by Matt Richtel
“Does your dad like The Godfather?”
“It’s his favorite movie. He told me that he’s seen it a hundred and four times and when I’m twelve I get to watch it with him,” the boy said. He was relaxing. Lyle thought, Okay, a step in the right direction. He clenched his teeth; Melanie is out there somewhere with a boy just like this. Footsteps close from behind as Lyle closed in on Tyler.
“Dr. Martin, please, a word,” Eleanor said.
“In a moment.” He didn’t want to lose the clinician’s rapport. He knelt on the cement, relieving the young man of the weapon, setting it on the ground, and took him in. Levis and a striped sweater, hands balled at his sides that looked like they’d be big mitts one day, with big, booted feet to go with them. Lyle felt a pulse on the boy’s wrist, a purely symbolic act of establishing intimacy, asked how Tyler felt (hot or cold; sick to his stomach). No, no, he felt fine, looked fine. Lyle palpated the belly; not swollen or tender.
Tyler’s lip quivered. Alex walked forward, pulling her less agile right leg a touch behind the left. Jerry seemed poised to stop her when she knelt in front of the boy.
“I bet you could run around this building ten times you’re so healthy,” she said.
He looked at Dr. Martin. “Do I have to?”
“No,” Lyle said, smiling. “I think she’s saying that you’re in good shape.” He looked at Alex appreciatively. He sensed she must know something about being scared as a child, what with her early-life illness. She liked children, knew how to care for them, maybe had kids of her own, then, Lyle thought, no, a younger sibling. Lyle dismissed his wandering thoughts and said to the boy, “Would it be okay if I speak for a second to the pilot? She’s the head of the rescue mission.”
A moment later, Lyle stood with Eleanor and felt a pang of relief. She was okay. When their eyes met, the instant held understanding, a mutual wavelength. In a low voice, just a few steps from everyone, she told Lyle what was going on in the plane.
“I assumed they were dead,” she said.
“Not quite,” Lyle said. He explained what he’d seen on the bodies, the baggage handler bolting upright.
“What is this?” Eleanor asked.
Lyle shook his head. He kept his voice low so the boy wouldn’t hear. “I have no idea, Captain Hall. It’s something I’ve never seen.” He paused. “Never read about.” He paused again, closed his eyes in thought.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m just puzzled,” he finally said. “Obviously.”
Eleanor studied his face and wondered if he was telling her everything he was thinking. She could see he was lost somewhere. “Lyle?”
He was thinking back to his neurology rotation during med school. One morning at the start of early morning rounds, the attending physician promised the handful of residents they were going to see a rarity, and an unfortunate one. The patient was an old Japanese man. He’d been delivered the night before to the hospital by his wife, who declined to explain his condition: sitting in the front seat, unable to move or speak, respiration very low, but fully conscious. Essentially catatonic but physically uninjured. The attending physician opened the door to the man’s room and there sat the shriveled patient, eyes open, breathing from a respirator, wife by his side, her face buried in a handkerchief in grief. The attending saw Lyle’s face, studying, assessing, calculating, and nudged him. “Lyle, please don’t say anything,” she said. It had become a running joke, wherein Lyle would mutter some theory during rounds, often right, about a patient’s condition. It wasn’t that Lyle was trying to show off, he just got lost putting the pieces together and would think aloud. Lyle stared at the old man, the liver spots on his temple, next to his frayed hair, the jaundiced skin, bone-thin shoulders beneath his gown, eyes blinking.
“She didn’t mean to do it,” Lyle had muttered.
The attending shot him a look. Pipe down, Lyle.
“I’m sorry,” Lyle had said, genuinely sorry. “I didn’t say he’d been poisoned.”
