Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  Ms Manigat says Virus-J is extra special in my body because even though I’m not sick any more, except for when I feel like I have a temperature and I have to lie down sometimes, the virus won’t go away. I can make other people sick even when I feel fine, so she said that makes me a carrier. Ms Manigat said Dr Ben doesn’t know anybody else who’s got well except for me.

  Oh, except maybe there are some little girls in China. Veronica told me once there were some little girls in China the same age as me who didn’t get sick either. But when I asked Dr Ben, he said he didn’t know if it was true. And Ms Manigat told me it might have been true once, but those girls might not be alive any more. I asked her if they died of Virus-J, and she said no, no, no. Three times. She told me to forget all about any little girls in China. Almost like she was mad.

  I’m the only one like me she knows about for sure, she says. The only one left.

  That’s why I’m here, she says. But I already knew that part. When I was little, Dr Ben told me about antibodies and stuff in my blood, and he said the reason him and Rene and Veronica and all the other doctors take so much blood from me all the time, until they make purple bruises on my arms and I feel dizzy, is so they can try to help other people get well, too. I have had almost ten surgeries since I have been here. I think they have even taken out parts of me, but I’m not really sure. I look the same on the outside, but I feel different on the inside. I had surgery on my belly a year ago, and sometimes when I’m climbing the play-rope hanging from the ceiling in my room, I feel like it hasn’t healed right, like I’m still cut open. Ms Manigat says that’s only in my mind. But it really hurts! I don’t hate anything like I hate operations. I wonder if that’s what happened to the other little girls, if I hey kept getting cut up and cut up until they died. Anyway, it’s been a year since I had any operations. I keep telling Dr Ben they can have as much blood as they want, but I don’t want any more operations, please.

  Dr Ben said there’s nobody in the world better than me to make people well, if only they can figure out how. Ms Manigat says the same thing. That makes me feel a little better about Virus-J.

  I was happy Ms Manigat told me all about disease, because I don’t want her to treat me like a baby the way everybody else does. That’s what I always tell her. I like to know things.

  I didn’t even cry when she told me Veronica died. Maybe I got all my crying over with in the beginning, because I figured out a long time ago nobody gets better once they get sick. Nobody except for me.

  November 14

  Today, I asked Ms Manigat how many people have Virus-J.

  “Oh, Jay, I don’t know,” she said. I don’t think she was in the mood to talk about disease.

  “Just guess,” I said.

  Ms Manigat thought for a long time. Then she opened her notebook and began drawing lines and boxes for me to see. Her picture looked like the tiny brown lines all over an oak-tree leaf. We had a tree called a live oak in our backyard, and my dad said it was more than a hundred years old. He said trees sometimes live longer than people do. And he was right, because I’m sure that tree is still standing in our yard even though my whole family is gone.

  “This is how it goes, Jay,” Ms Manigat said, showing me with her pencil-tip how one line branched down to the next. “People are giving it to each other. They don’t usually know they’re sick for two weeks, and by then they’ve passed it to a lot of other people. By now, it’s already been here four years, so the same thing that happened to your family is happening to a lot of families.”

  “How many families?” I asked again. I tried to think of the biggest number I could. “A million?”

  Ms Manigat shrugged just like Dr Ben would. Maybe that meant yes.

  I couldn’t imagine a million families, so I asked Ms Manigat if it happened to her family, too, if maybe she had a husband and kids and they got sick. But she said no, she was never married. I guess that’s true, because Ms Manigat doesn’t look that old. She won’t tell me her age, but she’s in her twenties, I think. Ms Manigat smiled at me, even though her eyes weren’t happy.

  “My parents were in Miami, and they got it right away,” Ms Manigat said. “Then my sister and nieces came to visit them from Haiti, and they got it, too. I was away working when it happened, and that’s why I’m still here.”

  Ms Manigat never told me that before.

  My family lived in Miami Beach. My dad said our house was too small—I had to share a room with my brother—but my mother liked where we lived because our building was six blocks from the ocean. My mother said the ocean can heal anything. But that can’t be true, can it?

