The Blue Death

by Joan Brady

  ‘They go straight out to the prisons?’

  ‘Now how’d you guess that?’

  The Warden had explained to David that his ‘arrangement’ with Wolfie to supply drugs went via this Jane Doe and that he didn’t know her real name either. He’d assured her that David wholly approved the arrangement, was interested only in unrelated medical matters and would pay well for the information.

  ‘Now tell me what happened at South Hams in June and July,’ David said.

  ‘You said this kid was at the Heights.’

  ‘There was an outbreak of “gastroenteritis” that wasn’t really gastroenteritis.’

  She paused. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Sure you do.’

  This time the pause was long; he could feel her weighing options. ‘That’s what you’re here for?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I really hate this job.’ At least it was anger rather than sarcasm this time. ‘But after you do it for a while you get a feel for the software. “Member service language” has its own style. You learn what should come up, what won’t. Protocols involving South Hams in June and July were way out of line. Right in the “transfer box” – you know, the patient’s location and stuff – a pop-up stated that the option of a doctor wasn’t available. The option of an ambulance wasn’t either. That’s never happened before. Never. Then came up the protocol for “gastroenteritis” as the chief complaint before I’d had a chance to type in anything, then home-care instructions that made no sense at all: “take faecal samples every four hours”. I’ve never run across such an instruction before either. That is—’ She stopped short.

  ‘“That is” what?’ he prompted.

  ‘Premier holds a group insurance policy for almost everybody in a town called Cawkerville. Very tiny place. Family business of some kind, way out in the Illinois cornfields. And back in early spring, I took a call from there. That’s the only other time the “gastroenteritis” protocol popped up before I’d entered the chief complaint. But that time, a pop-up box said a doctor was on the way.’

  ‘What about ambulances?’

  ‘For Cawkerville? Nope. “Option not available.” Can I have the money now?’

  He tossed the envelope on the counter, turned to leave, then turned back.

  ‘Tell me something. Who owns Premier?’

  ‘One of those vast conglomerates. St Louis, I think.’

  ‘UCAI?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  51

  CAWKERVILLE, ILLINOIS: That afternoon

  The drive should have taken only four hours, but David had to stop so often to throw up by the side of the road that it was twilight when he hit Cawkerville. Springfield Fever? He didn’t know, felt too sick to care.

  He saw the sign for the town – he was sure of that much – but the town itself was hazy around the edges. He pulled over, pressed his fingers over his eyes in an attempt to make them focus. What they seemed to see when he opened them again was a grizzled face and long white hair underneath a flamingo-pink baseball cap.

  ‘Howdy, stranger, you look mighty peaked to me.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, George’ – an old woman’s quaver – ‘cut the hillbilly crap. Let’s just get this guy inside.’

  David couldn’t have resisted the two old people even if he’d wanted to. They manoeuvred him out of the car, across a dusty street, through a door and onto a flat surface. The sleep mechanism is breakable. David’s had broken within a few months of his life sentence and it hadn’t got any better outside, except for the occasional fluke. Two hours was about his maximum; twilight had barely turned into night when the old man’s hand was beneath his head and a mug of something hot was at his lips.

  And then it was magically somewhere around noon. The light through the window showed that. It also showed he was lying beneath the fronds of a brilliant green palm tree painted on the ceiling. A tangle of painted vines in blue, green, purple, shared the walls with butterflies, birds and flowers on stalks. A path of crocodile scales in yellow and red wove through all this – the ceiling too – and across the floor.

  The old man stood over him. ‘You’re better today,’ he said.

  ‘No “hillbilly crap”?’ David asked. He was as comfortable as a cat in front of a fire after Sunday lunch, stomach, eyes, head – everything – in a state of bliss.

  ‘Wasn’t sure you’d remember arriving. Been to Gary, huh? Bad place.’

  ‘How’d you know?’

  ‘You got a map in your car. Gary used to make my mother sick like that. Maybe not quite so bad as you. You really got to stay away from pollution, know that?’

  ‘I like the treatment.’

