Cold Silence

by James Abel

  Now I stood with Nadine Huxley in the Miracle Chapel, beneath the window mosaic depicting lepers. Nadine was a small, trim blonde in black, with a clerical collar snug against her white throat. We both wore surgical masks. Behind us, all three rows of seats were crowded with worshippers, some of whom were clearly sick and should have been at the hospital. A man walked in behind me and knelt. His lips moved. I felt his eyes shift to me. He was praying.

  I told the dean, “So far we’ve been concentrating on medical aspects. I’m curious about leprosy in religion.”

  I knew Dean Huxley from her previous posting in Boston, where she’d returned from a leprosy mission in India, and addressed staffers at the Wilderness Medicine Program on treatment in poorer countries. I’d found her a brilliant and sensitive person, who managed to mesh a deep appreciation of the Bible with one of science. She had no problem mixing the biblical and the political, the biblical and the scientific. That’s what I wanted to hear now.

  “Leprosy?” she said. “In the Old Testament, it is basically a punishment. “The word itself is a translation from the Hebrew tzoraat, or ‘smiting.’ Moses asks Pharoah to let his people go, allow Jewish slaves to exit from Egypt, and he touches his chest as a threat, as if he’s leprous. Leprosy was punishment for lashon hara, slander. When Miriam mocks Moses, she is punished by God with leprosy. Tzoraat is often in the Old Testament. Read Leviticus. It’s all over the place.”

  “As a punishment,” I repeated.

  “For ridiculing God’s messenger, or message, yes.”

  “And in the New Testament? The same?”

  There were many more worshippers here than usual. Some watched Nadine. Others were engrossed in prayer. Smarter ones wore surgical masks and gloves against infection. Others ignored precautions, which was stupid, considering that this place drew the sick. I saw couples holding hands, parents who had brought children. What I saw was undoubtedly repeating itself in towns and cities all over the country. Churches, mosques, and synagogues would be hosting a steady stream of terrified supplicants, seeking divine help.

  Above us, in windows, lepers knelt before Christ, frozen in colored glass. The art commemorated events considered divine and, like Bible Fever as Admiral Galli called it, allegedly violated the laws of nature. Twenty-two panels showed impossible events, made true by the Lord. Jesus walking on the sea. The healing of the blind, the man with dropsy, the demonic, lepers.

  “In the New Testament, leprosy is cured by prophets. It’s an affliction, not a punishment,” she said. “In Latin, ‘Et cum ingrederetur quoddom castellum, occurrerunt ei decem viri leprosy, qui steterunt a longe.’ ‘And as Christ entered a town, ten leprous men met him, standing at a distance . . .’”

  I noticed that some of the people who had been praying were now listening to us. Some stared outright.

  “Can we continue this somewhere else?” I asked.

  “Are you here officially, Joe?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then we stay here,” she said, “for them.”

  I sighed. “You said that in the Old Testament, leprosy was punishment for mocking God or his prophets. Have you ever heard of the Sixth Prophet? A person? A book? A mention? Anything at all?”

  “‘The Sixth Prophet’? Why do you ask?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m just asking.”

  “Well, there are so many ways to answer that, so many prophets. Oral ones. Written ones. Minor ones. A prophet is an oracle of God. A prophet’s primary duty is to convey the holy word. In the American Orthodox Church, Micah would be the sixth. He prophesied the birth of the Savior. In the Mormon Church, Joseph F. Smith was, I believe, its sixth prophet. Islam has twenty-five prophets. Abraham is sixth. Where are you going with this?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “Is there a connection? The outbreak and prophets?”

  I tried to remember the exact words that the two men in Somalia had been singing. I couldn’t. I said, “I never knew there were so many prophets.”

  She laughed. “Well, in three thousand years of history, you get a big list. Saint Anthony was a patron for Saint Anthony’s fire, thought to be leprosy. Saint Bernard of Siena cured lepers. Saint Damian died afflicted. And those are so-called real prophets. There are plenty of false ones, coming out of the woodwork all the time. Cult prophets. Visit any asylum, you’ll find a dozen prophets.”

  “So Old Testament, punishment. New Testament, not.”

  “Nothing’s that easy. Jacobus de Voragine was archbishop of Genoa, thirteenth century. His writings charged that Emperor Constantine was punished by God with leprosy for persecuting Christians. So while the official version was cures, even churchmen pointed fingers.”

  “Of all the diseases, why did this one stand out?”

  Dean Huxley sighed. “Even into this century, leprosy victims have been shunned and stigmatized. Shut away. Mocked. It’s a cruel, cruel disease. Leprosy was considered a test by God. Mithraism may be the earliest remaining human religion, Joe. It is still practiced in some places. It’s thirty-five hundred years old. Mithras was a god, principle rival to Christ for five hundred years. The movement had similar sacraments. Adherents called their priests ‘father.’ Early Christians attacked Mithraic cult temples, smashed their statues, destroyed their graveyards, killed believers. Many scholars believe that if Rome had not become Christian, today Mithraism would be one of the principal religions on Earth. What’s the difference between a cult and a religion anyway? Some thinkers say the only difference is how many people belong.”

