Journals of the Plague Years

by Norman Spinrad

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he screamed in my face. “I’m Harlow Prinz, I’m the president of this company, and I don’t—”

  “And I’m just Walter Bigelow’s errand boy, but I don’t take shit either,” I told him. “Except of course from the boss man, and I got enough of that for being late already! So do us both a big favor and get into this chopper.” I waved my miniauto. “’Cause if you don’t, shit is about to flow downhill, if you get my meaning.”

  The wimpy type, who had to be Warren Feinstein, started to climb aboard, but that murdering meatfucker Prinz stood there with his hands on his hips looking suspicious. He took a good long look at my badly fitting uniform. “Let’s see your papers,” he said.

  I brought up the muzzle of my piece and pointed it at his belly button. “You’re lookin’ right at ’em,” I said.

  “Harlow, for chrissakes, he means it!” Feinstein said, and hustled his ass into the copter.

  Prinz moved slowly past me to the door and reluctantly started to board the chopper, but he must’ve spotted Linda when he peered inside and put it all together.

  ’Cause he suddenly aimed a sloppy kick at my nuts that missed the target but knocked me off balance, yelled, “Shoot! Shoot!” at his rent-a-cops, and broke and ran.

  Furious as I was, I didn’t blow my combat cool.

  I leaped through the door, scattering the rent-a-cops with a long fanning burst as our pilot lifted the chopper, and flipped myself into the copilot’s seat.

  By this time we were about a hundred feet in the air, and heading straight up into the wild blue yonder.

  “Hold it right here a minute!” I told the pilot.

  The rent-a-cops were scattering for cover. Only a few of ’em had the balls to fire a few useless shots up over their shoulders and they plinked harmlessly off the chopper’s armored belly.

  Prinz was running for the administration building. I smiled. I lined the bastard up in my sights and savored it just for a moment. This, after all, was the son of a bitch who was willing to let the Plague take us all to line his own pockets. I had wasted more citizens than I could count, but this was going to be special. This was going to be primo.

  “Thanks ever so much for making my day,” I told Harlow Prinz as he reached the stairs leading up to the entrance. And I fired a single rocket.

  A perfect shot. It hit him right in the base of the spine and blew him to dogmeat.

  I went aft, where Feinstein was cowering against a bulkhead. I grabbed him by the neck with my left hand, squeezed his jaws open, and jammed the muzzle of my piece down his throat.

  “You saw what I did to your buddy,” I told him. “And knowing what I know about you sons of bitches and what you’ve done, you better believe I enjoyed it just as much as I’ll enjoy wasting you if you don’t do exactly what you’re told. Get the message, meatfucker?”

  Feinstein nodded and I pulled the gun barrel out of his mouth. And when I tossed his worthless ass onto the deck, he just lay there blubbering. “I told Harlow he was going too far, it’s not my fault, it wasn’t my idea, Bigelow will believe me, won’t he, I swear I’ll tell him the truth, I never thought, I never knew…”

  “He better believe you, meatfucker, or a lot of asses are gonna be grass,” I told him. “And you better believe that you’re gonna go first!”

  >

  Walter T. Bigelow

  The station was in an uproar. The situation was growing graver by the minute. The mob had bridged the gap in the Golden Gate and fighting was raging on the Marin side of the span. Our gunboats were sinking scores of small craft loaded to the gunwales with black-carders, but all was chaos on the Bay; they couldn’t establish or hold a line. The landward Quarantine Line was crumbling under human wave onslaughts.

  There was no alternative. When I got the President on the line I was going to have to ask him to authorize an immediate nuclear strike against San Francisco.

  But while I was waiting for my call to the White House to get through, there was a commotion in my outer office, and a moment later an SP captain burst inside.

