Halo
It is a universal truth that a petty, vindictive bureaucrat enjoys humiliating underlings who have screwed up. The truth holds even at major governmental agencies devoted to saving the world.
“Dickson,” I snarl into my phone, “it was an outbreak of pneumococcal pneumonia. Nothing more.”
On screen, Dickson—never was anyone more aptly named—turns his head slowly and raises his eyebrows, one of his most annoying theatrical habits. Rumor is that once he’d wanted to be an actor. He says, “Susan, this discussion is pointless. Just have Dr. Silva send me the follow-up data.”
“Lucas already sent the data. You’ve seen the data, so stop playing games. The prep school had an outbreak of pneumococcal pneumonia, exactly as the school physician diagnosed. You just wasted thousands of dollars and four people’s expensive time for no justifiable reason. This outbreak did not require an investigative team!”
“We received a request.”
“EVAU gets dozens of requests every month. Why did you send me on this one? I’m filing a complaint with Internal Issues.”
“Go ahead,” Dickson says, perfectly serene except for a tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth. Unease? Apprehension? I can only hope.
“But,” he continues, “I can tell you that the request came directly from the headmaster’s cousin, Tyler James O’Brien.”
Not unease or apprehension. The twitch had been amusement. Gotcha! T.J. O’Brien is chief of staff to the president of the United States. Prep-school types have channels closed to people like me, and favors flow along them like dirty water, muddying the division between medicine and politics. Probably Headmaster O’Brien wanted to be able to say to anxious parents, “We’re taking all measures for our students’ safety, including an investigation by the Emerging Virus Advance Unit of the CDC, to be absolutely certain this outbreak is dealt with correctly.”
Unlike—Dickson doesn’t have to say to me because we both understand it already— that outbreak in Louisiana. Which haunts me and always will, but Dickson is not capable of understanding that.
He isn’t finished. “Actually, it’s lucky that you are in Massachusetts because I have your next assignment right here, and it’s only seventy miles from your present location. You and your team should drive there immediately. I’m sending you the relevant information.” He gives me a smile like venom. “Have a good trip!”
“You’re kidding me,” Carol says, gazing in disbelief at her tablet.
Dr. Carol Bernstein, the physician on my current, truncated team, is brand-new to EVAU. So is my genetic virologist Dr. Lucas Silva. Only my security officer, Sebastian Duer (“Sebastian Dour” to my two young colleagues, although they don’t know that I know that) has been with me before. Sebastian is, I presume, also being punished for Louisiana. He doesn’t say, not about that or pretty much anything else. But he saved my ass more than once—in Congo in ’32, and in an up-country Creole bayou.
The four of us sit with badly cooked hamburgers in an interstate highway restaurant while we study the encrypted request data that Dickson has sent. Carol and Lucas have stopped eating, but Sebastian chomps away steadily as a ’dozer demolishing a forest.
I state the obvious and imply the also obvious, which is that this is the job and we’re going to do it. “Implant data shows eighty percent infection rate and the clinic can’t identify the disease.”
Carol says, “Eighty percent of five implants! That means four people may—or may not—host a pathogen from which they are almost recovered, no fatalities, and lingering symptom data that doesn’t even require quarantine, let alone our talents!”
She’s right, of course, but her outburst tells me more than she intended. Young Dr. Bernstein, on her first job since obtaining her MD, has not done her homework. She doesn’t know that I’m in disgrace and so being sent on politically motivated, bottom-of-the-viral-barrel, bullshit jobs. That in turn says that Carol is both not tracking which investigative teams have racked up EVAU’s stunning successes in the past ten years, and that she is not plugged into the strong electrical flow of CDC gossip.
Quiet, self-contained Lucas Silva has done one or the other. He glances at me, then gives Carol a tiny shake of the head that she doesn’t see. He says in his musical, formal English, “Implant data is always so incomplete. I need tissue samples, including the brain.”
I’m stunned. Brain samples are not easy to obtain; recovering patients usually object to having their heads cut open to satisfy the scientific itches of researchers. Carol starts to sputter—this hot-headedness may be the reason Dickson stuck her on my pathetic team—but Lucas holds up his hand.
“It is possible that cerebral-spinal fluid will be enough. But nervous-system samples I must have. That is where personality changes occur.”
The personality changes are not evident at Soldiers Memorial Hospital in Anita Falls, Vermont.
The town, glorious in October foliage, is small, quaint, and full of tourists engaged in that seasonal New England peculiarity, “leaf peeping.” Anita Falls’s streets, bathed in mellow afternoon light, are a picture postcard of serenity. But I looked up the town’s history. Indigenous people, the Ehnita, a subset of the Abenaki tribe, backed the losers in the French and Indian War. Their enemies, the Iroquois, backed the winners. The Ehnita were all but obliterated, and descriptions of the violence in those battles are stomach-churning. Afterward, Fort Ehnita became the township of Anita Falls.
