The Rationing

by Charles Wheelan

  I wandered over to the Chief of Staff and told her what I was thinking. Huke was not an expert on lurking viruses, but he did have an excellent grasp of the broader field. Maybe we were too deep in the rabbit hole and needed to pull our heads out and look around. Huke would be a guy who could help us do that. “Of course we should talk to him,” the Chief of Staff said. “We can bring him to Washington or we can fly you up there.”

  “How do I do that?” I asked. I was still learning all the protocols.

  “Go this afternoon, after this meeting,” she instructed. “We’ll get you an Air Force plane. Just let me know the closest airport.”

  Huke called back just as the participants were making their way back to the Cabinet Room. He did not remember me; I had not expected that he would. I briefly explained the work I was doing at NIH and that we were facing a new threat from a lurking virus that could infect humans.

  “That’s curious,” Huke said.

  “Exactly,” I agreed. “It’s potentially dangerous. I’m hoping I could speak to you in person about it, as soon as possible.”

  “I’m not an expert on lurking viruses,” he protested.

  “I know, but we need to take a step back on this one. Our thoughts have gone stale.”

  “Sure. I’m retired now, so you pick the time and place.”

  Huke did not react when I asked if we could meet early the following morning. He knew enough about viruses to recognize that public health situations are often time-sensitive. I offered to meet him in a Hanover coffee shop, but Huke suggested that I come to his house instead.

  While this conversation was going on, I got a surprising inbound text. It was from Sloan, my Dartmouth infatuation, whom I had last seen at a friend’s wedding six or eight months earlier. It said, “In DC. Can you get coffee?? So eager to see u.” The meeting had resumed in the Cabinet Room, so I stepped out of the room to send a quick reply. Sloan had that effect on me.

  30.

  I DID NOT LEAK ANYTHING. THIS WAS THE CONCLUSION OF both congressional inquiries. My answers to the commissions were entirely truthful, if somewhat misleading. (In the eyes of the law, that is not a crime.) Still, the reality is that my meeting with Sloan inadvertently set in motion a series of events that I deeply regret.

  Sloan lived in New York City. We had drifted apart after graduation, but we still saw each other at weddings, reunions, and the like. We never dated in college, but we did “hook up” briefly during senior week—the week prior to our graduation from Dartmouth when classes were over, our diplomas had been earned, and we were left to do in seven days everything we wished we had done over the previous four years. Sloan and I had a long conversation after a class picnic on one of those June evenings when the sun seems to linger forever, the light getting softer and more beautiful before darkness finally falls and the temperature plunges. We were both drunk, not sloppily so, but enough to precipitate a long, meandering, lovely conversation about life’s big questions: our regrets at Dartmouth; our plans after graduation; the state of our families; the role that Turkey could play in promoting peace in the Middle East. (I said it was meandering.) Sloan leaned close to me, in part because it was getting cool, but also because our body language reflected the intensity of our conversation and the depth of the bond that we had built over four years—the kind of bond, really, that it’s hard to build at other points in life. And, as I mentioned, we were drunk. At one point two asshole lacrosse players began tossing beer at one another. I pulled Sloan out of the path of an arcing plastic cup of cheap beer and ended up with my arms wrapped around her from behind. My nose just dusted her hair and I could smell the flowery fragrance of her shampoo. I inhaled deeply.

  I am a scientist, not a romance novelist. As a scientist, I can say that a hundred million years of natural selection was telling my body that I should reproduce, which tends to produce a physical reaction. A romance novelist might simply point out that my dick was harder than the pine picnic table. Sloan was wearing jeans; nothing made her look better or more alluring. When she sensed the physiological response of my reptilian brain, she pushed gently back against me, and that sensation—her clearly sexual response after my years of platonic longing—remains one of the more pleasant sensations I have experienced in life.

  “Will you walk me home?” she asked.

  My answer should be obvious. Our walk home has social significance because of two things that happened, which is why I have gone to great lengths to explain how the night unfolded. We headed from the picnic area toward Sloan’s off-campus apartment, but then took a detour onto a well-worn path that led through a small pine forest and up a hill to an open field that housed the college observatory. It was a lovely spot; the night was crisp and clear. The observatory was obviously there for a reason. We were hours from a major city, so the night sky was brilliantly illuminated. There is no better brew for inspiring contemplation about the meaning of life for a pair of twenty-two-year-olds than college graduation, alcohol, and the endless bright expanse of a starry night. “So tell me what you’re going to do with your life?” Sloan asked.

