks, and changed my life. Broken up with my other girlfriends and stuck to the facts. If I’d held on to Marama everything would have been better. She would have grounded me in the right ways. My life would have played out differently. I would have had a community in her extended family; a rock to build upon. I would have flourished.
He sighs and billows smoke. Or not.
Of one thing he is certain. His briefly held belief that Sam was a criminal on his way to a penal planet can never be mentioned to anyone. Too many powerful people frightened of what the alien might say when he wakes up are seeking ways to discredit him. What if the alien talks about resource distribution through higher wages and tax on corporate capital? What if the alien believes the environment should be prioritised over economic growth at any cost? It has been claimed that Sam’s head injuries make him not only incompetent, should he wake up, but dangerous. The science around his DNA is being questioned, too. As with tobacco and climate change, a few scientists have come out against the overwhelming consensus that Sam is extraterrestrial, claiming his DNA is more likely the result of radical Earthly mutation. Those scientists are criminals, Bill thinks, either fraudsters or criminally negligent, and should be held to account. And the amount of attention they’re getting is criminal, too.
He flicks away the butt, with its yellow-brown puddle of sludge on the bottom. The problem of his empty hour solves itself. A walk in the rain before a drink is just the thing. Maybe pop in and see Sam? A spontaneous gesture?
Star Sailors Page 17