A viral mist seemed to fall between Mitty and Mrs.Abrams. Her face seemed to spurt pustules, as the virus boiling beneath her skin made her bubble.
“Mitty,” she said, as if from a great distance,“what topic have you chosen?”
“Smallpox,” he said thickly.
“Mitty, wake up! I am your English teacher. Do not tell me what your biology project is. What topic have you chosen for your term paper for me?”
Mitty chose not to think about the fact that he had yet another paper to worry about. He strolled into biology and handed his smallpox report to Mr. Lynch.
“You've written it?” said Mr. Lynch suspiciously. “You're done? You did it early?” Even eager academic types like Olivia never did anything early. Early was weird. Or cheating.
“I'm not completely done,” said Mitty. “I'm just mostly done.”
“The assignment,” said Mr. Lynch, “was ten pages of notes. I specifically wanted notes.”
If Mitty said his notes were at home, he'd have to produce them. If he said they were in his laptop, he'd have to print them. So Mitty tried to look innocent but puzzled by this bizarre emphasis on notes.
Mr. Lynch looked down at Mitty's writing, eyebrows raised in classic teacher skepticism. Plagiarism was a problem in school; it was so easy to download whatever you needed. Teachers had Web sites for checking on plagiarism, but there was way too much out there to check everything.
Mitty was well liked. Nobody wanted him to turn out to be a cheat, and nobody wanted him caught if he wasone. His classmates looked down at their desks while Mr. Lynch sighed. He could not avoid dealing with the cheating right here and now.
But Mitty knew that he had put everything into his own words and it would read that way. No real textbook author would put “Henderson's guys … called at every single solitary house in the entire country once a month to see if anybody had smallpox. They really and truly knocked on the doors of 120 million houses.” Authors would be like, “With impressive fortitude, the multitudinous staff of the eradication team shouldered the Herculean task of…”
Mr. Lynch read silently. Then he went back to the beginning of Mitty's report and proceeded to read it out loud. Mitty hoped the class wouldn't be asked to comment. Whatever anybody says, he thought, I won't rework a single sentence. I'm sick of this topic. It got under my skin.
Mitty suppressed a shiver.
What smallpox did, of course, was get under the skin.
He had a memory, complete with touch and smell. He saw himself pouring smallpox scabs into his palm, the scab disintegrating between his fingers, the dust wafting, his hand rubbing his nose, his chest rising in a deep breath. A breath full of dust. Smallpox dust.
“Mitty, this is good work!” said Mr. Lynch, visibly stunned that anything Mitty did might be good and also include work. “I think your writing has too much slang, but I'll let you keep it; it's definitely your own voice. Now. Three more topics, Mitty. First: bioterrorism. Smallpox is at the top of the list of feared viruses. Second: find out about the supply of smallpox vaccineprepared for the nation as a result of 9/11. Third: investigate possible future use or misuse of smallpox.”
“Smallpox doesn't exist,” protested Thomas, a normally silent member of the class.
“It doesn't exist in the population,” agreed Mr. Lynch.“But if terrorists—sophisticated terrorists, obviously, with outstanding laboratories and lots of money—got hold of the virus, then what?” He handed the paper back to Mitty
Emma said, “I have this question about tetanus? The alternative medicine sites? They say you shouldn't get inoculated against tetanus because tetanus doesn't exist anymore. I thought the bacteria were still lying around, though, waiting for you.”
“You are correct. The sources you cite are unscientific,” Mr. Lynch told Emma.“If you have a deep cut from something filthy, you could get tetanus unless you've been inoculated. The disease is gone because of inoculation, not because the bacteria is gone.”
“What is tetanus again?” asked Thomas. Mitty was grateful not to be the only guy who couldn't keep track of bacteria and viruses.
“It used to be called lockjaw because your face muscles freeze,” said Emma. “You die when the disease hits the muscles that expand your lungs. Your diaphragm seizes up and you suffocate.”
Everybody was very proud of the way their own personal infectious disease killed people. People who hadn't chosen killer diseases were sorry, especially Melanie and her corn blight.
Zorah said importantly,“I'm doing polio. Did you know that it's back again? We got rid of it in America and theyhad gotten rid of it in Africa, but it's back now in nine countries that got slouchy about vaccinating.”
Mr. Lynch had been collecting people's notes. “Nate!” he cried.“I am so impressed! You did get an interview!”
Nate had known all along how brilliant he was. “My uncle is a tropical disease researcher, of course,” said Nate, with the prim little smile of the successful student, “and he's very very very close friends with the premier researcher on Lassa fever. I've been e-mailing her, and she's been very responsive to my needs.”
“Poor woman must regret the invention of e-mail,” muttered Derek.
Mr. Lynch raved about the research levels to which Nate was now soaring. The class favored Nate with looks of loathing.
Olivia, unusually for her, was not contributing. She sat silently, braiding her long dark hair. Then she began writing in one of her many notebooks.
Mitty knew very few people—no boys—who liked writing by hand. Guys did everything on computers. But Olivia never traveled without paper and pencil. Her handwriting was neat no matter how quickly she wrote, and she never misspelled. Mitty was the reverse; his handwriting was terrible no matter how slowly he wrote, and he misspelled pretty much everything.
