Sometime- the Plague World

by Meredith Mason Brown

  “Will do, Kate. You’ve been helpful, in a deadly but well-informed way.”

  So ended Dan’s phone call with the director of the Rockinam Nature Conservancy. In the ill-maintained fustiness of his study, Dan called Ernst Kahn, who was one of the CDC doctors Dan had talked with in connection with the CDC discussions with and about Dr. Konrad Starkherz’s rash effort to develop a strong immunizer that would guard against death from revival of the WWI version of H1N1. Within two hours Dr. Kahn had driven up to Dan’s house and picked up the plastic bags that housed the two dead birds. “Thanks, Dan,” Dr. Kahn said. “Those bags make me think of the body bag we used in picking up Dr. Konrad after he died – though that bag was a whole lot bigger than these ones for the birds. Since we picked up that body bag, we’ve run tests and microscopic studies of Dr. Konrad’s body, which tested positive for something that looked very much like the H1N1 that was so lethal in World War I. We’ll check more for that, as well as for West Nile and EEE, and get back to you.”

  After Dr. Kahn left, Dan stayed at his study, nursing a bottle of wine. He remembered there was something in the New Testament about the fatal fall of sparrows. He googled about to find the text relating to the fall of sparrows, and came up with something in Matthew 10:29 which had Jesus urging the disciples not to fear “those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” and saying that although sparrows were cheap (two could be bought for a mere farthing), “[y]et not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” Dan couldn’t figure out the reasoning behind what St. Matthew had Jesus saying. God the Father watched over the fall of sparrows – but the sparrows in the Gospel still fell to the ground, presumably as stone-dead as the two birds Dan had picked up. How did this mean that God was helping the dead birds? How was Jesus or God the Father helping the disciples? The soul might be saved, but the body of the birds would have been killed by the fall. The deal described by Jesus to his disciples didn’t sound so great to Dan. Dan cared about his soul, but he also was fond of his body. He wanted that body to keep working for a while, even though he knew it was beginning to fall apart.

  1 To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

  2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

  3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

  4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

  5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

  6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

  7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

  8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

  (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, King James Version)

  15

  To Every Thing There Is a Season

  Dan stayed at home, carefully observing the quarantine and isolation rules that were then in force in Rockinam. He drank, not always to knock-out levels, but in considerable and ever-increasing amounts. He sprayed himself with Off!, but did not remember why he did so, and whether he should quickly wash away the spray. Were there horseflies in the house? Dan saw only some dead ones, lying on their backs on the floor of the study. He read whatever was close at hand, from porn to the Bible. He began to hurt more than he had before, including piercing pains in the side of his head – like migraine pains, but much more intense and lasting. He sought to distract himself by writing in his notebook, in a random way.

  Four days after Dr. Kahn had picked up the bag holding the two dead birds Dan had found, the doctor telephoned Dan.

  “Glad to reach you at home,” Dr. Kahn said.

  “I live here full time now,” Dan said. “Forgive me, but I’ve forgotten your name. I forget almost everything, these days.”

  Dr. Kahn gave his name to Dan. “I’m calling with a report on the dead birds,” the doctor said.

  “Shoot,” Dan said. He told the doctor that he did not remember exactly what the dead birds were. The CDC doctor filled in that vacuum. “These were the two dead birds you found on the ground of your place. I took the bird body bag back to the nearest CDC facility,” Dr. Kahn said. “Another CDC doctor and I got into our safety spacesuits, the ones we use to guard against lethal disease. Hot and disgusting things, those spacesuits. We cut up both birds, the nuthatch and the kestrel, and put bits of blood and flesh of each under high magnification microscopes. We compared what we saw with cells of birds with West Nile virus or with EEE.”

  “And?”

  “And the dead nuthatch was carrying West Nile virus, and the dead kestrel was carrying EEE.”

  “So what’s in store for me?”

  “It isn’t all good, Dan. You could get very sick. Maybe fatally so – especially with the Eastern Equine Encephalitis. That’s the EEE stuff.”

  “Well, I expect you CDC geniuses will come up with a vaccine or something.”

  “We’re trying. But we’ve been trying for a bunch of years to come up with effective immune systems for these things, and I can’t truthfully say a fix is just around the corner. How are you feeling?”

  “Bad to worse. I hurt much of the time. Sometimes the side of my skull – my living skull, not the empty dead one I keep on the desk in my study – feels as if someone is hitting my head with an axe, but I don’t see any axes by my head. And even when I don’t have the axe pain, I can’t summon up names of people I know – not just you, Dr., but also names of my own sons, for example. What’s all that about, that inability to call up from my memory?”