  By then we were sitting on a bed of pine needles at the edge of the clearing. I was leaning against an old stone wall and Sloan was resting in my arms, which was both a natural continuation of what had happened at the picnic and an instinctive response to the crisp New Hampshire night. “I’m going to be a scientist,” I said. “And I want to teach at a place like this.” We loved Dartmouth. For all our griping over the years, we had talked often about some of our more inspiring professors and our unique opportunities to interact with them, rather than being treated like the academic equivalent of cattle, herded into a huge lecture hall to listen to a teaching assistant with a tenuous grasp of English.

  “It’s an amazing lifestyle,” Sloan said. Only she would be prescient enough to think about lifestyle at that point. Our peers were rushing off to take jobs with hedge funds and investment banks, eagerly boasting about the ninety-hour weeks that they would work. It would take until our tenth reunion for many of them to admit that their lives were a wreck.

  “What kind of lawyer are you going to be in twenty years?” I asked.

  “I won’t be a lawyer,” she said emphatically.

  “Does Harvard Law know that?” I asked. Sloan had been accepted to Harvard Law (and every other law school to which she applied). She had deferred for a year to travel and write columns for a small Vermont newspaper.

  “I’m going to be a writer—journalism of some sort, probably political journalism,” she said. She had been the editor of the Dartmouth newspaper, so that was hardly a stretch.

  “So why law school, then?” I asked.

  “Because it will set me apart.” She paused, staring at the stars. “Because I’ll have some substantive knowledge, rather than just being able to write. There are lots of good writers in the world, and there are plenty of Harvard Law grads, but there aren’t many who are both.”

  We sat at the edge of that clearing watching the stars for a long time. If I could relive several hours of my life, kind of like the play Our Town, these would be the hours I would choose. The night sky was indescribably beautiful. I was holding in my arms the girl I had both loved and lusted after for nearly four years, who nuzzled closer as I buried my face in her hair and ran my hand gently across her breasts. The college chapter of our lives was drawing to a successful close; we had everything to look forward to—both in the next hour or two, at least for me, and then beyond.

  I held her hand as we wound our way through a narrow wooded path that led to her building. When we reached the front door she turned and wrapped her arms around my neck. We kissed—not the platonic pecks that we had exchanged a hundred times over the years—but a deep lingering kiss. Her mouth tasted of beer and spearmint gum, which I remember her popping in as we left the picnic. The moment was wonderful, and we had done something that we had never done before, but I recognize now that it was not particularly passionate, at least not on Sloan’s
part. After the long kiss, during which my hands roamed up and down like some kind of time-sensitive geological survey, Sloan pulled back and gave me a peck on the forehead, a much more familiar gesture. “Good night,” she said. “This was wonderful. Perfect.” She did not invite me in.

  Sloan’s career plan was uncanny, because it unfolded pretty much as she described that night. She spent two years writing and traveling (deferring Harvard for a second time) while building up a portfolio of work. She ground her way through Harvard Law while working summers in the newsroom at the New York Times. Between her second and third years, she was the personal assistant to Barack Obama, helping to draft his columns. Sloan’s postgraduation job search worked out exactly as she had planned: she was a Harvard Law grad applying for prestigious journalism jobs, setting her apart from other aspiring writers. Meanwhile, her super-smart law school classmates were slashing each other’s eyes out competing for clerkships and positions at prestigious law firms.

  Sloan was clever. She was also ambitious, in the old Shakespearean pejorative sense of the word, which I did not fully appreciate until I became a victim of that ambition.

  31.

  WE RECONVENED AFTER LUNCH IN THE CABINET ROOM, BUT the meeting broke up almost immediately, before the President had even taken his seat. The Communications Director, tethered as always to his phone, said, “Hold on, can we have five minutes here?” He huddled in the corner with the President, the Chief of Staff, and the Strategist. Something had obviously broken in the news. I did a quick search on my phone. The top story was that teen pop star Onyx was reportedly pregnant. Obviously that was not delaying our meeting—but I clicked anyway. “Hollywood sources” were saying that Ryan Seacrest, who had to be nearly sixty, might be the father. I restrained myself from clicking on that, too.

