Memory is a funny thing. Jaimie knew he had been in several grocery stores with his family, but they melded together as one gigantic grocery store. Such stores did not interest him. Memory shorthands the mundane. Instead, Jaimie’s memory of the afternoon he first spoke was perfect. He kept the slap and held on to the shimmy of sound and light that followed. Anna held on to that slap, too, but for different reasons.
At the end of the fight, Jack wept and begged Jaimie’s then eight-year-old sister for forgiveness. She bought Anna a new bicycle the next day. Jack never received her official pardon, but Jaimie’s father was never told the truth of the broken plates. In their excitement in discovering Jaimie wasn’t a true mute, no further questions were asked about why Anna changed so much after the boy began to occasionally speak. Theo thought it was jealousy over the shift in attention from daughter to son.
The doctors and therapists shrugged in their professional way and said the little boy must have been listening all that time he was thought to be terribly developmentally delayed.
“Mentally delayed,” Anna called him.
The day of the slap, the house changed. There was more tension in the air because Jaimie’s parents were always waiting for a song or at least a song title. Jaimie thought the slap made more difference to the family than his few words.
As he sat watching his mother’s hands and eyes now, Jaimie felt that something was coming for them, promising to change everything again. Jaimie had heard the letter arrive in the box outside the front door. He knew there was a mail carrier, a person whose job it was to bring the mail daily, but he never saw the deliverer. His mother said the Post Office was like God in that way, unseen and capricious about delivery. She spoke about God a lot before, and during, the plague. Afterward, less so.
Bored, Jaimie left his seat and sat on the floor in a corner of the kitchen. A line of ants ferried food from a small garbage bag beside the overflowing can. The ants took the crumbs to someplace he couldn’t see, though Jaimie assumed it was a place with lots of food and ant comforts and wonders. He hovered far above Antworld, outside of their awareness and time. He thought about the Post Office and what Jack said about God. He took a kernel of cereal from the box in his arms and placed the gift in the ants’ path. Jaimie’s mother insisted her son was made in God’s divine image, so maybe, he thought, we are all gods in some small way. Or, he considered, we are God’s ant farm.
Ants don’t speak, either, he thought, but each nest is a city filled with mute workers and soldiers, oblivious to any handicap.
The ants reminded him of crawling in grass in autumn sunshine, back when people weren’t so afraid to go outside. The radio voices called it “social distancing.” Word of plague was in the air and words spread from person to person, spreading as much fear as the virus. People avoided each other, even the ones who called the worriers alarmists and conspiracy theorists.
Jaimie thought himself safe from the plague since he’d been avoiding people all of his life. The boy wondered if the worry of the spreading mind virus was the precursor to the Sutr plague, preparing everyone for the coming invasion.
That sunny day last autumn, Jaimie searched the grass, straining to pick up the cricket’s chirp. Green stained his knees and the point of each cool blade prickled his bare chest, stomach and elbows as he carefully parted the green waves, focused on the small world. The boy found the cricket. He watched its beautiful yellow eyes, wondering if the insect studied him, too. If so, what did it see? Could the cricket see the full spectrum of colorful energy that wrapped his body, too?
The boy knew from watching the Nature Channel that the cricket’s ears were on its two foremost legs, just below the joint. If his large ears were at his knees, the boy thought, no one would ever make fun of his ears. He could conceal them under his pant legs. There was something to envy about every small, fragile thing.
The rumble of the distant plane’s engines reached him first, but Jaimie ignored the machine, his eyes focused on the insect. Perhaps the insect watched him. Then the aircraft’s quick shadow passed over him like a cool hand, a dark omen. He looked up to see the last commercial jet flights he’d ever see. They called them “air carriers”. Jaimie thought those words fit well. Aircraft shrank the world enough that the Sutr virus could stretch its shroud over the Earth. Each plane was the Sutr virus’s emissary, carrying plague in its air molecules and dooming the human race to a new kind of apocalypse that would grow stronger, mutating monsters.
When Jaimie looked to the grass again, the cricket was gone, escaped to its tiny world, far from ominous shadows and safe from curious boys and reaching plagues.
Of lost loves and butter creams
A man collapsed in front of Jaimie’s parents once, a long time ago. Papa Spence, Jaimie’s grandfather, paid for the honeymoon. That’s how they came to stand in line behind the man waiting for tickets at the Louvre.
“I had a romantic notion of Paris, as if it wasn’t like anyplace else in the world. Our first day in the city, the next guy in line drops dead in front of us,” Jack said. “The man was just buying his ticket, holding his hand out for change when he suddenly grabbed his left arm, and rubbed it hard, like he was trying to get something off it. After a few seconds, he fell like he’d been hit over the head with a huge mallet.”
Theo searched for a pulse. Jack yelled for help. The woman behind the counter froze for a moment and watched the three tourists on the floor. She seemed to take a long time to reach out and pick up the phone by the register. Two more tourists, not a hundred feet away, came running. They were a pair of young American doctors and they took over the attempt to resuscitate the man.
