The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  The map clearly meant something different to each of us.

  “I don’t have the luxury of not believing. Besides, if I don’t, I lose my job. Ready for that?”

  “It wouldn’t happen right away,” he said.

  “It would happen soon enough. You ready to support both of us?” I’d touched on a sensitive subject.

  “I could do it.”

  I shouldn’t have had the wine if we were going to talk about this now. I knew going into it that somewhere I’d start crying. “Eddy, we’ve had this discussion before. You want to have it again? Here we go: Maggie—six-figure income base; amazing bonuses; Eddy—Up and down income, sometimes zip; Maggie—Benefits; Eddy—No benefits; Maggie—401K; Eddy—Piggy bank. You want me to keep going?”

  “Not fair.”

  “Maybe not. But it’s true. Do you really want to sell the Porsche? Give up the Caribbean dives? The first-class trips anywhere in the world? Start draining our nest egg?”

  “We could change our lifestyle. Step out for a while.”

  “Eddy, get real. No more Australian Outback? No more Italian Riviera? No more ski weekends in Aspen?”

  “Maggie, we make choices in life all the time. I’d be willing to make those choices if you just don’t get the vaccine.” It was the most romantic thing he’d said to me in ages and I totally missed it.

  “I don’t have a choice. It really is the vaccine and my job or no vaccine and no job.”

  “This is a job you want to quit anyway.”

  “But now? What do I do for a job?”

  “You mean what do you do to define yourself?”

  “Who’s not being fair?”

  “It’s true. For too many years you’ve been ‘Maggie the Wonder Woman who jets around the world saving CEOs from themselves but doesn’t know where the dry cleaners are to pick up last week’s silk suit.’”

  “You’re jealous. That’s what this is about. If I don’t get the vaccine then I stay stuck at home like you.” I’d gone one step too far.

  “Like me? Or with me?”

  Now the tears came. “You know that’s not it. Not it at all.”

  “How would I know? This is the longest stretch we’ve spent together at home since you started with Zaan.”

  “What were those three weeks about last summer in Greece?”

  “Well, for starters, they were in Greece,” he said.

  “Do you think for a minute I don’t love you?” His sigh was too long. I got up to get the box of Kleenexes off the refrigerator. “Is this really about the vaccine, or is it about us?”

  He repeated the sigh. “Maggie. This is absolutely about the vaccine, but it’s also just as absolutely about us, just not the way you’re interpreting it.” He pulled out a tissue and blew his nose, his only hint that the wine and conversation had taken him to the edge, as well. “I’m as tired as you are of your traveling. You think I truly like living like a monk five days a week? I miss you. I miss us. I miss going to lunch with you on a random day or taking an early morning hike up the canyon or even just sharing a bowl of popcorn and watching some mindless TV like we used to do.”

  I missed him too, week after week after week. I thought he knew that, but I couldn’t even say it now because I couldn’t get it out through my tears and past the growing pile of wadded up tissues. Years after Linda McCartney died of cancer, I read that she and Paul had never spent a night apart from each other. For months afterwards, I couldn’t listen to his music because I was so jealous. I told Eddy about it and he just laughed at me, but I noticed he put his Beatles CDs to the back of his stack for a while.

  “But if I quit, what will I do? I can’t go live in a cubicle again or survive rush-hour traffic.”

  “Even if it means you’ll be home every night? You’ll find something,” he said and took my hand across the table and squeezed it. The tender moment brought another flood of tears. “But even if you don’t, we’ll figure out how to live less extravagantly. People live happily on a whole lot less than either one of us make. The bottom line is that I think it’s a really bad idea for you to get vaccinated. There’s something very off about the whole thing.”

  “I don’t see how the vaccine itself is bad. No matter how or who is spreading the virus, I’m tired of worrying about getting smallpox from some idiot on a plane.”

  “But that’s just it. We don’t know the how or who. So you have to be suspicious of the solution, too.”

  “Why do you look under every rock for a monster with an ulterior motive?”

  “Why do you take everything at face value?”

  “Because sometimes a vaccine is nothing more than a vaccine.”

  “And sometimes it’s more. You can’t ignore the weird pattern of exposure. We hear about all these exposures, but no names. It’s been almost two weeks and there haven’t been any more deaths because deaths would surface names. And now the vaccine is available months ahead of schedule.”

  “Eddy, I’m tired of being afraid.”

  He studied me. Shadows danced all around us from the dozen flickering candles. “Fear’s a powerful tool,” he finally said. “Look what it’s gotten you to do.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  THE NUMBER 972 WAS A GOOD NUMBER, if for no other reason than it came before the number one thousand, which apparently was the number of vaccines the State of Colorado had for their daily allotment. If you showed up as number one thousand one, you were out of luck. It didn’t matter if you’d driven six hours to get there. It didn’t matter if you had a “Priority 1” card. It didn’t matter if you had taken your last vacation day to make the trip. One through one thousand were magic numbers; one thousand one and beyond weren’t.

