The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  “Butoh doesn’t ‘do’ anything,” said Hiro. “Besides, you are already beautiful.” Hiro stepped into the glare and rubbed her bald scalp playfully. “And very ugly.” The watchman imagined the sound of her stubble scraping under Hiro’s callused hands. “Your immune system suffers Big Bonebreaker into itself every day,” said Hiro, “and every day your body dances by killing that virus. Dance the dead plague. Your immune body remembers it. Forever. You just let it remember, remember, remember.”

  An interesting strategy. The watchman’s was the opposite: forgetful oblivion. He couldn’t even count the days, his strategy was so effective. Last night, he and Hiro were sitting together on the chapel’s stage, drinking shot glasses of pulque, looted from a bodega.

  “Are we immune?” Hiro had asked him.

  The watchman didn’t know why he, Hiro, and the other dancers had survived viruses with an 80 percent mortality rate. But, in an attempt to answer his new friend, the watchman described how the body identifies a virus, then rallies a response to kill it. He described how that virus is then entered into the immune system’s memory, so that the body would have a better chance of spotting and killing that same virus in the future.

  “My body is killing this virus?” said Hiro. “It will remember how to kill it in the future?”

  “That’s right. At least, I think so. With these viruses—”

  Hiro shushed him loudly and lunged for his notebook. The watchman looked over Hiro’s shoulder as he drunkenly scrawled:

  “Our immune bodies will dance the plague forever.

  “Our bodies will always remember.”

  The watchman didn’t want to remember. He didn’t want to think about mouth pustules, tetravalent vaccine, or Sanjuan’s crucial opportunity and his own pitiful response to it. He didn’t want to remember anything except butoh. But, like most Mexicans, he was Catholic, so beneath his forgetfulness, he trusted that there was a working system in the cosmos. In Mexico’s case, he had faith that there was a massive, cultural response under way against the virus. Maybe it was nothing more than bodies surviving and working hard to help other bodies, but he decided that if he was immune, for whatever reason, it was his mission to haul corpses from houses to street corners, to comfort the infected with their swollen lymphs, which clustered in the armpits like nests of toads. He would say prayers with the dying, hold their hands when the seizures came. And he’d build funeral pyres from the wood of abandoned tenement shacks. He’d go as far as the Plaza de Toros, the bull rings, in search of healthy people, and he’d watch in horror as the bulls, monsters of the Xajay bloodline, fought in the streets, goring and then eating one another. He would even burn the body of a fellow field-clinic worker whose symptoms first flared as they washed sheets together. Day after day and on into the many nights, until exhaustion made a blurry smear of his mind, then he would return to Sor Juana’s chapel for stolen pulque, butoh, and sleep.

  But the oily-sweet smell of those horrifying bonfires clung to his sinuses, and he couldn’t misplace himself so easily. The bodies followed him back to the chapel-turned-theater and merged with the bodies of the dancers, so that the diseased corpses became the muscular arms and bulging calves that turned and flexed on the spotlit stage. The wiry beards and delicate clavicles. Creased brows smooth at last. Skinny froglike legs. Jiggling bellies. Hairy hands. After Epidemic Theater finished for the night, the relentless dead followed him to his bed of wool blankets, and he slept, dreaming of loose change scattered from upended pockets. Moles on anklebones. Blue, parted lips. Fingers fattening around wedding bands. Caesarian section scars. Tattoos. Watches keeping time on still wrists.

  Sitting on the wall, the watchman could hear people on the avenue dragging something. Emerging in a pool of moonlight, two women in old-fashioned surgical masks were hauling a litter up the sidewalk toward him. From his quiet perch he could see both the litter-bearers struggling and Yvonne, alone now, a steady white flame burning in the dark.

  The person borne by the litter bearers was in late-stage onset symptoms; the watchman could tell by the uneasy thrashing and twisting of limbs. Though he might have leapt down to help them, he decided to stay on the wall, in the shadow of the arching oak. Once the seizures started, there wasn’t much time left, so he held his breath as the dying person passed beneath him.

