The Body Human

by Nancy Kress

  “And I’m telling you it does. We need you, Eliz…Betty. You live next door to Dan and Ceci. You can tell us when they leave the house, who comes to it, anything suspicious you see. We’re not a vigilante group, Betty, like they are. We aren’t doing anything illegal. We don’t kill people, and we don’t blow up bridges, and we don’t threaten people like the Nordstrums who get endozine for their sick kids but are basically uneducated blue collar—”

  She stops. Jack and I are basically uneducated blue collar. I say coldly, “I can’t help you, Sylvia.”

  “I’m sorry, Betty. That wasn’t what I meant. Look, this is more important than anything that happened a decade and a half ago! Don’t you understand?” She leans toward me across the table. “The whole country’s caught in this thing. It’s already a public health crisis as big as the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, and it’s only just started! Drug-resistant bacteria can produce a new generation every twenty minutes, they can swap resistant genes not only within a species but across different species. The bacteria are winning. And people like the Moores are taking advantage of that to contribute further to the breakdown of even basic social decency.”

  In high school Sylvia had been on the debating team. But so, in that other life, had I. “If the Moores’ group is trying to keep endozine from being used, then aren’t they also fighting against the development of more drug-resistant bacteria? And if that’s so, aren’t they the ones, not you, who are ultimately aiding the country’s public health?”

  “Through dynamiting. And intimidation. And murder. Betty, I know you don’t approve of those things. I wouldn’t be here telling you about our countergroup if I thought you did. Before I came here, we looked very carefully at you. At the kind of person you are. Are now. You and your husband are law-abiding people, you vote, you make a contribution to the Orphans of AIDS Fund, you—”

  “How did you know about that? That’s supposed to be a secret contribution!”

  “—you signed the petition to protect the homeless from harassment. Your husband served on the jury that convicted Paul Keene of fraud, even though his real-estate scheme was so good for the economy of Emerton. You—”

  “Stop it,” I say. “You don’t have any right to investigate me like I was some criminal!”

  Only, of course, I was. Once. Not now. Sylvia’s right about that—Jack and I believe in law and order, but for different reasons. Jack because that’s what his father believed in, and his grandfather. Me, because I learned in Bedford that enforced rules are the only thing that even halfway restrains the kind of predators Sylvia James never dreamed of. The kind I want kept away from my children.

  Sylvia says, “We have a lot of people on our side, Betty. People who don’t want to see this town slide into the same kind of violence there is in Albany and Syracuse and, worst case, New York.”

  A month ago, New York Hospital in Queens was blown up. The whole thing, with a series of coordinated timed bombs. Seventeen hundred people dead in less than a minute.

  “It’s a varied group,” she continues. “Some town leaders, some housewives, some teachers, nearly all the medical personnel at the hospital. All people who care what happens to Emerton.”

  “Then you’ve got the wrong person here,” I say, and it comes out harsher than I want to reveal. “I don’t care about Emerton.”

  “You have reasons,” Sylvia says evenly. “And I’m part of your reasons, I know. But I think you’ll help us, Elizabeth. I know you must be concerned about your son—we’ve all observed what a good mother you are.”

  So she brought up Sean’s name first. I say, “You’re wrong again, Sylvia. I don’t need you to protect Sean, and if you’ve let him get involved in helping you, you’ll wish you’d never been born. I’ve worked damn hard to make sure that what happened seventeen years ago never touches him. He doesn’t need to get mixed up in any way with your ‘medical personnel at the hospital.’ And Sean sure the hell doesn’t owe this town anything, there wasn’t even anybody who would take him in after my aunt died, he had to go to—”

  The look on her face stops me. Pure surprise. And then something else.

  “Oh my God,” she says. “Is it possible you don’t know? Hasn’t Sean told you?”

  “Told me what?” I stand up, and I’m seventeen years old again, and just that scared. Sylvia-and-Elizabeth.

  “Your son isn’t helping our side. He’s working for Dan Moore and Mike Dyer. They use juveniles because if they’re caught, they won’t be tried as severely as adults. We think Sean was one of the kids they used to blow up the bridge over the river.”