  My mother wouldn’t like it where I am, because there is no ocean and no windows either. I wondered if Ms Manigat’s parents knew someone who worked on an oil rig, too, but probably not. Probably they got it from my dad and me.

  “Ms Manigat,” I said, “maybe you should move inside like Dr Ben and everybody else.”

  “Oh, Jay,” Ms Manigat said, like she was trying to sound cheerful. “Little old man, if I were that scared of anything, why would I be in here teaching you?”

  She said she asked to be my teacher, which I didn’t know. I said I thought her boss was making her do it, and she said she didn’t have a boss. No one sent her. She wanted to come.

  “Just to meet me?” I asked her.

  “Yes, because I saw your face on television, and you looked to me like a one-of-a-kind,” she said. She said she was a nurse before, and she used to work with Dr Ben in his office in Atlanta. She said they worked at the CDC, which is a place that studies diseases. And he knew her, so that was why he let her come teach me.

  “A boy like you needs his education. He needs to know how to face life outside,” she said.

  Ms Manigat is funny like that. Sometimes she’ll quit the regular lesson about presidents and the Ten Commandments and teach me something like how to sew and how to tell plants you eat from plants you don’t, and stuff. Like, I remember when she brought a basket with real fruits and vegetables in it, fresh. She said she has a garden where she lives on the outside, close to here. She said one of the reasons she won’t move inside is because she loves her garden so much, and she doesn’t want to leave it.

  The stuff she brought was not very interesting to look at. She showed me some cassava, which looked like a long, twisty tree branch to me, and she said it’s good to eat, except it has poison in it that has to be boiled out of the root first and the leaves are poisonous too. She also brought something called akee, which she said she used to eat from trees in Haiti. It has another name in Haiti that’s too hard for me to spell. It tasted fine to me, but she said akee can never be eaten before it’s opened, or before it’s ripe, because it makes your brain swell up and you can die. She also brought different kinds of mushrooms to show me which ones are good or bad, but they all looked alike to me. She promised to bring me other fruits and vegetables to see so I will know what’s good for me and what isn’t. There’s a lot to learn about life outside, she said.

  Well, I don’t want Ms Manigat to feel like I am a waste of her time, but I know for a fact I don’t have to face life outside. Dr Ben told me I might be a teenager before I can leave, or even older. He said I might even be a grown man.

  But that’s OK, I guess. I try not to think about what it would be like to leave. My room, which they moved me to when I had been here six months, is really, really big. They built it especially for me. It’s four times as big as the hotel room my mom and dad got for us when we went to Universal Studios in Orlando when I was five. I remember that room because my brother, Kevin, kept asking my dad, “Doesn’t this cost too much?” Every time my dad bought us a T-shirt or anything, Kevin brought up how much it cost. I told Kevin to stop it because I was afraid Dad would get mad and stop buying us stuff. Then, when we were in line for the King Kong ride, all by ourselves, Kevin told me, “Dad got fired from his job, stupid. Do you want to go on Welfare?” I waited for Dad and Mom to tell me he got fired, but t
hey didn’t. After Kevin said that, I didn’t ask them to buy me anything else, and I was scared to stay in that huge, pretty hotel room because I thought we wouldn’t have enough money to pay. But we did. And then Dad got a job on the oil rig, and we thought everything would be better.

  My room here is as big as half the whole floor I bet. When I run from one side of my room to the other, from the glass in front to the wall in back, I’m out of breath. I like to do that. Sometimes I run until my ribs start squeezing and my stomach hurts like it’s cut open and I have to sit down and rest. There’s a basketball net in here, too, and the ball doesn’t ever touch the ceiling except if I throw it too high on purpose. I also have comic books, and I draw pictures of me and my family and Ms Manigat and Dr Ben. Because I can’t watch my videos, now I spend a lot of time writing in this notebook. A whole hour went by already. When I am writing down my thoughts, I forget about everything else.

