“Have you or anyone you’ve been in physical contact with developed a cough in the last twenty-four hours?”
I shook my head again.
“I need a ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ Ma’am.”
“No.” I tried to not say it through gritted teeth. TSA agents are notorious for pulling rude people aside for a pat-down security check, the thinking being, I guess, that if you’re impatient, you’re probably also hiding a box cutter in your bra.
I only wanted to cocoon in the plane with my noise-canceling headphones. My seatmate, who turned out to be the Midwest territory manager for a ramen noodle company, only wanted to talk. He pulled off his own headphones.
“So did you hear about the new outbreak?” He was a balding, round-faced man with a red, bulbous nose. He could have been earning twice my salary or half. Business travelers are an oddly paid bunch.
I nodded. My headphones were on, but he knew I could hear him even with them on.
“Creepy, isn’t it?”
I nodded again and smiled, then closed my eyes like I was going to sleep. He was breaking all the unspoken traveling rules. Business travelers never talk to other travelers unless the plane has sat on the tarmac for at least two hours. Even then, the rule is to begin with other travel horror stories. He must have felt desperate to talk.
“You from Colorado?”
I lifted an earphone. I could hear enough through the headphones, but if I talked with them on, it felt like I was in a cave. “Colorado Springs.”
He nodded nervously. “Detroit’s my territory. So’s Cincinnati. I go into all those neighborhoods with my reps. Gotta keep all those customers happy.”
“Cincinnati?” What did that have to do with anything?
“Yeah.” He looked at me like I’d been wearing the headphones too long. “You didn’t hear? Twenty to thirty people showed up with smallpox in Detroit. At least that many in Cincinnati and a half dozen in New Jersey. Some more in Jackson, Mississippi, and some small town in Idaho. Never heard of the place, but they’re sick too.” He shifted his eyes nervously around the plane. “I’m not traveling again until I can get vaccinated. I don’t need this shit. It’s tough enough being on the road every week.”
Amen to that.
When I got off the plane in Denver, I made my usual stop in the restroom, but this time I threw up, too.
CHAPTER
08
IT WAS 9/11 REDUX. I received special dispensation from my Zaan manager not to travel the next week. He made it clear that I could travel if I wanted to, but there wouldn’t be any repercussions if I chose to work from home. I thought it was kind of the big Z not to threaten firing us all for joining in the national panic. Most likely, though, they were just trying to ward off a mass exodus. It happened in 2001.
In my previous week’s absence, Eddy had redecorated our office into Early Elementary School. He’d hung an enormous bulletin board on the wall over my desk. Across the bottom, he’d tacked individual calendar pages with handwritten notes on various days. A colorful map of the United States took up most of the rest of the corkboard. Red, black, yellow, and silver pinheads dotted the map: one red, one black, and one silver south of Colorado Springs; two black and twelve yellow in Salida, Colorado; bunches of yellow in Detroit, Cincinnati, New Jersey, Northern Idaho, and Jackson, Mississippi.
“Black is for people who have died from it, right?” Even my travel-dead brain could figure that one out.
Eddy nodded. He’d swiveled his office chair around so he could put his feet up on my desk. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and faded blue sweatpants. His curly black hair still glistened wet from his shower. Any other Saturday morning we would have been talking about what came in the mail during the week and debating between Thai and Indian food for dinner.
“What’s the silver for?”
“Silver is for a confirmed link to a terrorist cell.”
Tired as I was, I knew it seemed off. “Seems like there should be more, especially with the new outbreaks.”
“Yes. Curious, isn’t it? One would think the government would be frantically chasing that crowd.”
“Curious. That’s a kind word for it.” I nodded at the other pins. “So why red for the federal prison? Why yellow for all the others?
“Red is for an outbreak where people contracted smallpox, but didn’t die.”
“Why don’t you have red in any of the other locations?”
“Yellow represents unconfirmed reports.” He paused and let me think through what that meant. “They gave us a name for the three dead in Colorado and the prison survivor. For all the others, all we have up until now is the news reports that there are other victims. Without a name, it’s just a rumor.”
“Maybe they’re protecting their privacy,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Maybe we’ll never know,” I said.
“Could be,” he said.
“Does that make it any less of a threat?” Part of me felt frustrated that we were even having this discussion. Eddy stayed isolated all week long in his office, not having even to make eye contact with a real person if he didn’t feel like going out. It gave him the luxury of feeding his paranoia and numbed him to my reality even though the truth was that anything I got exposed to Monday through Friday could become his problem as soon we kissed hello at the airport.
Eddy put his feet back on the floor and leaned toward me. He rested his arms on his knees and clasped his hands—his jock-on-the-basketball-bench position. I’d fallen in love with it decades ago. “No. It doesn’t make it any less of a threat. But it certainly makes it a different kind of threat, doesn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
I stared at the calendar pages and map some more. I hadn’t had the timeline in my head until I saw Eddy’s notes. “You know what’s weird is that there was one outbreak followed within a week by a second one. Nothing happened for three weeks, now we have outbreaks in five more locations. And they all get reported on the same day.”
Eddy nodded. “Almost at the same time.”