  I look first at the high school. Sean isn’t there; he hadn’t even shown up for homeroom. No one’s home at his friend Tom’s house, or at Keith’s. He isn’t at the Billiard Ball or the Emerton Diner or the American Bowl. After that, I run out of places to search.

  This doesn’t happen in places like Emerton. We have fights at basketball games and grand theft auto and smashed store windows on Halloween and sometimes a drunken tragic car crash on prom night. But not secret terrorists, not counter-terrorist vigilante groups. Not in Emerton.

  Not with my son.

  I drive to the factory and make them page Jack.

  He comes off the line, face creased with sweat and dirt. The air is filled with clanging machinery and grinding drills. I pull him outside the door, where there are benches and picnic tables for workers on break. “Betty! What is it?”

  “Sean,” I gasp. “He’s in danger.”

  Something shifts behind Jack’s eyes. “What kind of danger?”

  “Sylvia Goddard came to see me today. Sylvia James. She says Sean is involved with the group that blew up the bridge, the ones who are trying to get Emerton Memorial closed, and…and killed Dr. Bennett.”

  Jack peels off his bench gloves, taking his time. Finally he looks up at me. “How come that bitch Sylvia Goddard comes to you with this? After all this time?”

  “Jack! Is that all you can think of? Sean is in trouble!”

  He says gently, “Well, Bets, it was bound to happen sooner or later, wasn’t it? He’s always been a tough kid to raise. Rebellious. Can’t tell him anything.”

  I stare at Jack.

  “Some people just have to learn the hard way.”

  “Jack…this is serious! Sean might be involved in terrorism! He could end up in jail!”

  “Couldn’t ever tell him anything,” Jack says, and I hear the hidden satisfaction in his voice, that he doesn’t even know is there. Not his son. Dr. Randy Satler’s son. Turning out bad.

  “Look,” Jack says, “when the shift ends I’ll go look for him, Bets. Bring him home. You go and wait there for us.” His face is gentle, soothing. He really will find Sean, if it’s possible. But only because he loves me.

  My sudden surge of hatred is so strong I can’t even speak.

  “Go on home, Bets. It’ll be all right. Sean just needs to have the nonsense kicked out of him.”

  I turn and walk away. At the turning in the parking lot, I see Jack walking jauntily back inside, pulling on his gloves.

  I drive home, because I can’t think what else to do. I sit on the couch and reach back in my mind, for that other place, the place I haven’t gone to since I got out of Bedford. The gray granite place that turns you to granite, too, so you can sit and wait for hours, for weeks, for years, without feeling very much. I go into that place, and I become the Elizabeth I was then, when Sean was in foster care someplace and I didn’t know who had him or what they might be doing to him or how I would get him back. I go into the gray granite place to become stone.

  And it doesn’t work.

  It’s been too long. I’ve had Sean too long. Jack has made me feel too safe. I can’t find the stony place.

  Jackie is spending the night at a friend’s. I sit in the dark, no lights on, car in the garage. Sean doesn’t come home, and neither does Jack. At two in the morning, a lot of people in dark clothing cross the back lawn and quietly enter D
an and Ceci’s house next door, carrying bulky packages wrapped in black cloth.

  Jack staggers in at six-thirty in the morning. Alone. His face droops with exhaustion.

  “I couldn’t find him, Betty. I looked everywhere.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and he nods. Accepting my thanks. This was something he did for me, not for Sean. Not for himself, as Sean’s stepfather. I push down my sudden anger and say, “You better get some sleep.”

  “Right.” He goes down the narrow hallway into our bedroom. In three minutes he’s snoring.

  I let the car coast in neutral down the driveway. Our bedroom faces the street. The curtains don’t stir.

  The West River Road is deserted, except for a few eighteen-wheelers. I cross the river at the interstate and start back along the east side. Three miles along, in the middle of farmland, the smell of burned flesh rolls in the window.

  Cows, close to the pasture fence. I stop the car and get out. Fifteen or sixteen Holsteins. By straining over the fence, I can see the bullet holes in their heads. Somebody herded them together, shot them one by one, and started a half-hearted fire among the bodies with neatly cut firewood. The fire had gone out; it didn’t look as if it was supposed to burn long. Just long enough to attract attention that hadn’t come yet.

