“Do you remember,” he asked William, who was seated in back of the chauffeur and watching the traffic (quite as though he’d been doing the driving himself), “a cartoonist called Saul Steinberg?”
“There was a financier called Saul Steinberg. I read an article in Fortune ten, twelve years ago.”
“There was a cartoonist by the same name. He was in The New Yorker a lot.”
“I remember The New Yorker. Anyhow, what about him?”
“He used to draw scenes of highways filled with cars that looked like crocodiles. I never got the point till just now.”
“And what’s the point?”
“ ‘His bones are tubes of bronze, and his limbs like bars of iron. He is the chief of God’s works, made to be a tyrant over his peers. If ever you lift your hand against him, think of the struggle that awaits you, and let be.’ That’s Jehovah’s view of crocodiles, and it fits the automobile perfectly, if you think of the highway as a kind of river. The way everyone accepts cars as a fatal necessity, and even admires them. It’s just the way God told Job to think of crocodiles. Steinberg was brilliant, he really was.”
“I thought you were against automobiles,” William said, turning sideways and inviting Ben to resume the argument that had been going on between them now for almost two decades, the argument about technology and where it would all lead.
“But that’s just it. One can’t be against automobiles, any more than one can be against crocodiles. Here we are a decade after the hole in the ozone layer was documented, and the greenhouse effect is a daily reality, and the cars are still on the road pumping more carbon into the atmosphere. ‘His nostrils pour forth smoke like a cauldron on a fire blown to full heat.’”
“That’s the crocodile again, I take it.”
Ben nodded. “Who was, if you think about it, the last surviving relative of the dinosaur. So in a way, the automobile is the dinosaur getting the last laugh. They’ve been refined to their irreducible molecular minimum, but they haven’t given up against the mammals.”
The Rolls was slowing down for no apparent reason, and William picked up the intercom to ask the chauffeur what the problem was. The chauffeur theorized it was a Public Health roadblock. William whispered, “Shit.”
Ben poured himself a second glass of wine and held the bottle up with a questioning look to William, who nodded his assent.
Outside, in the ninety-four-degree heat, the traffic snarled to a complete stop. A bold teenager alone in the backseat of a Honda began combing her hair, using as her mirror the Rolls window through which Ben watched. She seemed an allegory of youth, its genuine, ingenuous assumption that all the world reflects its own bland values. It did not occur to her that there might be someone behind her mirror, studying her. Once, in Ben’s own youth, the entire country had seemed like that. He still remembered the tune though not the exact words of the wonderful ad from the seventies about wanting to give the whole world a Coke. And why not? It was a realizable hope. Let them drink Coke!
“What’s so funny?” William asked glumly.
“I was thinking about Marie Antoinette.”
“Guillotines amuse you?”
“There won’t be any guillotines for us. If Senator Burton had made his stink two years ago when the project was first proposed we might be in trouble. Now there are simply too many others involved. We have achieved full bureaucratic inertia, we are unstoppable. That’s the beauty of being an institution instead of a person.”
Ben was spared from having to produce any more positive thinking by the appearance at the chauffeur’s window of a white and tan uniformed PHA officer, who explained that the Public Health Authority was conducting a random sampling, and that the riders in every seventh car had to submit to a blood test. The chauffeur tried to explain that such rules didn’t apply to Dr. William Michaels. The officer was adamant.
William rapped on the window and told the chauffeur to yield to the inevitable.
The PHA officer directed their car over to the right, where the Rolls took its place in line just behind the Honda with the blond girl in the backseat. The PHA van where the blood tests were being administered was fifty yards ahead. One of the intervening vehicles was a school bus full of kids.
“We are going to be here an hour, minimum,” Ben observed.
William sighed a philosophic sigh. “I can’t complain: I was on the board that drew up the guidelines for operations like this. The more holes you allow in a net, the less effective the net will be, it stands to reason.”
“At least we’ve got air-conditioning. If Judith were with us, she’d want us to turn it off out of respect for the ozone layer.”
“It’s too late to worry about the ozone layer.”
Ben went him one better: “It’s too late to worry about the atmosphere.”
“Or the rain forests,” William added.
“Or whales.”
“Not to mention several hundred varieties of phytoplankton.”
“You read about that one, too? That sounds like the scariest so far, if it’s true. Half the known species of algae in the Antarctic are dying off—half!”
“Now that’s the pessimistic way of looking at it. An optimist would say that half of them have survived.”
Ben laughed and lofted the bottle. “Your glass is half empty. But now”—he poured—“it’s full.”
Ben leaned back and regarded the sere grass at the road’s edge as though it were emblematic of what they had been discussing. Which, quite possibly, it was: the corn belt was well on its way to becoming an extension of the badlands, the topsoil drying up in the dry summers and blowing away in dust storms that were slowly scouring the earth down to bedrock. The world was coming to an end just like his crazy grandson was always saying.