  “Sounds like the EEE is working away at you. I’ll stop back at your place and pick up some blood, so we can see what you’ve got – whether you have one or both of these bug-borne ailments. I don’t have a magic cure for you. Aspirin might reduce the pain. We’ll keep trying, and we’ll stay in touch. Who do you have to help you? Your wife?”

  “My wife has been dead for more than two years now. Who else do I have? I have two sons, Nat and … and the other one. Michael! His name is Michael. Now I’m having trouble remembering the names of my own sons, but I finally did remember them! But they both live far away, in California somewhere. We yack on the phone a good bit. And there’s a cleaning lady who comes once a week to contend with the mess I make. She’s no nurse. And every day a driver with a truck, wearing gloves, and throws against my door a metal box holding some food, trying to keep me alive while I’m still in quarantine.”

  Dr. Kahn took down the telephone numbers of Dan’s sons, and also the address of Dan’s house. Within three hours the doctor was at Dan’s home, looking at the chaos of papers on the desk and floor of Dan’s study.

  “You are a working man,” Dr. Kahn said.

  “My work is to create confusion. I’m still good at that. And I play Bingo with the Bible, to see what comes up.”

  “What are these open books, all of them lined that are on your desk?”

  “Notebooks. I think I told you that I remember less and less from what’s in my head. I scribble down a fair number of things in my notebooks, and that helps me to remember the things. I used to have a remarkably good memory. Not any longer. I have a car, but I don’t drive it, because I’m likely to forget where I’m going, or how to get back home, if I’ve gone out. My son Nat has hidden my car key, in an effort to prevent me from driving, because he thinks I’d never be able to get where I intended to go, or to be able to find my way back home. The hiding of the key is working pretty well for Nat, but it’s hard on me. I have another car key in this house somewhere, but I’ve forgotten where I put it.”

  “Can you remember my name?”

  “I can’t call forth your name right now, but I think you’re a
doctor.”

  “Right on,” Kahn said. I’m a doctor at CDC, which is where your son Nat worked for several years. My name is Ernst Kahn.”

  “I also write poetry in these notebooks.”

  “Is your poetry published?”

  “Of course not. My poems rhyme and scan, and are comprehensible. That’s three strikes against my poetry, nowadays – though those are the three factors that made us learn poems when we were kids, and enabled us to keep the poems in our heads, and recite them from memory – at least until our minds went.”

  “Can you give me a for instance poem?”

  “Sure. I’m guessing that you or your family came from Germany, judging from your name and accent?”

  “Jawohl.”

  “Beethoven also was German. Here is a poem I wrote, which is meant to be a poem by Beethoven on his favorite sonata:

  Beethoven, On His Favorite Sonata

  “Even more than my Moonlight Sonata,

  I like my Appassionata.

  Its pulsating theme

  Grips the mind in a dream

  Like that of vagina dentata.”

  “Do you like that poem, Doctor?”

  “Thanks for that poem,” Dr. Kahn said. “It gets right into what Beethoven must have been thinking about. S’nota a totally clean-minded sonata.”

  “Ouch, Doctor. Here’s a poem about Alma Schindler, who came from Vienna. Another German-sounding name,” Dan said.

  Alma Schindler (Mahler Gropius Werfel) – (Schindler’s List)

  Alma Schindler

  Found that genius would kindler.

  She first kissed Gustav Klimt –

  But on follow-through skimpt.

  She let Alex Zemlinsky

  Caress all of her skinsky.

  She first married Mahler.

  Several others would foller –

  Though I think Anton Bruckner

  Was not one of those [dumdeedee].

  She said Mahler’s sequel

  “Was her racial equal”:

  Of architects copious

  Walter was Gropius,

  And he answered her need

  For “precious Aryan seed.”

  For three steamy years, she saw Oskar Kokoschka –

  A very young kid, an Oshkosh-B’gosh-ka.

  When she left him, to help him remember his moll

  He remade her in the form of a full-life-sized doll.

  Franz Werfel then was the third she was marryin’–

  A playwright, a poet, but for sure not an Aryan.

  A priest then appeared – a decided non-Jew.

  “He loves me,” said Alma. “He loves mass, too.”

  “You will have noticed, Doctor – I’ve already forgotten your name again– something like ‘Kong’, I think – that in this poem I refrained from using any of the dirtier words, though I had to cover one up by saying ‘dumdeedee.” I think the public can decipher that one.”

  “I admire your restraint, Dan,” said Dr. Kraus. “And the public is skilled at understanding such things. Can you give me an example of words or names that were hard for you to remember?”

  “Sure. Here’s a poem from a couple of years ago:”

  Word Retrieval

  The words of little use I readily recall.

  In Latin, hirudo is the word for leech.

  Lüfer is what Turkish people call

  The bluefish. To find useful words I beseech

  In vain the remnants of my aging brain.