  I’d never heard that cows could get human diseases. Why had they been shot?

  I get back in my car and drive the rest of the way to Emerton Memorial.

  This side of town is deathly quiet. Grass grows unmowed in yard after yard. One large, expensive house has old newspapers piled on the porch steps, ten or twelve of them. There are no kids waiting for school buses, no cars pulling out of driveways on the way to work. The hospital parking lot has huge empty stretches between cars. At the last minute I drive on through the lot, parking instead across the street in somebody’s empty driveway, under a clump of trees.

  Nobody sits at the information desk. The gift shop is locked. Nobody speaks to me as I study the directory on the lobby wall, even though two figures in gowns and masks hurry past. CHIEF OF MEDICINE, DR. RANDOLF SATLER. Third floor, east wing. The elevator is deserted.

  It stops at the second floor. When the doors open a man stands there, a middle-aged farmer in overalls and work boots, his eyes red and swollen like he’s been crying. There are tinted windows across from the elevators and I can see the back of him reflected in the glass. Coming and going. From somewhere I hear a voice calling, “Nurse, oh nurse, oh God…” A gurney sits in the hallway, the body on it covered by a sheet up to the neck. The man in overalls looks at me and raises both hands to ward off the elevator, like it’s some kind of demon. He steps backward. The doors close.

  I grip the railing on the elevator wall.

  The third floor looks empty. Bright arrows lead along the hallways: yellow for PATHOLOGY and LAB SERVICES, green for RESPIRATORY THERAPY, red for SUPPORT SERVICES. I follow the yellow arrow.

  It dead-ends at an empty alcove with chairs, magazines thrown on the floor. And three locked doors off a short corridor that’s little more than an alcove.

  I pick the farthest door and pound on it. No words, just regular blows of my fist. After a minute, I start on the second one. A voice calls, “Who’s there?”

  I recognize the voice, even through the locked door. Even after seventeen years. I shout, “Police! Open the door!”

  And he does. The second it cracks, I shove it hard and push my way into the lab.

  “Elizabeth?”

  He’s older, heavier, but still the same. Dark hair, blue eyes…I look at that face every day at dinner. I’ve looked at it at soccer matches, in school plays, in his playpen. Dr. Satler looks more shaken to see me than I would have thought, his face white, sweat on his forehead.

  “Hello, Randy.”

  “Elizabeth. You can’t come in here. You have to leave—”

  “Because of the staph? Do you think I care about that? After all, I’m in the hospital, right, Randy? This is where the endozine is. This place is safe. Unless it gets blown up while I’m standing here.”

  He stares at my left hand, still gripping the doorknob behind me. Then at the gun in my right hand. A seventeen-year-old Smith & Wesson, and for five of those years the gun wasn’t cleaned or oiled, hidden under my aunt’s garage. But it still fires.

  “I’m not going to shoot you, Randy. I don’t care if you’re alive or dead. But you’re going to help me. I can’t find my son,”—your son—“and Sylvia Goddard told me he’s mixed up with that group that blew up the bridge. He’s hiding with them someplace, probably scared out of his skull. You know everybody in town, everybody with power, you’re going to get on that phone there and find out where Sean is.”

  “I would do that anyway,” Randy says, and now he looks the way I remember him: impatient and arrogant. But not completely. There’s still sweat on his pale face. “Put that stupid thing away, Elizabeth.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, for…” He turns his back on me and punches at the phone.

  “Cam? Randy Satler here. Could you…no, it’s not about that…No. Not yet.”

  Cameron Witt. The mayor. His son is chief of Emerton’s five cops.

  “I need a favor. There’s a kid missing…I know that, Cam. You don’t have to lecture me on how bad delay could…But you might know about this kid. Sean Baker.”

  “Pulaski. Sean Pulaski.” He doesn’t even know that.

  “Sean Pulaski. Yeah, that one…okay. Get back to me…I told you. Not yet.” He hangs up. “Cam will hunt around and call back. Now will you put that stupid gun away, Elizabeth?”

