The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  He finally remembered what the sequence was, and Joaquin shoved himself away from his computer. “God bless me.” He folded his arms, eyes shut, picturing the sequence on his mind’s screen. It wasn’t a genome, as he had thought, but a break with genome. It was a rhythm that had been drilled into his head as a graduate student at La Universidad Catolica in Monterrey, Mexico. Young Joaquin’s task had been to develop a method of convincing the body not to reject newly developed wetware. He couldn’t find a universal passkey past the “matriarchy” as he thought of the immune system, but the resourceful, callow researcher found the next best thing. Since nearly 80 percent of mestizos drew their native blood from six Mexican indígena nations (Otomí, Mazahua, Mazatec, Nahuatl, Mixtec, and Zapoteco), he discovered a serviceable sequence in the MHC I complex, a body’s self-identifying protein. With neutered viruses targeting the native sequence, he was able to develop a therapy that would trick the average Mexican’s immune system into thinking a foreign entity (in this case, a newly developed brain implant) was actually part of the body’s own system—thus “indianizing” any body.

  Self and Not Self. Blur the line. Fool the Matriarch.

  Joaquin erased the Machupo genome from his silver gel screens. He silenced Bach and stood listening to the broken rhythm that had been playing in his head, beholding its fractured perfection.

  The Native Mexican sequence was in the dengue virus’s DNA. Unexpressed and rearranged, yes, virtually useless, true, but like an Inquisition-era cathedral in modern Mexico, or broken Mayan pottery in the heart of Spain, the sequences were present in virus and human protein both. Twin DNA in diametrically opposed cells. Perfect.

  “You are killing me,” Joaquin whispered to the Matriarch.

  “Pobrecito.” She sighed and relaxed, accepting his embrace, melting into his arms. “How could I have been so careless as to harm you, my baby?”

  Absent from his own body’s movements, the old man picked up his suit coat, his keys, locked his offices, and walked down to a seaside café. An ocean storm was skimming the Catalonia coast. Lightning broke in its dark blue heart. The scientist sat at his favorite table near the window. By the time he had received his espresso, the war plan was manifest, leaping from his mind like Minerva from the cloven skull.

  Joaquin removed the Matriarch’s blue mantle, let it fall from his hand. “You wanted to make me your enemy.” He ripped away her dress and shoved her to the ground. He drank in the sight of her ripe breasts and trembling limbs. “You wanted to kill me.”

  She did not flee from him, but she wept. “I know.”

  He threw himself on top of her, and said, “Now you will help me.”

  When the Spanish conquered Mexico, they took something more precious than gold. They took for their children the immunity of the vanquished Indians. Cortés was the first to steal this immunity when he took his indígena bride, a woman named Malintzin Tenepal. La Malinche, history would call her. A female Judas. Cortés and Malintzin’s child was the first mestizo, the first modern Mexican; and the children of the first conquistadors, with Spanish fathers and Native mothers, were graced with the immunological mysteries of survival in Mexico.

  Otomí, Mazahua, Mazatec, Nahuatl, Mixtec, Zapotec.

  Which was the original DNA sequence, the viral code or the human one? Joaquin wondered, watching bright sardine boats cut their white sails against the blackening sky, fleeing before the Mediterranean storm. No matter. This was the answer, and it swarmed over a split in Joaquin, stitching shut his soul over the wound of Mexico. It had been decades since he felt anything like hope. As the wunderkind student, Joaquin believed his work on the pilone would be a weapon against that rising fascism of the new party, the Holy Renaissance. Mexico was vibrant with a populist political rebirth, artists, and millions of skeptical students, none of whom would stand for Orbegón or de Veras’s perversion of the Catholic Church. The pilone would be a tool for intellectuals, researchers, and academicians—a fluid library coursing through the minds of millions. Joaquin joined the opposition to counter Be fruitful and multiply, the Holy Renaissance’s battle cry. But members of Orbegón’s party came to power in Monterrey and seized the pilone research from La Universidad Catolica, crushing Joaquin’s dreams of a truer renaissance in Mexico.

  “The viral therapy is just a shortcut,” he’d warned Orbegón, then the brash mayor of Monterrey, pleading with him not to start work on a pilone net. “It isn’t finished.”

