Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero

by James Abel

  “There will be many jobs for local people.”

  George read the lips of one of the Point Hope captains, a young man, and angry. Lies.

  But Point Hope people were always angry. They never trusted outsiders and George could not blame them. First they’d been decimated by diseases that the whalers carried in the 1800s. Then the U.S. government had tried to blow up the village with atomics, during Project Chariot, and government scientists had dumped cesium in nearby water.

  “I’m sure none of you want,” Dave Lillienthal said, looking around, palms out, “to go back to pre-oil days, when you chopped ice for drinking water.”

  The sister actually thought she could influence his vote by sleeping with him. George found this amusing. But he was not going to turn down excellent sex.

  George tried to take notes but his fingers began going numb again, damnit, he was losing feeling at the endings. The tingling and deadness had come in waves over the past two days, starting a day after he’d arrived in Barrow. In fact, when he’d walked into this room an hour ago, he’d almost fallen into the chair, because his right leg didn’t work right. Fortunately no one had noticed.

  I must be getting a flu, he thought.

  George caught sight of his reflection in the window and it disgusted him; the clean-shaven squarish face, bullet head, and fleshy cheeks on a trunk of a neck, a worker’s face, strong, the same as always and yet it seemed wrong to him, ugly, something he did not want to look at.

  Like this morning, at the hotel, after the post-sex shower . . . First the water had felt slimy, like there were chemicals in it, and then his reflection in the bathroom mirror was so disturbing that’d he’d draped a towel over it to shut the sight of himself off.

  Weird. Well, he’d gotten flus before. Whatever this stupid thing was, it would go away.

  Dave Lillienthal got his attention again, holding up the TV clicker, gesturing at the teleconference screen in front of the room, by the coffee and ham and turkey sandwiches. He said, “Our engineers in Houston want to show you our new drill machinery, safer and more efficient than before.”

  George distracted, catching Deborah’s wink. George thinking, I can’t believe I’m so hard!

  Last night he had been incredible, insatiable, better than when he was courting Agatha, better than his honeymoon or even anything he’d imagined when he was a teenager watching James Bond. He’d done it with Agatha again and again and left her gasping, both of them gloriously sore, and STILL he’d seen her with the towel this morning, gotten aroused and gone at it again.

  And now he could not stop glancing at Deborah, the way her hair fell around her face . . . the way her slender fingers caressed a pen. He smelled her Shalimar fragrance over the scents of coffee, Paco Rabanne from Dave, leather chair cleaner, and muktuk. Someone had it in a pocket, or breathed it.

  And now, in his head, pain, growing . . . Boom . . . Boom . . . Boom!

  “As you know,” Dave said, through George’s headache, as if he needed to remind them of what they all never forgot, “in the days of your grandparents, the Iñupiats had no plumbing. In the Indian Affairs schools children cried themselves to sleep at night. The Iñupiat language was banned in class.”

  A captain from Wainright, and one from St. Lawrence Island, both more than seventy years old, nodded, remembering.

  Dave said, “It wasn’t until you taxed oil that you took control of your own destiny. But if you shut us down, if offshore fails, you go back to the past.”

  The board thanked the Lillienthals and asked to discuss this in private, and the brother and sister left. They’d paid for the coffee and sandwiches; turkey on wheat, ham on rye, bacon cheeseburgers from Northern Lights Café.

  George’s headache was worse now, so bad that he forgot the sex, as the board argued about offshore drilling. Some favored it, because without oil tax money, the borough would go broke and without oil the ASRC would lose business. Others feared that a spill or explosion would drive away whales. Everyone felt the pull of logic on both ends, but half of the board came down on one side, half on the other.

  “George? You’re not saying anything,” Merlin said.

  “What?”

  “We’re going around the table.”

  His hand wouldn’t move. He told them he needed to think more, needed to pray on it. He sat there trying to look normal, caught sight of his face again in the window, and turned his eyes away.

