Cold Silence

by James Abel

  And finally the day it changed. Sykes taking refuge in an old record shop in Albany in a storm, not to buy anything, just to keep dry, standing amid vintage rock albums disdained as old-fashioned ten years ago, but regarded as valuable again. In a record store second chances were contagious.

  “You look hungry,” a girl’s voice said as he stood in back, trying to stay invisible and not get kicked out.

  She was pretty: jet-black hair, glistening blue eyes, lean figure, and firm belly visible below the cutoff top. He saw sympathy instead of revulsion in her eyes, kindness where he usually saw dread. Girls had not regarded him that way for years.

  “I’m Mariko. You look like you need a friend.”

  She’d taken his hand as if she knew him, led him outside, just opened the door to her late-model Toyota, unafraid. A miracle. An angel.

  “Don’t be shy. Get in.”

  The house where she brought him was filled with wonderful people who gave him a bed, and food, and didn’t ask questions. Carla and Fritz, Mariko and Morgan and Shahid. They didn’t make him leave. Weeks passed before he blurted out the story, sobbing, and even then they accepted him, gathered around and hugged him and told him he was welcome. He belonged. In that house Orrin met a man who had answers. And in his mind, he was reborn.

  And now, heart slamming with excitement, Orrin found parking on 2nd Street, five blocks from the Longworth Building. At one time, years ago, you could park closer, but between the security precaution tire shredders, bomb barriers, and no parking signs, you needed to range farther to find a legal two-hour parking space on Capitol Hill.

  He left the car in front of a townhouse. His size eleven footprints filled with falling snow as he walked. A few Diamond cabs cruised Independence, exhaust trailing like breath. Orrin had shaved. His dress shirt was blue and his tie was maroon, the suit gray. His hair was combed and he wore Washington’s ubiquitous belted raincoat. He was a lawyer. A lobbyist. The effect was enhanced by clear-lensed, thick-framed rectangular glasses.

  The line to get in stretched outside—people stamping in the cold, waiting to go through metal detectors. Longworth filled a city block. Its gray edifice represented the Capitol’s 1930s love affair with neoclassical revival architecture, a combo of boxy Soviet utilitarianism with glommed-on Ionic colonnades.

  At the security station he watched the Tumi bag float through the x-ray machine. This was the moment when he could be caught, and for an instant he was scared. The bag contained news clips about today’s hearing on a religious revival at U.S. Air Force bases. There was also the day’s Washington Post, Tylenol, and a pill vial labeled Cipro, an antibiotic. But it was not.

  It did not cure illness. It created it.

  The security guards didn’t even open the case. Sykes kept his head down so cameras would not show his face. He walked with a small limp, turned his feet slightly inward. A smart observer watching a tape later and then seeing the real Orrin walking, would not connect the gaits.

  The hearing room was packed, standing room only. He stood there for thirty minutes, pretending to listen, because Harlan said that security people would later go over the tapes. He opened the notebook. A Congressman from Buffalo grilled an Air Force major about evangelical meetings at air bases in Colorado Springs and at Creech in Nevada. Daily readings from the New Testament. Lunchtime prayers in a dining area. Hazing of non-Christian personnel.

  “Major, wouldn’t you say that there is no place for religious proselytizing in an air base?” the Congressman said curtly. “That our Constitution specifies the separation of Church and State?”

  The man at the witness table looked up at seven Congressmen and women on a raised dais, and frowned.

  “I would say, sir, that at no time were any personnel coerced into participating. Prayer was purely voluntary.”

  The blood roared in Orrin’s ears so loudly that it all was gibberish to him.

  The clock ticked toward noon, when the chairman adjourned for lunch and Sykes joined a stream of people heading downstairs to the underground level of the Capitol. It was a maze down there! A mini city. Corridors filled with staffers, tourists, witnesses from the hearings, lobbyists trying to get bills passed or shut down. Orrin saw a post office and a Quick Mart and a dry cleaners. There was a Verizon shop. One tunnel led to the Rayburn Building and another to a little open train taking riders back and forth to the Senate side of the Capitol.

