by Roy Freirich
“Mom—”
“I’m sorry, baby,” she whispers, tenderly. “You go on.” This last like a hiss, a barely expelled breath. “Babysitting, right?”
6
Just outside the clinic doors, Silver-haired Man turns out to be a Long Island pediatrician. Sam glances again at his card, embossed in prissy serif:
Doctor Stan Fleisher, Pediatrics
Mercy Children’s Hospital
Melville, New York. 10068
The day presses in, the hundred watchful faces barely yards away; he hands the card back.
The man gives a tepid, joyless smile, continuing a wandering prelude: “. . . vacationed years ago but now here on sabbatical, though it’s not much of one, I admit . . .”
Sam shifts his weight, edgy. “Sorry. I’m a little time-challenged. What’s it about?”
Fleisher looks sixty-and-change years old, slim and ruddy-faced, calm and self-assured. Maybe to a fault, given the surgical mask, and what’s next: “From what I’m told, you have a boy who may have answers, since cases began when he was brought in. But . . . he refuses to speak?”
So trusty aide Andrew turns out to be worse than a disgruntled employee and would-be thief, but a careless violator of physician/patient privilege, as well.
Sam looks more closely at the man, trying not to squint with the suspicion that every second with him seems to justify.
Fleisher continues blithely, blandly, “My background’s in epidemiology, and from what I see, you have a communicable illness spreading on your watch, and this boy’s recent and overall history is key to what sort of pathogen we’re dealing with.”
“Pathogen,” Sam repeats flatly. “It’s a theory. That’s why you’re wearing the mask?”
“I’ve been sleeping fine, Doctor. I’d like to keep it that way. Can’t say the same for you, can we? How many nights has it been?”
They’re rounding the wrong corner; Sam is attending here, no jurisdictional ambiguity, he’ll ask the questions, thanks very much, and damned if he’ll call this glad-handing blowhard “doctor.” He fixes Fleisher with a flat gaze. “The Boy’s been sleeping, no problems. How do you account for that?”
Fleisher seems to be suppressing laughter. “Come on, Harvard, could be a thousand reasons, a thousand times too many variables. Typhoid Mary, for instance, had no symptoms. It’s infectious disease boilerplate, pre-med.”
Weariness pulls at Sam. Too many variables would be too many to contemplate at present, so he won’t. “And . . .?”
“We need to isolate the boy, make sure he’s not spreading it further, and strongly encourage him to share everything he knows.”
The man smells of Phisohex or some other dermatological soap, old cologne, cigarettes, some vague underlying sourness.
The skin below his eyes looks powdery, pink. Makeup? Sleeplessness exacerbates pre-existing issues, and the language of “isolating” the Boy and “encouraging him to share” suggests there may be some at hand.
Sam hesitates, pretending to think it over. As if learning a new word, he repeats it: “Encourage . . .”
Fleisher presses on. “Hemorrhagic fevers, Marburg, Ebola—anyone close to you ever die of one of these?”
Now it fits: someone close to this man has, of course. Grief, guilt and sleeplessness have conspired to conjure a waking dream of redemption, a last chance to relive some personal drama with a better ending. “Thankfully, no. But—”
“Kaluamba, Congo. One boy, back from clearing traps in the jungle. Finally told his story. The slow, clumsy monkey they caught, butchered and ate. If he had only told us sooner. If only.”
Slow, clumsy monkey? Well, why not? Or why not a meme gone viral as a hashtag, or Gabriel’s dreamtime coming through a hole in the world? What is there to say any of it’s wrong? “Say you’re right. What can you hope to achieve when so many already have whatever it is? Probably some have already gone back to the mainland with it too. You’re too late there.”
“Four people with Ebola virus got on planes out of Kinshasa. If it had been twenty, we probably wouldn’t be here to discuss it. And if we don’t get to the bottom of what’s happening here, and take steps to contain, it may well be hundreds more who return to the mainland.”
