“My father’s birthday,” the landlord said, turning back around. “So what’s the trick?” he called.
“There’s no trick,” the hiker replied. “I hear better than you, that’s all.”
He began walking back to them. “All my senses are better,” he said, “That’s how I found your son. And that’s how I know the bobcat won’t hurt him, or anyone. I can see it and hear it and smell it and taste it and feel it too.”
The landlord watched him come, his expression shifting like lava through surprise and disbelief and dismay. And although she’d already come to know it, Laurelie felt a little of those same emotions as well, because it was one thing to have privately believed something and another to finally hear it voiced publicly.
From the silence, other sounds emerged. The hiker’s soft steps along the dirt lane, the skitter of a chipmunk in an oak tree, the slow buzz of a bumblebee. The distant barks of a dog and a boy up on the main house lawn. The sunlight was full of color, the breeze light and voluminous, and in that moment all of Laurelie’s own senses seemed to be heightened as well.
“Have you seen a doctor about this?” the landlord asked.
He’d seen many, the hiker told him. He’d been sick for a long time. The doctors had determined it was caused by a virus, but that was all they’d figured out. They’d said he would either die or recover, and eventually he’d recovered. But his senses never had.
He’d reached them by then, and was standing very still, looking at the landlord with his shoulders high and his hands fisted at his sides. His eyes were wet and his nostrils were flickering and his mouth was open, tasting him. It was a reaction that by now Laurelie had come to perceive as normal, and yet with its cause laid bare and the landlord there and aware of it, its effect was newly disconcerting. And the fact that the hiker must know she felt this only made it even worse.
The landlord took a step back.
The hiker closed the gap. “Now that you understand, what are you going to do?” he said, and Laurelie could almost see him bristling, hissing.
“About the—the bobcat?” The landlord could not look for long at the hiker’s face, and so his gaze bounced around from there to the trail to the car behind him, as if looking for somewhere safe. “Well, I definitely appreciate your, ah, special insights. The animal’s no danger, you say? I suppose there’s no need for us to be hasty, then.”
The hiker said nothing, watching him, his nostrils pulsing angrily.
“I should be going,” the landlord said. “Violet’s expecting me.”
Laurelie sank down on the porch stair and watched the landlord’s car crawl back up the lane. Above the main house the sun had reached its zenith and hung there like a ball of fire. She lay back and closed her eyes, welcoming its heat, feeling it anesthetize her brain and melt her knotted muscles into the warm porch boards. For a while that was all she felt, and then there was something else, a current of cold threading through the warmth, a sound so thin and high and keening it almost seemed she imagined it.
“Hawk,” the hiker murmured, and she opened her eyes to see it gliding low over the hill. And then, so fast it had already happened by the time it occurred, the bird dropped to the grass and was soaring away again with a tiny body twisting in its talons.
“Mole.”
It must have been in the dirt, the hiker told her. The sun was lowering and the cold was growing and he was sitting beside her on the porch stair with his long limbs tightly folded, telling her things she’d so long wanted to know, and that somehow now no longer seemed to matter at all. How some rich man had bought a tiny island in northern Maine and paid the hiker’s family to build a living greenhouse on it, because he wanted to grow tropical plants surrounded by snow. How it had been a big job and that’s why they’d taken it, even though it had come so late in the season that they’d had to rush to finish it before first frost. It had been the summer after the hiker’s freshman year at college and he’d been getting ready to go back. They’d spent two weeks on that island, from dawn until dark, his dad working the backhoe, digging out a six-foot house-sized hole, and then the hiker running the heating cables through it that would keep the soil a constant sixty degrees. It had rained the whole time; he’d been covered in mud. It had gotten in his water, his food. And somewhere in all that dirt, he said, there must have been a virus, ancient and long ago buried inside some other ancient life’s remains. Because three days later, the same morning he was supposed to leave for school, he’d gotten sick. The fever had struck so hard and quickly that he’d had a seizure right there on the kitchen floor. His dad had held him while his mom called 911. The hospital had gotten the fever down, but even afterward his body had still felt like it was burning. They’d done some tests and then sent him home, saying it would probably go away. But instead every few days he’d get another fever, the fire spreading over his skin until it consumed him. He always knew when one was coming on because of the triggers. One time a UPS guy had come to the door and the hiker smelled his aftershave all the way upstairs, in his room on the second floor. Another time, lying on his bed, he’d watched a tiny spider on the ceiling lift its leg and tap the thread of its web, and heard the whole thing hum.
Based on his blood work the doctors knew it was a virus, but it was one they’d never seen before. And so there was no medicine, no cure. Over time the fevers had grown weaker and less frequent, but the burning never stopped. And without the fevers, the doctors could find nothing wrong. They said there was some lingering swelling, that’s all. They suggested neurological testing. The hiker swallowed hard then, the motion traveling down his body as he told her they claimed hallucinations sometimes resulted from extended illness, and prescribed antipsychotic medication for him.
