The Nirvana Plague

by Gary Glass

  Benford read the skepticism in his face. “You don’t look too impressed.”

  “I mean, these cases look like pretty straightforward stress reactions to me. Though the incidence is pretty high.”

  “Extraordinarily high, don’t you think?”

  “Even so, I don’t see how you’re making the connection.”

  “With IDD?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you looking at now?” She tapped into his screen from her own and glanced at what he’d been reading. “Yeah, this stuff is no good. None of these doctors think they’re dealing with anything out of the ordinary. They’re just seeing what they’re used to seeing.”

  “Maybe. But that doesn’t mean they’re seeing wrong.”

  She pointed him to another container in the database and popped it open. “Take a look at some of that stuff.” She turned her attention back to her own work.

  Marley saw that she’d led him to a folder full of videos — recordings of patient interviews. Over a hundred of them. He wished he’d spotted these before — before he called her judgment into question. Sticking a bean-size earphone in his ear, he punched one up at random. Almost as soon as it started, he began to see things Benford’s way.

  The video showed a young woman being interviewed in a clinical setting. The similarity to his IDD cases was unmistakable. The same halting, hesitant speech patterns, drifting unfocused attention, indifference to the interviewer’s concerns, and sudden startling outbursts of sharp commentary.

  He only watched a couple of minutes of it, then flipped to a different recording. The next one was with three enlisted men at a field hospital. Attached notes specified that they’d all begun manifesting symptoms on the same shift. One of them was wounded, but not seriously. Again the echoes of IDD were readily apparent.

  Benford tapped his knee, and he looked up.

  “See what I mean?”

  “Yes,” he confessed. “But.”

  “What?”

  “But how you did you make the connection to my write-up in the Journal? Looking at these videos, it’s clear to me there are similarities. But how—”

  “How did I catch on? Well, you’ve seen how many cases? Five? I’ve seen over a hundred. Frankly, we’ve been waiting for it to appear in the civilian population. We were looking for it.”

  “We?”

  “Those who think, as I do, that there’s more to this than garden-variety stress reaction.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Including myself, there’s one.”

  “But somebody believes it enough that they authorized you to put together this taskforce.”

  “Just barely. Basically, the only reason why they were willing to authorize me to pursue this thing is that they don’t like the answers they got from the original investigation. That’s what I was telling you in the car earlier. The JCS wants a better answer.”

  “Better?”

  “More politically palatable. Nobody wants to attribute these incidents to cowardice or weakness.”

  “They wanted a better answer, so you got the job.”

  “I asked for the job.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand. You’re not a psychiatrist or psychologist, right? So—”

  “No, I’m not. That’s why you’re here. I’m just a lowly Health Affairs officer. My specialty is epidemiology. But I started out as an Army field medic in the Middle Eastern theatre. — It’s all in there. You have dossiers on everyone on the team, and they have yours, of course. You should familiarize yourself with them before we get started in the morning.”

  “All right. But what made you disagree with the panel’s conclusions? What made you think they’d got it wrong?”

  “A gut feeling. The gut feeling you get when you talk to these people that’s there’s something broken there. You know what I mean.”

  “The other doctors on the panel interviewed them too, didn’t they? Did any of them agree with you?”

  “Let’s just say no one else was willing to go out on that limb with me.”

  “And what if your hunch turns out to be wrong and the politically unpalatable conclusion is right?”

  “Let’s just say that Chicken Little never made general.”

  Karen found Roger east of the garden, near the observatory. He was standing perfectly still, looking up at the old observatory’s silver dome. Students passing on the sidewalk gave him a wide berth. But swarms of pigeons milled about his feet, strutting and cooing.

  She waded through the pigeons to him and touched his elbow. She felt the hard cast on his arm inside the baggy coat. She’d bought the oversized coat for him at a used clothing store near campus, the day she brought him home from the hospital, three weeks ago.

  “Roger!” she said. Out of breath, she had almost no voice.

  He looked down at her. “Karen.”

  “Where is your phone?”

  He smiled. “My phone.” There was no question mark in his tone.

  “Did you drop your phone?”

  “Well…”

  She waved her hands to shoo the pigeons. They fluttered heavily away in all directions, revealing the discarded phone on the pavement. Turning back to Roger, she found him staring up at the dome again. She shoved his phone into his pocket, and he looked at her again and smiled again. “What are you looking at up there?” she said.

  “It’s a signal,” he said.

  “What is?” She looked up. It was a brilliant day, and the sunlight glinting off the silver hemisphere was too bright to look at directly.

  “It’s a beacon,” he said.

  “A beacon.”

  “Like a mirror.”

  “Yes, I know what a beacon is.” But she didn’t see how a beacon was like a mirror.

  Roger kept watching the dome, as if it might be about to open.

