Songs for the End of the World

by Saleema Nawaz

  “Really.” Keisha raised an eyebrow. “Not many people would knowingly put themselves at risk after that.”

  “Well, that’s the job, isn’t it?” His shrug was a little self-conscious. “You know what it is to serve, too.”

  The door behind them opened with a clang as two nurses came out, cigarettes in gloved hands.

  “I should go,” said Keisha. She was looking at him oddly, as though he were displaying some symptom she couldn’t quite diagnose. “Take care of yourself, Elliot.”

  * * *

  After two days off, Elliot and Russ moved to the evening curfew patrol, as Russ had hoped. Away from the surging mortal fears of the hospital, the shift went by quickly. Until it was gone, Elliot hadn’t realized the psychic burden of bearing witness to so much panic and grief. For the most part, people stayed off the streets. Elliot and Russ issued warnings and tried without enthusiasm to disperse the homeless, who had nowhere else to go but wanted to avoid what they saw as certain infection in the shelters.

  When he got home, Elliot found a strange comfort in turning off his lights and opening the blinds. There was enough of a glow from the city for him to see his way around the apartment, though the nights were nowhere near as bright as they used to be. No more rivers of red tail lights slowing at the intersections, or white headlights blazing through in the other direction. Just streetlamps and neon signs and billboards illuminated by spotlights, because not even a plague could slow down corporate interests. As he poured himself a glass of water in the semi-dark, his phone rang.

  “Keisha,” he said. They’d exchanged numbers, but he’d never expected to hear from her.

  “I got so used to seeing you every so often,” she said, “it started to feel like something was wrong when you weren’t there.”

  “It’s nice to hear your voice.” Elliot took his glass of water and sat down in the chair he’d pushed over to the window. “What’s up?”

  “I’m helping to supervise a clinical trial.”

  “A new drug already? That’s fast.”

  “Not fast enough. The antivirals we have now cost a fortune and they don’t work on everybody.” There was a tinny echo to her voice, as though she was on speakerphone. “This could be the best hope some of these patients have.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Elliot. She sounded prickly, which made sense after what she’d been through in the press. “I hope it goes well.”

  “Remind me how many weeks you were working with potential ARAMIS exposure?”

  “One week at the hospital. Seven weeks on quarantine relief.”

  “And you said you were in quarantine yourself before that?”

  “Yes, for three weeks.” It was becoming apparent this was not a social call.

  “What for?” she asked. He could hear a rustling sound, like papers being shuffled on a desk. “Can you describe your exposure?”

  Elliot watched an ambulance speeding by on the street below. “Do you remember how it started? And where?”

  “That restaurant on the Lower East Side,” said Keisha.

  “Go on,” he said.

  She took a breath, as though beginning a well-practised recitation. “Mr. Zhihuan Tsiang, the index patient, a visiting martial arts expert from China, infected everyone at his table, all members of a local gym. Mr. Tsiang died in China two days later, and the eight others developed symptoms within the week. All were dead within three weeks of the dinner, and six spread ARAMIS to their families.” The timeline had been rehashed in news story after news story. “It came out later that Mr. Tsiang also infected a taxi driver, a hotel clerk, and the hostess of the restaurant, who continued to infect other staff members.” He could hear a tapping sound: her forefinger on the desk, a tattoo of the dead. “Mr. Tsiang was what we call a super-spreader.”

  Another ambulance drove by with its siren on.

  “Keisha, I was there,” said Elliot, when the sound stopped. “At the dinner with Mr. Tsiang.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “No,” said Keisha with some firmness. “We traced everyone at the dinner. And everyone working at the restaurant. And everyone who paid for a meal by credit or debit card. I would have remembered seeing your name. The only one we couldn’t find was the ARAMIS Girl.”

  “It was just for a minute, but I was there. I told all of this to the Department of Health when I called in.”

  “Well, okay then,” said Keisha. “A minute.”

  “I sat down. I shook people’s hands. I drank directly from Jejo Galang’s glass. He was sitting next to Mr. Tsiang.”

  Keisha’s voice was quiet. “Jejomar Galang died.”

  “I know,” said Elliot. “He was a friend of mine.”

  “So you went into quarantine,” she said. “And you’ve been fine this whole time.”

  “Yeah, fine.” It was a version of the truth. He’d doubted every decision he’d ever made, questioned whether his survival was a kind of punishment, and spent more time than he could ever have imagined considering matters of chance and fate. But still: he was alive. “I’m totally fine.”

  The sound of a door opening and a distant voice cut in on Keisha’s end: “Dr. Delille? The patient’s family has some concerns about the release form.”

  There was more rustling and some muffled conversation. “Sorry,” said Keisha, returning. “I need to finish some paperwork to get the drug trial started. Can you come in tomorrow and let me take a blood sample?”

  “Sure,” said Elliot.

  “Tomorrow, okay? If what you say is true, I don’t want to lose track of you.”