Five people are in the hospital’s quarantine ward, three adults and one child lying in bed and one young man pacing the short corridor. Presumably he is the asymptomatic whose implant nonetheless transmitted the same data as the bedridden patients. None of the five bear any readily identifiable similarity in age, gender, or medical history. None are in the CDC database.
The hospital administrator remonstrates about Sebastian’s side arms. Sebastian ignores her. He lugs in Lucas’s state-of-the-art equipment and a computer running software off military satellites, while Carol and Lucas suit up in Biohazard Level 3 PPE gear: Tyvek suit, HEPA mask, face shield, rubber boots, and gloves. This alarms the administrator even more, and I suggest his office as a better place to explain our protocol and begin my job.
“Dr. Kelly! Are guns necessary? The hospital has extremely good security and state-of-the-art metal detectors—”
“I was once attacked with a carbon-fiber knife and nearly lost a hand,” I say mildly, which shuts him up for the moment. I don’t tell him that the attack was in Louisiana, the hand is still partially crippled, and except for Sebastian I would probably be dead. EVAU security measures might have been originally designed for third-world countries, but we have enough homegrown crazies to justify them here as well.
I add, “Dr. Silva can set up in some corner of the hospital where almost no one will see him.” This is an attempt at repair diplomacy, never my forte. Until Louisiana, I headed an advance team of sixteen, always including a multilingual liaison officer skilled at soothing locals.
My repair attempt is not a great success. Dr. Minetti scowls at me. This increases the difficulty of my job, which is part cop.
Field epidemiologists and cops have the same two questions. Who are the perps? How can the perp be arrested? For the CDC, the criminal causing destruction may be a bacterium, a parasite, or a toxin, but is usually a virus. The perp’s accomplice is its transmission vector: mosquito, water, flea, farm animal, mouse urine, bat bite, human body fluids, more. Worst case: air. Carol’s job is to treat infectees, Lucas does research sleuthing to locate the perp, and I try to map the physical march forward of the disease by tracing who has been where, doing what, and with whom. Who does not get sick is as important as who does.
Our initial data comes from the voluntary implants that send blood data to the CDC. Why do people agree to be implanted? Many don’t, especially in rural areas. (“The government isn’t putting any secret chips in my blood!”) Those that do agree think that early detection of a new virus that has invaded their bodies can only be a good thing. Usually, they’re right.
CDC computer algorithms sort the genetic codes of known viruses (colds, flu, and an entire alphabet of diseases like RSV) from the unknowns. The knowns get sorted into relatively minor (variants of colds or seasonal flu), serious (MERSA, SARS), and catastrophic (Nipah, Lassa, Ebola). Known diseases may or may not trigger a CDC response. For unknown diseases, identifying who is infected, how severely, and by what becomes the responsibility of the Emerging Virus Advance Unit.
All this is complicated by rapid viral mutations, especially RNA viruses, as they adjust to new hosts. Also by some viruses’ tendency to polymorphism, meaning that they afflict different people with different symptoms, including none at all. Ten million viruses land daily on every square meter of Earth, wafting down from the air like unseen snow, and we know only a fraction of them. Hunting for an emerging virus or radically mutated variant of an old one is like chasing a shapeshifter through a vast crowded maze with dead ends, distorting fun-house mirrors, and corpses.
In Louisiana, I’d never found our way out of the maze.
Dr. Minetti and I settle in his office and I begin recording how these five people ended up at the hospital, including the young man with no symptoms whatsoever. Later, I will talk to each of the patients and begin the laborious task of mapping a disease I don’t believe warrants mapping. None of these five is going to die. They were not even very sick. Their blood data show some peculiar variations, but they are all recovering well. Whatever this is, it is not a danger to society.
It is the second time I have been deeply wrong.
By evening, Lucas has all his samples, including cerebrospinal fluid from two voluntary spinal taps. Most patients strenuously resist taps as soon as the dangers are explained to them. That two patients have consented is practically a miracle, and I suspect the miracle worker is Lucas, who talked in his quiet, formal way to all five.
The forty-year-old, stay-at-home mom refused.
The county road-crew worker, twenty-five, refused.
The high-school math teacher, sixty-two, refused.
Surprisingly, Jem Potter, twenty-one and asymptomatic, agreed. Had Lucas told him that donating a cerebrospinal sample would get him out of quarantine faster? I hoped not, since it wasn’t true, but I didn’t inquire. Cops sometimes lie.
