by David Bajo
She nodded upward to the screens. “It was them, the other bodies. Sorry.”
Claiborne pulled at the back of his neck, flexed his shoulders.
“Don’t be. It shows there’s hope for you. It shows you kind of really might think it’s viral.”
“I’ve been thinking that,” she said. “Mullich got me thinking. I told him it was in there. In him. In them. Us.”
“Well.” He motioned to the screens. “It’s not in you or him.”
She realized the one screen was her. She flinched and turned to the one for Mullich.
“What?” asked Claiborne. He nodded to the scan of Mullich.
“What’s he have you thinking?”
She resisted looking at the scans. She focused on the cello music, imagined breathing it. “What if it is in us? Some of us.”
“You’re thinking syndrome?”
“Why not? We have nothing but death and indicators. Maybe we can’t find the one thing because there are two things. It happens to us all the time in ER. Maybe it’s like Reye’s. Working off a common virus. Coryza plus something else. Zoster plus something else.”
He almost laughed, no smile but a straightening of the shoulders.
“You and Thorpe are still going the same way. He’ll like that. I think.”
“Assuming the virus is horizontal,” she replied. “In us. Then the other factor has to be vertical.”
“They’ve taken all the air filters. All disposal receptacles.”
At first she felt a sense of headway, almost a rush. She examined the overhead scans, briefly hers, focusing on Mullich’s form, sublimate to profile. That could take forever, to search and test for the vertical factor. It would split resources. They could never find it.
As in Reye’s Syndrome. We just know it’s there. We just know the two ends of the equation: pox plus aspirin plus childhood times y equals sudden death. Remove any one additive and we’re okay; damn that unknown variable.
She sympathized with Thorpe and hated him at the same time.
She was almost able to picture him, to recall which one of those onstage experts he was.
On the overheads Mullich’s scans looked better than hers.
Sublimate, his form appeared ready, arms and legs evenly spread; in profile, the form was serene, jawline perpendicular to throat. He displayed himself proudly. Both of hers were askew. In profile, her face angled toward torso, a body fearing itself. Sublimate, she had swept her left arm inward, turned the right foot more outward. The form was almost Chaplinesque, or Kabuki.
She returned to Mullich’s scans.
“You trust him?” she asked.
Claiborne looked at the scans, studied Mullich’s. “All I can say is that I’m glad he’s set up down here.”
She traced the outline of Mullich’s face, squinted, pretended to see something. “Did he ask for these, or did you request them?”
“After I took your blood and your scans, he told me I should do the same for him. Told me he was there with you and Cabral.”
Mendenhall clicked her tongue. “Did Thorpe ever find out who called in Meeks? Who found Meeks first and called ER? Used Meeks’s cell?”
Claiborne shook his head. “If it wasn’t Meeks himself, we figured it was somebody from physical plant who was scared. Scared of infection, scared of quarantine. Makes sense they would call it in quick and then dash, use Meeks’s cell.”
“But it doesn’t make sense that Thorpe can’t find that person,”
replied Mendenhall. “I mean, I could find that person. You know what makes more sense?” She pointed directly to the middle of Mullich’s sublimate form. “That. Him. Who else would be poking around the basements? Who would want the body to get to ER—
to me, then maybe you?”
She knew. She could picture Mullich down there with his laser pointer and range finder, blueprints in his head. She didn’t need Claiborne’s confirmation.
“Like I said.” Claiborne bowed his head and massaged the back of his neck. “Glad I got him down here.”
“He’s everywhere.” Mendenhall kept her gaze on the scan.
“Everywhere and nowhere.”
34.
She remembered to eat. The cafeteria surprised her. All tables were occupied. Groups had set up camp at every one, coats and bags saving seats, table surfaces strewn with empty cups, stacked dishes and trays. Clutter from the booths spilled into the pathways. Three workers from physical plant had been sent to help with the busing and sweeping. The restroom doors were propped open. The bleach smell was singular, sharp, a full erasure. The physical plant people wore tool belts, and the leather hung low on their hips as they pushed brooms and gathered litter into bags.
