Of Starlight and Plague

by Beth Hersant

  He liquidated all of his assets and sold the five-bedroom house on Reinzo Lane. He cashed in his shares, savings plans and pension fund and poured every last dime into his laboratory on Cáscara. And it was there, as he prepped the latest round of slides, that he happened to glance at the clock. His assistant was late again — probably sleeping off last night’s bender. Like the lab, the island, and the situation, Travis Montgomery was yet another thing Pickman had to settle for because he couldn’t get anything better.

  Chapter Three

  Igor

  “The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

  Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

  “How did I get here? Somebody pushed me. Somebody must have set me off in this direction and clusters of other hands must have touched themselves to the controls at various times, for I would not have picked this way for the world.”

  Joseph Heller, Catch-22

  “Contrary to the myth of pure evil, one does not have to be at all evil to cross the line. Once one has done so, there are powerful forces that sweep one along into greater acts of cruelty…”

  Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence

  Travis Montgomery woke up with the mother of all hangovers. He was naked and lying on a rough wooden floor next to a full ashtray and empty bottle of tequila. Oh God, the tequila. His head swam.

  He’d told the girl last night that, according to connoisseurs, you should choose an añejo tequila that has been aged for at least a year in an oak barrel. This should be enjoyed while following strict “sipping protocols” (she’d giggled at that).

  “First,” he said when he’d stopped nibbling on her ear, “you pour an ounce into your glass and inspect the color.” He demonstrated, pouring a measure into a Flintstone’s jam glass that had Fred and Dino etched on the side. He cocked an eyebrow as he surveyed the liquid’s hue. “It looks like a normal urine sample,” he nodded. “I declare the patient healthy!”

  The girl collapsed against him in fits of laughter.

  “Next, you swirl the tequila.” He did so. “Apparently it’s supposed to cling to the side of the glass creating a string-of-pearls effect… Huh. I see no string of pearls; that’s disappointing.”

  The girl reached for the glass.

  “No, no,” he said. “You take a small sip and swish it, kind of like mouthwash, so that it bathes every part of your tongue.”

  “Estás jodidamente loco!” She grabbed up the bottle and took a big gulp.

  “You know I don’t speak Spanish.”

  “You are fucking crazy!” She translated and then she was on top of him and he wanted her so urgently he could barely get his hands working to unbutton her dress.

  As always it was … what? The word “incandescent” sprang to mind and he congratulated himself on his grasp of advanced vocabulary at this juncture of the morning. The word fit, though. With Clarita he could forget about everything else and just be there with her, listening for the little catches in her breath that signified real, not pretended, pleasure.

  The girl was gone now … and so was his wallet. It was not the first time, bless her, and so he’d bought a collection of cheap wallets from a souvenir shop and each evening he’d put in enough cash to cover her fee plus a little extra because he really did like her. Her departure signaled the end of all things good and he was now left with the morning after the night before.

  First of all there was the taste. There was a woody, I’ve-just-chewed-on-a-leaf-and-for-some-strange-reason-my-mouth-is-on-fire taste. That was the tequila. Then there was another flavor, further back in his throat, that tasted just the way gasoline smells. That was the coke. The two made for a rancid combination and he groped blindly around him for his pack of Marlboros. They had gone the same way as his wallet. This too was not a new development and so he crawled over to the bed and dug a spare pack from its hiding place beneath the mattress. He lit up, took a long drag and let the comparatively mellow flavor of tobacco mask the piquant, battery-acid astringency of drugs and booze.

  Even though he just woke up, he felt like he hadn’t slept. His head pounded, his nose was sore and stuffed up, and he should have been at work an hour ago. Luckily, he had the cure. Recommended by a friend and fellow pharmacological enthusiast, the magic antidote to a cocaine-tequila hangover was … (drum roll please) … Gazpacho soup. (Don’t ask. No one knows why). And because you eat Gazpacho cold, he could keep it in a Tupperware bowl in the mini-fridge in his room and didn’t even have to go down to his landlady’s kitchen to nuke it. Awesome. You have to appreciate life’s little gifts.