  When Elliot hung up, he flipped on the television and saw Keelan Gibbs giving an interview. He looked older than Elliot remembered him, but not by much. Pale forehead, ruddy cheeks, limpid blue eyes. Had surely refused makeup. The professor actually stroked his long, white beard before commenting, “The only way a pandemic can be stopped is through international cooperation.” Elliot clicked the TV off again. Then he turned on his computer and sent a message to Sarah and Noah. Their regular phone calls had been replaced with emails since they’d gone to sea. Sarah had a fair amount of time to write, and since they were being careful about putting ashore, she was limited in her company.

  Hi guys. Thanks for the update. I printed out that last photo of Noah and put it inside my hat. It’s about time I had a new one in there…in the Polaroid you gave me he’s just a chubby little baby!

  He attached a photo of himself holding his police hat, flipped over to reveal Noah and the boat tucked into its inner plastic sleeve.

  His phone rang again.

  “You’re sure you were there?” It was Keisha.

  “I was there.”

  “And you don’t have kids, right?”

  “No,” said Elliot. He stared out the window again, where the city’s diminished lights kept on glowing. “Well, actually. I might.”

  “You might have kids? Plural? You don’t know?”

  “It’s uncertain,” he said. “Everything about being a man is uncertain these days.”

  “If you say so.” Keisha sounded skeptical in the extreme.

  * * *

  The next day, Elliot stopped by the hospital before his evening curfew patrol. Keisha was waiting for him in the lobby with a spare set of personal protective equipment, the same full kit worn by at-risk hospital staff: gown, respirator mask, goggles, gloves. “Put all the gear on,” she said. “We follow protocol here, no matter who you are.”

  Elliot followed Keisha upstairs and tried to ignore the sounds in the corridors, ranging from animated murmurs to ragged coughing to the outright distress of wails and sobbing. Ahead of them were the doors to the ARAMIS ward that his colleagues had been guarding just a few weeks earlier, after nurses complained about difficulties enforcing the new isolation proc
edures. The assignment had been called off after half of the on-duty officers developed symptoms and had to be hospitalized themselves.

  As they passed through the ARAMIS waiting area, it felt forcibly quiet in comparison, as though a testy Fate had whispered to the huddled family members that any wrong word might provoke a final blow. Every mouth and nose was covered with a mask, and every set of eyes was trained on him and Keisha as they passed by. A white-haired husband and wife, two thirty-something women in colourful hijabs, and a skinny, teenaged boy who was there by himself, whose eyes met Elliot’s in such naked terror as the door to the ARAMIS ward clanged open that he was almost relieved to enter the epicentre of contagion.

  At first glance, the ARAMIS ICU was not so different from the other hospital corridors, though Elliot noticed that all the doors were closed, with visitor logbooks posted outside.

  “Today’s the first day of the trial,” said Keisha. She looked keyed up, her eyes blinking rapidly, and there was a sharp edge to her voice. “This could be what helps us turn the tide.”

  She scanned a set of charts handed to her by a nurse, then passed them back with further instructions. The patients selected for the trial were all adults between thirty-five and forty-four. They were gravely ill, but still conscious and not on ventilators.

  “We’ve assessed them as being the candidates for whom this new therapy could make the biggest difference,” said Keisha. “They’re also at the bottom of the scale if there’s a new wave of patients.”

  “The scale?”

  Keisha explained the controversial point system for gaining access to antivirals and specialized equipment that had come into effect at the beginning of October.

  “Additional points for being married and for having children, exponentially increasing with each child. Mandatory subtraction of points for adults over sixty-five, with more points subtracted with each five-year span.”

  “Wow,” said Elliot. “What about kids?”

  “Oh, kids take priority,” said Keisha. “Hospitals tend to have more pediatric-enabled ventilators per population anyway.”

  They peered through a viewing window. Nurses in hazmat suits were administering the drug via IVS to six subjects in hospital beds under the supervision of a doctor. There were curtains set up between the patients, but most were not drawn. The large pane of glass for observers already undercut any sense of privacy.

  Elliot felt the import of the moment—to be present at a discovery that might soon be reported around the world. “Do you sort of feel like it’s fate?” he asked. These days he couldn’t avoid a preoccupation with the concept. “Working on this drug? You know, like everything in your life has led you to this?”

  “I believe in science, not fate. Obviously.”

  “Right, sure.” He noticed that the teenaged boy and the white-haired couple had been permitted inside and were standing at the other end of the observation window. The boy pressed a gloved hand up against the glass and, within the room, Elliot saw the gesture returned in the upturned chin and slow blink of a dark-haired woman, who seemed to be summoning reserves of strength to reassure the teen. “Is it normal to move into human trials so quickly?”

  “It’s worth the risk,” said Keisha. “Especially for the patients without health insurance. Not to mention the exponential difference the medication could make around the globe.”

  She brought him around the corner, past the nurses’ station, and into a small office, where he rolled up his sleeve and she began to draw several vials of his blood, carefully affixing a label to each one as she placed them in the stand.

  “I know it seems like a lot,” she said. “But this way I can send it to other labs, too.”

  “Cool,” said Elliot. He glanced away from the needle in his arm to a poster on the wall of a cute puppy. In large letters, it bore the slogan THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A HYPOALLERGENIC DOG. “Huh,” he said.