Most surprising of all was the sample from Sarah Emily Nowak. She was the sickest patient and, being eight years old, could not consent to anything. Her parents agreed to the spinal tap. They told Lucas, and then me, and then the hospital, that anything that might help Sarah was all right. “Only …” the mother said hesitantly, and her eyes filled with tears.
Every instinct I owned went on high alert. “Only what, Ms. Nowak?”
“Only now Sarah, even though she’s so sick, she’s … before this, she was …”
Sarah’s father said, “She’s happier now.”
“Happier?”
“No, not that,” the mother said, having regained herself. “Of course she’s not happy. She has headaches and body aches, and she cries she wants to go home. But she isn’t using that dreadful language she picked up on the school bus, isn’t trying to shock us to get attention, doesn’t try to bite me when I don’t give into her or—”
“Bite you? She used to bite you?”
The father says bitterly, “She was a little bitch. No, don’t look at me like that, Nicole. You know she was.” He turns to me. “Our other kids were never like that, and we raised all of them the same. But getting this sick has made Sarah sort of … not happy, but less aggressive. Not so nasty. Not nasty at all, in fact.”
I nodded meaninglessly. Many children become more docile when they don’t feel well. Others … well. Nature? Nurture? Who the hell knew? But I was not going to think about Zed, not now. I made the huge effort to bring both the Nowaks and myself to my immediate concern. “Mrs. Nowak, how long ago did Sarah bite you?”
“The last time”—The last time! How many times had there been?—“was just before she got sick. Tuesday. Why?”
“Did she break your skin? Did you bleed?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Will you consent to giving Dr. Silva blood, tissue, and cerebrospinal fluid samples?”
She looks uncertain. “Will it help Sarah?”
I tread carefully. “It may.”
“Then yes, of course.”
Saliva is a major transmitter of many viruses. If Mrs. Nowak has not contracted the virus, I can rule out saliva as a transmission vector. “Thank you,” I say. “Let me get you a consent form. Mr. Nowak, did Sarah ever bite you?”
“No.”
“Any of your other children, or anyone else you know of?”
The parents look at each other. Mrs. Nowak says, “There was that little boy on the playground who called her fat.…”
“What is his name? How long ago was that? Anything you can tell me may help Sarah.”
I take all the information I can, and then suit up to talk again to Sarah Nowak, who had struck me as an unremarkable little girl who understandably wanted to leave the hospital and go home.
Several pathogens can cause personality changes. Toxoplasmosis, contracted from cat feces, can reach the brain and turn people less risk-averse. Usually, however, personality changes are not evident until the disease has nearly finished its deadly course and is destroying its host’s brain. Rabies. Nipah. Ebola.
In Louisiana, there had also been personality changes—more day-dreaming, less sharp mental focus—which I missed until it was too late. It is so difficult to say anything definitive about a virus newly spilled from its animal host into unfortunate human bodies. And viruses can hide in bodies for a long time, as the chicken-pox virus does for decades until it turns into shingles.
By the end of the epidemic in Louisiana, a hundred sixty-two people were dead and the rest kept in quarantine for over a year.
The only thing that saved the rest of the United States was that the pox virus, whose original host is still unidentified, broke out up-country in a spread-out area of swamp and bayou where people did not travel much to the outside world. The disaster broke the halo the CDC had worn ever since EVAU had successfully contained Ebola in Los Angeles, and Lassa fever in New York, both brought here by imported animals. Well, halos should not be worn by scientists anyway. Some of the epidemiologists on the New York team strutted around to talk shows like some combination of an archangel and a rock star. One of them was Peter, my ex-husband.
He divorced me after Louisiana. Neither rock stars nor archangels have to stay attached to failures. Although, to be fair—why do women strive so hard to be fair to men who’ve treated them like crap? Louisiana wasn’t the only thing that led to our divorce. Nor was my premature replacement, who gazed at Peter as if he had just created Eden and opened its gates to her. Peter’s and my marriage had had its heart, if not its brains, gnawed long before her perky young body showed up in Peter’s bed. Some of the blame belonged to Zed.
Sarah Emily Nowak is not the only aggressive child in the world.
“Hello, Sarah,” I say to her. “I brought you something.”
She takes the hypoallergenic teddy bear, sewn by a volunteer organization of elderly women who send toys to hospitalized children, and smiles at me. “Thank you so much.”
Illustration by Lucas Durham
Long Description
During the next weeks we work like demons. Lucas succeeds in isolating the virus in both blood, where it breeds, and in cerebrospinal fluid. That he succeeds in this so quickly is amazing; viral isolation can take months, or even years. My opinion of Lucas’s skill soars.