  He ate, downed four bottles of mineral water, took a hasty shower and was soon guiding his old, beat-up Jeep along Highway 11, the coastal road that led to the lab.

  It wasn’t raining this morning and so his view of the sea was stunning, even if it was over-bright. This glimpse of sunshine in the middle of the island’s rainy season should have cheered and lifted him. But as he approached the lab, his mood darkened and his shoulders hunched over the wheel. I could just turn around, he thought, skip work today, crawl back in bed with Clarita and hide.

  He pulled the jeep over and stared in the rearview mirror, looking back the way he’d come. This was not the first time he’d sat on the hard shoulder and had this debate with himself. The reasons to quit this job were many and he’d recited the list often enough to know it by heart. And to stay? There was only one reason — something that happened shortly after he’d arrived on Cáscara.

  At first he’d been so grateful for the opportunity. A research position. On a Caribbean island with golden sand and clear water and bikinis. And no human patients. That was the thing. Although he’d been a surgeon in Chicago, he could not bring himself to touch another human patient. Not after Joyce Sheldon. The mother of four had come in for a keyhole procedure to remove a tumor from her adrenal gland. He’d done it a hundred times before. But after a heavy night on the flake, he’d fucked it up. He clipped the wrong vessels and cut off all blood supply to her liver and gut. She was dead in less than twenty-four hours.

  Yes, he’d messed up, but he was not an animal. He felt that he should pay for what he had done. He was going to tell the truth and let her family sue his ass for malpractice. But then his dealer called with an excellent shipment of Mexican Panda — only $300 a gram! — and he realized: that money had to come from somewhere. He had to be able to work and so he told the medical review board that he must have been disoriented by the angle of the camera during the procedure. He thought he was clipping one blood vessel when unfortunately he was clipping another. It was a fatal mistake, but not malicious and anyone who’d had to orient those tiny cameras knew how easy it was to misinterpret what you were seeing. They labelled the incident “an unfortunate accident” and he thought he was home free …until he had to pick up a scalpel again. It was for a routine appendectomy — surgery 101 — and he couldn’t bring himself to make the opening incision. His hand trembled, sweat got in his eyes and he actually fled the operating theater.

  Sitting on cold steps in the stairwell, he worked it all through in his head. He was dangerous — he couldn’t deny that. He could not kick the habit. Frankly he didn’t want to kick the habit. And so he would continue to use. If he used, he couldn’t be trusted with other people’s lives. But he was a doctor and that was kinda part of the job description and so what could he do? Then the answer came to him like a shaft of light from heaven. Research. Clinical research where the greatest harm he could do was to kill a rat or a monkey. No human patients.

  And so, here he was: working in a dump of a lab on Cáscara. But if he thought that he’d finally escaped to a job that wouldn’t prick his conscience, he was very wrong. The environment he had to work in, the things he had to do there — it was killing him. That’s why he tri
ed to self-medicate through an afternoon of particularly grim labor. And that is why he OD’ed. He should have seen it coming. One by one all the classic symptoms emerged. As he worked to obtain a sample of infected brain tissue (which required him to drill a hole through a live beagle’s skull), his mood fluctuated wildly. One minute he was euphoric, sure that he was working at the top of his game and he was going to crack this problem, find a cure, and be a hero. The next he felt crushed by a sense of utter despair. He was certain that there was no point even trying because it was impossible. Then that just pissed him off. Next it got really hot in the lab and he couldn’t seem to get a good breath of air. His head thudded. A tremor jerked his hand at the wrong moment and he thought he’d nicked himself with an infected scalpel. In a panic, he inspected his gloves for tears, wondering if he’d just fucking given himself rabies, but the latex was unbroken. He took a break to go be sick. Then one more line of coke in the bathroom and the seizure hit. It was accompanied by almost total blindness as his retinal vessels went into spasm. As he hit the floor he thought, Nice going, meathead. You’ve finally killed yourself. And then there was nothing.

  He awoke in a strange bed with Pickman sitting nearby. “It’s alive,” Aaron said wryly.

  Travis’s voice was a dry rasp. “What happened?”

  “You OD’ed, you fucking idiot.”

  “Where…”

  “I put you in my bed.”

