I sleep badly that night, dreading the appointment, and by the time it comes my skin feels itchy and feverish. I can’t tell if it’s nerves or some new development in my condition.
In Dr. Varghese’s office, I stare at the only personal thing in the room, a framed photograph sitting on top of her filing cabinet. In the picture she is a teenager, in hiking gear, baggy, pocketed trousers that seem to dwarf her slim frame, and behind her the waterfall cascades down a gorgeous, tiered set of rocks. “It’s from Lakhaniya Dari, near where I grew up,” she tells me when I ask about it. “In the rainy season the waters are furious. Amazing.” I wonder how far it is from Varanasi where the bodies are abandoned in the river, what she’s heard about what’s happening where she grew up. But I don’t ask.
Even though she’s been trying to help me relax, our relationship still feels too formal—too one-sided, I guess—for that kind of intimacy. Sometimes she reminds me of a big sister, joking with me, telling me stories about her home—how she misses the smells of ginger and cumin, the taste of sweet milky tea on hot days. She’s vague on the details but it’s enough to encourage me to talk.
“What do you love about Toronto?” she asks me and I have to think about it for a bit.
“How clean the air feels before it frosts over,” I say, at last. “I miss seeing the ice on the trees, thick enough that the branches sparkle like they’re made of glass. I remember last year it got so cold my mascara froze on my way to school. When I got inside, it melted down my face. My friend Jaina had to help my scrub it off before anyone saw.”
“I’ve never even seen snow,” she says with a tone of wonder.
Then she asks me about Kira, about how I’m doing emotionally. But thinking about Kira reminds me of what Dr. Varghese must know about the nymphs that she won’t tell me. How she’s keeping her own secrets. They must have seen what I’ve seen.
“And physically?” Dr. Varghese asks. “How are you doing? Appetite still good?”
“I could murder a pizza, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Sounds about right.”
I try to peek over the top of the open folder and catch sight of a clipped school photograph from last year, when my hair was longer. I’d been trying to look like Antal Lila, the lead singer from Sleepy Jesus.
“Anything else I should know about? Any irregular bleeding? Mood swings?”
I shake my head, blushing faintly.
“The good news is that things are holding steady. No deterioration. No signs of immunodeficiency issues. You’re healthy.”
“Healthy-ish.”
She jots something down in my file, pretending not to have heard me.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what could happen. A friend of mine told me there were options. Cremation isn’t the only choice.”
She glances up. “You don’t need to worry about that right now, Sophie.”
“But I want you to tell me about it.”
She sits up straighter. “It’s just a bit complicated.”
“Why?”
“Because of the state of the deceased. They can’t be buried. Donation to science is an option but I’m going to be honest with you, it isn’t a good one. We can’t use the organs of someone with JI2 for transplant surgery. But in some cases, we can arrange for the Centre to make use of the body for a short period for medical research. After that time, it would still be disposed of.”
“Disposed of?”
She shifts uncomfortably but doesn’t say more.
“Does something happen to the bodies afterward?” I ask. “Is that why you want to observe them? I’ve heard there might be genetic changes…anomalies…not just the tremors.”
“I can’t tell you any more about that, Sophie. We’re beginning to experiment with a drug called M-Plagge that could block the production of the juvenile hormone, but it may be some time before we know how effective it is.”
“What does it do?”
“The theory is that the hormone interferes in the body’s normal operations. It prevents your body from fighting infections and diseases, and interferes with the production of adrenaline, norepinephrine, dopamine and serotonin. If we can suppress the production of the hormone then we hope the body should reset. Begin to operate as normal. But I shouldn’t really be talking about this with you. The tests are preliminary. It could be months before we know more. And for the moment you’re healthy. Focus on your schoolwork. Your family. That’s where your attention should be. You have to try to live a normal life.”
“How was it?” Aunt Irene asks me as she gets up from the chair in the waiting room.
“Nothing much to report.”
My energy is low. I just want to head back to the house to rest but Aunt Irene has other ideas. “We better get a move on if we’re going to make Ashwell by noon.”
“Now?”
“I’ve got that conference on virology in London all weekend. It’s now or never, niece of mine.”
