The Canopy

by Angela Hunt

  Perhaps the natives will speak of me—the skinny white woman who would not give up. Stranger things have happened. Who knows what odd things will happen when we enter the jungle? Already I feel we are operating in a world completely removed from everything I have ever known and trusted.

  Alex paused, lifting her pen from the page. She could write more of her fears, but why dwell on thoughts that might one day terrify Caitlyn? Besides, fears had a way of turning into phobias and phobias into paranoia, all of which were symptoms of brain disease. She would have to guard her thoughts and not ramble only to pass the hours in which she should have been sleeping.

  She closed her eyes, her fingers curling into a fist as she visualized the knotty little proteins that had amassed a microscopic army within her body. For years they had been accumulating, biding their time, waiting for her to enter the fullness of life—

  I have never before thought that a microscopic protein could possess a moral value. Yet somehow I am convinced that just as Baklanov’s bacteriophages are good, prions are evil. My colleagues would scoff at such a notion, but their brains are not playing host to the little devils.

  She hated this disease, hated all encephalopathies because they struck at the core of a person’s self. Take away a woman’s arm or leg or stomach, and you still had a functioning human being. Take away a woman’s mind, even a small but crucial part of her brain, and you had nothing.

  Her mother, Geneva Pace, had been fifty-two when she developed the first symptoms of FFI. Alex and Caitlyn had been living with her at the time, so Geneva could care for the baby while Alex worked. She had experienced tremors, anxiety, and difficulty in falling asleep, but ignored these symptoms for months, chalking them up to the process of aging and the stress of caring for a young child.

  Total insomnia, however, had been hard to ignore.

  “It’s the oddest thing,” she’d said one morning at breakfast. “But I don’t think I slept at all last night. I turned on one of those old movies to lull myself to sleep, but my mind just wouldn’t turn off—I watched the entire movie, then two others.”

  Alex had looked up in alarm, but her beautiful mother smiled and shrugged. “I’ll take a nap with Caitlyn this afternoon, dear, don’t worry.”

  But she hadn’t napped that afternoon, nor had she slept more than half an hour the next night. Within two weeks, her pupils had shrunk to pinpoints and her blood pressure had risen to alarming levels. Alex had taken her mother to the doctor, who had prescribed medication for blood pressure and sleeping pills, but the pills had only made her mother lethargic. He had asked for a family history; Alex had replied that her grandmother died from Parkinson’s. Her death had been the reason Alex became a neurologist.

  Undoubtedly, that diagnosis had been wrong.

  For the next several months, Alex watched in horror as Geneva Pace withered to skin and bones. Her mother had never been a heavy woman, but every ounce of fat melted away as her body continually burned calories. She perspired constantly, which caused thirst and dehydration. Her attempts to sleep became desperate, and occasionally Alex would find her mother lying in bed, her mouth slack and her eyes wide. A light doze was the deepest sleep she could manage, no more than what other people would call a catnap. The sound of a footfall compressing the fibers of a carpet was enough to snap her back to wakefulness.

  Geneva began to stumble and fall as her ability to balance slipped away. For a few weeks she could scrawl her thoughts on a notepad, but that ability disappeared as her motor skills deteriorated.

  One of the last things she’d written for Alex was a warning: Find a way to stop this. For you. For Cait.

  Alex had to put her mother in a nursing home, where the staff had a tendency to treat the sick woman as if she were unaware of her surroundings. She could not speak at the end, but her eyes told Alex she was cognizant of everything around her . . . and she was frightened.

  Only in that last month did Geneva Pace enjoy anything resembling rest. After a long nightmare, she fell into a state of exhaustion that outwardly resembled a coma, though her EEG revealed a normal awake pattern.

  Sitting by her mother’s bed, Alex stared at the frail body and the EEG and wondered if her mother was, in fact, awake and a prisoner within her own physical shell. What sort of exquisite torture it must be to hear, feel, and think without any way of communicating. Sort of like being buried alive, but instead of being locked up inside a coffin, you were entombed within your own dying body. . .

