by Jim Shepard
“Yeah, well,” Danny answered.
“Jeez,” she complained.
“Ma’s been in a kind of circle-the-wagons mode,” Danny said. “If you’re not family, she doesn’t want to know about you.”
“Nice,” Danice said. “Real Good Samaritan stuff.”
“You had Ma pegged as a Good Samaritan?” he asked.
“So what’s it like there?” she wanted to know.
“It’s like everywhere else,” he said. “Most stuff is closed. The only places that are busy are the electronics stores. I guess everyone needs their phones and laptops one way or the other. I been helping out at the school. The National Guard’s been handing out water and things people need.”
“That’s great,” Danice said. Then, when he didn’t say anything to that, she said, “I’m proud of you.”
“Yeah, well, I figured out as a kid that just because someone was ashamed of you that didn’t mean you had to be ashamed of yourself,” he said.
“She wasn’t ashamed of you,” Danice said.
“So listen,” her brother said. “You take care of yourself.”
“Of course,” she said. “You too.”
“We love you,” he said. “Everybody’s scared shitless here but we love you.” He told her to check in when she could, even if it was just a text, and she promised she would, and then the phone got passed back and forth between her brother and mother with each of them having to say goodbye and then remembering something else, and it took another five minutes to get off.
Who Doesn’t Miss What’s-Her-Name?
She got off one call and found herself on another when Jeannine’s number popped up while she was heading back up the stairs.
“Look who’s got a free minute,” Danice said when she answered. She stopped and headed back down.
“How’re you guys doing?” Jeannine wanted to know. “Everything fall apart there without me to hold it together?” They’d promised they were going to keep each other updated by text, and they had for a little while, but after a week of some pretty basic exchanges, most things other than the trading of information updates had petered out. While they’d been saying goodbye, Danice had predicted it would, and Jeannine had responded, “Why do you always assume that nobody likes you?”
“There’s a whole new sheriff in town,” Danice told her. “Your replacement keeps going, ‘Who decided to do things this way?’ ”
“So is Sussman wowing everybody with his Danish?” Jeannine wanted to know.
“His Danish is about as good as my singing,” Danice said.
“So really, how are things going there?” Jeannine asked.
Danice caught her up. There’d been some problem with the hotel so they’d moved her to a two-room house closer to the harbor. It was bolted to the rock and uninsulated and had no running water. Snow that was tracked in never melted. Her neighbor was a woman who everybody said had shot her first husband when he hadn’t gotten the things she wanted at the store. Outside her house she had a whale rib stuck upright in the sand. And things were bad enough now that people had stopped coming to the weekend open-air markets. The day before she’d seen a woman pass someone lying on the street without checking to see if the guy was okay.
“So what’s it like there?” Danice finally said. “How’s it working in a Level 4?”
Jeannine said that she lived across the street from the lab and that even so it took her three full hours to get to the point where she could start her work. She said that the security was out of this world, and that they were a long way from the old days when a mailman could walk into a smallpox lab to deliver a package. She said she’d never realized what it would be like to work day after day in one of those suits. She said that after the first day you learned not to have a coffee first or to go in feeling hungry. The negative airflow dehydrated you faster than you’d think, so most people didn’t stick it out much past three hours. And the suit was heavy. You really felt it on your shoulders. And there was nothing worse than getting something like a runny nose. You couldn’t blow it, so people got creative with towels and kerchiefs around their necks and stuff like that. And if you did sneeze, you couldn’t clean your face shield. She said that everyone told her that an hour in there was like three in a high-stress environment in the real world, so nearly everyone burned out after five or six years, or way sooner, after their first near accident.
“If you’re trying to impress me, so far I don’t see the excitement here,” Danice told her.
It was mostly a matter of training and concentration, Jeannine said. It was probably like being a cop or a firefighter in that you just practiced everything until you got so you could handle dangerous situations smoothly. And anyway, because it was so hard working in the suits, they tried to do as much as possible on components of whatever they were working on that had been inactivated and could be moved down to Level 2 labs. But of course they had to identify something before they could do that in this case.
“Long hours?” Danice commiserated.
“I’ve seen so little of the sun I feel like a miner,” Jeannine complained.
“What’re the people like?” Danice asked. “Is there anybody there as fun as me?”
“Is there anybody anywhere as fun as you?” Jeannine asked. She said she liked the chief of virology, Hank. He sang songs from Hamilton when he was suited up, and he loved that everybody else had to listen on their earpieces.
“Hank Feldman? I’ve heard of him,” Danice said.
“He’s always touring everybody’s labs to see what people need and what he can do to help,” Jeannine told her. She said he had this knack for getting people who were already totally committed to work even harder, and it reminded her of the way her dad used to tease her that most opportunities were missed because they showed up looking like work. She said that whenever there was anything like encouraging news, Hank said to everyone around him in a singsong voice, “Well, maybe something is going on.” And that he always pulled the most relevant piece of information from whatever you put in front of him. “He’s also always saying that if we’re not wrong half the time, we’re not being brave enough,” Jeannine added.
