The Virus

by Janelle Diller

As people began to remember I commuted from Colorado, they dropped by my cubicle to get whatever gossipy particulars I might have by virtue of living in the same state as the outbreak. Maybe if the Baja Breeze people hadn’t been so far behind with their data conversions—and every other task in the project—I might have felt chattier. But I didn’t want them to drag me down with them. And since the work I didn’t finish in California by Friday would be work I’d be doing in Colorado on Saturday and Sunday, I avoided bringing up Cindy Marshall’s details.

  I made an exception for Michael de Leon, though. We grabbed some Mexican fast food on Thursday and exchanged low points from the week. True to the realities of our jobs, Michael’s low points were much lower than mine. After all, if the project didn’t come in on time and on budget, it was his neck that would get chopped. Given the Baja Breeze skill set and work ethic, Michael fully expected to be without a neck—or a job—when this project finally finished, even though he was one of the company’s most competent project managers.

  “And now with all those smallpox posters up, people are starting to call in sick with fevers.”

  I laughed, but probably shouldn’t have. “You’re kidding.”

  Michael just shook his head and looked a little pale himself.

  “They’re staying home because they think they’ve got smallpox?”

  “Apparently so, but I’m guessing they’re not so conscientious about their fevers that they’re not out shoe shopping.”

  “As long as no one coughs on them.”

  Michael rolled his eyes.

  Someone at the next table rolled through a deep and raspy series of coughs.

  I flinched, then caught Michael’s eye. He’d flinched, too. We laughed nervously.

  “Smoker’s hack,” I said and Michael nodded, but I know both of us were silently thinking, I hope.

  “I hate all this media hype. It’s the scare of the week. I mean, what are the odds? You live in Colorado. Are you afraid you’re going to get smallpox?”

  I shook my head. “Not very. I probably spend more of my anxiety vouchers on flying. Takeoffs, landings, crashing into other planes in the air—you know, all the irrational stuff.”

  He nodded even though he lived within driving distance of Baja Breeze. “And now you have to worry about ambient air.”

  “My theory is that I’m now immune to everything because I’ve been exposed to it all. Kind of like a kindergarten teacher.”

  “So what are people saying in Colorado?”

  “If I were ever home, I could tell you. All I get is what Eddy sends me, and he’s paranoid about everything.”

  Michael smiled. “Too much time to surf the Internet.” I’d told him about Eddy’s job hazard.

  “Here’s the funny thing, though. Eddy ran into an old friend of ours who’s been living in Salida, where the outbreak was. She said no one else got exposed. These guys were just a couple of town drunks, and they weren’t even in town during the contagious stage of the disease.”

  “But the papers are saying at least a dozen others are being treated.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Not according to Cindy.”

  “Couldn’t it be, though? That they would whisk people out of town so they didn’t spread the disease. Or the panic.”

  I shook my head. “It’s a small mountain town that’s twenty or thirty miles away from the next town of any size. People talk. They’d know someone who knew someone. You can’t get a DUI in that town without everyone hearing about it. You don’t think this would be big gossip?”

  “So who are these other victims?”

  I shrugged my shoulders again. “You tell me.”

  “It’s all just kind of weird, isn’t it?”

  That was my word, but because I liked Michael, I let him use it. For the moment, there wasn’t a better one.

  Unfortunately, for my flight from San Francisco to Denver, I didn’t need Ixquick or even Google. The posters at Baja Breeze had shouted about coughing and sneezing. Wouldn’t you know it? My entire plane seemed to be carrying coughing and sneezing people from the West Coast to Colorado. The young man next to me suffered from a particularly wet hack. Even though he covered his mouth and nose with a well-traveled handkerchief, I could still see little sneeze droplets spray out into the sunlight and onto the seat in front of him. Somewhere over Utah, he started lightly snoring. I’m embarrassed to admit that I used his naptime to look for red blotches on his face. I assumed that’s how the pustules began. Sure enough, he had five red bumps emerging on his cheeks and neck. The rational side of me said he was young enough to simply have a bad complexion. But the newly fearful side of me said it was more and this was the future. After all, who wouldn’t long to go home to die if they thought they had a terminal illness even if the trip was the ultimate selfish act?