In addition to skill, he has grit. But, then, without grit he would be dead. He fled Brazil at age twenty, a hunted insurrectionist against a very corrupt regime. He can never return. During the years he was gaining his PhD through a combination of scholarships, charity, and insanely hard work, his sister was captured in his stead, tortured, and murdered. His parents were blown up in Brazil’s brief and bloody civil war, during a government missile attack on an apartment building. I never press him for details on any of this, which he wouldn’t give me anyway. Lucas is self-contained, watchful, brilliant.
He amplifies the virus and analyzes its genome. Carol screens the blood of incoming hospital patients for symptoms of what we are calling—but only among ourselves—“the happy disease.” But blood is all we have. Lucas cannot figure out what the virus is actually doing and to which cells. “Happy disease” is a misnomer anyway; the patients aren’t happy. They don’t want to be here (nor do I). They grumble and snap and occasionally cry, but they cooperate. And often they are agreeable, not in a Stepford-robot way but in a how-can-I-help-you way of successful customer representatives, which is slightly unnerving.
I trace everyone I can, and we test everyone who will agree. We have no mandate to force testing on anyone not hospitalized. Hospitalized infectees go promptly into quarantine. Most victims fall ill for a few days, feel fatigued and brain-fogged for a week or two, and then recover.
What we know so far is that the transmission vector seems to be bodily fluids, especially saliva, mucus, and blood. My field mapping included a lot of intrusive “Whom have you kissed lately?” questions, along with even more intrusive “Have you shared a tissue or napkin with anyone? Spit on anyone? Bitten anyone? Shared a needle? Do you drool?” I am not popular in Anita Falls. Sebastian accompanies me on my door-knocking rounds, but neither in the town nor the hospital does anyone try to so much as shove me. Sebastian does not do well in the absence of danger. Lucas, from pity, takes him out for a drink one night with the misguided idea of making Sebastian feel relevant by listening to his war stories. This is a failure. Sebastian drinking is no more forthcoming than Sebastian totally sober, not even when what Lucas describes as “really excellent craft beers” are available at a local brewery.
The bulk of our evidence for the mild personality changes is anecdotal, a notoriously unreliable data source. Mrs. Nowak, who has indeed been infected by Sarah’s bite and is now in quarantine, by all reports has always been cooperative and agreeable. Her husband does not become infected, which tells me something about their sex life. Jem Potter arrived in town only two weeks ago and no one in Anita Falls seems to know him. The math teacher and housewife know a lot of people, but everyone says they were “really nice” to begin with. Also that they don’t kiss, bite, drool on, or share needles with anyone. Only the road worker and Sarah Nowak seem to have become more cooperative and agreeable after their infection, but who knows what I-never-got-enough-love-from-Mommy syndrome has been temporarily brought out by all this hospital attention?
After people infected with this elusive disease recover, they do not seem able to infect others, so we release them from quarantine and send them home. Neither Lucas nor Carol can determine if the virus remains in infectees’ bodies after recovery, nor what bodily systems it affects, nor by what mechanism.
Dickson is not impressed with our results. “Pretty thin. Hardly a public-health emergency.”
This infuriates me. “It was always thin, and you knew this wasn’t going to be a public-health emergency when you sent me here.”
“Don’t be so egotistical, Susan. It wasn’t about you.” His nasty smile says differently, but there is no point in arguing. I have an elaborate contact-tracing map, but it’s for a virus that may or may not make people less aggressive, that operates in some unidentified bodily system, that kills nobody, and for which any long-term effects could only be verified by a longitudinal study, which I know Dickson will not authorize. He’s going to shut us down.
“I’m shutting down your investigation.”
We pack up our equipment. No one in Anita Falls is sorry to see us go. We have accomplished nothing, cured nothing, wasted everyone’s time. And as a result of the last two investigations, Lucas is detached from my team, ordered to fly immediately to HQ for reassignment. No reason is given, but I know why. Lucas has demonstrated above-average ability as a virologist. Dickson can use him on legitimate investigations; he is too good for my sorry team.
“Susan, I am sorry to leave you,” Lucas says, courteous as always. He does not mean it. He has a strong career ahead of him and is naturally excited about that. He cannot meet my eyes.
“I’m happy for you,” I say, which is at least partly true. “Do you know where your new team is heading?”
“Mexico. An outbreak of hantavirus.”
“Good luck,” I say. What I do not say is complex. I admire you. I envy you. You are too young to know that everyone eventually falls into a pothole on the viral trail. I hope yours won’t be deep enough to derail you.
“Well, I’m glad he’s gone,” Carol says, jealousy riming her words like frost. “I never liked him. He’s so … so closed in. Never jokes around, never shares anything personal. Never fun.”