Mendenhall felt a pang, a crawling behind her eyes. Meeks and Dozier would have been down here. They might have been friends with these others. The bleached air stung tears to her eyes. She used the sleeve at the inside of her elbow to press them away.
Food and water supplies that had been trucked in were stacked in plastic-wrapped pallets. The vending machines were empty. The crowd was noisy, bursts of laughter here and there. Mendenhall broke the seal on a nearby pallet and helped herself to a box of granola bars. She started to do the same with a stack of water bottles, but a security officer touched her wrist with a baton. His uniform had the same piping as that worn by her dislocated-shoulder patient in the ER. This guy was even bigger.
She considered the baton on her wrist, her fingers on the bottle.
She maintained the pose, studied his face. His expression was blank, his gaze aimed at her throat. She removed her fingers from the bottle. The baton tip lingered on her wrist. She returned the box of granola bars. The bleach air and the officer’s pale features fit too well and killed her appetite.
“I was gonna pay,” she told him. “I always do it this way. I’m from ER. We have to go here and back. It’s weird, isn’t it, that they put us on the same floor? Food and blood.”
She could have left it there. But there was a downturn in his lips. It wouldn’t have affected her except that it appeared delivered, a rote response, a passing down of judgment.
“I’ve seen the dead,” she told him. “All six, inside and out. I got them first. I have touched them all. I have breathed their breath.”
She spread her hand in front of his face.
He didn’t flinch. His voice was throaty, boyish. “I know who you are. We all do.”
“So what are your orders for me?” she asked. “Like shoot to kill?”
He folded his arms across his chest and centered himself between the pallets, stared at the cafeteria chaos.
“What was it like being sent in?” she asked. She aligned herself next to him, watched, thought of going to parades as a kid. “A thrill, I bet. Telling yourselves you’re being sent in to save people, sacrificing. But really it’s the power and the secrets. The game.”
She studied his jaw. It was shiny, freshly shaved. The bleach scent could have been his cologne.
“Have you ever seen virions? Did they show you pictures?
They look like spaceships. Different types of spaceships. They have geometric capsules—some spherical, some octagonal. They have landing gear, tripods, suction cups, drills. But those are only the ones we can find. They hide. In different ways, in different places, in various disguises. They aren’t alive, but neither are they inanimate.”
She waved a hand in front of his face. His eyes remained still.
“They didn’t, did they? They didn’t show you pictures of a virus.”
She positioned herself in front of him, faced him. “But they showed you a picture of me.”
She backed away. “Think about that. When you think.”
Back in her cubicle, she sipped from a little carton of warm milk she had swiped from a tray. It tasted of chlorine, the chemical still in her nose. She visited the forum. More sympathy from ERs in Mexico City, Denver, and Istanbul. They referred to her cases as the Mercy Six. There were rumors of
similar cases emerging. In Tokyo.
In Hong Kong. Rumors were to be expected. But Mendenhall had seen the helicopter, and so she worried.
Her mentor had taught her to examine and divide her emotions, especially the surface ones. It was important to learn this in the ER, a way to avoid conflating the stream of patients, injuries, conditions. The worry connected to the helicopter felt new to her, not part of the diagnosis for the Mercy Six. So what she feared was not overreaction but policy. Maybe this was selfish, a fear of losing even more control. Maybe it was objective, rooted in her earliest intuition: not infection, not viral—but we make it so by thinking and acting that way.
A message from the outside invaded her screen. It was a query from a reporter with the Times, a T. Ben-Curtis. The presumptive tone led her to believe it was a man. He assumed she would want to respond, couched his message in her need, hid his sex. He just wanted to know how it had started in the ER, how it looked. He wanted to put faces to the names involved. Following protocol, she forwarded the query to Dmir.
The last thing Ben-Curtis asked was, How many more? That was the one answer he wanted, the patient at the doorknob. Who’s next? Who’s dying in there?
