by John Case
‘Not bad,’ Solange said, ‘but you have to get inside, cher, or you’ll get hurt. I’m too big for you.’
She was moving in a circle around him, trying to stay away from his arms but not really succeeding. He kept closing her off, hitting her with a succession of jabs, pounding her upper arms.
‘Don’t ever run when you’re attacked, cher. It’s an important lesson. When someone comes after you, go after him. Otherwise . . .’ He set her up in mid-sentence, popping her with three quick jabs that loosened her teeth and filled her mouth with blood. Then he pivoted at the hips, stepped in and hit her so hard in the stomach that it felt like the butt end of a telephone pole had been driven through her.
Suddenly, she was on her hands and knees, unable to breathe, choking on the pain she felt.
‘A minute twenty!’ Solange said, standing over her. ‘C’mon, Susannah! Get up, or I’ll add injury time!’
She still couldn’t breathe, but she did what he told her to do: she pushed herself up from the flagstones and, ducking her head, rushed into his arms, tying him up. The move surprised him, and she took advantage of the surprise to hit him twice, catching his jaw the second time.
She held him as tightly as she could, locking her arms around his back. Together, they turned in a circle, and she saw the faces of her friends, pulsing inside the bags, watching her. But something was missing, and as she struggled to hold on to the much stronger Solange, she realized what it was, and it panicked her: little Stephen wasn’t crying anymore.
‘Thirty seconds, cher! Don’t let me down!’ She clung to him as hard as she could, but he twisted suddenly, rolling away from her. And then he began to head-hunt, popping her in the mouth, the nose, the chin, the cheeks, one jab after another, turning her in a circle around the terrace, showering her eyes with stars, heating her face with punches.
She was barely standing, shocked and swaying on trembling knees. Slowly, she raised a glove to her face and touched her cheek, as if to make sure that her face was still there. And, dazedly, she saw him windmilling his right arm like he was a fast-pitch softball player, or a cartoon boxer getting ready to deliver a punch that would send her into outer space.
Then he laughed and stepped forward, and like a groom at a wedding, he pulled her into his arms and lifted her off the ground. ‘Not bad, cher, not bad at all.’ Then he turned to the others and with a wicked grin shouted, ‘What are you doing with bags on your heads? Are you so ugly? Take them off! What silly people!’
And so the bags came off, and everyone was laughing and gasping at the same time, while Mr. Kim applauded and Susannah fell to her knees at little Stephen’s side and, frantic and bleeding, tore at the bag with her fingers.
A moment later the boy was in her arms, crying with life, and she was so happy, she burst into tears and, with an adoring look at Solange, thought Thank you thank you thank you . . .
26
‘I’LL BE BACK at five,’ Annie said. ‘You call me if you start feeling funny – you promise?’
Frank sat in the easy chair in Annie’s living room, in front of the television set, which was tuned to the Today show. At first it seemed to him that Katie Couric was speaking with Annie’s voice, although he knew that wasn’t true.
‘Frank?’
He frowned and leaned toward the television. Katie spoke but it seemed to take a long time for her words to reach his brain. He felt as if he were watching a foreign movie, with subpar lip-synching.
‘Are you all right?’
He turned to Annie. Her words seemed also to arrive in his brain after a small but significant delay, as if she were on the phone from Tokyo.
‘Tip-top,’ he said, swiveling back toward the television. Katie Couric said something that sounded like ‘poppadom crocodile.’
‘Maybe I should skip work again. I mean really.’
‘I’m all right,’ Frank said.
And miraculously, he was, having slipped into one of those bubbles of clarity, into the state that he recognized as ‘normal.’ The doctors assured him that in the next few days the lingering effects of the drugs would fade, ‘episodes’ would occur with diminishing frequency, and he would find himself feeling better for longer and longer periods. In a few more days he should be fully recovered – although the occasional flashback was possible.
‘You’re sure?’ Annie asked. She was dressed for work in one of her kindergarten-teacher outfits. ‘I don’t know.’ She leaned down to kiss him, and he pulled her into the chair, wincing slightly as he received the weight of her body.
