Virus: The Day of Resurrection

by Sakyo Komatsu

  What’re you talking about? I feel fine. I’m still young, and my body is still in great shape. I’ve got a ton of things I want to do, and I should still have plenty of time to do them.

  Except … what about when you read an article that says there are thirty million people who have come down with Tibetan flu, the mortality rate is about to exceed twenty-five percent, and you realistically, specifically, feel those numbers bearing down on you personally? When you hear that a third of the population of Japan has already contracted it and realize that a quarter of those people are going to die? That out of a group of a dozen people, four will catch it, and one of those will die? The puffiness around your eyes, your runny nose, the hot, vacant unpleasantness of the fog in your head, the sluggishness of your whole body, the dull aching of the joints in your arms and legs … all signs that you’ve already become one of the four. You take your temperature, and it’s sitting right at 37.5 degrees. Your nose is stopped up, you feel warmer than is comfortable, and the pain in your head is getting stronger and stronger. Which means you have a one in four chance of …

  It can’t be! But what if it is?

  Gripped with unease, you try to run to the pharmacy. Then at the door, you remember that you’ve already taken quite a lot of over-the-counter cold medicine. Or perhaps you remember someone you knew who died of acute symptoms even as they were taking cold medicine. Because of that, you are wracked with terror and call your doctor at home or at the hospital. No matter who you call, all you’re likely to get is a busy signal. Annoyed, you open the yellow pages to the Doctors, Clinics, and Hospitals section and start dialing numbers one after another. All busy—even the main numbers for large hospitals. So now it’s become a matter of principle: you double down and keep on dialing, and then several dozen numbers later, you finally get ahold of a doctor’s home, terribly far away. However, at just the moment when you’re about to tell him what you want, you hear the voice of a terribly hoarse woman telling you bluntly between clearings of her throat, “I’m sorry, but I’m very busy right now. The doctor has just recently passed away. Yes. Overwork and influenza!”

  The clack of the receiver being slammed down as she hangs up.

  Unable to stand it any longer, you take off running for your neighborhood clinic. And what will you find when you get there?

  For the past two weeks, people had come thronging into the blue-collar neighborhood around K Hospital at six o’clock every morning in the hopes of seeing a doctor. By ten o’clock, the people who couldn’t get into the waiting rooms had formed lines of people—walls of people—crushed together with uneasy expressions on their faces. There was a dangerous tension there, as if just by casting a small stone in their direction you could trigger a sudden, panicked stampede for the hospital doors, with everyone fighting to get out first. Even so, the people were actually being more orderly and well behaved than at regular times. That orderliness seemed to be something that emerged naturally from within the multitude as a whole. When a mother with a small child came to the end of a line, those in front of her immediately yielded their places one after another until she was conveyed to the very front. When another young mother came running, out of breath, carrying a limp baby in her arms, the line parted right away and someone in the back shouted, “You in front! Switch places with her! Tell the doctor it’s a baby!”

  Most of the people had teary eyes, faces that were red from fever, and bad coughs. There were many as well who had poultices wrapped around their necks and white surgical masks over their mouths. This was not such an unusual sight at a hospital, but what was different now was the absence of much conversation amid such a large multitude. It was as though their fears—ambiguous fears—had cut each individual off emotionally from every other.

  From morning until afternoon, the crowd’s numbers grew larger and larger. One week ago, the hospital staff had pitched a temporary tent in front of the main entrance and set out some simple benches as well. The benches were occupied primarily by children and the elderly, so the vast majority of people waited, unmoving, bathed in the remarkably hot late May sunlight. There were many who would go suddenly pale and collapse right where they stood, as though sun-stricken. When others put their hands on the shoulders of such people to check on them, they sometimes found that the person had died while waiting.