  She looked sad, not because Christianity had won out, but because suffering had taken place.

  I asked, “What did Mithraism have to do with leprosy?”

  “Well, they had a sanctuary in France, near Bourg-Saint-Andéol. They regarded the spring there as having healing power. In the middle ages they brought people suspected of having leprosy there, stood ’em up by the bank, and had the town barber bleed them. They’d mix the blood with the spring water. If the blood remained red and liquid, the suspect was pronounced clean. What are you staring at?”

  In some ways, the year might as well have been 1200. The pews might have been filled with peasants and dukes. The expressions on the faces around me were probably as similar to those long-dead people as the DNA inside them, and the bacteria multiplying in their bloodstreams.

  “The window,” I said. “The lepers. Leprosy and religions. I’m thinking about what you said.”

  Nadine said with some delicacy, lowering her voice, “Joe, you look tired. Eddie called a few weeks back, and told me that you spend too much time alone in the woods.”

  “Eddie is an asshole.”

  “No, he’s not. You know, Joe, the French writer André Malraux wrote that everyone is really three people: the one you show the world, the one you think you are, and the one who you really are.”

  “So you know who I am but I don’t?”

  “I would never be that presumptuous.”

  “The world was simpler when Malraux was alive.”

  “It was never that.”

  “Oh, I think you’ll agree that we face a few new complex problems just now, Nadine.”

  “Technically, yes. But in the end, complexity is something humans dream up to deny truth.”

  I appreciated the concern but the preaching irritated me, especially now. “I’m not going to play this game so you can feel better, Nadine. There are more important things to do.”

  Unfazed, she said, “You don’t believe in God anymore?”

  I shook my head. “Oh, I do. That’s the problem. But he and I made a deal.”

  “Which is?”

  “I agree to keep making the choices he throws at me, and he agrees to keep me away from love.”

  “What does one thing have to do with the other?”

  I saw Karen, dead, in an abandoned house in
Alaska. I was startled to have that image switch to a vision of Chris Vekey, which I pushed away. “I’ve killed people, Nadine. I’d do it again. Eddie thinks I feel guilty about it but he’s wrong.” I poked my chest. I signed the deal here. I said, “No more dragging in other people.”

  “Joe, we both know that you can’t make deals with him, he doesn’t work that way, and if you think you have, you’re fooling yourself.”

  “All kinds of new things seem to be going on.”

  —

  It was impossible for Orrin Sykes to hear what Joe Rush and the dean were saying. He’d knelt only eight feet from them, but they spoke in low voices, and the prayers around him were loud. Sykes wished he could get closer, but that might draw Rush’s attention. He’d hoped that the cathedral would be one of those places where you could stand on one side of a room and, through weird acoustics, hear whispers on the other. You were always reading about whisper corners in castles or cathedrals.

  There was no whisper corner here.

  The prayers fell silent for a moment and Sykes watched Rush. Through the quiet he heard a single phrase.

  The Sixth Prophet.

  Sykes rose and looked down at the worshipper beside him, a heavyset jowly guy wearing a Washington Redskins hat and a jacket. He was a football fan and that had been his undoing. The condiments had been infected before Sykes arrived in Washington, during a game against the New York Giants. Hundreds of people putting mustard or ketchup on their burgers and hot dogs had consumed the bug. Orrin saw sores on the man’s lips. The man had to know what was happening. He was staring up at the depiction of Christ. Sykes could read the moving lips, “Save me, save me.”

  Sykes thought, with real compassion, After you die, you will change into something new.

  Sykes got to his feet and, with a backward glance at Joe Rush, made his way back down the nave and past the redwood-sized columns and beneath the soaring V-shaped ceiling, past the Woodrow Wilson Bay, where the remains of the Twenty-eighth President were buried. Past the Lee-Jackson Bay, which depicted scenes from the lives of U.S. Civil War generals. Past the Folger Bay, where windows honored eighteenth-century explorers who opened the American West.

  Outside, the snow had thickened, and fell heavily, and Orrin Sykes left rapidly filling tracks as he made his way back toward the car. Rush was still inside. Sykes called Harlan, who went oddly silent when he heard the report. Sykes was unaccustomed to detecting any sign of doubt in Harlan. But when Harlan spoke, it was with the same soothing tones he used day to day back home.

  “He asked about the Sixth Prophet, Orrin?”

  “About the term. The words.”

  “He’s alone, you said. Major Nakamura isn’t there?”

  “No.”

  “There’s nothing in the reports I saw about this. No guard with him? Private car? You said you saw him arguing with the others in the admiral’s car?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I think I saw it.”

  “Did he phone anyone?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Did he mention Columbia County?”

  “I couldn’t hear well. Everyone was praying.”

  Harlan muttered something bitter, which Orrin could not make out, then said, “He was told to stay out of the investigation. He’s supposed to be out! And he’s still in the church now, but you left?”

  “I thought you’d want to hear this right away.”

