The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  “Joaquin Delgado told you to study in Oaxaca, so you went to Oaxaca,” Cazador said. “He recommended you for the Centers for Disease Control, so you joined their Special Pathogens Branch. Joaquin helped create the CDC’s Central Command, and you became its coordinator. Joaquin Delgado all but built you in his laboratory, Dr. Stark.” El Jefe’s tone was reasonable, though a strain in his voice betrayed his anger. “And the morning of the outbreak in Zapata, you spoke to Dr. Delgado by sat phone. We have a record of it.”

  “Yes, that’s true and I—”

  Cazador interrupted in a cutting bark. “Explain! Why were you talking to the terrorist the morning our people began dying like vermin!”

  Stark flinched. “I always—Joaquin was telling me—” He couldn’t say the words. He couldn’t admit it. Couldn’t speak. The Ghana outbreak was a lame stab in the dark, and Stark knew it, deep down, but he hadn’t been able to conjure the doubt in Joaquin. There had been just enough of a thread to make the Ghana connection seem plausible, but now that theory, that hope, collapsed like a scaffold of support inside Stark.

  While he searched for his voice, Stark glanced down at the report that Isabel had sent him, showing what the sabihondas had found. She was right. It was all there, including slides of cloned dengue-4 cells time-stamped with Joaquin’s registry.

  Cloning. The first step in wetcoding the virus. Joaquin’s private business was to consult with hospitals. It was a desk job, no, a job that was conducted over steak dinners and rioja. Joaquin had no professional reason to buy and clone viruses.

  Let alone that virus.

  He planned it. The bastard. Jesus, he planned it for years. Joaquin knew I’d call, what I’d ask, how to spin me.

  “Joaquin Delgado told you what?” Ofelio said, leaning forward, intrigued by Stark’s lengthy silence. “Finish your thought, Dr. Stark.”

  Stark shook his head. His blind spot—his love for Joaquin—was humiliating in its grandeur and folly, and he loathed that it was on display for beloved colleagues and strangers alike. He still couldn’t admit it. Joaquin had played on his blindness as coolly as if Stark were a stranger, an enemy. As if their friendship were nothing.

  “Tell us, Henry David,” Isabel said.

  The kindness in her voice unlocked the words and Stark said, “He told me about an outbreak in Ghana and I took the bait.” Stark clutched the seat. “He sucker punched me. It was a terrible mistake.”

  “Oh, it appears to be more than a mistake,” Sanjuan said. “It appears to us that you deliberately misled—”

  “Stop,” Stark said.

  “—your own investigation. Can you prove—?”

  “I said stop. Stop right there,” Stark said, mustering his nerve. “You proved Joaquin’s involvement to me. Now you must prove mine. Wait, Minister, listen to me,” Stark said, shouting over Sanjuan until the man fell quiet with Cazador’s hand on his arm. Stark was falling back on the anger he’d felt for the past forty-eight hours, remembering it and letting it guide his words, though he was still hot and breathless with confusion. “Because you seem to be the ones obstructing this effort. You ignored Pedro Muñoz. And I think you knew there was a chance that he was right about this virus. You suspected from the beginning that mosquitoes didn’t spread Big Bonebreaker. You had to, because your team was headed by Miguel Cristóbal, who’s incapable of the incompetence required to misdiagnose a simple vector.”

  Rosangelica’s empty metallic eyes had their typical, sedate gleam, but Stark was beginning to understand her strange expressions better. Rosangelica seemed torn between two visions of Stark, one as savior and the other as demon.

  “I say you played on our confusion to further the goals of your old teacher,” Sanjuan said. “A nanophage for typical dengue, when you knew it was atypical? I don’t think you’re capable of that incompetence.”

  “Yes, I was grasping. I admit it,” Stark said. His cut lip ached from all the talking. “But you”—he stabbed his finger in the air at Sanjuan—“you bet your people’s lives and lost thousands. You owe Mexico an explanation of what you’re hiding about the outbreak.”

  “We aren’t hiding anything,” Minister Sanjuan said as if Stark were swinging wildly at him.

  “Then put Zapata’s records on our memboards. Now.”

  Silence.

