“But we have to figure out what kind of flu virus it is that’s going around now.” Shibata flashed another thin smile. “It isn’t clear yet whether it’s Type A or Type B. And this one spreads like lightning.”
“Why not just prepare stocks of vaccine for both?”
“It might not help. A simple life-form like a virus can mutate very, very easily. It’s fair to say it’s different in nearly every epidemic. Remember the big one in 1957?”
“Yeah, the one called Asian flu?”
“Yep, that’s the one. That one wasn’t Type A or Type B. It was a new strain they called Tokyo A-57. Thanks to that, it was a nightmare coming up with a vaccine for it. Kumamoto University’s looking at this one for us. A fellow from the Chemo-Sero-Therapeutic Research Institute is helping out too.”
“So eggs are about to get expensive again?” Noriko made a sour face. “And here they were just saying that prices would drop now that spring is here.”
“Spring flus aren’t easy to cure.”
“Do you keep enough vaccine nowadays for Asian flu too?”
“Well, we bought three million two hundred thousand eggs back then to make just five hundred liters of vaccine.” Shibata’s face looked troubled. “Everybody says ‘vaccine’ this and ‘vaccine’ that, but when it comes to making the stuff, it’s a whole lot of trouble. You’ve got to implant the strain inside an egg, and after that it takes as many as a hundred days to make the finished product. Now, our production ability is improving somewhat, but even if we used the full capacity of the whole country … I don’t know if we could vaccinate even thirty percent of the population.”
“How many people could you vaccinate with five hundred liters?”
“Five hundred thousand adults,” he replied, rapping his desk with his knuckles. “Five million people got infected with Asian flu.”
“Just a drop in the bucket.” Noriko winced. “But oh well. You don’t die from influenza, so if you just take aspirin or something …”
“Hey, this isn’t a joke.” Shibata’s face grew a little more serious. “We’ll be in trouble if former medical journalists start spreading bad info like that. Depending on the year, the death rate from influenza can actually be quite high. Especially among children and the elderly, who have weaker resistance. Even among adults, people with heart problems or complications from stuff like pneumonia have to be careful. The A-57 flu had quite a high fatality rate.”
“Don’t go trying to scare me,” Noriko said, lighting up a cigarette. “I’ve been told I might have Wilson’s disease, not that I really know what that means.”
“Well, you should be careful, then,” Shibata said teasingly. “And because it’s hitting together with polio, well, if there are double infections, that’s worrisome for the children.”
She offered him the pack of cigarettes, but he shook his head. “I’ve quit for good,” he said. “Didn’t you quit for a while yourself?”
“The minute I quit covering medicine I went right back to it.” Noriko laughed out loud. “Also, that fuss about lung cancer has died down now.”
“And that’s the problem with the media,” he said with a laugh of his own. “As soon as the fuss dies down, they forget all about things. Things fade away as topics, but their reality goes on.”
“But they say that in America, they’ve finally got that miracle drug for cancer, right?”
“Oh yeah … they’re saying it was the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York that discovered it.” Shibata said this as though it were no particularly impressive achievement. “But now they’ve got to get the clinical trials going for real, and they don’t know what the side effects of long-term use are—you ought to be careful for another two or three years.”
“Not to worry. I have a very long lifeline,” Noriko said as she stood up to go. “Even cancer’s become curable—I’m gonna live to be a hundred and go to Mars someday.”
“Leaving already?” the technical officer said, a bit disappointed. “Just a minute; I’ve still got something else interesting to tell you.”
“And what would that be?”
“We don’t have a clear tally just yet, but lately there’s been another increase in that so-called ‘sudden death disease.’ ”
“Sudden death disease?” Noriko turned her head slightly. “That’s fairly old news, isn’t it? Stories about healthy people suddenly dropping dead late at night.”
“Yeah, apparently exhaustion can build up in busy people and cause neurogenic heart attacks. There’s been another sudden uptick in cases since the start of spring.”
