by Jim Shepard
Aleq had hair like Branislav’s son, Mirko, and Jeannine was a little startled that her mind had made that connection. His nose was running, and also like Mirko you could see on his sleeve where he was always wiping it. She told Olsen to tell him that they needed to examine him and to ask if he was going to be okay if they let him up. Olsen conveyed all of that and then waited, but the kid didn’t answer. He was looking through the grass off into the distance and his eyes were full of tears. Jeannine crouched nearer to him so he could see her face better through the clear plastic hood, and Danice did the same. At first he didn’t glance over at them, and Jeannine could feel the sweat on her back from their suits in the sun. Then he gave them a look and said a few things, one after the other. When Olsen stayed silent, Danice finally said, “Well?” Olsen cleared his throat and then reported that the kid wanted to know if they could help him bury his grandmother and grandfather. And his friend. And his parents, and their kids.
Since she couldn’t reach her eyes Jeannine had to blink energetically to clear them, and she could see that Danice was doing the same. She told Olsen to tell Aleq that yes, they could help him, but first they needed to make sure he was okay, and then they needed to check for any other survivors.
Danice asked Olsen if he’d hurt himself when he’d slipped, and Olsen said no, but he winced when he said it, and Jeannine imagined that his reaction was about having had the kid’s foot in his face and his mask knocked off. She winced herself.
They did their examination in one of the houses they’d found empty on their way to the nurse’s house. On a kitchen table they’d cleared for him they took his temperature and checked his blood oxygen. He didn’t want to sit still for any of it, and he and Olsen seemed to be increasingly annoying each another, though when Jeannine asked about it Olsen shook his head and told her she wouldn’t understand. “Maybe it’s a colonial thing,” Danice suggested, and Olsen told her sharply that it wasn’t a colonial thing.
The boy kept his eyes on Jeannine while she was asking questions and even while Olsen was translating. He told them he hadn’t thrown up the way the others had. He hadn’t been shaking the way the others had. He hadn’t been so sweaty he’d soaked through his clothes the way the others had. He answered each of Olsen’s follow-up questions from Jeannine as if impatient to get off the table. He hadn’t had a cough. He hadn’t had trouble breathing. He had had a runny nose, and a sore throat, and he’d gotten them the same time his friend Malik had gotten his. Malik had then gotten all of those other things. And Malik had been the first one to get sick. When he threw that out there, Jeannine and Danice exchanged rapid looks, and then Jeannine started firing so many questions at him that both he and Olsen looked taken aback.
When had they gotten sick? What had they been doing just before they got sick? Had they been near any animals? Had they been anywhere they had never been before? The barrage caused the boy to shut down, and all of her attempts to get Olsen to follow up with him got nowhere.
They didn’t have much more time before the copter would be back, so Jeannine proposed that Danice stay behind with the boy and that she and Olsen check out the rest of the settlement for survivors, but as they started to leave the boy cried out, and when Jeannine looked at Olsen, he explained with some surprise that the boy had said that he wanted the dark-skinned one to stay with him. “I can’t catch a break even with the twelve-year-olds,” Danice said, and Jeannine, after a moment, said, “It’s fine with me if it’s fine with you,” and Danice said, “I can handle it,” and she and Olsen left.
After they were gone, the boy slid off the table and slumped in a chair near the window. She could see he was trying to hold it together, but then the tears ran from his eyes and nose and his body shook so much that his chair legs rattled on the floor. He retrieved the ratty sweater they’d removed to examine him and draped it over his shoulders, though it was hot in the room, but it kept slipping off, and finally she stepped forward and tucked the sleeves around his neck to help it stay.
He said something she assumed was thank you. Some ravens cawed outside. He wiped his nose again and she put the outside of her gloved hand against his cheek, and for a moment he closed his eyes and leaned into it, and then he swayed back upright. He wiped his face and then flexed his dirty fingers in front of it like he was vaguely amazed at the intricacy of a human hand.
That pained I-don’t-quite-see-you absorption in something else also reminded her of Mirko. In the morning he would set up his trains on the hardwood floor beside his father’s bed and she’d have to step over both them and him on her way to the shower.
“I think you may have known our index patient, Mr. Aleq,” she told the boy, and he looked at her as if in response, and then looked out the window. “There’s a whole lot of information we likely need to pull out of you,” she added. Then she leaned forward to see, out the window, what had his attention.
A few sled dogs were sitting and standing in front of the house across the way, looking back at her. The closest had lost an eye and was staring over with its remaining one. It was hunched in a plywood box set on its side that its owner had dug into the turf as a doghouse.
They’d need to examine a lot more closely where this boy had been living, and his friend’s house as well, as well as whatever bodies were still in either, and they also needed to bring away a lot of material from the health service nurse’s house. If there really were no other survivors maybe they could leave Danice to begin all of that while Jeannine and Olsen got the boy back to the hospital. Then they could collect everything else, including what Jeannine would have to explain to the pilots were potentially extremely dangerous throat swabs and blood samples, in a second load. So the next hurdle once the pilots got back was to talk them into ferrying both the kid and then the materials. The kid would be in the portable isolation chamber—the ISO-POD—that they’d stowed in the copter’s cargo compartment, so maybe the pilots would be okay with that. And maybe in terms of the other materials she could reassure them about the way she’d packed and sealed everything, and about Danice’s expertise with travel protocols.