He stopped going to doctors then. For a long time he’d stayed at home. He’d moved into the downstairs room, and never left it. The input, he told her, was just too overwhelming. Everything stank, or deafened, or blinded him, everything he touched pierced him like a knife, and even plain water tasted like poison. By then it was spring, and one day his mother came in and opened his window. Just to see, she’d said.
Amazingly, it had helped. The input was if anything more intense, but somehow it made more sense to him. He began spending time outside, first hours and then entire days, drawn to the woods where there were no humans to see him as sick, their reactions only making him feel sicker. He began sleeping out there with his dog, began staying for weeks at a time. Alone in the woods, his fear and panic diminished, and finally the burning began to differentiate, so that he could distinguish the individual strands of information coming in. He began to understand how his senses had changed, and what they could now do. He learned to survive in the wild, to eat only what vegetation his senses told him was okay, and to track and hunt down animal prey.
He got a lot better then, he said. His senses still flared at every stimulus, but now he could assimilate them, and instead of panicking could determine which and how much he could bear. He began returning home for short periods, and then for longer ones. His parents were so relieved they rebuilt their downstairs all in unprocessed woods and glass and clays, using only materials that didn’t smell abhorrent to him. They were already organic gardeners, but now he’d bring home meat for them to eat, deer and rabbit and small birds. Eventually he even started working in their landscaping business again.
But the human smells were just too complex, he said. Everything people did stank of corruption. That’s why, after a while, he always had to go back to the woods again.
He turned then and gazed down at her.
And so, she thought, looking back at him, what has changed? In the telling his story had felt so physical, raging over them like a force of nature. But now that it had receded again, nothing had changed. Only the light. Everything looked deeper, sadder and richer too, everything coated in the residue of his remembered pain. How clearly one saw a world in its twilight.
Whatever he sought in her eyes, he must have foun
d, for he lay back against the stairs beside her. His nose pulsed softly, nearly infinitesimally. He closed his eyes, and she did the same.
17
Laurelie released a long pent-up breath as she walked down the path from the Montague administration offices. It seemed as if she’d been holding it forever, and now she took great gulps of air. She’d just officially graduated from college, having handed in her honors thesis, a compendium of panels she’d been up until dawn putting the final touches on. Then she’d fallen asleep and dreamed of flying. Not flying exactly, bouncing really, first an epiphany of realizing she could spring with her legs and soar into the air and then the crystalline uncertainty of descent, so much faster than rising and with death at the end, until she discovered that falling was in fact simply high-speed floating and she was strong enough to land, after which she began leaping, arcing off the sides of buildings and riffling through the tops of trees, experimenting with different angles and heights and breadths.
She remembered this sensation as she looked around the green, at the college buildings huddling close as if frightened of the trees. Above the scene the morning sun twinkled and beamed, and she raised her face and smiled back at it. Then, lowering her gaze again, she found herself watched by a short but extremely muscular guy who was walking toward her up the path. He was dressed all in camouflage, with R-O-T-C stenciled white and askew on his high black boots. On another day she might have lowered her head. But not this one. She picked up her pace, but not in fear; she was thinking of the hiker. He’d be returning soon. He’d arrived at her cottage just as she was leaving and was at that moment cajoling the bobcat and her kittens into the large wooden crate he’d constructed for them. By tonight they would all be safe in his woods, settling into their new home. Laurelie herself would have an entire month to live there with them before graduate school started and she had to return to Montague.
When her cell phone chirruped she fumbled for it in her backpack, imagining for an instant he was calling because he’d felt her thinking of him. That it wasn’t him but rather her landlord hardly deflated her at all. Nor did the man’s asking her to stop by his office before she left campus in order to sign her lease for the coming year. The task would not take long; the ivy-covered building in which he worked was only a few paces away.
His secretary said he was expecting her. Walking down the quiet hall she heard his voice and found the door was partway open. Knocking softly, she pushed it wider. Her landlord was sitting behind an ornate desk on the other side of the room. When he caught sight of her, he bid her enter and smiled.
She imagined herself shrinking as she crossed the floor. Her feet sank deep into the enormous blue carpet, its creamy border twined with golden vines and at its center a coiled and snarling dragon. But also the room, being so large and nearly a perfect cube, seemed to alter the proportions of the things inside it. Despite the bright day, it was dim as well, the only light a matrix of small windows on the far wall that glowed but did not penetrate, and on the desk a small lamp shining green. There was a fireplace in one corner but it was cold now, and the armchairs before it were full of shadows. She imagined as she passed them she heard the murmurs of prior administrators still lingering.
Not until she’d reached the desk did she realize a small gray-haired man was sitting in one of them.
She stepped back in surprise as he rose to greet her.
“Laurelie,” said the landlord, “I’d like you to meet Dr. Waters. We were college roommates years ago. Back in the dark ages.”
Both men laughed.
“Dr. Waters was in the area this morning,” the landlord went on, “so I asked him to drop by. We’ve had a nice talk, and now he’d like to talk with you.” He clasped his hands in the small circle of light on his desk, continuing, “Dr. Waters is a virologist, Laurelie. He works at the CDC. He’s done some truly groundbreaking research there over the past twenty years. Twice he’s even been short-listed for the Nobel Prize.”
