Amsterdam 2012 (29 page)

Down the hall I saw two volunteers helping a very overweight woman from a gurney into a hospital room.
 
As soon as they helped her off and turned their backs, I nabbed the gurney and rolled it back down the hall.
 
“Get on,” I ordered, “both of you.”
 
Sara
Jiluwis
climbed on and lay beside her daughter.
 
I rolled her down the hall, stopped by the supply closet for sheets, and continued down the hallway.
 

In the mornings the morgue picks up bodies that have expired over night.
 
I saw two orderlies loading a body bag down the hallway, stacking it on an industrial-sized pallet cart.
 
I scooted the gurney with Sara
Jiluwis
and her daughter down the hallway into the recently vacated room.
 

There were three beds jammed into a one bed room.
 
Sara
Jiluwis
helped me make up the empty bed with clean sheets.
 
I lifted her daughter onto the bed, hooked up an I.V., and started her on antibiotic, the last packet of which I had in my pocket.
 
There was no need to take the girl’s temperature—I could feel the heat radiating off of her.
 
I handed Sara pills to bring down the fever, and told her to try to get her daughter to drink fluids.
 

By now the nurses at my station would be screaming for antibiotic.
 
I would do the paperwork later—we were all behind anyway.
 
I dashed back down the hallway to the elevators.
  

#

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

What to do with all of the dead?
 
Funeral homes are filled up with coffins, but there aren’t enough healthy people to bury them, not enough preachers to pray for them.
 
The city has run out of coffins.
 
Some funeral homes have hired security guards.
 
People were breaking in, dumping bodies out of coffins, and stealing them.
 

The city distributes body bags at each house the way it once dropped off sandbags before the January rains.
 
People fill the body bags with their dead, then lay them in their driveways to be picked up.
 
The bodies are loaded on trucks and taken to a mass grave somewhere in the dessert.
 
At first people were furious.
 
They demanded their caskets and their funerals.
 
Then they got too sick to care.
 
Funerals are one of the “public gatherings” the mayor now prohibits.
 

When I walk to work in the afternoons, I look for the dead.
 
Almost every house I pass has had a body in its driveway.
 

Left in blue plastic like forgotten newspapers.
 

#

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Many people die and are buried without being identified.
 
Their pictures are taken, and posted on the Internet.
 
Every day I check the morgue website for Tampa, Florida.

Two scenarios run through my head.
 
That Peter died of the flu in a safe house, a trailer in the piney swamps of northern Florida.
 
He stumbled into the woods in a feverish delirium, collapsed, and died.
 
Animals and insects have feasted on his corpse, and already young saplings are growing up between his bones and hair.
 
The other is that he is in Canada, where the flu epidemic has been mild.
 
He has hired himself out as a laborer, and is muscular and healthy.
 
He tells people he is from South America and affects an accent.
 
He is dating the daughter of the Mexican foreman, and she is pregnant.
 
Both scenarios seem equally true.
 
A third scenario, that he is alive working in a terrorist network, plotting some atrocious event, seems equally possible.

I don’t want any of them to be true.

#

Saturday, October 26, 2013

I got a letter from Alex.
 
He is in a U.S. military base in Greece, and was supposed to be deployed to Turkey last week, but the military is trying to contain the influenza virus by limiting nonessential military movement.
 
President Mullet has suspended the draft.
 

Alex writes that the camp looks like a triage medical unit on a battlefield.
 
A continuous line of soldiers, hacking and coughing, stumbles to the medical hospital.
 
Every bed is full, and they’ve moved cots into an airplane hangar.
 
“They all have a bluish cast.
 
You can hardly tell the difference between the blacks and the whites.”
 
He goes on to say they get almost no medical care, “half of the nurses are sick.
 
Cots fill every corridor, every spare room.”
 
They began piling the bodies in one of the barracks, stacks and stacks of body bags like cord wood.
 
“As soon as they take away a body, another sick soldier takes his bed.
 
Sometimes he has to change the sheets himself.
 
Half the sick can’t make it to the bathroom and there’s no one to help them.
 
It’s unbelievably disgusting.
 
Blood is everywhere, on sheets and clothes, pouring out of men’s noses and ears.”

So far Alex hadn’t gotten ill.
 
“I can’t believe we all came to fight a war and it looks like we’ll all die before we ever see a single
jihadist
.”

The war continues.
 
Before aircraft carriers are deployed, sick soldiers are removed, but by the time they arrive in Greece, half of the soldiers are sick.
 
The Europeans blame the soldiers for bringing the flu over from America.
 
Now NATO soldiers are getting sick and bringing it home to their countries.
 