  Zaan had somehow missed this factoid on their website instructions. So it was sheer good fortune that I filled up with gas the night before instead of that morning. The extra seven minutes would have put me over the top and I would have had to make the drive again on Saturday—which carried a magic number of five hundred since the makeshift clinic would only be open till noon—or Monday, assuming my manager would have forgiven another day not on the road and billable.

  All the chitchat drifting down toward us latecomers—although prior to this, I’d never considered seven forty-five late—said that some people had arrived as early as 4:00 a.m. to stake out a place in line. Being first in line when the clinic opened was their bonus. But in the end, everyone had at least a four-hour wait. I just didn’t have to bring a sleeping bag for mine.

  From what I gathered out of the line gossip, the other people getting vaccinated were mostly doctors, nurses, emergency medical technicians, firefighters and police officers. But there were plenty of people like me who traveled and could easily and unknowingly carry the virus across the country.

  Accustomed as I was to waiting in line—ticket, security, baggage, taxi, hotel—this nearly took me over the edge. The day started out efficiently enough. We were each given a ticket with our number on it and a packet of papers to fill out that asked for everything but our underwear size:

  Citizenship

  Social security number

  Date of birth

  Location of birth

  Medical history

  Current address

  Phone numbers—work, home, cell

  Email addresses—work and personal

  Next of kin names—parents, spouse, children

  Employer

  Within the first fifteen minutes, they pulled ten groups of twenty-five people each out of the auditorium. It gave me hope that number 972 would get called before lunch, but when they didn’t pull the next ten groups until after ten o’clock, I realized it wasn’t going to happen. The instructions said we could leave and return later in the day, but I had no place to go except to find an outlet for my laptop, which I managed to do in a gathering area inside the building. I would have been totally out of luck with the outlet except that I always carry a multi-plug adapter with me so I can talk someone into le
tting me share his or her outlet.

  I could spot the other business traveler types because they were all hunched over their computers and grumbling into their cell phones about the inefficient day. The firefighters and police officers, who were more adept in the art of waiting, lounged in our area, too, They were having a good time just shooting the breeze and making occasional doughnut, sandwich, coffee, pizza, or any-kind-of-food runs. I could have kicked myself for not bringing my noise-canceling headphones because the firefighter/police crowd kept growing and getting louder. I don’t know where the medical people were hanging out. Maybe they somehow got special dispensation to cut the line and be in the first group to be vaccinated.

  By lunchtime, the firefighter/police crowd had ballooned sufficiently that there was no possible way I could concentrate enough to work. I pulled out my Kindle and tried to read, but that clearly didn’t have a chance of happening either with all the noise.

  Somehow a pizza box and a six-pack of icy Cokes ended up on my table and for the price of the space to share, the invading firefighters let me join them and their conversation.

  “How’d you get so lucky to be a Priority One?” a beefy balding guy named Carl asked me.

  I shrugged my shoulders. I’d spent enough time in Nebraska to do it right. “I travel. I guess the theory is that I can unknowingly be exposed to the virus in San Francisco and end up exposing everyone on the plane who then expose people on other planes, airports, and cities.”

  Carl nodded his head, maybe a little skeptically. “It could happen.”

  “Is your job on the line if you don’t get the vaccine?” someone else asked.

  “Not in so many words. But I refuse to travel without getting vaccinated, and if I can’t travel, I’m less likely to be billable. If I’m not billable, I’m flotsam.” I took a piece of pizza. No surprise that it was meat lovers. “What about you? Are you required to be vaccinated?”

  “Required, but no one is objecting,” Carl said. He seemed to be the spokesman for the group. “I’d get vaccines for everything on God’s green earth if it were available. You wouldn’t believe the crud we’re exposed to.”

  Several others nodded.

  Some guy with honest-to-goodness naturally orange hair disagreed. “I don’t mind the vaccine. I get flu shots every year. What I don’t like is all the stuff they’re getting out of us to get the vaccine.”

  The others shuffled. They seemed uncomfortable, but I wasn’t sure.

  “You mean the information sheet you have to fill out?”

  Orange hair guy casually waved me off. “That stuff is nothing. They haven’t asked for any information that isn’t in a dozen other places already. It’s the other stuff. The fingerprinting, the saliva samples stuff.”

  “Huh?” This was the first I’d heard of this. Eddy would’ve immediately bolted.

  I caught glances from the other firefighters.

  “You didn’t know?”

  I shook my head.

  “They fingerprint you and take a saliva sample.”

  “But why? What does that have to do with getting a vaccine?”

  Orange hair guy did his own Nebraska shrug. “They take it back to 9/11. They say if they’d had DNA they would have been able to identify at least another five hundred people from the remains they uncovered. That still leaves over five hundred unidentified, but I guess they think it’s worth it.”

  I know I stiffened. The others had stopped making eye contact. “So they’ll have my fingerprints and DNA in exchange for the vaccine.”

  Orange hair guy nodded.

  “You can’t refuse?”

  Orange hair guy shook his head. “You don’t get the vaccine if you do.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  By the time they called my number, I’d invested too much time and wasn’t willing to deal with the consequences. A woman at the computer took my form and started entering information.

  “They’re asking for a lot of stuff that doesn’t seem related to smallpox or an epidemic.”

