Phase Six

by Jim Shepard

  The nurse came in and took away Aleq’s food tray. She saw he’d been crying and made a sad face back at him in return by sticking out her lower lip. She put a little plastic clip on his finger and then looked at the numbers on it, and then did something with the computer on the rolling stand and then left.

  He told himself that he wasn’t going to be sad about not being home. By this time of year the sun would be lighting up the ice even this early in the morning. But it wasn’t that great. He remembered his grandmother marveling at a young woman who’d moved there from Ililussat, asking herself who would do that who didn’t have to take care of a relative. In December, two out of three days the winds kept you in the house. The last boat through before the storms and the sea ice shut down the harbor was the one with the Christmas trees. After that there were no more ships until May. But even before then, because there was no real dock and only the tidal steps on the cement wharf, when it was too windy the boats couldn’t moor and sometimes had to just turn around and go back.

  Things came into his head, and after a minute or two he used the computer to distract himself. The way the sea ice got soupy before it hardened. The big plastic water carriers you could barely see over on the front racks of everyone’s ATVs. The big black water buckets for the dogs that were stuck all around in the tall grasses. The spongy patches of marsh good for catching bait. The dog the dogcatcher shot that writhed around at his feet like a fish in the bottom of a boat. The way everybody’s front doors when they opened out cleared away the snow pile outside. The way in winter, hunters could go all the way to Disko Island on their sledges. The morning in art class he helped Malik’s little brother paint a Real Madrid logo on the leatherwork of his boots. His grandmother at her happiest sitting in her chair, smoking and not speaking. The time he and Malik tried to come home in a dense fog across thin ice, and the way if they got too far apart they lost each other but if they got too close their combined weight cracked the surface. They’d kept veering toward each other’s voices in the grayness and then hearing the ice start to give way and veering off.

  He set the computer aside. It was bright in the room. His Thanos figure was still under the covers next to him in the bed. The helmet was missing, but the figure didn’t need the helmet.

  He lay there like there was no reason to move. The nurse came and went and things appeared and disappeared. There were seashell sounds in the vents.

  He’d seen kids run away from their parents in their sickbeds. He’d seen old people go from sick to dead so fast that their relatives stopped asking who was sick. He’d traveled around like he was healthy and he’d given whatever germ he’d been carrying to who knew how many people. He’d ruined families he would have given everything to save.

  The next morning the nurse came back with the doctor whose name he had trouble saying, and they gave him an earpiece again, and held up the tablet, and there was the man with the beard, and the man in the earpiece told him that the man with the beard wanted to know how he was doing. And Aleq said some of the things he’d been thinking about. And the man with the beard agreed that it was terrible but told him that there was nothing Aleq could have done to stop what had happened. And that they were going to work to keep Aleq safe. And to see if he could maybe help them keep other people safe. The man told him that soon someone else might be coming to take care of him, and he told them he didn’t want anyone else. The man said that he worked with kids to help them feel better about whatever was making them sad, and Aleq reminded him that he’d already told Aleq that, and then said that everyone should get out of his room. And then when they all just looked at him like they hadn’t understood what he’d said, he said it so loudly the nurse jumped back from the bed.

  Every Country with Its Own Small War

  By day thirty-five, estimations were as high as fourteen million infected. In New Delhi, the chief epidemiologist from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases was himself in one of the isolation wards and said to be doing very poorly. The Egyptian media was reporting a mass breakout from one of Alexandria’s largest isolation camps, triggered by the sight of an imam’s body being carried out. The army units guarding the camp were said to have let it happen, more terrified than the patients they were guarding. Ukraine and Kazakhstan were reporting hospitals so overwhelmed that even the dispensaries were now shut down. One of the microbiologists at Porton Down accidentally infected himself and the media panic forced it to close its labs and send its staff home for a week.

  The WHO’s most recent situation bulletin described the challenges involved in mounting a response to the outbreak for those countries most affected as akin to a small war.

  And those countries were mounting that response with state health departments featuring no more than skeleton staffs after having weathered however many hiring freezes on replacement posts, and privatization, and shrinking core budgets, even after all of the resolutions made in the wake of COVID-19. The WHO technical officer in charge of emerging viruses had begun the crisis with no full-time assistant, so that when someone called from another part of the world, more often than not they got his answering machine.

  There was, of course, still no adequately funded or internationally coordinated system of focus, cooperation, and response. Public policy’s position in the U.S. and a surprising number of other countries had been to rebuild the status quo and then to sit back and wait for the next avalanche, as though pandemics were not a recurring natural phenomenon. With no global procedure agreed upon, time was continually lost reinventing the wheel. Additional time was squandered squabbling over which organizations would assume which administrative, technical, and financial responsibilities.