I try to smile like she wants. I’d been looking forward to this trip before she delayed it, the idea of getting out of Oxford for a little while. But as I watch her packing her notes back into her tote bag I can’t quiet the edge of frustration. How much does she know about what goes on in the Centre? Her research is connected to what they’re doing but is the flow of information two-way? Whenever I ask she goes quiet and thoughtful. Kira’s death has made her less sure of herself around me, more reticent about JI2. Sometimes I catch her watching me when she thinks I’m not looking, trying to suss out if I’m as fragile as Mom. If I need the same kid-glove treatment, after all.
We head toward the parking lot and I try to settle into the Renault, which was repaired after the accident. My phone beeps and there’s a message from Jaina, though it’s four days old. They still haven’t managed to get the network to work properly, leaving us with constant power outages and dead spots in my reception. It’s beginning to feel as if England has broken off from the rest of the world, is drifting further and further away. Dad’s calls are broken up by static and delays. I can barely make out what he says most of the time, only that he’s unhappy. He wishes we were with him. He hopes I’m doing better.
As we drive into the outskirts of the city, my gaze drifts over the landscape. Distant farms and fields of early bluebells surround the motorway. Dilapidated barns that have been refurbished by the families moving inland. Makeshift accommodations. They resettled half of Somerset in places like this, places where the floods haven’t been so bad.
We pass a church signboard.
BEHOLD! I MAKE ALL THINGS NEW!
There are emergency vehicles parked in front of it, the calamitous orange lights blinking in the distance. I’ve heard about this, that they’re digging up the bodies of anyone who died within six months of the first recorded death, before the cremation policy took effect. Just in case. I crane my head to see what they’re doing but we’re heading past too quickly. On the side of the church someone has spray-painted the symbol of an insect. The jitterbug. Underneath it they’ve scrawled:
HOW MUCH MORE CAN WE TAKE?
It’s midday when we turn off the A-1. Ashwell is a cozy village tucked on the River Cam, with medieval cottages and Tudor town houses lining the streets. Quaint, like the Industrial Revolution never happened here.
“What do you think?” Aunt Irene parks the car outside a pub called The Bushel and Strike. Its garden is filled with picnic benches, families basking in the early March heat. A small child of three, maybe, stares up at me with wide eyes as she sucks her fingers. At the next table is her brother, fourteen by the look of him, with the same brown eyes and prominent nose. A smattering of acne on his chin. Even without the medical ID bracelet around his wrist, I would have known he was sick from his paleness, the wariness of his expression.
“Postcard pretty,” I say, not sure if I mean it. One of Mom’s phrases.
Aunt Irene smiles faintly. “She’ll be home soon, sweetheart. Any day now she said. She and Jackie are finishing up with the spring preplanting.”
It’s the parish church we’ve come for. Inside it are chalk-painted arcades and a roof of coal-black timber. There are a few tables stocked with knitting and jam jars, a jumble sale to raise money for repairs to the south aisle and transept roofs. Chipper women wrapped in modest sundresses gossip and chuckle with one another, brooding hens.
We skirt the edges of the crowd to get a closer look at the building itself. Separating the nave from the chancel is a decrepit rood screen, a series of old wooden slats fixed together to form a semi-circle. It depicts the sounding of the last trumpet on Judgment Day. At the bottom cower the souls of the dead, naked, some being ushered by the heavenly host toward the alabaster halls of paradise while the others are forced toward a great burning city. A sketchily drawn Christ sits above in robes of faded red while around him swirl dark shapes, black-bodied angels with bat-like wings locked in an endless battle.
Aunt Irene stops in front of it. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? This is old, mid-fifteenth century. See how the colours are so bright? There are only a few examples like this left from the period. Most of them were destroyed in the Reformation and the civil war, but this one survived.”
My eye is drawn to the Devil who leers at the sinners, his mouth open and hungry. Near him, clay-coloured bodies with their hands stretched out in supplication climb from coffins whose lids have been carelessly overturned. Below the etiolated coat of arms is an inscription: Let every soule submyt him selfe unto the authorytye of the hygher powers for there is no power but of God.