  “Warren Feinstein’s outside, Mr. Director,” he stammered. “There’s…there’s a girl with him who says she’s Our Lady of Love Reborn…and there’s a man holding him at gunpoint. Says he’s gonna blow his head off if we make a move and—”

  There was a further commotion in the outer office and then Feinstein was rudely thrown through the doorway by a man who held the barrel of a miniauto at the back of his neck, followed by a young girl, and half a dozen SP men with drawn pistols.

  The man with the miniauto was John David, whom I had sent into San Francisco after Richard Bruno. And he was wearing an SP uniform.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” I demanded. “This isn’t Bruno! How did you—”

  “No shit!” David snarled, prodding Feinstein with his gun barrel. “Go ahead, tell the man, or I’ll blow your worthless head off!”

  Tears poured from the eyes of Sutcliffe’s chairman as he blubbered out the most incredible and chilling story.

  “Harlow lied to you, Bruno’s virus wasn’t an ambient Plague variant, it was a cure for all Plague variants, an artificial venereal disease—”

  “A cure? But then why—”

  “—that conferred total immunity—”

  “If it was a cure, then why on Earth did you suppress it?” I shouted at him. “Why did you tell me—”

  “It’s a venereal disease!” Feinstein babbled. “Spreads by itself, nothing for us to market, it would have bankrupted Sutcliffe, brought on an economic depression, Harlow insisted—”

  I could not believe my ears. I could not be hearing this. “You suppressed a total cure for the Plague to preserve your own profits? My God, Prinz kept trying to get me to nuke San Francisco just to keep Sutcliffe solvent?”

  Feinstein shook his head. “By then it was too late, don’t you see?” he moaned. “The whole thing had gone too far. I warned him, I swear I did, but he insisted that San Francisco had to be nuked to cover up what we’d done…”

  Feinstein seemed to pull himself together with an enormous effort. “But you can’t do that now,” he said much more coherently. “You won’t do that now. I’m willing to take my medicine, even if it means spending the rest of my life in jail. Harlow was wrong, monstrously wrong, and I was weak, horribly weak. You can’t nuke San Francisco. You can’t kill millions of people. You can’t destroy the dreadnaught virus.”

  Was this the truth, or was it Satan’s greatest lie? Feinstein was, after all, speaking with a gun at his throat. And he was a self-admitted liar.

  If this was the Devil speaking through him, and I believed Satan’s greatest lie, I would infect the nation with a deadly new Plague variant that might destroy all human life.

  But if God had chosen this unlikely instrument to reveal His truth at the eleventh hour and I didn’t believe it, I would not only be responsible for the deaths of a million people, I would be responsible for destroying God’s own cure for the Plague.

  What was I to do? What could I believe? Whatever the truth was, Satan could not have devised for me a more perfect moral dilemma.

  “The President on the line…” said a voice on my intercom.

  No man should be forced to make such a decision. But I was. And I had to do it now. But I could not. There was only one thing that I could do.

  There, in front of Feinstein, and David, and my own men, and with the President of the United States waiting on the telephone, I sank unashamedly to my knees and prayed aloud.

  “Please, Jesus, I know that this cup cannot pass from me,” I prayed. “But grant me at least one mercy. Send me a Sign. Show me Your Countenance.”

  And God, in His infinite wisdom, answered my prayer, through the most unlikely of instruments.

  The young girl stepped forward. “Let me help you,” she said softly. She took my hand in hers and raised me to my feet. “Let me be your Sign,” she said.

  “You? You’re—”

/>   “Our Lady of Love Reborn—”

  “—the blasphemous mouthpiece of Satan!”

  “No, I’m not. Nothing speaks through me but the truth in an ordinary girl’s heart, and I’m very much afraid,” she said with the strangest gentleness. “But I know that this man is speaking the truth, and there’s no one else. So I have to be your Sign, now don’t I? In the only way I can.”

  “How?” I asked softly, wanting very much, in that moment, to believe. In Jesus. In God’s Grace. In anything that would show me the truth.

  Even in she whom I had believed to be my nemesis, even in Our Lady of Love Reborn, if she could make me.