  What name is given to those who can count,

  But, according to a joke that’s old and lame,

  Who lack the personality needed to account?

  So the word can’t be “accountant.” All I could find

  In day-long mind-search is that it may

  Have both an “a” and an “ary.” (Age isn’t kind.)

  Not “cassowary” or “janissary.” Today

  “Actuary” appeared, as if by necromancy –

  One who figures life expectancy.

  “But that poem is highfaluting; it uses some words I couldn’t remember without looking in one of my books. I have worked on some more basic poems. About a week ago, I bought a book of pictures by Norman Rockwell, whose works I love. A day later, without having the book before me, I tried to call to mind the artist’s name. Rockwell Kent? Norman Conquest? Normandy Landing? Only three days later, in the dead of night, did the name “Norman Rockwell” appear in my head. The disappearances of names I had known well are getting to be more and more frequent; the reappearances of those names are scarcer and scarcer for me. It’s serious. Last week, I could not remember the names of Ernest Hemingway, Harry Belafonte, or Woody Allen. And last Sunday, when I called into the 10:00 service at my church (I no longer go directly to the church, because the risk of getting or giving a disease; I use a conference phone), I realized I no longer could summon the words to The Lord’s Prayer – words I’ve said aloud for seventy years. Words I’ve lived by. But I’m losing it, Doctor. My mind is going – I guess because of those damned birds and mosquitos.”

  Dr. Kahn was carrying a black bag, of the sort that doctors used to carry long ago, when doctors visited patients at the patients’ houses. He began to open the bag.

  “What’s with the bag, Doc?”

  “Well, just the way we took some blood from the two birds and from Dr. Konrad Starkherz, to see whether they had diseases or effective immune systems, I and my CDC colleagues would like to take some blood from you to see whether you have any ailments, and how best to treat them. Is that OK by you?”

  “OK by me, Doc. It’s worth a shot.”

  Dan rolled up his left sleeve. Dr. Kahn drew blood, squeezed the blood into three small glass containers, put the containers in his black bag, thanked Dan and gave him best wishes, and left to drive back to New York. After the doctor’s departure, Dan opened a bottle of red wine and began working on glasses of it as he sat in his study, writing in his notebook of the day’s event. He wrote about the doctor’s visit, but remained unable to recall the doctor’s name. Was it Kong, as in King Kong?

  When Dr. Kahn got home, he called Nat Floyd and recounted the meeting he had had with Dan Floyd. “I have to tell you that your father is forgetting a lot these days,” the doctor said to Nat. “He hurts a lot, too, in ways that sound like he might have something like EEE. We’ll test that. But I think you and your brother probably should begin thinking of how and where to get a hospice nurse, if it turns out that he has EEE. Nobody so far has developed a vaccine or immune system that works against EEE. And without good vaccines to block a lethal virus, what do you have?”

  “I’m a doctor, too,” Nat said. “Without a strong blocking vaccine, the lethal virus will flourish, and often it will kill the infected person.”

  “Examples?”

  “Afghanistan and Pakistan, for examples. Many of the people in those countries are too far away from doctors to be vaccinated. Or some Muslims kill doctors from Western countries who try to vaccinate children to prevent polio, because the Muslims think the Westerners are somehow trying to destroy Islam. So polio, which we thought had been eradicated by Sabin’s live-attenuated vaccine and by Salk’s inactivated poliovirus vaccine, among others, is coming back to cripple and to kill in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Syria would be another example. The fighting of rebels against Assad’s forces, and vice versa, caused insufficiency of vaccines, and a resurgence of polio. And we even have some parents in America who don’t permit their children to be vaccinated against polio. Those parents believe that vaccination is inconsistent with the will of God, so polio reemerges, even in the United States.”

  “Right on, Nat. I wish you were at the CDC.”

 
“I was, for some years, Doctor. There was good teaching there, thanks to you and your colleagues. And good luck, too!”

  “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” Psalm 90:10 (King James Version).

  16

  Threescore Years and Ten

  Dan felt progressively worse in the days that followed Dr. Kahn’s visit to his house. He tried to keep reading and writing in his study, but was less and less able to do so. He could not summon to his mind words that had been thoroughly familiar to him, for decades. Example from notes in his notebook:

  “I believe polaroid virus, which experts like Sabin and Salk had fought pretty much to extinction around the world, is starting to come back, thanks to insufficient amounts of vaccine, and the unwillingness of some people or countries to permit vaccination. Shit! I meant to say polio virus – not Polaroid virus!”

  Dan also attempted to distract himself with music that he loved, including CDs of Mozart and the singing of Jussi Björling. The attempt didn’t help much. The music was beautiful, but Dan couldn’t remember who had written the music or who was singing it.