The Nirvana Plague Read online

  Marley’s jaw seized up in mid-chew.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ll be under military rules.”

  Then to everyone, as matter-of-fact as you please: “Your escorts will help you get your gear packed.”

  Finally to the aides: “We’ll assemble at the Clinical Center heliport in one hour.”

  The aides answered “Yes, sir!” from around the room.

  Most of the civilians were still trying to process what had just happened.

  Somebody finally said, “Where are we going?”

  “Classified. Sorry.”

  “But it is another country, right?” Sikora said.

  “Yes. That’s why we’re traveling by plane.”

  “What, now?” Marley said. “What’s the rush?” He said it with more impatience than he liked, so he was glad when Peters protested still more strongly:

  “Some of us have families and responsibilities, colonel. Suppose we can’t just fly off within the hour?”

  “Then you’re off the team.” Then to Marley, but for everyone’s benefit, she said: “We have units in the field that are being put at risk by this thing, whatever it is. The consequences of it getting out of control could be severe. We can’t diagnose it from here. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a direct examination is worth a thousand case reports. The risk is too great to play it safe. Perhaps I’m overreacting, but—”

  Here she brought out the cool smile that Marley was coming to think of as her trademark expression: “I’d rather be labeled an alarmist a month from now than be held responsible for the needless loss of American lives on the battlefield.”

  Marley once again found himself admiring her frank patriotism. It was almost disconcerting to think the country could still produce idealists who weren’t running for office.

  “Wait a second,” Wenslau said. “We’re going into combat?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Benford said.

  “But we’re going into a war zone?”

  “You’re already in a war zone. The war is everywhere. Don’t you watch the news? — Now let’s get moving.”

  Tennover escorted Marley back to his room to “pack his gear,” as Benford had put it — which turned out to be a euphemism for leaving everything behind. Tennover told him he wouldn’t need civilian clothes or toiletries where they were going.

  “And where exactly would that be?”

  “Can’t say, sir.”

  “But it isn’t Kansas.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And it’s not a five-star Paris hotel?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But they do have soap there?”

  “Yes, sir. You will be supplied with all necessaries.”

  Aside from his wallet, the clothes on his person, and, of course, his new GI computer, Tennover refused to let him take anything else.

  Marley excused himself to use the bathroom, and quietly called Ally on his cell.

  Chapter 11

  NEWSREADER: … According to sources inside the White House these plans lay out a series of steps the government could execute to take control of the economic infrastructure. These steps would include federal management of banks and other large financial institutions — statutory control of interest rates, lending rates, and exchange rates — and federal takeover of key industries such as transportation, shipping, and defense-related manufacturing. It should be emphasized that these are only contingency plans for an emergency situation. In all likelihood they would only be temporary measures in the event of an economic crisis…

  There was a knock on the door. Karen muted the screen. Assuming it was one of her neighbors, probably come to borrow something, she went to the door and opened it without checking the peephole.

  A uniformed police officer presented her with a folded document.

  She ignored it. “How did you get in the building?”

  “Police privilege,” the officer said.

  It was the same one who had picked them up the day before. He was escorting someone else today: a short hairless man in a large dark overcoat stood behind him in the corridor.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  The officer wiggled the document under her nose. “Court order, ma’am.”

  “I don’t care.”

  The little man stepped out from behind the officer.

  “I am Dr. Noon,” he said in a weak, wet little voice. “I am your husband’s court-appointed physician. If you fail to comply with this order, your husband will be involuntarily committed to the county—”

  She snatched the order out of the officer’s hand. “All right. I get the point.”

  She gave way and the officer stepped inside, followed by Noon. He was a pot-bellied, big-nosed, thin-haired, watery-eyed little troll, and she hated him on sight. He took off his dark overcoat and handed it to the officer. Under the coat he was wearing oversized maroon scrubs, and under the scrubs, thermal underwear.

  “Please ask the patient to remove his clothes, Ms. Hanover.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Turning toward the kitchen, the little troll barely glanced at her.

  “Please have your husband remove his clothes.”

  Roger was sitting in one of their two ratty chairs in the living room, doodling on a pad of paper, in full view of everyone in the room. The cat was draped over his left shoulder and the back of the chair, watching the new guests warily. Roger looked up at them with a vague smile.

  The little troll opened a metal case on the kitchen counter and started pulling things out of it.

  Karen stepped toward him. “Who are you?” she demanded. “If we’re going to get naked here, maybe we could have your name first, you think? Just for our records?”

  “I just told you my name is Noon. Now please have your husband remove his clothes.”

  She pointed back at Roger.

  “That’s him there. Speaks English fluently.”

  Noon pursed his fat little lips and glanced up at the officer.

  The beefy officer stirred slightly. “Ma’am…”

  “Oh all right!” she snarled. “Jesus Christ!”

  She turned to Roger, but he was already removing his shirt. She helped him get his cast through the sleeve.

  Noon snapped open a plastic envelope and started pulling Latrile gloves over his hands and the cuffs of his long-sleeved undershirt.

  Roger removed his pants and jeans and stood up naked in the middle of the living room.