  I have decided for sure to be a doctor someday. I’m going to help make people better.

  November 29

  Thanksgiving was great! Ms Manigat cooked real bread and brought me food she’d heated up. I could tell everything except the bread and cassava was from a can, like always, but it tasted much better than my regular food. I haven’t had bread in a long time. Because of her mask, Ms Manigat ate her dinner before she came, but she sat and watched me eat. Rene came in, too, and she surprised me when she gave me a hug. She never does that. Dr Ben came in for a little while at the end, and he hugged me too, but he said he couldn’t stay because he was busy. Dr Ben doesn’t come visit me much any more. I could see he was growing a beard, and it was almost all white! I’ve seen Dr Ben’s hair when he’s outside of the glass, when he isn’t wearing his hot suit, and his hair is brown, not white. I asked him how come his beard was white, and he said that’s what happens when your mind is overly tired.

  I liked having everybody come to my room. Before, in the beginning, almost nobody came in, not even Ms Manigat. She used to sit in a chair outside the glass and use the intercom for my lessons. It’s better when they come in.

  I remember how Thanksgiving used to be, with my family around the table in the dining room, and I told Ms Manigat about that. Yes, she said, even though she didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Haiti like Americans do, she remembers sitting at the table with her parents and her sister for Christmas dinner. She said she came to see me today, and Rene and Dr Ben came too, because we are each other’s family now, so we are not alone. I hadn’t thought of it like that before.

  December 1

  No one will tell me, not even Ms M., but I think maybe Dr Ben is sick. I have not seen him in five whole days. It is quiet here. I wish it was Thanksgiving again.

  January 23

  I didn’t know this before, but you have to be in the right mood to write your thoughts down. A lot happened in the days I missed.

  The doctor with the French name is gone now, and I’m glad. He wasn’t like Dr Ben at all. I could hardly believe he was a real doctor, because he always had on the dirtiest clothes when I saw him take off his hot suit outside of the glass. And he was never nice to me—he wouldn’t answer at all when I asked him questions, and he wouldn’t look in my eyes except for a second. One time he slapped me on my ear, almost for nothing, and his glove hurt so much my ear turned red and was sore for a whole day. He didn’t say he was sorry, but I didn’t cry. I think he wanted me to.

  Oh yeah, and he hooked me up to IV bags and took so much blood from me I couldn’t even stand up. I was scared he would operate on me. Ms Manigat didn’t come in for almost a week, and when she finally came, I told her about the doctor taking too much blood. She got really mad. Then I found out the reason she didn’t come all those days—he wouldn’t let her! She said he tried to bar her from coming. Bar is the word she used, which sounds like a prison.

  The new doctor and Ms Manigat do not get along, even though they both speak French. I saw them outside of the glass, yelling back and forth and moving their hands, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I was afraid he would send Ms Manigat away for good. But yesterday she told me he’s leaving! I told her I was happy, because I was afraid he would take Dr Ben’s place.

  No, she told me, there isn’t anyone taking Dr Ben’s place. She said the French doctor came here to study me in person because he was one of the doctors Dr Ben had been sending my blood to ever since I first came. But he was already very sick when he got here, and he started feeling worse, so he had to go. Seeing me was his last wish, Ms Manigat said, which didn’t seem like it could be true because he didn’t act like he wanted to be with me.

  I asked her if he went back to France to his family, and Ms Manigat said no, he probably didn’t have a family, and even if he did, it’s too hard to go to France. The ocean is in the way, she said.

  Ms Manigat seemed tired from all that talking. She said she’d decided to move inside, like Rene, to make sure they were taking care of me properly. She said she misses her garden. The whole place has been falling apart, she said. She said I do a good job of keeping my room clean—and I do, because I have my own mop and bucket and Lysol in my closet—but she told me the hallways are filthy. Which is true, because sometimes I can see water dripping down the wall outside of my glass, a lot of it, and it makes puddles all over the floor. You can tell the water is dirty because you can see different colours floating on top, the way my family’s driveway used to look after my dad sprayed it with a hose. He said the oil from the car made the water look that way, but I don’t know why it looks that way here. Ms Manigat said the water smells bad, too.