  “Ya basta,” joked Orbegón, stealing an old indígena battle cry. It would be enough, and he was right. The pilone network would help the dictator-to-be leash Mexico, and Orbegón’s future was lashed to something more dynamic than patriotism. Hope collapsed in Joaquin as he watched young Catholics ignore the admonitions of Pope Santiago I, crossing into de Veras’s Catholicism and signing up for the implant surgery, paid for by the Holy Renaissance.

  Joaquin’s hips drove forward between the Matriarch’s spread thighs. She pleaded with him to stop, but he would not stop until he had taken her, until he had given her everything.

  Orbegón had personally offered Joaquin an office in the Holy Renaissance. Colleagues at La Universidad wanted to use the methods Joaquin pioneered to implant even stronger hookups, with denser central servers, DNA-based computers, satellite relays. They also wanted to use his viral therapy to “indianize” non-Mexicans, so that anyone could use the pilone. It never crossed Joaquin’s mind to accept the offer. He left Mexico the day after Orbegón officially changed the name of Mexico City to Ascensión, less a religious name than an arrogant acknowledgment of the dictator’s rise to power.

  Time healed nothing. Though half his life had passed since then, Joaquin still despised Orbegón for perverting his science, his church, his adopted country. He hated the Mexican people for their weakness and greed. He hated their willingness to have their minds and bodies infiltrated by the dictator. He hated de Veras’s church, which implored Mexico’s women for more children, to make their country the Western Hemisphere’s sole superpower with an even bigger population. He hated it that he was responsible for finding the genomic sequence that made the mark of the Beast, the pilone, a reality.

  The dark sky and water made a mirror of the seaside café’s window. Joaquin had grown accustomed to looking away from his reflection in these later years, unwilling to see the deep circles under his eyes, the slight sag of flesh on his throat. The wunderkind was gone. His smooth, young face and long ringlets of raven hair appeared only in old photographs now. Joaquin had fled Mexico, the United States, and field epidemiology, one after the other—all in various forms of protest, supposedly. But all that running had merely transformed the angry young man into a timid old scientist with a comfortable business and a roomful of industry awards. It made him as melancholy as Quixote at the end of his opera, crying his final aria over an ironic blast of brass, unwilling to face either his own reflection in the Knight of Mirrors’ armor or the fantastical world that the Don himself had shaped.

  The vampire priest appeared. “Look what you have done.” He guided Joaquin away from the sun-scorched, grassy hill where he had raped the Matriarch. “Evil boy!” He slammed the door shut on that hill and handed Joaquin a whip. “Now. Again. Thirty-nine more.”

  The dream lash fell and his own hideous scream woke Joaquin. He remembered that he was back in his childhood home, back in the Villa, as his father had called it. Joaquin looked at his fist and opened his hand. He was carrying a little crucifix, which he set on the table next to his bed.

  Joaquin went to the bathroom and found a box of things marked BAÑO in capital letters, as if prepared for a move, then left in haste. He cleaned his back as best he could with linens, then lowered himself into a tub of water mixed with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He could barely stand the sting, the lap of water on his cut back excruciating. After letting the bloody water drain from the tub, Joaquin dried himself. Like a somnambulist, he walked downstairs in search of food and found three ripe avocados and a netmonitor.
He hooked up the monitor in his bedroom and lay on his stomach while he cut open the avocados.

  A netcast of the preposterously tall President Orbegón was on. Ascensión had been quarantined, and the international community had quarantined Mexico. Good. In the capital, sixty-seven hundred had died since the outbreak began—nearly ninety-eight hundred nationwide. Orbegón declared that he had allowed agents from the Pan-Islamic Virological Institute to visit the devastation in Ascensión. But he declared that America and the EU had started a war by releasing Big Bonebreaker into Mexico, and he demanded to see the work records of all their wetcoders for the last two years.

  Joaquin cut the pit out of an avocado.

  “Our critics have claimed,” Orbegón was saying, “that we are oblivious to the plight of the poor, that we deliberately underestimated the virulence of Big Bonebreaker when it first appeared. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are struggling with technology beyond our knowledge, friends, dispatched upon us by an outlaw nation desperate to recapture its past glory. I extend my hand to those Mexicans who have been hurt most by this plague, in both apology for our ineffectiveness and in hopes that you will join with me in rebuilding our great capital. Mexico is always growing, ever expanding. There is always a place for you at Mexico’s table.”