The attending, a young-looking Indian woman with jet black hair, all but smiled. Lyle couldn’t help himself, and he was right again. So she asked him what type of poison. This stumped Lyle. Another resident picked up the ball and suggested tetrodotoxin. Now the attending allowed herself an appreciative nod at this group, whip smart the lot of them. She led them through a quick physical exam and then left the woman to her husband and grief and took the group back outside and explained what they all now knew. The man had eaten puffer fish, a delicacy, but, if not prepared precisely in the correct way, leads to skeletal paralysis, eventually, likely, death.
Now it was clear what Lyle had meant by she didn’t mean to do it. The wife, he thought, hadn’t meant to poison the husband. Lyle had been right. The husband was suffering from stage four bladder cancer, spread to the lymph nodes, and, as it turned out, he’d dreamed of having puffer fish as a last delicacy. The old man darned well had known it was a win-win; if he survived dinner, it would be a great meal; if he died, a great last meal.
As Lyle stood in the hangar, he pictured the old man, locked in his predeath catatonia and tried in vain to remember how that toxin worked, what its physiological mechanism was. What did puffer fish do to the brain? The answer evaded him. He looked back at the mechanic on the couch and considered the eerie similarity. But there was nothing contagious or widespread about puffer fish, nothing virulent.
“Are you okay, Dr. Martin?” Eleanor said. For an instant, she wondered if the syndrome had hit him, too.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it this time, too. He’d long since learned to apologize after taking his mental junkets. He grimaced.
“Time to let us into your head,” Eleanor said.
This further jerked Lyle back to reality. The pilot sounded like Melanie, in a good way, some appreciation in her voice that he wasn’t just a lummox on a mental vacation.
“Saxitoxin,” he said, with some bit of revelation.
“What’s that?” The first officer suddenly was standing too close for Lyle’s comfort.
“I’m thinking of various poisons, nerve agents, toxins. They can paralyze the body but leave the brain intact, more or less. I can’t remember how they work.”
“What’s saxitoxin?”
“Nerve gas,” Alex said from ten feet away, where she stood next to the boy. Her outburst surprised everyone and seemed a bit to surprise her, too. She stared at them and, nervously, down at her phone. “I’m a comic book geek. Graphic novels. When I was younger, I had a lot of time on my hands . . .” she said. “It’s kind of a trope, neurotoxins used by bad guys, and saxitoxin gets regularly mentioned.” After a brief pause: “But it was a real thing, not made up, that the government had.”
“That’s right,” Lyle said, remembering. Saxitoxin, he recalled, had been used by American spies in covert operations. Great for assassinations because so little poison brought the desired result: skeletal paralysis and eventual death.
“Nixon ordered it all destroyed,” Alex said. “But some survived.”
Now she really had their attention.
“That’s the lore, anyhow,” she said. She noticed Lyle boring a stare through her, quizzical but distant. She fiddled with her inert phone.
Eleanor noticed that Lyle watched Alex like she was a painting in a museum and he was an obsessing art history student.
“Is your phone working?” Lyle asked Alex.
“No.”
“I notice you keep fiddling with it.”
The passenger didn’t seem like she had anything to add. She, in turn, seemed struck by the way the pilot watched Lyle. Below the surface, cliques were forming, alliances, but they hadn’t solidified.
“We need a plan,” Jerry said.
“I’ll second that motion,” Lyle suddenly said and turned to the first officer. “Let’s move the father into the office with the space heater and I’ll go get the girl from the plane,” he said.
“Say what? What girl?” Jerry turned to
Eleanor.
“There’s a girl on the airplane?”
“This is nuts,” Jerry said. “How does he know that? Am I the only one who thinks this is nuts?”
Lyle had reverted to his old style of managing crisis, focusing on the medical issues, in effect barking orders at people with less understanding of the situation. The problem was that, unlike the old days, no one was imbuing him with omniscience or saintlike status. So, to them, he sounded like a know-it-all or, plainly, an asshole. Or a conspirator. What girl was he even talking about?
Undeterred, Lyle started walking back toward the plane.
“Freeze,” Eleanor said.
He kept walking.
“Dr. Martin, I’m still the captain here.”
Lyle turned around.
“A little girl is on that airplane, terrified.”