Class was about two-thirds over. Mitty often set his watch to keep track of how much endurance he needed to live through the rest of a class. Sixteen more minutes. Mitty reached into his backpack, pulled out the Koplow book and went to the index, thinking that he would skip listening to Mr. Lynch and get the research for another topic over with.
Mitty looked up vaccine.
Sure enough, on page twenty-eight, the author said that after the September 11 attacks, the administration was worried about other possible terrorist moves and wanted to be prepared with enough smallpox vaccine for everybody in America.
At first, the U.S. couldn't come up with enough vaccine. There was zero market for it, so there were zero manufacturers. But, Koplow wrote, “Aventis Pasteur, a French vaccine-making company, discovered a previously overlooked inventory of eighty-five million doses of vaccine, housed in its Pennsylvania warehouse, and donated it to the U.S. government.”
Mitty was totally distracted. You could overlook eighty-five doses of something. Maybe 85,000. But where were you looking, that you didn't spot 85 million of something? Just how sloppy was your inventory, anyway? Had those 85 million doses been in abandoned Pennsylvania refrigerators, forgotten even by the cleaning lady? Had some little sign on the freezer door fallen off? Had somebody once picked up a piece of paper that said 85 million smallpox doses and said to himself,“Oh, this is nothing” and thrown out the label?
But why manufacture a vaccine you never gave to anybody? If you didn't get vaccinated, what was the point of having this vaccine? Didn't it exist to prevent disease?
Class was over. Everybody but Mitty was leaving. Olivia paused at his side.
He was planning to ask what she'd been writing that was so important that she had made no definitive contribution to classroom discussion. But when he looked at her, her lovely complexion seemed to mottle and split, like with Mrs. Abrams, bubbling and crusting.
He was having disease hallucinations. He concentrated on shrugging his shoulders into his backpack and somehow made it into the hall with everybody else. When he looked up again, Olivia was normal, though with a slightly sad expression. “How's Typhoid Mary?” he asked.
“Seductive?” said Emma.
“I'm being drawn into it,” Olivia explained. “I think about typhoid all the time. I think about the disease, about the woman who gave it to other people, the men who pursued her, the prison she lived in.”
“I'm doing bubonic plague,” said Madelyn sadly, “and every paragraph I read, I feel under my arms to see if my lymph nodes are swollen.”
Mitty was cheered. Maybe they were all being drawn into their diseases. Maybe Zorah, who had polio, was feeling her legs wither, while Emma, who had tetanus, was having difficulty chewing. He just needed to clarify one little point. “So, Mr. Lynch,” he yelled back into the classroom, “can a vaccine be used after a person gets sick?”
Mr. Lynch's next class piled through the door as if getting to the same old desk in the same old room mattered more than anything on earth. Olivia got shoved sideways and Mitty looked around for the offender to sock him.
“Look it up, Mitty!” yelled Mr. Lynch. “It'll come under the heading of treatment.”
Mitty had hated this kind of response since third grade, when he couldn't spell one word in a row, never mind two, and the teacher would trill, “Look it up in the dictionary, Mitty!” and Mitty would trudge to this obnoxiously thick book (little did he know it was actually askinny beginner dictionary and the real horror of dictionaries was yet to come) and aimlessly jab at its contents.
“I'm going back to the medical school library again today,” said Olivia. “Want to come?”
“No,” said Mitty “Let's go to a movie.” In Mitty's family, the call of a theater could be heard loud and clear at any hour of any day. But Olivia's family had rules. Movies were for Friday and Saturday, the assigned evenings of recreation for the Clarks.
Olivia went alone to the medical school library.
Mitty headed for the movie theater to distract himself because there was something he didn't want to think about.
Three words circled over and over through Mitty's mind, like a digital sign on a building in Times Square.
YOU HANDLED SMALLPOX, said the sign.
In spite of Mr. Lynch's instructions, Mitty didn't have to look anything up.
He already knew.
The medical responders' handbook had had a section on smallpox treatment.
A short section.
Because there is none.
CHAPTER SIX
Mitty Blake stood on Broadway at Sixty-eighth reading movie titles on the marquee. For the first time he could remember, it didn't matter if he never saw any of them.
The wind chewed on his bare ankles. He seriously had to consider wearing socks for the rest of February. He warmed himself up with a coffee from a street vendor. The coffee didn't go down. He had to lunge at his own throat to make the swallow happen.
Great, he thought. I not only have symptoms of my own disease, but now I'm getting symptoms of everybody else's disease.
I should destroy that envelope. My mother is going to sell some poor slob a nice little library and when they put it on the shelf they'll find …
He was being a jerk. The envelope held dust, not disease.
Mitty flicked his coffee cup into a trash barrel and headed home. Probably because he was in a hurry he ended up having to speak to everybody in his entire building: Jed the doorman, Brandi the weekday concierge, Henry the mailman. Then Mitty bumped into Felix, who stored all the packages delivered to all seven hundred tenants and had to ask how his operation had gone and even listen to the details; he had to welcome home the opera singer from her performances in Italy and pat her white terrier; squat down and make faces at the two-year-old twins Ashton and Avery, for whom he had once babysat and decided that once was enough when it came to babysitting, and also tell their nanny how great her new hair color looked. Then he had to get into an argument with Nick in maintenance over whether UConn was capable of beating Duke.