“I’ll come by again—I’ve got to get to some non-clinical work now, though.” Suddenly, she felt a tickle at her nostrils and sneezed lightly. “Oh, I hate this!” Noriko said, pressing a handkerchief over her nose. “I may have caught the flu just by coming here and listening to you talk about it.”
“Wow! You really do have a sensitive constitution.”
“Hey.” Noriko turned around at the door. “We can cure cancer and we can broadcast live television worldwide, so why can’t we stop something as simple as influenza?”
“That’s how the world works. While we’re launching rockets to Mars and spending money on our daydreams, what percentage of the world’s current population do you think is adequately served by good doctors and treatment facilities? Smallpox is constantly going around in Nepal.” In an ironic tone, he added, “Give us half the budget that Defense gets every year, and there wouldn’t be a single contagious disease we couldn’t beat back.”
When Noriko stepped outside, she could practically feel the air teeming with germs and viruses all around her. Influenza and polio infecting the air. Can they not even exterminate the little things that go around spreading disease—the mosquitoes and flies, and even the mice?
The sensation she had felt was soon forgotten, however, in a warm shower of spring sunlight pouring down from above, and in thoughts of a celebrity interview to be held in a swanky hotel.
So as to come to the interview fresh, Noriko first called the editorial department at her weekly and dictated the influenza story to them. Then she went to the hotel to meet an entertainer from the Kansai region who had come up to the capital.
Late that night and rather drunk, Noriko came back to her midtown apartment. She was humming as she climbed the steps to the second floor. The sticky feel of the spring night was present even in the dim hallway. She unlocked the door, but just as she was about to go inside, a small object caught against the door and was dragged across the floor. She fixed her drunken eyes on it, and when they focused on that soft little thing, her throat let loose with a high-pitched scream. Gone completely pale, Noriko slammed the door shut, and with her purse still hanging from her arm, lunged for the telephone. After ringing for a long time, someone answered the phone, and Noriko felt relief wash over her.
“Oh, thank goodness you went on back!” Noriko exhaled.
“What’s the matter?” The voice on the line belonged to a slightly intoxicated TV director, from whom she had parted company only a few minutes earlier.
“Please, I am begging you, come over here now!” Noriko said, fighting back the bitter saliva that was rising back up in her throat.
“What in the world’s going on? Did something happen to you?”
“Just get over here!” Her words ended in a long, loud scream that this time she couldn’t hold back any longer.
“Hey!” the voice’s owner shouted, surprised. “What on earth is going—”
Noriko hung up the phone and backed up against the wall.
On the carpet at her feet, there were more. Two more of them.
“They’re just mice,” the director said with a grimace.
“But I can’t stand mice. And dead mice are even worse.”
“Even if you didn’t put out rat poison,” the man said, closing the garbage chute, “somebody else in another room must have.”
“Wash your hands, okay?” Noriko called from
a distance. “There’s cresol under the sink. Um, I’m sorry, but can you scrub here and here too?”
“Nervous, aren’t we?” the man laughed as he did as she asked. The room soon smelled like a hospital. “There we go,” he said. When he had finished the task, he looked around the room a little embarrassedly and wiped his palms off on his hips.
“Thank you very much. Wait just a minute.” Noriko, finally relaxed, took off her suit jacket. “Have some tea or something. Is brandy okay? Can you still drink?”
“Yeah,” he said as though he had nothing better to do. He settled uneasily into a chair. “I can drink.”
In the small hours of that night in early spring, it was very quiet. Only the tick of the clock resounded loudly in the room. Noriko set a bottle of Martell and two tulip glasses on the table, and for herself poured water from a decanter into a tumbler. The glug-glug of the water, the pop as she removed the cork, the faint chink as their two glasses met, these soft sounds made the stillness of the night all the more apparent. The two of them seemed to have lost any reason to speak. They sat facing one another and raised their glasses without a word. As soon as the rich, fragrant smell of the Martell hit her nostrils, she began to sneeze. Influenza! Noriko’s body went stiff. Influenza …
Such a trivial thing was oddly frightening tonight. Suddenly, a dog began to howl somewhere far away. It was a sad, depressing sort of cry.