She forced herself to finish the warm, tainted milk. She wrote out a response she knew she would not send. It’s not a virus. The infection is us. I am the worst part of it because I know and I act and I speak and I don’t speak out of fear and comfort. We’re all dying in here.
We go to sleep and wake up dead.
Instead of catharsis she felt dread, the same feeling she had whenever she removed a bandage to find that a wound had worsened. She thought of Kae Ng 23 first but recognized her own self-diversion. She almost forgot to delete her message to Ben-Curtis before hurrying off to Pathology. To find Silva. To wake her.
35.
She searched the lesser rooms of Pathology. They were empty, peaceful, just as Silva had explained. Mendenhall found her in a small lab at the end of a hall. Within, light fell from a green exit sign. As Mendenhall’s eyes adjusted, Silva’s form came clear.
The tech lay on her back, her lab coat as blanket, her head on a thin pillow. Her hair swept over her face, and her hands rested on the pillow, too, softly fisted.
Part of her wanted to linger and watch, watch for breathing, for a flutter of lashes, a finger twitch. But the part of her that always won swept her toward Silva. I am breaking into pieces, she thought in the movement, a line of vertebrae slinking into itself. Her two fingers went to Silva’s carotid, dipped into the warm fold.
Silva’s head twitched, turned in the direction of the touch.
Mendenhall started, drew her hand back. She sighed twice, the first deep with relief, the second sharp with self-reproach. Silva did not wake. Her lashes quivered. Her lips mouthed dream words.
Mendenhall smoothed the tech’s hair clear, placed hand to forehead. Body temp was just below 98.6. Silva had gone into deep sleep. She might have slept for hours. Mendenhall’s touch had triggered her toward consciousness, maybe into dream. Silva’s fists clenched and released, still pillowed about her head.
Mendenhall pinched the ends of Silva’s hair, twirled a thin lock into a delicate yarn. She lifted this and watched the green light slide along the sleekness.
“If I knew what I believed, I would tell you. But it’s only in parts right now.” She eased the lock of hair higher, weightless between thumb and forefinger. “Maybe that’s just what belief is. Parts never reaching a whole, always that gap.”
Silva murmured in her sleep. Mendenhall watched the flutter of lashes, followed the black curve, the lift at the end reflecting the lift of the brow. When she fixed her gaze, she found that Silva’s eyes had opened. She was awake.
Mendenhall released the lock of hair. Silva blinked, focused, appeared only slightly perplexed. She lifted her head, raised herself to one elbow, her lab coat falling away.
“Dr. Mendenhall.” Silva checked her watch. “I overslept.”
She started to hurry. Mendenhall touched her shoulder. “You’re fine. Everything’s fine.”
Silva blinked some more, let her stare go blank. “No.” She made an mm sound. “No. It’s not.”
Mendenhall pressed her palm to Silva’s forehead, then drew a pulse. The tech’s eyes appeared clear, remarkably clear. “You feel something? Something off ?”
Silva stared straight ahead. “The only time I think clearly is just before waking. Dreams, you know? What they seem to do?”
Mendenhall nodded.
“I’m not off.” Silva finally looked at Mendenhall. “You’re the one. You.”
“I’ve been scanned. You have my blood. I’m good.”
“Still. Something.” Silva gathered herself into sitting position, opened a space on the edge of the bed for Mendenhall. “You. You’re not the same.”
The same? Mendenhall almost felt she was the one trying to wake.
“Not the same as what?”
“The person you were before all this started. Before you called containment.”
“You didn’t know me then.”
“I did. Dr. Claiborne spoke of you often, your work, your charts.
He sent me up there often, usually to gather data, sometimes just to observe, to maintain connection.”
Mendenhall didn’t know why this bothered her. She fought her temper, sat on the edge. “Look. I’m ER. We change for each arrival. We move on. We turn it over to the specialists and move on. Trauma. Think about it. Everything can cause trauma. We can think ourselves into it, dream ourselves into it. I surmise and tend wounds.”
