Code Orange (3 page)

Mitty loved his building.

“Mitty honey, help me unpack the bags,” said his mother.

In a million years Mitty would never understand why she brought groceries back and forth. Especially now, trapped between
Beowulf and
infectious disease, he did not want to get involved with leftover lettuce. He started to tell his mother he was busy, but she was smiling at him with such affection that he smiled back.“Sure,” he said cheerfully, and
used up another precious ten minutes. Then he had to spend a while looking out the window. Considering how low they were, just the eighth floor, they had a great view, north up Amsterdam where it crossed Broadway. Both avenues were clogged with vans and trucks and buses and taxis. When the lights changed, even on this icy February evening, people poured across the street with their little tots zipped up under the plastic covers of their strollers, with their dogs and shopping carts, their briefcases and their bags and bags and bags of groceries. Mitty admired a bicycle delivery guy narrowly escaping death as he crossed streets against traffic while balancing pizzas.

New Yorkers were strong because they carried everything a suburbanite would drop in the backseat of his car. They were strong because they got so much more exercise: their lives were full of sidewalks, stairs and detours; they were always running to grab a taxi, racing to catch a train and threading through crowds, while carrying what they needed, lacking a car to toss it in.

Mitty's family pretty much only used the car to go to the country. In town, it was a time-consuming pain just getting the car out of the underground lot, never mind fighting city traffic, but finding a parking space close enough to their destination so that there was any point in taking the car to start with was the real obstacle.

His father closed the door to his study, probably returning business calls or else ordering food (Mitty's dad loved delivery: there was nothing he would not have delivered; he certainly wouldn't walk across the street for books; he'd have Barnes & Noble deliver), and his mother closed the door to their bedroom, preparing for a shower (she took a mysteriously high number of showers, like Mitty
with naps). Mitty got the Blockbuster card from the little stack of family-use cards on the kitchen counter (the Metropolitan Museum card; the public library card; the Museum of Natural History card), left the apartment, decided to take the stairs, pounded down eight flights as fast as a fugitive, or so he told himself, went out the back way, jogged around the corner and lucked out.

They had the movie.

“Dude,” said the movie guy, checking out
Beowulf
.“Is this for school?”

“Yes,” said Mitty. Why else would he look at it?

“Dude, you are so going to flunk your test,” said the movie guy. “It does have a monster named Grendel but nothing else matches. You gotta read the book.”

Mitty was awestruck.“
You
read the book?”

“A decade ago.”

“You pass the test?”

“I'm working at Blockbuster. What's your guess?”

Mitty was still laughing when he got back to the apartment. He laughed until his cell phone rang.“You do your algebra yet?” asked Derek.

Of course he hadn't done his algebra yet.

Weekends were for rest, anybody knew that.

Mitty was actually doing fairly well in math, so now he faced another question: should he do his math first, thus maintaining a decent standing in one class, anyway, or try to accomplish something in
Beowulf
or something on his biology paper, maybe lifting himself to a passing grade in those classes—but risking failure in the one subject in which he was okay?

Mitty felt that watching the movie was a good response to this dilemma.

Having fallen asleep in the first few minutes of
Beowulf
, Mitty got up the following morning telling himself it was better to have had a good night's rest and be fortified with a hearty breakfast than to have actually done any homework.

He looked in on his parents, who rarely went to bed before midnight or one and rarely got up before nine. Mitty had been on his own in the morning ever since he could remember. He was always surprised and touched by the sight of his parents asleep. He couldn't look at them very long, or he would get a stab in his heart, as if these unconscious people needed him in some way he would never discover.

Mitty left the apartment silently, locked the door behind him, grabbed an elevator and went out the back. The high buildings of the West Side created canyons of slashing wind. Even Mitty, who liked the cold, braced himself against the February blast. He passed any number of diners, delis, sidewalk coffee vendors, coffee shops, corner groceries and bakeries, considering each one carefully. He was on the lookout for breakfast, and the decision was difficult: should he go the chewy route (bagel)—and if so, what flavor? Or should he go with soft and sweet (croissant, Danish) or have a fried egg and bacon on a roll?

He ended up with two Krispy Kreme original doughnuts, which he ate walking the remaining nine blocks to school, where he lucked out. In English, there was a sub. No
Beowulf exam
. Instead, they were sent to the library.

Mitty grabbed a computer screen and went to Google. He meant to research variola major, since it was now his
topic, but even though he knew what the result would be, he typed in virus. This brought up 2.5 million hits: virus bulletins, antivirus advice and instructions for fighting off viruses. Of course, these hits were for computer viruses, but who cared?

When he got bored, Mitty did a search for variola major and was guided to the CDC site. This was a nice coincidence because, he remembered now, the CDC was supposed to be his first move anyway. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, has the premier site for reliable information for all of you except Melanie, who's doing plant disease,” Mr. Lynch had said.

Mitty scrolled around. Variola major turned out to be smallpox, a disease Mitty had vaguely heard of. It was medieval or something, like the Black Plague. It turned out that nobody got smallpox anymore. It had been destroyed decades ago. The CDC actually said, “Surveillance for a disease that does not currently exist anywhere in the world presents unique challenges.”

Surveillance for a disease that didn't exist sounded like something from a TV exposé: “What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I get a huge salary from your tax dollars to oversee a disease that doesn't exist.”