  The cafeteria was packed, smaller than he would have imagined. At one table: Iñupiat Eskimos from Alaska, here to lobby against blocking off their entire coastline, polar bear habitat, to development; at another, pro-football players fighting against salary caps. Nuns on the left. Ten guys in AFL-CIO jackets sat in a corner. A Toyota Motor Corp. legal team sat beneath a flat-screen TV showing a Midwest snowstorm. The cafeteria was like a high school lunchroom for the whole country, each table a clique, each group wearing their group uniforms, clerical collars, pinstriped men at the deli counter, logo sweatshirts by the steam table reading, A FETUS IS A PERSON.

  “You will want the salad bar,” Harlan Maas had said.

  Sykes put his right hand in his pocket and palmed the little vial. The blood rushed in his head and his voice, when he ordered a burger, sounded astoundingly calm. The fries looked soggy. The burger looked like paper. He had no appetite to eat. He carried the food to the salad bar; shiny bins offering up red tomatoes and black olives, here a bin of yellow pineapple squares, there a container featuring freshly cut rings of red onions.

  He’d rehearsed the hand movements last night before a mirror. He was, after all, in public, moving down a line. This was his most vulnerable moment. He felt sweat inside his socks. If someone saw him, there would be no question that he was contaminating the food.

  All heads swiveled for a moment to the TV on the wall, rebroadcasting an argumentative part of today’s hearing. As Sykes’s tray passed over the mushroom bits, he pinched the capsule, felt plastic give. He envisioned the mushroom-colored powder falling on the veggies. Then his legs—as if by themselves—carried him to a four-person table. He sat down. From his pocket he removed a small clear plastic vial labeled HAND SANITIZER. He felt the liquid squishing between his fingers. Stomach churning, he picked up the burger and forced himself to take a bite.

  “Remember, surveillance tapes will be scrutinized,” Harlan had warned him. “Make yourself eat.”

  Sykes finished the burger. Heart slamming in his chest, he felt a fry ooze down his throat, as if it were a living creature, wriggling and trying to get back out.

  He watched the room. No one went to the salad bar.

  Then suddenly his throat constricted as a cafeteria worker approached the bar with a rolling cart filled with replacement vegetables. He was going to take away the infected food before anyone ate it!

  The worker wore thick blue rubber gloves as he replaced some of the vegetable bins in the salad bar with fresh ones. Sykes wanted to scream at him to stop. Not even one person had eaten from the mushroom bin yet. Sykes had to contain himself from launching himself across the floor at the cafeteria worker. But then the worker broke off his activity before replacing the mushroom bin. The attendant rolled the cart away, looking bored.

  Harlan’s voice, in Sykes’s head, said, “Relax, friend.”

  Orrin Sykes watched a trio of men in expensive suits—including a Congressman he recognized from the TV—step up to the salad bar. Sykes uncapped his bottled water. The Congressman added mushrooms to his salad, then the men carried their trays to the STAFF ONLY area.

  Orrin rose and placed his tray with the empties. Leaving the room, he turned back to see a half dozen Amish women, in bonnets, at the salad bar, loading up.

  Orrin Sykes walked out of the Longworth Building and down the marble stairs and hit the cold air outside. The weather had turned vicious. The temperature had plunged. A barrage of snowy hail slanted from the sky, smashing taxis, slash
ing the rooftops of government. In wonder, Sykes recalled that sometimes Harlan Maas sermonized about the ten plagues that God visited upon Egypt when Pharaoh denied the Hebrew slaves permission to leave. The prophet Moses warned Pharaoh that if he did not relent, great suffering would afflict his people. Pharaoh laughed, never imagining that any force existed that was more powerful than him.

  Boils. Hail. Leprosy, Harlan said.

  The wind blew punishing granules into his face. He tilted forward against gusts to reach the car. Inside, the noise lessened, and the radio announcer said a worse storm was coming. Today it was ravaging swaths of the Midwest.

  “We’re in for the biggest blizzard of the decade!”