I try to take the image in, try to see what she sees in it. “The priests in those times really hated the world, didn’t they? This world, I mean. The world of flesh and blood. They were so fixed on what was coming afterward.”
“I suppose their world must’ve seemed hellish to them. Bodies in the street, so many of their friends dead. Society was breaking down.”
I cast a steadying glance toward the jumble fair, so homely, so mundane. “How did they find a way to keep going? I mean, how many of them really thought they were going to heaven? For the rest—for most of them—the afterlife would’ve been the same nightmare they’d lived through. Only then it would last forever. I mean, at least when you strip away religion, there’s a way out. If things get too bad, well. You know. But something like this—” I point at the painting, with its deathless faces, its tormented misshapen bodies. “There’s no end to it. No escape.”
Her brows furrow and I wonder if I’m surprising her a little with these dark thoughts but it’s hard not to think about what death means now. Some of the figures look so much like Kira it makes me uneasy.
She takes my shoulders and turns me away from it, guiding me toward the north wall. “Here—look. This is what I wanted you to see.”
“What?”
Aunt Irene draws my fingers to a set of deep grooves cut into the ancient stonework of the wall. “Think you can translate it?”
“The people who remain…miseranda ferox…wild and miserable?” I falter. Latin abbreviations can be so tricky even with Aunt Irene’s help. “They are…um…testis.”
“Wretched witnesses to the end. A strong wind is thundering over the whole earth. Written on Saint Maurus’s day, 1361,” she murmurs. “Someone carved those words ten years after the first outbreak of plague.”
I had just read about this in one of the books she gave me recording the spread of the Black Death in the eastern counties. The villagers called it “the pestilence of boys” because all the young men died. That seemed unfair to me—women and girls were dying too. When I say this to Aunt Irene her laugh has an edge to it: “They never care about the girls and women, do they?”
A huge storm blew in from the north, flattening trees and houses, the mills and all the church towers. I feel a sudden chill despite the musty warmth of the church.
But Aunt Irene’s face is alive with interest. “You see it, don’t you?”
I think I do—the sickness and the storms. “It’s like what’s happening now, isn’t it?”
She nods and digs through her tote. Out comes her own dog-eared notebook, a twin to mine. “The same patterns occurred in the Middle Ages. Changes in the seasons, terrible storms. There had been a string of volcanic eruptions that began in 1258. Here.” She hands me her notebook. “See for yourself.”
Afterward, the north wind prevailed for several months…scarcely a small rare flower or shooting germ appeared, whence the hope of harvest was uncertain….Innumerable multitudes of poor people died, and their bodies were found lying all about swollen from want….In London alone 15,000 of the poor perished; in England and elsewhere thousands died.
Shivering, I hand it back to Aunt Irene, thinking about the numbers. The papers suggest more than fifteen thousand have now died from JI2, worldwide.
“There were over ten thousand skeletons found at Spitalfields Market alone.” She smooths the pages. “That was where they buried the plague victims. But it wasn’t just that. In 536, there were three massive volcanic eruptions that ushered in an earlier period of cooling. And it coincided with one of the worst epidemics the Roman Empire had seen. The plague of Justinian.”
“But what’s the link with volcanoes and storms?”
“The earth has always experienced natural fluctuations in its temperature. The Middle Ages coincided with a period of intense ecological change. The Little Ice Age. A terrible stretch fell between 1290 to the late 1400s when plagues and famines ravaged Europe and glaciers descended from the Alps. Changes in the climate, droughts in the summer, increased flooding of coastal regions.”
“That sounds familiar.”
She takes out a fresh sheet of paper and carefully rubs a record of the Latin in charcoal, glancing at me before she speaks.
“The earth is a vast self-regulating system. But sometimes it doesn’t work properly. Volcanic eruptions led to more dust in the air and less sunlight breaking through—but the problem is that what we’re experiencing now is far more extreme. Some of the causes are the same, but add in human activity, greenhouse gases, and what we’re seeing is a feedback loop. There has been more seismic activity, more eruptions as the melting of continental glaciers causes massive shifts in already geologically active regions. Storms and flooding here, droughts in Europe and across most of the Middle East. The scale of all this change is unprecedented. They’re calling it the Anthropocene epoch. A period of dramatic human impact on the environment.”