  But then the numbness passed as suddenly as it had come, as it had several times already. It would probably go away by itself in the end. The meeting ended without resolution. George waited until he was the last to leave—so no one saw where he went next. He made his way outside and across the street to the Wells Fargo Bank building, and up in the elevator to the fourth floor, where she waited in the tiny, unoccupied Teens Against Drugs suite. Longhorn funded the organization, so she had a key.

  “Georgy.”

  He could not control himself. He had her gasping. She lay eagerly below him on the couch. His knees pressed into thick carpet and he knelt behind her, ramming. His big hands encircling her tiny dancer’s back, squeezed her small breasts. A coffee table was knocked over. The smell became rank and musky. All of it drove him to new heights.

  He looked down, and son of a bitch, HE WAS STILL HARD.

  “George, how old did you say you were? Seventeen?”

  He made a grunting sound, like an animal.

  “A little bird told me that you didn’t vote in there, Georgy. Is there something bothering you about our plan?”

  George knew that the “little bird” was thirty-six-year-old Patrick Ahmogak from Nuigsut, who had once worked as a marine mammal spotter on the BP seismic boats out of Prudhoe Bay.

  Deborah jerked up on the couch when he answered, looked alarmed and asked, “What did you say?”

  “I said I want to think about it.”

  “Why are you making those noises?”

  “What noises?”

  “George, stop that! This isn’t funny! Speak English!”

  He stood up. He could see the reflection of a startled, ape-like man, naked in the window, and a small woman, head turned to him, her white body stiff on the sofa. He sat beside her. He tried to explain about the headache. Except she backed off and then stood, quickly gathering up her clothes, looking frightened. He tried to reach out to soothe her, but his hand remained at his side. She was dressing, telling him that no one was supposed to know that they spent time together and she’d see him later and just STOP MAKING THOSE NOISES!

  And that was when George realized that he’d only thought he’d been speaking English. Because the sound of barking in the room, the sound that he believed to be coming from outside, from a dog, was actually coming from deep inside his own throat.

  George dressing now also, baffled and afraid. He needed to see a doctor. He’d go to the hospital. But he waited for her to leave first, as she always did, to keep their secret, before he took a step toward the door to leave.

  He fell down.

  His foot would not work. It simply refused to function. He told himself to stand but the command did not reach his limbs, so they did nothing. Instead little shooting pains started up in his ankle, worming their way toward his hip, so that his knee began stinging, too.

  He lay on the carpet. He fought away fear. He was a captain and he had faced many dangers worse than this, he thought. There was the time that the engine stopped forty miles out, during a fall hunt, in a storm, and they’d been towing a dead thirty tonner and he’d kept the crew safe until help arrived. And the time on the tundra when he’d been alone, hunting caribou, and the snowmobile engine jammed and he’d walked twenty-nine miles home in a blizzard. So now he lay there and waited for opportunity. He waited for the numbness to pass and he told himself that he would then get up and go to the hospital emergency room.

  He could
see a clock on the shelf and at length thirty minutes had passed, then forty. His throat seemed to be closing. He was thirsty, REALLY thirsty but at the same time the thought of water in his mouth was repulsive, and he watched the clock and waited for the bad to pass.

  George told himself that when he got to the hospital, he would need to tell doctors about the symptoms. He tried to think back and pinpoint when they had begun. He’d been fine four days ago when he and Agatha had boarded the flight from Wainright, his village, to Barrow. He’d felt fine on the plane, and on the first night here, at the potluck at the high school. That was the evening he had gotten into that argument with the woman from Greenpeace, the fiery Brit who was always trying to stop any kind of development on the North Slope.

  “Longhorn is lying to you,” she’d said. “Nobody can clean up spilled oil under ice. Why not make this land into a beautiful park for tourists, and make money that way.”