Doubt nags at Sam; every moment a crossroads, only hindsight to guide us. But no one is bleeding from the eyes here, so no, nobody is “encouraging” the Boy to speak before he’s ready, not on his watch.
“O . . . kay. Well, thanks, but I have patients waiting, as you can see. I’ll take it under advisement.” Sam tries not to back away too quickly.
Fleisher nods, his eyes shining. “You really think he doesn’t know anything?”
“Well, like I said, under advisement. Meanwhile, I do have other patients.”
“Of course. I’ll check back. But I do think a headcount and quarantine are worth considering, at least until we know more. After all, if it turns out you’re wrong to do it, what harm really? Compared to not doing it when you should have? Think it over,” Fleisher pauses for effect, and gives the appellation a plummy, ironic twang: “Doctor.”
Their expressions shift through poor imitations of deadpan defiance, restrained hostility, chilly dismissal.
Sam turns from him and heads back inside with an even, purposeful pace, refusing to look back.
#
As the island’s highest point, Regis Dune is named on any U.S. Geologic topographical map of Carratuck and environs. In hurricanes past, Norman and Ida, and of course Sandy, when much of the island became not so much flooded as simply overrun by the ocean, Regis Point remained above sea level.
Today it seems to hover, surrounded by the misty whiteness of fog dissipating in the island’s warmer air. A GTE utility truck has pulled up, and cell-infrastructure maintenance engineer Carl Blonner climbs out. His eyes are reddened, dark-circled as he talks into his cell phone, staring up at the tower. It’s sixteen years and a few months old, with three eighty-foot high, die-cast, anodized aluminum support struts, and twelve mounted, variable-azimuth full bandwidth receptor dishes sprouting like steel blossoms up top.
Blonner’s voice sounds level, utterly calm and certain as he opines, “It’s just some kind of signal coming over the bandwidth, disrupting everybody’s brain wavelengths, I’m betting.”
Over the line, GTE Senior Field Engineer Tony Blaistro adopts a reassuring tone, as if talking to a man with a gun on a hostage: “Hey, sure, Carl, could definitely be. Sounds smart. How you feeling, anyway?”
“Me? Had a mother of a headache, but that’s gone. So all good, thanks, but I got a lot on my plate here.”
“Why not come in and we can talk about it? Maybe come up with a solution together, you know, before you go and—”
“—gonna take out the landline switchbox, too,” Carl decides. “One right here, highest point on the island. Hank, I’m sorry to say, but I gotta seal this sucker up. People need to be protected.”
“Carl—”
“It’s okay, you don’t need to say anything. You’d do the same thing, Hank, for me and mine.”
Carl hangs up. He smashes his cell phone carefully against a cyclone fence post, and then underfoot.
He pulls an axe out of the back of his utility Jeep and carries it to the cyclone fence surrounding the tower. He could unlock the gate padlock there, but why bother? He swings the axe in a single accurate blow and lowers it to examine the cleft hasp with a nod of satisfaction.
At the base of the tower, he pauses and swings again, splitting the hasp of the next padlock. He yanks it off the control station housing door and tosses it aside. Inside the housing, there’s a nest of landline wires and circuits and switches he’ll destroy before he goes for the cell signal junction box a few yards away and the tower strut support cables after that.
The first shower of sparks is like a beautiful reward for best intentions a
nd earnest efforts on behalf of all, and Carl imagines the heartfelt thanks of a grateful company and of citizens everywhere whose brains have been saved, to think and dream of a future filled with equal sleep for all Americans, from every walk of life.
7
Along the beach, sun barely cuts the salt mist and the ocean looks oily and slow, gleaming heavily. Cort walks south toward Sea View to try to find Madison; the servers are back online, but still Madison has failed to return anything, texts, tweets, even an email, so not like her, since she lives with her eyes fixed on her cell screen.
Cort pauses to check #sleepless43 yet again, shaking her head at just how massively multiplayer this truly idiotic contest has become. She stabs the timeline and flicks the screen to scroll back, but still can’t find the last of the new players and their absurdly gleeful updates and dopey emojis.
