Phase Six

by Jim Shepard

  Maybe it was a mutation he’d been born with, she thought. It could have been a germ-line mutation or an alteration in the egg or sperm that made him. But his family didn’t have it; they were dead. The more she thought about it one way or the other, the more she thought it was likely that he had a mutation in his apoptosis regulator.

  “I guess you are just going to stare at him,” Elias remarked, startling her.

  “Excuse me?” she asked.

  “Sorry. I’m kidding,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you’d heard me.”

  She looked through the window across the atrium at him in a way that she hoped suggested a reprimand. “Tell him we’re sorry he’s had to go through all of this here,” she said. “And tell him that he might be the most important boy in all of Greenland.”

  She watched Aleq’s face while she listened to the Danish, and when Elias was finished passing that along, the boy had less response to it than he would have had to the news that lunch would be late.

  She felt a wave of impatience, looking at him, and banished it. Now that you’re all the way in here, try to be a human being, she suggested to herself.

  Aleq asked her a question. “He wants to know if the man with the beard was your friend or the person you had sex with,” Elias translated.

  She snorted, and was going to laugh, but something in her faltered. She stepped closer and sat on the edge of the bed, twisting around to ensure that her hose was clear. She had to tilt her head a little to get rid of some of the glare from the overhead lights on her bonnet. He seemed to be studying her face, and again she had the weird feeling that she wasn’t sure what was on it.

  She asked if he was still experiencing those pictures in his head of his friend remembering him. She watched while the translation caused him pain, but then he looked up as if he appreciated her having remembered that much.

  They sat with each other for a few minutes while she ran a gloved finger over his hand.

  He started recounting something, and even Elias, once he began translating, sounded moved. “He says that in his head his friend remembers everything,” Elias said. “The good and the bad.”

  When he didn’t go on, Jeannine asked about some of the good.

  Elias started translating at times before the boy was fully finished, so she had to deal with both voices at once, but managed to do so without missing too much. Apparently in the summer Aleq’s friend had ridden around on his bike with a broom handle under one arm and used it to spear other kids off their bikes. And other kids had started to carry around garbage can lids and their own broom handles and it got to be a really big game in the settlement. And another summer thing they liked was chasing geese and ptarmigan around the heather with an old badminton racket. And it got so that even dogs followed his friend around, to see what he would do next.

  After Aleq stopped talking, he seemed to pull back into his sadness again. Jeannine thanked him for sharing with her, and in response he asked if he was right in thinking that he was never going to see the man with the beard again. And if she was eventually going to go away too.

  She told him that she wasn’t sure what was going to happen, and that that was the truth, but that she wasn’t going anywhere right away. He told her that his grandmother, when he was ten, had told his mother not to come to his grandmother’s house when his mother had been drinking, and so his mother had stayed away after that, and hadn’t even wanted him to visit. And that sometimes all he remembered about her was her telling him to eat more fat to keep out the cold.

  She remembered with a pang something that Branislav had said about him when they’d been sitting in Branislav’s hotel room. “I just want to give him a chance to participate in a new story,” he’d said. She didn’t remember how she’d responded.

  Aleq addressed the window, as if talking to Elias, and Elias reported that Aleq said that he didn’t feel well, and Jeannine, once she’d heard, took the boy by the shoulders and asked him, “Do you mean you’re sick? Do you feel like you’re sick?” But he didn’t elaborate.

  She looked over at Elias across the atrium. He gave her a shrug.

  She crossed to the rolling cart and got what she needed and took the boy’s temperature and blood oxygen levels. Both were normal. He stayed still, looking across the room, while she went about her business.

  “You seem fine,” she told him. She waited while Elias translated.

  He put his chin on his chest. It wasn’t all that late, but she was so tired. They looked at each other as if waiting for the moment when she was going to leave.

  He formulated one more long sentence, and she waited for the translation. Elias said, “He says he’s always doing that: wishing for things that won’t happen.”

  She felt the responsibility of having understood him, and instead of asking him to say any more, put her hands out, to offer a hug, but he just looked at her, and turned away.

  She was pretty much at the end of her tether when it came to energy. She took a few steps toward the door and then turned to face him. “Tell him I’m sure I’ll see him sometime soon,” she told Elias. While Elias translated, she gave a little wave, and Aleq called to her and gestured her back. Once she was at his side again, he opened the drawer of the bedside table and took out a folded piece of paper and handed it to her. She unfolded it and it said “Jeg elsker dig” in small letters in black crayon.

  “What does Jeg elsker dig mean?” she asked Elias.

  “Jeg elsker dig?” he asked.

  “Jeg elsker dig,” she repeated.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She swayed where she was standing, and flopped onto her rear on the bed without even making sure her hose wasn’t in the way. This time she did hug him, and he didn’t resist, though he also didn’t hug her back. With her hand closed she could barely feel the note through her double layer of gloves. The plastic of her bonnet compressed the hair on the side of his head.

  She was helping him, she wanted to believe. She was making him less alone.