  “When I was a kid,” Karen said. “In Terre Haute, there was this little school called Beacon Hill. It was a special school for retarded kids. It was really just a big old white house someone had converted into a private school. Beacon Hill School. So, among us normal kids, if you wanted to really insult somebody you called them a ‘beacon’.”

  Roger showed no reaction, just stood there watching the dome.

  “You know, there was also a psychiatric hospital in Terre Haute called ‘Katherine Hamilton’s’. So everyone called it ‘Crazy Kate’s.’ And if you wanted to call another kid crazy, you’d call them ‘Kate.’ Beacon meant idiot. Kate meant crazy. We were vicious little trolls.”

  Roger looked down at her. In a different tone he said, “Don’t feel bad.”

  And somehow she felt he understood about the secret wish. “OK,” she said, ashamed. “Now, let’s go home.”

  The pigeons had scattered only a few yards away, and were already cautiously waddling back, closing in around them.

  “Were you feeding the birds?”

  He was watching the dome again. “No. They like to come around.”

  “You mean, to come round you?”

  “Everything flows toward its comfort. Mmm.”

  She liked that. “Is that Aristotle?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, still studying the dome. “Comfort is the name for the way things go.”

  That was how he talked now, since three weeks. Not like before. The old aggressive impatience had vanished. She had called it “the burn.” The burn of his thoughts, consuming his mind, slowly and inexorably metabolizing the crystalline brilliance of his personality into an ash heap. Now the burn was gone. Now there was just this weird charm and a kind of deep innocence — not like a child’s bland innocence, the innocence of ignorance and inexperience. This was something else, something subtler. It was as if he’d just realized that his madness had only been a nightmare. The trouble was that he had not awakened into the old world again, where Karen was. He was still somewhere else, in some other dream. But now and then, just for an instant, she’d catch a whiff of the breeze coming from wherever
he was, and it was good. She caught one now and in that moment felt her anxieties magically lifted.

  Then the phone in her hand started bleeping again. She stuffed it back into her bag, unanswered.

  Chapter 9

  A Humvee was waiting on the tarmac at Andrews. A young private hopped out of it as soon as the C-20 came to rest. Salutes were exchanged, bags transferred, passengers loaded. It seemed that within seconds of landing they were roaring across the airfield on four wheels. Marley barely looked up from his tablet.

  The two lieutenants sat up front.

  He was scanning the backgrounds and medical histories of affected personnel, bookmarking items to look at more carefully later, scribbling notes of any ideas that came to him — when he noticed something he hadn’t seen before. In addition to military personnel, there was a container for civilian cases. Inside was a subfolder called “Joplin Psychiatric, Chicago, IL.” And there were the full names of all his patients. He tapped open the file on “Sturgeon, Roger” and found himself looking at a copy of Roger’s entire medical record. There on his brand new government-issued computer were his own notes on Roger’s case from his chart at Joplin. Along with absolutely every other scrap of documentation on Roger’s case from Joplin’s records, going back over ten years — every admission record, every medication schedule, every nurse’s shift report, every treatment order, every digital signature. Marley’s signatures. In addition to medical records, there were hundreds of items of personal information: identification records, passport photos, tax returns, credit histories, professional resumes, residential addresses going back to birth, next of kin contacts…

  The records on all his other patients were just as complete.

  Once again, Benford saw the consternation on his face. “Something wrong?”

  He looked up. “What the hell.”

  “What the hell what?”

  “You’ve got all my patient records. Real names. Everything.”

  “We have everything we could get on all known or suspected cases of IDD.”

  “It’s illegal.”

  “No, it isn’t. Under the provisions of the IDCA the CDC can access virtually any non-classified information on known or suspected—”

  “What’s IDCA?”

  “Infectious Disease Control Authority. It’s the legal instrument which empowers the CDC and other DHS agencies to enforce quarantine.”

  “Quarantine? What are you talking about?”

  “The Secretary of the DHS has ordered the CDC to impose level one quarantine restrictions on all known and probable civilian and military cases of—”

  “When did this happen?”

  “This morning. There’s a copy of the order in the materials you have.”

  “This morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “This morning while I was seeing my patients?”

  “Yes. This morning.”

  “And you’ve got all these records already?”

  The slightest smile crossed her lips. There might even have been a twinkle in her eye. “Welcome to cyberspace, Dr. Marley.”

  “When is the quarantine supposed to go into effect?”

  “It already has.”

  “It already has?”

  “You keep repeating me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before? Why wasn’t I contacted?”

  “You were. By me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this before we left Chicago?”

  “Because it wouldn’t have made any difference. I needed to get you here, and I gave you the information you needed to make that choice. The CDC’s quarantine orders were not relevant to that decision.”

  “But these are my patients! I don’t like people messing with my patients behind my back. It’s not just unprofessional. It’s damn bad manners.”