  “Right. Of course. But why is he asking? Does he know something? Or is he fishing?”

  Harlan gave Orrin instructions then. He knew that what he requested was risky, but it was necessary, he said. “If there’s a way to talk to him, a way to pick his brain, that would help us very much, Orrin.”

  “But there’s people going in or out every few minutes. And you never know if someone will appear.”

  “Remember those things you did in Iraq? That you confessed? I told you then there was a reason for everything, there’s a reason you learned those skills. You must call upon those skills now. A skill is neither good nor bad by itself.”

  Orrin had a vision of a cement block house in a village. Of an Iraqi tied to a chair, screaming as Orrin did things to him. The man had been nothing more than a thief who worked for a rival gang. Orrin had tortured and killed that man to find a thousand gallons of diverted lubrication oil. When he was done, even his socks and the space between his toes had been soaked with the man’s blood.

  “I’ll try, Harlan. But if it’s not possible?”

  There was no hesitation in Harlan this time. “Kill him, Orrin. Find out what he’s up to or not, but I don’t want him back at that hospital. We have to hope he’s the only one, of all of them, who may be figuring this out.”

  Orrin Sykes clicked off and, dwarfed by the massive cathedral up the hill, sighed and missed Harlan. He missed the people back home. His friends. He wanted to go home.

  It would be simple to walk up to Rush and just pull a trigger, but Orrin had asked him to try to do more.

  There has to be a way, thought Orrin.

  Far up the driveway, in the dusk, a lone figure appeared on the cathedral steps.

  Rush?

  THIRTEEN

  Back in 1980, at the height of the Cold War, the FBI commissioned a study by Stanford psychologists to predict public reaction to a biological attack on the United States. Academically titled “Probability Analysis of Mass Fear Among Certain Populations,” the study used as a premise that an unknown enemy had released a rapidly spreading infectious agent in the United States.

  “Our purpose is to assist decision makers in designing effective policy,” the authors wrote after crisscrossing the country for months, taking surveys.

  I’d read the report, one more attempt to mask anarchy as controllable. The researchers had driven from city to city, administering five hundred true-false or multiple-choice questions to sixth graders in Little Rock, Montana convicts, Ohio steel workers, welfare moms in Oakland, migrant farmers in California, Wall Street brokers, corn farmers, teachers, long-haul truckers, bank clerks, house painters, heart surgeons.

  If law enforcement in your city ceased operating, and you were ill and knew you were infectious, would you:

  a. lock yourself in your home

  b. attempt to relocate to a possibly safer area

  c. consider the use of firearms justified

  d. go to a designated hospital

  The dryly written report predicted an initial phase of mass confusion, during which, “eighteen percent of people will panic, while 23 percent willfully ignore health announcements and refuse to take precautions, not believing that the illness is infectious. Seven percent will flee, believing that safety lies elsewhere. Four percent will secure their homes, hoard food, even attack strangers. Between 2 and 5 percent ‘will turn to crime,’” the summary stated, as if prediction were fact. “We expect a brief period of mass confusion but general cooperation, followed by rapid descent into anarchy, and an abandonment of all essential services. Therefore, we recommend a quick establishment of martial law, and the temporary closing of mass news outlets in order to minimize confusion and promote a common agenda.”

  Which had not happened.

  I stood on the steps of the National Cathedral with an encrypted cell phone in hand, knowing that I was once again going to anger Chris Vekey. I saw in my mind’s eye the frightened worshippers at my back, kneeling, praying, lips moving, eyes staring at the miracle windows inset into gray stone. I didn’t need a ten million dollar report to confirm the obvious—that the illness was in the initial phase, and things would worsen if it wasn’t contained.

  In 1980, when that report was written, our government had, for all its faults, still functioned more efficiently than under the unstable collection of extremists who currently kept the nation in gridlock. I punched numbers into the phone, readying arguments. But Chris didn’t ans
wer. The person I really wanted to speak to did.

  “Aya, did you mean what you said about wanting to help?” I asked.

  “Yes, Joe.” She sounded breathless, eager.

  “Put your mom on the phone, please.”

  I explained to Chris that I could use a researcher to replace the staffers Burke had pulled from the investigation. Aya could access social media with ease. She could surf the Net probably better than me, or half the adults I knew. She could check backgrounds on people, public records, at least. She could monitor news reports. She wasn’t a pro, but she was competent, and I needed all the help I could get.

  I took her silence for serious consideration until she said, “Only hours ago we were told to stick to the medical end. Are you out of your mind, Joe? If she looks into things, they can backtrack what she did on her computer. Then she’s in trouble, too.”

  I argued into cold silence. I had not forgotten. I simply wanted Aya to look at public records, not government ones.

  “You’re not dragging her into this.”

  Chris hung up.

  I started down the driveway. At its foot, the block was deserted. Lights came on in some small homes, but residents in others might have left the city, as they were dark. I was preoccupied, thinking that once I returned to the hospital, I’d be busy with patients, and conducting even the most basic Internet searches would be difficult.