Isolation Ward

by Joshua Spanogle

  I was happy he was coming. Really, I was relieved he was coming. And I might believe it if I said it enough.

  I resigned myself to the imminent arrival of Herr Lancaster. Still, there were some things I wanted to do before he came and took over the city.

  I tracked down the male members of this sordid love knot to their jobs at the Miller nursing homes. Henry and Jerry and Mitchell were there. Disturbingly, Douglas—whose full name was Douglas Buchanan—was not. The group home where he was a resident called to say he was sick. While I was there, I reinterviewed Henry, Jerry, and Mitchell. Though they had lied to me the night before about their relationships with the women, they were somewhat more forthcoming that afternoon.

  Other than their trysts with Bethany and Helen, the three men’s histories were uneventful. I drew blood and got semen samples. Next time you’re trying to do something difficult—say, trying to teach your dog to recite Shakespeare—think about getting semen samples from a couple of mentally disabled men who don’t really understand the reason for your wanting their seed. Dan Miller came down and pressured them, and I don’t even want to think what kinds of legal boundaries we were crossing with his presence. Anyway, after a few minutes of cajoling, I sent them one by one into the men’s room with a copy of Hustler and a condom. I’m happy to report that each man performed.

  With my little bag of blood and sperm samples, I left Miller Grove, and drove to Douglas Buchanan’s residence. I played the relationships through in my head over and over. Each time, the web got bigger. AIDS II—or the face-sparing hemorrhagic fever, or whatever the hell it was—might well be sliding out of control.

  I called Verlach, who, at the moment, was off the street and in his office, having sent the poor state bastards out to interview the people we’d missed. The first twenty interviews in an outbreak are fun. The last one hundred are sheer, unforgiving hell. I didn’t blame him for taking some cover in administration.

  I gave him the download. “Making some headway,” he said.

  “Maybe.” I told him I was headed to Baltimore Haven to talk to Douglas Buchanan.

  “That’s where Debbie Fillmore lives.”

  “Yes. Convenient for them.”

  “And for you. Enjoy yourself. The place is dank.” He shuffled some papers. “I’d come with you, but I have to coordinate from here. Get ready for state and your CDC chums. And speaking of chums, it looks like your boss is coming up from Atlanta.”

  “I heard.”

  “I thought Timmons was going to request more guys like you, more EIS. I guess he wanted bigger guns.”

  “I called Tim Lancaster, Herb. I suggested he come.”

  “Oh,” he said flatly. “I guess that’s why Timmons looked like a grenade went off in his face.”

  I could imagine Tim Lancaster giving the full-court press to Timmons, scaring the hell out of him, not about a microbial blowup but about the commissioner’s own career. Playing the old cover-your-ass. If things went wrong, CDC’s shoulders were a lot stronger than Commissioner Ben Timmons’s. Tim Lancaster knew it, Ben Timmons knew it. So did I, and so did Herb Verlach.

  “Good luck with them,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  Verlach took a moment; I heard him flipping through more pages. “Douglas Buchanan. We missed him each time we were there.”

  “He’s the guy who bolted from me at the nursing home.”

  “Right. Maybe you’ll catch him at Baltimore Haven. Don’t call ahead.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And wait until you see the guy’s room.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just wait. You’ll know what I mean when you see it.” Verlach cleared his throat. “Hey, Nate, you’re doing a great job.”

  I thanked him for the much-needed boost and said good-bye. But before I hung up, Verlach stopped me.

  “Hey, check on the vermin for me, will you?”

  “I thought the press was camped outside your office.”

  “Very funny, Doctor. Make sure the traps weren’t tampered with. I have a little gray piece of tape on each trap. It’ll be broken if anyone screwed with it.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Jesus Christ, Verlach was right. Baltimore Haven was anything but a haven. Three stories of beige brick, housing thirty-six residents in a decayed neighborhood in northwest Baltimore. The top floor must have had a nice view of Druid Park. A pretty park, actually, if you didn’t think about the murders and rapes that regularly occur there.

  The door buzzed, and I walked down a hallway floored in cracked linoleum. A woman sat at what I guess was a receiving desk. Well, it was either that or a counseling station, since there was a small sign—faded now—with a bear and a dialogue bubble reading: Talk to me. I can help with ANYTHING. She seemed to be counseling a boyfriend now, cracking gum and giggling into the phone.

  “Dr. Nathaniel McCormick, Baltimore City Health Department,” I said, figuring the local Department of Health would carry more weight than some unknown national agency. I pulled out my Health Department credentials.

  “Hold on,” she said, and dropped the receiver from her mouth. “What do you want?”

  To see this place shut down and you shoveling burgers at McDonald’s. “I’m here to speak with one of your residents. Douglas Buchanan. I also need to check the rodent traps Dr. Verlach set yesterday.”

  “Call you back,” she heaved wearily into the phone. She dropped it into its cradle. “Which do you want to do first?”

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Buchanan.”

  “Third floor, end of the hallway.” She made no move to get up and lead me. And this woman is in health care? I thought. God.