“You’ve got to look on the bright side,” William said in a tone of considered equanimity.
“Right,” Ben agreed. “Where is it?”
“In a way, we’re in the middle of it right now, as we wait in this line. What is the basic problem, after all? The basic problem is too many people. It’s people, billions of people, who burn the coal and gas and forests, too many people. The only long-term solution to the overall problem is to reduce the level of the population to what it was about a hundred years ago, a hundred million tops.”
“Oh God, another deep ecologist. Spare me.”
“No, not in a political sense. No society will ever be convinced to trim its own numbers to a half or a quarter of what they are now. But ARVIDS, potentially, is the ultimate Malthusian equalizer.”
“Unless a cure is found—Dr. Michaels.”
“That’s what I meant by potentially.”
“Does that mean you’re in favor of the disease? If so, please don’t ever discuss this topic in front of a TV camera. We can survive Senator Burton. We couldn’t survive that.”
William gave a wince of annoyance. “Every doctor has a kind of vested interest in disease, just as dentists thrive on tooth decay.”
“Do you know, there are some people, including my grandson’s guru, Brother Orson, who think that ARVIDS has been custom-designed by genetic engineers for just these reasons, that the government decided ten years ago to institute its own covert population-control program.”
“There were people who thought the same thing about AIDS,” William noted. “And that actually makes more sense, since the people who would have implemented such a policy would not have been putting themselves at risk. ARVIDS, on the other hand, doesn’t confine itself to marginal social classes. It’s as democratic as the Black Death. It would take a fanatically principled leadership to let loose an epidemic that was as liable to kill them as anyone else. No, if ARVIDS was engineered, the engineer had to be someone who had it in for the human race right across the board. Someone, I suppose, like God.”
“Which takes us right back where we started, to the Book of Job. Or how I learned to stop worrying and love…” Ben paused to see if William would hit the ball back.
/> “The crocodile.”
“Exactly,” Ben said.
At just the moment there was a gunshot. Ben looked up in time to see the blond girl who had been sitting in the Honda running in front of the Rolls. There was a second shot that shattered the limo’s windshield and the front seat window on the passenger side. The chauffeur began to moan. Ben crouched down behind the bar. There was a third shot and a fourth, and a crashing sound that made the car shake. Ben peeked up over the front seat to see what had happened. The PHA officer who had made them pull over had jumped onto the hood of the Rolls to take aim at the girl who was running away. His fifth shot connected. The girl collapsed into the yellow grass beside the road.
The chauffeur continued moaning.
66
Sgt. Janet Beale looked down at the limp body of the protester with a familiar rush of satisfaction and fear. Satisfaction for the obvious reason. Fear because any time you had to incapacitate someone in the line of duty you were inviting an inquiry, and an inquiry could always go the wrong way. This guy had said he was a doctor, and he’d been riding in a limo so he probably hadn’t been bullshitting. Who but a doctor would go out of his way to become involved with someone shot down trying to escape a PHA checkpoint? It was a complex they had that made them look for trouble, and then when they found themselves in trouble, it was always the same story, “I’m an M.D., you can’t arrest me, I was following my Hippocratic oath.” Well, they could follow it all the way to Evaluation & Detention and on to the camps, as far as Sgt. Beale was concerned. Doctors weren’t any better than anyone else. They could come down with ARVIDS as quick as the next person, and this doctor had got blood on his hands from the girl who’d been shot, so there was every chance he’d been infected. The stupid asshole.
To make matters worse, the asshole had panicked when he’d seen the chauffeur and the other passenger from his limo being driven off in a police car. He’d starting yelling at Sgt. Beale and then tried to push her aside from the door of the shed, and when he wouldn’t obey a simple command to desist, she had been obliged to use a choke hold.
This was not the first time Sgt. Beale had faced a possible charge of using excessive force. Fortunately there were no witnesses. The incident had taken place inside the PHA detention shed while the guy had been waiting for the results of his blood test. Though he must have realized that whatever the results were, he was on a greased slide to E & D, since the girl’s blood was all over him. And she’d been saturated with ARVIDS. The guy had only himself to blame for the fix he was in, and Sgt. Beale could see no good reason why she should take any heat for what had happened.
What she must do now was a simple matter of routing her problem to the farthest possible bureaucratic distance from herself. Beginning with ID.
She went through his pockets and was happy to discover that William Michaels (that was the name on all his plastic) did not live on credit alone. She took five of the six crisp hundred-dollar bills, leaving the sixth for Larry, who drove the meat wagon. Then she disposed of the billfold and assorted scraps of paper in the pyrolyzer. She didn’t bother taking the watch, even though it was a good one. Likewise a ring and a fancy fountain pen. It had become more trouble than it was worth to unload that kind of junk. No matter what the experts said about how such things weren’t contagious, fences were about as interested in secondhand jewelry as in old underwear.