“How do you know that?”
“She’s immune to this,” he said. “They’re immune, I think.”
He’d seen a little girl on the plane earlier and Eleanor said there was a noise on the plane. It must be the girl. “I’m not, and the rest of us aren’t. I’m probably exposed at this point. I can’t speak for you.”
“Then why didn’t we get it on the airplane—with the rest of them?”
“Were you in the cockpit, er, flight deck?”
Eleanor nodded.
“I don’t know. Something airborne. Something . . .” He had only the vaguest ideas, not even that, just fuzzy images, not worth sharing. He could feel the shadow of gun-toting Jerry, right on his heels. Lyle shivered; this new world was feeling like a microcosm of the one left behind: growing tension, people getting their backs up, positions taken and entrenched. A gun.
Maybe there was a way to inoculate against Jerry’s seeming desire to escalate, take control. Lyle looked the first officer in the eye.
“Do you have thoughts?” he asked Jerry.
“You’re asking my thoughts? How gracious.”
“You’ve been out here with me, seen the baggage guy, you can see the weather.” Lyle left it open-ended, trying to draw Jerry in. “I don’t know airports, airplanes, weather, any of it. I mean, should we get the bodies into the plane to keep them warm and we can see what’s going on in there?” He paused.
Jerry tried to measure whether he was being baited, couldn’t quite figure it out.
“It would be easier to bring the baggage guy, into the office, back here,” he said.
“Smart,” Lyle said as deferentially as possible.
Twenty minutes later, Lyle had dragged the body of the mechanic by his armpits, with Jerry standing guard, into the back office, along with the bodies of the baggage handler and other workers. Now they stood under the airplane, ready to use the luggage rack as a ladder.
“You or me first?” Lyle asked.
Jerry hesitated.
“I guess I can stand guard,” Lyle said. “You check the plane, which is obviously your baby, and I’ll be down here if something weird goes down. But I one hundred percent defer to you.”
Jerry looked over at the hangar, where Eleanor and the passenger tinkered with the cell phone and watched the child. He could see their outline in the doorway. Jerry tried to look like he was thinking hard about this, making some complex calculation. Truth was, he couldn’t keep up. It was why he loved talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh; you had to find somebody you could trust in a world where there was just too much to think about.
“I’ve got to overrule you on this one, Dr. Martin. You go in there and do your doctor thing and I’ll keep watch if something goes down. I need to keep an eye on the women and children.”
“But . . .”
“I’m decided. Let’s keep the chain of command.”
Perfect, Lyle thought. What he had hoped for.
Jerry hoisted him up. “Holler if you need me.”
“If you don’t hear from me in ten minutes,” Lyle said—he paused on what to say next . . .
“I’ll come rescue you.”
Jesus—Lyle fought a smile—what a prick.
Seconds later, Lyle stood in the flight deck, now holding a Beefeater bottle that he’d snagged in the belly. The plane was just the way he’d remembered it, but darker and colder. The temperature differential between inside and out had diminished. Near freezing in here, though Lyle presumed that was because the cargo-hold door had remained ajar. The passengers, presumably, would be warmer.
The radio buzzed with static, the way Eleanor must’ve left it.
Lyle took a deep breath and entered the cabin. The soft ambient light would’ve suited a mortician, the cool air too, and, of course, the bodies. Row after row of the inert. Lyle stared at them while he guzzled the last drops from a tiny Beefeater bottle. He made it halfway through a second and stuffed it, and two Tanqueray gins, into his pocket. His senses cleared. He looked at a tall man in first class wearing headphones, head slumped to the right touching the head of the woman next to him, catatonic too. He whisked into coach. Was there a scent? Something burnt? He rubbed his fingers together to remind himself he wore the rubber gloves. He realized he’d long since abandoned his breathing mask.