“Odd coincidence and odd timing.” I had a fuzzy image of some poor contagious business traveler slogging from city to city over the course of a few days, unknowingly exposing innocents everywhere. My knees couldn’t hold me anymore. I dropped in a chair. It could have been me. I could have been the source. I could have been a victim.
Eddy nodded some more. He was watching me think. “The outbreaks seem too plotted out.”
“But why wait for three weeks between the second and third strike?”
“You tell me.”
It didn’t make sense. “What are they saying on the news about the potential link to terrorists?” Earlier that morning, I’d gathered up—Easter egg hunt-style—the Eddy articles from around the house. I’d even skimmed them, but I didn’t remember seeing anything that would make you think this was coming.
“Just the usual. They’re tracking down leads. They think this is linked to that missing smallpox vial from last summer. Now it’s just a matter of dragging a couple of suspects in front of the TV cameras—if they can find them.”
“You think about how quickly they named names and had photos after 9/11 or after the Boston Marathon bombing. Why haven’t the Feds been able to make faster traction on this?”
“Unless it isn’t terrorists who are doing it.” Eddy took my hand in his two hands and squeezed it.
“What do you mean? How did this all get started? What are you reading?”
“Nothing in the papers.” He glanced at the floor. “Maybe a little on some Internet sites.”
The confession.
“Eddio, you have way too much time on your hands.”
He sounded a little sheepish. “People send me stuff. What can I do?”
“Delete? Ignore the blog sites?”
“And miss all the good conspiracy theories?”
I sighed. It was a pointless discussion.
“Here’s what I think, Mz M.”
“Not every full moon. Just the months with the letter r.”
“We should all be so lucky to get our summers off.”
“Exactly. We’re well back into the R months again, so I’m on my own on this one.”
“Yes you are, Eddio. Okay. Tell me what you think.”
“I think the timing is odd because whoever is infecting these people expected more exposures and more hysteria after the Salida outbreak. Nothing happened, but it took a while to realize that those two drunks hadn’t infected anyone else. But I’ve been noodling around about why they didn’t hit a place like Detroit or New York. Why target a small town?”
I thought about that awhile. “It’s too strange. Maybe the original goal was about scaring and containment. That would be a lot harder to do in a city.”
“Right. Except they must have expected a ton of panic. So they—whoever ‘they’ might be—had to regroup and figure out how to create some panic.”
“I think they hit the jackpot. We’re there now.”
“The other thing I think is that we might never learn the names of the victims. It’s not going to be 9/11 where we read the obits for years afterwards.”
“Because you don’t think those pins represent real victims.” I knew his pattern.
“Cindy Marshall would probably say the same thing.”
He had me there.
“So now what?”
“Now we wait and see. Some terrorist group claims responsibility or the guys in white shirts don’t do anything but get the outbreaks contained? That tells us one thing.”
“And if that’s not what happens?”
“Then we see what the next big move is and who makes it.”
Who could tell what the next big move was? Nothing happened the next week except that Eddy added more yellow pins to his map: in Montpelier, Vermont; a Dallas suburb; Socorro, New Mexico; New York City; and Los Angeles.
Every added pin mirrored the ratcheting up in national panic. People cleared the grocery store shelves and the malls were empty as tombs. The national and even the local stations carried a repeating scroll of what early symptoms looked like and what to do if you thought you were exposed.
The economy did a nose-dive that the White House insisted wasn’t actually happening. They explained the plunge in the stock market as a momentary self-correcting blip. They also announced they were closer to getting sufficient immunizations but were still at least a month away, if not two or three, for enough vaccinations for everyone who wanted one—which included everyone in the country except Eddy and a few of his friends, r month or not. In the meantime, the vaccines they did have had to go to people in the infected areas.
Triage became the new word of the year: take care of the most vulnerable first.
The press rumbled about the incompetence of the White House. The White House grumbled off the record about the FDA obstacle course to getting a vaccine out fast. The press growled about the White House making excuses while putting the nation at risk. The White house attacked back with detailed press releases about all the regulatory handcuffs Congress had put on the FDA, which quadrupled the time it took to create enough doses and to ensure every dose was safe and effective. No one wanted the flu vaccine debacle of 2004-2005 with something as serious as smallpox. It didn’t matter that only the FDA and the CDC remembered that mess.
The Senate announced hearings to get at the bottom of why the FBI hadn’t tracked down the terrorist cell that started the whole epidemic.
And the airlines, hotel industry, rental car companies, and anyone else remotely associated with travel or tourism grew nervous about a domino of bankruptcies.
Yes, I know it was incredibly selfish, but me? I didn’t care if it took them a year. I could stay home forever and ever and have my groceries delivered, fresh-packed meat and coughing butchers momentarily submerged far enough into my subconscious that I didn’t lose my appetite.
I walked around the house all week, dizzy with the eighteen-hour windfall from no traveling that the week gave me and the luxury of crawling into bed every night with Eddy, which was where some of those extra twenty hours got whiled away. And since I wasn’t distracted by the client or my Zaan colleagues, I truly got a third again as much done in two-thirds the time. Everyone won except Zaan since the company couldn’t bill me out for the usual forty hours at the ridiculously high hourly fee they charged for me. Maybe they’d have to lay me off and give me a severance package.