  ‘Just a little home brew. You been out near enough to two days, boy. Gave us plenty of time to establish you weren’t a fed.’

  David tried to focus on the old man. The flamingo-pink cap said ‘Grandpa’ on it. ‘Where’d you get that idea?’

  ‘You hungry? You probably don’t know, do you? Take it from me, you’re hungry. Can you stand? Almost, huh? Steady now. Here we go.’

  The old man supported him into another room as brilliantly painted as the one he’d left; an entire menagerie paraded around the walls, across the floor and up again towards the fronds of a purple-coloured palm tree on the ceiling. ‘This is Grandma,’ he said, nodding at an old woman with hair as long and as white as his.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, George, my name’s Margaret. I hate being called “Grandma”. You’re David. Hello, David. You’re still pretty high from the looks of you, but you need food even so.’

  David slept again.

  When he woke it was evening, and he felt more rested than he had in years. He wore a long nightgown; his clothes had been tossed haphazardly at a chair painted with zodiacal signs. He could hear laughing and talking in the other room; he dressed and went to join them. Four people sat around the table, another man and woman as old as Margaret and George. Both wore brightly coloured clothes and beads.

  ‘Sit down, David,’ Margaret said. ‘Meet Popeye and Olive.’ Popeye got up and shook David’s hand. Olive embraced him. She must have been very pretty a long time ago. ‘God knows why they want to be known by such stupid names,’ Margaret went on. ‘That’s Polly and Cerise over there.’ She pointed at two old women, cuddled in each other’s arms and dead to the world. ‘They’ve been in love for near onto fifty years.’

  ‘What are you people?’ David asked. ‘Some kind of retirement home?’

  All four laughed uproariously, but when they calmed down, Margaret frowned and said, ‘You know, he’s right. Jesus. Fuck it all. Christ. That’s just what we are. Our kids grew up. They’re long gone now, and we’re all as old as God. We just never got around to leaving. Or to growing up.’

  ‘You got around to the farming though,’ David said.

  ‘Seemed natural.’

  Smells had dominated everything in David’s life for days, and it was the smell that had given them away: hay, grass, pine; flowers, citrus, metal; musty, musky, earthy; like skunk if it’s old. Each kind of marijuana has its own smell, and there was variety in the air. As the director of the Insiders’ drug trade, David was used to evaluating the various weeds as well as the various narcotics and chemical brews that float on the market either briefly or for good. But he’d never paid a great deal of attention to how any of it came into being – had no idea what the plants looked like.

  George glanced up at the fronds above him. ‘This here’s Purple Haze. Seen from a bug’s view of course. In the other room, it’s Power Skunk.’

  ‘Not palm trees after all,’ David said.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘How do you manage? You’re right out in the open.’

  The words came straight out of a 1960s soundtrack. ‘Hey, dude, you got to get your mind in the groove. We’re in the business of love and freedom.’ But the 1960s argot dropped away just as the hillbilly had. ‘When morphine won’t kill the pain, we can.
Lot of sick people out there. We got customers with muscular dystrophy, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis. Then, sure, maybe their kids want to get high. Maybe college people need escape from the jungle, and maybe the profits from marijuana just don’t seem high enough to interest the CIA. At least not so far. But times are getting tough. Which is why we worried you might be a fed. Anyhow, I’m going to be kind of sorry if Illinois legalizes the stuff. What I don’t get is why a guy like you is sniffing around.’

  Margaret served a meal of beans and chilli, and David explained that he was following an erratic trail of outbreaks of a poorly explained gastroenteritis that seemed to resemble Springfield Fever. He didn’t mention UCAI or how he’d found out about the outbreaks in Cawkerville, nor did he go into South Hams’ troubles. There was a pause when he finished.

  ‘You spent a long time inside,’ George said then.

  David nodded. ‘There was some publicity when I got out.’

  ‘Never see the papers. But prison tattoos are pretty obvious. Prison-pumped bodies too. And all them scars. But you ain’t telling us the truth.’