‘Don’t go,’ he said weakly. ‘I do feel funny.’
She giggled. ‘Frank . . .’
‘Okay. Get outta here.’
After Frank’s doping, he’d ended up in the psych ward at Georgetown. It was a setting where they were equipped to deal with a person in the throes of violent hallucinations. He’d assaulted the paramedics who responded to Annie’s panicked call – an incident he remembered as a desperate attempt to get away from men who were holding him down so they could dismember him. When a black-and-white arrived to sort things out, he’d attacked the cops as well, raving all the while. The Saab was towed from the middle of Columbia Road, where it had become the focal point of a memorable traffic jam.
It had taken all day, and all the stubborn insistence Annie could muster, to persuade the authorities that Frank was in fact the victim of a crime and not a druggie who ought to be charged with assaulting a police officer. The Saab was impounded, dusted for prints, the leather steering wheel wrap removed and sent in for testing.
The theory was that the drug – which was identified as a military grade psychotropic called BZ – had been administered through the use of DMSO. This was an industrial solvent – sometimes used by athletes as a kind of super liniment – that penetrated directly into the bloodstream and deep tissues. It functioned as a transdermal delivery system for medication – or poison.
After four days on the psych ward, Frank had been moved to a regular room. Two more days, and they let him go, albeit doped up with tranquilizers to take the edge off the lingering effects of what, for the record, was called ‘involuntary acute indeterminate drug poisoning.’
His body had suffered the inevitable effects of forcible restraint by four adult men. But at least he wasn’t still pissing blood. He shuffled to the bathroom, feeling like an old man, splashed water on his face and took a look. The first day after ‘the incident,’ his face had resembled meat loaf. Now, the swelling was down – except for the area around one eye, which was still surrounded by puffy tissue that had turned a sort of chartreuse color. With indigo streaks. In the indentation above his chin were the sutures where he’d bitten through his lower lip.
Apart from the face, he had two cracked ribs where one of his rescuers had weighed in with a little too much force. Also, the thumb and middle finger of his right hand – which he’d put through the kitchen window while trying to get away from the paramedics – were stitched, splinted, and bandaged.
As long as he was in one of his ‘lucid’ periods, he thought, he ought to work. He headed, slowly, up the stairs to Annie’s room. Typing or even operating a mouse with his hand like this was slow going, but at least he could do it. His laptop, which Annie had brought over from his apartment, was impossible.
Yesterday, he’d printed out his interview with Tom Deer, and he scanned it as he waited for Annie’s computer to boot up.
Deer: You couldn’t threaten anyone with it. All you could do is use it. And then the birds would take it. You start a herald wave in some place like Peking, and bam! It’s all over the map.
Frank drummed his fingers on the table.
Deer: Everyone gets the flu. That’s the thing about it. You can’t control it. So if you used it as a weapon . . . you’d kill millions.
Deer: Why would anyone want to do that?
Deer: You couldn’t stop it.
Frank remembered Deer joking around at the end of their interview, kidding about the
Sioux. Vhat did he say? He frowned, looked through the pages.
Deer: On the other hand, if someone wanted revenge . . . if they were mad at the world . . .
Mad at the world. The more he learned about the Temple of Light or at least its leader – the more apparent it became that the group was definitely ‘mad at the world.’ And Frank knew that killing ‘tens of millions of people’ would be grand as far as Solange was concerned. In fact, it would go a long way toward redressing what the Temple’s leader called an ‘infestation of a species gone amuck.’ That species, of course, being humankind.
Annie’s computer played the corny little Windows fanfare and Frank logged into Editor, a directory he’d created to hold the word processor he liked to use: XyWrite.
Yesterday he’d spent a couple of hours on the Net, exploring sites related to the Temple of Light. And he’d summarized what he found in a file called Overview.
