Pandora Jones: Admission

by Barry Jonsberg

  But Pan only stopped trembling when the bag was firmly shut. She sank down into the bed, pulled the covers up to her eyes. The man leaned over her.

  ‘Get some rest,’ he whispered. ‘And no more wandering, okay?’

  ‘Hope,’ said Pan.

  ‘Hope?’

  The man’s face started to blur. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. Her own words seemed to come from a long way away.

  ‘Pandora brought mischief, evil into the world, but she also brought hope.’

  ‘So she did,’ said the man. ‘So she did.’

  But Pan was already asleep.

  Chapter 2

  Summer rain.

  Holding her face up to the sky, the water washing her clean. She could taste the drops on her tongue, feel the pricks of impact on her skin. She closed her eyes.

  A voice called to her. It called her name, but the sound was blurred around the edges. She opened her eyes and searched for the source of the sound. Far off to her right, a tree stood in the corner of a park. It was huge, its branches a massive canopy that freckled the sky. At the base a woman was sitting on a large chequered cloth. A boy sat next to her. He had blonde hair and he was toying with something in his hand. The woman was making movements with her hands. Join us. Come in from the rain.

  The park stretched all around. The grass beneath her feet was coarse and yellow. Rain made the leaves jump. The girl had her arms spread wide, palms up. Her wet clothing clung to her body. She loved the feel of it. She laughed at the sullen sky. Then she ran to the tree, shaking her wet hair from side to side, drying it as a dog might. She collapsed on the cloth. The woman looked up and there was annoyance in her eyes, but its roots weren’t deep.

  ‘Don’t you dare make me wet as well. Keep off.’

  The boy glanced up at her. He was sulking, but there was also a small smile there. His face held a curious mixture of annoyance and mischief.

  ‘Not fair,’ he whined. ‘I wanted to go in the rain, but she wouldn’t let me.’

  ‘Who’s she?’ said the woman. ‘The cat’s mother?’

  This made the boy smile more, though he fought it.

  ‘I’m starving,’ she said.

  ‘You’re always starving,’ said the woman.

  And then, in the strange, unsurprising way dreams have, she looked at herself from the outside. She saw a girl, thin as a whippet, her face quite plain. She saw her hair, brown but streaked with natural bands of blonde, lying in wet strands on thin, bony shoulders.

  Everything was entirely familiar, yet totally unfamiliar at the same time. She moved further from the small group picnicking in the summer rain. They shrank to small dots on the landscape, faded entirely, became nothing.

  She felt close to knowledge. Names teased her. But the more she focused, the more elusive they became. Recognition was infuriatingly close. She could taste it, like a water drop on the tip of her tongue. She raised her head to the weeping sky, closed her eyes and put out her tongue. The sun’s warmth dried it. She was running down a street in broad sunlight. Her shadow paced her, a slab of darkness tilted on her left. When she raised her eyes, a police officer was there. He had a moustache. When he smiled, a gold tooth glinted.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to say that,’ said the officer. He laughed and clapped a hand on her shoulder.

  The jolt to wakefulness was painful, the sound of her hammering heart echoing in her ears.

  Pan glanced around the room, chest heaving. The beds arranged along the wall, the French doors, the garden furniture, the snow-capped peaks. Her name was Pandora Jones. She remembered standing on a cliff. The School. A man with laughter in his face. There were other memories, too, from further back. An explosion of blood, an aeroplane’s wing catching a building, a teacher slumped on a classroom floor. They were like images from a movie, but spliced together with no regard for narrative. There was a story there, but it was fragmented, chaotic.

  She dragged aside her bed covers and stood. For a moment, she thought she might faint. Her legs were weak. But then she straightened. A towelling robe lay at the foot of her bed. She put it on, cinched the belt. Apart from the French doors that led to the courtyard, there appeared to be only one exit door, off to her left. Pan walked towards it and the weakness in her legs diminished. By the time she passed through the door, the sense of faintness in her head had faded.

  There was a short corridor, with clean floor tiles and walls painted a light pink. Her brain processed a scent, recognised it. Disinfectant, with its artificial tinge of pine, and below that, the smell of sickness, of air breathed into ailing lungs a thousand times and exhaled, recycled. That curious smell of hospitals, decay and sterility mixed. There were no signs indicating which way to turn, but Pan glanced to her left and noticed, no more than five or six metres away, a nurses’ station. Behind a desk, a woman in a light blue uniform sat, writing in a ledger. She glanced up as Pan took a step forward.

  ‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘Our sleeping beauty awakens. How are you feeling, dear?’

  ‘I need answers,’ said Pan.

  ‘You need rest, my lovely. That’s what you need. Before The School takes you and, trust me, you won’t be resting then. How about I take you back to bed, get you settled? There’ll be time for questions and answers later.’

  ‘No,’ said Pan. ‘Now. I need answers now.’

  The nurse’s smile froze for a moment, but she recovered quickly.

  ‘I’ll phone Dr Morgan,’ she said. ‘You sit, Pandora, before you fall down. You have been very ill, you know, and the body takes time to recover. You mustn’t push yourself too hard, too early.’

  Pan leaned against the desk, but said nothing else. She ignored the row of chairs to her left. The nurse frowned, picked up a phone and punched in a couple of numbers. The fingers of her right hand drummed a beat on the surface of the desk.

  ‘Dr Morgan? Clare here. Our patient Pandora is in reception . . . Yes, she seems fine, possibly a little agitated . . . She wants to talk to someone as a matter of urgency . . . Uh, huh . . . Fine. I’ll tell her. Okay. Thanks, doctor.’

  She replaced the receiver.

  ‘Dr Morgan will be here shortly, Pan. Now, please sit down.’

  The nurse stood and walked around the side of the desk, took her by the arm. Pan allowed herself to be led to a chair. The dizziness had returned and so had the sense of weakness.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’

  It was only when the idea was suggested that Pan realised how thirsty she was. The back of her mouth felt thick and coated. When she swallowed, her throat felt raw.

  ‘Water, please,’ she said.

  The nurse smiled. ‘I’ll get you some. Back in a moment.’

  Alone in the reception area, Pan felt an almost overwhelming desire to go behind the nurse’s desk, check what was written in the ledger, look at the charts and files bundled in a pile. But there was a pain, a pressure behind her eyes and she was just too tired. A minute passed and the nurse came back with a glass of water and a carafe.

  ‘Here you are, Pan,’ she said, handing her the glass. ‘You are probably dehydrated. We’ve tried to keep you as hydrated as possible intravenously, but you’ve been unconscious for a long time. Drink as much as you can, my dear. Don’t bolt it down. Sip. Small amounts, but regularly. We’ve no ice, I’m afraid.’

  Pan paused with the glass halfway to her mouth. ‘How long have I been unconscious?’

  The nurse looked flustered. She put the carafe on the table next to the chairs and returned to her position behind the desk. ‘You have been very sick,’ she said. ‘Anyway, Doctor will be here in a moment and I’m sure he will answer all your questions. Now, if you will excuse me, I must return to my work.’

  Pan swallowed the urge to push for answers. Instead, she took a long draught of the water. It tasted wonderful. Slightly warm, but clean and pure.

  A door opened behind the nurses’ station and the man she remembered from the previous day – was it the previous day? –
stepped into the reception area. Following him was a woman with bright red hair scraped back from her face and tied in a ponytail. Both of them wore doctors’ white coats. Both were smiling.

  ‘Pan!’ said the man. ‘You look remarkably well. I am Dr Morgan – your doctor. This is my colleague, Dr Macredie, who is our psychologist and student counsellor here at The School.’

  The woman smiled and put out her hand. Pan shook it automatically.

  ‘Nurse Watson tells me you have some questions.’ Dr Morgan beamed at Pan. ‘And who can blame you? Who can blame you? But before the interrogation – the understandable interrogation – I would like to check you over briefly. Not long, I promise. Pulse, shine a light into your eyes, smack your kneecaps with a hammer. I am joking, my dear.’ He crouched down before Pan, slipped his fingers onto her wrist. ‘Routine, that’s all.’ He took a pencil-thin torch from his top pocket and shone it into first one eye and then the other. ‘Right,’ he said, snapping off the torch and replacing it in his pocket. ‘I have established beyond any reasonable doubt that you have indeed the correct number of eyes and that they are positioned as they should be – either side of your nose. Another triumph for medical science.’ He smiled at his own joke.

  ‘I need answers,’ said Pan.

  The doctor pushed his half-moon glasses further up his nose.