  ‘Not all of it.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Then I got nothing to say to you.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, George,’ Margaret said. ‘He’s on the level. I know that. Popeye and Olive know it. You know it too. You’re the one talked to his wife, and we all know there’s something funny going on.’

  Today’s old people of Cawkerville were the young and wild of 1960s San Francisco. A bunch of them had settled here to do what hippies did: live free, love free and stay high. Most were college educated and middle class; the one secret they’d kept from each other and from themselves was that their commune couldn’t have survived without money from their parents.

  But they’d found they enjoyed raising and tending the plants, harvesting and trimming flowers and leaves; and they’d acquired a reputation. For fifty years, the local cops had turned a blind eye in exchange for some of the produce and, as George said, the CIA didn’t seem interested. Meantime, all that free living and loving produced a crop of kids who grew up to become accountants and bankers, leaving some thirty old people behind, and there’s nothing like old age to give a person an appreciation of modern medicine. Diabetes, emphysema, osteoporosis: it had come as a shock to find out that cannabis wouldn’t take care of all the body’s problems. People their age should have been entitled to Medicare, but none of these people had ever held a job or paid tax. None had even bothered with anything as bourgeois as a Social Security number, which meant they had no access to government programmes, medical or otherwise. More and more of their budget was going on doctors and hospitals.

  Then one day, an insurance salesman appeared. A man in a suit. Nobody in Cawkerville trusted the men in suits that their parents had been and that their children had become, but this one offered them a Group Insurance Plan with Premier, Inc, and it came with a year’s free trial. They thought, what the hell? What’s there to lose? What impressed them most, even while they mocked themselves for it, was that Premier was linked to the highly reputable corporation UCAI of St Louis.

  The coverage was straight from an aging pot-head’s dream. Premier gave every member of the commune a thorough physical. They prescribed diuretics for Popeye’s high blood pressure and insulin for Margaret’s diabetes; they arranged surgery for a clot in George’s left leg. The nursing staff at the call centre were helpful and encouraging. They often put Cawkerville residents straight through to a doctor, who urged them to call if anything seemed wrong and explained that Premier could help with many practical problems if they concerned health. That’s why we didn’t think twice about calling them when the water went funny,’ Olive said. ‘We realized we shouldn’t drink it, but some of us already had. We were sure it was going to make us sick.’

  ‘When was that?’ David asked.

  ‘Maybe eighteen months ago.’

  ‘Two years,’ said Popeye.

  George dismissed the other two with a contemptuous wave of the hand. ‘At least four years.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, George,’ Margaret said, ‘you spend too much time high to get any kind of timing right.’

  ‘Anyhow,’ Olive went on irritably, ‘they sent a nurse right over to check us all out, and they brought supplies of bottled water. Nobody did get sick or anything, but she seemed really concerned. And the second time—’

  ‘It happened twice?’ David interrupted.

  ‘Oh, yes. The second time – that was early this year – several of us got really sick, very, very sick, and three—’ Olive broke off abruptly, stifled a sob, tried to pull herself together, couldn’t.

  ‘Diarrhoea, vomiting, prostration, coughing,’ George said. ‘Jesus, old people are disgusting enough without all that, and those three . Premier sent out a doctor and loads of equipment. Ran lots of tests. Doctor said it was gastroenteritis or stomach flu or some goddamned thing. Nothing to do with the water. We aren’t exactly hygienic – as he pointed out – so most likely it was a wildcat bug that our lifestyle let in. But they took really good care of us. It’s just that those three . They spewed out their guts and—’

  ‘They turned blue,’ Olive interrupted. ‘I’ve had some wild trips in my life, but this was real. They turned this ugly blue colour, and then they died. And then . ’

  ‘“And then” what?’ David prompted.

  Olive only shook her head; George took up the tale. ‘We were sent compensation for the dead guys. Now we know we’re pretty remote when it comes to the ways of the world, but that seemed a little weird even to us. We do see ourselves as sisters and brothers, but it’s hardly the way authorities of any kind see us. We started thinking that no insurance company is that nice, and then somebody suggested it was a pay-off—’

  ‘Not just somebody,’ Popeye interrupted. ‘It was Aloysia.’