She looks up, turning again and again to see only still dunes and the same sliding sea at the far edges of her sight, but the motion she thought she saw feels like the beginning of more—of gathering ghostly forms from the private world behind her eyes, floating there now even when her eyes are open, too open, wide and aching.
Mom should be here, she thinks. Out of that place smelling dusty and sour, away from the TV and the cigarettes with all the nicotine and tar killing her every minute of every fucking day, another less to share with anyone else. It’s selfishness on the surface, but really it’s fear inside that drives her apart, deeper even than anger—fear like everyone’s, of finding no one, and so to cover it up you deny you need anyone or anything, ever. Just vodka, cigarettes, TV.
Ahead, a group is in a circle, motionless, staring down. A game, a new-agey therapy thing, some kind of ceremony?
Cort approaches, tingly with unease, already half-wanting to run, to hide before more blame finds her. No one glances up. A few thumb cell phones, another starts to cry softly. Cort looks down and her lungs tug in a breath all at once as if it might be her last, to see someone who breathed theirs days ago.
The Boy’s mom lies half on her side in the wet sand, motionless, naked, the palest gray and blue of nothing that could be alive. A strand of kelp is plastered across her neck in a shape like an “S,” a tiny crab crawls in the shell of her ear, another crosses her hairline, picking its way toward milky eyes fixed on nothing.
The world slides, the sky plunges; the beach seems to rear and plummet with every jarring step as she runs by a jetty and a lifeguard stand and the chief roaring by in his Jeep, until she’s lost track of how many houses and lanes and bunches of tourists standing around dumbly looking at nothing she’s passed, until she’s slowing to finally fumble for her cell again in her pocket, to press his name, finally. Her breath is gone, but the words still spill from her lips in gasps when he answers, “Cort?”
“Tay, meet me, it’s horrible! I just saw her, she was staying on our lane, the lady I was supposed to babysit for . . .”
“Wait, hello? Who? The—”
His voice doesn’t fade or sink below a wave of static; it simply vanishes, into nothing more than the nothing she hears now, all she has to cling to.
“Hello? Hello?” She grips the phone, shouting into it. And then pulls it closer to switch to messaging, but the screen locks there, dead.
With a low sob of fear, Cort stabs uselessly at the screen again and again, her link to everything suddenly cut, gasping at this cruel betrayal, stabbing over and over at it only to see now the white Arial letters in the blackness of the upper edge of her screen, spelling out the flat refusal of what she has never needed more: “No Service.”
8
Whatever keeps the world in place while we move has weakened, and the foggy beach sways in a haze of light as Chief climbs out of his Jeep and approaches the cluster of stunned vacationers. They step back and watch him, slack-jawed and wary.
One clears his throat nervously. “It was me who called, sir. I said we should. Call.”
Chief nods. “You found her like this? Anyone touch anything?”
They trade glances like guilty children. “Yeah. No one, none of us. She the kid’s mother? From the picture?”
Chief’s already crouching by the drowned woman, turning back the first surge of nausea at the stench, and the small strange ache at the loss of a stranger. He pulls a camphor stick from his pocket, dabs beneath his nostrils, and lets the details of the scene hit him how they will before he works his way down the basic first-responder forensic checklist.
“Is she—”
He doesn’t look up. “Folks, nothing else for you to do here. Please step away.”
Chief takes in her pallor, gently brushing aside sand to check for dependent lividity where one hip has run aground. He flicks a tiny crab away from her forehead and lets his gaze travel, from her small white breasts laying flattened against her chest to where one thigh leans demurely on the other, to where the toes of one blue foot point at the sky, the other turned wrong, half-buried.
He starts again, establishing ID first, comparing her general size and hair color to the woman he remembers too well from the nanny cam video, and her wrists for the old scars. Check, and check. He wishes he had a name, for whatever else it might reveal about her and her boy—motive, next of kin—but his two calls to the owner of record of their rented bungalow have so far gone unanswered.
