by Glenn Cooper
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Emma said.
“Yeah?”
“My father’s a doctor. He knew about it before anyone.”
“Cool,” he said. “I’ll get your Diet Cokes.”
He came back with the sodas and lingered. There were only a few occupied tables left.
“What are you guys doing this afternoon?” he asked. “We’re closing. The manager says there’s no point staying open.”
“What two can do, three can do,” Kyra said, giggling some more.
He coughed a couple of times over their heads and Emma handed him her napkin. “Ever hear of germs?”
“My big sister used to call me a germ,” he said.
“I want to go to the waterfront,” Kyra said.
“That’s cool,” the kid said. “My mother and aunt just got back from a Caribbean cruise. The harbor’s the closest I’m ever going to get to a cruise ship.”
“We don’t have to pay the bill, do we?” Kyra asked, batting her eyelids.
The waiter looked around the nearly empty room and said, “Hell no. Let’s get out of here.”
10
It was 6 p.m. when Emma finally answered one of Jamie’s calls. She was characteristically unapologetic. Tossing around statements like, it’s no big deal, and the phone must have been charging in another room, she didn’t give an inch and insisted she’d been home all day. On her own. After a carefree afternoon with Kyra and their new friend, where a remarkably unpopulated Boston seemed like their private playground, she had, in fact, come home alone, and while she talked to her father, she popped some frozen pizza squares into the oven.
“I can’t come home tonight,” Jamie told her.
“Why not?”
He told her the truth.
“How long is that going to last?”
“The CDC and the public health department are calling the shots on the quarantine,” he said. “I wish I could give you a good answer. But here’s the thing. You need to stay put. No exceptions.”
“What about school tomorrow?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Hear what?”
“Boston, Brookline, all the schools in the state are going to be closed for the rest of the week. There’ll be a decision Sunday night whether to extend into next week.”
“A dream come true,” she said, sarcastically.
“This is no party, kiddo,” he said. “The latest figures from the CDC show over three thousand cases in the US with an unknown number in other countries. I think this epidemic is just getting started.”
“Is it bird flu, like Dr. Emma said?”
“No, Doctor, it’s something new.”
“Oh yeah, what’s it do to you?”
“It affects people’s memories.”
“I hope it infects my math teacher, so he won’t remember my last quiz.”
“Was it bad?”
“What’s your definition of bad?” she asked.
“B minus or lower.”
“Then it was very bad. My pizza’s ready. See you when I see you.”
“Don’t—” He didn’t manage to say, leave the house, before she ended the call.
Carrie Bowman was outside his door, waiting for him to get off the call. She wanted to know if he was going to suit up with her to see Andy Soulandros. She had been in his room most of the day.
“Anything new?” Jamie asked.
“You’ll see. Give me fifteen minutes.”
Jamie decided to make his rounds, not of patients—Soulandros was the only one—but of fellow Avenue Qs, a moniker that one of the nurses came up with. He gravitated toward an elderly African-American woman named Margaret who was sitting alone, her face buried in her phone. She was a diabetic who had been in the waiting room with an infected foot ulcer.
“How goes it?” he asked.
“I think my foot’s better.”
He hadn’t meant her foot, although he was glad to know the antibiotics were working.
“Good to hear. Reading or watching?”
She held up her phone and he saw that she had been studying some kind of Bible app. “When are they going to let us out, Dr. A?”
“I wish I knew. The good news is that so far, all of us Qs are doing well.”
“Amen to that.”
On his way to the isolation room he stopped and chatted with more people, all with the same unanswerable question. They had been pasted to the TV coverage and every new statistic that splashed onto the screen deepened the collective gloom. He wasn’t going to censor them, but he secretly wished the TV feed would go down. This was only the first day of quarantine. How would Avenue Q look on day three or five?
He joined Carrie in the gowning room.
“Did you find your daughter?” she asked.
“Yeah but she was oblivious to how worried I was. It’s infuriating.”
“I was a total nightmare when I was a teenager. I’m scared if I ever have kids that karma’s going to get me.”
“Really? You? A nightmare?”
“Seriously. I’ll have you talk to my mom next time she’s in town.”
They finished suiting up and entered Soulandros’s room. He had calmed down considerably, and they had decided to keep him free of restraints. However, the room was still locked, and a nurse was monitoring him on CCTV.
Soulandros focused all his attention on Carrie and smiled at her. He furrowed his brow in thought and said, “Car-rie.”
Jamie said into his helmet’s microphone, “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“We’ve been working on it,” she said. “There’s more.”
Jamie noticed her wobble.
“You okay?” he said.
“Just a little dizzy. It’s hot in this thing.”
He went around to the back of her Ebola suit and saw that the valve to her oxygen supply was on the off position. He turned it full on.
“You forgot your air supply.”
“Oh Jeez,” she said, “did I?”
“Okay now?”
“Much better thanks.”
When she was rock-steady she went to the patient’s bed rails and said to him, “My name is Carrie. Very good. What is your name?”
“Andy.” He was more fluent than earlier.
“Good. Where are you?”
He huffed as he thought. “In hos-pi-tal.”