  David was sure he couldn’t have heard the name right. ‘Who?’ he said.

  ‘Aloysia. English bird. Forgot her last name—’

  ‘Gonzaga?’ David said.

  ‘That’s the one,’ George said. ‘Know her, do you? Smart lady and a new customer but a good one and she—’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, George, she hasn’t shown up in months.’ Margaret turned to David. ‘She just happened to come for a supply when the bad bout began. She took one look at us and seemed mad as hell. We knew she was medical in some kind of way, not sure what, but we needed all the help we could get. She took lots of samples. Oh, Christ, though, she didn’t think much of the Premier doctor.’

  ‘They met?’ David asked.

  ‘She told him he was an idiot. She told him the symptoms couldn’t be whatever he said they were. Plainly the water was what was making us sick, and she sure as fuck was going to do something about it. Then I took her out to the well house and she collected some more samples. That’s when she said, “Compensation? You can’t be that silly. They’re paying you not to make a fuss.” I mean, fuck it all, how could we make a fuss? We don’t exist. When I told her that, all she said was “Precisely.”’

  Aloysia hadn’t said anything about any of this to David. Not that she’d had that much of a chance. But Quack certainly had. ‘Waterborne,’ he’d said of the outbreaks in Springfield as well as South Hams. He’d also said whatever it was couldn’t be gastroenteritis. And a ‘well house’ might sound like where the non-sick kept themselves, but David knew it was where their water came from. That’s why Aloysia would have wanted to see it.

  ‘Can you show me the well house?’ he asked Margaret.

  The Cawkerville well house was a small structure at the edge of town that could have served for public toilets or an electrical utility of some kind. There was a fence around it, but no sign on the door.

  ‘Any idea where the water comes from?’ David asked Margaret.

  ‘Mahomet Aquifer – the biggest underground reservoir in the Midwest. It’s a major reason why we settled here.’

&n
bsp; ‘Where’d she take the samples?’

  Margaret took him inside the structure. If David had known about the description that got Brittany and Lamar Bryant burned to a crisp by their air conditioner, he couldn’t have characterized what he saw better: a clunky, crude mechanism very like a cast-off industrial ice-cream maker or an espresso machine from Starbucks sat in a puddle of rust on a concrete plinth.

  ‘What is it?’ David asked.

  ‘It’s a pump.’

  ‘A pump?’

  ‘You got to pump the water up out of the ground, child. What did you have in mind? Us old folk reeling in buckets on a rope?’

  52

  CHAMPAIGN-URBANA: Tuesday

  For some bugs there are well-worked-up systems to match specimens to known strains. Cryptosporidium parvum the species that Springfield Fever belonged to – isn’t one of them.

  To see one in a sample, you smear faeces over a glass slide, stain and examine under a microscope. What shows under high magnification is a scatter of perfect little spheres. They’re called oocysts, and each is a heavily armoured egg containing dark internal structures that promise life. The armour works too. It protects cryptosporidium even from chlorine in a water-treatment plant; not that outbreaks of the disease it causes are as uncommon as they ought to be. You’d also see ‘ghosts’ on your slide – ‘ghosts’ is actually the term microbiologists use – similar in size to the armoured blobs but without any structures inside. Just empty armour? The sign of a resolving infection? Nobody’s sure.

  But if you can’t identify your bug quickly, you have to start serious investigations; and this was clearly an unusual strain. There’d been blood in some of the Springfield samples sent to the lab, and some patients had died of kidney failure: not cryptosporidium parvum ’s style. To this day, scientists verify a bug’s credentials with a system that dates back to 1882 and a German called Koch who first identified the tuberculosis bug. Grow the sample in a culture, inject it into an animal, see if it produces the symptoms, extract it, grow it again in a culture and match the second growth to the first. But cryptosporidium parvum is notoriously difficult to grow. Not even Prof Richard Stands, Champaign-Urbana’s eminent microbiologist and television personality, could get his sample to do anything but lie there. Nor could any of the other labs.