He sighs as a new, deeper fatigue weighs on him; he’s got two on ice that the mainland coroner’s office is late to pick up, now plus one. In the substation’s makeshift cold storage, three’s definitely a crowd.
He stands slowly, joints swollen and aching, moving to the Jeep to open the back and drag the stiff, heavy utility tarp out and over to the woman. Panting slightly, he pulls the grommeted edge over her drowned face and her eyes open on nothing.
He straightens and points at two young guys gaping and blinking at him. “I need a second to phone this in, and then I’ll need you two to give a hand with her. Nice and easy, into the back of the Jeep?”
They nod dumbly.
Chief steps back, turns away again and speed dials his cell, looking off at the windless gray day, the line of smooth breakers, the bank of fog offshore, hovering.
“Sam, listen, they found her.” He hadn’t meant to blurt it, and lowers his voice: “Yes, the kid’s mother. Drowned. Yeah. Sam, what the fuck have we got here? Where is EPA, CDC? Is any—”
A stocky, hirsute little tourist snaps a cell pic of the corpse, stopping Chief mid-word.
“Sam, gotta go.” He clicks off and lunges at the man with something between a laugh and a sob of incredulous fury. “Motherfucker.”
The man cringes, sputtering, as Chief yanks the cell away and tosses it sidearm, spinning and flashing into the day’s lazy surf.
Another tourist laughs outright, but all fall silent and a few step back at Chief’s glare.
The worst in everyone is emerging, but how much, how far, how bad? How ugly can ugly get?
As if in answer, his earbud chimes softly. He does his own half-turn now, choking back a curse, and then he pulls just enough of his own cell out of his pocket to see the ID: Howard’s Odds ’n Ends.
What now? Torn, Chief glances back at the crooked square of tarp. Howard is a prissy, lonely old mama’s boy who lucked into the family business, but not one to call for idle chat. Chief clicks him through. “Chief here.”
Howard’s voice sounds a little breathless, pitched low: “Chief, listen, I got some guy here says he’s a doctor—”
The man’s voice simply disappears.
“Hello?”
Chief pulls his cell away from his ear to frown down at the screen. His service bars are gone, and he curses softly as he flicks the phone off and then back on again. “Searching,” it tells him, and he stares down at it, waiting.
9
Flashing, fading, vanished: Sam’s hope against hope—that he has heard the chief incorrectly—is just more wi
shful thinking, more childish urge to deny. We shut our eyes, but the unseen thing still looms.
His gaze darts sideways down the short hall to where the Boy sits with his feet dangling, urgently lost in the quest of his never-ending game. He wants to go to him, to gather him up and turn his face from the world and murmur reassurance until his little body sags again with sleep. But what reassurance is true today? That the falsehood of placebos is true enough for some, that sleep always comes to us in the end?
Cell in hand, he turns toward the waiting area where too many others wait. From an exam room to his left, the cry of another sleepless child rises to hover and fall and climb again.
He wants to loosen the grip of his own hand clutching at his hair, to ease the throb of fear in his temples and the clenched pit of his stomach. He wants to cut and run and find someplace to drink again the sweet air in deep draughts like a balm to spiral him downward and away.
He rubs a hand over his eyes, but now the cell in his hand is buzzing like an angry insect, and he yanks it up and swipes. “Hello?”
A voice crackles through, loud, trebly, welcome. “Sam? It’s Donald Hale. I—”
Breath caught in his throat, Sam tilts his head, straining to hear the next word that will finally offer respite, encouragement, solace, drugs, a team of specialists, or a personal psych evaluation.
Unaccountably, the silence on the line shifts into a different deadness, like the nothing from which too many voices have emerged, from which too many truly awful sounds have lately leapt into being, jack-in-the-box-style.
“Can you hear me?” Sam fairly shouts, “Hello?”
Nothing, less than, since nothing more emerges from it.
“Hello?”
#