  Alex was present when her mother drew her last breath. A moment later, the EEG spiked, then went flat as the neurons of her brain finally stopped firing.

  Alex moved through the burial and funeral like a shell-shocked soldier, but when the paralysis of grief wore off, she returned to work and asked for permission to spearhead a new project. Leaving the wellpopulated field of Parkinson’s research, she began studying fatal familial insomnia and other prion diseases. When mad cow disease struck Britain in the last decade of the twentieth century, she realized that she had stumbled into the study of a disease as threatening as AIDS and as horrifying as Ebola. Agreeing with her vision, Kenneth Carlton of Horizon Biotherapies appointed Alex as head of the newly formed Neurological Research Department.

  She had always heard that people found the death of a parent particularly sobering because it removed the so-called “buffer zone” between death and an individual . . . for Alex, her mother’s death removed any doubt that she had inherited a fatal disease. If her mother and grandmother had died from FFI, odds were great that she and Caitlyn would suffer from it, too. The disease was active in their bodies even now, quietly persuading healthy proteins to join its traitorous army.

  How did this disease come to be rooted in my family? And how far back does the chain stretch? More important, why do 50 percent of children in a family escape diagnosis? Are they not carriers, or do they not live long enough for the disease to manifest itself? Perhaps it has something to do with gender—an infected father would not pass blood to his offspring through a placenta, and in that case, none of the children should inherit the disease. . .

  I am tired, for I am making no sense. Perhaps I am completely off base. If stress is a major accelerator, is it possible that some infected individuals lead such blissful lives that prions never amass enough strength to do real damage? Sometimes I think I’d give anything to experience that kind of bliss, then I realize that sort of innocence must be unattainable for a thinking person in today’s world. . .

  She lifted her pen as something rustled the leaves beyond the screen separating her from the rainforest. “Come in,” she taunted, keeping her voice low. “Anaconda, caiman, poisonous snake. Come in and kill me, if you dare. But don’t eat me, or you’ll spread prions throughout the jungle.”

  She glanced up at the thatched roof as a random thought skittered through her mind—she should have told Dr. Kenway to soak his jungle man’s corpse in bleach. The devilish prions had proven themselves capable of withstanding thirty minutes of boiling water, two months of freezing temperatures, as well as disinfection with formaldehyde, carbolic acid, and chloroform. The malevolent entities had successfully passed through filters designed to stop the smallest viruses; they were tiny enough to remain in a suspended state even when spun in a centrifuge at 400,000 revolutions per minute. Prions remained viable in dried brains for at least two years; they resisted doses of ultraviolet light that routinely killed phage viruses.

  The only agent that had managed to destroy prions was chlorine bleach. “Good old Clorox,” she murmured, capping her pen. “Wish we had a bottle with us.”

  The corner of her mouth curled. Kenway believed God had hidden a cure for every disease somewhere on the planet? God would have proven himself far more practical if he had buried a few bottles of bleach in the jungle.

  “Mom?”

  From out of the darkness, Caitlyn’s voice startled her. “What is it, sweetheart? My flashlight keeping you awake?”

  “Can’t you slee
p?” A note of alarm trembled in the girl’s question, and Alex’s heart sank at the sound of it. Caitlyn didn’t remember anything about her grandmother’s death, but through the years she’d overheard stories about Geneva’s desperate insomnia.

  Alex clenched her fist as her heart pumped fear and outrage through her veins. Life wasn’t fair.

  “I’m fine, precious. Just writing a few things in my journal.” She reached for the flashlight and turned it off. “That better?”

  The sound of silence hung in the darkness between them, followed by a sigh. “I can’t sleep if you can’t sleep, Mom.”

  “Okay . . . so do you want to play the word game?”

  “Sure. Can I choose the topic?”

  “Go for it.”

  Alex heard the rustle of sheets as Caitlyn turned. “Okay. Words that other kids say about you behind your back.”

  An internal alarm rang in Alex’s brain. “Like what?”

  “Like . . . geek.”