  “Uhhum.” The woman was young, thin, and without noticeable body piercings. I took her for a straight shooter. She’d obviously been hired for her word-processing skills because she rapidly clicked away.

  “What are they going to do with all the information?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. Maybe she’d grown up in Nebraska.

  “Why do they need to know where I was born?”

  Another shoulder shrug. Definitely Nebraska-born. Why did she move to Denver?

  When she came to the spot on my form that said I worked for Zaan, though, she perked up and finally got chatty. “We’re using Zaan software for this.”

  I waited for the other shoe to drop, but it didn’t. It dropped all the time with my clients because it was so hard for them to change from their old software to Zaan, regardless of which was better or easier to use. Change is change. The only kind of change most people like is the kind they get from a vending machine.

  “It’s really user-friendly.”

  “That’s good to hear.” I leaned over the computer screen and saw the familiar blue and green Zaan-style web form.

  “We have to scan the forms in to get the signatures. It’ll pick up the rest of the information, too, if we don’t want to key it in. But most people have terrible handwriting. I spend as much time looking for errors to fix as I do just entering it myself.” She studied the screen one more time, then clicked her mouse on the “OK” button. “Down the road, the plan is to have all these computer and scanning stations and have people enter their own information. The trouble is, it’s a huge investment in computers if they’re going to have enough for the initial big rush of people, and then they’ll only need a fraction of them to maintain.”

  “The initial big rush?”

  “Sure. There’ll be enough vaccines to do the whole country within the next couple of months. Don’t you think there’ll be a huge demand?”

  I thought about my own eagerness to get vaccinated and Eddy’s reluctance. Once he knew how much information he’d have to give up, the reluctance would turn into refusal. Still, how many people were like me and how many were like Eddy?

  She seemed to miss that I hadn’t responded. “Do you know how many people we turned away today? At least a couple of thousand, maybe more. I hear it got ugly yesterday. Good thing so many of these guys are cops.” She pointed me to a taped X on the carpet and took my picture. I wished I had worn a different shirt.

  There was a pause and then the machine spit out a plastic card that looked like a credit card. She swiped it in another machine and studied a small screen readout. Satisfied, she handed the card to me. “Here’s your health card. You’ll need to carry this with you.”

  I looked at the picture. Definitely better than the driver’s license I had to carry for the next eight years.

  “Why do I need to carry it with me?”

  “Proof of vaccination.”

  “Why do I need proof?”

  She shrugged her shoulders and smiled, but her eyes were focused beyond me. She did a small stretch at her computer and looked back at me. “Almost done for the day. I’m bushed.”

  From the data-entry clerk on, the rest was an assembly line. First, someone fingerprinted me on a computer pad and then swiped my health card. Next, an attendant put my card into a reader and entered some information into a computer; then he took a quick scrape of the inside of my cheek. It was painless, but I was glad the firefighters had warned me, or I would have thought that was somehow the vaccine. Next, someone prepped my arm with a sterile alcohol swab and asked if I was allergic to anything.

  “Would it make a difference?”

  “People with egg allergies seem to have trouble.” She looked at me. “Are you allergic to eggs?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sorry, I need a verbal yes or no.”

  “No.”

  At the next stop, someone poked my arm with a local anesthetic. I w
aited about five minutes and then moved to the next station where the person had a very strange-looking gizmo that made a tiny slice on my left upper arm, inserted a nub of something, and stitched twice. He ran my health card through a card scanner, punched in some numbers and studied the screen a minute, then pressed “OK.”

  “I thought it would be a series of needle pricks like the old smallpox vaccine,” I said.

  It was the end of the day. The attendant had no sense of humor or history. “This is the new one,” was all he said.

  “But why the fingerprinting and the saliva sample?”

  He rolled his eyes. He had one more immunization after me. “Ask your congressman.”

  At the final station, where I got a dressing for the incision, I finally met someone chatty. Maybe that explained the seven-and-a-half hour wait.

  “This has really been a long day,” I said.

  “No kidding. I feel sorry for all of you having to wait like this.” She had a sweet, matronly look. She could easily have had grandkids.

  “If it took this long to vaccinate a thousand people, how will they ever do the rest of the city, let alone the rest of the state?” I asked.

  “Good question.” She swabbed my arm one more time and applied an elaborate Band-Aid that didn’t actually rest on the incision but was raised at least a quarter inch above the skin. “I think they’re using all you Priority One people as a dry run. The plan is to train more people to do what we’re doing and then hold immunization clinics throughout the state in schools. Kinda like the old polio vaccination clinics. Remember those?” She looked at me, maybe for the first time. “No. Of course you don’t. You’re too young.” She glanced to see if she had anyone waiting and then turned back to me. “There were designated days and places to go get the vaccine. I remember going to the grade school after church one Sunday. We lined up and got these sugar cubes coated in something pink. That was the vaccine. No needles, no nothing. I don’t remember much about it except that my mother cried because she was so relieved we’d all been vaccinated.”

  “I don’t understand why they need all this other stuff, the fingerprints, the saliva sample. Why can’t they just give us the vaccine and be done with it?”