  Benford’s face hardened momentarily. But no expression stayed on her face for long. “If you had decided not to join my team, I would have told you about it. But you need to understand something. Either way, under the IDCA, you would no longer have been their primary care physician.”

  “I’ve never heard of this IDCA thing.”

  “No reason why you should have. It’s just part of the legal infrastructure created to support the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS has a vast scope of responsibilities. Combating terrorism is just one aspect of it.”

  “Terrorism? I thought we were talking about infectious disease.”

  “It could be both.”

  “You’re joking. It’s probably neither.”

  “Well, it’s something.”

  Marley still felt spied upon. “How did you know who these people were anyway? How did you know who I was treating? You just handed me this tablet three hours ago, and it already has all their records.”

  “Once the IDCA kicks in, it provides automatic warrants for various types of surveillance, subpoena, and records reviews in order to expedite the initiation of quarantine protocols as effectively as possible.” She rattled all this off with ease.

  “I don’t believe you could have pulled all this together that fast.”

  “All government records are indexed a thousand different ways. Precisely so that we can pull it all together. That’s how intelligence works.”

  Marley put his tablet down and looked away from her, out through the tinted windows of the Humvee at the traffic. They were barely moving. Late afternoon on a weekday: the Beltway was a twelve-lane parking lot. No police escort here. This glacier of frozen steel and concrete was utterly indifferent to Benford’s hurry-up take-no-prisoners posturing.

  After a few minutes he said: “There’s one thing I still don’t understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “You told me on the plane that nobody else believes IDD is a bona fide disorder, let alone infectious. Yet you knew when you said it that the CDC was already imposing quarantine measures to contain it.”

  “The Secretary ordered quarantine purely as a precautionary measure. It’s a lot harder to catch the horse once it’s out of the corral.”

  “The secretary?”

  “The DHS Secretary. Eliot Pritzker.”

  “Who recommended it to him?”

  “I did.”

  “And you’re just a lowly Health Affairs officer?”

  “Yes. Until a few days ago.”

  “So how do you think the Secretary is going to react if it turns out you’re wrong about all this?”

  “If he acts rationally, he’s going to be relieved.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  The mercurial smile came and went. “The Secretary is a rational man,” she said.

  He smiled to himself and looked out again at the traffic. They had made about two meters of progress.

  Karen and Roger came to the street at the edge of campus. A police cruiser passed them, then suddenly did a U-turn, and, beacons strobing blue and red, ran its nose up onto the curb and stopped dead in front of them, half on the sidewalk. The passenger door swung open even before the car came to a stop, and someone jumped out, but lost his balance and went down on one knee.

  Karen heard him grunt something, either “Ma’am” or “Damn.” For a wild instant she thought of running, but Roger walked on, indifferent to the show. She grabbed his sleeve to stop him, afraid.

  The stumbler quickly regained his feet as the driver yelped over the speakers —

  “Halt!”

  The stumbler stepped forward, brushing the dirt off his knees, and addressed himself to Karen: “I’m Gordon DeStefano.”

  Karen suppressed an urge to laugh. Keystone Kops.

  “I’m not surprised,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t have hung up on me.”

  A crowd seemed to coalesce out of thin air around them. Karen thought of the pigeons. Attracts a crowd wherever he goes.

  “What do you want?”

  “You’re under quarantine.”

  “I am?”

  “Roger is,” he said, not looking a
t him.

  “This Roger here?” she said with mock curiosity. “Or some other Roger?”

  DeStefano’s lips curled.

  He tugged a folded sheet of paper out of his coat pocket and held it out to her.

  “This is a court order empowering the Board of Health to place your husband under quarantine. Please get in the car, and we’ll take you home. If necessary, we will take you into custody.”

  Karen took the paper automatically, but didn’t look at it. “Quarantine for what?”

  DeStefano looked over at the officer by the car, signaling him to come and take Roger by force.

  “All right!” Karen barked.

  She took Roger by the arm again and stalked toward the car, pulling him after. They sat in the back, DeStefano in front, a plastic shield between them. No one spoke. The engine roared up and the tires squealed as they bounced down off the sidewalk and shot backwards into the street, lights still flashing. Squealed again as they reversed and leapt forward.

  The power of fossil fuel, Karen thought as she and Roger caromed off each other in the back seat.

  It was only a few blocks to the apartment. She didn’t have to tell them where it was.

  Cars, including Karen’s, lined the street in front of the apartment. The officer stopped in the street, leaving the lights flashing. He got out, opened the door on Karen’s side, and stepped back.

  Karen stalked up the front steps angrily. It’s just us, the local crime family. On the landing, she pressed her finger to the doorlock scanner. She was trembling.

  “Don’t worry,” Roger said.

  But when she looked up, she saw that he was talking to the police officer.

  The officer avoided his gaze, not looking any higher than his chest.