by Gary Glass
“I want Roger Sturgeon, Fred Peters, and one of the female patients. Reynolds.”
“Peters isn’t your patient.”
“Make him my patient.”
“Why him in particular?”
“Same reason as Sturgeon. Because I knew him before it happened. Makes it easier to identify the effects of the disease.”
“All right. You’ve got a week.”
“Two weeks.”
“Ten days.”
Chapter 24
The next morning Karen awoke, as usual, in front of the television.
NEWSREADER: … in an effort to stop the spread of the disease, imposed strict new quarantine measures. Nationwide all forms of mass transportation have been temporarily halted while plans for screening all passengers are developed and put into place. This includes all commuter trains and buses as well as all international and domestic commercial passenger flights. The government has also ordered all public and private schools closed for one week, including colleges and universities. Consequently, the federal government and most state and local governments are shut down this week. Only essential emergency personnel are being asked to report to work. Of course, business and industry are also severely affected…
Freedom Day, she thought. The thirty-first day. Welcome to the new reality.
Freedom Day. And what’s the news? Still less freedom. It came as no surprise to her though. She talked to Ally every day, and Ally talked to Marley three times a week. He’d been explicitly scrupulous in his adherence to the constraints of his secrecy clearance, but it hadn’t been hard for Ally to read the hints he let drop that whatever it was he and his team were doing to combat IDD, it wasn’t working. She’d last spoken to him a couple of days ago, and told Karen later that as the thirty days counted down, Carl was becoming increasingly stressed. And, knowing what she did about the effects of the disease, Karen could see the signs of IDD in the news as well: however heavily distorted by Defense Department censorship and mass-media streamlining, the sanitized combat reports couldn’t disguise the simple fact that there was a noticeable lack of actual combat going on in any of the half-dozen theatres in which the U.S. was engaged.
She got up from the chair, stretched, wrapped herself in her blanket, and went to the window. The cat was on the sill. She cranked the window open a little. A clear, bright morning. She scratched the cat while the news droned on in the background.
NEWSREADER: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been given broad powers to implement what the government calls “containment” quarantine on areas where outbreaks of IDD have occurred. This would include restricting all unauthorized entry or exit to those areas.
She went to the kitchen and started coffee, and while she waited for it she got online and got her health certificate authorized.
NEWSREADER: In making his announcement this morning, the President urged the nation to…
The President is up early today, she thought. To make the morning news shows. — No, he probably taped it days ago.
After a breakfast of toast and jam, she showered and dressed. Then, for the first time in thirty days, she walked out of her apartment, down the stairs, and got in her car. The battery was not dead. Tender mercy.
She continued listening to the news on the radio while she drove.
REPORTER: How widespread are these closings?
CDC SPOKESMAN: Not that widespread. Not yet. We’re focusing on public places that we have reason to suspect could be possible IDD reservoirs.
REPORTER: Reservoirs?
SPOKESMAN: Places that could harbor the agent that causes IDD.
REPORTER: For example?
SPOKESMAN: Hospitals. Prisons. Military bases or barracks. Pubs and restaurants.
REPORTER: Restaurants?
SPOKESMAN: A few restaurants have been closed.
REPORTER: For how long?
SPOKESMAN: Standard quarantine is thirty days after sterilization.
REPORTER: Sterilization?
SPOKESMAN: Yes. A special team is sent in to assess and sterilize the environment.
REPORTER: That must be pretty expensive and time-consuming.
SPOKESMAN: Yes. Depending on the size of the location, of course.
REPORTER: What’s going to be the economic impact, both of the clean-up effort and of the downtime for these businesses?
SPOKESMAN: What’s going to be the economic impact of this disease getting out of control?
REPORTER: How many businesses have been closed so far?
SPOKESMAN: I don’t have that exact number.
REPORTER: Approximately?
SPOKESMAN: I really don’t know.
REPORTER: Is it closer to ten or a hundred or a thousand?
SPOKESMAN: I really don’t know.
The streets, by the standards of Chicago traffic, were practically deserted. She made it to Chicago County General in forty minutes flat. She had to present her new health cert to get into the parking building. The guard was wearing blue Nitrile gloves. He wanded her card and handed it back to her. He studied her skeptically while he waited for her authorization to come through. She could see the news playing on a screen inside his booth. She asked if the hospital was worried about letting any sick people in. He didn’t like the joke.
She had to go through the whole thing again with a different guard at the entrance to the hospital lobby.
The lobby was a zoo. The emergency room was so backed up people were sitting in the public lounge waiting for treatment, some coughing and hacking, some holding broken or disjointed limbs in place, some blinking and shivering and trying not to jump out of their skins as their bodies metabolized intoxicants. Mothers and wives milled about, quietly crying or noisily complaining or trying to soothe screaming babies. The place stank of urine and vomit and disinfectant. The threadbare carpet was sticky underfoot. The news blared or squeaked from screens suspended over each corner of the room.