  Although the bystanders’ faces would go pale, they actually made little stir, rarely speaking to one another in whispers between fits of coughing. One of them would hurry off to the nurse’s station at a full run. The face of the body would be covered without fanfare by whatever cloths or handkerchiefs were on hand, and the long line of people that had quietly stepped aside would look on from the corners of their eyes as they passed by, advancing ever so slowly.

  Under the brilliantly shining sky of early summer, carp streamers undulated gently, and pinwheels made from the feathered ends of arrows glinted as they turned in the sunlight. Amid the warm, gentle breeze of early summer was the sound that everyone was thoroughly sick of—the incessant sirens of the ambulances and police cars running here and there past distant street corners, down nearby roads, and into the emergency entrances of hospitals, their wailing like the ferocious cries of monstrous birds.

  Middle-aged men who heard them got the uneasy feeling that a war or something had suddenly broken out.

  Speaking of war, that was exactly what it was like inside the hospital. Vaccines, antipyretics, cardiotonics, antibiotics. Every hospital room occupied by patients in critical condition with high fever. Even the ear and nose, surgical, ophthalmological, and obstetrical wards were pressed into service. Even the couches in the hallways were being used as beds. Most of the doctors had been working without sleep or breaks, and there were even some who had soldiered on through dozens of hours of treating patients, relying on stimulants, vitamins, and nutritional supplements to keep themselves going. In the surgical wing, the surgeons couldn’t get away because people injured in a sharply climbing number of traffic accidents were being carried in with hardly a break. On the other hand, other kinds of doctors including ophthalmologists, ear and nose specialists, and dermatologists had been mobilized to care for Tibetan flu patients. Even worse, there had already been three deaths among the doctors who worked at K Hospital. Despite the fact that the nurses had all had their vaccinations, some of them were in very serious condition, and K Hospital, which was being forced to handle more than three times its usual workload, was calling up volunteer caregivers and medical school students to help out.

  This is no ordinary flu, thought Dr. Tsuchiya, the assistant head of Internal Medicine. As he injected patients with antipyretics to break their fever and diaporetics to cause sweating, he repeated these words in his mind again and again, as though reciting a sutra. This is absolutely no ordinary flu. Could it not have some other cause?

  The patients were all getting high fevers of around thirty-nine to forty degrees Centigrade. The high fever was the most obvious characteristic of this Tibetan flu. The symptoms were dramatic. One minute you were feeling a little draggy, as if you’d caught a head cold, and then suddenly you were running a high fever of almost forty degrees, which continued for more than two weeks. Almost everyone who showed these symptoms ended up in very serious condition. Moreover, because of the weak effect of the vaccine, there was no small number of previously vaccinated patients showing almost the same symptoms. There were even those who had died after being infected a second time. Vomiting, diarrhea, symptoms of meningitis, lethargy, convulsions, pneumonia, and then weakening of the heart and myocardial infarction—the number of patients who died suddenly of such damage to their hearts was staggeringly huge. It was characteristic of this Tibetan flu and was steadily becoming one of its most serious traits. Of the patients who died of the disease, the curve representing the percentage of those who died of cardiac arrest was climbing upward at almost a seventy-degree angle. This was true of this hospital, and it was true of the nationwide statistics released by the Ministry of Healt
h and Welfare.

  Something is wrong about this flu. A phenomenon unlike anything we’ve seen in the countless flu epidemics we’ve experienced until now is showing in the epidemic phase.

  Using some tricks he’d learned doing group examinations at schools and factories, Dr. Tsuchiya quickly divided the patients into three sections for treatment based on their conditions and also took on the job of injecting them with antipyretic and antibiotic medicines himself. It had been three days already. With only occasional breaks here and there, he had hardly slept at all.

  Even though the people who have been vaccinated present somewhat lighter symptoms, we’re still seeing deaths in that group. The vaccine is weak and doesn’t work at all unless you take three times the usual dose in three separate injections, yet even among those who follow all the rules … even among those who have shown no symptoms of flu beyond sneezing a few times … people are dying, and mostly of heart attacks. This doesn’t make sense. This is no ordinary flu.