“You hear that?” Carrie said. “He learned hospital and spontaneously used the preposition. I didn’t drill him on that specifically.”
“Procedural memory,” Jamie said. “The grammatical architecture is accessible once he’s relearned the words.”
“Okay,” Carrie said, “the pièce de résistance. If it works.” She smiled at Andy and he reciprocated, though his was a bit goofy. She patted her suit over her belly. “Andy, tell me what you want?”
Soulandros looked around and set his eyes on a cart by a wall. “I. I want. I want food.”
“Why do you want food?”
He closed his eyes hard and grunted a few times before saying, “Hun-gry.”
“Very good, Andy! Let’s get you some food.”
Later, they sat together on steel stools in the quiet pharmacy room behind the nurses’ station. Jamie was telling Carrie to keep detailed notes on her tutelage.
“This is going to make a killer article,” he said. “It’ll be fast-tracked like you won’t believe.”
“New England Journal?” she asked.
“They’ll go ape for it. This could define your career. The doctor who taught the first Febrile Amnesia Syndrome patient to talk again. Couple it with the molecular biology data and some PET scans, if we can figure out how to safely get him over to Nuclear Medicine, and it’ll be the seminal paper.”
“You’ll be the senior author, right?”
“Me? I don’t think so. I’m going to be radioactive. Everyone involved in the Alzheimer’s study is going to be a pariah.”
“But Steadman’s the villain in the story, you’r
e not.”
“Guilt by association. It is what it is. I’m going to be keeping my head down, working on containing the spread.”
“What’s the plan?”
“As soon as I get out of quarantine, I’m going to collaborate with the woman who designed the adenovirus vector to figure out how to put the genie back in the bottle.”
Carrie made a face at the first sip of coffee. “Do you think they’d bring us Starbucks?” she asked.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Her phone dinged with a message. She glanced at it and shook her head a bit.
“Go ahead and answer if you need to.”
She told him it was her boyfriend, an associate at a Boston law firm. At first, he’d been supportive of her situation, but over the course of the day as the number of cases crept higher, his texts had become tinged with hostility.
“I think he’s scared,” she said. “He’s a bit of a hypochondriac anyway and this has kind of put him over the top. He’s sitting at home, afraid to go to work, texting me every five minutes. He’s pissed off that I’m not there with him, like I should leave the hospital in the middle of an epidemic to give him a back rub or something.”
Jamie smiled. “The Y chromosome isn’t always covered in glory.”
*
At ten, Jamie did his last walkabout for the night. The residents of Avenue Q were in good shape, physically at least. He was encouraged by that and tried to pass along a sense of optimism to elevate the shut-ins.
As soon as he got to his sleeping quarters, he rang Emma, anticipating another frustrating round of ring-throughs and voice mails. But the good-fortune express rolled on. She answered promptly and wasn’t the least bit shirty with him. He heard the TV on in the living room.
“Watching the news?” he asked.
“Netflix. An old TV show called Law and Order. Ever hear of it?”
“Indeed, I have. If you like it, there’s a million episodes, give or take.”
“We’re running low on milk,” she said.
“I don’t want you going out.”
“Kyra wants to do a sleepover. Her mom’s not coming home ’cause she’s slammed at work.”
Jamie had met Kyra’s mother a few times for quick words through front doors and car windows. They were practically strangers but there was an unspoken bond between them; both were single parents, and both had somewhat unpredictable schedules; she was a detective in the Brookline Police Department.
“I’m sure the police have their hands full right now,” he said. “But it’s safest for both of you to stay put.”
“What about the milk? You want me to eat dry cereal?”
“Times are tough, kiddo. I’ll call you in the morning. Lock the door and set the alarm.”
Mandy had told him earlier that she’d try to call sometime after ten. Just past eleven, he got an email update from the CDC to the FAS working group. He read it, then broke down and reached out to her first. She was in the lab and sounded exhausted.
“You there on your own?” he asked.
“Yeah. I sent my techs home a few hours ago.”
“What are you working on?”
“I’ve shelved the basic stuff for now, trying to understand what makes the new virus tick. First things first. We need to know whether we can kill it with conventional antivirals. I’ve been setting up lethality assays. It’ll take up to three days for meaningful read-outs. What’s happening on Avenue Q?”
He chuckled. It was still funny. He had never seen the Broadway play, but he understood it involved a cast of humans and puppets. Right now, he felt kind of fuzzy, like one of the latter. “Nothing bad, believe it or not. Everyone’s asymptomatic and our patient is showing the capacity to learn new things.”
“Remember or learn?”
“Good question. I think it’s learning.”
“Why aren’t the altered CREBs sitting on the new memory gates too?”
“I can’t answer that. Maybe there’s a structural difference between established gates and new ones. We’re going to have to do a shitload of molecular biology to figure this out. If we have the time.”
“That sounds ominous. What’s behind that cheerful statement?”
“I just got CDC’s latest numbers. It’s bad. Worse than what’s on the news.”
“How bad?”
“Domestically, over ten thousand cases have been reported in all but four states. These are only people who’ve been seen in hospitals and clinics, so the actual numbers are probably significantly higher. This is as contagious as it gets. They’re saying that it’s a little too early to do good epidemiological modeling, but so far, its infectivity is behaving a lot like bird-flu epidemics. There’s some data that’s just coming in from Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands and it looks similar.”
