by Brad Parks
They were, most of all, cheap labor and eager helpmates. So it was that my eyes wandered toward the intern pod, looking for an enthusiastic aide-de-camp. Jackie Orr had promised me a room full of sick people. Interviewing them one by one, which is what I’d need to do, would take time. Having the assistance of an intern, presuming it was one who had been properly potty trained, would double my efficiency and halve my time. Plus, much like with kook calls, there was always the entertainment factor to consider. Interns were nothing if not amusing.
This being the middle of the afternoon, the pod was only partially populated. Half of them were out being good little interns, chasing stories. As I sized up the half that remained, my gaze immediately fell on Neesha Krishnamurthy, a smart—if a little too smart—young woman who had come to us from somewhere in the Ivy League. Columbia School of Journalism, if memory served. Poor thing.
Neesha’s internship had thus far been distinguished only by an incident during the early days of her employment, when she stumbled across one of those only-in-Newark stories: a one-legged homeless man who had taken on a one-legged pigeon as a pet, training the bird to perch on his finger, arm, and shoulder.
Neesha somehow persuaded her editor to let her write a human-interest story about the guy—some kind of misguided effort to tug on the readership’s heartstrings with a tale of man and bird, bonded by their shared disability. Unfortunately for her, our Web editors thought it had what they liked to call “viral potential,” so they sent along a videographer. And he had the camera rolling during that priceless moment when Neesha got the bird on her shoulder and it confused her for its favorite statue, depositing a salvo of white glop on her arm.
One point three million YouTube hits had guaranteed that, for the rest of her days at the Eagle-Examiner, Neesha would be known as Pigeon.
Hence, I strolled over to the intern pod, sat down across from her, and said, “Hey, Pigeon, what’s up?”
She looked stricken. “How long are people going to keep calling me that?
“Well, that all depends on one thing,” I said, faux philosophically.
“What?”
“How long you plan on being alive.”
She groaned. “What if I become executive editor someday? That would mean people would have to stop calling me Pigeon, right?”
“No, that would mean we’d have to stop calling you Pigeon to your face.”
“It’s so unfair!” she whined.
“No, unfair is being a pigeon in Newark, New Jersey with only one leg. What happened to you is just funny.”
She pouted. Pigeon could be considered attractive—lots of long, dark hair and long, dark eyelashes surrounded by rather flawless skin—but after a dalliance with the aforementioned Sweet Thang, I had promised myself to swear off interns. Plus, I had enough complications in my romantic life at the moment.
“Anyhow, I was wondering if you wanted to help me report a story,” I said.
“It doesn’t involve pigeons, does it? Because Buster Hays tried to trick me into a story about a—”
I interrupted her by laughing. Buster Hays was the oldest reporter left, the only septuagenarian in a newsroom whose median age was roughly twenty-four. He hung around mostly because he was far too cantankerous to give us the pleasure of seeing him quit.
“No, no. I’m serious,” I assured her. “No pigeons. No birds of any sort. I got a tip about a neighborhood in Newark where apparently a bunch of people are getting sick and no one knows why.”
“Oh, cool,” she said.
Yes, this was one who belonged in the Fourth Estate: only someone with a reporter’s sensibilities would describe mysteriously ill people as “cool.”
“Anyhow, there’s going to be a group of them gathered at a house this afternoon, and I was hoping you could help me interview them. You busy?”
“Well, sort of. But it can wait. Let me just go tell Matt where I’m going.”
Matt was her editor. And he was a decent enough guy, for an editor, but I didn’t need Matt knowing about this. There was too great a risk he would tell my editor, Tina Thompson, with whom I had a somewhat complex relationship. The less Tina knew about my activities at the moment, the better.
“Don’t do that,” I said. She looked confused, so I continued: “Intern lesson number one: when it comes to editors, it’s always better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Well, that depends. Do you want to be known around here for something other than bird poop?”
She followed me out of the newsroom without another word.
* * *
The address furnished to me by Jackie Orr was on Ridgewood Avenue, and as we made the short drive out there from downtown, I gave Pigeon a quick history lesson. Ridgewood Avenue used to be one of the South Ward’s great streets, located in the Weequahic section of the city, one of Newark’s great neighborhoods. Then someone got the fine idea to construct Interstate 78 through it in the late 1950s. It tore Ridgewood Avenue roughly in half, destroying the neighborhood and leaving behind a piece of the city that never quite recovered.
The house was located on the section of Ridgewood Avenue that survived just to the north of the highway, an odd wedge of real estate that had long been yearning for revitalization. It was a strange hodgepodge of residential and industrial, with everything from manufacturing and transportation companies to new public housing and old private housing, with some newly paved streets next to ones in such serious need of repaving you could see cobblestones under the asphalt.
Symbolically, nothing captured the area better than the South Ward Industrial Park. Originally conceived in the seventies as a $100 million economic engine that would employ more than a thousand residents, it was finally built in the late nineties as a $9 million facility that maybe—maybe—employed a hundred people and never did become the catalyst that anyone thought it would be.