The result was, Mitty felt pretty normal by the time he reached the eighth floor and let himself into the apartment. He strode into his bedroom planning to squash the envelope like a cockroach. Not that they had roaches in this building; they probably used enough insecticide here to blanket all five boroughs.
But there were no antique books in Mitty's room.
Had his mother come in and taken them? Sold them?
It's okay, he said to himself. The envelope never mattered anyhow.
He was so thirsty that his tongue felt like corduroy.
People who got smallpox, he thought. How did they stay hydrated when they were so sick? There were no IVs back then, so they weren't getting water intravenously. Plus their mouths were full of sores. Every swallow musthave been brutal. And everybody else was just as sick as you, so it wasn't as if your family was hovering over the bed with glasses of water helping you sip.
He was still shivering. His pulse was up.
Mitty slammed into his father's study and approached the big Webster's dictionary his least favorite bound pages in the world. He looked up that stupid symptom rigor. The fourth meaning was shivering or trembling, as in the chill preceding a fever.
This is what happens when you do your homework, Mitty decided. It makes you sick.
He went into the kitchen to get a soda.
Mitty could understand the theory behind school: every citizen had to read and write. But he had conquered reading and writing in elementary school and did not want to hone his skills. Everybody said that USA Today was written on a sixth-grade level, and since Mitty could totally cruise through the sports section, why go on?
He yearned to quit school.
How could they ask him not only to write a huge biology paper but also to write an English paper and read Beowulf and do his math and world history, in which offhand he couldn't remember what continent they were studying right now, never mind what century?
Mitty frowned. That was four subjects. Wasn't he taking five?
He pulled the pop tab on a can of Pepsi, wishing he had gone to the medical library with Olivia. There were several aspects of his disease he wanted to look up.
“It isn't my disease!” he yelled. “And you don't need a treatment for it because it doesn't exist!”
He had a sudden vision involving towels. Almost blushing, he walked back into his bedroom. Yes. After his morning shower, he had draped his wet towel over a handy stack of books.
Mitty had never gotten into the whole yoga/Zen thing where you solved your anxiety with deep breathing and peaceful thoughts. He preferred action, so he kicked the books under his bed, one at a time, and hard. They could live in the dark indefinitely, because the maid refused to clean under there.
Mitty went online and wandered around on the CDC site again, ignoring its little sidebars filled with warnings and its little hotlines for consulting staff if you perceived an emergency.
They didn't use Mitty's favorite phrase, hot agent. Lethal incurable disease was their term. Then he went to the site run by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, abbreviated USAMRIID and pronounced “You-sam-rid,” which ran Maximum Containment Laboratories.
There was something very comforting about USAMRIID. These were Americans who knew what they were doing, as opposed to Mitty, an American who did not have the slightest idea what he was doing, other than getting the shakes over homework. That was when you knew you had bottomed out.
Mitty decided to look up North Brother Island instead of do homework. Those people who arranged walking tours in New York City (Lower East Side walks; jazz in Harlem walks; mystery book walks) could probably arrange a Typhoid Mary walk. That would be a terrific present for Olivia. Mitty happened to know that Valentine's Day was coming up. He knew this becausehis mother began mentioning holidays weeks ahead of time, giving his dad time to close in on a gift and arrange a celebration. Approximately forty-eight hours prior to the special day it was Mitty's job to ask Dad whether he was ready because if he failed, Mom would kill him ag
ain this year.
It dawned on Mitty that if New York City had a typhoid hospital, it must have had a smallpox hospital. And if they isolated typhoid on an island, wouldn't they also isolate smallpox on an island? He loved online research and he was good at it, so it took only a minute to find that the island was Roosevelt in the East River and that the smallpox hospital, although in ruins, still existed.
Mitty threw on a jacket and left the building. He had a great digital camera but didn't remember it until he was on Broadway, so he stopped at Duane Reade to buy a disposable one. Not too shabby, thought Mitty, ripping off the cardboard. For my disease, I'll have a mummified body part and photographs of a historic hospital.
Why would a doctor save scabs, anyway? Pathologists saved stuff like diseased liver slices or brain tissue to study later in a lab. Had a doctor back in 1902 planned to study those scabs? And then forgotten about them? Or died of smallpox himself before he could do anything?
Perhaps there were still things to learn from those scabs, in which case some scientist or physician would love to have a look at Mitty's variola major remains. I could go one better than some lousy interview like Nate's, Mitty thought. I'm the owner, so I can make those scientists beg and plead.
Maybe he would design a Web site. He'd call it Got Scabs. That would attract some attention. Probably notfrom the right people, though, because that was the thing about the Internet; the wrong people were there too.
Derek had Web sites of his own and would definitely help design Got Scabs or even take over the whole project. But no matter how much work Derek did, it would still mean work for Mitty, and so Mitty rejected the idea.
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