By Thursday afternoon, the White House still hadn’t come up with enough vaccines to put me on a plane on Sunday. It made me believe in the power of prayer. And I was beginning to re-think my vote in the next general election. There was a lot to be said for incompetence if it meant I got to sleep in my own bed every night.
CHAPTER
09
USUALLY, SUNDAY NIGHT IS THE WORST NIGHT OF THE WEEK for me since most Mondays find me on a plane. The only exception to this is when I have to fly out on Sunday, in which case, the worst night of the week is too close to call because a Sunday flight is the same as no weekend at all. To have two weeks in a row at home almost seemed worth the national crisis, although I hated to make that very public, seeing as it sounded so insensitive.
I really needed a different job.
Nevertheless, the second week without travel was as precious as the first. I don’t know what a third week would have been like because on Wednesday I got an email from my manager.
Team,
Zaan has arranged for priority on the smallpox vaccine list for people in the company who travel.
Please follow the instructions at: https://[email protected]/benefits/sp to get vaccinated. Plan to resume your travel schedule as of Monday, Tuesday at the latest. If you’re unable to obtain the vaccination as scheduled, please contact me no later than Friday afternoon.
Ken
The internal gtalk flew.
dbenningZaan: Hi Maggie.
MRiderZAAN: Hey Denise.
dbenningZaan: You depressed as I am?
MRiderZAAN: About going back on the road?
dbenningZaan: What else?
MRiderZAAN: They shouldn’t have let us remember what it’s like to wake up in your own bed for a week straight.
dbenningZaan: No kidding. They’re better off keeping us mindless drones. Here’s one for you. I just found out they changed my trash day from Tuesday to Monday last January! I cleaned out my refrigerator and freezer Monday night, put it out early on Tuesday, and cleaned up the mess all morning Wednesday ... YUCK! Now I’ve got to figure out what to do with my rapidly ripening garbage so the raccoons don’t get into before next Wednesday.
MRiderZAAN: LOL! You never had smelly trash before now?
dbenningZaan: Hell no. I don’t think I’ve even had trash before except for frozen dinner containers and junk mail. And I always rinsed the containers out so the neighbors wouldn’t swear at me while they cleaned up the raccoon leftovers.
MRiderZAAN: You know your neighbors? I wouldn’t recognize mine if we arm-wrestled over the newspaper.
dbenningZaan: You get a newspaper????? You do have a complicated life.
MRiderZAAN: Eddy gets the newspaper. He even reads it.
And ripped out those articles that, come to think of it, were piling up again.
dbenningZaan: Get your vaccine scheduled yet?
MRiderZAAN: Ugh. No. Have you?
dbenningZaan: Yes ma’am. Tomorrow ... Unless I find another job without travel first.
MRiderZAAN: Call me if you get hired. Find out if they need someone to answer the phones and make coffee.
dbenningZaan: You kidding? That’s the job I’m interviewing for.
MRiderZAAN: So how did the big Z get bumped to the top of the vaccination list? Seem a little goofy to you that software implementations are suddenly critical to homeland security?
Denise always knew something the
rest of us didn’t. For her, the arrival of Google Talk had been a gift from God.
MRiderZAAN: Must be the dividend of the Z’s political contributions, no? Don’t they own the Senate or something?
dbenningZaan: I think the mega database contract Z got with the CDC was the dividend. Getting bumped to the top of the vaccine list falls more into the payola arena.
MRiderZAAN: Payola???? You gotta be kidding.
dbenningZaan: LOL! Of course I’m kidding. But not about the database contract. You knew about that, right?
MRiderZAAN: Maybe I read something about that. CDC, huh?
dbenningZaan: Yup. We’re the show behind the show. Megabucks. Mega.
MRiderZAAN: Database? No applications?
dbenningZaan: DB and something else we built for them. Something around keeping track of the spread of disease. A one-off, but there must be enough money in it that Z thought it was worth doing.
While Denise and I gtalked, two or three more people sent me instant messages, including Michael de Leon, who wanted to know if I’d be back in the land of Baja Breeze the next week. Denise must have been getting pinged a bunch, too, because there were occasional long pauses while we conversed.
My own long pauses included checking out the Zaan internal website vaccination directions. It left me miserable. I had to print off a “Priority 1” vaccination document, drive an hour and a half to the University of Colorado in Boulder, plan on at least a two-hour wait, and allow at least forty-eight hours before traveling. It was a terrible, albeit not unexpected, price to pay for my two weeks at home.
The whole thing also triggered an unhappy evening.
“Why are you getting this vaccine?” Eddy asked over dinner on Thursday evening. He’d made a pot roast—comfort food—and bought some fresh Inca lilies and a dozen new candles for the table. We’d already split a bottle of wine, and I wasn’t done drinking. Misery drives you to things like that.
“Look at your map with all the pinheads. What are there? A couple hundred?”
“And you believe those are all real?”
The Virus Page 4