Still, this being Newark, where urban renewal has been just around the corner for fifty years, there was a new project being touted as a neighborhood savior. Using eminent domain as something of a cudgel, the city had managed to scrape together a sizable piece of property across several city blocks, in the process leveling some abandoned factories and some houses that should have been abandoned but still had people living in them.
Then, with a variety of tax abatements and promises about streamlining approval processes, it had sold the parcel to McAlister Properties, a father-son development team who fancied themselves the Trumps of Newark. I was always a little unclear where the father, Barry McAlister, had gotten his seed money from—family? investments? bank theft?—but he and his son, Vaughn, had slapped their name on a couple of buildings in the city and, allegedly, they were going to toss up something sizable and shiny on this plot as well.
The last proposal I had heard about was for one of those mixed-use, mixed-income developments that have become all the rage among the urban-planning set. The numbers being touted by city hall always seemed to vary—anywhere from two hundred to three hundred affordable and market-rate residential units and 60,000 to 90,000 square feet of retail space—but it was, without question, going to be large. The total price tag was put somewhere around $120 million.
There were even rumors about a big-box store anchoring the retail space. A Kohl’s? A Target? It was, so far, a well-guarded secret. But Newarkers got giddy when they spoke of it. That was one of the real ironies of life in a depressed city: all the people wanted was the same kind of national franchises—with their homogeneous, cookie-cutter architecture—that people in the well-to-do suburbs desperately tried to keep out.
The development was currently being called McAlister Arms—not to be confused with McAlister Center or McAlister Place, which were office buildings located downtown—and it was located just off an exit ramp to I-78. The thinking was that shoppers might be enticed into the stores by the lower sales tax of an urban enterprise zone and that commuters might be enticed to move there by t
he easy access to the highway.
That was another irony: the very roadway that had first rent the neighborhood asunder was now being seen as a hope for helping to bring it back. Some of the locals thought it would really turn into a boon for the area. Others thought it would be another South Ward Industrial Park, a project that promised salvation and delivered something well short of it.
Either way, it had to be better than what was there now: a big, empty lot.
It turned out the neatly trimmed single-family house where Jackie Orr had her group congregating was within shouting distance of the McAlister Arms site—or at least it was shouting distance if you could make yourself heard over the rumble of trucks and other heavy equipment that were readying the site for construction. As I pulled into a parking spot, I saw an earthmover pushing dirt into a pile that a backhoe was then scooping into a dump truck. Elsewhere, a crane was stacking steel girders. It was like watching very large Tonka trucks in action.
“So what’s our plan?” Pigeon asked.
“Basically, you want to make like a doctor: ask them questions about what ouches, when it started ouching, and how it ouches. Then write down the answers. We’ll sort everything else out later.”
“Okay. Who’s keeping the spreadsheet?”
“Who said anything about a spreadsheet?”
She looked at me like I had caught the stupid virus. “Investigative reporters keep spreadsheets,” she said, as if quoting from a textbook. “It allows them to systematically track large volumes of data, identify emerging patterns, and draw conclusions based on their findings. It’s how modern investigative reporting is done.”
I made a show of stifling a fake yawn. “Really? Is that so? Says who?”
“Didn’t you go to journalism school?”
“Thankfully, no,” I said. Which is true. I had no formal training in journalism. And, frankly, I had never missed it. My undergraduate degree was from Amherst, a small liberal-arts college in Massachusetts where they had no journalism major and, in general, had tried not to teach us anything too useful. I grew more appreciative of how nonspecific my education had been with each passing year, as it became clear that in this breakneck world of ours, anything allegedly practical they might have crammed into me would have become quickly outdated anyway.
“Oh, well, I took several classes in investigative reporting and computer-assisted reporting,” she said. “I’d be happy to help you set up a spreadsheet.”
“Oh, no, thank you. Some of us reporters like to do their investigating a little more haphazardly.”
“Why?”
“Because studies have shown reporters who use spreadsheets are seventy-two percent more likely to clog their stories with meaningless statistics,” I said. “In fact, did you know that spreadsheets account for more than ninety-one percent of the deathly dull stories that get into the newspaper?”
She paused to consider these purely fabricated pieces of information as I turned off the engine. “You’re making fun of me right now, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Pigeon, you’re about to meet real people, not data points,” I said. “In my experience, human beings are too messy for spreadsheets. Stick around long enough and you’ll learn to love them for it.”
* * *
The woman who answered my knock on the door could not have been more than twenty-one. And if you told me she was fourteen, I would have believed that, too. She sort of resembled a mop held upside down: thin as the handle until her head, which exploded in a profusion of thick, black braids, loosely organized by a rubber band.
I smiled as she pulled open the wooden front door, noting she had not yet touched the clear Plexiglas storm door. She was going to size me up first, and that was fine by me. Newspaper reporters grow accustomed to being the Fuller Brush salesmen of the modern day: if we don’t make a good impression on the front porch, we’ll never get inside the house. For that reason, I’m always conscious of making my appearance as professional and noncontroversial as possible.