  Orrin had gotten away with it! He was safe! He drove carefully along Rock Creek Parkway, passing sliding cars, a crash, a Chevy idling at a light like a horse afraid to cross water. Washington sent powerful armies ranging across the earth. But it froze with fear if half an inch of snow fell.

  Orrin waited until he was back in Northwest Washington to punch in Harlan’s number on the disposable.

  “Burke is worried about one of his investigators. A man named Rush. I’m sending you his photo,” Harlan said.

  NINE

  A quarantined town is a ghost town filled with living people. The stillness gives weight to air, turns streets into still lifes, exaggerates any movement at all. Smoke curling from a chimney seems more ominous than comforting. Faces at windows drop away quickly, and curtains fall back in place. Even a stray dog, sensing fear, walks tentatively down a deserted street with its tail down as a trio of biosuited figures knocks on a bar door, the banging sounding, in the stillness, far too loud.

  “Go away,” called the frightened man inside. “I’m sick of you people. You’re not taking me away!”

  “Sir, if we have to break in, we will.”

  A handful of weathered, sun-blasted wooden homes. A dozen diagonal parking spots before a motel/gas station combo. I saw a brown hawk staring down at me from the flat roof of Gazzara’s Tavern. Its creamy feathers matched the dun color of surrounding scrub desert, the dark streaks the escarpments in the hazy distance.

  The voice called, “I’m not going to any hospital!”

  We’d come into town during a gap between medical team visits, when investigators took samples of blood, hair, fingernails, urine, and probed and examined wall mold, air conditioners, refrigerators, vents.

  The screen and wooden slat door opened. Gazzara’s smelled of pine sawdust, beer, garlic, and bananas. A hand-scrawled sign by an oval mirror read, OUR SPECIALTY: SPAGHETTI AND ELK SAUSAGE, FRIDAY NIGHTS. Antelope jerky sticks leaned like pretzels in a tall jar. Electric beer signs—RUBY MOUNTAIN ANGEL CREEK AMBER ALE, TENAYA CREEK—were turned off at midday, below a banner for the Nevada Wolf Pack football team. The sawdust muted the shuffle of our biofootwear. I saw a half dozen empty tables and a pool table and dart board on a wall.

  “See my arm? They poke me every six hours!”

  Art Gazarra kept the bar between us, like a protective barrier. He looked about forty, balding on top, wearing soiled Levi’s and a sweat-stained T-shirt that showed a well-developed chest and biceps, but a pot belly swelling over his belt. Eddie, Chris, and I stood at the rail in our gear, probably looking like aliens waiting for beers.

  Gazzara growled, “You have no right to cut us off!”

  “We’re here to help.”

  He laughed insanely. Two Gazzaras stood before us, the frightened one and a healthier one in the softball team photo behind the bar. Before illness struck, he’d been a sad-faced man with hangdog eyes, large ears, thick brows, and clumpy chestnut hair that seemed hacked off by a blind person. He’d not shaved in days. Based on the damage I saw—nose decay, red spots by the mouth, cauliflower left ear—I guessed that his beard obscured more. No wonder he was angry. If he’s not at the hospital, this damage is new.

  Eddie kept his hand on his sidearm. But Gazzara’s fear was not aggressive. He was a rabbit hiding in his hole. Once we were in that hole, his resistance collapsed, and he became pliant. I didn’t need a friend just now. I needed information.

  Had he noticed anyone sick in town prior to two Fridays ago? No, he snapped. Had anything unusual happened recently? Had food or drink tasted odd? Had any illness resembling this one ever happened here before?

  “Why did you ask about that Friday?”

  “My understanding is,” I said, taking a stool to position myself at eye level, “that’s when the base people—first ones to get sick—came in. For the birthday.”

  “You’re trying to pin this on me?”

  “I’m trying to figure it out.”

  He resumed wiping the bar. It did not need cleaning but he didn’t stop. The movement gave him something to do.

  “I don’t remember anything special about that day, if that’s what you mean,” he said.

  “Good! Then if nothing special happened that day, please just go over what was normal.”