  “Um . . . brilliant nonconformist?”

  “They don’t say that, Mom.”

  “But it’s a synonym. It’s just a matter of perspective.”

  “Nerd.”

  “Talented and unique personality.”

  “You’re not playing by the rules.”

  Alex hesitated, wondering how much she could say without interfering. Caitlyn managed beautifully in the field but seemed to struggle with her peers in Atlanta. On more than one occasion she had run into the house in tears after attempting to speak to the neighborhood kids.

  The other preadolescent girls in their subdivision pulled their chemically streaked hair in taut ponytails, wore polo shirts and khaki slacks to private school, and spent their spare time watching MTV. Caitlyn, who usually wore the first thing she could pull from the laundry hamper, had hair the approximate size and texture of a tumbleweed and spent her spare time memorizing entries from Roget’s Thesaurus.

  Geek. Nerd.

  Sticks and stones could break your bones, but names hurt more than anything.

  “Honey,” she began, “have the kids back home—”

  “Let’s try another one: words you can say when you’re angry. Without cussing, of course.”

  Alex looked away. So Caitlyn didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe out here, miles from home, she could almost forget the snotty little girls back in Atlanta.

  She pretended shock. “Oh, my.”

  “That’s kinda mild, Mom.”

  “I wasn’t playing—I was responding to your suggestion.”

  “Okay, so I’ll go first. Jiminy Cricket.”

  Alex felt the corner of her mouth lift in a half-smile. “Rats.”

  “Blast—Dr. Kenway says that one. I heard him saying it when he got out of the helicopter.”

  Ignoring Cait’s reference to the doctor’s arrival, Alex pressed on. “Nuts.”

  “Confound it.”

  “Heck.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Dad-blamed, dad-burned, dad-gummit.”

  “Oh, my garden peas.”

  Alex stared into the darkness. “Who says that?”

  Caitlyn giggled. “Dr. Simons. She said it tonight, right after spilling her lemonade on Lazaro’s sleeve.”

  Alex heaved a sigh. “Good night, honey. See you in the morning.”

  “Aren’t we going to play any more?”

  “You win. I’m too tired to think. And you need your rest.”

  She heard the thump of Caitlyn’s slender frame on the boards supporting the narrow mattress, then . . . nothing.

  Steeling her will, Alex lay down and stared into the blackness. “One,” she whispered, summoning up the image of a khaki-clad preadolescent tormenter leaping over her net-draped bed. “Two. . .”

  4 APRIL 2003

  4:37 P.M.

  Standing behind his chair, Michael stared at the paraphernalia scattered over his desk: a portable battery-powered microscope, his medical kit, a six-inch hunting knife, a flashlight, and a bagful of bandages and an assortment of drugs, including penicillin, antihistamines, and snakebite antivenin.

  He could never take all this—the others would laugh if he showed up with a duffle bag as big as a body. Alexandra and her crew were experienced field researchers; they would know how to travel light.

  Sighing, he lifted the microscope and set it on a shelf. The wonderful little gadget was probably too weak to be of much use, anyway. While the device had proven invaluable for showing reluctant natives what chiggers and flea eggs looked like, the machine’s magnification wasn’t nearly great enough to penetrate the infinitesimal universe of viruses and prions.

  Picking up an old canvas duffel he’d found in a storage room, he dropped in the medicines, medical kit, knife, flashlight, and the bag of drugs and bandages.

  He looked up as Fortuna rapped on his door. “El doctor, there is someone to see you.”

  “A patient?”

  “No. He says he has news about your tattooed man.”

  Instantly alert, Michael shoved the duffel out of the way. “Send him in, please.”

  Immediately after returning from Yarupapa Lodge, he had sought out Rico, the orderly who helped treat Ya-ree. After sharing the sad news that Ya-ree had died, Michael sent Rico into Iquitos to find the good Samaritans who had transported the Indian from the river to the hospital. After asking them who had brought the patient to Iquitos, Rico had been instructed to send messages downriver to discover exactly where Ya-ree had exited the jungle. Without that information, the expedition would not know where to begin its search for the healing tribe.