Bawoo-oo … uoooo …
“I hate this,” Noriko murmured unthinkingly. “I hate that sound.”
“Owaaaru, towaaaru, pawawawaa,” the man muttered with a smirk. “That was ‘Howling at the Moon’ by Hagiwara Sakutarou.”
Was it a dog barking at the hazy spring moon? The howl trailed on higher and higher and then suddenly ceased.
“It’s dead!” Noriko whispered as she squeezed her glass hard. “That dog is dead!”
“No it’s not.” The man looked at her with boredom in his eyes. “What’s with you tonight?”
“But it stopped all of a sudden. That seemed different from a normal howl.”
The man set aside his glass deliberately and looked at his wristwatch. It was one in the morning.
“Hey,” Noriko said without looking at the man. Her upper body was pressed tightly against the back of her chair. “Don’t go. Stay here tonight. I’m scared.”
The man took a long, slow look at Noriko sitting in front of him. It was an appraising look, an impudent, forward look, as though he had been expecting something like this all along. Slowly, he stood up, came around the table to Noriko’s side and put his hands on her shoulders. Noriko shivered slightly.
Was the fear of mice just an act to get me over here? The man wondered. What is she, an old maid who can’t get any without putting on some kind of song and dance? Well, if that’s the case …
Noriko took hold of the man’s hands. They were bony, thoughtless hands—this director was a worthless man. She knew that until just a little while ago, he’d been wandering around doing nothing, but now he was looking at her with this smug expression on his face, full of pride and even pity, as though he fancied himself some kind of lady-killer.
Yet at that moment none of that mattered. A kind of primal terror was rising up inside of her that might best be likened to a premonition.
I’m scared, Noriko thought meaninglessly. Mice … howling … a hazy spring moon. The worry over disgusting plagues swirling amid the shadows of darkness. When disaster is about to strike, the females cling to the males. The man beside her was no longer a glib TV director who, while fun to be around, was really an egotistical jerk just under the surface. Instead, he was simply a male of the species, with strong, knobby hands. And from under the conscious mind of a woman who had been worn down a little by city living, there rose up a female—terrified by a presentiment of doom.
You’re trembling, aren’t you, said the eyes of the man. He was getting into quite a good mood now. There’s no need to be afraid. You may be getting up in years a bit, but I’ll still treat you right.
Hold me tight, Noriko thought as she buried her face in the man’s chest. Idiot! I didn’t want you pawing all over me. Just hold me as tight as you can, make this shaking go away . . .
In the bedroom, the man noticed a stand-up picture frame. “What’s this?”
“Oh, that?” Noriko murmured while catching a breath underneath the man’s weight. “He’s a guy who’s in Antarctica …”
The man snorted and tried to turn the picture down.
“Don’t touch it!” Noriko shouted from under the man’s body.
“Boyfriend?”
“No—just somebody I know.”
With the lightening of the sky toward dawn, Noriko opened her eyes and shivered. The sheets were rolled down, and both of her shoulders had become as cold as ice.
What a stupid thing, she thought as yesterday’s dreary memories came back to her. The man’s impudently naked back was right in front of her nose. She pressed her lips together tightly and stared up at the ceiling, not moving her freezing, stiff upper body.
The terror was still there.
But where? It was bubbling up as cold as death in the faint odor of cresol that lingered in the room, in the pit of her stomach, the inside of her chest, around her solar plexus. And then, suddenly, another terror clamped down on her throat. The man beside her was as still as a dead man. His skin was like ice … and she couldn’t hear him breathing.
The “dropping dead” disease is going around again.
If he’s died here … like this … right in my bed … She was gripped with terror as she remembered that he had a wife and child.