  Sanjuan and Rosangelica leaned forward, seemingly ready to leap upon Stark, and Cazador was about to defuse the tension once more, an affable smile seeping across his face yet again, when Stark interrupted them all.

  “I killed a man in order to get here in time to help you,” Stark shouted. He kept his gaze on Sanjuan. His throat clamped shut, and his cheeks burned red behind his blond beard.

  Cazador spit, “What bluster.”

  Sanjuan narrowed his eyes and his nostrils flared in an expression that Stark read as either distaste or shock—or both. “Please, Dr. Stark. No histrionics.”

  Rosangelica unclenched her fist and laid her hands flat on the table. “No.” The animalistic coil in her muscles unwound. “It’s true. I saw him do it.”

  Cazador and Sanjuan stared at Rosangelica, then shifted their gazes to Stark.

  Isabel whispered, “How? What happened?”

  Rosangelica spoke with ease in her low, throaty voice. “He shot a man who meant to keep him from reaching San Antonio,” she said. “Then he released me from jail.”

  Cazador looked as if the American had just removed a mask, revealing himself to be someone utterly different than the Jefe had expected. “Why then did you say in your report that you saved Dr. Stark from jail?” asked Cazador. “Why didn’t you mention a killing?”

  “Porque la carne de burro no es transparente,” Rosangelica said.

  A mule’s hide isn’t transparent. After puzzling over that one, Stark decided, She didn’t trust me either—till just now.

  “I didn’t want to make a hero of him before determining his association with Delgado,” said Rosangelica. “I wanted to see if he would tilt his hand. But it’s clear to me that he is truly destroyed by all this.” She glanced sidelong at Isabel, and said, “Dr. Khushub’s accusation has wrecked him, I’m relieved to see.”

  “Maybe Stark killed simply in order to infiltrate us,” Sanjuan said, unable to see Stark as anything but a terrorist, “to continue a campaign of subterfuge.”

  “No, believe me,” Rosangelica said, “he’s not a cool killer. And when it matters most, when he’s under duress like this, Stark can’t lie. No, the farm boy is just a farm boy, exactly as he seems to be.”

  Watching Cazador digest that last piece of information, Stark realized he suddenly had a very expensive feather in his cap with El Jefe. Rosangelica’s word. Stark turned up the volume on his speaker since he didn’t have much breath for speaking. “I have a plan for ending this epidemic. A sketchy and optimistic plan, but I have one.” Stark let that sink in, watching Cazador lean his bulk back toward the table. “But you have to trust me. So. For the record,” said Stark, taking a deep breath and letting his voice wheeze into the room. “I haven’t seen Joaquin for two years and the first I heard about this outbreak was two days ago. If you don’t trust me, I’ll find my own way back to the US.”

  Sanjuan and Cazador were still chewing on Stark’s admission of murder and only seemed to half hear his declaration of innocence. Ofelio Xultan looked satisfied and Isabel now seemed disgusted by herself, this meeting, and the people in it. She stared at the middle of the table, then looked at Sanjuan, giving him a short nod. “For the record, the Minister asked me to observe your response to this accusation. I feel like a bloody, fucking Judas dragging you through this, but Minister Sanjuan wanted to be sure of your integrity before proceeding.”

  Cazador turned to Sanjuan, and said, “Are you satisfied?”

  At that moment, the aerobus driver drafted an empty ascent lane for the Majority Cloister’s dock a half kilometer up.

  “No, I don’t trust him,” Sanjuan said, “but I trust Rosangelica. So I’ll take
the sabihonda’s voucher.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Stark saw Rosangelica sag back in her seat, sated.

  Pulses of traffic sent streams of glittering swoop jets and barcos into the docking bays of the high towers. The aerobus sailed up the shimmering silver-green cliff face of Torre Cuauhtémoc, and a shock of sun electrified a bank of gilded balconies. Then, plunged into shadow, Stark found himself in a La Alta docking chamber with wooden barrel-vaulted ceilings overhead like a medieval church. No more political games of intrigue. No more guessing if he would be accepted. Henry David Stark was finally in.

  WEDNESDAY, MAY 18. 10:32 P.M.

  ATOP THE FIFTEEN-FOOT-HIGH wall that enclosed the little courtyard, a watchman wrapped his trench coat’s skirts around his cold legs, while behind him the Gaijin Butoh Troupe prepared in the chapel for Epidemic Theater.