  “Is he tired? Does he want to rest?” she finally asked Elias. Elias, after asking, relayed that he didn’t.

  “Well, tell him I do need to rest,” she said, after she felt like she’d held the boy for a while. And she stood, while Elias passed that along.

  She stroked Aleq’s hair with her glove where the bonnet had pressed it down. He flinched from her hand and fixed it himself, and when she returned to the door he watched quietly all the rigamarole of her exiting.

  When was she going to be adequate support for somebody? What was her damage, when it came to the kind of simple interactions everybody else pulled off every day? She could feel his solitude spreading out inside her even as she closed the outer door of the airlock. It was like his note was meant for Malik or his grandparents or his parents or even Branislav, and she was the only one left to receive it.

  She sat facing the window into his room while she progressed through the stages of stripping off her suit. When she was halfway out of it, she took a break, and shook out her hair and wiped her eyes, and looked again at the folded paper on the bench. When she looked back through the window, he’d turned his head away, so that she was looking at him in profile. And she thought fiercely about herself, This is the kind of person you are, because from that angle and distance, he just looked like any other round-faced kid with black hair and dark eyes.

  Problem Solving 101

  The next day she called Danice with the good news that the 109th Airlift Wing of the New York Air National Guard, which among other things ran resupply missions to the U.S. air base at Kangerlussuaq, had a C-130 that this week was coming back empty and could be diverted to Ililussat to bring Danice home. They were able to find an ISO-POD and everything.

  “That’s great,” Jerry told Jeannine, when Danice failed to respond. He was on the line, too.

>   “Did she hear me?” Jeannine asked him. “Is she all right?”

  “She’s been better,” he reported.

  “So you gotta get all your stuff together in the next few days,” Jeannine kidded her. “Jerry can help you find some trunks big enough for your wardrobe.”

  The line buzzed for a minute or two, and she could hear what sounded like rasping.

  “She says it may work better to just email,” Jerry told her.

  Jeannine felt herself flinch at the news. “Sure; no problem,” she said. “I just wanted to hear her voice. Bye, beautiful,” she said, with a little extra volume. She hung up and turned to her keyboard and typed, ETA 0700 for the transport. Maybe I can meet you stateside—!

  After a minute Danice answered, What’s the news? What’re you hearing?

  Jeannine caught her up.

  How’s the fever? How’s the breathing? she typed after that.

  Fever’s better and breathing’s worse, Danice answered.

  They doing anything for you besides the venturi? Jeannine asked.

  Hammekin and Jerry are bonding over keeping me going, Danice wrote. It’s very sweet.

  Your mom turned out to be right. You were the one who ended up being the big hero in all of this, Jeannine told her.

  Danice’s response took a while. Finally it pinged in.

  If this bacterium lived in the soil it could have picked up a gene from plants: maybe an apoptosis regulator that was closely enough related in plants and animals that it wasn’t immediately obvious that it wasn’t part of the normal human complement of DNA. A gene so closely related to humans that it enabled the thing to cause this set of symptoms.

  Jeannine wrote back what she’d been thinking about the kid maybe having some kind of super-competent downstream regulator, and Danice responded with a smiley emoji. And then:

  Right right right. What was it HE had that everyone else didn’t? That’s what all the AIDS researchers have been asking themselves for the last however many years about all those people the researchers call supercontrollers: people who’ve been infected for ten or twenty or thirty years and have never progressed to full-blown AIDS. What do they have that we don’t?

  And while Jeannine was thinking about that, the question rolled in again:

  What do they have that we don’t?

  While Jeannine stared at it, another question followed.

  Have you seen the list of how many labs are trying to do the molecular epidemiology of who’s passing it to who by looking at the mutations to see how it’s changing?

  Jeannine said that she had, and then told her about some other things Danice might not have known about as well. The list was long enough that even abbreviated it sounded reassuring. If things kept progressing on some of these fronts, this whole problem might start to look workable.

  According to their theory, the body was already dealing with the bacteria pretty rapidly anyway; maybe it was just a matter of speeding that process up even more, or, if not, of figuring out how to further strengthen those initial defenses.

  Bacterial virulence was a relatively well-established field, with some really good work already having been done for years on the ways in which each pathogen had its own tool kit of virulence factors that kept it alive and killing, and helped it bypass host barriers and protect itself from a body’s defense systems. Maybe all of that could now be brought to bear in a more useful way.

  She typed all of that to Danice, and it took a little while, and after she’d received no response for ten minutes or so, she texted Jerry, who texted back, Breathing went off the rails a little. More soon. And when she immediately called, to get more information, he didn’t answer.

  The Bell Jar

  It took a frantic forty minutes for Jeannine to get through to someone who spoke English at the hospital in Ililussat, and by the time she did, Jerry was calling her back.

  “She wants to talk to you,” he told her.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. “What’re you, the Master of Suspense? You type that to me and then disappear?”

  “Sorry,” he told her. “Things got a little involved here.”