“Maybe I can flap my arms and fly to the moon,” she muttered to herself. And when she looked over, Aleq had returned his attention to her, like even he was glad he wasn’t in her shoes.
Meanwhile the clock was ticking and there was no internet here on this rock so she had no way of knowing whether things were getting more or less out of control back in Ilulissat.
While she waited for Danice and Olsen to return, she had Aleq stand, and she gowned and gloved and masked him to inhibit the spread of infectious particles from his clothing and hands. He didn’t seem to need to have explained to him what she was up to, and he stood patiently throughout all she was doing. Before she finished zipping him up, she redraped his sweater over his shoulders and loosely tied the sleeves again under his chin, and he seemed to appreciate the gesture.
When Danice and Olsen finally returned, they both were streaming with sweat inside their suits, especially Danice, and it was hard to tell who was the more shaken up.
“It just seems impossible that it would be everyone,” Danice told her. Olsen didn’t say anything, and looked even grimmer than he had before. Jeannine outlined her plan for taking Aleq back and leaving Danice behind alone, and Danice seemed less than happy with the idea, but game. She rested a while in the shade of one of the houses, and then separated out the equipment she’d need from what Jeannine would be taking back with her.
Then it was Aleq’s turn to hear the plan, through Olsen, and he shook his head violently and accused Jeannine of something, and Olsen translated that she had promised to help him with the burials. She instructed Olsen to reassure him, promising that his family and friend would be taken care of, but there were other things that had to happen first, and they needed to take care of both him and other very, very sick people in Ilulissat. They went back and forth about it until the boy
finally quit, looking so stricken in his helplessness and his oversized gown and mask that her heart went out to him even more than it already had.
They all stood around him sympathetically until Olsen finally told them that he could hear the copter returning in the distance. Jeannine told Danice that they’d better get the ISO-POD together, and Danice gave Aleq one more look before complying. “I’d say he’s holding up pretty well for someone who’s watched everyone he knows kick the bucket,” she said.
Olsen asked what “kick the bucket” meant, and Danice told him. He gave her another one of his wary looks, like he wasn’t sure whether or not she was telling him the truth.
“They have a saying,” he finally responded. “ ‘The wolf keeps the caribou strong.’ ”
The ISO-POD’s carry sack had “AIRBOSS DEFENSE ADVANTAGE” printed across the top. They unrolled and inflated it on top of a spinal board on the duckboards outside, since there was no gurney, and by then the copter was so close even Jeannine and Danice could hear it through their hoods. After it set down inside the hazard cones near the windsock, they had Aleq get down on his butt and slide himself into the ISO-POD carefully, feet first, and once they’d sealed him inside and turned on the air, they wiped the outside down with antimicrobial wipes. He seemed distressed by the white noise of the blower motor. It was loud enough that Olsen gave up trying to shout reassurances through the vinyl. On Jeannine’s count they hefted him up using the board’s handles, Jeannine and Danice on one end and Olsen on the other, and then they lugged him along the duckboards to the landing site. Even in the short while they had the apparatus in the sun, they could see that it was starting to act like a greenhouse for the poor kid.
“What is that?” the pilot asked them, in English, when they arrived, and Jeannine explained calmly that it was a mobile transport system, a collapsible vinyl enclosure that created a negative pressure environment for more safely transporting potentially infectious patients.
The pilot and copilot said nothing in response, but provided no help in sliding the apparatus in across the copter’s rear seating area. Once it was in and secured, Jeannine and then Olsen climbed in awkwardly around it, spreading their legs and setting their feet wherever they could for the ride. The copilot slammed the rear doors shut, and Danice gave them a parodic, last-girl-on-the-Titanic cupped hand wave as they lifted off.
A Smile Explains Everything
In the hospital Aleq sat on the bed under the sheet that they’d thrown into the thing they’d carried him in, after the guy who spoke Danish had told him to take off all of the stuff they had put on him, and his clothes, too, as best he could in the narrow space, and then they’d given him another long shirt that went down to his knees. The tent was very small and he could see through all parts of it, and there were plastic sleeves that drooped over him on both sides that they stuck their arms in every so often. He could just about sit up before he hit his head, but the whole thing was soft and smelled like the waterproof covers people used around the settlement. The doctors and nurses all wore masks and gloves, including the two in the space suits, and they had another clear sheet of plastic across the door to his room. Through its cloudiness across the hall he could see nurses and doctors coming and going from around a crib. The sickness wasn’t there in his bed yet, but he assumed that it was on its way, gliding toward him. When he leaned over he could see open and closed doors farther down the corridor, and knew that the Greenlandic patients didn’t want to be alone, so any closed doors meant there was a Dane in that room. He imagined all those sick kids at night like Malik, opening their eyes in the darkness.