  Through the branches of an arching oak, a cloud-board could be seen in the dusk, floating against the side of a skyscraper overhead, eclipsing its minaret crown. The cloud bulged around the tower like an amoeba and reformed on the other side, reigniting its eerie, orange light.

  YOU ARE IN A QUARANTINED NEIGHBORHOOD, read the cloud. PLEASE REPORT TO THE NEAREST PERIMETER CLINIC AT ONCE.

  Every evening, the watchman sat on this wall in the shade of the oak, nearly invisible, watching the day’s last march of the dead pass Sor Juana’s chapel. Stretchers, wheelchairs, biers of old loading pallets, and upon them, the dead and dying, with loved ones carting them off the street before sun-fall. In the hot zone, no one was safe on the streets at night, when looters made their rounds and rape gangs emerged to test their immunity. Worse were the government’s ejércitos de la luna, moon troops, who came out at night to shoot the infected. Last night, from this very wall, the watchman saw seven soldiers wearing black Racal-plus antiviral suits, carrying heavy Sangre de Cristo class rifles. They stalked across Isabela la Catolica Avenue, emerging from one shadow, then vanishing into another, ghosts hunting down the hot zone’s last bit of life.

  Witnessing the day’s last march from this wall was the watchman’s way of allowing himself to leave it, after fourteen or fifteen hours of hauling bodies.

  From where he sat, the watchman could also see the stage through the nineteenth-century chapel’s bombed-out wall. A spotlight cut a bright circle on the black floorboards, and he could hear dancers shuffling and talking in the dark. Seconds later, a naked female figure stepped into the spotlight, plaster white makeup covering her from shaved head to bare feet. She stood with her chin resting on her chest.

  Epidemic Theater would begin when she was in her skin.

  “Your dance is everything now,” Hiro, the troupe’s leader, said from the shadows, and his Japanese accent added to the watchman’s sensation that he was no longer in Mexico. A second later, Hiro appeared near the spotlight, his red-shirted torso floating legless along the stage. “So dance,” Hiro said to Yvonne, “your body remembering.”

  The skin of Yvonne’s freshly shaven head gleamed in the spotlight, as her shoulders hunched forward like a feeble old woman’s. Her left arm began trembling as if a current rattled through it.

  Even though he hadn’t been a lover of theater in his previous life, before it erased itself and began again in chaos, the watchman found this strange dance form hypnotic. Back then, before Ascensión fell, his tastes ran more toward soccer and historical novels, not obscure, Japanese theater. He liked to tell his coworkers that they never had to worry about his filing red sheets on them—he didn’t like trouble, dissonance. But there was something about butoh—something profoundly troubling and dissonant—that he found comforting now.

  Walking just outside Yvonne’s harsh spotlight, Hiro’s feet waded in darkness. “The body’s sole ambition is to claim you for its own,” he told her, watching Yvonne’s arm, which continued to shake as if with seizure.

  No matter how he tried, the watchman couldn’t count how many nights he’d been here, in the hot zone. It was at least three, but less than twenty. Astonishing how, after Zapata Hospital was compromised, civilization collapsed so thoroughly that even the walls between day and night had eroded. Now he dwelt in a half-lit unlife of hauling dead bodies, igniting bonfires, tending to the infected, then returning here, to “the cell of sanity,” as Hiro called it.

  Trying to count the days back, he started with Saturday evening, when everything changed. The night that patients started appearing at Zapata, while searching for the lost notes he’d taken on the effect of this retrovirus upon the first patient’s histocompatability, he had chanced across a curious report in a dead doc folder.

  Reality started crumbling in that dead doc file.

  The report was written by a sagrado servicio officer named Xavier Sanjuan, composed on-site at Zapata and sealed with his Epidemic Intelligence Services code. Unfortunately for Sanjuan, he didn’t realize documents written on the hospital system were automatically triplicated.

  Our initial tests prove that we have a crucial opportunity here, not a crisis, Sanjuan had written. My people believe the virus targets an immune response in Native Mexicans. It occurs to me that this condition, if allowed to propagate, may alleviate long-standing economic concerns in the lower city of Ascensión, and in Mexico.