Hence, what the woman saw on the other side of her storm door was a smiling, six-foot-one, 185-pound WASP with the world’s most boring haircut, pleated khaki pants, a freshly ironed white shirt, and a necktie that looked like it had been picked out by the Republican National Committee.
If she had looked really carefully, she would have noticed I double-knotted my shoes.
“Hi. I’m Carter Ross. Are you Jackie?”
She adjusted a pair of bug-eyed glasses that were too big for her small face. They were at least twenty years out of style and might have been charity giveaways. Or maybe that’s just what The Kids were wearing these days. Either way, they gave Jackie an owlish look. I immediately pegged her as the girl in her high school class who spent lunchtime by herself in the corner of the cafeteria, reading fiction for pleasure.
“Yes, hi, Mr. Ross, thank you for coming,” Jackie said, opening the storm door.
“First of all, please call me Carter. Otherwise you’ll make me feel old. Second, this is my colleague Neesha Krishnamurthy. I hope you don’t mind I brought her along to help me do some interviewing.”
“That’s fine. Please come in.”
She showed me into a small entryway, with stairs immediately in front of me, a small living room to the right, and a kitchen in back. Nothing in the house looked to have been added within the last thirty years or so.
“Nice place,” I said, because politeness is sometimes more important than honesty.
“This is my grandma’s house,” Jackie said, then corrected herself: “Was my grandma’s house.”
Right. Was. In case I hadn’t already figured it out, Jackie added, “She just died.”
“Sorry for your loss. How old was she?”
“Seventy-seven. It was actually at her funeral that we started realizing how many people in the neighborhood had been getting sick. We had been so busy caring for Grandma we hadn’t noticed before that.”
I considered asking for more details about Grandma, but I was aware there was a room full of people just to my right. They were all from the neighborhood, which meant they were all African American, and I got the sense they were sizing up the white guy who had just walked in. I figured it made more sense to talk to the living now and get details about the dead later.
“There are more of us than what you see here,” she said, pointing me to the living room. “There are about twenty of us altogether. This is just who I could get on short notice.”
I turned into the room and took stock. There were eight people: six women and two guys, roughly thirty to seventy years of age. They tended to be more toward the pleasantly plump side, but otherwise they looked … healthy, I guess. Or at least healthy for Newark, which is not an especially well city to begin with. In modern-day America, taking care of one’s self requires money, good insurance, and ready access to primary care, none of which are things that people in a place like Newark tend to have.
“Hi, folks,” I said. “How is everyone today?”
The replies were mostly mumbled, the faces downcast. I think people sometimes have newspapers confused with television, or at least they were acting like they were on camera. This little cadre of convalescents was ill, and they were going to play that part as long as they were in my presence. Then again, since Jackie’s grandma had just died—perhaps of the same cause that was diseasing them—I suppose I shouldn’t have expected a pep rally to break out just because I had asked them how they were doing.
After the introductions and a few necessary niceties, Pigeon and I divided the afflicted, went into separate quarters—me to the kitchen, her to the small dining room that was connected to the living room—and began interviewing them.
What I heard four times over the next hour or so was more or less the same story, told in slightly different ways. People kept getting what they thought was the flu, except it was happening too often to really be the flu. There was no discernible pattern to how or when it happened. There was no reliable predictor of wh
en it would flare up again.
The symptoms beyond that were a little more scattershot, everything from puffy eyes to aching feet to a persistent cough and respiratory distress. And that could mean anything from diabetes to allergies. Being that my medical training didn’t go beyond watching Scrubs reruns, it’s not like I could place them as all being related to, say, a failure in the endocrine system. Mostly because I couldn’t remember what the endocrine system actually did. I was proud of myself for even knowing we had one.
But there was one thing that caught my attention: broken bones. Three of the four people I talked to had fractured something recently, and they said others in their group had reported the same thing. That could just be coincidence, but I doubted it. Adults just weren’t that clumsy.
What I liked about broken bones, from a journalistic standpoint, was that it wasn’t the flu. A bunch of people who complained they were getting flulike symptoms too often felt like it could be an imagined thing, some kind of mass hypochondria. You couldn’t imagine breaking a bone. It could be confirmed with X-rays. It was incontrovertible.
Plus, it suggested something truly strange was going on.
They all had theories as to what that was. One woman swore it was the water: she noticed it was suspiciously cloudy just before the onset of her most recent outbreak. Another woman thought perhaps the local grocery store where they all shopped had applied some kind of chemical to its produce. The guy I interviewed thought it had something to do with the neighborhood’s proximity to I-78, which was more or less on top of them.
It was all possible, I guess. I just knew whatever it was had to be fairly local. The people I talked to didn’t really have a lot in common. They ate different diets, worked different kinds of jobs (or not at all), lived in different houses. But the one thing they all shared was the neighborhood. It didn’t take an epidemiologist to speculate that something very nearby—in the air, in the soil, in the water—was the culprit.
But I understood why the lawyers Jackie had talked to wanted nothing to do with her and her motley little group. Unless you had some kind of inkling to what this peculiar pathogen might be, it would take a lot of time—and money—to figure it out. That was assuming you ever could.