  “Ever expanding?” scoffed Joaquin. “Like a cancer.”

  “A vocal critic of the Holy Renaissance has set aside her arguments and joined with us today,” Orbegón said. “Sister Domenica is the most popular religious figure in a very religious land. Her compassion for los destitutos is worthy of Santa Teresa of Calcutta. She has joined us in the Federal Cloister to deliver a message to all of Mexico, and she has our blessing to speak her heart.”

  The camera pulled back, and there she was.

  The nun.

  Joaquin stopped moving, a halved avocado in one hand, the slippery pit in the other.

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” she said in her high, violin voice.

  “The Holy Renaissance is grateful for your cooperation, Sister,” Orbegón said. Their voices were like an absurd duet in Joaquin’s ears, Orbegón’s comic bass to the Malinche’s searing soprano.

  “Mexicanistas,” said Sister Domenica. She wore Cardinal de Veras’s symbol, a tin heart of Jesus the Conquistador, on her deep blue blouse. The traitor. The traitorous bitch. “I am here with President Orbegón today to beseech Los Hijos de Marcos and the Indígena Insurgent Army to suspend their aggressions toward the Mexican military, particularly in the hot zones of the capital. You have nothing to gain in this conflict, compadres. The president’s Outbreak Task Force cannot mount an effective response to the virus while you fight.”

  Joaquin edged closer to the monitor, wincing with the movement.

  The nun’s face went smooth with a peacefulness that seemed to sigh from behind her eyes. “Mexicanistas, this virus was created to target a genetic code inherent in Native Mexicans, which means it will attack mestizos and indígenas alike. Mexico, you must stop fighting yourselves and admit this one great truth: The virus does not discern between blancos and indígenas. What divides the indígena from the mestizo cuts Mexico in half.”

  She made it sound as if the viruses were created to kill Indians, as if Joaquin were a racist. I wanted the pilone, not Indians. Joaquin set down the pitted avocado. I wanted to destroy the government that you’re protecting, Malinchiste!

  “That which infects the indígena infects us all,” she said, raising her voice until she was almost singing.

  A disturbance of voices shouting dissent and approval rose somewhere behind the cameras. Domenica was playing a dangerous game, Joaquin figured, pretending to “join” the Holy Renaissance, only to use this press conference as a means to push her pro-indígena agenda.

  The emblem of Torre Cuauhtémoc behind her, Domenica shouted over the shouting in the studio with: “What kills the indígena kills all of Mexico!”

  Orbegón, behind the nun, looked anxious for his safety as a commotion broke out behind the cameras.

  It was the pilone I was after, thought Joaquin. I am not a racist.

  A heartbeat later, the tumult behind the cameras passed. Domenica said, “Though it does not have a cure—yet—the Task Force is responding swiftly and with all its might. They are exhausting all supplies and all their energy now, mounting a single, massive response. Because the world has quarantined us, we must stop quarreling and save Mexico ourselves.”

  This was CDC talk, CDC language. Immune system as leitmotif. Health institutes mounting responses with swiftness and unity of purpose. Joaquin cracked his knuckles. Mexico is secretly doing business with a US agency. I wonder if they pursuaded Henry David to come here, after all.

  “Hold your rosaries up tonight. Say thirteen Ave Marias at sunset for the Blessed Virgin of Guadalupe. Obey the curfew. Obey the military rule in the hot zone, Mexicanistas, and follow the orders of Emil Orbegón and his Task Force.”

  Joaquin tried to stand up but couldn’t. He looked hard at the screen. Was that really the same girl he had seen at the Capilla? The one who had called for resistance to the Holy Renaissance? “How dare you, Malinche? How dare you in the midst of this atrocity betray your people and side with that devil?” Joaquin screwed his eyes shut and rubbed his face. “The world is backwards and upside down if God has sided with her and the dictatorship.”

  “A cure is coming, Mexicanistas. I swear to you. This is God’s promise spoken to me through the woman in white.” Domenica took a step back and stood side by side with Emil Orbegón. She put her arm around him in a half hug.