  “That’s all we need, thirty thousand tourists a year,” he said. He’d been to several public parks and remembered crowds, trash, blaring radios, buses. George had told the woman, “You want to put us in a snow globe, and shake it, so snow falls on the quaint Iñupiat people. You want us to be the endangered species, not the animals.”

  That same evening he’d had a pleasant talk with Alan McDougal, who ran the research base, and told him that caribou herds were growing instead of shrinking even with pipelines crossing part of the borough. Then he and Agatha had stayed up until two, catching up with his cousin, Ned, and his wife and son, Leon Kavik, in Browerville. He’d felt a bit of headache the next morning, and attributed it to the hotel bed, and the odd angle with which his head had lain on the overly soft pillow. And then later that day he’d felt a little fatigue, and Agatha had taken his temperature and told him it was low grade, little cold probably, 99.2, a nuisance, a go-away-fast fever, not worth thinking about.

  George tried to move his hand. It worked! He filled with gratefulness. He tried his feet. They slid forward a few inches. He felt as if he had won an Olympic race. He stood. He felt dizzy. His fever had spiked.

  Get to the hospital, he thought.

  Outside, it was night, and he swayed as he left the building, needed to grasp the handrail by the steel steps, barely aware of the frigid metal against his hand. Cars were passing, their headlights brighter than usual, painful, in his face, causing him to turn away. His throat hurt badly. He bent over and threw up in the snow. When the episode was over he realized that his saliva still ran freely from his mouth over his chin, dripping, Christ.

  Finally, he was scared. This was no small cold. This was no flu. Cancer?

  George walked into the middle of the street to hail a ride. A cab passed but did not stop. The driver already had a passenger. In Barrow, you didn’t flag cabs. They were on radio call or you found them outside the AV Value Center, where they picked up shoppers. But gasoline cost so much—as much as seven dollars a gallon—that no taxi driver would simply drive around, hoping for fares.

  Another pair of headlights approached. Fearing that if he waited longer, he’d lose mobility again, George stumbled into the road and held up his arms. The Subaru began skidding. It loomed and swayed but stopped. The driver was a scientist he recognized; Bruce Friday, who regularly came to Wainright to research polar bears.

  “What’s wrong, George?”

  “I need to get to the hospital.”

  Dr. Friday helped him in and he coughed on the man, sprayed his whole face, mumbled, “Sorry.” Dr. Friday said not to worry and wiped the spit off with his parka sleeve. Back at the wheel, he eased down on the accelerator to keep from skidding. The hospital, like any building in Barrow, was minutes away.

  When they pulled up at the ER George’s hand refused to grasp the door handle. Dr. Friday came around to his side and helped him out. George, staring at Friday’s gloved hand, had an urge to bite it. He started laughing. Friday asked him if he was able to walk, and slipped an arm under his shoulders. Someone must have changed the lighting in the ER, because it was like floodlights in a theater, like one time when he’d walked on stage at the University of Alaska auditorium in Anchorage, to receive an award for mentoring the wrestling team. The light hurt.

  At first they made him wait, but when he started throwing up they ushered him into a curtained-off cubicle. The nurses took his blood pressure and blood and a young doctor—she looked fifteen years old—asked about symptoms.

  He tried to get it out. The curtain seemed to be billowing and voices in the big exam room, from other cubicles, seemed to echo and then the beating sound in his head was like the end of a kivgiq, the winter messenger feast, when all the dance groups in the borough crowd into the high school gym, when, at 2 A.M., after the five-day-long celebration, all the drummers from all the villages marched in, in groups, and stand in a solid line, in their traditional dance clothes, and hit those whale liver–lining and hide handheld drums at the same time. The dancers stamping. The stands filled and everyone—young and old—visitors from D.C., moms with infants on their backs, whalers, and hunters . . . all clapping . . . magnificent!

  BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM!

  Like a thousand years of drums mixing together under the basketball banners. He blinked. He was hallucinating. He thought he was in that gym, the stands filled, the dancers stomping. BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM!

