by Mark Tufo
“Dad says it’s a terrible thing what’s happened to flight attendants,” Anna said. “He says when they were called stewardesses, they were cuter. Now the older ones have a waxy look.”
Jaimie wondered how the change in the name of their occupation could have changed the way they looked. He’d heard there were magic words. “Flight attendant” must have powerful, and dangerous, magical properties.
Anna pulled her little brother into the house. “Let’s keep this between you and me,” Anna said and then burst out in a giggle. “Mom would worry you’re getting corrupted. I won’t say anything and I know you won’t.”
Jaimie followed Anna up the back stairs into the kitchen. She pulled out a box of cereal and poured a bowl for herself and one for her brother. He never asked to eat but was usually cooperative if a bowl and spoon was placed in front of him.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Sotherby and the woman. Jaimie liked to watch colorful patterns that flowed around people. He had seen the colors around living things all of his life. He assumed everyone saw them. The boy had seen something pass between Mr. Sotherby and the flight attendant he had never before seen. It was disturbing because it muddied their colors and made them less vibrant.
Jaimie stood at the sink and gazed out of the kitchen window as he ate. The moon hung so low and full, the tip of a distant church spire reached, its tip stretching to split Clavius, a large crater toward the base of the moon’s face. The boy’s mind wandered over the words spire and aspire. Surely, the terms shared the same arrogant word root. But the spire would always be bound to the Earth, many miles short of aspiration’s heights. The gap between hope and doomed reality turned the boy’s mind back to the naked woman in the next yard.
Small black spots had hovered between the pair like greasy flies. The black smear spoiled the usual pleasing weave of colors. There had been many of them, like a cloud of feeding insects, around the woman. They spread over Mr. Sotherby, too, reaching for him. Jaimie didn’t know what the black spots were, but he sensed a yearning and purpose in their movement. They aspired to reach Mr. Sotherby and overtake him. He sensed the black cloud’s aspirations would be fulfilled.
That was Jaimie Spencer’s first glimpse of the Sutr Virus at its deadly work. He was sixteen. He might have mentioned it to someone, but Jaimie Spencer was a selective mute. His mother didn’t like that label so she called it, “How Jaimie is.”
“He’s a very selective mute,” his father, Theo Spencer, said. “Jaimie has something we all lack: A super power. My son can shut up until he has something to say.”
But Jaimie’s ability to communicate well still waited on a distant time horizon then. Billions would have to expire — and one death would have to transpire — before Jaimie found his voice.
Toast Fortune’s smiles and fever dreams
The letter arrived in the late morning. Jaimie’s father worked in a small library branch. Jaimie was home because the School Board and the Health Board were “in discussions” about whether children should be kept at home. Officials debated if masks should be worn while others insisted masks were too uncomfortable for children to wear all day.
Jaimie heard his parents debating, too. Jack, his mother, said she was keeping him home because she didn’t want to be alone in the house. (She was “Jacqueline” to very few people, and to no one who knew her well.)
If Jaimie had chosen to speak, he would have said, “We’re always alone.”
Jack hugged her son and he let her because it pleased her. Jaimie knew she wanted him to speak and he occasionally pushed a word or two up past his throat, each like a stone forced through a narrow gap. Jaimie sensed his mother wanted something more from him now, but the boy couldn’t guess what that might be. He ate his cereal dry from the box as she read the letter. She glanced up at him as she read, as if to make sure he was still in his seat at the kitchen table, and safe. Her hands trembled and Jaimie suspected this was a good time to say something. No words came.
Jaimie did not speak at all until he was six and then he spoke, or rather sang, words in perfect pitch. His mother credited John Lennon for her son’s first miracle. After all the cajoling by many frustrated therapists and teachers, it was John Lennon who stirred Jaimie to vocalize for the first time.
“Everyone loved the Beatles,” Jack said. “Somehow we never noticed that much of it is excellent children’s music.” The song was Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. Jack did not hear Jaimie’s first words. He sang for Anna and only his sister heard him. She whooped and leapt in the air shouting for their mother to come hear Jaimie sing those two nonsense words over and over. He never began the lyrics, as if singing the title should be enough after so long a silence.
Jack ran upstairs and slapped her daughter. “What a mean lie!” The red outline of Jack’s fingers tattooed her cheek, including the thin outline of her wedding ring. She had never done such a thing until that moment.
Jaimie listened to the echo of the slap bounce off the bedroom wall. To him, the slap ended with a thin shine, the color of mustard. His mother’s energies shone bright red. His sister shone yellow and crimson.
Anna screamed and whirled on Jaimie, insisting the little boy sing Ob-La-Di again. She was only two years older than her brother. She didn’t know the surest way to shut up a selective mute is to insist he speak.
Anna was still jailed in her room, long after supper, when Jaimie sang another Beatles title. This time it was Taxman. He sang the title absentmindedly as he spun a plastic bowl on the kitchen floor, watching the after images flutter to the hollow sound as the bowl circled and shuddered to a stop.
Jack dropped and shattered a plate, wept and squeezed the six-year-old tight. That became what the rest of the family remembered, the agreed-upon and official story. However, Jaimie knew the dishes had been shattered in the sink in the late afternoon as Anna and his mother fought. Jack threw the first plate in the sink as she washed it. Anna threw the second. Jaimie listened to the screams. He caught the familiar, accusatory tone people use when they shout the same things over and over, conveying more energy than information.
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 sma
ll 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 focussed 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 pr
ice. 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.