  Most hospitals still lacked even the most basic biocontainment equipment. Almost no one was still adequately trained in Level 3 isolation techniques, let alone Level 4. And even many hospitals affiliated with medical schools still lacked the clinical expertise to diagnose rare conditions.

  Most countries’ militaries had now deployed field hospitals and constructed mega-camps to address the massive isolation requirements, but there wasn’t nearly enough expertise to medically staff such camps, and given that radical shortage, extremely inexperienced staff were being pitched into the breach in the hope that they would learn very fast.

  Access to distribution centers for food and water and medicine often had to be cleared by force. In the U.S., a sizable minority was still refusing to social distance. A sick senator returning from one of the infected cities caused Congress to issue a shutdown of Reagan, Dulles, and BWI. Seven states had called out their National Guards to set up roadblocks and shut down all trade, and in five other states the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO had pulled their drivers off the roads. The president and the rest of the executive branch had been moved underground and congresspeople were now carrying on their work online. A full brigade of the Georgia National Guard had had to be deployed to protect the CDC from an encircling encampment of violent protestors who refilled the camps as quickly as they were cleared. And three hundred miles away in Jacksonville, a deranged libertarian attacked a hospital with automatic weapons to liberate the patients being held there against their will.

  The WHO, which had followed its global alert with a series of travel warnings and then a series of travel bans, and then a series of situation bulletins, on day thirty-six finally ceased its foot-dragging and upped its announced pandemic level to Phase 6, its highest, designating for anyone who might have missed it by this point that a global pandemic was officially under way.

  XI

  Knock on Wood

  Sometime in the middle of the night a phone message had come through from a Madeline, Jeannine noticed when she checked her phone on the bedside table after having sat up with the sun in her eyes. Who was Madeline?

  Madeline turned out to be her CDC supervisor’s wife—of course—leaving a message that he was so sick that he couldn’t call. Jeannine had
only met her twice. On the message she sounded like she was weeping, though as upset as she was, she still went on to add some other information, about three or four other people who’d been at that party having already died, and some more having gotten sick.

  What party? Jeannine thought, then remembered the anniversary party he’d mentioned.

  She took a few minutes to process the information, her bare feet on the floor, and then shook herself like a dog and called Madeline back and didn’t get through. She made coffee and sat holding her hair with her hands and then called a few other people from her center at the CDC, and they confirmed the bad news and provided more details.

  “Every day he’d say after he’d hung up his coat, ‘So we’re all still healthy, knock on wood?’ ” one of the lab techs told her tearfully. “He was so careful, and worked so hard to make sure we were careful,” she wailed. She went on about how upset he’d been about the protestors.

  The tech was the third call, and in the middle of it Jeannine had to stop. She cut the woman off after five minutes and told her that she’d check in later but she had to get to the lab.

  This Is You

  On the drive in to work even the teenage boys she passed were wearing masks. The armed guard at the security cottage at the main gate took longer than usual to slide open his window. “You okay?” he asked after she wiped her eyes. He was leaning noticeably away from her.

  “This isn’t that,” she explained. “I’ve just been crying.”

  He didn’t answer, but he seemed a little less wary.

  “Time to make a difference,” she said, mostly to herself. Even he seemed to get the grim joke. It was what Danice had said to her each morning in Greenland. He waved her through and she said it again to herself, and then added, “Really.” Then she spent the day hashing through numbers that offered up so little of anything that was of any use that, before she ended her work, she drew a slug with a moronic expression on the notepad beside her keyboard, and captioned it “THIS IS YOU.”

  There You Are

  One of Jeannine’s drearier boyfriends in graduate school had been into rare vinyl and had lingered so long in used record shops that she had often accused him of wanting to touch every record in the store. In one of the smaller and dumpier places, a fifty-year-old geek with a neck like a stork and a bad haircut who’d been standing beside her in a flasher’s overcoat had suddenly drawn in his breath while flipping through a section. “There you are,” he had crooned, and had eased an album up out of the rack and held it before him as if it were too precious even to transport to the cash register.

  Those moments of discovery that she had had in her career—like when, as a postdoc, she’d worked out that method of targeting virulence traits without killing off the pathogens in her study—had always brought back to her that geek in his overcoat, standing there like all the time he’d pissed away had been vindicated. All those hours spent two to a bench, measuring solutions with pipettes or preparing gels or working with mice, intermittently apathetic or demoralized, hearing vague stories of how well rival labs were doing and how much funding was headed everywhere else, had drilled into her that some people earned their pessimism while others were just naturally good at it. But she’d never lost the sense that she might be a part of a major investigation that succeeded. “You’re a bigger optimist than I am,” Danice had exclaimed a little way into their time together in Greenland. “You talk a good gloom-and-doom game, but you think everything’s going to work out, don’t you?” Branislav had said a version of the same thing the other night when he’d ushered her out of his hotel room.