I could come to dislike Carol.
She and Lucas take a taxi to the airport; Sebastian and I will drive the equipment to Atlanta. As we load the heavy crates in the hospital’s underground parking lot, a man appears from nowhere and rushes toward me. He waves a baseball bat and screams something I don’t, can’t, catch. I duck, falling to the ground, and the bat shatters a side window of the van. I scuttle backward, crab-like—where is Sebastian? Then, simultaneously, he emerges from behind the van and a gunshot reverberates around the cement walls. The attacker drops in a spray of blood.
The shot was not Sebastian’s.
We stare at each other across the corpse. A security guard runs over, gun still hot. “Are you OK?”
“Yes,” I say.
Sebastian’s usual stoniness has morphed into surprise, shame, and fear. He stammers something, so low that all I hear are stuttering sounds. He looks at his own belatedly drawn sidearm as if it is a viper.
“It happens,” I say, as people suddenly pour into the parking lot. “Nobody catches them all.” But I can see my words don’t reach him.
Someone says to someone else, “That’s the crazy that attacked that other woman yesterday.”
Sebastian is still staring at his gun, until a cop demands he drop it, and he does.
Sometimes I schedule dreaded tasks all at once, getting the unpleasantness over in one difficult chunk. So in Atlanta I see the dentist for a root canal and crown, file my overdue taxes, and fly to New York to see my son, who is not thrilled by the visit.
“Hi, Mom,” Zed says at the door of his tiny, dirty apartment in Fordham. Zed is a composer of atonal, discordant, “neo-classical” music, in which nobody has ever shown the slightest interest. He supports himself by teaching as adjunct faculty at Fordham University. His neighborhood has an assault rate five times the national average, his apartment smells bad, and the piano on which he composes looks as if it survived the Punic Wars. Barely.
Zed scowls at me. “Like I told you on the phone, this really isn’t a good time for a visit. Yet here you are.”
“Here I am,” I agree, squeezing past him into the apartment, “because this is the time I have. And I haven’t seen you in over a year.”
“Well, I’ve been busy. Really busy.”
“So I see.” Sheets of handwritten music cover every dusty surface. “Can you at least spare the time to let me take you to lunch?”
His scowl deepens. “You really don’t respect anybody else’s work except your own, do you? I’m working, the ideas are just … just foaming up, and I really can’t interrupt … OK, I’ll go!”
With Zed, this passes for gracious acceptance. I let it go because if I argue, it will only get worse.
At lunch, he relents a little and actually asks me if I’m on “a virus safari.” I say only, “One just finished,” and ask what ideas are foaming up.
“Mom, you’re tone deaf! You wouldn’t understand if I told you. So I’ll just say that I’m this close”—he holds thumb and forefinger an inch apart—“to finishing a new concerto. It’s unlike anything I’ve composed before, and it’s going to cause a sensation. I’m right on the edge of it!”
“That’s wonderful, honey.”
His fingers drop. “You don’t believe me.”
I don’t; I’ve seen this movie before. But I say cheerfully, “You said yourself that I don’t understand music. If you say the concerto is good, then I can believe it is.”
He looks at me steadily for a long moment, then rips savagely into his turkey panini.
You cannot choose the children you birth. Nature? Nurture? Zed was difficult from birth, unresponsive to cuddling, full of inexplicable rage. Both Peter and I tried our best with him. Now Peter has given up. I never will.
Nonetheless, there is more than one night that I dream that Lucas, not Zed, is my son, and I wake up burning with guilt.
Two months later, Dickson calls me into his office. I expect another bullshit assignment. Instead, Dickson stands with a crowd of people, all looking tense. I blink when I recognize Leland Matthews, the head of the entire National Biodefense and Countermeasures Agency, to which the CDC and everyone else reports.
“Dr. Susan Kelly,” Dickson says, looking ghostly pale and, almost shockingly, with no contemptuous eye roll or melodramatic lip curl. “Dr. Kelly, Dr. Matthews has a few questions for you.”
I nod, completely bewildered. What the hell is going on here?
Matthews says, with no preliminaries, “You headed the EVAU team investigating the outbreak in Anita Falls. I’ve read your report on the investigation, but since then there has been a development. Your contact tracing indicated a close relationship between infectee Jem Potter and a young woman stationed in Massachusetts, Corporal Olivia Elizabeth Donavan.”
“Yes, sir.” Jem Potter was the asymptomatic who, it turned out, was pacing the corridor in quarantine because his soldier girlfriend was being transferred and he would lose his chance to say goodbye. My stomach suddenly knots. “I was unable to interview Corporal Donavan. She had just been transferred to Texas for retraining.”