  Onstage, Yvonne, painted white, looked new and pure, her slim back and teacup breasts turning in the spotlight. He watched as she shivered and pivoted to look over her shoulder with an expression of pained surprise.

  The dying person below caught his eye. A teenage girl with dark liquid dripping from her nose—blood rendered black in the color-sapping moon—and around her mouth a crescent of pustules.

  The watchman stood, hand on the heavy limb of the oak, bewildered.

  Mouth pustules?

  In his endless days of hauling bodies, he hadn’t seen a single chapped lip, canker sore, or mouth pustule. Not since the day he fled Zapata.

  “Stop, please,” he shouted.

  The two litter-bearers spun in fright, almost dropping the sick girl, trying to pinpoint the direction of the man’s voice. “Who is it? Who’s there?”

  “I’m a doctor,” he said. “I won’t hurt you. I just want to know how that person caught Big Bonebreaker.”

  “Are you joking?” one woman said. “Come on, let’s hurry and get her home.”

  “Please,” he said, “she’s obviously been in the hot zone for days. How did she finally get it?”

  “She caught it from a group of flagellants who came to her house begging for help,” the woman shouted back. “They broke in and infected her. Now come down and help us or leave us alone.”

  “Better hurry, then. It’s getting dark.” The watchman sat down again, letting the oak’s shadow swallow him up.

  Looking back at the dancer, he wondered if he had the nerve to present his credentials at a perimeter clinic and tell them what he’d just found.

  Somehow, the virus is still being spread from a primary source. Yvonne was at last dancing butoh, the watchman could see. Ash white makeup, shaved head, Hiro, this insane cell of sanity, the dead’s march, and her own remembering body all had conspired to erase the person named Yvonne. With tottering steps and uncontrolled tremors in her plaster white hands, she was a leap beyond human now—a phantom, an angel, or some very other thing. As the watchman slipped down the wall and away into the dark, her body claimed her, and she intended nothing, nothing but the whim of her alabaster form.

  THURSDAY, MAY 19. 6:44 P.M.

  DR. JOAQUIN DELGADO had stood at the podium, resting his long hands there without looking up at the audience. He introduced himself quietly into the microphone, said he was from the CDC, then fell quiet.

  He was quite tall, young HD noticed, and his slightly stooped posture made him look like a man with tiring pride, a brilliance burdened with a thousand enemies and a man who believed himself worthy of the enmity. A modest farm kid, HD couldn’t decide if he admired this about the guy or not.

  Osterholm Hall in the University of Wells-Fargo seated three hundred, but only half of it was filled. Local doctors and college administrators filled the front three rows, and graduate students made up the rest. Most presumed that Delgado’s revolutionary advances in virology would direct their own work: employing viral therapy to repair the damage of heart disease, drug and alcohol abuse, postsurgical trauma. Muscle tone enhancement without exercise. Total memory restoration. The possibilities of harnessing the virus seemed endless. HD, considering grad school, was enticed by virologists who were creating urban immune complexes. These city-sized laboratories, located in the viral hotbed of southern China, would monitor the seasonal diaspora of influenza and create nanophages, Delgado’s breakthrough contribution to modern medicine, for each new mutation of flu as it appeared, killing it before it could emigrate.

  Joaquin Delgado turned to the blackboard behind him and picked up a blue piece of chalk. He drew a big circle and slashed a vertical line
through it. In the left hemisphere, he wrote THEM in square capitals, and in the right, US. Then he turned back to the audience. “Who is ‘us?’”

  Looking at that diagram, HD found himself groping toward a life-changing thought.

  Later, Joaquin would say that the young man looked as if he were crawling out of his skin to be recognized. Delgado nodded. “Who is ’us? You, with the crew cut.”

  HD started to speak, but his voice cracked. He made a vague, inclusive gesture that could mean everyone in the room or everyone in the world. Then he cleared his throat, and said, “The immune system.”

  The professors in the first three rows turned to look at HD, whose grades were barely average and who rarely spoke in class.