“My hospital had several cases before they shut down the ER,” she said. “I’ve got swabs from four patients in the freezer.”
“Be careful with the virus, okay?”
“I am. I will.”
“How’s Derek doing?”
She sounded sincerely grateful that he had asked.
“He’s been at the house all day. His division chief shut his lab and sent them all packing. He’s been texting me constantly to come home.”
“You should, at least for the night. You’ve got to be running on fumes.”
“One of my people lives nearby. She brought me a blanket and a pillow for my office sofa. I want to start early. Derek’s okay.”
He hesitated but he wanted to put it out there. “Mandy, I—”
“Please don’t say it, Jamie.”
*
It must have been a dreamless sleep because nothing came to mind other than the insistent knocking on his door.
“Yeah, what?” he said, shifting the blanket and sitting up.
Martha Harrison, the most senior nurse in isolation, poked her head in. “Dr. Abbott, could you come with me?”
He touched the screen of his charging phone. It was 2:30.
He’d gone to bed fully clothed and only had to pull on shoes. He followed the nurse without asking why; he had a sense it was something awful and he selfishly wanted a few seconds of respite before crashing into some new version of reality.
The nurse led him into the med room behind the nurses’ station.
He saw her sitting on the floor, her hair in a mess, like she’d been running her hands through in all directions.
“Hey, Carrie,” he said, kneeling beside her. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” she said. Her eyes were red from crying.
“Okay, what are you experiencing?”
“Where is this place?”
He wanted to cry too. “This is the hospital, Carrie. It’s Mass General.”
“Okay, okay. Why am I here?”
“We’re all in quarantine because of the virus. Do you remember the virus?”
A small “no” came out.
“Do you know who I am?”
She nodded.
“What’s my name?”
She sobbed, “I’m sorry, I don’t. What’s happening to me?”
“What’s your name?”
“Carrie Bowman.”
“Good. What’s today’s date?”
“Should I know that?”
He got up and helped her to her feet. “It’s okay. You don’t need to know it.” He reached into a drawer for a surgical mask. “Would you mind putting this on?”
“I don’t mind.”
He calmly talked to the nurse. She looked nearly as scared as Carrie. “Martha, could you set up Isolation Room Two? Dr. Bowman’s going to sleep in there tonight.”
11
In the borderland between sleep and waking, there is a moment when it is all but impossible to separate dreams from reality, and in that moment, Jamie chose to believe that nothing was wrong with Carrie. By the time his feet hit the floor, the moment was well past. He performed some rudiment
ary ablutions, pocketed his phone, and draped his stethoscope over his neck.
He wasn’t prepared for what he saw in the corridor.
One of the nurses was on the floor, curled in a fetal position. A young phlebotomist, who had been caught up in the quarantine doing a blood draw on an ER patient, was facing a wall, naked from the waist down, clothes around her ankles. She had a hacking cough. As Jamie approached her, Dave Soulandros came into view from around the corner, his erect penis showing from his open fly. He grabbed at the phlebotomist and began humping her from behind.
Jamie shouted, “Hey, what are you doing!”
Jamie was on him fast, pulling him off, but Soulandros began grunting and swinging at him with balled-up fists.
“Stop it!” Jamie said. “Cut it out!”
One punch landed hard on his shoulder and Jamie reacted with a sharp, two-handed shove sending Soulandros off-balance against a wall. He lost his footing and hit his rump on the floor where he suddenly became interested in his penis and began to masturbate.
Jamie left him, pulled up the woman’s panties and khakis, and turned her around. She looked scared and lost. Her name was on her hospital ID. She coughed, and he felt the spray on his face.
“Angie, it’s Dr. Abbott. How are you feeling?”
“Ca-ca-ca—”
“You can’t remember?” he asked.
“I-I-I-I—”
“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. Come with me.”
He led her down the corridor to the nursing station where over a dozen people were milling around, all of them looking confused, some mute, some mumbling a few syllables, many coughing.
Jamie uttered, “Christ,” and left the phlebotomist with the gaggle. He sprinted toward the isolation rooms and looked through the double windows. Carrie’s bed was empty but someone in an Ebola suit was lying on the floor, motionless.
In the gowning room he reached for a hanging suit but stopped himself. What was the point? He had been exposed on day one and he had been exposed again just now. Emma’s face floated through his mind. If he got infected, she’d be alone. It was an unbearable thought, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it now. As long as he was compos mentis, he was a doctor with a job to do.
He flung the inner door open and rolled the Ebola suit over. Through the visor, he saw it was the nurse, Martha Harrison. She was unresponsive to shaking and didn’t seem to be breathing. He urgently unzipped her suit and removed the head gear. She was dusky blue and pulseless with dilated pupils. When he extended her neck to check her airway there was some stiffness. He suspected early rigor mortis, but he began to do CPR anyway, and when he pressed his lips against hers and breathed into her mouth, the phrase the kiss of death ran through his consciousness. He continued chest compressions for a few minutes to no avail and quietly accepted her fate.