In the midst of this churning chaos, the information desk foundered like a dismasted ship. A wary girl with green hair sat there hoping not to be bothered. The news was playing on screens behind the desk too.
“I am Roger Sturgeon’s wife,” Karen said. “He’s being released today. I’ve come to pick him up.”
The receptionist punched up her screen, and asked her to spell that name.
Karen spelled it.
The girl tapped it out on her keyboard. She was wearing Latrile gloves. “Sorry,” she said, and looked up, “we don’t have any patient by that name.”
Karen spelled it again.
“No, ma’am. Sorry.”
“Check again. S-t-u—”
“I’ve checked it twice. Are you sure you have the right hospital?”
Without moving from her spot, Karen took out her phone and dialed the Board of Health.
“Good morning,” chirped the secretary, “this is—”
“Give me DeStefano, please.”
“Who’s calling, please?”
“Who would be calling, Nancy?”
“Well, all right.”
She waited, not moving from her spot in front of the information desk. She watched two nurses going through the lobby with tablets, screening the patients and checking ID’s.
It took two minutes for DeStefano to come on the line. It always did. She imagined he sat at his desk with a stopwatch, because a real executive is always two minutes too busy to take an unexpected call. Her call had been unexpected every morning for thirty days straight.
“Good morning, Kar—”
“I’m at Chicago County General. They can’t find my husband.”
Pause.
“I don’t understand.”
“Me either.”
Pause.
“Why are you calling me this morning?”
Karen began to wonder how many seconds remained before she completely lost her mind. T-minus nine, eight, seven.
“I’m calling you for the same reason I call you every morning, DeSte
fano. I want to speak to my husband. Only this time I’m out of quarantine, and so is he, and I’m at the goddamned hospital to take him home only they can’t find him. Now this is the hospital you put him in, right? Chicago General. This is where he’s supposed to be, right?”
“Oh, yes, of course it is,” he said. Glad to help!
“Well, where is he?”
“Isn’t he there?”
Her answer came like an executioner’s farewell:
“I just told you he isn’t.” T-minus six, five.
Pause.
“Perhaps he checked himself out already.”
“Did you issue him a quarantine certification?”
“Well, no,” DeStefano answered, drawing out the no contemplatively. “He wouldn’t have been eligible till today.”
To the receptionist, Karen said: “Was he ever a patient here?”
She hesitated. “Well…”
“Within the last thirty days.”
“And you are?”
“His wife.”
The receptionist was beginning to look a little scared. “Do you have some identification?” she said defensively.
“Stay on the line, DeStefano,” she said into the phone, then put it down on the counter, and started pulling materials out of her shoulder bag. She slapped down her quarantine cert card, her national ID card, her driver’s license, and a copy of the court order committing Roger to quarantine.
The receptionist glanced at the materials nervously and turned back to her computer screen. Tap, tap, tap.
Karen picked up the phone.
“Still there?”
“Yes,” DeStefano said.
“No,” said the receptionist.
“No, what?”
“Roger Sturgeon has not been admitted to this hospital in the last thirty days.”
T-minus four, three…
“DeStefano, did you hear that?”
“No.”
To the receptionist: “Pick up your phone and conference into this call.”
The receptionist complied.
In a matter-of-fact tone, DeStefano told her who he was, and asked if she had any record of Roger Sturgeon’s “admittance.”
“No, sir.”
“That’s odd.”
T-minus two, one…
“Isn’t it though.”
“Hm,” DeStefano mused. “Perhaps he ran off again?”
Zero! She screamed into the phone: “He was never admitted in the first place, you lying pile of dogshit son of a bitch!”
The receptionist jumped. Everyone in the lobby who wasn’t too sick or delusional looked up.
Pause.
“Well.…” DeStefano said slowly, coldly: “I don’t know what else to say, Ms. Hanover.”
“I suggest you start thinking of something, DeStefano. I’m going to be in your office in about fifteen minutes.”
She clicked off the phone and threw it in her bag, swept her papers off the desk in after it, and walked out, hardly able to keep herself from breaking into a run.
She didn’t even know where the Board of Health administrative offices were, but it didn’t take her long to look it up. She was still shaking with anger when she screeched to a stop in the visitor’s parking lot, and drilled into the lobby like the Light Brigade into the Valley of Death.
The security guards were waiting for her. Two of them stopped her even before she entered the metal detector.
“It’d be best if you just went home,” one of them said.
“Mind your own business,” she snapped and started through the gate.
The guard put a hand on her, stopping her.
“Get your fucking hands off me!”
“Either leave now, or—”
“I want to speak to your supervisor.”
“You can phone him after you leave the premises.”
“I’m not leaving the premises until I see DeStefano.”