“Thank you, Owen,” the doctor said. “It’s nice to meet you, Laurelie. Owen is right. I’d very much like to talk to you. And to your friend too.”
Slowly, then, the relative proportions of the room and its contents inverted. The walls receded and the living bodies loomed, while the whispers of the dead ones swelled until a sound like static filled the room.
“CDC?” Her own voice came out cracked and bleak. “That’s—that’s Center for Disease Control.”
“Actually it’s Centers with an ‘s,’” the doctor said with a smile. “We’re a multi-site organization.”
“Laurelie, wait a minute!” the landlord called. She paid him no mind, passing over the dragon’s back and crossing the twining golden vines. Then her hand closed around the door handle, and she was grateful for its cold hard smoothness as she swung the door wide.
Halfway through the doorway she heard the doctor remark, “Of course, with any virus there is a public safety issue at stake. But of primary concern to you, I’m sure, would be how great a risk there still is to your friend.”
She stopped.
“Yes. Now you see why I’d like to talk to you.”
Slowly she turned around, her mind flashing cinematics of outbreaks and quarantines in hazy staccato red.
“I’d suggest we keep the door closed,” the virologist murmured, “for privacy.”
After a moment she did as he suggested, but remained there, standing with her back against it.
“Are you sure you won’t sit down?” the doctor said.
She shook her head.
“Well then, let me start with a disclaimer. Until I examine your friend I can’t make a specific diagnosis. However, based on the limited history Owen provided, I can make some general predictions. Owen said your friend was previously diagnosed with a virus of unknown origin. He thought this probably occurred a few years ago now?”
The doctor’s gaze met hers. When she didn’t respond, it attached itself high on the wall above her head. “Owen also said your friend appears to have lingering symptoms, specifically one or more senses functioning beyond normal human range.”
He began to pace now, back and forth over the dragon’s back. His body was slight as a greyhound’s, its motions small but brisk. “The question we must therefore ask ourselves is what this schedule of onset and symptoms suggests.
“We have at our disposal over two hundred years of viral research. And what have we learned from it? First, that the virus is the oldest and most abundant biological entity on Earth. There are millions currently in existence, although we’ve studied only a tiny fraction in any detail.” He was warming to his discourse, picking up speed, his hands gesturing in rapid punctuation of his speech.
“Second, we know the virus is a highly specialized organism. Most can target only a single cell type within a single species, which statistically, of course, will be non-human. However, viruses can evolve, and thus so can their targets. Rabies, avian flu, and smallpox are all examples of viruses that have evolved to target multiple species, including humans.
“Third, although we think of a virus as a living organism, in fact it only partially fulfills the requirements for life. It contains genetic material, the medium by which instructions are transmitted from one generation of organisms to the next, but it lacks the internal cellular structure necessary to reproduce on its own. To do so it must borrow the machinery of other organisms. And this of course is done through the process of infection.”
Here the landlord cleared his throat, but the virologist paid him no attention. “Regardless of the type of cell it infects,” he went on, “each virus particle has only one single purpose, and it is one it achieves alone. For there is no communication at all between virus particles. Each acts wholly in isolation, seeking a host cell to penetrate and then copy itself inside, using the cell’s internal machinery. Typically replication continues until the cell’s resources have been depleted. The viral copies that have been produced then each go out and seek their own host cell,
either within the same host or a new one. This ability to be transferred between hosts is what makes a virus contagious.”
Again the landlord cleared his throat, and for an instant Laurelie wanted to throttle him.
“However, we must also keep in mind,” the virologist said, “that the infected host doesn’t usually die as a result of contagion. Mortality depends on a number of factors, including the speed and profusion with which the virus replicates, the cell type it targets, and the immune system’s defense. Rabies, for example, kills because it bursts the walls of the brain cells in which it replicates. Influenza, on the other hand, typically does not kill even though it replicates more profusely, because it does so in cells of the respiratory system. Ebola, on the other hand, kills so overwhelmingly not because of its own actions but because of those of the host’s own immune system, which responds with such a massive release of cytokines that the integrity of the infected vascular cells is compromised—basically causing its own body to bleed to death.”
The doctor smiled into the landlord’s shocked expression and went on. “Contrary to the impression lent by such extreme examples, however, most viruses only cause death when there are weak immune systems at play, such as in the very young, or elderly, or sick. Healthy immune systems will typically recover completely. This of course is in the interest of both species’ survival, in the virus’s case because it increases the amount of reproduction that occurs, and also the likelihood of transference to new hosts. Usually a healthy immune system will eradicate the infection within a few weeks, but during this time many instances of transfer will take place. Viruses can enter our bodies through the mouth, nose, eyes, or urogenital openings, or through bites or wounds that breach the skin. They can come, or course, from direct contact with an infected body, but also indirectly from all the environments where its infected fluids and microbes may have been shed.”
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