“How lucky is that?” Theo said. “Two doctors, right there! As soon as they showed up, I thought things were going to work out okay. Then there was this sickening crunch! One rib broken, then two. I wasn’t so sure things would work out after that.”
Museum Security arrived and shooed people back, making room for the doctors to work, telling the tourists in both English and French, “Everything is fine. Everything is fine. The problem is under control.”
“I really wanted to believe that was true, but they kept saying it over and over until I didn’t believe it anymore.” The loud la-la, la-la of an ambulance drew closer, promising more help for the stricken man.
The security guards let Theo and Jack stand close, perhaps thinking they were related or thinking that the police would want to speak to them. Theo and Jack watched the unconscious man’s eyes. One eye was a slit. The other pupil shot wide. It looked like an old penny.
When the paramedics arrived, the doctors stood and stepped back shaking their heads at each other. They spoke no French. One of the doctors breathed heavily, trying to catch his breath from the frantic resuscitation attempt. He turned to Theo. “His passport fell out of his pocket. I saw it. This guy’s from Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein only takes about twenty minutes to cross by train…and so close to Paris, really. Everything is so close together here.”
“He said it like it explained something,” Theo said.
The paramedics injected their drugs and stimulants and massaged the dead man’s heart. They rattled back and forth at each other and, though Jack and Theo didn’t understand their words, they intuitively recognized the pattern unfolding. Life signs and orders were barked urgently at first. Then came the hard work of pushing on the man’s chest. The paramedics spoke less and less as resignation set in. At last, an eloquent shrug and one of them glanced at his watch.
Jack told the story many times and she always ended it the same way. “He was on his way in. I can’t get over that. Imagine dropping dead on your way in to the Louvre! He got up that day thinking he was finally going to see the greatest art in the history of the world.”
That day in the Louvre was the first thing Jack thought of when she read the letter from Uncle Cliff. “Medical people are working hard, security people are telling everyone to stay calm and that they’re in control.
People are dying anyway.”
Theo and Jack whispered at first, so Anna paid more attention. Jaimie paid attention, knowing parents only whispered about birthdays, Christmas presents, and death.
Everyone knew about the Sutr virus for some time, of course, but in the early days of the Sutr flu, it was not considered a serious threat. When people died in small numbers in countries far away, somehow that didn’t count and went unreported. Eventually, the virus asserted itself, made itself known so it could not be ignored. Still, it was downplayed as just another flu virus. It took no more of a toll than the expected, seasonal influenza. The very young and vulnerable died. The Sutr flu killed old people crammed in nursing homes, passing the disease hand to hand.
Scary speculation in the media had lost its potency so people switched the channel, searching for news about sexy, young starlets flirting with death by meth, STDs and drunk driving. The public had heard the media cry wolf too many times to prepare for the killer wolf pack when it finally arrived.
The name Sutr was on everyone’s lips by February. Scientists speculated that the plague had begun in India with cows. Riots erupted over attempts by public health officials to slaughter cows for the protection of humans. The virus might have been contained then, but when it was reported that more people had died in violent protests than from the virus, the sacred cows were allowed to live. Travel to India was restricted, but even that stopped when someone pointed out that there had been just as many deaths in the United States.
Theo said the disaster was a perfect example of the potted frog. “Put a frog in a hot pot and he’ll jump out right away. Turn up the heat slowly and the frog will boil to death because, each moment, he’s just a little hotter than before so he doesn’t jump. He doesn’t even complain. Inside, we’re all frogs.”
Stocks of hand sanitizer were bought up quickly and there weren’t any of the little bottles to be had for any price. People washed their hands more and coughed into their sleeves as they were told by public health experts, who didn’t have anything more to offer than simple hygiene.
Jaimie’s father was unimpressed. “No one noticed Johnny Cash couldn’t sing but he talked well enough that people took him for a singer. No one noticed that health experts weren’t offering more than 19th century remedies.”
Spokespeople for the CDC reassured the public that the dead were mostly from remote parts of the world or were already sick of something else when they died.
“Not very reassuring if you’re a farmer, or a foreigner or already sick with something else,” Theo said. “Sounds like, ‘Everything is fine. Everything is fine. The problem is under control.’”
A curious denial stole over the coverage of the developing crisis: The news stories began to take on a sameness. People tired of the alarm bells. Some pundits turned to mocking their own reporters from cozy desk chairs in safe television studios.
“There have been too many false alarms to take the alarmists seriously,” one confident commentator declared.
“Overblown,” a pretty blonde woman named Megan agreed. “Many more thousands die of the regular strains of influenza every year and no one makes a big deal about that.”
Jaimie watched the plague unfold. He loved television because the machine did all the talking and asked nothing of him. It was content to talk into the boy’s silence. But he wondered why the TV people weren’t worried about the thousands who died yearly, before the Sutr virus rose to strike down the confident and comfortable?
“Uncle Cliff wrote to warn us,” his mother told the assembled family.
It was a short letter but, to Jaimie’s consternation, it wasn’t written in block letters. The message was dashed off with a slashing hand. Jaimie couldn’t read it himself. The nuances of cursive writing were a code he could not break. Each deviation from the expected thwarted his understanding.