  “Thank you. Yes. We are the immune system”—he made the same vague gesture that Stark had made, drawing a laugh from the audience—“we men and women in this room. The health organizations around the world. Immunologists and epidemiologists. We fight for both the survival of individual bodies and the body of the species. This struggle,” he said, with a slight nod to the chalk diagram, “is in the body, eternally, waging itself, even in this very room.”

  Delgado leaned on the podium and looked up under heavy lids. “Most of you, students and doctors alike, came to hear me speak because you are fascinated with”—Joaquin turned and touched the chalk word THEM—“viruses. You will probably devote your life to virology because you Americans are rugged individualists, undaunted by spending long hours alone in laboratories over freezes of replicating viruses. Bueno. Even Milton found Satan more fascinating than God.”

  Delgado paused as if expecting a laugh. When none came, HD thought he saw the man wince, perhaps at his own clumsiness.

  “This is the greater work. Public health,” he said, pointing to the word US. “Defending and maintaining the greatest good for the greatest number.” He straightened, but even with his head held high, he looked like a man whose pride exhausted him. “Epidemiology is a medium in decline, falling away as new technologies emerge. Analyzing statistical data, calculating a chicken report by hand, organizing immunization programs. These are not breakthrough tasks, are they? Nor is entering a hot zone to clean human filth, but it is the noblest work.”

  Sitting in that plastic seat in the lecture hall, HD felt a charge of energy rattling in his hands, as if his body were actually shaking something off.

  HD had grown up with a deep allegiance to his grandfather’s cooperative farm and the people there. It had created a hyperawareness in him, surrounded as he was by the strange array of people who were perpetually drawn to Nissevalle Farm. With US agriculture slowly starving for lack of oil even before gold mold destroyed it, many Midwestern cities had drained into rural communities in search of food and jobs during HD’s childhood. Nissevalle became a beacon not only for farmers who wanted to farm, but spoiled old-timers accustomed to a steady supply of food, avant-garde artists turned rural hayseeds, neo-Jeffersonians, intellectuals fleeing the sinking isle of America’s collegiate class, urban Land Reformers, Australian war refugees who’d fled one frying pan only to land in another, disabled people whose government aid had evaporated, misfits, orphans, former dot-commies, and the unemployed mass that had been marching into the countryside for years. As a kid in this environment, HD had grown into a role that the quop desperately needed, the one member who could look into all the different lives of people in his quop without judging. The Wisconsin Rosetta Stone Grandfather called him.

  But watching Delgado deliver his lecture, the child’s awareness expanded outward from the circle of his childhood—from farm to globe, and the selfishness of a career in virology to the selflessness of epidemiology. From person to species:

  Us.

  Isabel Khushub cleared her throat noisily, and said, “¡Caray! Don’t make me repeat myself, Henry David.”

  Stark looked at her reflection in the elevator door before them—her biohazard suit a warble of white in the glass—and smiled thinly. She looked older than thirty-eight right now, older than she had in Cairo a year ago.

  So did he, Stark noticed. Not just tired. Old.

  She said, “You’re thinking about him again.”

  “Bela, stop it. I’m not.”

  Screaming swoops and parachuting penny-drops fell past their boost and down through the vast, central shaft of the tower. Isabel, Rosangelica, and Stark were being lifted through the Federal Cloister of Torre Cuauhtémoc.

  “Rosangelica is right about you,” Isabel said.

  The sabihonda stopped eating and looked at Isabel, tamale poised before her chin. “What am I right about?”

  “What is she right about?” Stark asked, annoyed.

  Isabel slipped her memboard into the pocket at the small of her back and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “You’re a shitty liar.”

  Standing next to her in the boost, Stark could feel the humming jolt of Isabel, wound tight as she was on coffee, adrenaline, megadoses of vitamin C, huge volumes of pathology data, fear, and guilt. She’d apologized to him repeatedly over the last three days, but it did little to soothe her—or him. Probably because Stark was still trapped in an echo chamber of his own regret and guilt. “Sorry, Bela. Tell me what you just said.”

  “The viruses are mutating too fast for us to respond with effective nanophages.” She propped her reading glasses on the tip of her nose and slipped her memboard back in hand. “I’d say our ’phages are seventy to eighty percent effective, which is a pile of laughable shit.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “Even if we had ninety-nine percent effective ‘phages,’ that one percent would allow the viruses to break free,” Isabel said. “I’m beginning to think that ‘phages’ are the wrong approach.”