  “You still don’t say thank you for anything.” The words just come out. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  “To Cam, or to you for not shooting me?” He says it evenly, and the evenness is the only way I finally see how furious he is. People don’t order around Dr. Randy Satler at gunpoint. A part of my mind wonders why he doesn’t call security.

  I say, “All right, I’m here. Give me a dose of endozine, just in case.”

  He goes on staring at me with that same level, furious gaze. “Too late, Elizabeth.”

  “What do you mean, too late? Haven’t you got endozine?”

  “Of course we do.” Suddenly he staggers slightly, puts out one hand behind him, and holds onto a table covered with glassware and papers.

  “Randy. You’re sick.”

  “I am. And not with anything endozine is going to cure. Ah, Elizabeth, why didn’t you just phone me? I’d have looked for Sean for you.”

  “Oh, right. Like you’ve been so interested and helpful in raising him.”

  “You never asked me.”

  I see that he means it. He really believes his total lack of contact with his son is my fault. I see that Randy gives only what he’s asked to. He waits, lordly, for people to plead for his help, beg for it, and then he gives it. If it suits him.

  I say, “I’ll bet anything your kids with your wife are turning out really scary.”

  The blood rushes to his face, and I know I guessed right. His blue eyes darken and he looks like Jack looks just before Jack explodes. But Randy isn’t Jack. An explosion would be too clean for him. He says instead, “You were stupid to come here. Haven’t you been listening to the news?”

  I haven’t.

  “The CDC publicly announced just last night what medical personnel have seen for weeks. A virulent strain of staphylococcus aureus has incorporated endozine-resistant plasmids from enterococcus.” He pauses to catch his breath. “And pneumococcus may have done the same thing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, you stupid woman, that now there are highly contagious infections that we have no drugs to cure. No antibiotics at all, not even endozine. This staph is resistant to them all. And it can live everywhere.”

  I lower the gun. The empty parking lot. No security to summon. The man who wouldn’t get on the elevator. And Randy’s face. “And you’ve got it.”

  “We’ve all got it.
Everyone…in the hospital. And for forcing your way in here, you probably do, too.”

  “You’re going to die,” I say, and it’s half a hope.

  And he smiles.

  He stands there in his white lab coat, sweating like a horse, barely able to stand up straight, almost shot by a woman he’d once abandoned pregnant, and he smiles. His blue eyes gleam. He looks like a picture I once saw in a book, back when I read a lot. It takes me a minute to remember that it was my high school World History book. A picture of some general.

  “Everybody’s going to die eventually,” Randy says. “But not me right now. At least…I hope not.” Casually he crosses the floor toward me, and I step backward. He smiles again.

  “I’m not going to deliberately infect you, Elizabeth. I’m a doctor. I just want the gun.”

  “No.”

  “Have it your way. Look, how much do you know about the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century?”

  “Nothing,” I say, although I do. Why had I always acted stupider around Randy than I actually am?

  “Then it won’t mean anything to you to say that this mutated staph has at least that much potential”—again he paused and gulped air—“for rapid and fatal transmission. It flourishes everywhere. Even on doorknobs.”

  “So why the fuck are you smiling?” Alexander. That was the picture of the general. Alexander the Great.

  “Because I…because the CDC distributed…I was on the national team to discover…” His face changes again. Goes even whiter. And he pitches over onto the floor.

  I grab him, roll him face up, and feel his forehead. He’s burning up. I bolt for the door. “Nurse! Doctor! There’s a sick doctor here!”

  Nobody comes.

  I run down the corridors. Respiratory Therapy is empty. So is Support Services. I jab at the elevator button, but before it comes I run back to Randy.

  And stand above him, lying there crumpled on the floor, laboring to breathe.

  I’d dreamed about a moment like this for years. Dreamed it waking and asleep, in Emerton and in Bedford Hills and in Jack’s arms. Dreamed it in a thousand ridiculous melodramatic versions. And here it is, Randy helpless and pleading, and me strong, standing over him, free to walk away and let him die. Free.