  I started up my computer, initially to distract myself with some leftover work. Instead I couldn’t help myself and read some of the CDC bulletins that Eddy had so kindly forwarded to me. The CDC information didn’t encourage me. “The period of contagion begins with a two-to-four day nonspecific prodrome of fever and myalgias before rash onset.” I had no idea what prodrome or myalgias meant, but I certainly understood fever. It was all I could do not to reach over and check my seatmate’s forehead. He didn’t look flushed or sweaty. He only sounded like he had walking pneumonia.

  When we landed in Denver, I stopped in the restroom and scoured my face and hands and wiped down my leather jacket. None of the other women stared at me, which tells you something about the national mood.

  Eddy tossed my bag into the back seat and greeted me with a wet kiss on the lips.

  “Good kiss,” I said as we pulled away from the curb. “Now we can both suffer through the ravages of smallpox together.”

  “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather get ravaged with.” He was in a good mood for having been by himself all week.

  I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, sorry that the decades and Detroit had put a console between our seats. I fell in love with him because of his loose black curls and blue, blue eyes, and I stayed in love with him because of his wit and intelligence. I missed him.

  “I’m half serious. I sat next to a guy who sneezed and coughed the whole way from San Francisco to Denver. Even if it wasn’t smallpox, whatever he had is going to be disgusting after the incubation period.”

  “I thought you were immune to every communicable virus in the continental United States.”

  “Or so I thought.” I stared out the window, glad that I’d gotten home while there was still a trace of red on the mountains. “It’s funny how your head changes with all of this.”

  Eddy nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “I’m not a fearful person. I’m careful and not stupid. I didn’t worry about SARS or H1N1. I never worry about the flu. A window opened in my head this week, though.”

  “So you’ll get vaccinated if it becomes available?”

  I knew the answer to this already because I’d thought of nothing else since I’d buckled my seatbelt on the San Francisco flight.

  “That was the worst flight I’ve ever been on.” I watched his profile.

  Eddy raised an eyebrow at me. “Worse than the lightening strike coming into Chicago last summer? Or the aborted landing in Wichita before that?” He had no trace of cynicism in his voice, which he would have had a right to have. I’d sworn off flying forever with both of those flights, even though I was back on a plane the following week.

  “This was a different kind of fear. Those were sudden and dramatic. But they were also flukes. How many hundreds of thousands of miles have I flown, and I’ve never experienced either of those before or since? This is different,” I said again, more to process why than because it was a new thought. “There was never a moment of sheer panic. In fact, my heart rate probably never even bumped up. But this is a very tangible fear. If I’m vaccinated, I can control the outcome. I don’t have to pay attention to it anymore. I can spend my en
ergy steeling myself against the more mundane communicable viruses or even E. coli.”

  “So you’ll get vaccinated if it becomes available?”

  I looked out the window again at the tangle of mountains fading into evening shadows. And then I looked at him again. “I don’t want to be afraid.”

  CHAPTER

  06

  THE BEST THING ABOUT NEBRASKA BEEF PACKING CORPORATION, my client in Timber, Nebraska, was that it wasn’t Baja Breeze. I didn’t see any navels. The visible cleavages fell more into the plentiful bosom category than the sexy breast one. And the only facial metal showed up in the smiles of the children that marched in frames across the desks of everyone who owned a desk.

  The worst thing about Nebraska Beef Packing was that Timber was two hours from Lincoln, the closest airport. The second worst thing was that NBP was, at the end of the day, a meat packing company. Although I can long for a juicy steak, I’d just as soon pretend there’s no connection between what comes wrapped in cellophane from my grocery store and what was hanging, bloody and heavy, on a hook just a few doors down from the conference room where I worked. A scent of something—maybe sour, maybe sharp—always hung in the air. I’d learned to bring a scented candle along and light it several times a day.

