OUT THE WINDOW, THE DOCKWORKER COULD hear children playing and laughing.
He lay back on the bed and threw his arm over his eyes to block the light that filtered in through the dirty window. He fumbled for his cigarettes on the nightstand. To say he felt terrible was an understatement. He found the remote and turned on the television, then turned it off again, too ill to watch it. On the end table next to the bed, he saw an empty bottle of tequila. He couldn’t remember finishing it. It probably explained a lot. Either that, or God was punishing him, but he couldn’t believe God would punish him for stealing one lousy bottle of olive oil—not after all the other times when God had looked the other way.
He didn’t feel much better when the phone woke him up again around four. This time he screened the call. A man’s voice said: “This is O’Brien down at the hall. Look, we got two ships coming in on Monday and we’re going to need a full crew so I was hoping you could make it . . .”
The dockworker had half a mind to pick up the phone and tell O’Brien to go screw himself, asking for favors after the way he’d ridden him all week. If he felt better by Monday, maybe he’d go in, but right now it wasn’t looking so likely.
He managed to walk to the bathroom, though he felt dizzy and leaned heavily against the sink. This was more than a hangover. He looked at himself in the mirror. The handsome devil he usually saw looked awful. His eyes were red, and his skin was the color of oatmeal. At six foot four and a muscular 250 pounds, only thirty-three years of age, he was a strong man who’d done a bit of goon work for the union from time to time, but right now he felt too weak to blow the fuzz off a dandelion. He popped two Alka-Seltzers in a glass of water, drank it, and immediately felt worse, barely turning in time to kneel before the toilet, where he vomited for the next ten minutes, including a violent series of dry heaves toward the end that left him feeling even weaker.
He went back to bed. His lower back ached, which he assumed was from all the lifting he’d done during the week, but soon the muscles in his arms and legs began to ache, and his head hurt. He felt utterly fatigued. When he took his temperature, he found he had a fever of 101 degrees.
“Well that’s fucking great,” he said to no one.
He didn’t have any health insurance, and he wasn’t about to blow the nine hundred dollars he’d earned that week on a doctor, so he covered himself with a blanket, took three Tylenol and went to bed. He had chills during the night, and he vomited several more times.
By noon of the following day, Sunday, he’d changed his mind about seeing a doctor. He was reluctant to call the hospital emergency room at Massachusetts General because he still owed them five hundred dollars for a prior visit, but he had to talk to somebody, so he placed a block on his phone to prevent the advice nurse from using caller ID and gave a fake name when she finally came on the line. He told her he felt like crap and wondered if she could prescribe him something.
“We’d really have to see you in person before we could do that,” she said.
“I don’t have any insurance,” he told her.
“Can you answer a few questions?”
“I guess,” he muttered.
“Do you have a fever?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“One hundred two point four.”
“How long have you had a fever?”
“It was a hundred and one yesterday.”
“Did it go down last night?”
“I don’t know,” he struggled to say. “I don’t think so.”
“Muscle aches?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.”
“Backache?”
“Yeah.”
“Headache?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Vomiting?”
“Yeah.”
“How many times?”
“I don’t know. Twenty?”
“Diarrhea?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I was thinking maybe I had food poisoning.”
“What’s the last thing you ate?”
“Spaghetti with white clam sauce. Do you think it’s food poisoning?”
“It’s possible, with clams, though usually if it’s food poisoning, you feel better after you vomit. Anything else? Any other symptoms. Sore throat?”
“No,” he said. “I think I’ve got a rash, though.”
“Where?” she inquired.
“On my chest,” he said.
“How large is the area?” she asked.
“Maybe the size of my hand.”
“Is the area raised and slightly puffy or just red?”
“I don’t know. Just red, I think.”
“That sounds erythematous,” she said as if she was thinking out loud.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It could be a negative reaction to medication. Have you taken any drugs?”
“Not lately,” he said. The dog downstairs was yapping again.
“Aspirin? Motrin? Tylenol . . . ?”
“Tylenol,” he said weakly.
He waited while she added it all up. His head was pounding as he shivered beneath his blankets.
“And you said your fever is one-oh-two point four?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I think you should probably be seen by a doctor,” she said at last. “Do you think you’d be able to drive?”
“I don’t have a car,” he said. He had a car, just no license after his third DWI.
“Is there somebody you could call who could give you a ride?” she asked.
He told her there wasn’t anybody he could call. He thought again of the five hundred dollars he owed. If he paid it, he might as well not have worked at all the previous week. He told himself that it was just a bug of some sort, and that no matter how bad he felt, he could tough it out.
By Sunday evening, he realized he was wrong about that, but by then he was too sick to move, utterly prostrate and barely able to sit up. He’d brought a hand-held mirror to bed, and when he looked in it, he saw that the rash had spread up his chest and neck to the left side of his face. The rash on his face was simply red, but the rash on his chest had indeed become puffy and tender to the touch.
When the dockworker finally called a cab to give him a ride to the hospital, he got a busy signal. He tried again a while later, but with his fever raging at nearly 104 degrees, in a state of only partial lucidity, he dropped the phone on the floor and was too sick to reach down and pick it up. He never made it to the hospital.
By midnight on Monday, his rash had become vesicular, the red nodes distending into erumpent bladderlike sacs filled with pus and lymphatic fluids, each whitehead excruciating to the touch, the largest about the size of a dime, though they were fairly uniform in size and evenly distributed. His fever stabilized in the night at 102.5 degrees as his thymus, spleen, liver, lymph nodes, and bone marrow began to run out of the raw materials needed to produce antibodies. He spent the next day, Tuesday, lying in bed, groaning and wishing that someone would knock on the door and find him, the mailman, an errant pizza delivery man, anybody. He prayed to God for help, holding in his hands the Bible he’d found in the back corner of his bedstand drawer.
“I know maybe I never gave you enough credit,” he said in his prayers, “and I never done much for the church or whatever, but if you could do me this one favor and make me better, I swear I’ll change stuff . . .”
Tuesday night (though he could no longer tell how fast or slow time was passing) his condition worsened. His joints throbbed with pain, while lightning bolts of gastrointestinal anguish doubled him over, leaving him in a fetal position most of the time. The whiteheads on his skin began to split and burst. Within hours, full-blown lesions covered his entire body, seeping and staining the sheets upon which he was dying as his air passage narrowed, making him feel like he was suffocating.
In the final throes, he trembled and gnashed his teeth and shook violently, his skin a mat of bubbling rubber as he bled out, hemorrhaging both internally and externally, blood coming from his rectum, his fingernails, his nose, ears, eyes, mouth, and gums. Where he clawed at his skin, the skin tore as easily as tissue paper. The hair on his head fell out in clumps when he grabbed at it. The lining of his brain was inflamed with encephalitis, causing him to hallucinate. In his last uncontrolled thrashing, he knocked over the lamp and lacked the strength to right it. He lost consciousness entirely shortly before midnight. The smoke alarm went off half an hour later when the heat from the light bulb in the overturned lamp set fire to the pages of the Bible he’d hoped would be his salvation.
Firefighters blamed the intensity of the flames on the fact that the old couple they’d rescued from the first floor were packrats who hadn’t thrown out a newspaper or magazine in the last twenty years, providing fuel for the inferno. When firefighters finally got to the dockworker—his name was Anthony Fusaro—his body was burned beyond recognition and mostly ash.