I watch the way the words seem to appear on the page out of nowhere as her hand moves over the paper. I’ve heard all this before in my environmental studies class but it never really sunk in before, not the way it does now. “You think that somehow relates to the spread of disease?”
“Maybe. There are some patterns. During the Black Death, coastal cities were hit hardest.”
“Just like here.”
She nods. “The theory was that the Black Death was spread by ships infested with rats docking in new harbours. But I don’t think that explains everything. The areas with the highest mortality rates of JI2 have been China and the Philippines. Bangladesh. It hit earliest in places where there was massive flooding.”
“So you think it might be in the water?”
“Not exactly. What if JI2 isn’t a disease in the traditional sense?” She stops and turns to me.
“But what else could it be?” I ask.
“Think about it like this. What we know at present is that the condition we call JI2 can be identified by the presence of a specific hormone in the bloodstream. The juvenile hormone. That hormone seems to trigger a reaction that results in the host’s death, followed by the beginning of some sort of new biological processes.”
I swallow thickly. “You’re talking about the jitters, aren’t you?”
She nods. “Something happens to the bodies after death, something we don’t entirely understand. But what interests me is the spread of the condition in the first place. It seemed to be responding to environmental triggers, triggers we saw then that we’re seeing again now. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Or perhaps it had to do with the melting glaciers. Something in the water, like you said. Or the storm conditions.”
“Does the Centre know about this?”
“I suppose they do,” she says. “I send them regular updates on my work but I have no idea who reads them or what gets passed along. I know it takes at least a week for my contact to process most of what I report into bulletins—but even then links to the Black Death may still strike most of their medical researchers as…tangential to the main problem.”
I wonder if she’s stumbled on something Dr. Varghese doesn’t know about yet.
“But you said traces of the hormone were found in the bodies of people who died from the Black Death. It had changed their DNA. But why? What kind of change is it?”
“I don’t know, Sophie. I don’t know why the body reacts the way it does—or what it means. I wish I did—and I’m trying. We’re all trying.” Disappointment squeezes the air from my lungs.
“But what if something of the host survives the changes?”
“There’s no evidence of that.”
“That you know of.” An echo, me at the hospital, saying the same thing to Dr. Varghese.
Her voice is low. “Maybe, but my subjects have been deceased for too long. There’s nothing I can learn about that. Besides, the problem isn’t what happens after but why the condition is spreading so fast in the first place. That’s how we’ll figure out how to do something about it. The situation is serious, you know that, but I can’t help thinking it’s going to get worse. Much worse.”
The noises in the church seem too loud and they echo weirdly off the stonework. I don’t want to look at what Aunt Irene is scratching onto the page. The last trace of all that misery and death. “Is this it then? This could be the end?”
“Sometimes I think so.” Desperation in her voice. “But then I try to remember this isn’t the first time people have been sick. The Spanish flu killed millions. There was the AIDS crisis. Ebola. Zika. Your generation isn’t the first to suffer, to feel alone and frightened. But I’m doing this for you, Sophie. You’re the reason this matters so much to me.” She touches my shoulder gently with her charcoal-blackened fingers. “That’s why I wanted you to come here and see this place. These people are the children of survivors.”
Trinkets and jams, scarves and cookies and lace. Harmless, petty objects of everyday life.
The people who remain are driven wild and miserable. They are wretched witnesses to the end.
“It’s why we need to take precautions,” she says. “Cremating the bodies. The curfew. I know you don’t like it, Feef, but it’s for your own good. We need to protect you.” A pause. “I don’t trust despair. It’s selfish. It frees you of your responsibilities.”
“But if it’s as bad as you say…” I don’t understand her sometimes. How can she look around at what’s happening and keep going as if nothing has changed?
“Hope is the last—and best—form of resistance. Things change and we endure, we learn from what came before us. We can grow stronger because of it. That’s how we survive.” With a few more sweeps of the charcoal, she contemplates her work. “That’s a good thing to learn, niece of mine. Remember it, okay?”