“Hey!” she cried, shaking him as hard as she could. His head rolled limply off of the pillow. For an instant, she felt as if a bucket of ice-cold water had been thrown in her face. This isn’t happening!
“Uhh,” the man gave a slovenly groan. “C’mon, can’t you lemme sleep a little longer?”
“Get out!” Noriko shouted, out of both relief and anger, as she shoved him out of bed. “The sun’s coming up! Get out of here while people still won’t see you leaving!”
Muttering complaints, the man got up. Then he creased his eyebrows, shook his head, and complained that his head was hurting.
As he was going out, he stopped by the door and said in a tone dripping with lover’s pretension, “I’ll call you at the office around noon.”
This isn’t funny at all, Noriko thought after she had turned away from the door and curled back up in her sheets. To have a man like that—insufferable, insensitive, bloated with oh-so-modern vanity—hovering around me from now on … And if I give him the cold shoulder, he’ll probably go talking to a bunch of dirty people …
And so what if he does! Noriko thought. This is my fault, but I couldn’t help it! I was really scared last night. He said he’d call at noon. I’ll just have to take a long lunch.
In the end, however, there was no need to flee the office. The promised noontime phone call never came. While driving home in his car from Noriko’s apartment, he lost control of the car and died.
4. The Second Week of April, Part 2
Early on the morning of April 10, Tom Worth, supervisor at the Phil and Phil Poultry Farm on the outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri, found six turkey chicks lying on their sides, gasping for breath in the turkey coop of poultry house number seven.
“Ah, great,” muttered Worth. “You were in such a hurry you just couldn’t wait until Christmas to get yourselves stuffed.”
He opened the chicken-wire door and picked up the six chicks from among many others chirping all around them.
“You eat too much, your tummy’s gonna hurt. Isn’t that right? We’ll have to get the doctor to give you shots and check you into the hospital. Or should we have him roast you up with pink food coloring to make us some Easter turkeys?”
One of the chicks convulsed. The other chicks weakly opened their beaks, gasping. Tom Worth gave the joints of the wings a little squeeze with his thic
k fingertips and breathed out an overdone sigh. “Uh-oh, not much meat on you. If you stay this skinny, you won’t even be worth eating. Gotta tell the doctor …”
That was when the farmer’s voice suddenly stopped. He had spotted two more chicks collapsed in the corner of the coop. Worth stuffed the chicks into his pockets and came closer.
These two were already dead.
Worth experienced a sudden, intense feeling of unease. He remembered having seen a dead pigeon sprawled out beside the hedge as he’d been walking to work. Figuring it had been brought by a cat or a dog, he hadn’t paid it much mind, but—
When he came out of the coops carrying a total of eight turkey chicks, he ran into his young redheaded colleague Willie Podkin who was hurrying from the henhouse carrying a clipboard. From the look of him, something big was going on.
“Willie!”
“Willie!” Tom Worth shouted. “What’s with you? Is something wrong?”
“The hens’ output is way down this morning,” said Willie, a thin sweat breaking out on his densely freckled face. “It’d been dropping off a little for a while now, but this morning—we’re down over twenty percent all of a sudden. The hens are acting kinda funny too … I’d decided to have Doc take a look at them.” Willie blinked his little eyes when he noticed the turkey chicks hanging limp in Tom’s hands.
“This looks like it’s gonna be bad,” Tom murmured, looking down at the chicks. They didn’t even have the energy to struggle. “Look, another one’s dead.”
“Some of the hens have diarrhea,” Willie said in a strained tone of voice. “C’mon. Let’s go call Doc right away.”
“He’s probably still home in bed,” Tom growled.
“Ahh, Tom, you’re the old hand here. What do you think? It couldn’t be fowl plague, could it?”
“This seems a little different,” Tom said, staring at the chicks he held firmly in his rough, strong hands. “If it was that, the symptoms would be stronger—but these are hardly running any fever.”
“I’ll go call him up,” Willie said with a glance at his wristwatch. “It’s early, but we’ve gotta do it. Be right back!”
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