  They heard a Code Blue on the intercom, and running feet. Elliot felt Keisha’s grip on his arm tighten slightly, but she carried on. The sight of his own blood being drawn was at first curious, then dizzying. He switched his focus to Keisha, whose face had become grim and intense. She was capping the last vial when the door burst open.

  “They’re hemorrhaging,” gasped a nurse. “All of them. Everywhere. Eyes, nose, mouth. The doctors can’t stop it.”

  Keisha was already on her feet. “Get the families out of here. Get them out.”

  “They’re all going to die,” said the nurse. “I killed them.”

  “Go!” yelled Keisha, and the nurse departed, sobbing.

  Keisha turned to Elliot. “You need to guard the ward,” she said. Her voice was sharp. “The families can’t see this.”

  He stood up and followed her, holding his fingers to his forearm and feeling light-headed. She was already at the nurses’ station when he caught up to her, talking to a woman behind the desk who sounded like she was about to cry.

  “Are there any orderlies without families?” Keisha was saying. “All that blood, it’s going to be very high-risk.” She exhaled and closed her eyes for a moment.

  “I don’t understand,” Elliot said.

  Keisha shook her head, her eyes still closed. “Their blood must have decoagulated. I don’t understand either. It wasn’t indicated—”

  “That’s terrible,” he said. Elliot tried and failed not to picture what the nurse had described, imagining blood pouring from his own eyes. He wished he could take his mask off and get more air.

  Keisha opened her eyes and looked at him. “Please go guard the door,” she said. “If those families see this, it will make everything so much worse.”

  He turned the corner into a wall of sound, a cacophony of shouting and screaming, clattering equipment and guttural wails. The urgency of the situation, or maybe its futility, seemed to thicken the very air itself. Elliot couldn’t tell how fast he was moving as he retraced his steps down the hallway, where the white-haired couple were clutching each other in front of the observation window, their eyes squeezed shut and streaming with tears. Just beyond them, a weeping nurse was trying to hold back the teen boy, who was hammering on the glass.

  Elliot averted his eyes from the observation window, a swimming horror of red, and he touched the white-haired man on his shoulder. Their eyes met and Elliot nodded to the double doors at the end of the hall.

  “Please,” said Elliot. The man’s chin quivered, then he began steering the woman, whose shoulders were heaving, towards the exit.

  When the nurse saw Elliot approach, she stumbled back from the boy, who was screaming for his mother. The teen pushed and rattled the window, his gloved hands scrabbling, feet kicking the wall. Crying and swearing, begging and demanding, until he collapsed into a heap.

  Elliot felt as though his uniform were just a costume holding him upright. He wasn’t really a police officer, or a man, but a human being as frail as any other. He felt the loss of the blood Keisha had taken—there was so little flesh and blood holding him together, really. And almost none holding people apart. Less than ten metres away, the blood of six people who were dead or dying was pooling on the floor. He thought he knew what it meant to be grateful, but all of a sudden he wasn’t sure.

  Elliot put his hand on the back of the teen’s shirt and pulled him up to his feet, light and unresisting as a rag doll, even as he kept up the primal sound that churned Elliot’s stomach. They followed in the wake of the older couple, and as a group they moved into the silence of the waiting room, where the ward doors clanged shut behind them and the faces of the remaining families turned to them in mute horror.

  finally

  Bailey, Sarah

  To: Elliot Howe

  Sent: Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 8:09 PM

  Elliot,

  We’ve made it as far as Ponce Inlet, Florida. Nine
teen days aboard Buona Fortuna. We have a dinghy for going ashore but somehow we still haven’t used it. We’re staying safe and keeping to ourselves to avoid infection.

  It’s only been a couple of weeks, but I feel like I’ve lived an age on this boat, getting my sea legs back. Owen is a good first mate and learning fast. Noah is in heaven, with two doting adults never out of earshot. You would think he was born on the water, the way he’s taken to it. Right now, we’re still heading to Key West, where we’ll wait for a good weather window to cross the Gulf Stream over to the Bahamas.

  Being stuck on this boat reminds me of rainy days at the cabin. Reading all day, doing crossword puzzles, those ill-fated attempts at crafting that left me with glue all over my fingertips! It seems strange to think that Noah and I won’t be at the cabin for Christmas this year.

  Do you remember how embarrassed I was by Mom and Dad’s whole anti-Christmas thing? I hated having to explain it to anyone. Isn’t that silly? I wish I could go back in time and get rid of every thought and impulse I had that just came out of something as stupid as wanting to fit in.

  Tell me you’re being careful, too.

  Lots of love from me and Noah,

  Sarah

  re: finally

  Howe, Elliot

  To: Sarah Bailey

  Sent: Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 9:46 PM

  Sarah,

  Don’t be so hard on yourself. There are worse things than wanting to fit in. There’s probably nothing more human.

  xo

  E.

  SARAH

  DECEMBER 2016

  The Impala nosed up the access road, and Sarah gripped the bottom of her seat as the old car jounced up and down in the ruts. The snow compressed in a muted crunch below the tires and her brother craned his neck as they passed each sign and its accompanying—now almost invisible—turnoff.