  Plenty of people at NBP had worked at the company for longer than most of the Baja Breeze people had been alive, which was mostly a good thing. At least it was one of the reasons they were two weeks ahead in cleaning up their data to convert into the new system. But any strength overdone becomes a weakness, and if you need a good example, just take a look at what happens when someone works for the same company for thirty years, especially if you’re trying to move someone from a pencil and Big Chief tablet to a computer. Still, aging meat odor and all, I would gladly have traded a Baja Breeze for two NBPs.

  For all their differences, NBP and Baja Breeze did have one thing in common: fear of smallpox. There, in the middle of cow and corn country, the panic not only surfaced, but thrived. I figured this out without any help from bathroom stall posters the day I went to lunch with Scott Leinbach, the NBP project manager.

  Scott was a fourth-generation Nebraskan, and a third-generation NBP employee. His paunchy middle and prematurely graying hair aged him an easy ten years, but he still had a handsome face in an earthy sort of way. We sat at a table in the NBP cafeteria, which except for the amazing beef stew, reminded me way too much of a grade school cafeteria, canned vegetable odor and all. Our conversation started the way all my conversations seemed to start with clients.

  “How’s the project going? Are you on schedule? Any ugly surprises we need to anticipate?”

  Scott shrugged his shoulders and stirred a couple of packets of sugar into his tea. Maybe it was because he’d spent so many decades around cows, but he was one of the calmest people I’d ever met, certainly the most easy going project manager. “We’re doing good. The shipping application is giving us fits, though.”

  Where had I heard that before?

  “We can’t get it to sync with FindIt.”

  “FindIt?”

  “The RFID software.”

  “RFID?” I hadn’t heard the Zaan team talk about this acronym before.

  “Radio Frequency Identification. It’s the way we track our packages. But everything else seems to be falling into place. We’re not a complicated business. We buy cows; we kill and cut up cows; we sell and ship the byproducts.” He bit into his hamburger.

  I probably winced. I know I momentarily bypassed a chunk of stew meat and went for some carrots.

  “We’re ahead on data conversion. Not as far ahead as I’d hoped, but ahead.”

  I’d never heard that before.

  “We’ll be ready.” He stirred the iced tea some more. “It’ll be good to get this done and get back to our real jobs. Timing’s right. I think we’re headed for an uptick in business.”

  “Really? What makes you say that?”

  He shrugged his shoulders again, although he knew exactly what he meant. I think it was a Nebraska thing; I’d seen variations of the shrug all over town. “This smallpox outbreak. If it’s anything like after 9/11, people will cocoon. They’ll stay home more and eat out less. They’ll splurge on the little things for themselves like a good steak from Osco.”

  I must have looked skeptical.

  “Think about it,” he said. “If you didn’t have to get on a plane right now, would you?”

  “No. But that has nothing to do with smallpox.”

  “Point taken.” Clients, because they’re usually fairly intelligent, can never figure out why Zaan consultants are willing to be gone from home Monday through Friday week after week. “So would you go sit in a crowded movie theater and cringe every time someone coughs a row behind you? Do you want to send your kids to school, knowing a place like that’s already a Petri dish for every ugly communicable disease out there?”

  I shook my head. “But won’t people worry that someone’s coughing all over their meat while they’re butchering it?”

  He shrugged his shoulders again. “We’ve done surveys. Most people have this picture in their head that the whole process is so automated that a live cow goes in the door over here and a box of packaged meat comes out over there, all untouched by human hands. So even though it’s not true at all, it gives them one less thing to worry about.”

  “Perception is more powerful than reality.” It was a stock phrase I used on every implementation. My job was eighty-five percent pattern recognition. It made me look smart when I only really had to be alert.

  “Ain’t it the truth? This time it actually works in our favor, unlike people’s E. coli fears.”

  “So you’re worried too?”

  “Worried? Me? Hell yes. Aren’t you?”