  ‘Of course you do. Of course you do. But this reception area is perhaps not the best place to talk. Come with me. There’s a conference room we can use. It will be much more comfortable. And private.’

  He held out his hand and Pan used it to help raise herself to her feet. She followed the doctors through the door behind the nurses’ station, along a short corridor and into a large, windowless room dominated by a long wooden table. A dozen chairs were arranged around its perimeter. A whiteboard stood to one side, a row of markers lined up on its metal ledge. She was ushered to a chair at the head of the table, the doctors sitting either side of her. The woman – the psychologist/counsellor – had brought in the carafe of water. She refilled Pan’s glass and poured water into two glasses already arranged along the table. There was silence for a moment. The man sipped slowly.

  ‘Pandora,’ he said finally. ‘Before we start, can I ask what you remember before you woke up in our hospital bed? As many details as you can. Start with your full name.’

  ‘My name is Pandora Jones,’ she said. ‘I am sixteen years old and I live in Melbourne. I have a mother, and a brother called Danny. Where are they and what am I doing here?’

  Dr Morgan held up a hand. ‘Please,’ he replied. ‘We will answer all your questions fully and honestly. That is my promise to you.’ He put a hand over his heart. ‘But first, we need to understand how much you already know. It differs, you see. Some survivors remember everything that happened. Others . . . well, there are gaps in their memories. I suspect that is the case with you, my dear.’

  ‘Survivors? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Describe the last full day you remember. Indulge me, Pan.’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t know. It’s kind of hazy. I went to school . . .’

  ‘Before you went to school?’

  ‘Something on the news, I think. Something important, but I can’t remember what it was . . . I was having breakfast. My brother Danny said he was feeling ill.’

  ‘Okay. Excellent. You said you went to school?’

  ‘Except I can’t remember anything about it. I remember coming home.’ Images flashed into Pan’s mind. A police officer. A car hitting a bridge. A woman coming out of a shop. She shook her head. They were nightmares. They weren’t real. ‘I couldn’t find my mother,’ she finished. ‘Like I said, it’s all hazy. What happened? What is it? Why can’t I remember?’

  Dr Morgan glanced at Dr Macredie and ran a hand through his hair, smoothing it over his bald patch. Then he leaned forward and locked his hands together, rested his chin on upturned index fingers. He fixed Pan with his eyes.

  ‘You do remember other things, Pandora,’ he said. ‘Unpleasant things, am I right? I can see it in your eyes. But you think they were nightmares. They couldn’t possibly be real.’ He paused and this time there was no laughter in his eyes. ‘They weren’t nightmares, Pan. They actually happened.’

  ‘This isn’t making sense.’

  Dr Macredie spoke for the first time. Her voice was soft and Pan instinctively leaned forward to better catch her words.

  ‘On 24 March, the last day you remember, there was an outbreak of a new flu virus. It seems to have originated in the north-eastern states of America, though no one can be sure. At any rate, that is where it was first reported.’

  Pan’s memory was jolted. The radio broadcast over breakfast. A man reporting from New York City. Something about deaths. She forced herself to pay attention to Dr Macredie’s words.

  ‘We have no idea what the virus is, though we have been conducting research. We can talk about that later, if you like. When you’ve had time to come to terms with what we have to tell you.’

  She took a sip of water. Pan noticed that the doctor’s hands were shaking. ‘The bottom line is that the virus spread at a rate that was . . . unprecedented. The symptoms initially were unremarkable. Coughing, sore throat, a mild fever. But within hours, people’s lungs were effectively destroyed, eaten away. Most people died drowning in their own blood . . .’

  (The relief teacher, her face purple, struggling to get air, eyes wide with panic.)

  ‘. . . and by the time the seriousness of the situation was realised it was far too late. Maybe the virus stayed inert for a time. We just don’t know. The United States grounded all national and international flights later that day. But it did no good. The virus appeared in Europe, the Far East, Africa, Australia. Every country in the world.’

  ‘My mother and brother are dead, aren’t they?’ said Pan. Her voice was wooden and it was as if her feelings had been anaesthetised.

  Dr Morgan reached over to take her hand, but Pan snatched it away.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dr Morgan. ‘I wish I didn’t have to say this, but when you were rescued, from a small public park in Melbourne, you were found close to the bodies of a woman and a boy. I assume they were members of your family. Pan, I am so sorry.’