He took the rows at speed, glancing, looking for anomalies. He saw a woman with a neck pillow seemingly suspended like a puppet by the weight of her chin on her chest. In her lap, her phone, attached to headphones in her ears. Lyle walked past the row and then did a full stop and backpedaled. It wasn’t the woman who caught his attention but the man next to her, an older guy, nearly elderly, wispy thin hair, waxy skin, different somehow, what was it?
There, Lyle noticed, blood dried below his nose. Lyle bent down and studied, started to study. Something not right.
He heard the whimper and paused. A few rows farther down. He made his way back and found the source of the noise: a lump beneath a blanket, muffling the hysterics. The girl he’d seen earlier, clutching a stuffed bear. He steeled himself against emotion.
“I’m a doctor? I’m here to help you.”
She blinked with trauma.
“What’s your name?”
Whimpering, terror.
“Is this your mom? I’m going to help her.”
“She . . . she won’t wake up.”
The girl had bangs and freckles and seemed uncertain if she were awake herself. Surely, this must be a nightmare. On the ground, he saw a piece of paper she’d drawn on and written her name.
“Andrea?”
She looked up.
“We are going to get help—for her, your mom,” Lyle said. He wanted to quiz her on what had happened here but there was no sense to be discussed, the girl too far gone. He simply carried her to the front and lowered her down to Jerry. Lyle started to lower himself down and he saw the truck pulled beside the airplane, with Eleanor behind the wheel. What new plan was this?
He didn’t have time to process it when he was struck by an impulse, more than that, a severe nag. Ignoring Jerry’s overtures to come down, Lyle pulled himself back into the plane. He could hear Jerry say, “I think he’s drunk.”
Lyle cruised back into the cabin and found the older gentleman. Pulling off his plastic glove, come what may, Lyle put his hand to the man’s left temple. Then felt for a pulse at the carotid. Then back to the temple. He focused on the frayed skin and couldn’t deny what he was looking at: a contusion. Without an x-ray he couldn’t be sure, but he’d have bet his damn booze bottles he was looking at a skull fracture.
He stood and nearly sprinted back to his row. He stared, surrounded by these near-dead creatures, inhaling whatever was in here. It hit him, right here, all of it, the weight of the last two hours. This was madness, impossible, all but a dream. He slammed his open palm against the overhead compartment to feel the pain and assure himself he wasn’t asleep. Then he opened the compartment and yanked out his suitcase and tossed it on the ground and unzipped it. He rummaged. He’d managed to bring a single suit, wrinkled with folding. In an inner compartment, he felt for his itinerary. An official invitation, embo
ssed stationery, to give a midday talk at a small infectious disease conference.
“Bullshit,” he said. “Bullshit.”
He’d known it, of course, on some level. He must have? An infectious disease conference, here in Steamboat, in November?
Who was he kidding?
He reached behind the itinerary and pulled out a small, framed picture in the cheap Walgreen’s frame, the glass broken horizontally. Melanie smiling on a rock, an invisible bump in her belly, the last happy picture.
A sob caught in his throat.
He read the letter of invitation. He studied the stilted language, deliberately formal, an honorarium not too much or too little, a number to call, and a website to visit.
He tried to remember the seduction that got him to this putative conference—in the mountains, on this plane—the phone calls, the travel arrangements, a slow reel, patient, low pressure, persistent, striking his chords, eventually, finally pulling him out of his fetid apartment and his own stink. He must’ve known all along it was a setup. On some level. But what in the hell for? Who would want a washed-up infectious disease specialist? Especially one who had given up completely on humanity?
He stared at Melanie’s picture and sipped more gin. He turned and threw the bottle straight down the aisle toward the back of the airplane, a perfect strike flying between the half-dead passengers. It didn’t shatter, just hit with a thud against the wall of the bathroom door.
Lyle started back toward the front of the plane. But after a step, he paused. He returned to the overhead compartment. What had struck his attention? He looked at a red roller bag lodged next to where his own luggage had been. His eye stopped on a white luggage tag with green letters: “Google.” He turned the tag over and saw the name: Alex. No address, or phone number.