  Auld Lang Syne

  Speaking of which: she was irritated to discover four emails and a Post-it note at her workstation all from Hank and Emily on the subject of Branislav. He apparently wanted to stay, for Aleq’s sake. Hank’s response had been that this was a Level 4 facility.

  There were two texts from Branislav as well. He was in the building and asking to see her. She told him he might as well come now. It felt like she’d just pressed Send and then there was a knock on the door.

  He came in and shut the door behind him. For some reason he had hilarious hat hair, but she didn’t mention it.

  “I heard you want to argue for staying,” she told him.

  “It just feels a little cold-blooded to do all this work to win the kid over and then to stick him in a holding room like one of the ferrets,” Branislav said.

  “We’re not just going to stick him in a room,” she protested, and when he looked at her in response, she flashed on all of the times before Mirko’s death when she’d breezily said to Branislav things like “The kid’ll be fine home all alone.” After one late night they’d returned to find him asleep next to the door.

  “It’s not just Hank,” she told him. “Homeland Security is on his back. They’re on a mission from God to contract rather than expand clearances.”

  “I already heard all of this,” Branislav said.

  “What’re you hoping I can do?” she asked, suddenly very tired. “Maybe if I went to the mat for you on this I could get you another half a week.”

  “Isn’t there anything else that you or they imagine we might need from the boy that I could help with?” he asked.

  “I think they’re thinking they can always come back to you remotely if they have to,” she told him.

  “It wasn’t my call,” she added after he didn’t respond. “I’m actually still surprised I was able to get you here in the first place.”

  “I said I get it,” he said. “I just wanted you to see how much I don’t like it.”

  She rubbed her eyes with her fingers and then blinked him back into focus. He didn’t say anything else while she looked at him, and she didn’t say anything else, either.

  “I had the nurse bring him a calendar and a magic marker, and had him circle the last day of this week, and told him that that was our Goodbye Day,” he said. “You should have seen the way he looked at it.”

  Her phone buzzed, and emails were stacking up in her inbox when she glanced at her computer monitor. “How did he look at it?” she asked.

  He gave her a disappointed expression again and chose not to answer.

  “Where was I during all of this?” she wanted to know.

  “I don’t know. In bed?” he asked. “Seems like you got a late start today.”

  “I’m going to do everything for this kid that I can,” she finally told him.

  He nodded unhappily, like he knew that. He said he’d been interested in administering some of the newer tests to the boy, to see where the boy stood—like the CAT or the WISC-R—but nobody here was interested.

  “You know if there was anything I could do for you I would do it,” she said.

  He looked at her like he could see every failure she’d ever been a party to. He smiled. “You know what auld lang syne actually means?” he asked.

  She made a now-what-are-we-talking-about face. “I don’t even know what language it is,” she said.

  “Scottish,” he said. “It means ‘For the sake of old times.’ It’s an interesting question the song’s asking, if you think about it: Should old acquaintances be forgot, for the sake of old times?”

  “That doesn’t sound right to me,” she told him.

  “I believe it,” he said.

  “I feel like we could’ve made it work,” she said stubbornly. But another part of her said to herself, Okay, you don’t have time for this.

  “And yet here we are all over again,” he said.

  She let it go. “Think he’s gonna be all right?” she ventured.

  “I can’t tell you how many questions like that, when they come up, we just have to concede the field,” he said.

  “We?” she asked.

  “Therapists,” he said. “Social workers.�
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  “Okay, well. I really do need to get back to this,” she said.

  “Be my guest,” he said. He gave her one more look, like he hadn’t given up on the notion that she might surprise him, and then he let himself out.

  And that was that. She sat at her keyboard and started going through what had piled up just in the time they’d been talking.

  She found herself listening for the sound of the staircase door at the end of the hall. She thought maybe it didn’t matter whether what he’d felt for her had or hadn’t been real, as much as that it had made her happy, if even for such a short time. Either way, she figured she’d keep making the same mistakes, and learning the same things, over and over again, in isolation.

  There You Are

  At the end of a long day her phone buzzed with Danice’s check-in call. She was expecting the usual How are yous but instead Danice sounded transformed.

  “Listen listen listen listen,” she said. “So we’ve been seeing immune responses indicative of a bacterial infection but nothing’s shown up on PCR or anything else, right?”

  “Good afternoon to you, too,” Jeannine told her.

  “Right?” Danice persisted.

  “Right,” Jeannine agreed.

  “So it looks like a bacterial infection with no bacteria,” Danice said. “Followed by a whole lot of cell death. But suppose the infection had cleared quickly? And if there was so much cell death, there’d be no residual tissue to study. The cells’ DNA would be too fragmented.”