  “By placing my life in your hands,” she said.

  I locked eyes with Our Lady of Love Reborn. They were young and they were fearful, but there was a strength in them too that seemed timeless. She smiled the Madonna’s smile at me. Or was this only what I was longing to see?

  “There’s a helicopter waiting outside. I’m going to go to it and fly back to San Francisco. If the city dies at your hand, so will I. Would Satan’s mouthpiece do that, Walter Bigelow?”

  “The President on the line…”

  “You would do that?” I said. “You’d really do that?”

  She nibbled nervously at her bottom lip. She nodded demurely. “You’ll have to kill me right now to stop me,” she said, letting go of my hand and turning to confront the men blocking the doorway. “Will you tell these men to shoot me, Mr. Bigelow? Or will you let me pass?”

  >

  John David

  “Hey, Linda, you can’t do that, we’re safe here, don’t be crazy!” I said, grabbing her by the arm.

  The SP guards trained their pistols on us, looking to Bigelow for orders. I brought up my miniauto, flipped it to full rock and roll as conspicuously as I could, just daring the mothers to try it.

  “I can, John, I must,” Linda told me, and took two steps forward with me hanging on to her.

  I turned to confront Bigelow. I could see that he wanted to believe. Wouldn’t you?

  What can I tell you, brothers and sisters? Maybe I figured Bigelow needed a final push. Anyway, how could I let her do this thing all alone? A short life, but a happy one, as we say in the Army of the Living Dead.

  “Not without me, you don’t,” I said, taking her hand.

  “The President on the line…”

  I whipped the miniauto around and pointed it right at Bigelow’s head. “I could blow you away right now,” I told him. “And don’t think I wouldn’t enjoy it, meatfucker!”

  Walter T. Bigelow looked straight into my eyes and didn’t flinch. The bastard had balls, you had to give him that.

  “But I won’t,” I told him. “’Cause this old zombie believes her. And you’ve gotta believe her too.”

  “Make me,” Walter T. Bigelow said softly. “I truly pray that you can.”

  “Then try this,” I said. I smiled, I shrugged, and I threw the miniauto on the floor in front of him. “We’re gonna walk out of here to that helicopter, and we’re gonna fly back to San Francisco. You can clock us on radar.”

  I turned to face the pistols of the SPs. “Or you can have these bozos fill us full of holes—your choice, Bigelow,” I said over my shoulder. “Of course then you’ll never know, now will you?”

  And hand in hand we walked toward the armed men blocking the doorway.

  The guards’ fingers tightened against their triggers.

  The moment hung in the air.

  “Let them pass,” Walter T. Bigelow said behind us. “Praise the mysterious workings of the Lord.”

  >

  Walter T. Bigelow

  And the two of them walked out of the room hand in hand toward the helicopter, toward San Francisco, toward their faith in the wisdom and mercy of God, which no true Christian, in that moment, could justly deny.

  In all my life, no one had placed greater trust in me than this young girl and this savage young man.

  A nimbus of clear white light seemed to surround them as they walked out the door, and there were tears in my eyes as I watched them go.

  God could not have granted me a clearer Sign.

  I sank once more to my knees and gave thanks for His infinite wisdom, His infinite mercy, for His presence in that room, in that moment, in my heart, for the Sign He had granted me in my ultimate hour of need.

  The rest is, as they say, history, and this is the end of the story of my part in it.

  I did not ask the President for a nuclear strike. Instead I told him what Feinstein had told me. And I issued an order for my troops to cease firing, to let those seeking to leave San Francisco pass as well.

  There was much confusion afterward as hundreds of thousands of people poured out of the San Francisco Quarantine Zone. Congress called for my impeachment. I offered up my resignation. It was refused. Proceedings began in the House.

  But as the hearings began, hundreds of escapees from San Francisco were rounded up, and all of them tested out blue. And the dreadnaught virus was found in all of their bodies.