  I scrolled down. There was a study purporting to show that one donut a day could lower your blood pressure. That was not why the President was huddled in the corner, either. I scrolled further. The script for an Oscar-nominated film was allegedly plagiarized. Two convicts had escaped from a New York state prison, one of them for the second time. (According to a poll on the subject—who conducts polls about prison breaks?—a solid majority of Americans were pulling for the escapees.) And then, near the bottom of the page: “News Outlet Reports Nuclear Standoff.” Some Middle East news agency that I had never heard of, perhaps because it was really just some Arab guy sitting in his underwear in his parents’ basement, was reporting that Saudi Arabia had threatened “nuclear retaliation against the state sponsors of the recent coup attempt.” The story hinted that Iran was behind the coup and that the Saudis had Tehran in their nuclear crosshairs. Even I knew that made no sense. The Iranians are Shia Muslims; the coup plotters were radical Sunnis. Besides, the President had been with us since our morning delay, so my sense was that that situation was under control. I clicked around. Other news outlets had picked up the story from the Middle East Affairs News Outlet. All of the coverage mentioned that the President had been sequestered in the White House for days with the Secretary of Defense, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate Majority Leader. They did get that right. A cub reporter on a high school newspaper could tell that something was afoot, even if it did not happen to be a nuclear standoff in the Middle East.

  I was amazed by the speed with which the cameras were set up on the White House lawn. Each major news outlet gave the crisis a name, because every disaster of any sort must now have a name. Fox News tossed subtlety aside and went with “Countdown to Armageddon.” NBC went with “Nuclear Nightmare?,” which deserves honorable mention for inviting panic while simultaneously adding the question mark to signal they really had no clue what was happening. The nuclear story was taking on a life of its own, crowding out nearly everything else on the political page (though Onyx’s alleged pregnancy was still a far more popular story overall). Another story at the bottom of the Netflix politics blog caught my eye. The Speaker of the House had told a group of political reporters that the U.S. approach to China “may be overly confrontational.” I was still a political neophyte, but even I could see her long game on this one. China had the Dormigen; the Speaker was going to be the one to get it.

  The President, the Chief of Staff, and the others had wandered back to the table in the Cabinet Room, still discussing the nuclear situation. “It buys us time,” the Communications Director was arguing.

  “Great,” the President said sarcastically. “It might also set off a real nuclear conflict. The last thing we need is a bunch of unstable regimes believing that the Saudis and the Israelis are conspiring to launch an attack.”

  “No government is going to take this seriously,” the Communications Director said.

  “The hell they won’t,” the President snapped. “Have you spent any time in the region? Have you? The place runs on conspiracy theories, not to mention that there are twenty different groups that will use this to advance their agenda, whether they think it’s true or not. This story needs to die now.”

  “Then how do we explain it?” the Communications Director said, motioning to the rest of us standing and sitting around the conference table.

  “That’s your job,” the President said unhelpfully. The Chief of Staff called the meeting back to order, but no more than three minutes later the Communications Director interrupted, “Sorry, can I have five minutes alone with the President?”

  “You just had twenty,” the President said. “Unless you can get me a million doses of Dormigen, we need to be right here.”

  “I agree with the President,” the Speaker of the House said. “We still don’t have a grasp on what’s happening here.”

  “Give me five minutes,” the Communications Director insisted. “I can kill this nuclear story right now. Can we talk with the First Lady?”

  “What does she have to do with this?” the President asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “Five minutes, everybody. Sorry,” the Communications Director said.