“Well, we’re plenty brave here, then,” Danice told her.
Jeannine snorted. She had a way of snorting at the end of her laughs that always made Danice laugh.
“I made Hank laugh the first day,” Jeannine told her. “He was going on about how he wanted his labs to be the kind of places where people could be proud to say ‘I don’t know.’ And then he asked me this really basic question, and I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
“I’m jealous,” Danice said.
“I think he could’ve been a member of the Junior Certain Death Squad,” Jeannine said.
“I thought that was just us,” Danice said.
“A junior member,” Jeannine said. When Danice let it go at that, she added, “So how’re you doing otherwise?”
Danice told her that most of the time she was so tired, she worried that the possibility of insight was out the window, and she was just doing data management.
“No, I mean otherwise,” Jeannine said. “With the rest of everything.”
“Oh, you know me,” Danice told her. “I’m just sitting here on OkCupid.”
Jeannine chuckled. “You ever do one of those things?” she wanted to know.
“Once, and then I had to get off the site,” Danice told her. “I get scared looking at an endless menu of guys.” When Jeannine chuckled again, Danice added that it used to be that you had to do a little work to get yourself into trouble. And that she still remembered when that kind of dating service was for the saddest kind of losers.
“So listen,” Jeannine said. “Whatever happened with the burial stuff? Can I tell the kid that it’s all taken care of?”
“It’s all taken care of,” Danice confirmed. “You need me to send photos of the plots?”
“You’d better,” Jeannine said. “I’m not sure he’s taking my word for anything.”
They were quiet. “You know, I wanted to call anyway,” Jeannine said. “To see how you were doing.”
“Sure,” Danice said. “So.” They were quiet again. “How about you? Have you been taking care of yourself?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” Jeannine said. “Besides living on chai lattes. And I’ve been eating so many Sun Chips I probably should just apply them directly to my butt.”
“So how’s the kid?” Danice said.
“About how you’d expect,” Jeannine said. “Did I tell you I’m actually bringing Branislav here to help out with him?”
“Branislav?” Danice said. “No, you didn’t.”
“He’s about as well qualified for this as anybody,” Jeannine argued. “And what’re you snorting about?”
“I’m not snorting about anything,” Danice said.
There was a buzzing on the line, and then it went away. “Branislav,” Danice said again.
“He’s pretty amazing when it comes to getting through to kids,” Jeannine said.
“Well, here’s hoping he comes through for everybody,” Danice said.
They each waited for the other to offer something else. “I miss you,” Jeannine finally added.
“I just talked to my mom,” Danice told her. “She said she predicts that I’m going to end up being the big hero in all of this.”
“Ha. That’s my prediction, too,” Jeannine agreed.
“I think it’s going to be you,” Danice said.
“Oh, I doubt that,” Jeannine murmured. Danice could hear an increase of noise from the floor above in the hospital, like a group had just poured into the intake area.
“I had this real hardass for a tutorial in grad school,” Jeannine finally said. “And this one time when I told him that maybe my project hadn’t panned out because it had been too ambitious, he said that he’d always thought that the moral of the Icarus story was not ‘Don’t try to fly too high.’ He said he thought it was ‘Do a better job on the wings.’ ”
The door above the stairs swung open with a bang, startling Danice. “If you’re finished with your day on the phone,” Jerry told her, “there are one or two other things around here that could use your attention.”
She held up her hand for him and told Jeannine that she had to get off, and Jeannine agreed that she had to get off, too, and they promised to stay in touch. And Danice came upstairs into the bright light of the lobby, and sat at one of the intake tables and apologized to Jerry and Dr. Hammekin, and started working with a nurse to take down information, but Jerry didn’t seem mollified, and after a few minutes he got up and left, and she didn’t see him again for the rest of the morning.
VIII
The Second Epidemic
A disease outbreak spreading rapidly among a large number of patients within a single region is considered an epidemic, from the Greek for “upon the people,” and that same outbreak spread to a certain number of other geographic regions is classified as a pandemic, from the Greek “for all people.”
Those definitions had now also spread worldwide. The billions of texts, tweets, photos, videos, and other postings tsunami-ing in all directions in response to the general panic featured some helpful information, the way in negotiating a nearly impenetrable rain forest you might every so often come across an edible piece of fruit. The good news was that the internet democratized and facilitated the sharing of information, and that was the bad news, as well. All of those media platforms that served as back channels in the information universe now overwhelmed official channels, and overwhelmed themselves, as well; servers crashed and spikes in capacity never receded. Data centers reported continual extended network and power outages, and new spikes appeared with each new rumor. People claiming they already had vaccines were everywhere, as were people who claimed to have stumbled across other preventatives. One influencer from Australia who before the pandemic had hit had been sponsored by various upscale home and bath product companies and had made her family’s affluence look like a permanent vacation was now announcing that her family had been kept safe by an elaborate and fanatically precise diet and hygiene regimen. She had gone from five million to forty-five million followers on Instagram. On the one hand, useful information might have been pouring in from everywhere; on the other, you had to stir through the stew of journalism and entertainment and horseshit and noise to find it. And anything was probably more comforting than the official story, which seemed perpetually to be “We’re working on it,” and with so many more appealing options out there reality was being abandoned the way you might walk away from farmland that had lost its water source.
