by Anna Jansson
She walked around the living room, stood a while at Linda’s bedroom door, watching her sleep, took another round through the apartment.
Finally she called Emil to check that he really had been given medicine. He could tell right away that she was worried, although she tried to joke it off.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“I wish I could be with you, Emil. I would like to, you know that.” She tried to say it without letting him hear that she was crying. She had to let her nose run without sniffing.
“Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll manage. I talk with a kid named Zebastian; he’s cool.”
After hanging up, Maria wandered out into the kitchen and made a sandwich, which she couldn't swallow. The bites seemed to expand in her mouth. She stood by the window and looked at the streetlamp shining outside the library. The street was deserted. Not a car.
She had to talk with someone. Talk about her fears. She didn’t want to call Krister. He would come over in a flash and think that everything was going to be like it used to be and she couldn’t risk that. The Hartmans were surely already asleep and Jesper Ek had been admitted for observation at the old sanitarium. She couldn’t call there after nine o’clock. So who was there to talk with?
She wondered how late the information line was open? Was it only during office hours or was it possible to talk with someone now? Maria dialed the number and waited. Jonathan Eriksson answered immediately, as if he had been sitting by the phone waiting for it to ring.
“I don’t intend to discuss this with you when you’re not yourself. This is humiliating for both of us. Go to bed for Christ’s sake and don’t disturb me anymore.”
“What?” Maria wondered if she was hearing right. If this was the support they intended to offer the parents of the children being interned at Klinte School there was even more reason to despair than she had guessed! “I didn’t want anything anyway,” she said, slamming down the receiver.
Chapter 14
Jonathan Eriksson realized his mistake as soon as the caller hung up. The steady tone in the receiver drilled itself into his gut. What had he said? “I don’t intend to discuss this with you when you’re not yourself. This is humiliating for both of us.” After four increasingly abusive calls from Nina he hadn’t even considered that the fifth might be from someone else. This is called “logical sequence” in intelligence tests—in reality it doesn’t work that way. Reality is seldom logical and he did not have caller ID so that he could even correct his mistake. Damn it, damn it, damn it, what a stupid mistake!
Jonathan walked once around the room and slammed the walls with his fist before it occurred to him that the person in the adjoining room was likely trying to sleep.
Nina’s scornful voice still echoed in his head. First she’d called enraged that his mother had taken their son to her home. The old bag had no right to go into the house without her permission and take him! After the first call there were two tearful calls apologizing and promising that everything was fine. “Please forgive me! I’m sorry! I swear, Jonathan, it will never happen again. Never again. I love you. When this is over, we’ll go away. We can take that trip to Paris we dreamed about. Just you and me. Malte can stay with your mother and we can have time for each other like we had before, when we couldn’t be without each other a single minute. Do you remember the sandpit on Faro? Do you remember when we made love by the sea? Do you remember the vacation in Smogen? I want us to start over. We need a fresh start. It’s been tough for a while, but I promise that everything will be better. I promise.”
The final call, of course, proved the opposite.
“I can tell you’ve been drinking. Don’t lie to me, Nina. The least you can do is admit you’re drunk.” And then things got really bad.
“It’s none of your business, damn it! You do your fancy job and I’ll do mine. If you only gave me the appreciation I deserve, if you only listened to me and cared even a tiny bit about what it’s like for us at home everything would be different. Of course I have to wind down with a glass of wine to relax and go to sleep after a day like this. I have to manage everything myself while you frolic in the linen closet at the hospital. I know there’s someone else, or are there several? Maybe there are several, Jonathan, that’s why you’re never able to when you come home. I’m so tired, you say. I’ve been on call the whole weekend. That’s what you say when you come home and we haven’t seen a trace of you for days. I’m sure it was exhausting for you…. How many do you manage on a weekend?”
There was no point in arguing with her when she was in that state. He’d hung up and then, when it rang again … Well, what should he think?