  Rico came into the office, his eyes shining. “Buenos tardes, el doctor.”

  “Buenos tardes, Rico.” Michael shook his hand. “I gather you learned something about our injured Indian.”

  Nodding, Rico pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. “The family who found Ya-ree lives outside Libertad. It is a village of less than one hundred people, but it is only a few hours by boat. I have drawn a map.”

  Michael studied the diagram but could make no sense of the winding lines that doubtless represented several of the many tributaries feeding the Amazon. But someone who knew the area should be able to decipher it.

  Smiling, he pulled a ten-sole note from his pocket and gave it to Rico. “Gracias, amigo.”

  When Rico had gone, Fortuna stepped into the room, her eyes shiny with distress. “How can I convince you not to go on this trip? We need you here.”

  “I’ve arranged for Dr. Aznar to fill in for me.”

  The nurse made a face. “That man is anticuado—he knows nothing of modern medicine. We need you to care for the little ones.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Fortuna, but I won’t be gone long. A week, two at the most.”

  “That is too long!”

  He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “You managed very well before I arrived. I have every confidence you’ll manage Dr. Aznar brilliantly.”

  He picked up the bag, intending to move past her, but she clutched his sleeve and stopped him just outside his door.

  “Por favor, el doctor—do not do this thing! You do not know the jungle. It is dangerous, especially for a white man.”

  “You mean for a white man from the city.” He smiled with a confidence he did not quite feel. “I am traveling with a team of experts. I’m quite certain they’re not about to let anyone get hurt.”

  “But you do not know the jungle! It is deep and dark. There are places even the most experienced hunters dare not go—”

  “I’ll be fine.” Gently, he extracted her hand from his sleeve. “It is only a rainforest, Fortuna. Thousands of Peruvians have lived in it for generations, so I hardly think I’ll have too much trouble in a fortnight.”

  Lowering her arm, she gave him a pouting look. If Dr. Garcia had not rounded the corner in that moment, Michael thought she might have whimpered.

  Dr. Esteban Garcia, administrator of Regional Hospital, had visited the office only once before, a br
ief welcoming visit shortly after Michael’s arrival in Iquitos. Michael wasn’t sure what the man’s duties included apart from riding in parades with city dignitaries and flying to Lima for political meetings. Hospital gossip held that Garcia hadn’t examined a patient in years.

  “Dr. Kenway.” He reached out and shook Michael’s hand. “I hear you are intending to leave us.”

  Michael let his duffel bag drop to the floor. Apparently Garcia did pop into the hospital often enough to sift through rumors of staff defections.

  “Only for a fortnight or so.” Michael released the man’s hand. “It’s a rather critical research trip. A patient autopsy turned up evidence of a deadly infectious encephalopathy, so it’s necessary we find the source of the disease.”

  Dr. Garcia slipped one hand into the pocket of his pristine lab coat. “I do not know that it is necessary at all. I reviewed the chart, and it is clear your man did not die from encephalopathy.”

  Crossing his arms, Michael searched for words that might penetrate the thickness of a stubborn skull. “Quite right. Which makes the case even more remarkable, considering that we found spongiform brain tissue in his autopsy. The man should have died years ago, but he claimed to have been cured by native medicine. If such a cure is possible, the necessity of this expedition becomes even more urgent. We must not only look for the source of contagion; we must also find the treatment that halted Ya-ree’s disease. We will be serving our own people as well as the population of the entire—”

  “If you leave your office unattended,” Garcia interrupted as if he hadn’t heard a word, “we will assign the space to someone else.”

  Michael choked back a hoot of laughter. The hospital suffered from a chronic shortage of qualified physicians, and he doubted Dr. Garcia had a stack of applicants waiting to fill any spot. Only those with a genuine bent toward altruism would consider a position on the fringe of the jungle.

  Still . . . the administrator had a responsibility to uphold. He probably felt duty required him to issue a perfunctory warning whenever the urge for jungle exploration struck his physicians.