  How did I answer that? Especially since on my flight to Lincoln, I’d done something that never would have occurred to me a month earlier: I brought some sterile hand wipes along and wiped the armrest and headrest on my airplane seat before I sat down. One person actually wore a disposable surgical mask on the plane, something I hadn’t seen since I’d been in Korea several years earlier.

  “Sure. I’m worried. I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I didn’t say I wasn’t.” I did my increasingly common ten-second mental sort of my life priorities to remember why I stuck with this job. These days “paycheck” topped the short list. “But I’m here this week.”

  He kind of laughed and shrugged the Nebraska shrug. “Well, if I lived in Colorado, I’d rather be in Nebraska these days, too. Even if it is Timber. I’ll tell you one thing. We’ve vacationed in Colorado every summer since I was a kid and most winters for skiing, but this year, we’re not going. Who knows what’s out there.”

  “I’ve been telling myself that it’s all contained. I mean, surely, if there’s some terrorist cell trying to start an epidemic, wouldn’t there be more cases popping up all over?”

  “Really? You think it’s been contained.” It was a statement, not a question.

  I thought about the contrast in The New York Times report and Cindy Marshall’s story. “Hard to say.” Scott was a nice guy. I had no reason not to trust him, but Eddy and I had talked in circles about it all weekend. We never came to a rational conclusion. I weighed the risk of sounding nutty with a client and came out on the careful side. “I think it’s contained, but it’s not the last we’ll see of it.” It seemed like a safe, yet honest, answer.

  His eyes narrowed slightly and he slowly nodded his head. “That’s an interesting suspicion.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and scraped out the last spoonful of stew. “What do you think? Is it contained?”

  His eyes flickered around the room and he stirred his tea some more. Finally, he said, “Not a chance.”

  CHAPTER

  07

  ON FRIDAY, THE END OF THE WORLD BEGAN. Or so it seemed.

  Eddy, of course, gave me a heads-up. A message from him pulsed blue at the bottom of my screen while I finished talking with t
he NBP Human Resources manager about company turnover and her latest grandchild. I tried my best to ignore the message, but I missed him and longed for even a five-minute cyberspace interlude with him.

  EddytheWebMan: hey

  MRiderZAAN: Hey you.

  EddytheWebMan: see the news?

  MRiderZAAN: Me? How likely is that?

  EddytheWebMan: how well i know … so glad you’ll always need me

  MRiderZAAN: Forever and ever Eddio…So what’s happened?

  EddytheWebMan: More smallpox victims.

  MRiderZAAN: Yeah? In Colorado?

  EddytheWebMan: detroit and some suburbs. maybe 18-20 people? they closed the entire detroit school system down, though. Pure panic.

  MRiderZAAN: Ooooh … not good. Not good at all.

  EddytheWebMan: ... yeah. lots of fallout. if you can believe the reports, of course.

  MRiderZAAN: Hummmm ... and what does Detroit have to do with the terrorist cells in Colorado?

  EddytheWebMan: well isn’t that a good q.

  The question had to hang for fifteen minutes with another interruption from the HR manager and pictures of not just the newest grandbaby, but of all her grandchildren. Twelve. She was from the Midwest. By the time I got back to Eddy, he must have been off someplace because he didn’t respond to my gtalk. I had to pack up and leave for the airport before he returned.

  Lincoln Airport is a long way from Detroit, but it didn’t seem to matter. A scary time is a scary time, particularly for the exhausted traveling business crowd, which is what Fridays are full of. This particular Friday, we were probably all more skittish than exhausted. The new questions the TSA agents had started asking each passenger as they went through security didn’t help: “Have you or anyone you’ve been in physical contact with run a fever in the last twenty-four hours?”

  “No.”

  We were all sheep. If we had to tell them our underwear size or the last time we’d taken a shower, we’d do it just to be able to board our planes and go home. Would people be any more honest about this than the question they finally stopped asking us about carrying packages for total strangers?