Jonathan sat down at the computer to pass the time. As agitated as he felt now it would be impossible to fall asleep. He opened the window to let in the coolness of the night. The worst thing was that Malte had to experience this. The thought that Nina’s emotional outbursts and lack of supervision might damage the boy made Jonathan furious. But there was no way out, however he looked at it he was stuck. If it hadn’t been for Malte, he would have left Nina long ago. After the initial violent passion there was only a gaping vacuum. The feeling of distaste when she lay in bed drooling and snoring, a sour stench of sweat and stale booze in the room. No, he didn’t love her anymore and he was so unspeakably tired of lying for her sake, coaxing her home from parties: “You look tired, dear, maybe we should go home now.” “Tomorrow will be another day. Now I think it’s time to go home.” “You really look tired, Nina. Perhaps we should say goodbye and …” “Well, Nina is not sleeping well and is so easily affected. Wine goes to your head so easily when you haven’t slept.”
What she said was quite true; he really had no desire to touch her anymore. They deserved something better, but you can’t cut a child in two. Shared custody would in the worst case mean that he would only see his son every other weekend. But even the thought of having full custody with her taking care of him every other weekend made his stomach turn. Forty-eight hours without being able to check that his son wasn’t in harm’s way. How could he protect him, how could he keep an eye on him if they separated?
Malte loved his mother and was loyal to a fault. He always believed her promises and was always disappointed. It was painful to stand by and see it happen again and again. But a custody dispute can be so humiliatingly ugly and dirty. Nina would not hesitate to make up preposterous lies, not if she felt pressured and offended. How could he avoid that?
And how could he arrange things so that people wouldn’t know? For Malte’s sake more than for anyone else’s, he thought about that. If only he had someone to talk with—someone who could understand what a nightmare he was living—without judging and moralizing. Someone who could help put order into the chaos of thoughts that made him live through the days in a haze.
Absentmindedly Jonathan browsed the Internet for hits on “medicine + Internet commerce”—the Web trade in prescription drugs. It was surprisingly open. Although it’s illegal to purchase medicine over the Internet if you don’t have a prescription, the worst that could happen is that the medicine would be confiscated. Viagra topped the list in popularity, but there was also epilepsy medicine, drugs for depression, and antibiotics for anyone prepared to pay full price for uncertain products. The quality of the medication available through the Internet varied considerably, according to several studies he skimmed. Some medications had even been revealed as pure fraud: at best they had no effect and at worst they were downright harmful. The Internet trader that Jonathan had just brought up on the screen, Doctor M, appropriately enough sold Tamiflu. It was cheap too—795 kronor for a course of treatment at 75 mg times two for five days. The dosage seemed correct. Presumably sugar tablets. Asa ought to have someone look more closely at this immediately.
“Jonathan, you have to come!” The door was thrown open without warning and a masked face peeked in. “Now, it’s urgent.”
Jonathan put on his breathing protection and followed the nurse into the corridor and down t
he stairs.
“It’s Sonja Cederroth; she’s suddenly become much worse. We’ve injected Furix, but she has no urine output and she’s oxygenating very poorly. Saturation is at 64 percent.”
“Where’s Morgan? Shouldn’t he be working tonight?”
“Morgan is occupied at Klinte School. Two boys and one of the coaches have symptoms. They’re on their way here in an ambulance. And Reine Hammar has disappeared. Karin in reception said he went out, needed to get some air. He’s a smoker. I said he couldn’t smoke inside. She couldn’t stop him. What do we do now?”
“Prepare a respirator. We’ll start with five liters of oxygen. But before that I want to retake the arterial blood gas. It can be venous,” said Jonathan glancing at the slip of paper with the test results that had been put in his hand.
“I wouldn’t think so,” said the nurse. “She looks deathly ill, her nail beds are completely blue and her face is pale gray. It’s hard to see whether she has any lip cyanosis under the mask, but we have to assume that. Irregular pulse at about 120, blood pressure immeasurable. I don’t think we can save her, Jonathan.”
