Code Orange (8 page)

Mitty went online and wandered around on the CDC site again, ignoring its little sidebars filled with warnings and its little hotlines for consulting staff if you perceived an emergency.

They didn't use Mitty's favorite phrase,
hot agent. Lethal incurable disease
was their term. Then he went to the site run by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, abbreviated USAMRIID and pronounced “You-
sam
-rid,” which ran Maximum Containment Laboratories.

There was something very comforting about USAMRIID. These were Americans who knew what they were doing, as opposed to Mitty, an American who did not have the slightest idea what he was doing, other than getting the shakes over homework. That was when you knew you had bottomed out.

Mitty decided to look up North Brother Island instead of do homework. Those people who arranged walking tours in New York City (Lower East Side walks; jazz in Harlem walks; mystery book walks) could probably arrange a Typhoid Mary walk. That would be a terrific present for Olivia. Mitty happened to know that Valentine's Day was coming up. He knew this because
his mother began mentioning holidays weeks ahead of time, giving his dad time to close in on a gift and arrange a celebration. Approximately forty-eight hours prior to the special day it was Mitty's job to ask Dad whether he was ready because if he failed, Mom would kill him again this year.

It dawned on Mitty that if New York City had a typhoid hospital, it must have had a smallpox hospital. And if they isolated typhoid on an island, wouldn't they also isolate smallpox on an island? He loved online research and he was good at it, so it took only a minute to find that the island was Roosevelt in the East River and that the smallpox hospital, although in ruins, still existed.

Mitty threw on a jacket and left the building. He had a great digital camera but didn't remember it until he was on Broadway, so he stopped at Duane Reade to buy a disposable one. Not too shabby, thought Mitty, ripping off the cardboard. For my disease, I'll have a mummified body part
and
photographs of a historic hospital.

Why would a doctor save scabs, anyway? Pathologists saved stuff like diseased liver slices or brain tissue to study later in a lab. Had a doctor back in 1902 planned to study those scabs? And then forgotten about them? Or died of smallpox himself before he could do anything?

Perhaps there were still things to learn from those scabs, in which case some scientist or physician would love to have a look at Mitty's variola major remains. I could go one better than some lousy interview like Nate's, Mitty thought. I'm the owner, so I can make those scientists beg and plead.

Maybe he would design a Web site. He'd call it Got Scabs. That would attract some attention. Probably not
from the right people, though, because that was the thing about the Internet; the wrong people were there too.

Derek had Web sites of his own and would definitely help design Got Scabs or even take over the whole project. But no matter how much work Derek did, it would still mean work for Mitty, and so Mitty rejected the idea.

He jogged across Central Park, passing the softball diamonds with their tattered winter look and the carousel building, shuttered and sad. He cut across traffic near the Plaza Hotel, where even in this weather a few tough horses were giving carriage rides.

He had never taken the tram ride to Roosevelt Island even though he always meant to, because in
Spider-Man
, there was a great scene involving the tram.

The tram was waiting on its platform. When it was docked, there was nothing exciting about it. Mitty swiped his MetroCard and boarded. Gloomily, he perceived that there was going to be nothing exciting anyway. It was just a box with windows on a cable. Besides,
Spider-Man
had been filmed at night, when anything could be made mysterious.

A lot of the other riders knew each other, the population of Roosevelt being pretty small. There were mothers with strollers, shoppers with bags, old guys looking mournful, and four little boys who, if they were with a grown-up, were ignoring that person. There was a dramatic mix of races. Probably because the United Nations building was across the river from the island, so UN people were likely to think of living on Roosevelt Island, whereas regular people cringed at the thought of being forced to live off Manhattan.

The tram moved slowly and without bumps. For a minute, Mitty had an outstanding view in all directions. He looked down at the rough currents of the East River and the heavy car traffic on the Queensborough Bridge and then they were down. Everyone else got on a little bus, so Mitty did too. Roosevelt Island faced a boring part of Manhattan. Mitty had not known there was such a thing.

He went into what looked like the only grocery store in town to buy some Advil and a bottle of water. He was beginning to worry about the number of headaches he was having. The clerk told him where to find the smallpox hospital ruins on the southern tip of the island.

Mitty walked back, passing the tram station and then a long-term hospital still in use, with that hunkered-down look of institutions in winter. Cars were parked everywhere, which puzzled him until he realized that from the other direction, Queens, there must be a car bridge. Roosevelt had exactly one road, the island being too skinny to fit two roads, and not a single car was being driven. Not a single person was walking either, although it was so cold, it might just have been that everybody except Mitty had a brain.

The pedestrian path along the East River came to a sudden eerie halt at an extraordinarily high chain-link fence topped with rolls of slicing wire. Bolted to the fence were huge
NO TRESPASSING
signs. There was even a call box in case you needed cops.

The smallpox hospital ruins were kept behind
this
? They didn't even want people near the
building? After all these years
?