  So did the Plague Years end. And so too my public life. I became a national hero once more, and though there was no further need for a Federal Quarantine Agency or its director, I could no doubt have been elected to any office in the land.

  But I chose instead to retire. And write this memoir. And go off on a long retreat into the desert with my family to try to understand the mysterious ways of God. And to reconcile with my wife.

  And God granted us an easy reconciliation, for Satan had gone from her, if he had ever really possessed her, and she believed in me again.

  “It was a true Christian act, Walter, and a brave one,” she told me the night she took me once more into her arms. “God works in mysterious ways.”

  So He does. And perhaps the true wisdom is that that is all we can ever really know of the workings of His Will.

  Did Satan send the Plague to torment us? Or did God send the Plague to chastise and test us?

  If so, it was a terrible chastisement and a cruel testing. But so was the Great Flood, and the Ten Plagues, and the Forty Years in the Wilderness, and of course Jesus’s own martyrdom on the Cross.

  “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Jesus told us, and was crucified for it.

  How could that be the Will of a God of Love?

  How could the Plague Years be the Will of God either?

  I don’t know. I don’t think I ever will.

  And yet my faith is still strong. For God spoke to me in my greatest hour of need through the unlikely instrumentalities of a young girl whom I had believed to be Satan’s daughter and a vicious creature who had certainly spent most of his life doing the Devil’s work on Earth.

  Such a God I will never understand.

  In such a God I can only believe.

  Such a God I can only love.

  Afterword

  The journey of Journals of the Plague Years from initial conception to this first freestanding book publication has been a long and strange one, mirroring our passage into the Plague Years themselves in some ways, foreshadowing it in others.

  Back around 1986, I began to realize that AIDS was going to be more than a deadly new disease. A virtually universally fatal disease that spread by sexual contact would create, in fact had already created, a baleful new existential equation between sex and death, and that could not fail to alter our psyches and our society on the most intimate and ultimate of levels.

  I began to study the scientific literature, to follow the unfolding exploration of the strange nature of the virus itself, the attempts to develop cures, palliatives, vaccines. I began to ponder the unfolding politics of the situation. I began imagining what it was like to enter puberty during these Plague Years, never to have known an adolescent moment when unprotected natural sex was not linked with potential death.

  The children of such Plague Years would not be like thee and me. There would be social and political consequences. The economic impact of the Plague would grow a
nd grow. Already, religious fundamentalists of a certain extremist bent were talking of AIDS as God’s judgment on sinners, as a vindication of their beliefs, and this marginal viewpoint was likely to move closer to the national front and center.

  By sometime in 1987, I had decided that I wanted to write a novel on the subject, an exploration of a world after a full generation under the shadow of AIDS, and I was ready to write an outline to present to Bantam Books, my regular publisher.

  My agent was somewhat less than encouraging.

  “Forget it,” she told me. “You write great outlines, but no matter how good your outline is, no publisher will touch it with a fork. Because they know the distributors will shun it like the, uh, plague, too.”

  She believed that the subject was too frightening, that the public was in too deep a state of denial, out of which they had no desire to be roused, for a speculative novel about AIDS to be commercially viable; she believed, at the very least, that the publishing industry was convinced that this was true.

  To me, perversely enough, this only confirmed the conviction that Journals of the Plague Years had to be written.

  When she saw that I couldn’t be talked out of trying, she implored me to at least keep the word AIDS out of the manuscript.

  That concession to the publishing realities I did make on a conscious level. And in retrospect, I believe that I may have made a far greater concession on a subconscious level to the unfortunate commercial realities that, paradoxically, had a positive creative effect.

  My customary method of writing novels is to write an outline first for both commercial and creative purposes. Commercially, an outline is something to show to a publisher in order to secure a contract. Creatively, the writing of the outline is where I first tell the story to myself, where I develop the structure, the settings, the characters and their voices.