They put on their protective gear and went into the ward while precious minutes were lost. Petter Cederroth was sitting on the edge of his wife’s bed holding her hand. A nurse in protective clothing and visor was connecting oxygen to the respirator. The pulse oximeter sounded an alarm. The numbers for pulse disappeared from the display. Saturation sank further and the numbers turned into straight lines. Jonathan felt for a pulse on her neck.
“We’re losing her!” He tore off the oxygen mask and pressed the bag valve mask over Sonja’s face. Rhythmically he started to pump in air with the black rubber bladder in his hand while the nurse connected the oxygen. Someone brought the cardiac massage board. The pillow was torn off the bed and the board was worked in under the woman and heart massage was begun. The silence became dense. The only sounds were brief commands and necessary information exchanged. On the face of the clock, the minutes slipped by.
“Defibrillator.”
It was already in place. Jonathan held the plates over the woman’s chest to give a jolt.
“I’m firing now.”
Those who were gathered around the bed took a step back. A jolt made the woman’s body bounce on the bed, then it fell back just as limp as before. The room was a chaos of apparatus and hoses. On the bed next to his wife sat Petter Cederroth, frightened and abandoned. He picked at his arm; tore himself bloody with the hope the pain would wake him from this hellish nightmare. Under normal circumstances someone—a nurse or social worker—would have pulled him from the room and cared for him while the doctors and nurses tried to save his wife’s life. But no one had time for him and there were no normal procedures to rely on. With the risk of infection, the routines were considerably more elaborate and time-consuming and empathy came in second place where saving lives was concerned.
“Is she dead?” His voice was very weak and could barely be heard through the protective mask.
“Yes, I'm very sorry. We couldn’t save her.” Jonathan sank down next to Petter on the bed and put his arm around his shoulders. He had no words of consolation. All he could offer was his silent sympathy. It felt worse than ridiculous to talk through the breathing protection, but Jonathan resisted the impulse to tear off the mask.
“Will I be the next to go? Is it really that contagious?”
“We don’t know who will be affected. I don’t think there is any great danger on your part. The medicine seems to be working. You’re no worse today than you were yesterday, are you?”
“My Sonja.” Jonathan assumed that Petter was crying, there were no sounds but his shoulders were shaking and a clear drop fell down onto his white shirt from the edge of the mask.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” the taxi driver said suddenly, in a completely different tone. “There’s something I didn’t tell you, before when you asked me, about who rode in the taxi. I drove a girl, a nice-looking blonde, to Jungmansgatan at the same time as Reine Hammar, the doctor that is. He gave me five hundred kronor to keep quiet about it. I can pay it back. If this pestilence is that contagious, maybe you need to know about that.”
Jonathan nodded.
“One more thing,” said Petter, taking firm hold of Jonathan’s arm. “Sonja didn’t want to be cremated. Anything at all, but not that. She was scared to death of fire. Promise me that. We talked about it just this morning. You have to promise.” Jonathan assured him that he would do his best to accommodate their wish. He could only guess what Asa Gahnstrom would think about this promise.
“Jonathan, it’s important, I have to speak with you,” Nurse Agneta called from the corridor. “We’ve got test results!” He made a sign so that she would know he had heard.
It took a while to take off the protective suit and visor. The clothes he was wearing were sour with sweat. Jonathan felt feverish and his throat felt a little sore when he swallowed. Test results. Now they had arrived. Until now he had pushed aside the thought that he himself might be infected. If he was, what would that mean? He could not bear to complete the thought. “We’ve got test results,” she said again, meeting his eyes. During the four years they had worked together he had never seen her so jittery. He took the bundle of papers she had printed out from the computer and sat down at the desk. A policeman, Jesper Ek, tested positive. Then the older woman who took the taxi with Cederroth to Faro, positive; the man with the heart attack, positive; the homing pigeon guys, all had positive cultures. Those who had been in the ER at the same time as Cederroth miraculously enough had avoided the infection. Reine Hammar, negative. When he picked up the next paper his eyes blurred; it was his own test results. He read through it several times to be certain that it really was negative and then he quickly scanned through the rest of the results. Four of those who had treated Berit Hoas had been infected, one of whom was Nurse Agneta. He heard her crying quietly behind him.