  It was true. Travis was lying in a spartan room that held a bed, a chair and a dresser. There were other things too: a heart monitor, a crash cart, a stand laden with IV bags. He blinked and let his eyes focus so he could read the labels: Saline (for hydration), Lorazepam (to calm him), Nitropusside (to lower his blood pressure).

  “Why am I wet?” he croaked.

  “I had to pack you in ice. Your temp was so high I was afraid you’d spontaneously combust. The good news is, that despite your best efforts, you’re going to live. Your kidney and liver function are normal. Your cardiac evaluation wasn’t stellar, but your heart didn’t explode so … yay. What on earth were you thinking?”

  Travis was quiet for a long time but Dr. Pickman did not move. He just sat there, looking at his patient intently. It was clear that he wanted an answer and he wasn’t going anywhere until he got it.

  “It’s this place,” Travis said quietly.

  “What? The lab?”

  Montgomery nodded. “How can you stand to work here, to live here, doing what we do?”

  Pickman nodded and sat back in his chair. “It’s grim, painful work, I know. But it’s necessary work. Your problem is that you get too emotionally attached. You need to stop treating the monkeys like they’re your pets.”

  Travis glared at him. “I’m not the problem here. My feelings aren’t the problem here. Those animals…”

  “Those animals are vital for the research. What will it take to convince you? You have Nobel Laureates like John Gurdon and John Walker asserting that, and I quote, “primate research is still critical for developing treatment for debilitating illness.” Emeritus professors of medicine at Oxford insist that there is a strong scientific and moral case for using primates in medical experiments. Eighty percent of all drugs for the treatment of Parkinson’s are tested on marmosets. Rhesus macaques have been used to develop vaccines for rabies, smallpox, polio and AIDS. Animal testing has allowed us to treat Zika and Ebola…”

  “I know!” Travis cut him off, the effort of the exclamation making him feel dizzy. “I know all of that. But the conditions here…”

  “Are all I can afford. You asked me why I came here and I explained to you that we are doing research that no one else cares about and no one else will fund. I’ve sunk everything into this — my house, my car, my savings, my pension. There isn’t any more that I can give. This is it.” He gestured to the room around him and Travis looked again at the sparse furnishings, the lack of comfort. There was no decoration to brighten up the place, no items that made it feel like home.

  “I know that the lab is bad,” Pickman continued, “but what of it? Hell, I’ve read about labs with worse violations than this that still passed USDA inspection!”

  “It goes beyond a few AWA violations,” Travis insisted. “What we’re doing here is grotesque!”

  “I know it’s hard on the animals…”

  “That’s a fucking understatement.”

  Pickman looked at him placidly. “The animals suffer not because I’m cruel, but because nature is cruel. I didn’t invent rabies; I’m trying to cure it so that no one ever has to suffer like that again.”

  “But we have a vaccine, isn’t that enough?”

  “That is not enough!” Pickman hissed. “You think you just suffered because of your little overdose? That was a cakewalk compared to dying from rabies. When Rachel went down…”

  “Hang on, who’s Rachel?”

  And then it all came pouring out. Travis, mind still raw and body weak, absorbed it all. The terrible shock of Mary’s accident and how Pickman withdrew into his work in an effort to cope. The neighbor’s dog. And the full horror of Rachel’s death. She had died because her father had messed up (and Travis was again painfully reminded of his own fatal mistake). Pickman related the whole sorry tale in minute detail, but that is not what spoke most eloquently to Montgomery. It was the change in Pickman himself. The usually sardonic, emotionless man paced and wept. People say that some things come out all in a flood and that cliché is wholly apt. The story tumbled out of him in a ceaseless flow of horror and agony that brought tears to Travis’s eyes. Is this, he wondered, the first time he’s ever talked about it? Holy shit.

  And then Aaron handed him a photo of the child and she was beautiful. She had a heart-shaped face framed by shoulder-length brown hair clipped back in a butterfly barrette. She was smiling for the camera — a mischievous grin. He thought he would have liked her. Anyone who can smile with that mixture of innocence and devilry promised to be a lot of fun.