Temple/Solange
Le Monde: Temple of Light founded Lausanne in early seventies. Original name: Académie des Recherches et de la Connaissance des Hautes Sciences – ARCH. 1979: two of its members firebombed the cathedral at Einsiedeln, protesting the pope’s opposition to birth control. 1980: member indicted for murder in drive-by shooting of the director of the Swiss nuclear authority. Other incidents included violent attacks on environmental organizations that Solange said were ‘insufficiently militant.’ Following suspicious death of a liberal politician who’d pronounced Solange ‘a bacillus of hatred within the Green movement,’ ARCH and its leader disappeared from public view.
Two years later the organization reemerged in San Francisco as the Temple of Light, a newly incorporated ‘religion’ guided by Luc Solange.
According to U.S. News & World Report: Solange ‘served up a weird mix of mysticism and “deep ecology” to a following that was remarkably well-educated.’ Temple recruiters were ‘particularly active on the science and engineering campuses of some of America’s best universities.’
Under the heading ‘Temple Money,’ he detailed how the Temple’s recruitment of scientists had paid off, both through its line of Eco-Vita products and through the substantial royalties derived from Temple patents. He noted that the Temple’s most lucrative patents, worth about $10 million a year, were microencapsulation techniques leased to pharmaceutical concerns. He quoted Annie:
Adair (5-12-98): ‘Basically, microencapsulation encloses very small particles in self-decaying protective sheaths, enabling biological agents to survive in conditions – such as stomach acid or high temperatures – that would otherwise kill them.’
He yawned, and frowned. His concentration was for shit; it faded in and out like a weak cellular telephone signal. Stern, he thought. He ought to get in touch with Stern.
And, in fact, he’d tried. He’d called him three times, but so far Stern had not returned the calls. He ought to check him. After all, it had been outside the grad student’s apartment that he’d been drugged, so the girl who did it must have known who he was talking to.
But he didn’t want to drive over there now. He was too tired, and he was finding it impossible to concentrate. He’d check on Stern tomorrow, or the day after, and make sure he was okay.
The police had been finished with the car for three or four days now, and yesterday he’d been called and told to retrieve it from the impoundment lot. Starting Monday, the clerk told him, he’d be charged twenty bucks a day for storage. There was also the towing fee. He couldn’t believe it. It was like being raped a second time.
On Thursday his eye was almost normal-looking, and the stitches in his lip were out. No longer a danger to himself or others, he’d bailed the Saab out.
When Annie went to Atlanta for an annual gathering of influenza specialists, which she called ‘the flu powwow,’ it seemed awkward – staying in her apartment without her – so he moved back to his own place. Indu had never really warmed up to him. In Annie’s opinion, this was probably because the second night Frank had stayed at the apartment, just back from the hospital, he’d wandered into Indu’s room by mistake and climbed into bed with her.
How he ended up in Annie’s bed, how they had become lovers – this event was lost somewhere in the fog bank of his memory, where it might well remain forever. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of it, a shudder of memory. Once or twice he had a flash of her concerned face, leaning over him, and when he spoke her name, ‘Annie,’ her face lighting up in a sudden flare of joy. And then he could see her bending over, tenderly pressing a damp towel to his forehead, and remember her sliding into bed next to him, her warm body stretched out along the length of him. And then the memory would turn gauzy and dissolve. Twice she’d referred to their ‘first time,’ once with a happy, starry look in her eyes, the second time with a lascivious giggle. He just smiled, because it clearly wouldn’t do to ask. Besides, it was kind of fun – if distracting – to imagine . . . In bed, Annie was surprisingly uninhibited and passionate, or at least as passionate as his injuries allowed.
Stern still hadn’t returned his messages, so on his way back from the impoundment lot, Frank drove to the grad student’s apartment.
And though he wasn’t to be found at home, neither was there any evidence that he was missing. No piles of newspapers or mail. He knocked on a neighbor’s door.
A skinny black man wearing wire-rimmed glasses answered. No, he said, he hadn’t seen Stern. ‘Must be outta town, because I don’t hear any music. He likes his music, I can tell you. Likes it too much, in my opinion.’
Frank pressed him. ‘Does he ever, I don’t know, ask you to water his plants, take in his mail or anything?’