  Then his vision changed and there was a new doctor there, that Indian fellow, from Mumbai, positioning a mirror to look into George’s throat but the light spiked so harshly that George reached and swept the mirror into the corner, where it shattered.

  “Turn down the lights!” he screamed.

  Faces went out of focus. There were more faces there, the two Marine doctors who had flown into Wainright earlier in the season, with the Coast Guard. All three doctors bending over him, looking down at him, looking worried, asking questions that he struggled to answer.

  Suddenly he was convulsing, thrashing, trying to hit the doctors, flailing, and when a nurse tried to put the plastic cuffs on him, restrain him against the bed rests, he lunged with his teeth, tried to bite her, felt the crazy heat spread through his synapses, like poison, like a sizzling electricity cauterizing thought, the sun was in his chest, a furnace, consuming tissue as fuel.

  Nurses wheeling in medicines.

  “George, look at me. George!”

  “What’s happening to him, Ranjay?”

  “Oh, my God! Look at the monitor!”

  BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOOOOOOM! . . .

  • • •

  I STOOD WITH EDDIE AND RANJAY, BESIDE THE DEAD MAN. HIS AGITATION had exploded in the final moments, and he’d been trying to speak, but no words had come out.

  “It’s the same thing the Harmons had,” said Eddie.

  “It’s in town,” said Ranjay.

  “Did we bring it back with us, in the chopper?”

  “If we brought it back, why did he get it? Why not us?”

  “You think it started here?”

  We heard voices from other ER cubicles, as doctors had normal conversations with patients. Where does it hurt? We’re going to do an X-ray. Take these pills when you get home. Illness, but something familiar. Disease, but something we understand.

  “What the hell is this thing?” said Eddie.

  All three of us doctors, in our imaginations, now filled in sights to go with the voice recordings that Kelley Harmon had made, out in a deserted research camp. And what I imagined was terrifying. Clay Qaqulik holding a shotgun . . . yes, we’d known that . . . but all four people convulsing, babbling, and feverish.

  Dr. Ranjay Sengupta said, in a whisper, “Contagious?”

  I left the cubicle and walked to the ER window. Outside it was night and I looked over the rooftops. I saw headlights moving. I saw lights in windows. In those homes people were watching television and making love and sleeping. I wondered if, in those houses, there was also somethin
g else, lurking, small enough to seem invisible. Or was it in the caskets awaiting flight out? I looked at the ER doors, portals for the sick and injured. At the moment they were still, as was the hallway. I did not want to think about what I saw in my mind’s eye, which was more people coming in, convulsing, screaming, like George.

  Eddie said, “We go home tomorrow, One.”

  “Oh, not now, Two.”

  I went back into the cubicle. The man on the table looked yellow in the artificial light, and the pain he’d suffered at the end remained etched in agony lines of his mouth. My eyes swept the cubicle, the medicine vials, the tools of my job, all of which had failed us this evening.

  I saw the mirror shards on the bright linoleum, in the corner, I recalled George sweeping the instrument from Ranjay’s hand, barking something about too-bright light.

  Mirrors . . .

  And then it hit me.

  “Shit.”

  The other two doctors stared at me, understanding that I’d made a connection. But it was a bad one, a very, very hideous connection, a connection that I wished would turn out to be wrong.

  “We knew it. But we ignored it,” I said.

  They both drew in closer.

  “We ignored it because we said it was impossible,” I said. “Tell me, why did we come here this summer, Eddie?”

  “To check if there have been changes, new things . . .”

  “Changes, Eddie. Because the place is warming. Because the Slope’s been a dumping ground. Because new species are arriving. We saw it, but didn’t believe it.”

  He knew what I meant, his eyes growing wider. I uttered a single word then. The word has terrified humans for two thousand years.

  “It’s a one-hour test,” I said. “We can do it right now. At our lab. After we leave, disinfect this room.”