“Yes. To the Fort Sam Houston medical training program. Where she fell ill, recovered quickly, and inadvertently infected at least two other soldiers, who in turn have infected more with something no one could identify until we happened across your team’s EVAU report of the outbreak in Anita Falls. A report which had not been entered into the master database.”
No wonder Dickson looks pale. Why didn’t he enter my report into the deebee? Because it had been a bullshit assignment motivated by petty vindictiveness. Dickson thought he could bury it without any consequences.
Matthews continues. “Your report would have helped the Texas team investigate the virus that your viral researcher had already identified and saved us a lot of critical time. Dr. Lucas Silva is on his way to Texas now to aid in that effort. You will join him there immediately to give whatever assistance you can to the USAMRIID team already effecting quarantine. Transport is outside to take you home to pack and then to military transport. Full data will be given to you on the plane.”
USAMRIID—United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Dickson’s bullshit disease was being taken very seriously. My bewilderment grew.
“Sir, can I ask … has the disease mutated? Are soldiers at Fort Sam Houston dying?”
“No. They are briefly ill, some asymptomatically, and highly contagious for about a week. That’s enough to cause an epidemic.”
“With what symptoms? In Anita Falls we didn’t notice—”
Matthews scowled. “You should already know this, Doctor. You were there. The virus affects personality, and the personality changes seem permanent after the disease passes. The infected soldiers are quietly content. Agreeable. Non-aggressive. They do not want to fight, not anyone. The base prison is full of dissenters already, and it is a very large prison. We might as well have an army of Quakers.
“Now get your ass to Texas and help fix this.”
Before the military transport takes off, I call my son in New York. “Zed, I’m going to be in Texas for a while, working. Just wanted to let you know where I am.”
Silence. My statement makes no sense to either of us. I never tell Zed where I’m working unless it’s out of the country. What am I looking for from him? Reassurance? Support? Concern? I don’t get it.
“OK. But, Mom, I can’t talk right now. I work, too, you know, and I was right on the edge when you just interrupted a … oh, never mind!” And then, after silence on my part. “I’m sorry. I am. It’s just that—”
“It’s OK,” I say. “I know what it’s like to have your momentum interrupted. Good luck with the concerto.”
“Don’t add guilt on top of interruption!” And then, again, “I’m sorry!”
“Be well,” I say gently, and click off before I can do any more damage. Or evoke any more aggression or guilt or whatever the hell is and has always been wrong between us. I do not have a talent for motherhood. My work always came first, even when Zed was a child—a very difficult child—and so how can I blame him for doing the same?
I settle in for the flight, reading the data from the hastily assembled interagency team. Somewhere over Tennessee, I sit bolt upright and read a section again, and then again.
I don’t usually pray, but involuntarily words arise in my mind, God, let me be wrong about this.
At Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, the interagency team is cool to me, which is clear when my request to meet immediately with the team leader is denied.
“Dr. Kenton is unavailable,” says Major Liu, the virologist obviously placed in charge of me, just as obviously without any enthusiasm for the charge. In her eyes—all their eyes—my team and I have screwed up.
I attack the issue head-on. “You’re wondering how we missed the virus’s effect on our patients’ endocannabinoid systems.”
She gazes at me steadily. She’s my age, and she has the aura of an epidemiologist who’s wrestled with major diseases under impossible conditions. I can feel it, that aura; to anyone who’s waded through exsanguinating blood from Ebola, watched children in mud huts die of Lassa, that aura is palpable. I had it once myself, before Louisiana.
Major Liu says simply. “Yes. Our patients’ endocannabinoid receptors are blazing like Roman candles. It should have been hard to miss.”
“Have you talked to … is the rest of my team here? I was told in Atlanta that both Dr. Silva and Dr. Bernstein—”
“Dr. Silva arrived three hours ago and is being debriefed. We’ve talked to Dr. Bernstein by Link. Why do you think they missed the endocannabinoid connection?”
Carol missed it because she is inexperienced, not particularly competent, and willing to follow Lucas’s lead. Lucas missed it because …
I say, “They are both inexperienced, on their first assignments. Is it possible … May I talk to Dr. Silva?”
“Perhaps first you can give us some insight into how a geneticist talented enough to isolate a virus in record time was unable to then identify which receptors the virus attached to and so what it might be doing. Or why you didn’t make the behavioral connection. It’s not as if endocannabinoid-system reactions are that hard to spot.”
Her words are acid quietly poured over me. And she is, of course, right.