  “It’s ridiculous, if they’re going to keep you here, they’d damn well better take care of you,” Ms Manigat said. She must have been really mad, because she never swears.

  I told her about the time when Lou came and pressed on my intercom really late at night, when I was asleep and nobody else was around. He was talking really loud like people do in videos when they’re drunk. Lou was glaring at me through the glass, banging on it. I had never seen him look so mean. I thought he would try to come into my room but then I remembered he couldn’t because he didn’t have a hot suit. But I’ll never forget how he said, They should put you to sleep like a dog at the pound.

  I try not to think about that night, because it gave me nightmares. It happened when I was pretty little, like eight. Sometimes I thought maybe I just dreamed it, because the next time Lou came he acted just like normal. He even smiled at me a little bit. Before he stopped coming here, Lou was nice to me every day after that.

  Ms Manigat did not sound surprised when I told her what Lou said about putting me to sleep. “Yes, Jay,” she told me, “for a long time, there have been people outside who didn’t think we should be taking care of you.”

  I never knew that before!

  I remember a long time ago, when I was really little and I had pneumonia, my mom was scared to leave me alone at the hospital. “They won’t know how to take care of Jay there,” she said to my dad, even though she didn’t know I heard her. I had to stay by myself all night, and because of what my mom said, I couldn’t go to sleep. I was afraid everyone at the hospital would forget I was there. Or maybe something bad would happen to me.

  It seems like the lights go off every other day now. And I know people must really miss Lou, because the dirty grey water is all over the floor outside my glass and there’s no one to clean it up.

  February 14

  6-4-6-7-2-9-4-3 6-4-6-7-2-9-4-3 6-4-6-7-2-9-4-3

  I remember the numbers already! I have been saying them over and over in my head so I won’t forget, but I wanted to write them down in the exact right order to be extra sure. I want to know them without even looking.

  Oh, I should start at the beginning. Yesterday, no one brought me any dinner, not even Ms Manigat. She came with a huge bowl of oatmeal this morning, saying she was very sorry. She said she had to look a long time to find that food, and it wore her out. The oatmeal wasn’t even hot, but I didn’t say an
ything. I just ate. She watched me eating.

  She didn’t stay with me long, because she doesn’t teach me lessons any more. After the French doctor left, we talked about the Emancipation Proclamation and Martin Luther King, but she didn’t bring that up today. She just kept sighing, and she said she had been in bed all day yesterday because she was so tired, and she was sorry she forgot to feed me. She said I couldn’t count on Rene to bring me food because she didn’t know where Rene was. It was hard for me to hear her talk through her hot suit today. Her mask was crooked, so the microphone wasn’t in front of her mouth where it should be.

  She saw my notebook and asked if she could look at it. I said sure. She looked at the pages from the beginning. She said she liked the part where I said she was my best friend. Her face-mask was fogging up, so I couldn’t see her eyes and I couldn’t tell if she was smiling. I am very sure she did not put her suit on right today.

  When she put my notebook down, she told me to pay close attention to her and repeat the numbers she told me, which were 6-4-6-7-2-9-4-3.

  I asked her what they were. She said it was the security code for my door. She said she wanted to give the code to me because my buzzer wasn’t working, and I might need to leave my room if she overslept and nobody came to bring me food. She told me I could use the same code on the elevator, and the kitchen was on the third floor. There wouldn’t be anybody there, she said, but I could look on the shelves, the top ones up high, to see if there was any food. If not, she said I should take the stairs down to the first floor and find the red EXIT sign to go outside. She said the elevator doesn’t go to the first floor any more.

  I felt scared then, but she put her hand on top of my head again just like usual. She said she was sure there was plenty of food outside.

  “But am I allowed?” I asked her. “What if people get sick?”

  “You worry so much, little man,” she said. “Only you matter now, my little one-of-a-kind.”