  Pssssh!—stick the needle in hard, push on the piston, and pull it back out while holding a disinfectant swab over the puncture.

  “Next. You stand over there. Yes, please come. What’s your temperature? You really should check it at home before coming in. Stick out your tongue. Okay, give me your arm.” Pssssh! “All right, next patient, please …”

  As he waited for the next person to come forward and sit down in front, he would set aside the syringe and gently massage his fingers to loosen them up. He had already forgotten when he had started and how many tens of thousands of people he had injected. He had sharp twinges of pain running from his right shoulder to the back of his neck, his fingers were terribly swollen, and his arms felt like lead.

  “All right, next.”

  Phenacetin, vitacamphor, ilotycin, quinine hydrochloric acid, codeine hydrochloric acid, antihistamines—heavens, this stuff does nothing except calm them down while they’re here. Is that all we’ve got for fighting this flu? Have humans really lived for thousands of years with influenza without ever finding a cure?

  Take a diaphoretic to make you sweat and an antipyretic to break the fever. Keep yourself warm and lie down. Drinking some egg sake or water boiled with kudzu root would also be good. Boiling the water with pickled apricots steamed and blackened in shochu? Yes, do that. Over-the-counter medicines are ultimately about as effective.

  There were no cure-alls for viral diseases. The only one that had ever been discovered was 5-iodo-2-deoxyuridine, discovered by Herbert E. Kaufman in 1962, and that only worked on herpetic keratitis. There had been many trial runs for other nucleic acid synthesis inhibitors, but all of them had ended in failure.

  What is wrong with this world? Dr. Tsuchiya thought. The 1960s were almost over, and yet out of all the countless viral illnesses that existed, a cure had been discovered for only one of them—herpetic keratitis, which wasn’t even a particularly serious disease!

  “I’m sorry, but vaccinations are over now; the vaccine has run out. We won’t get any more in for another three days. I’m very sorry.”

  Far away, a crowd controller was shouting in a voice gone hoarse. Some of the people waiting were shouting back. There wasn’t enough vaccine. Although the production capacity had been made known, there were too many patients. On top of this, the worldwide epidemic of false fowl plague had dealt a strong blow to egg production, and though all the universities and laboratories were switching over to tissue cultures, and even though preparations for mass production had been made to some extent, three times the usual amount was necessary, and the vaccine didn’t have much of an effect anyway.

  “All right, next!”

  The next patient had a red rash around his mouth and water blisters at the corners of his lips. Dr. Tsuchiya inwardly gasped. He had just been thinking about herpes, and here was a patient with complications of herpes with his influenza. That’s right, he thought. Herpes develops even if there are antibodies in the blood. Completely different from other diseases. Come to think of it, the antibodies produced by the vaccine for this virus aren’t any use either …

  “Doctor, is my child going to be all right?”

  A young mother, herself white as a sheet and looking quite feverish, held out a little girl of about four who hung limp and pale in her arms, her eyes closed. The doctor was startled when he felt her forehead—she was burning up.

  “When did it start?”

  “She’d been coughing until yesterday evening, but this morning she suddenly became so weak …”

  Pulse: fast but weak. Breathing: labored and fast, with weak whistling sounds from her throat. From time to time, her arms, legs, and lips shuddered twitchily.

  “Get her into a room!” the doctor shouted over his shoulder. “Tell Takada to see her right away, right now. He can’t get away from what he’s doing? Well then, you and you come with me and follow my instructions. This is urgent. It’s lobar pneumonia. Her heart is weak too. Get the vitacamphor—”

  “Will she be all right?” the distraught mother cried.

  “You should have brought her in sooner,” the doctor said at last.

  “But, Doctor … the phones are busy at every single hospital. I can’t get anyone to make a house call. Even the emergency number is—” At last, the mother broke down in sobs. “Her father is sick in bed with a terrible fever too. We all have fever.”