She took out her phone to call him again, but before she could dial the number, the guard grabbed her wrist, deftly twisted her arm behind her, spinning her away from him, and removed the phone from her hand.
“Goddamn it!” Karen yelled, flailing with her free arm.
He handed the phone to the other guard, caught her other arm, and pulled it down behind her back, then neatly handcuffed her. While everyone else in the lobby watched, the two guards marched her away from the security station through a door into a side room. There they sat her down in a metal chair, put her bag on a table next to it, and called the police.
Chapter 25
One of the security guards sat in the little white security room with her, watching the news on a mini-tablet while they waited for the police. Karen silently boiled with rage and humiliation.
It was more than an hour before the police finally arrived. They formally arrested her in front of the security guards, cut off the plastic handcuffs the security guards had put her in, replaced them with an identical pair of their own, then marched her out to the parking lot and inserted her into the back seat of a squad car.
At the precinct, she was turned over to a jail matron who strip-searched her, watched her dress again, relieved her of all other personal effects, and put her in a holding cell with three jittery drug addicts and one sleepy prostitute.
When she asked how long she’d be there, the officer said, “Until we get our paperwork caught up.”
“How long will that be?”
“Busy day today.”
“When can I call my lawyer?”
“When we get our paperwork caught up.”
A twelve foot square. Three walls of concrete and one of bars. Walls, floor, and ceiling all a grimy battleship grey. A low steel shelf ran the length of each wall — too narrow for a bed, too broad for a bench. A lidless steel toilet sat inside a doorless cubicle off the back wall, the only break in the line of the shelf. The prostitute squirmed on one shelf, a dirty white glove draped over her eyes, trying to sleep. The addicts had spaced themselves evenly around the remaining space. They sat shivering and coughing. One of them emitted a tight, Tourette's-like grunt several times a minute.
Karen remained a long time standing against the barred door, afraid to invade the territories the others had so evenly apportioned. The place stank of urine and unbathed bodies. Worse than the stink was the constant, skull-rattling noise. Every sound from every cell rang like hammer blows off the hard walls — cell doors clanging, inmates cursing, toilets flushing, pipes knocking, and TV screens blaring.
Her first thought was: If I start screaming and don’t stop, they’ll have to come let me out. But she couldn’t trust that plan. More likely one of the addicts would lose it and shove a sock down her throat.
Then she thought: I can take this. I won’t be here long. — However, her cellmates looked anything but recently arrived. Assuming first in / first out, she could be here a good while.
Then she thought: The noise will soon drive me out of my head anyway, so I may as well start screaming now.
But she didn’t. She just stood there by the bars, watching the addicts shiver and sneeze, twitch and grunt.
After a while she settled on a plan for distracting herself by paying close attention to the video screen on the wall outside the cell. That was when her day advanced from extremely unpleasant to truly bizarre.
It was showing the news, of course. The whole world was watching the news. She really had to concentrate to hear it over the incessant din, but it wasn’t the sound that mattered in this case.
NEWSREADER: …to know more about this strange disorder. Newsline today obtained the clip you’re about to see from the Centers for Disease Control. Doctor, can you tell us what we’re seeing here?
GUEST: [Undertitle: Dr. Philip Kaufman, New York, former director of NIMH] Yes. This tape was produced by the CDC and supplied to health officers and medical personnel around the country to familiarize them with the signs and symptoms of IDD. Is it on now? OK, good. Yes—
Kaufman shrank
into a small box as the main screen cued up an over-lit scene of a clinically white room, a table, and two men sitting on opposite sides of the table. It looked like it had been shot behind a two-way mirror. One man was dressed in a lab coat over lime-green scrubs. The other man, in a white T-shirt and orange scrub pants, had his head down, bent over a piece of paper on which he was drawing or writing with great deliberation. Doctor and patient. Or was it interrogator and perpetrator? Karen thought the ambiguity looked less than coincidental. But maybe her present circumstances were affecting her judgment.
DOCTOR: [Calmly.] How are you today?
PATIENT: [Looking up.] How is who? Who is how?
Karen stopped breathing. Her knuckles turned white around the bars.
DOCTOR: I’m fine. How are you?
PATIENT: Who says how? Who says you are how you are?
The desire to start screaming came rushing back over her. This cannot be happening. This cannot be real.
The patient/perpetrator on the screen was Roger Sturgeon. The doctor interogating him was Carl Marley.
DOCTOR: Do you understand my question? I asked how you are today. Do you understand that question?
PATIENT: Mm. Well, that’s a question, isn’t it? That’s quite a question, isn’t it?
DOCTOR: [Helpfully.] It’s an ordinary question, don’t you think?
PATIENT: [Banging the table with the cast on his right arm.] Why do you ask questions you already know?
[The Doctor jumps — but only slightly.]
PATIENT: Why do you make a problem out of everything?
DOCTOR: I can see you’re upset.