  Pickman had stopped talking and was sitting back down with his head in his hands. After a long pause, he spoke quietly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have unloaded all that on you. But understand this,” he looked up, “the work will continue because honestly, if I don’t keep going with it I might as well eat a bullet. Stay if you want.” He rose and left the room.

  Travis lay there and cried. He cried for Pickman and the girl and for himself — all of them little more than wreckage in this junkyard world. But then he took a long, calming breath and … Lo! He could breathe! Dr. P had done a fantastic job of bringing him around and that first easy, unhindered breath was a small taste of paradise. God, the relief of it. Gratitude and sympathy combined in that moment to bind him indivisibly to Pickman. And the experiment, which had seemed like something demons would conduct in hell, now gave him purpose. If they succeeded, then no one would ever die like Rachel again. Hence, they had to succeed. God, all the people they’d save! Surely rescuing 55,000 a year from certain death would atone for his one mistake.

  Thinking back on that night, on the reasons for the research and how it offered them both one last shot at redemption, Travis started the Jeep and headed toward the lab.

  When he arrived, he found Pickman hunched over an electron microscope.

  “You’re late,” he mumbled.

  “Sorry.”

  “Never mind. So what shirt is it today?”

  Travis brightened at the question. When Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo embarked on their trip in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the former insisted: “right … we need the car and after that, the cocaine. And then the tape recorder, for special music, and some Acapulco shirts.” It was a packing list that made eminent sense to Travis Montgomery. But “Acapulco shirts” were by nature garish items and not designed for a man of taste. In order to wear one with panache, you had to own it, to embrace the ugliness and love it for that reason alone. So, since moving to
the Caribbean, he had set himself a personal challenge: to find the most hideous Hawaiian shirt on the planet. It had turned into quite an amusing game and even Dr. P., with all his professionalism and unwavering focus, had been drawn in by the quality of Travis’s finds.

  “Oh I think I’ve found the winner. This is something special,” he drawled.

  Pickman turned around and gaped at him.

  Travis performed a little catwalk strut. “Today’s offering, fresh from the Paris fashion houses, comes to us in a jaunty shade of baby-shit yellow. Notice the word “Luau” is included throughout the pattern in fluorescent orange and that gives us a cheeky little hint about the raison d’être of this gorgeous design. It is all things luau, darling. Grass skirts in pea green and ukuleles in a blue so bright it actually sears the retinas. And don’t forget all of those luau pigs just waiting to be roasted on a spit. Marvelous. But the pièce de résistance is the clever rendering of a hand dipping two badly-drawn fingers into a bowl of poi.”

  Pickman couldn’t breathe he was laughing so hard. “That is fucking vile.”

  Travis beamed at him, “I know!”

  It felt good to laugh, but the moment was short-lived. The smile faded from Montgomery’s face. “First inoculation today?” he asked quietly.

  “Yeah, and cages A, B and F need to be cleared.”

  Cages A, B and F had to be cleared because they contained dead animals — dogs who had died in the night. In and of itself, it was an awful job: hauling the carcasses away to be burned and then scrubbing out the soiled cages. But it was the live animals that really unnerved him. Every dog in the room had rabies and the full spectrum of infection-based behaviors was on display. One large German shepherd bit down on the bars of his cage and rattled the door so violently Travis feared that the catch wouldn’t hold. Another dog, a black Labrador, had bone-in-the-throat syndrome in which it clawed at its own mouth trying to dislodge an obstruction that wasn’t even there. It rolled around and around its cage, raking at its face with its dewclaw. A beagle, thirsty but unable to drink, dug at its water bowl in frustration and then broke into a repetitive rasp of coughing until it vomited up dark bile. A fox terrier was fly-snapping at invisible insects and the rest of the hounds were baying like the doomed, damned wraiths they were. However one dog, a mutt with odd fennec-like ears, was quiet and still. He fixed Travis with an odd glare that was at once vacant and full of meaning. The dog’s mind was all but gone, but the virus was still calculating whether to make one more lunge in the man’s direction. The dog staggered and fell over on its side, its legs twitching as if he was trying to run. Travis glanced up at the label. Cage H. He’d be clearing that one out tomorrow.