  “I understand. Please calm down. At her age, pneumonia heals right up,” Dr. Tsuchiya said.

  Though he knew he was merely placating her, he had no choice but to say it. There was no way to save the child. In the time since the epidemic had reached this hospital, more than five hundred babies and infants had died. In the obstetrics ward, the number of stillborn babies and babies who died after being born was going through the roof. What on earth else was he supposed to say? He was a doctor; he wasn’t God.

  “Next … all right. Give me your arm.”

  Dr. Tsuchiya was about to stick in the needle when his hand suddenly began to shake violently. He tried to pull it back, but he was too late. The needle struck home, sticking deep into the arm of the patient—a short-haired boy who looked as though he was still in junior high school. Despite being stabbed with the needle, he only pursed his lips and squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t so much as grunt. The doctor tried to pull the needle out, but his hands were still shaking up and down as violently as if he had malaria. In the end, the syringe was left stuck in the boy’s arm, hanging upside-down from it.

  “Doctor! Please rest for a little while.” An intern behind him had noticed what was happening and put a hand on his shoulder. His stubble had been growing unshaven for days, and his face—pale from too many all-nighters—glistened with oil. The rings under his eyes were so dark that it looked like someone had hauled off and punched him there.

  “Take care of him …” Dr. Tsuchiya said, standing up. “You can do examinations, right?”

  “Yes. Not as quickly as you, but …”

  When he was at last on his feet, his spine and hips seemed to be making remarkably loud noises. The shaking in his hands grew worse and worse, and the throbbing pain in his right shoulder felt like it was pounding against the back of his head. Dr. Tsuchiya looked all around him, as if seeking help from someone. He made a face as though he were thinking something over very carefully, and then one of the nurses who had been looking on in confusion suddenly realized what the problem was. She nimbly thrust one hand into the pocket of the doctor’s lab coat and pulled out a crumpled cigarette. She put it in the doctor’s mouth and lit it for him.

  “Thank you,” the doctor said. He breathed in deeply, closed his eyes, and lowered his shoulders. “Thank you …”

  The inside of his mouth was swollen from night after night without sleeping, and the smoke seemed to get caught in his throat, but oh, it felt good. One good smoke and his hands stopped shaking right away.

  “There are rice balls in the office,” the nurse said quickly, taking back the matchbook and the bag of tobacco. �
�There’s tea in the blue pot and coffee in the red. You need to get some food in your system.”

  The nurses walked very quickly. The powder and lipstick had worn off of their ashen faces, their hair was disheveled something awful, and the lab coats they had been sleeping in were wrinkled and faintly darkened with dirt and grime. Their feet were swollen from standing and walking all day—they were on the verge of collapse.

  This is just like the war, the doctor thought as he gazed off into space.

  Along the side of a hall crowded with patients, their attendants, and doctors all around, patients were resting on couches and wheeled beds. Among them, there were even babies resting on the tops of wooden fire hose crates. The ones on the floor itself had white sheets pulled up over their heads—they had already died. There were three such corpses at present that had not yet been taken away. The weeping of the children, the sobs of the mothers …

  It’s just like it was back then.

  The doctor was nearing the age of fifty, and during the Pacific War he had served as an army medic, traveling from central China to the southeast Asian islands of the southern front. At a field hospital with a roof made of nipa palm, they would bring them in after every combat operation: soldiers covered in sweat, mud, blood, and mucus. Then came the rains and with them the mosquitoes and flies, the amoebic dysentery, contagious diseases, festering wounds, the film coating the eyes of living men, the maggots squirming even at the edges of their mouths, the groans of those being tormented by the high fever of malaria, the screams, the weeping, the delirious raving, the strafings by machine gun from enemy fighter planes—Dr. Tsuchiya had been injured near the end of Showa 19 and sent back home to Japan. In Showa 20, he had been assigned new duties on Japanese soil and then at Hiroshima.