  Jeannine sat where she’d been standing, in the hallway, against the wall, and calmed herself down. “What happened?” she asked.

  “I’ll catch you up on all of that later,” he said. “Here she is.”

  “Back from the dead,” Danice joked when she got on the line. She sounded a little better.

  “Oh my God, are you okay?” Jeannine asked. “You guys can’t scare me like that.”

  “Sure we can,” Danice told her. “I was scared myself.”

  “You all right now?” Jeannine asked.

  “For a little while I had a room to myself,” Danice answered. “While they were working on me.”

  “And not now?” Jeannine asked.

  “Now it’s back to Grand Central Station,” Danice said. She had a coughing fit. “Jesus and Mary,” she said when she finally finished.

  “Really hurts?” Jeannine asked.

  “The chest is really bad when you cough,” Danice told her. She cleared her throat loudly a couple of times, and then Jeannine could hear her taking a drink of something.

  “Have you heard from anyone in the Air National Guard?” Jeannine asked.

  Danice’s answer didn’t make any sense, and when Jeannine asked her to repeat herself, Danice apologized, and said that she could barely keep her head up.

  “Well, you should sleep, then,” Jeannine urged her. “We can talk afterward.”

  “Yeah, I should sleep,” Danice told her. “Leave your phone on?”

  “Absolutely,” Jeannine said.

  And even with everything else she had to deal with, she was aware of her phone all day, and kept checking to make sure the ringer was on. She was mostly emailing and texting, and was informed every so often of even more media craziness outside, and when she finally had to pack it in because of exhaustion, to give her a shot at getting out without being mobbed Hank made a show of bringing a number of people out to the front gate, which pulled the camera crews in that direction while Jeannine snuck out the gate for deliveries in the back. Someone had brought her car around and had it parked a couple of blocks away, and she took it to the new hotel to which she’d been moved. Her things were in paper bags waiting for her on the hotel room’s coffee table when she let herself in. She collapsed into bed without brushing her teeth and the phone woke her six hours later.

  It was after three in the morning. She didn’t do the math to figure out what it was for Danice.

  “Here’s some good news,” Danice said hoarsely. “It looks like our Marie Louisa has made a complete recovery.”

  “That is good news,” Jeannine said.

  “I’m so happy for her,” Danice said.

  “God, yes,” Jeannine agreed.

  “Not counting Ilimanaq, it looks like in most places the lethality rate is still holding steady about where we first figured it,” Danice said. “Like 39, 40 percent.”

  “How’re you?” Jeannine asked.

  “Who knows what was going on in Ilimanaq,” Danice said.

  “How’re you?” Jeannine repeated.

  “I had a dream I was in Carl Woese’s lab in the early ’70s,” Danice went on, as if to herself. “You remember reading about that lab?”

  “Vaguely,” Jeannine told her, rubbing her eyes.

  “I read about it when I was, I think, a sophomore,” Danice told her. “I thought it was so cool what they were doing with ribosomal RNA.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jeannine said. She sat up and turned on the bedside table lamp.

  “And then on top of that they were working with killer pathogens, and radioactive phosphorus, and whatever else, and just making up their safety procedures as they wen
t,” Danice said. “It was like a little girl’s dream.”

  Jeannine laughed a little. “Well, certain little girls,” she said.

  “When I was first thinking about the CDC, I was thinking of going into Foodborne,” Danice told her. “Did you know that?”

  “I didn’t,” Jeannine said.

  “It was the biggest branch,” Danice reminded her. “And I remember my mother telling me I wasn’t going to catch any diseases in Foodborne.”

  Jeannine put her hand over her eyes. It took Danice a minute to go on.

  “EIS must’ve been hard on you PhDs,” she told Jeannine.

  “It was,” Jeannine said, touched. Headlights from a car in the hotel parking lot spanned the length of her ceiling and then disappeared. “Academic hiring season was before government budgets were set. So you had to decide whether to take a university job before the CDC supervisors knew if they’d have one available for you.”

  “Sucks,” Danice commiserated. “Did you almost go somewhere else?”

  “Sure. Almost,” Jeannine said.

  There was some wheezing on the other end of the line, and then a breath. “Glad you didn’t,” Danice finally said.

  “Me too,” Jeannine told her.

  “What time is it there?” Danice asked, after a little while.

  “It’s not that late,” Jeannine told her.

  “So what is up with the mortality rate in Ilimanaq?” Danice asked. “It is so scary that we have no idea why it was so much higher there.”

  “I know. There’s a whole team that’s been working on that here,” Jeannine said. “At some point somebody’s going to have to go there. Right now the Danes have it on lockdown. I can’t say I blame them.”

  “It still hits me at times: the shock of that place,” Danice said.

  Jeannine felt the same way. “Yeah. Me too,” she said, after a minute. They were quiet together, thinking about it.

  “I don’t know what it is with me, but I never felt like I made a lot of good girlfriends over the years,” Danice told her.