In the mornings before she went in to work, Jeannine gave herself ten minutes while she had her coffee to catch herself up and bring herself down when it came to all of this. Postings about a run on clarithromycin had generated pharmacy riots in seven cities in the South and Midwest. Why only the South and Midwest, no one could say. There was a robust black market for high-filtration masks. With China’s lockdown, supply chains were breaking down all over Europe and North America, and even the most basic prescription drugs were disappearing. The COVID-19 pandemic had exposed the way America’s health care system, having been stripped to the bare bones to maximize profit, was uniquely ill-equipped to handle the dramatically added burdens of disaster. But as in so many instances in American politics, after the lesson had been learned nothing had been done about it. One frustrated CDC media liaison had been shitcanned after, in response to a question by a CNN reporter about what government could be doing differently, he suggested an immediate halt to all flights out of states with Republican governors to reduce the spread of political imbecility. Videos of people trying to get out of their cities by highway or airport had caused a stampede of others to do the same. Images of airports and train stations during the first few weeks had looked like the fall of Saigon; now, with the lockdowns in place, pictures of empty spaces circled the world: no one in Times Square; one woman facing the vast colonnade outside St. Peter’s. Whole sections of store shelves had been cleared out and truckers were refusing to haul freight to some regions. Nurses and nurses’ aides were refusing to work and rebelling at being thrown into the fire with no real plan for how to save either them or their patients. Hospitals in hotspots were rationing care of all kinds. Amazon was unable to ship and had turned its flywheels to the problem, and Alexa could now list for customers in real time where riots were occurring, which hospitals were shut down, where to locate updates on the CDC’s website, how to find the safest noninfected areas within various preset radii, and which homeopathic remedies were trending. Google was tracking pneumonia activity by analyzing the changing numbers of requests for information on the subject and cross-referencing those requests with their geographic locations. A 737 in Chicago had been disabled on the tarmac by a passenger riot when its Wi-Fi had gone down and an emergency exit was opened and didn’t reseal when closed.
Jeannine sent that last link to Branislav, whose first day was today. She texted underneath it that for most people the worst news probably wasn’t so much the collapse of order and infrastructure as it was the possibility that the party was over. No free Wi-Fi, she wrote—that was when the survivors were going to envy the dead. Branislav didn’t text back.
Her father texted that he’d heard that people in China were being cured with something called dioscorea root, and wanted to know if she’d heard about that, and if they were looking into it where she was. She began a response and then found herself just staring at his words. All those people out there, spreading anything they wanted, out of desperation or for recreation or for no reason at all. Maybe democracy worked for restaurant reviews and movie ratings, but boy, wa
s it creating problems in this case. What were all those dystopias she’d had to read about in high school, concerning the individual trampled by the state, talking about? Why hadn’t anyone imagined the chaos of no one in charge?
She still hadn’t answered the questions Hank had forwarded her from an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva about Aleq. They didn’t much prioritize the WHO’s communications in general, since it was always running on a shoestring, with an annual budget less than that of a decent-sized city hospital. Its viral unit in Geneva was six people, three of whom had allegedly been hired for administrative work. Three real virologists and a board of like 190 ministers, all political appointees. That, too, was supposed to have changed after COVID and hadn’t. And like the CDC, between disasters the WHO was always having to sit still for “realistic” administrative reviews that further shaved its budget.
The rule of thumb for most elected officials was that they worked tirelessly to make things worse. In the U.S., whichever party was in power wasn’t interested in support for public health. Public health never competed well for resources in either the House or the Senate. Countries were like people: they didn’t value health until they lost it. And then once they got it back, they returned to their old complacency.
A lot of media outlets were calling the illness “RAS,” now, for Respiratory Arrest Syndrome, and there was a term, RAS Orphans, for people who had lost their entire families. Around the lab, nobody mentioned myxomatosis, and nobody had to. After rabbits had been introduced to Australia in the nineteenth century as a food source, by 1950 their populations had gotten so out of hand that microbiologists had been encouraged to introduce a virus from a Brazilian rabbit against which the Australian rabbits would have had no defenses. The result had been a successful manmade extinction experiment: within three months, 99.8 percent of the rabbit population of the entire southeast of Australia—a land area larger than Western Europe—had been eradicated. The good news, epidemiologists liked to say when they did talk about it, was that eventually the lethality rate had diminished, so that after seven years, it had gotten down to 25 percent.