  Stark was about to ask why Isabel hadn’t said this in the meeting they’d just attended, the Ministry of Emergency Management, but he knew why. Ministerials weren’t the place for communicating bad news backed by hard evidence. Such meetings were cheerleading sessions, where politicians kidded themselves that the outbreak was being tamped down, and too much time was devoted to bishops blessing the proceedings. The truth emerged in transit from one meeting to another, or, like this, at the wrung-out end of another bitter day of bad news. “What’s your assessment of Vaccination? Are they helping?”

  All three of them snatched at handrails in the boost, as the elevator slowed for horizontal traffic. An enormous statue the color of polished lead dominated the hollow space in this section of Torre Cuauhtémoc, its blank eyes gazing down watchfully over the villas, terraces, and balconies conies of La Alta. Outside their boost, Stark could see a saber hilt the size of a barn.

  “No. To put it bluntly, it’s not. We’re fucked,” Isabel said.

  Rosangelica held the tamale away from her body as the boost shot upward again. “But daily mortality has dropped. Something must be working.”

  Isabel’s sneer was queenly. “Fifty-eight hundred dead in Ascensión alone. You call that foquin ‘working’? I call that horse shit raining from heaven.”

  Rosangelica opened her mouth as if to retort, then bit the tamale instead.

  The only thing that lifted Stark’s spirits these days was watching people get rocked on their heels by Isabel’s prosaic cursing. “Omnivalent vaccine is finally hitting the perimeter clinics,” he said. “I have two hundred thousand doses of tetravalents coming in this evening from Bombay. Vaccination teams are ready to take those doses into the street tonight. That will slow the viruses down some.”

  “But Pathology has shown,” Isabel said, releasing the handrail as the boost regained its previous speed, “that vaccines are just staving off the inevitable. The viruses are mutating so fast that they dodge around vaccinated sections of Ascensión, then double back to start claiming lives again.”

  Stark had read this morning that Mortuary teams were finding corpses with vaccination marks on their arms. “What’s the answer, Isabel?”

  She shook her head. In all their years of workin
g together, Isabel had never said I don’t know. The boost was plunged into darkness as they rocketed into the residential floors.

  “It gets worse,” Isabel said as gold utility lights blinked on.

  Stark folded his arms. “Of course it does.”

  “Unless we come up with an effective ’phage or vaccine,” Isabel said, “the viruses will break free in four to six days. They’ll mutate so that tetravalents are ineffective—even omnivalents won’t be able to identify the new viruses correctly. We could get mortality down to one death per day and it still wouldn’t be good enough. That’s how virulent these viruses are.”

  So. There it is, he thought. Four days.

  After a day of reorganizing and streamlining the public health response in Ascensión and bringing Outbreak Hospital Administration, Perimeter Clinics, Inoculation Program, Wetcoding and Pathology, Microbiology, Vaccination and Clonufacturing, and Mortuary Assistance Teams under his command; after another day of leashing the Ministry of Emergency Management, the Joint Information and Joint Operations, Joint Epidemiological Committee, Disaster Coordination, and Emergency Operations Centers; and after a third day, today, of being brought up to speed on the Pilone Network Task Force’s work to bring the net online, Stark was right back to the paralyzing thought he had as he disembarked from the aerobus in La Alta three days ago.

  Joaquin Delgado had already won.

  He looked me right in the eye and lied to me and I ate it up, Stark thought, staring at himself in the elevator door again. Might as well have shot me in the face.

  As of noon today, fifty-eight hundred dead, that number was climbing, and the worst was yet to come.

  Four days away.

  Light flooded the boost as it slowed toward their floor in the Triforium section of the Cloister, where the elite of La Alta lived; all the foreign VIP members of the Task Force were housed here. The boost stopped and its doors parted. As Rosangelica stepped out, a large family waiting to get on stepped back in unison, the father bug-eyed at the sight of the sabihonda’s disfigured face.