“While I slept, what did you do?”
“I sutured a wound, reset a shoulder, stole some milk from caf. I told off Mullich and made nice with your boss.”
“You shouldn’t have done those.” Silva swung herself off the other side of the bed, gathered her hair into a ponytail. “Those last two. Those. I could see it in your face.”
“You didn’t even look at my face.”
“I saw it before I woke up.”
They faced each other across the bed. Silva fastened her hair, slipped on her lab coat, and pushed sleep from just below her eyes.
“I saw you faking.” She bowed her head and gave Mendenhall an apologetic glance. “It’s not a virus. I do everything I’m supposed to do. Everything I’m told. But it’s not a virus. You’re the one who’s right.”
Mendenhall shook her head. “Saying it’s not a virus is saying nothing. Saying it is a virus is nothing. In ten years we won’t even use the term anymore. Not in medicine.”
Silva appeared confused.
“We have to operate under a theory. Or we can just go along blind like most, not see the theory.”
“Or you can form your own.” Silva’s arms hung straight.
Mendenhall shook her head again. “It doesn’t work that way.
Science can’t work that way. You have to work off the existing premise, the dominant one, the one that’s saving lives. Virus theory.
Thorpe’s. Claiborne’s. DC’s. Yours.” She opened her hands toward Silva. “Mine.”
“I don’t see that. I don’t see that at all. I see that I must do what Dr. Claiborne says because he knows more than I, has seen much more than I. I’m just an instrument, nothing more—and that’s how it should be. But I don’t have to believe. In fact, I work better believing you. You and your gel blocks and your ability to see inside without scans.”
Mendenhall leaned forward and placed her hands on the bed.
“Then maybe understand this. We used to believe in miasma. That disease wafted over our bodies, was born in swamps and bogs.
Before that, it was the four humors. We can smirk, but those kind of worked. Humoral theory, miasmal theory. They’re not wrong.
They’re just incomplete. We push their definitions and we find our way.”
Silva moved her arms. “Unless the working theory obscures.
Regresses. Damages. Tells us to bleed the anemic.”
; Mendenhall pressed her thumb to her forehead, fending off a headache.
“What do you want from me?”
Silva raised her chin. “I want you to take me with you when you go.”
Mendenhall smiled. “Even if I wanted to go, there’s no way.
Mullich’s built this place for containment. Even the windows don’t break. Outside, there are white trucks and helicopters. Inside, there are goons who won’t even let me snitch a bottle of water.”
“Then you’ve considered it.”
Mendenhall shook her head. But wondered.
Silva moved to the foot of the bed, fiddled with the empty clipboard dangling from the frame. “I saw Dr. Claiborne taking notes—paper notes—after he looked at Cabral’s amygdala. He saw something. He even sketched something.”
Mendenhall rested her gaze on the green glow of the exit sign. Silva motioned with her arm for Mendenhall to lie down.
She pressed her eyes with the heels of her palms, pictured the gray-and-black strokes of Claiborne’s sketches, the almond shape of amygdalae, their graceful connection to the hippocampus, a connection too ephemeral-looking to accept its charge.
Then she was lying down. Silva removed Mendenhall’s shoes and fitted a pillow beneath her Achilles. She grasped both feet and drove her thumbs along the arches, firm enough to ply the longus tendons. The strength of Silva’s hands surprised her, but the warmth did not. Mendenhall relaxed her neck and closed her eyes partway, let the green light of the exit sign blur around Silva’s silhouette.
Silva hooked her fingers between the toes, spread them, a delicate force. As she pulled her fingers free, she pinched the web between each one.
“Take better care of your feet, Doctor.” She blew a cooling breath then, using both hands for one foot, twisted the left metatarsals together, close to pain, holding there for three long seconds, which she counted in a whisper. Then she did the same to the right.
“They’re farthest from our minds, the plantar nerves, all the way out here.” Silva ran a fingernail along the oblique arch of each foot.
“Firing from here, traveling the length of the body.”