“What happens to me now? I’m so afraid.”
Chapter 15
“The epidemic of bird flu that has broken out on Gotland has now claimed its third fatality and another twelve persons are feared infected. Once again we appeal to the general public not to come to Visby General Hospital or the community health centers if infection is suspected. House calls by a doctor will be made instead, and appointments can be scheduled on one of the infectious disease clinic’s phone lines. We are also looking for a particular person. The night of July 1 or early morning of July 2 a woman in her thirties was taken by taxi to an address on Jungmansgatan in Visby. The woman is of medium height and has long blonde hair. It is very urgent that we make contact with her or receive information about who she might be. According to disease control officer Asa Gahnstrom, the epidemic is under control. She also believes that in the current situation there is no cause for alarm.”
“Confounded lie!” Jonathan Eriksson turned off the radio and pushed away the paper plate of warmed-up beef and powdered mashed potatoes. He could not choke down even a bite. He got up and tossed the plate of cold food and the plastic utensils into a garbage bag marked with yellow tape and the words “contagion hazard”. Food had no taste when worry was gnawing at his stomach. It was apparent that they were faced with a very grave situation. The conversation with Reine Hammar last evening had not produced the information Jonathan was looking for. First his colleague flatly denied having been in a taxi with a blonde woman and then unwillingly admitted that it was possible when he really thought about it. After a whole evening at the bar you don’t remember much. I’m only human, damn it. Reine had shared a taxi with a young woman, but he did not know her name or where she lived. They got in together at Hamnkrogen and then went their separate ways outside the Grabo School after sharing a taxi. No, he had no idea what her name was, he already said that, he hardly noticed that she was in the same taxi. You might think that perhaps he had left a pretty generous tip. Probably mistook a five hundred for a hundred kronor note, what the hell. He hadn
’t intended to get out of the taxi right where they happened to be, in the Grabo area; it was just a mistake. That sort of thing can happen, can’t it?
Jonathan had no opinion about that. He was uninterested in Reine’s relationship with the woman as long as they were able to test whether she was contagious. In the worst case this might mean bringing in a new batch of patients for observation and even more deaths. Jonathan leaned his head in his hands and closed his eyes. He just wanted to be away from it all and most of all from this deadly sanitarium. At the teleconference that morning the disease control officer painted a different picture of the situation than she had reported to the press. The emergency management board could not reach agreement and the division of labor was unclear. The situation was more dire than any of them could have imagined, with another twelve falling ill. How many more would be affected? There was nothing to do in the current situation other than put their cards on the table and report facts. The medicine they had was not going to be enough.
A company doctor had prescribed Tamiflu at the end of the year to all personnel in the company he worked for. Most of the employees misunderstood the instructions and took the medicine when the regular flu prevailed during the winter. It was an outright scandal given the risk of resistance development that might entail. What do you do if Tamiflu is no longer effective, if that option gets used up due to pure carelessness? The doctor was employed by a private healthcare provider and hired out to the company and told not to get on the bad side of his client but instead accommodate their expectations, despite the disease control officer’s recommendations. What was left to do now was to appeal to other countries. This was a matter of saving lives. The Internet sellers of medication should undergo an immediate review, Asa Gahnstrom had decided. Although the trade was not strictly illegal, in the worst-case scenario they might be forced to buy medicine from them—if any of them perchance were actually selling Tamiflu and the substance proved to be effective, that is. In that case the medicine must be tested before it was given out to patients. The question was whether it would be possible to get that process to run quickly and smoothly. It would be best, of course, if despite previous rejections they could get medicine through the usual channels. That might work out if an appeal was made in the media while at the same time the pharmaceutical companies were contacted again. At best this might produce an effect. PR and goodwill in exchange for medicine. There would be headlines, of course. People would get scared, and frightened people do risky things. But fortunately it was not Jonathan who would make that decision.