Alex writes, “The one good thing is the virus doesn’t discriminate between American soldiers and
jihadists
, and you know they don’t have stockpiles of antiviral drugs.
 
Several U.S. commanders got the brilliant idea of releasing POWs from infected prisons.
 
Of course they go running back to their terrorist buddies.
 
The first prisoners were released last week, and already sniper attacks are down.
 
If we had enough healthy soldiers, we could beat them back to Syria.”
 

The virus is following the course of jihad, spreading across northern Africa, south through Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, down into Kenya and Zaire, across the Middle East into China, and up through Turkey into Europe.
 
As it travels, the virus is mutating toward mildness.
 
By the time it reached South Africa and England, only six percent of those infected die.

As in the 1918 influenza epidemic, India is getting hit hard.
 
Reporters describe the streets of Bombay as being littered with the dead and dying, and the Ganges, where corpses are traditionally sent into the river on burning
ghats
, is a river of flames, clogged with corpses, the air raining ashes.

In Europe, where police failed to keep rioters and demonstrators home, the flu has cleared the streets.
 
For the first time since the
Jenever
Theater murders, the streets of Paris and London are without demonstrations and marauding vandals.

The jihad typhoon is weakening.

Where diplomacy failed, international anti-terrorist teams failed, prayers failed, armies of Christian soldiers failed, the virus has succeeded, consuming the
jihadists
’ strength, their fervor, their vitriol, leaving them too weak to hate.
 

#

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Cynthia has been in bed for three days.
 
Everyone in the family takes turns watching her, bringing her juice and soup.
 
It breaks my heart.
 
She lies with her arms around a teddy bear.
 
In her sickness she has reverted back to childhood, but her face has aged.
 
She is a Goth princess, her long blond hair loose around her face, her lips lightly blue.
 

She asks me to read from the
Quran
.
 
I hesitate—the handbook of the enemy—but I could never deny Cynthia anything.
 
So I read:

Of Allah’s Signs, one is that He created you

From dust; and lo,

You become human beings ranging far and wide.

And among God’s Signs,

Another is...that He engenders love

And tenderness between you,

Planted love and kindness in your hearts...

And yet other of Allah’s Signs

Are the creation of the heavens and the
earth,

And the differences of your languages and complexions...

And yet among Allah’s Signs,

He shows you the lightning,

...He sends down rain from the sky

and
with it gives life to the earth...

Verily in this are

Signs for those who reflect.

Cynthia starts coughing violently.
 
I roll her on her side and gently thump her back.
 
When the coughing passes, she grabs my fingers, and looks up at her poster of
Buraq
.
 
“I’ve always wanted to ride a horse,” she says.

My palm sweeps her forehead.
 
The fever is down.
 
The fever we can control.
 
We can’t control the cytokines and the other immune responses that ravage healthy as well as virus cells.
 
We cannot keep her body from destroying the very capillaries that deliver the rescuing killer T cells, or prevent fluid and cell debris from filling her lungs.
 
We cannot stop the potent destruction of the immune system.
 
“You’ll be better tomorrow, sweetie,” I lie.
 

I pry her fingers from my hand and tell her to try to sleep.

That night my father goes to bed coughing.
 
I think if one more person I know gets sick I’ll kill myself.

#

Friday, November 1, 2013

The government estimates that of the 300 million people in the United States, between 15 to 40 percent of the population will get sick, which is between 45 and 120 million people.
 
Even with a low estimate of a 10 percent mortality rate, we are talking between 4 million to 12 million dead.

The 1918 influenza virus killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide.
 
Its population was 30 percent of what it is today.
 
So I guess we can expect between 150 and 300 million deaths worldwide.

World War II killed 50-60 million.

#

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

I leave the hospital several hours after my shift was supposed to end and head down Arizona Avenue.
 
I don’t turn north toward home.
 
It’s as if all I can do is walk straight, as if turning requires too much brain function, too much coordination, too much energy.
 
Like a zombie, my leaden feet clomp one after the other down the sidewalk.
 
I walk to Palisade Park until I can go no further without going over the cliff onto Pacific Coast Highway.

This time of year when storms swoop down from the north, and scarves of moisture sweep up from Mexico, we get the most glorious sunrises.
 
The sky is bright vermillion, crenulated with red and pink like the cortex of a brain.
 
The astonishing color frightens me a little.
 
I sense like a flaming volcano such awesome beauty cannot be benign.
 

I move through the sentry palms along the bluff.
 
Below the ocean sleeps in purple, the wide beach a pale pink.
 
Within minutes, the sun climbs into the sky, and the red fades to violet, then to a hoary drabness that saps the color of the city to porridge gray.