The endocannabinoid system, ECS, which spreads through virtually every organ in the body, is an active and complex cell-signaling network. It is what marijuana bonds to. More relevantly, the human body manufactures its own endocannabinoids. They are naturally occurring neurotransmitters, and we know less about them than anything else in the body except the brain. Their function is to regulate key bodily functions to keep them in balance. When your ECS is deficient, your sleep is disturbed, your walking is uneven, your blood pressure swings wildly, your pain may be amplified, your appetite goes wonky, your body temperature is not kept steady. And if the right endocannabinoids bind to the right receptors in your nervous system, it will affect that other barely understood organ, the brain.
“Runner’s high” is the result of a rush of endocannabinoids to the brain.
So is the high from pot.
So is the occasional sudden good mood, mellow and feeling positive about the world, that seems to strike for no reason. The sort of pleasant, cooperative mood that leads a cantankerous, difficult child to smile sweetly and say “Thank you” for a teddy bear in an ineptly sewn pinafore.
The sort of mood that disinclines a person for complaint or unpleasantness because, after all, it’s good to be alive and other people are interesting and hey, live and let live, right?
The sort of mood that disinclines Army recruits to stick bayonets in people, fire guns at them, drop bombs on them.
The sort of mood that is supposed to pass, through the breakdown of endocannabinoid in the synapses of your brain, as soon as aggression seems the better evolutionary option.
All this passes through my mind in a flash while Major Liu stands waiting for my response to her sarcastic insult. Perhaps you can give us some insight into why you did not make the connection. I know the answers I’m supposed to give—because I only had five patients, because I wasn’t supervising my sole virologist on what I considered a bullshit assignment—but I don’t say them. Her scorn is justified.
I say, “I’d like to talk to Dr. Silva as soon as possible. I can ask him questions you may not have thought of, questions based on informal observations in Anita Falls.”
Her lip actually curls in contempt, something I’ve never seen outside of melodramatic movies and Dickson’s pathetic theatrics. But all she says is, “Wait here. I’ll send him to you after he’s fully debriefed.”
It’s a long wait. I sit on an uncomfortable chair in the windowless room furnished only with three chairs and a wooden table. What is this room ordinarily? I can picture difficult soldiers being reprimanded here, or being dishonorably discharged. This room—this whole building—is far removed from labs, hospitals, the medical training facility for which Fort Sam Houston is known.
Eventually, Lucas is escorted in and we’re left to stare at each other.
I know that this interview is probably being observed and/or recorded. Does he? Of course, he does. Lucas Silva is the reverse of naive; his personal history guaranteed that, the personal history that he has risen above with such admirable grit. Gritty, brilliant, traumatized, arrogant Dr. Silva.
He gazes at me, waiting with his usual quiet composure.
I say, “You told the researchers here that you missed the virus’s effect on the endocannabinoid system.”
He says, “Viruses don’t usually affect that system. Or if they do, the immune system is usually good at defending it.”
“Yes. But you are usually very thorough.”
“Thank you. Did you not observe changes in the patients’ behavior based on your extensive interviews with their contacts?”
Clever. He is going to throw me under the bus. Although he is basically right. I didn’t investigate the pre-infection personality traits of the patients, and so could not tell if their personalities had changed. The exception was Sarah Emily, whose parents tried to tell me their aggressive child had just become an angel. And I did not listen.
Lucas rises slightly on the balls of his feet, like a boxer, his only outward sign of what must be enormous inward strain.
He says, “I should have been able to see the increased ECS activity. I missed it because of my inexperience.”
I can say, Yes, you did, and that will be the end of the interview. Or I can say to him, and everyone listening, what I believe to be the truth.
No, you did see that the virus affects the endocannabinoid system. You deliberately hid that data because your parents were blown to bits in war and your sister tortured and murdered. You believe human aggression will destroy humanity. You wanted this virus to have time to spread. And you did more than just stay silent.
Sebastian is the key. Sebastian Duer and Jem Potter.
Sebastian, skilled and trigger-quick bodyguard, who failed to protect me from the baseball-bat-wielding crazy in the Anita Falls parking lot.
Jem Potter, my asymptomatic patient, identified as infected only by his implant. A man whom nobody in Anita Falls knew anything about because he was just passing through on his way to Fort Sam Houston to stalk ex-girlfriend Corporal Olivia Elizabeth Donavan. Jem Potter, who had a restraining order against him, as well as a dismissed Connecticut case of domestic violence (“he said, she said”). Jem Potter, now calm and agreeable and who, according to new intel I’d read on the plane, had abandoned his stalking of Donavan to settle quietly into a new job in Boston.
Lucas, tense as piano wire, stares silently at me. We both know that I hold his future in my hands.