  He polished that bar over and over. His vocal cords sounded unaffected, but I remembered how victims in Somalia had manifested symptoms differently. One person suffered skin damage first. Another, voice loss. There was no way to tell at this point how far the disease had progressed in Gazarra. He’d need to go to the hospital, but I wasn’t going to say that yet.

  “You want normal? I came down from upstairs—we live there—at ten. I made jerky. Normal! We get hunters on weekends so I keep extra around. I knew there would be a party that night. Crystal already had the cake in the fridge. That help?” he challenged. “Help you figure out what the hell is going on?”

  “You never know what can be important. I appreciate hearing about even little things.”

  His expression soured even more. “I paid some bills. Normal! I cleaned spigots. I got burgers from the freezer. I made lunch for those two weird tourists from L.A.”

  I felt a sudden throbbing in the back of my head. My lungs seemed to tighten, and for an instant, my breathing slowed. Tourists were here? Chris looked shocked. We were thinking the same thing. This bar may have been ground zero for an outbreak. The soldiers would have arrived too late if tourists had been here for the initial infection, if they had then gone blithely out into the world, days ago, shedding the disease.

  I felt Chris Vekey come closer behind me.

  “I made his elk burger well done. Hers was rare, with crispy fries,” Gazzara said. “They’re long gone.”

  “Did they give you their names, sir?”

  “I don’t require names to take an order.”

  “Did they say where they were going? Or pay with a credit card?”

  That would have been too easy. Food orders were his memory tricks. I curbed my impatience while he recalled clearly that she’d asked for extra pickles. The man had shaken pepper on his fries. But talk? He had no memory of talk, beyond their order. Did he recall the license plate on their car? The kind of car? A rental company sticker or regional accent? Sorry.

  “They definitely had two beers each.”

  “If they said nothing you remember,” Chris asked, trying to keep frustration from her voice, “why are you so sure they came from L.A.?”

  “Hmmm. Good question. Hmmm. Maybe they did say something. Or I just assumed L.A. I mean, most tourists who show up turn out to be from there. Ask Jack Lawrence at the Quick Mart. I think I saw them buy gas. Wait. He’s at the hospital with his wife, Millie.”

  My face had started prickling, and I hoped all that meant was that I was alarmed.

  “Mr. Gazarra, did you tell any of the doctors who examined you about these tourists?”

  “I might have. I’m not sure. They mostly wanted to know whether I lost power in the freezers, as if I’d serve rotted food to customers! The assholes!”

  Eddie shook his head.

  We needed to get outside, somewhere where communication wasn’t jammed,
needed to find out if authorities knew about the tourists. If not, we needed Burke to order an alert. To shotgun a message to state police, health officials, and hospitals. We needed a sketch artist. We needed to search phones, to go house to house and try to ID the pair.

  Eddie said, “Someone must have mentioned it.”

  “No such thing as ‘must have.’”

  Eddie groaned. “Murphy’s Law.”

  I envisioned a car on a road and a faceless man and woman inside. Then they were checking into a motel, and touching a pen, or one of those punch-button sign-in machines. I saw them in a restaurant, touching a sugar bowl. I saw them at a gas station, handing a credit card to an attendant. I saw them back home in Los Angeles, shaking hands, kissing children, inviting friends over for a drink, ignoring early signs that they were getting sick.

  Shit.

  “I’ll do it,” Chris said, and quickly left the bar. The screen door slammed behind her. I heard our Humvee start up outside.

  I thanked Gazarra and explained that he needed to pack a bag and get to the hospital. Chris would have him picked up. He started to refuse but Eddie leaned over the bar, snapping out, “You have a wife upstairs? You want to make her sick, too? Or is she sick already?”

  Gazarra put his face in his hands. No, she’s not sick. He looked up. I imagined that in the last twenty minutes while we’d talked, the red patch on his cheek had enlarged. Was that my imagination? For the tenth time today I cursed whoever had ordered the drone attack on the Somali clan fighters back in Africa.

  There might have been evidence there—a story, a folktale, a piece of information we might have learned.

  Right now we needed to go house to house and continue questioning. But at the screen door I turned back. I’d thought of one last thing. “Mr. Gazzara? Why did you call the two tourists weird?”