  Noon spoke again, in his wet little voice: “If he could just come over to the kitchen, please.”

  Karen burned. “Why do you keep talking to me?”

  But Roger was already moving toward the kitchen. In the brighter light he looked older, saggier.

  Noon stepped behind Roger and started talking: “Examination report. Roger Sturgeon. Caucasian male. Approximately fifty years old.”

  “Fifty-one,” Karen said.

  “Approximately one hundred fifty pounds. Grey hair, hazel eyes. Cast on right forearm. Extensive fading contusions over ribs bilaterally.”

  “He was mugged.”

  Roger smiled, watching the doctor inspecting him.

  Noon placed some sort of device against his back and continued talking. “Pulse 123, strong, steady, even. BP 130 over 90. Temperature 37.1. Respiration nine. Chest sounds clear, no rales or wheezes. Cardiac sounds even. Slight secondary murmur, probably right atrial.”

  Noon plucked from his case another device, the size and shape of a soda can, and clapped it on Roger’s back. Suddenly Roger’s whole chest filled with light, like his heart had burst into flame. His ribs, spine, and clavicles cast dark shadows out of the glowing red-orange flesh.

  Karen jumped. “What the hell!”

  But Roger looked down at his chest with something like amusement, his face lit from below by the light of his own body.

  Noon recorded for four or five seconds then switched the scope off again and dropped it back in its cradle in
the case, narrating, “MSVL recording taken. Simple fractures of fourth, fifth, and sixth right-side ribs observed. Healing well.”

  Noon droned on this way for several minutes, plucking out one device after another and touching it to Roger’s skin, or in his ears, or over his eyes, or —

  “Ask your husband to bend forward and spread the cheeks of his buttocks apart.”

  “Is this really all that necessary?”

  But her protest was irrelevant since Roger was already doing it.

  Noon muttered something about the condition of the anus, and took a picture.

  Karen wanted to run out of the room, out of the apartment. She knew the little troll was just doing a standard physical examination, but she couldn’t stand watching it happen, couldn’t help feeling that her husband was being somehow humiliated and degraded. It wasn’t just that Noon examined Roger with less regard than an inspector might have paid a side of beef in a packing plant. It was also that she knew this was all completely pointless. There was nothing organic about Roger’s condition. And she couldn’t believe this ugly little troll thought there could be. He was just an officious little bureaucrat filling in all the boxes on his little forms: name, age, sex, skin condition, anal tension, mental clarity. Why should Roger have to be humiliated just so the bureaucrat could go back to his office with all his little datapoints in order? It was disgusting.

  But she didn’t run to the bedroom or even turn away.

  And as she watched the little troll poking and prodding, she began to see something else going on. Or feel something else. It took her a few minutes to decide what it was, what she was feeling about Roger. Then she caught his eye, just for an instant, and she knew what it was: his nobility. He was tall and straight and calm in his skin. Inside his body, ravaged by a decade of disease and harsh drugs, inside the sagging age-speckled flesh and thinning muscles, under the grey stubble of his three-day beard, in the harsh remorseless light of the kitchen fluorescents, and most especially next to the nervous, hard-shelled little physician in his floppy maroon scrubs, Roger stood untroubled, graceful as a cat, calm as a statue, like a David standing in the middle of a junkyard. This was what was really different about him now. The rest, the stuff the doctors noticed, was just superficial, just froth on the surface of the waves. They couldn’t see that something deep inside him had changed.

  Noon turned Roger’s left wrist up, exposing his inner arm. He snapped a rubber hose round the bicep and flicked the veins inside the elbow.

  “Why won’t you talk to him?” Karen said to Noon’s back. “What do you think you’re dealing with?”

  Noon flicked the cap off a syringe, saying nothing.

  “If you think you can catch it from his voice, then what do you need the blood for or the anal snapshots? Do you think he farts psychosis?”

  She knew she was being irrational. She knew her arguments were invalid. She didn’t care. She just wanted their lives to make sense again. Any kind of sense.

  Roger didn’t even wince when the needle went in. Passively, he watched the dark red blood fill the plastic chamber.

  Noon concluded his examination, packed up his case, and reached for his overcoat from the officer.

  “What’s next?” Karen said.

  “You’ll be hearing from the Board of Health,” Noon said flatly.

  “When.”

  “Soon.”

  “When.”

  No answer.

  “Can he leave the apartment now?”

  “Only to go to the hospital.”

  “How much longer will he be in quarantine?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have a job, doctor. It’s how I pay my taxes, your salary. I need to know how long I’m going to be unable to go to work.”

  “You are not under quarantine.”

  He actually met her eye when he said that. She felt a little victory in the midst of her rage.

  “I can’t leave him here alone. How long? Ball park. Wild-assed guess. A day, a week, a month?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The officer opened the door for him.

  “When will you know?”

  The officer followed him out into the hallway.

  Karen trailed out after them and stood on the landing watching the two men go down.

  “I want to see your report, Dr. Noon.”

  As he turned the next landing he said, “It’s not public information.”