Mitty did a news search to see what was up in the smallpox world. He found very little, which was reasonable, considering it didn't exist. He did locate a case of monkeypox in Wisconsin. Some people had bought a prairie dog for a pet, but it had spent time in the company of a Gambian giant rat from Africa, and the rat had a bad case of monkeypox, which the prairie dog caught and gave to one of its owners. Mitty felt that anybody
nuts enough to have a prairie dog for a pet should not be surprised when they got diseases. He looked up monkeypox to see what rats in Gambia were up to that they were coming down with monkey diseases.

He was enchanted to find that just about any creature could have its own personal pox: there was skunk pox, pig pox and camel pox. Parrot pox, dolphin pox, and croc pox. There was even mosquito pox. Mitty was pretty sure that pox were spots, so exactly how did you spot spots on a mosquito's complexion? You'd have to have a seriously powerful microscope. The paragraph went on to explain that since bugs don't have skin, they also don't get a rash. Instead, the bug goes insane.

Right away Mitty had a new life plan: he would study insanity in insects. It seemed like a big field, probably without much competition because there would be so few paying patients.

When Mitty arrived in the school lunchroom, he was in an excellent mood, buoyed by thoughts of mosquito insanity. He sat with Derek and Olivia. He and Derek congratulated each other that they'd had a sub in English. Olivia would have the same sub when
she
went to English, which for her was the last period of the school day.

“Are you telling me neither one of you has read
Beowulf yet
?” said Olivia, frowning. “It's very short,” she said, implying that anybody could read it, even Mitty or Derek.

Mitty responded with pleasure, thinking how pretty she looked with that little crease of concern across her forehead. Derek responded with loathing, thinking how repellent she looked with that little crease of superiority across her forehead.

Mitty avoided suggestions that he ought to be reading, so he said,“How are you coming with typhoid?”

Olivia smiled back, which was one of her best points: she never clung to an annoying subject the way Mitty's mother and sister did. “I'm finding so much on the history of typhoid and it's so exciting,” she said, eyes sparkling with research joy. “I'm hoping Mr. Lynch will give me permission just to do typhoid history and not bother with current events and treatment. You see, I've found out about a woman named Mary Mallon who was responsible for infecting forty-seven people with typhoid, right here in New York City in the early nineteen hundreds. She was a cook and everybody she cooked for got typhoid because she had handled their food. Eventually she was known all over America for infecting people, so they called her Typhoid Mary. When the authorities finally caught her, since she was just a carrier and had never gotten sick herself, she refused to believe she was a problem and she refused to stop being a cook. So they locked her away in a prison on an island in the East River. What I want to do, Mitty, is visit that island. It's a bird sanctuary now. Want to come?”

Naturally Mitty wanted to invade a bird sanctuary in the Bronx in February in icy weather. Boats probably weren't allowed to dock at a bird sanctuary even in July, and the likelihood of finding a captain willing to sail through ice floes was low, and he and Olivia did not qualify as high-level bird-watchers deserving of such a treat, and furthermore, Typhoid Mary probably hadn't left any traces—but so what? “I'm on,” said Mitty. “What's the island?”

“North Brother,” said Olivia excitedly.

Mitty had never heard of it. But there was a surprisingly high number of islets around Manhattan. Liberty, Ellis and Rikers were the famous ones.

“I haven't figured out how to get there yet,” said Olivia worriedly.

“I have complete faith in you,” said Mitty, who did. He and Olivia had sat next to each other in two classes the year before and he had not noticed her. This year, they were in one class together and he noticed her every moment and thought about her every day, sometimes every hour. Mitty had mixed feelings about this. The reason he hadn't asked her out was that half his life was already spent thinking about her and he wasn't sure about handing over the other half as well.

Derek disliked topics that did not include him, so he said,“I, meanwhile, am trying to figure out the motive of the murderer of Ottilie Lundgren.”

Olivia turned her frown of concern upon Derek. “It was established that the person or persons who mailed that anthrax did not have individual victims in mind. Those deaths were random accidents.”

“They were random
murders
,” Derek corrected her. “I need to know the guy's motivation or I won't find him. See, normal people aren't killers. Normal people don't murder at all, let alone fly planes into occupied buildings or strap bombs to their chests and detonate themselves in pizza parlors. You have to be very hate-filled or very brainwashed to do those things, like say Mohammed Atta flying into the Twin Towers. On the other hand, Atta was crazy but had guts, whereas pouring dust into an envelope doesn't take guts. It's a weak act, so I'm looking for a weak person.”

Mitty vaguely recalled pouring dust into an envelope of his own.

“Did you know that Ottilie Lundgren liked to read mystery novels?” asked Derek. “What do you suppose it was like for her to lie in the hospital, and she's ninety-four years old, and all of a sudden, she realizes
she's
the murder victim?”

Mitty finished his carton of chocolate milk, fortifying himself because in about a minute, he was going to be kicked out of advanced biology in front of everybody. “I still don't see how you find the guy on the Internet, Derek.”

“Google claims to have more than four billion Web pages. There's got to be one where that murderer checks in. Because what's the point if you don't brag? What's the point if you don't get credit?”

“You think it was one person, not a conspiracy?” asked Mitty.

Derek nodded. “A single evil person.”

In New York, the word
evil
made everybody tense, just like the word
terrorist
. Everybody knew what the words meant, and nobody liked to use them. New Yorkers wanted total protection against evil and against terrorists, but no New Yorker wanted to admit that either one existed. But every person who had seen the towers collapse and heard the recorded voices of those about to die making their final phone calls to someone they loved knew about evil.

New York was a big town. At some point Mitty must literally have crossed paths with evil, but he hadn't noticed. That was the scariest part of the anthrax killer: he was still out there, leading the same old life in the
same old place with the same old colleagues, keeping his evil safe.