Stern’s neighbor stared at him. ‘Ben doesn’t have any plants. He’s not the plant type. I told you: he’s the music type. I don’t know about the mail. I think he has a post office box somewhere.’ He peered at Frank. ‘How well are you knowing Ben?’
‘Not well at all,’ Frank conceded.
The slender man made a spiral motion by his temple. ‘Ben’s a little unusual,’ he said.
When he got home, he found a message from Annie waiting for him on his voice mail.
‘Hi, Frank, I’m down here in Atlanta.’ Pause. ‘I’m calling you because . . . something weird is happening,’ she continued in an urgent voice. ‘And I think it might . . . Anyway, there’ve been these strange outbreaks of flu in different parts of the country – strange because it’s the wrong time of the year for it, you know? I didn’t think too much about it until I got down here. But it’s an archival flu –’ She hesitated. ‘What I mean by that is . . ., oh, I wish you were there, I hate talking to machines. Anyway, the thing is, what’s happened can’t be a natural occurrence, because –’ And here the machine cut her off.
The second message began: ‘The thing is, there’s no way this flu could occur in four separate places! And there’s something else . . .’ She took a deep breath, and sighed. ‘This is too frustrating. I’ll be back tomorrow. We can talk then.’
Frank played the messages again, and frowned. what the hell was an ‘archival flu’?
He found her at home at one o’clock the next afternoon. ‘I’m on the phone,’ she said, rushing back to the kitchen. He followed her. ‘Take a look at those,’ she said with her hand over the telephone, gesturing toward some papers on the kitchen table. ‘Not yet,’ she said, speaking into the receiver again. ‘I’m heading over to the lab as soon as I catch my breath.’
The papers turned out to be two issues of something called MMWR, which was put out by the Centers for Disease Control. The acronym, Frank saw, stood for Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The headline of the lead segment, under the banner ‘Epidemiologic Notes and Reports,’ read:
INFLUENZA A OUTBREAKS
CALIFORNIA – On April 18, the California Department of Health (CDH) initiated an investigation of an outbreak of acute respiratory illness reported by area sentinel physicians, urgent care facilities, and hospital emergency rooms in the Los Angeles metropoli
tan area. During April 4–11, 1,395 cases were reported, of which 1,011 had a documented temperature of >100 F. (37.8C) and cough. Patients ranged in age from 34 to 99 years. 67 were hospitalized; 9 had radiographic signs of pneumonia. Onset of similar symptoms was reported by 27 of 142 reporting medical care facility staff members. Unusual prolongation of acute phase noted in many patients, along with attenuated recovery phase.
Testing by CDC-supplied reagents of 1997/98 circulating influenza strains failed to produce conclusive identificahon. Amantadine was administered for treatment.
Annie was scribbling on a pad of paper. ‘Maybe tonight,’ she said. ‘If I’m lucky. Sure, day or night.’
Frank continued leafing through the MMWRs, concentrating on the sections reporting influenza outbreaks. Apart from the outbreak in California, there were similar reports of infection from Washington, D.C.; Madison, Wisconsin; and Daytona Beach, Florida.
‘Thanks, Ozzie. Yeah,’ Annie said. She hung up and dropped into the chair opposite him, looking very tired. ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked. ‘There’s no medical solution to this. There’s not enough amantadine to protect the population of Washington, let alone –’
‘What are you talking about?’ Frank asked. ‘This just looks like a bunch of people who got the flu. And it can’t be our flu, because they didn’t get sick enough. No one died. So . . . what’s the big deal?’
‘You’re right. It’s not our flu. Not yet. But these people that got sick – they didn’t just get the flu, Frank. First of all, flu cases in April are rare, and in May – the Wisconsin and Florida outbreaks – exceedingly rare. It’s the only reason we’re even aware of it, frankly. The first outbreak, in L.A. – initially, they didn’t even test for flu. If it had occurred a month or two earlier, we wouldn’t have a clue that this weird flu bug was even out there.’
‘What do you mean that they didn’t just get the flu?’
‘They got an archival flu, that’s what I was trying to tell you on the telephone.’