  Orbegón shouted, “We will have the pilone network functioning within days, my friends. ¡Viva El Renacimiento!”

  Joaquin flinched in disgust. The woman whom the Virgin had chosen was hugging that despot, that fiend. God shunned Joaquin, but He would send the Virgin to that nun, and send that treacherous, profane, Malinchiste to the tyrant.

  The pilone net will be back up in days.

  Joaquin turned away from the screen. He stood up and went to the window that overlooked downtown Ascensión. With ion-scrubbers disabled, the city was smoky and dank, as filthy as he remembered it when he was six. Nonetheless, the shining spikes of green, the towers of La Alta, remained like nails driven into the bones of Mexico. Sixty-eight hundred deaths in a week and it still wasn’t enough to alter Orbegón’s skyline.

  “God spoke to her. To her?” Joaquin clapped his hands and stalked away from the window, then back, gripping the sill in fury. “Why would You choose a traitor?” He pushed himself away from the sill again and picked up the monitor with great effort. He staggered with it for a moment, then threw it out the window, watching it burst and smoke in the street. His crucifix pin followed a moment later. A moment after that, his fail-safe syringe full of palitoxin sailed out the window. “I am fighting the true epidemic in this country, and I’ll fight God to eradicate it, if I have to.”

  The netmonitor was gone, but in his mind’s eye, Joaquin could see the tower’s emblem, a portrait of the last free Nahuatl chief raising a red-and-orange fist behind them. Joaquin said that tower’s name aloud.

  “Cuauhtémoc. Cuauhtémoc. Cuauhtémoc.”

  Joaquin felt a wet trickle on the back of his calves. He pivoted carefully at the waist and saw red dots flecking the backs of his legs. His vision misted. His mind shifted. Later he remembered taking a step toward the bed.

  Doors led through doors, and those doors opened onto confusing, fevered passages. Joaquin walked slowly through the maze and finally opened the last portal. He saw himself lying in his childhood bed, his back so badly flayed and scarred that he seemed burned.

  Disease. Overpopulation. Starvation. War upon war upon war. Nature had been attempting to expel humanity from this poor valley forever. Now she could finally expel the human infection with the arrival of Joaquin’s progeny. “Am I not a part of nature? Are not these viruses mine?” Joaquin said, walking to his own sleeping body, touching his back, dipping a finger in
the blood where his children played. “Am I not here,” he said, looking at the bead of red on his fingertip, “I that am your Mother?”

  On the wall above his bed, he wrote two Latin words in blood.

  Virus sum.

  “I am poison.”

  The first game was over. He’d won. But the pilone net was now under repair and his children were still breeding in his veins. A new hunt was under way, a new mission. Infect Domenica, defy God, and once his children were stampeding through the dictator’s city in the heavens, he would count himself the victor in that game too.

  SATURDAY, MAY 21. 4:17 P.M.

  IN DEATH, the infected lung cell destroyed the virus that had poisoned it.

  “Look what has happened to me,” the lung cell said.

  Defeating this virus was a victory. But it was too late to help the rest of the body; the virus had already bred. Other lung cells did what they could, however, to alert the body by gathering bits of the destroyed cell and presenting them like a dying murder victim clutching the attacker’s kerchief. It presented these viral bits to the bloodstream, demanding justice. “Look!”

  Two days earlier, the immune system never would have recognized even the shattered pieces of the virus. Two days earlier, the powerful antigen would have mutated and spread unimpeded, killing the body within hours.

  But vaccinia from an omnivalent serum floated here. So, cued that something had gone wrong, a newly formed T lymphocyte stopped to examine the attacked cell and its offered evidence. It scurried over the surface like a spider looking for an anchor point for its thread and found the offered viral protein bits. It recognized the virus, having been taught by the omnivalent vaccine what to look for. The immature T cell then sprouted, differentiated, using the information it gathered from the destroyed virus in order to mature into a white blood cell with the ability to kill viruses just like this disassembled one. One T cell couldn’t do much against a rapidly spreading virus, however, so this cell cloned itself. Geometrically. Thousands of identical T cells spread through the body, hunting down their one prey, wherever the virus had found purchase in the body—lung cells, muscle cells, or even floating harmlessly in the blood.