Cliff was Theo’s identical twin brother. Though his letter was short, it sat atop a sheaf of papers that supported his claims. Jaimie could read the printed type but many of the words were unfamiliar. He went to his room and reappeared in a moment with one of his dictionaries to work through his uncle’s warning.
Jaimie loved the dictionary even more than television because it is the one book that contains all others. Jaimie looked up “variant” and “adaptation” and “evolution” and “contagion”.
At times, even with one finger under the questioned word and his other hand planted on the dictionary’s explanation, Jaimie was lost. What exactly did Uncle Cliff mean when he said a virus could “jump”? The definition of one word led to other words. Jaimie disappeared into his dictionaries for hours, each time finding new paths to follow to new treasures he hadn’t known existed.
Cliff and Theo had not gotten along in childhood and the letter seemed to acknowledge the distance between them. Uncle Cliff seemed to expect his twin to object to whatever he might say, so he sent copies of World Health Organization reports. The whispers shot back and forth between Theo and Jack for an hour as they read and reread the letter.
Jaimie caught a few of their words. His mother used the words “journey to Golgotha”, which seemed to displease his father. Jaimie remembered that Golgotha, in Greek, meant place of the skull. Jaimie liked descriptive language.
Theo repeated the word “conflagration.” Jaimie went back to his dictionary, turning pages fast to keep up.
Anna waited until the lull between dinner and dessert to steal the letter from its place by Jack’s plate. When she came back to the table, Jaimie could tell she was excited: Back straight, eyes wide. “What are we going to do?”
Theo and Jack looked to each other, their faces blank.
Jack’s eyes went tight, squeezing out tears.
Jaimie looked up from his dictionary and watched his father reach out and rub his mother’s back in slow, warm circles. Tentatively, Jaimie reached for his mother’s cheek. His hand came away wet. Thinking of amphibians on stovetops, Jaimie said one word: “Frog.”
Without understanding the dark context of Jaimie’s thoughts, they all laughed.
Tonight we dream of claws and teeth
Jaimie enjoyed school. He listened in class but his teachers asked little more of him than his attention. Anna said she didn’t like school, but she cried when the government shuttered all the schools and decreed that everyone had to stay home.
Jack listened to the radio and shook her head when a parent called in to say that school closures interfered with his job. Daycare centers were also closed. The words “social distancing” were spoken so much that some people started saying “SD” instead.
Anna talked to a friend on the phone and complained how bored she was. Then she called another friend from school and made the same complaints. When she talked to her boyfriend Trent, she closed the door on her little brother, saying only, “Ears!”
Away from their teachers, Jaimie’s classmates called him Ears, as well. Jaimie had large ears, but he thought the right one special. It pointed forward so his mother called it Jaimie’s listening ear. His teachers said they wished all their students listened as well as he did. Jaimie liked that, so he didn’t mind the nickname.
He didn’t mind being called “retard” very much, either, because that didn’t say anything about what he could do. Jaimie could listen better than anyone, and remember everything. It took Jaimie some time to realize he saw the world more deeply than everyone he knew.
When he discovered they didn’t see the colors he could detect, he felt sorry for them. They spoke easily but were mostly blind. For instance, the boy saw the colors of numbers. Each flower had its own sound, gently humming to itself.
Words were Jaimie’s favorite thing, though. Words had meanings everyone could understand, but Jaimie could detect the music and feel the shape of each word. As a very young child, he’d been lost in an overwhelming sea of color, taste and sensation, near to drowning. Currents and tides closed in over his head until he had to close his eyes to the beau
tiful onslaught. The texture of the sounds on the radio distracted him. Soft music tasted sweet. Angry voices felt jagged. Sharp words prickled his skin. Everything in the world had such dimension that Jaimie remembered everything he saw. Jaimie was the perfect witness to the end of the world.
It came to the boy that he was unique in his perceptions when he happened across his word in the dictionary. It had started with a random find of the word “poeticule.” Wandering through the Ps, he found “perspicacity” and “perception.” In the details about perception, Jaimie found a reference to “synesthesia”. He followed that path to the Ss. That’s where he found himself. “Synesthete.”
Jaimie saw the worry lines in Jack’s forehead as she listened to the radio. Her body’s envelope of energy contracted and took on a washed-out yellow tone. When she turned off the radio, she unplugged it, as well. The first day the schools were closed there were only 406 cases of Sutr flu in all of Canada. There were 1,200 in the United States, only 98 in the Britain (they shut their borders early), “over 3,000” in India. (No precise numbers were provided once they got past 2,500). China stopped reporting any cases once the number rose past 4,000. Some journalists suggested that meant the true number was higher than one million in China.
* * *
Later the same week, schools everywhere shut down and it was said there wasn’t a working subway train in the world. Sometimes when Jack was outside working in the garden, Theo would plug the radio back in and listen with the sound low. The voices didn’t feel sharp on Jaimie’s skin anymore. He felt something in the radio voices he hadn’t encountered before. Fear that arrives electronically is a cool, yellow that tastes sour, like a rotten lemon.
This Plague of Days (Omnibus): Seasons 1-3 Page 2