Condemning Lucas won’t stop the virus. It is out and spreading, like most enteroviruses, through bodily fluids: saliva, mucus, feces. Put another way, through kisses, shared vapes, careless hand-washing, babies’ diapers. Eventually there may be an antidote or a vaccine, but not before huge numbers of infectees become, to some unknown degree for some unknown length of time including permanently, nicer people. More cooperative. Less aggressive, less driven.
Driven dictators—Hitler, Stalin—have murdered millions, caused wars, specialized in cruelty.
But … could less aggressive soldiers defend this country? Or any other?
Driven malcontents are the stuff of which terrorists are fashioned.
But … would less driven epidemiologists face death in the field, bulldoze their way through local politics and public reaction, work twenty-hour days for weeks on end to fight diseases that could wipe out the planet?
“Ehnita Falls” became “Anita Falls” because of the terrible slaughter of the indigenous people by British soldiers. Slaughter that has happened over and over whenever one group has more advanced weapons than another.
But … would less aggressive humanists risk their lives and the lives of their families to try to stop the slaughter?
Would less aggressive athletes train so hard or compete so fiercely?
Would less driven artists focus so exclusively on composing, painting, writing, dancing, sculpting to produce Swan Lake or Ode to Joy or Crime and Punishment? Zed saying, “I’m right on the edge …” Edgy. Driven. Discontent with the establishment has always fueled art.
I say, “How did you infect Sebastian? He never goes into quarantined areas. He’s as careful around disease as he is—was—protective of me and my team. It was when you took him out for craft beers, wasn’t it? Did you bring a patient’s saliva with you, offer to get him a special beer from the bar, carefully smear the saliva on the glass? Something like that? You knew he’s always refused an implant, and that between my missions he goes to his brother’s in New York, a great place to incubate germs.”
Lucas says, “No. You are wrong. I didn’t infect anybody, and I didn’t realize the virus attacked the endocannabinoid system.”
“One more question, Lucas. If you really believe that spreading this virus, which is going to disrupt global security and economy for decades, will change the human race in a positive way and is ultimately going to do so much good, why didn’t you infect yourself as well as Sebastian?”
For a long moment Lucas is silent. Then he repeats, “I didn’t infect anybody, and I didn’t realize the virus attacked the endocannabinoid system.”
I look up at the camera I still can’t see and say, “We’re done here, Dr. Liu.”
Instantly the door opens, and the aftermath—hearings, public-relations strategies, citizen panic, citizen contentment, quarantines, containment measures, the frantic race for a vaccine that will preserve humanity as it is now, driven and aggressive and capable of choosing hard actions no matter the personal sacrifice—all of it will begin.
How much contentment is contented enough? How much innate aggression is too much? I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know. But I know that epidemiologists should not use pathogens to shape human minds. That is not our decision. We are not divinities.
Months later, after I have been fired from the CDC, after Lucas has been indicted for a seditious act to undermine the United States military, after it has been determined that no charges will be filed against me because incompetence is not a federal offense, after I have found a job doing lab work that a talented college sophomore could master, after the virus has gone public and the active military sequestered and relentlessly tested, after violent crime has dropped in urban areas by over ten percent and counting, after the world’s scientists have united to search for a so-far-elusive vaccine, after media uproar has exhausted its supply of multi-syllable adjectives (“cataclysmic, evolutionarily transformative, terrifyingly disruptive”) and begun to repeat them—after all that, Zed called me.
He doesn’t know about my role in the cataclysmic, terrifying disruption. No names were made public. But even if Zed had known, I’m not sure it would have penetrated his current excitement.
“Mom! I did it! I found the way to finish the concerto!”
“Honey, that’s—”
“Actually, to rewrite it completely. I found the missing piece! It … never mind, you wouldn’t understand anyway. But the important thing is I got a hearing with Anton Cieślak—not right away, of course, I had to work my way up a whole chain of people and some of those fools that … never mind. Cieślak saw it! He wants it! To be performed next season in New York!”
Even I know who Anton Cieślak is. America’s legendary conductor, and one of the premier conductors in the world.
“Zed, I’m so—”
“He says the concerto is brilliant!”
Zed babbles on about Cieślak, about scoring the concerto for full orchestra, about technicalities I can’t follow and don’t try. What matters to me, his mother, is that he sounds happy, and that he called me—however belatedly—to share that happiness.
That driven, edgy, non-agreeable happiness.
Is it worth the viral turmoil affecting the world? No, of course not. One concerto cannot balance a pandemic, not even a pandemic of niceness. Nor can the thank-you letter I received from Sarah Emily Nowak’s mother. (“I am so grateful to you for giving us the best possible version of our daughter.”) Nor can the email from Sebastian, now enrolled in a nursing program. But these things matter to me.
They are what I have now, and I am unexpectedly, surprisingly, even alarmingly content.