  (A drop of blood oozed between the woman’s fingers, dropped to the ground, a crimson coin between her feet. It was followed by another and another and yet another. The splatters were separate, bright circles. Then their edges merged, puddled. Before Pan’s eyes, the area of red spread, the drops no longer falling from the woman’s hands individually, but in long strings. On the swing, the boy coughed once.)

  The man’s voice was muffled. It came as if from a great distance. When Pan looked up she couldn’t see clearly either. It was like watching something underwater and her eyes burned. Everything was blurred and fragmented. There was a solid lump in her chest, constricting her lungs. Her mind seemed as inert as the lump. Pan registered dimly that Dr Macredie was speaking again.

  ‘. . . just blind luck that we found you. A needle in a haystack really. Even with the heat sensor, the helicopter’s equipment can’t isolate people. Other animals don’t seem affected, so the sensors constantly identified life. You are a miracle, Pandora Jones, and although you probably don’t understand that now, you will give thanks in time. Trust me.’ She spread her arms out. ‘Some people, it seems, were resistant to the virus. Not immune, but they survived. People like you, Pan. Others weren’t affected at all. Dr Morgan and myself, for example. We didn’t even display any symptoms. As yet, we have no idea why. Maybe we will never know. Whatever the reason, we have come together. The School is a place for those who survived.’

  ‘How many?’ Pan didn’t recognise her own voice in her ears. It was thin and croaky.

  Dr Morgan glanced at his colleague. Neither spoke for a moment.

  ‘I told you we wouldn’t lie to you, my dear,’ said Dr Morgan. ‘We don’t know how many survived. It’s possibl
e – probable even – that thousands are out there, in comas like the one you have been in for the past two months . . .’

  (Two months?)

  ‘. . . but we don’t know where they are. We have people searching, but the more time passes, the less chance we have of finding more. You, yourself, were among the last of those we discovered. In the past two weeks, no one at all.’

  ‘How many survivors?’ Pan didn’t know why she was so insistent. Under the circumstances, was it really important?

  ‘Worldwide?’ said Dr Morgan. ‘Maybe ten thousand. Maybe more.’

  Those figures were absurd. A part of Pan’s mind understood that.

  Dr Macredie put her hand on Pan’s and this time Pan didn’t have the energy to remove it.

  ‘The virus has killed billions, Pan,’ she said. ‘There’s no one out there. The world as we know it has been destroyed. Humanity stands on the edge of extinction. And that is why we have come to The School. To learn how to pull back from that brink.’

  Chapter 3

  Pan studied her reflection in the bathroom mirror.

  The face that gazed back was familiar in a strange, dislocated fashion. She looked into her pale, green-tinged eyes, the long face with a nose slightly too large to be in proportion, the brown hair flecked with blonde. A plain girl. I used to know you, but that was in a different time and a different world. Her arms and legs were thin, wasted. Examining her eyes more closely, she noticed they too were pinched – eyes, she thought, that had seen far too much. It wasn’t how she remembered herself – not really. There had been a time when she laughed, when her body was taut and muscular, rather than shrivelled, emaciated. But that had been a different girl entirely.

  Because that girl is dead.

  Pan shuddered and stepped into the shower cubicle, turned on both taps. The water wasn’t hot and the pressure was weak, but the flow was restful against her skin. It helped drown out the clamouring in her mind.

  Pan scrubbed her hair with coarse soap. She had asked the nurse for shampoo, but the woman had only smiled in a wry fashion and told her that supplies of luxury items were limited. It didn’t matter. Nothing much mattered anymore. After her discussion with the two doctors, Pan had gone back to the ward and slept, though sleep was perhaps too benign a word for what was effectively a shutdown of body and mind. She’d slept for eighteen hours, though she was unaware of the time that elapsed. Nor did she care. It was not a sleep that relaxed and restored. It was torn by vivid dreams. She saw the same images over and over again, like scenes from a horror film on a loop, but among the replaying of a woman turning almost delicately in the air and a pool of blood tracing patterns in the street were other pictures. Pan running through an alleyway, her heart thundering in her chest. Someone was behind her and closing. She turned her head from time to time, but saw nothing. Her eyes fixed on the opening of the alley, legs cramping with acid, sure that someone would, at any moment, step in front of her, block her escape.