  It felt a great act of cowardice, copying that document in his personal files, disguising the title. He should have sent it to the media. He should have sent it to, well, someone. In the hours that followed, the watchman felt craven and small, hinting about the atrocity like a sniveling gossip to his colleagues. But he couldn’t just say what he knew. Couldn’t blurt it out in the press conference as every instinct in his body told him to do. If he did that, he knew the consequences would be swift and total. If he was lucky, the Holy Renaissance would disappear him, rearrange his brain, and drop him in the Peruvian province, where he’d wake up as a church gardener or a mad street-corner evangelist. After filing a dissenting report to the Ministry of Health’s assessment of Big Bonebreaker’s vector, he felt lucky that he got away with a mere demotion.

  And besides, it was simply too horrible to contemplate, that these words should be typed and sent from a hospital while human beings were bleeding and shaking like that.

  All his coy hinting and surreptitiousness had amounted to nothing. The night that the airborne virus compromised Zapata’s integrity as a hospital, he was assessing a new round of patients. These people, oddly, did not have mouth pustules, a notable change in symptoms that he’d wanted to tell Dr. Stark about. Alejandro’s pathetic dengue conference was nothing but political grandstanding and he was blackballed anyway, so he had slipped away to confer with the dengue ward’s attending physician. When the Code Blue Klaxon sounded and the hospital’s rarely used loudspeaker announced that people were rapidly dying of massive bleeding, he knew that his own prophecy of a coming dengue hemorrhagic fever outbreak had come true.

  He only stayed in the hospital long enough to receive bloodwork affirming that he was clean, all the while wondering if this could have been prevented had he spoken up like a man. But after he was deemed clean, he fled the hospital with scores of others—medicos and patients alike—pressing through the military cordon outside and into the mass panic that clogged the streets beyond. Weapons fire lit the underbellies of faltering cloud-boards, and a blaze or a war was raging in the National Square.

  Running by the corner of Isabela La Catolica and Izazago Avenues, he’d seen a group of hipsters dragging trunks and backpacks toward a bombed-out chapel on that intersection. Without thinking, he ran with them. A Japanese man in dreadlocks and muscle shirt slammed the gate shut behind him, clapping him on the shoulder as they ran to the cloister together.

  That night, as attack boats screamed over the nearby National Square, Gaijin Butoh Troupe’s leader, Hiro, inaugurated the first performance of Epidemic Theater.

  It was the first time the watchman had ever seen butoh. The gestures and movements of the dance seemed bizarre, like the delirium tremens of a drunkard. Later Hiro exp
lained that it had originated in post-World War II Japan, in a society nearly as rigid as the Holy Renaissance’s. During Hiro’s first performance, an attack barco had roared low over the Sor Juana chapel. His dreadlocks shook, and his mouth tightened into a purse of bitterness. His eyes scanned the ceiling in absolute terror. The barco passed. Still, Hiro had stared at the ceiling, like a child unable to forget the nightmare, and that fear transformed into a hunching, quivering dance, a palsy of subtle gestures. Hiro was a specter signaling across the void between worlds. Arms clutched close to his stomach, face twisting into expressions of agony, then mad delight, Hiro seemed both disciplined and yet totally out of control, his body a fantastic, nonsensical thing. It hypnotized the watchman, a man who knew too well the limits of the human body. He had decided then, watching Hiro dance, that he would stay with the Gaijin Butoh Troupe until the quarantine was lifted.

  Yvonne’s left arm trembled until it seemed to rise on its own accord, parallel with her shoulder.

  “Your body is giving you this moment,” Hiro said, coaching Yvonne.

  She let her arm twitch, elbow cranked at an unnatural angle, then she wiggled her fingers.

  Hiro winced. “Freeze.”

  Yvonne stood with her left arm in the air, as though embracing an invisible partner around the shoulders.

  “You aren’t here,” Hiro said. “You just left.”

  “I know.”

  “You are intending.”

  She nodded.

  “What were you intending?”

  Yvonne answered quickly, as if she had been expecting this. “I’m just too aware of—” She looked through the ruined wall to the cloud-board with its quarantine warning floating above the chapel. “I wanted to do something beautiful.”