Mitty took another Advil. So the CDC could say what it
wanted, but in real life, New York City didn't want human beings touching the very walls where smallpox had once lived.

The last case in the United States had been in 1949. Was New York City still worried, almost six decades later?

Then he saw that there was a door in the fence— padlocked
open
. Mitty was disappointed, having hoped to test his Spider-Man skills by scaling twelve feet of chain link covered with razor wire. He walked between low chain link to keep him safe from the East River and high chain link with more
NO TRESPASSING
signs.

Darkness was closing in. The ugly grounds and the rough water, the lowering clouds and the shadows blended into one grim tapestry. Against the dusky sky he saw gothic towers, with windowless arches.

His pace slowed.

Trees grew inside the walls. The turrets were separating, trying to collapse, the way patients must have collapsed in smallpox agony.

The hospital ruins were beyond hope. Like smallpox victims. Mitty felt as if he'd been thinking about smallpox for a century.

He took two photographs of the gothic remains and a blast of light enveloped him. He was blinded like a deer about to be poached.

Mitty flung an arm up to shade his eyes and ward off the enemy—but it was just floodlights coming on automatically to silhouette the romantic crumbling stones against the darkening sky.

It looked like a movie setting.

It
was
a movie setting.

It was where Spider-Man and the Green Goblin fought to the death in the final confrontation.

Mitty started laughing. He was so glad there had been no witness. Mitty Blake: scared of electricity. So glad he had not said out loud that New York City still had fences to prevent the spread of smallpox when in fact it had fences to keep movie fans from spidering up and down ruins that could fall on top of them and kill them.

His cell phone rang and he answered, still laughing. It was his mother. Mitty didn't tell her that he was exploring little islands alone in the dark. She chattered excitedly about her day and they discussed dinner while Mitty headed back to the tram. She made her phone-kiss sound and Mitty phone-kissed back and boarded.

Olivia had left him a text message. “Productive afternoon at the library. Am now walking past the nursing school about to get on subway.”

The tram reached the peak of its short trip, where for one moment there was a spectacular view in each direction as Manhattan lit up for the night.

Mitty loved Olivia's courage. It was not fashionable to have a productive afternoon at a library. It was not chic to thrive on knowledge. How easily the other girls could turn on Olivia; how readily the guys could scorn her. He thought of how she sat at the front of a classroom, where even Mitty, who liked her, would not go. She was there so she didn't have to see the contempt on the faces of those to whom school was a stupid waste of time, and so was Olivia.

He hoped that the girl who had once been Bunny would never get tromped on, especially by him. But he didn't know how to say that, so instead, he called her and
said,“Why'd you mention nursing school? You want to be a nurse?”

“No. That was geographical detail. I wouldn't be good at nursing. I'm not actually that fond of individual people.”

Mitty loved people. It was why he loved New York: all those people. He could watch anyone in New York and be satisfied. He loved their expressions and hairstyles and dogs, their tattoos and T-shirt slogans. Mitty's great skill was making friends. He was friends with doormen, janitors, pretzel vendors and police officers. He was friends with the jocks and the zeros, with people standing in line for coffee or movie tickets. He loved listening to other people's cell phone conversations. He loved what people would say out loud. When they spoke some other language and he couldn't listen in, he felt deprived. He was taking Spanish not because colleges required foreign language but so he wouldn't miss out on conversations that didn't include him.

Spanish! That was his fifth subject! Mitty felt better now that he'd remembered.

“I want research,” Olivia was saying.“Medical, historical or both. Right now, I'm interested in the concept of quarantine. That was the only medical recourse for thousands of years. But there are moral problems with how they handled Mary Mallon.”

He could not think of another girl who would dare use disturbing words like
moral
in conversation with a boy she liked.

When Olivia descended into the subway, Mitty lost her signal, so he called his father.“I didn't see you this morning,” said his father regretfully, “and I won't get home
until you're asleep.” His dad worked for an international firm, where everybody was happy to have one guy willing to hang out in the office at night for calls from the West Coast and Japan.

“I'll be up working on my term paper,” Mitty told him. “Guess what, Dad. Mr. Lynch thinks the first half is outstanding.”

His father had wanted to hear these words for a long time. “I want to read it,” he said eagerly.

Mitty got off the phone. He was shivering again. It was not from cold.

He had not yet mentioned the scabs to anybody, even Olivia. He had not written about it. He had visualized a clear plastic sleeve into which he would drop the envelope so he could include it with his report, but now he wasn't so sure.

The thought of his father touching that envelope made Mitty shiver again.

I know it isn't dangerous, he thought.

But what if it is?

Koplow, page 49:

If Mitty used language like that, Mr. Lynch would totally know he was copying. So Mitty wrote:

Tucker, page 138:

Mitty reflected on this. So a virus was happy (so far as a virus had emotions) in a freezer or in egg powder. How happy was a virus in an envelope? And what did “extremely stable” mean? That it could still infect? And could it still infect just the following day or even a hundred years later?