  “I’ll find my own way.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  To my left, there was a large recreation room cluttered with broken chairs, a couple of board games, and a television. Two slack-mouthed residents stared at the TV. If Open Arms was heaven for its inhabitants, Baltimore Haven was definitely some sort of hell.

  Evidently, like Verlach said, there had been some effort to clean up since attention focused on this place. In fact, the effort was still going on. A man in filthy coveralls was mopping the stairs, and not doing a great job. Gray water cascaded over the steps. Fine for a fountain, not good for a means of egress. I held on to the railing and kept walking.

  “Hi,” I said. The man looked at me blankly, then slopped the filthy mop onto the stairs.

  I walked out of the stairwell into a hallway about twenty feet long. Two doors lined each side of the hallway with another door—closed—at the end. From the stellar directions given me by my guide, I decided the door at the end of the hallway was Douglas’s.

  The first door on my right was open, or, more exactly, broken and open, hanging by a single hinge. In it, a man sat on one of two beds. He was hugging himself and mumbling. The only decoration in the room, besides a big poster for State Farm Insurance (“Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There”), was a picture of a black Jesus surrounded by black apostles.

  Through another open door, I saw a man lying on his bed, naked from the waist down, legs pulled up to his chest. Feces was newly smeared on the bed. In the next room, a man slumped in a chair, a tinny radio belching out fire-and-brimstone religion. He was, it looked like, trying to eat his shirt.

  At the end of the hall, I knocked on the closed door.

  “Who goes there?” I heard from inside.

  “It’s Dr. McCormick, Douglas. I saw you last night at the nursing home. I need to talk to you, please.”

  For a moment, there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of a lock being undone.

  Verlach was right: Douglas’s room was something else. Nothing to write home about, but in the context of Baltimore Haven, this was a suite at the Plaza.

  The first thing I noticed was the lock—a nice Yale dead bolt—and that there was only one bed. In addition to being a single, the room was decked out in personal accoutrements: a large poster for the San Francis
co 49ers, another for the SF Giants. There was a framed picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. No State Farm posters here.

  Music played from a portable CD player. A window air conditioner hummed.

  Dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, Douglas Buchanan stood in front of me with his arms crossed. He avoided eye contact. “You have a nice place here, Douglas.”

  “Thank you,” he said nervously.

  I let the silence sink in for a moment; then I said, “You seem to like San Francisco.” I gestured at the posters. “Have you ever been there?”

  If there was one place I didn’t need to see again, it was San Francisco, or anywhere in the Bay Area, for that matter. I’d rather spend a week in Baltimore Haven, bunking with the guy who chowed on his shirt, than one night in a four-star in downtown SF.

  Well, maybe that’s a stretch, but you get the idea.

  I caught Douglas Buchanan staring hard-eyed at me; he quickly looked at his feet. “I ain’t been there,” he said.

  “It’s an interesting place,” I said. Then, changing tack: “Are you feeling sick?”

  “No.” Quickly, he added, “Yes.”

  “Which is it? I just need to know. I’m not going to tell the people where you work.”

  After a long moment, he said, “No.”

  “I’m a doctor, Douglas. Would you mind if I felt your forehead? To see if you have a fever?”

  I reached at him without giving him time to answer. He flinched, but let me touch his head. It was a little wet with perspiration, but despite the air-conditioning, it was July in Baltimore, after all. He felt fine to me.

  I pulled back my hand and wiped it on my pants. “Douglas, I need to ask you some questions about your girlfriends. You have girlfriends, don’t you?”

  He hugged himself a little tighter. “No.”

  “Do you know Deborah Fillmore? She lives here.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Do you know Helen Jones or Bethany Reginald? They work with you at Mr. Miller’s nursing home.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Douglas, this is very important. Debbie, Bethany, and Helen are all very sick. They need your help.”

  He shot me a look. Afraid? Angry? I couldn’t tell. “Douglas, I know you know them. They told me.” Well, one of them, at least. “Douglas, do you know what sex is?”

  “Yes, I know what sex is.” He sounded annoyed. He sat on the bed and rubbed his strong, heavy jaw. If you didn’t speak to him, you wouldn’t know he was retarded. Even then, it might take a few sentences to realize he was, as they say, slow.

  Okay, I thought, one more try before I get tough. “Have you had sex with Helen or Debbie or Bethany?” Douglas scooped up a small toy truck from a nightstand and began to spin its wheels. “When was the last time you had sex with any of them?”

  Spin, spin, spin.

  “Douglas, you have to talk to me.”

  Spin, spin, spin.

  “Douglas, this is very important. I can call the police if you don’t talk to me.”

  The spinning stopped. He looked up at me. Now there was fear in his face. Naked fear.

  “No . . .” he whispered.

  “I’ll have to, Douglas, if you don’t talk to me—”

  “No!”

  As his anger flared, a phone started to ring. I reached for mine, which was stupid, considering I always kept it on vibrate. My pager, too. It wasn’t a phone in the room, either—there wasn’t one. The noise was coming from Douglas’s pocket. He looked at the pocket, then at me, then went back to spinning the wheels on the truck.

  He said, “Two weeks or a week. I don’t know.” The phone continued ringing, then abruptly stopped.