  “But you’re a public fucking servant, aren’t you?”

  They went on down silently.

  One of her neighbors peered out from his door. Tom Somebody. First-year MBA student. Karen glared at him and stalked back into the apartment.

  Still naked, Roger was back in his chair in the living room, taking up his pad of paper. The cat was slinking out from her hiding place behind a crate to be with him.

  “Fucking cat is touched,” she grumbled, and headed to the kitchen for the bitter comfort of some wine.

  An enormous black helicopter crouched on the roof of the Clinical Center like a giant dragonfly flexing long transparent wings. The whole team and its escorts, sixteen strong, trotted through the whumping downdraft and scrambled into the belly of the beast. The cabin was as big as the cabin of a small passenger plane. Benford made a point of pulling Marley into the seat next to hers.

  Once the door was locked, it was surprisingly quiet inside. Benford started talking to him privately. “You should have told me about those two other hospital outbreaks, doctor.”

  “I did. You weren’t listening.”

  Through the window beyond her, Marley saw the edge of the roof moving toward them. He hadn’t even felt them lift off.

  “Listen,” Benford said, “I’m relying on you to lead the way here.”

  “You are?”

  “This morning’s discussion was fine,” she said, looking him in the eye. “It was important to give people a chance to state their positions, raise concerns, and so on. But this thing is real. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know what causes it, I don’t know how it’s transmitted or how fast, I don’t know how widespread it is, I don’t know a goddamn thing about it, but I know it’s real. It’s not a statistical anomaly. And I know you know it too, because, like me, you’ve seen it first-hand. I’m counting on that. I’m counting on you to lead the others toward the same certainty. That starts with your own certainty. You need to take this thing seriously. It’s real. You’re here. It’s happening.”

  The NIH campus slid under them — red brick buildings on still-snowy ground, crossed with curving roads dirty with sand — empty and lifeless.

  “Colonel,” Marley said, “I’m not a committed believer yet. I know that what I saw at Joplin was something unusual. The patients in the tapes you’ve shown me certainly exhibit some similarities. But is it really the same thing? All my cases were among chronic schizophrenics. I don’t see the connection between schizophrenics and frontline troops.”

  “That’s why you’re here. When you talk to a couple of our cases, you’ll see.”

  “What makes you so certain? You haven’t interviewed any of my patients either. — Have you?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They were a couple of hundred feet up now and swung around to the south. The familiar punctuations of DC’s low skyline opened toward them: the spires of the National Cathedral, the Washington Monument, the Capitol dome.

  “I need you to focus on developing a solid diagnostic instrument,” Benford said. “Your Joplin case descriptions are your starting point. Find the commonalities with our cases. Figure out what’s peculiar to the different populations and discard it.”

  The cabin pitched forward slightly as the pilot traded altitude for speed and shot down the Potomac, low over the water, under the commercial approaches to National Airport. On the right, the towers of Roslyn marched past, and the white stones of Arlington cemetery blinked up from the white snow.

  “You know Peters is probably right about the epi curv
es,” Marley said. “Statistically, it’s meaningless. The numbers are too small and too soft to justify any conclusions either way yet.”

  “Come on, doctor. If you’d been going strictly by stats you wouldn’t have written your paper. Hell, most of the diagnoses you psychiatrists take for granted as real are statistically unsupported. If you based all your treatment decisions on stats, a lot of people would be suffering needlessly.”

  “Are you sure about that, colonel? All we’ve got so far is a handful of psychotic patients that seem to be able to go off their meds without significant consequences and a couple dozen soldiers who don’t want to shoot people anymore or get shot at. From their point of view, are they suffering?”

  On the left, the Watergate and the Lincoln Memorial came into view; the frozen reflecting pool and the snow-covered mall opened like a runway toward the Washington monument and the Capitol. On the right, the Pentagon and the Air Force memorial drifted past. The road and rail bridges flicked by below.

  Benford countered: “You don’t take a psychotic’s report of his condition at face value, do you?”

  “No,” he answered, “but you do take their reports of their experiences at face value. If they say they hear voices that you don’t hear, you don’t assume they’re lying.”

  “No, but you also don’t assume they’re hearing those voices in the same sense that you hear voices.”

  This point reminded him of an exchange he’d had with Karen Hanover a few weeks ago. She’d taken him to task for talking to her about Roger’s motives instead of talking to Roger. And she’d been right. He wondered how Benford and Karen would get along — like two cats with their tails tied.

  On the left, another helicopter flashed past soundlessly. On the right, a fat commercial jet flopped into the air off the runway at Reagan and showed them its belly as it drew in its wheels.

  Benford met his eye again. “You think this whole thing is an overreaction.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It isn’t. It hasn’t had much play in the press yet, thank God, but the CDC has been circulating a report on the incidence of new infectious disease outbreaks. There’s no doubt that new diseases are appearing worldwide at increasing rates. Significantly increased rates. New diseases. You understand? Stuff we’ve never seen before. Stuff that’s never existed before. Stuff we have no natural immunity to. We’re evolving deadly new stuff faster than ever before.”