  I was not privy to the subsequent meeting. I admire the First Lady for her willingness to play a role in a very clever misdirection scheme. Then again, no one ever doubted the First Lady’s toughness. The Communication Director’s plan can best be described as media tai chi. “You cannot fight a story, no matter how ridiculous it is,” he told me later. “You can only redirect the frenzy.” Buried in the news that day was another story—made up wholesale by some Internet troll—that the President was having an affair with a South American diplomat. The story had no legs whatsoever. The page had ninety-one views when the Communications Director stumbled across it. It was wedged between a headline proclaiming that a cream made from avocado pits could cure skin cancer and another alleging that the former Federal Reserve Chair had stolen two tons of gold during his tenure—purloining bars one at a time from the vault under the New York Federal Reserve Bank, hiding them under his desk (which was in Washington??), and eventually sneaking it all out in the family minivan.

  Later that afternoon, the Communications Director released a statement proclaiming, “The President and First Lady have a rock-solid marriage,” and that any reports of extramarital affairs were “damaging and unsubstantiated.” Every press person immediately recognized the “nondenial denial,” which in media-speak means that the Communications Director had not denied the affair. He had merely described it as “damaging and unsubstantiated,” which means, “Yeah, it’s true, but my boss made me say something.” Over the next hour, the original South American affair story had fifty-two thousand hits, at which point the server went down.† At about the same time, the Washington Post–USA Today reported that a “senior White House official” had “acknowledged the possibility” that the President was embroiled in a salacious sex scandal with “a member of the foreign diplomatic corps.” The genius of this misdirection was twofold. First, the nuclear story went away. (The cameras on the White House lawn were disassembled almost immediately and dispatched to camp out at various embassies across Washington.) Second, the
mainstream media could pass off this sex scandal as real news, rather than just salacious gossip, because it involved a foreign diplomat, no doubt a spy. Obviously, the public has a right to know if the President is giving up national security secrets in exchange for sexual favors.

  The news “analysts” quickly pieced the story together: the nuclear situation was just a cover for the President’s sexual misdeeds, which were so serious that he had assembled the top officials in the government, including the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader, to discuss the possibility of his resignation. When this rumor frenzy was at its peak, the Communications Director leaked a photograph of a voluptuous, ethnically ambiguous, thirty-something woman to a Spanish-language television network. Much like that first iconic picture of Monica Lewinsky in the beret, this lovely Mediterranean or Arab or Hispanic woman became the face of the crisis. The press camped out at the twenty-plus embassies most likely to have a sexy spy with a vaguely olive complexion. In reality, the photo was computer-generated: a composite of several attractive celebrities, including a Lebanese jazz singer and a Brazilian soccer star, all melded together by a young computer whiz at the NSA. It was just an unfortunate coincidence that the computer-generated photo bore a stunning resemblance to Maria de la Campos Rivera, the head of the political section at the Colombian Embassy. Telemundo made the discovery, after which the press corps followed her doggedly. This turned out to be doubly tragic, since she was, in fact, having an affair with the married Cuban ambassador.

  Roughly 60 percent of the American population still believes that the President was passing secrets through this Colombian mistress to the Cubans. That is ten times the number of Americans who can correctly locate Saudi Arabia on a world map.

  32.

  BACK IN THE CABINET ROOM, WE STILL HAD NOT ADDRESSED the two most contentious issues: China and a possible “rationing plan” for Dormigen if we were to come up short. Before we plunged into that, the Chief of Staff updated us on assorted other small developments. The U.S. military had identified a stash of Dormigen in Germany, some forty thousand doses, that would be shipped back stateside immediately. The Canadians were monitoring their Dormigen usage on a daily basis; demand was falling short of their projections, so they shipped us a hundred thousand doses and projected they might be able to donate more in the coming days. The better news came from a working group at the Centers for Disease Control. Doctors there had lowered the likely fatality rate for those sickened by Capellaviridae to a range between 0.5 to 1.1 percent—which they described as “on par with a virulent strain of the flu.” The earlier estimates were based on data from victims who had not sought treatment. Those who showed up at a hospital were likely to do better, even without Dormigen. The CDC experts wrote in a short memo, “If victims are treated with fluids and antibiotics to deal with possible secondary infections, the likely fatality rate would be appreciably lower than our earlier estimate.” The report also noted that the pattern of fatalities would be similar to a bad flu: the very old, the very young, and the immunocompromised. Our intuition was confirmed: the early fatalities—clusters of college students and young, otherwise healthy men—were not the most vulnerable populations; they were the ones who were too stubborn to seek treatment.