  “Who was it the last time?” He didn’t answer. “Was it Bethany—?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  No response. I asked again.

  “A week or two weeks ago.”

  “This is really important, Douglas. Besides Helen, Debbie, and Bethany, did you have sex with anybody else?”

  He sighed. “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “You don’t tell the police.”

  “I won’t. What were their names?”

  “You don’t tell anyone.”

  In the interest of public health, I lied through my teeth. “I promise I won’t,” I told him.

  Reluctantly, he ran through five names. I dutifully took each down into my notebook; some sounded familiar. “Do they work at Mr. Miller’s nursing homes?”

  “Who?”

  “The women you had sex with.”

  “Yeah.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yeah.”

  Good, I thought. If this thing is sexually transmitted, we might be able to contain it.

  Douglas’s cell phone squawked twice; someone had left a message on it. He didn’t bother to silence it.

  “Did you use condoms when you had sex with these women?”

  He processed that for a moment, then said: “I forget.”

  Great. “Douglas, have you ever had sex with a man?”

  “No!” he shouted. “Go. Go away now. Now it’s time for you to go.” He stood. “Go away. Go, go.”

  Douglas Buchanan was, as I said, a big man; he probably had two inches and forty pounds on me. My heart thudded and—I’m not going to shout this from the rooftops—I stepped back a pace or two. But I’ve taken a few blows in my time, including one from Douglas Buchanan the night before. However, that was before I thought he might be crawling with pathogens. I stood my ground anyway; Douglas came no closer.

  “Douglas, I need something else. I need to take some blood from you.”

  “No.” He shook his head violently and took a step toward me.

  Violence, as was drilled into me through those first rotations in the ER and psych wards, is seldom spontaneous. There are signals: escalating agitation, threatening movements. The upsurge to violence is clear, what’s not clear is the exact moment when the wave actually crests and the blows fly. Douglas Buchanan was definitely broadcasting to me he was about to crack.

  This time, it was I who backed down. I said gently, “Okay, I think we’re finished for now. But we’ll need to talk later, okay?” The cell phone chirped again; I pointed at his pocket. “Could you give me your cell phone number so I could call you if I needed to?”

  “What phone?”

  “The cellular phone in your pocket.”

  A weird look came over his face. Douglas, it seemed, was pretty damned cunning for a retarded guy. He knew he was slow. More important, he knew people knew he was slow: he played on that.

  I decided to let that one lie and moved to the door. I turned around just before I left.

  “One more thing. If you have to have sex, use a condom. We’re worried that the women you were with have a disease that is transmitted—it’s contagious—through sex. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes.” I might have been a lame public health appeal plastered to a city bus, for all he cared.

  “Tell me what I just said.”

  “Sex can kill you.”

  Well put, Douglas. I said, “Will you use a condom when you have sex again? Can you do that for me?”

  Douglas Buchanan, his eyes dead, nodded.

  “Thank you, Douglas. You’ve done a very good thing.” I forced a smile.

  CHAPTER 19

  On the way out of Baltimore Haven-cum-Hell, I stopped at the counseling desk, where, if you can believe it, the woman was still chatting it up. I tapped on her desk, which had the desired effects of making her stop the conversation and deeply annoying her.

  “Are the residents permitted to have cellular phones?”

  “There’s a pay phone in the hall behind you,” she said nastily. I looked. Indeed, there was a pay phone in the hallway.

  “Not what I asked.”

  She got off the telephone and rummaged in her desk, finally producing a beat-up sheaf of photocopied papers. She leafed through
them, stopped on one, and read: “‘No resident shall be permitted to possess personal communication devices (pagers, cellular telephones) while residing at Baltimore Haven.’” She reassembled the papers. “To keep them from dealing drugs,” she explained.

  I didn’t see why they couldn’t use the pay phone to deal drugs, and I almost said something about it. I didn’t, though, when I looked closer at the phone. The thing was missing its mouthpiece and earpiece. Wires sprang from the gutted ends of the handset.

  I turned back to her. “Can you show me to the kitchen and the basement?”

  “Why?”

  “I need to check the rat traps.”

  She looked pointedly at her watch, then looked at me with a practiced fuck-you stare. “You can wait here for Dr. Jefferson. He wants to talk to you.” Then she picked up the phone and began to dial.

  I took that as my cue.

  I walked past the desk down a small hallway to where I hoped the kitchen would be.

  “Hey!” she yelled after me. “Hey, you can’t go back there.”

  I saw a grungy dining room on my right, plates of half-eaten breakfast still on the tables.

  “You’ll be in deep shit, you keep going!” If she was right about that, we might actually have the reservoir for our disease. “What’s your name?” she screeched.

  Well, if she didn’t remember, I wasn’t going to help her. “Dr. Faustus,” I shouted back. By that time, I had my phone out and was dialing Verlach’s number.

  “Where are the traps?” I asked.

  Verlach gave me the rough locations of ten rodent traps. I took out my notebook and sketched a quick map of the kitchen, in which I was standing, and the pantry and basement. Two of the kitchen staff were lazily assembling sandwiches while a Latino radio station jangled in the background.