Then the paperwork. What mistake could be more natural than writing him up as M. Williams instead of W. Michaels? She printed the reversed name on a yellow and black band and fastened it to his wrist. Larry’s first drop was at Como Hospital Admissions. With a yellow and black band around the guy’s wrist, and without instructions to the contrary on the envelope attached to the stretcher, it would be a natural enough mistake to leave him at Como instead of at E & D, where there were always do-gooders (the so-called ombudsmen) going around looking for trouble. At Como he’d be processed like anyone else.
In the register, however, Sgt. Beale noted that M. Williams was being sent to E & D and she used Pvt. Cullen’s key and code number to log it in, Pvt. Cullen having conveniently left these at her disposal when he’d panicked after killing the girl, his first such experience in the line of duty. Now, even if there was fallout from leaving the guy off at Como, it would be the driver who got blamed, not Cullen and certainly not herself.
Larry arrived with the meat wagon at half past six. Sgt. Beale helped load the girl’s black-bagged body into what had been the luggage compartment in the wagon’s first incarnation as an interstate carrier. Then they hauled “M. Williams,” strapped to a stretcher, into the wagon and slotted him into a middle berth.
Seven other berths were filled, a couple of them being obviously symptomatic cases.
“Busy day?” Sgt. Beale asked, when they were back outside the wagon and had peeled off the black plastic snouts you had to wear whenever you were handling meat.
“So-so. There was a pickup at a school this morning. Kids are always a pisser. You can’t sedate the whole lot of them, so you just got to put up with the hollering.”
“You know if you’ve got any darts left it wouldn’t be a bad idea to give this jerk another dose. He was a real hell-raiser when we pulled him over.”
“Will do.”
“Have a good run.”
After Larry had driven off with the bodies, Sgt. Beale poured herself a cup of decaf and rolled her neck around five times clockwise and then in reverse to take out the tension. Then, because the phone log was one of the first things they checked when there was an inquiry, she called the number on the card she’d taken from the breast pocket of the man’s suit.
She was in luck: after the fourth ring, a machine answered and said she’d reached the number she’d dialed and to leave a message at the beep. At the beep she held the receiver up to the speaker the Muzak came out of and left the doctor’s machine a minute of cheery polka music.
The rest of the work was routine, cleaning up, shutting down, peeling off and disposing of her protective underuniform. Sgt. Beale generally followed the procedures as they were set down, since their purpose was to protect her from the possibility of contagion. She was not such a fanatic, though, that she was about to put the day’s windfall of $500 into the pyrolyzers. None of the PHA guards she’d ever known were that scrupulous in following the rule book.
By seven o’clock she was done, and by eight she was home with a big bucket of fried chicken and all of the extras. She dished up the chicken and potatoes and slaw and then joined the kids in front of the TV. She let them watch their Star Trek cartoon through to the end, but then she insisted on tuning to the religion channel and watching that. Sgt. Beale wasn’t particularly religious herself, but she believed religion was something kids should have, like milk.
At eleven o’clock she turned in, having smoothed the way to sleep with a pint of blackberry brandy.
When the children went into her bedroom the next morning, summoned by the nonstop ringing of the alarm clock, they found their mother on her back in the rumpled bed, staring at the ceiling through tears that welled up and pooled at the sides of her eyes and trickled down into her tightly braided hair. She wouldn’t move, and nothing they said to her seemed to register. Later the social worker would explain to them that the reason she couldn’t move was because she had had a stroke in the middle of the night. But he assured them it wasn’t ARVIDS, and that was a great relief, since they had always expected that because of her job their mother would eventually come down with the plague and they would all be sent to the State Fairgrounds and put into quarantine and die.
67
There was a child seated on the steps of Medical Defense Systems, a boy no older than his own sons. He was playing with a radio-controlled turtle, making it emit nuts onto the sidewalk, then backing it off a little way, daring the squirrels to go after the nuts and, when they tried, sending the turtle to attack them at its top speed. On the sidewalk the turtle was almost as fast as the squirrels, but it
could only inch along through the grass, so eventually the squirrels got all the nuts the turtle produced.
He was dressed in the unwary T-shirted style of only a decade ago, but the skin his clothing left exposed to the sunlight had the creamy, protected pallor of a child of the present fin de siècle, whom direct sunlight has no chance to tan.
The boy looked up at William with eyes as black, and a gaze as intent, as the squirrels’ he was teasing.—Hi there, Dr. Michaels. What are you doing up so early?
William knew that he knew the boy from somewhere but couldn’t think where.
The boy smiled in a mischievous way, biting the tip of his tongue. His lips and tongue were the bright, unnatural ripe cherry of red dye number two.—Have you forgotten my name?
William had to admit that he had.
—That’s all right. It’ll come back. He pointed the zapper at the turtle, which emitted, this time, not a nut but an inch-long brown turd. Then the turtle slowly lifted its head to take in William’s reaction.
THE M.D. A Horror Story Page 41