The tent made a lot of noise that sounded like rushing water and was so loud that he had felt more than heard the thumping blades over his head on the helicopter ride. He hadn’t been able to see what they’d been passing except for the occasional top of an iceberg until they’d tilted to turn, and he’d caught a glimpse of the twinkling lights of the container terminals. On a second turn he’d recognized the bay they called Some Fish Sometimes, and then he hadn’t seen anything more until they’d lifted him out after they’d landed.
The dark-skinned woman with the space suit slid her arms into the plastic sleeves and the Dane who did all the talking told him that they needed to take some blood, and the woman said something else and the Dane asked if Aleq was afraid of needles, and Aleq said no, and the woman smiled. He imagined that she smelled like medicine and coffee.
He asked what her name was, and she told the Dane, and the Dane told him. He had trouble saying it, and she tried to give him some help but he couldn’t hear her.
She said something else in a low voice and the Dane asked Aleq again if he and Malik had been anywhere or come across anything unusual before Malik got sick. The edge of the pit at the mine bobbed up into Aleq’s head, along with the smell of the cold air coming up from below, and the smell of the rock after that. He felt guiltier but wasn’t sure why, and rolled onto his side so he was turned to face the wall and could stop thinking about it.
They left him alone for a while and he dozed, and when he woke he started remembering again. He managed to get Malik out of his head but not his grandmother, and he remembered that when he was little and bothered her, she always said that she had clothes to mend and harnesses to repair and food to make but she still found time to sit on the floor with him and play his games. Sometimes she’d set him on the counter and say, “Aren’t you ugly? Don’t I have the ugliest little boy in the whole settlement?” and he’d answer, “You’re the one who’s ugly. It must be hard for people to share food with you.” Some mornings they just stood at the kitchen window and looked down at the water. When he had tantrums she picked him up and carried him around the room until he stopped. When he made too much noise in the early mornings she always asked if someone had hired him to come keep her awake. When he was older and went on about something she thought was stupid, she would listen for a while and then finally tell him to get some water for the pot, or his bath. She embarrassed him with the way even when there was a big line at the grocery store she would pick through each egg carton and lift out and inspect every egg. And with the way she eavesdropped on arguments or bad behavior. When he complained about it, she told him that when there was a real quarrel it was better than a movie. He had also been impatient with how much she talked about her cousins, who had moved to Ilulissat and sold seabird meat from the trunk of their car or laid out on cardboard in front of the supermarket.
When she’d had wine, she liked to talk about the competitions the catechists had arranged when she was a girl in school, and the way she won them almost every time, because you had to learn a piece of scripture and recite it without mistakes, and she was good at it, maybe because she just liked remembering the sounds. She also talked about her childhood in Eqi and waking up in winter and the way her mother would let her and her sisters stay under the quilt until the cabin warmed up. Once their father had had his coffee, the kids would get their tea and rye bread, and on the coldest mornings they got to eat under the quilt.
He must have slept, because he woke up alone and panicked before the dark-skinned woman came in to see him. An older nurse came in with her and the nurse asked him if he felt all right and after talking with the woman asked some other questions too. The woman put down what he answered in a little computer.
He asked what had happened to the Danish doctor, and her expression changed, and she said something to the nurse and the nurse told him that Dr. Olsen had gotten sick.
Something was occurring to him and it took him a while to bring himself to say it. “Am I making other people sick?” he asked the nurse, and she had to lean forward to hear him through the plastic, so he asked it again in a much louder voice.
She said something to the dark-skinned woman and the woman waited, and then said something back, and the nurse told him that they weren’t sure about that, but they were trying to find
out.
He asked if Dr. Olsen was okay and the nurse didn’t want to answer at first and then finally said that no, he was very sick.
“Did I make Malik sick?” he wanted to know. “Did I make my grandparents sick?” The nurse shushed him, and tried to pat his arms with hers in the plastic sleeves.
“Did I make everyone sick?” he wanted to know, but even as he said it he already knew.
“We’re not sure who made who sick,” the nurse told him, but he yelled at everyone to get out of the room, and tried to tear the seam of his tent open, and the woman and the nurse held him down and called for help and other people came in and helped hold him down, three on each side, and one of them gave him another shot.
It took him a while to calm down, and he could see how much the other people who’d been called in didn’t want to be near him. At some point he stopped yelling, and had trouble keeping his eyes open, and one by one the other people left. Finally it was just him and the dark-skinned woman.
His arms felt like they were floating. He told her that, but he knew she didn’t understand. She didn’t seem impatient sitting with him, and his head was filling with a white mist, and the two things together made him feel generous, like he wanted to give her something back. He also liked her because the first time she’d crouched near him and caught his eye, she’d surprised him with her smile, and it had made him think about the time he’d complained to his grandmother that one of these days her eavesdropping on other families’ fights was going to get them into trouble, and the way his grandmother had shrugged and told him that a smile explained everything.
