The Blondes (11 page)

I sat for a second with that piece of information. I couldn’t tell if Larissa was going to say more. On the phone she usually
talked nonstop, which made sense since most of the time her only conversational outlet was a two-year-old. But the icon onscreen didn’t appear to be moving.

What plague?
I asked reluctantly.

What are you on? It’s everywhere …
There was a pause as Larissa broke the line with a hard return, then continued,
People hysterical here. Totally
.

There was another pause and then:

Two attacks in Toronto, one in Ottawa …

Her letters filled the screen, ellipses marking how quickly she was typing, an indicator there would be more to come. So I sat and waited, not sure I believed what she was saying.

More in the UK, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden …

They’re talking pandemic …

Oh, and Latvia!

Everyone keeps going to hospital …

Jay insisted I get rid of my blonde …

So I did …

But nothing we can do about Dev
.

They say infants are more sceptible
.

Susceptible!
She corrected her spelling.

He is pretty dark but we are so worried
.

They still haven’t said if boys can be affected, or just girls & women
.

I peered at the letters like they were some code I’d found on a scrap of paper on the street.

Thank god you are safe—brunette already!
she typed.

You there?
she typed.

She may have had to type it a couple of times. I remember
the heat that engulfed me as I stared at her messages.
What are you talking about?
I finally wrote.

Then she wrote,
Oh god, Haze, turn on your TV
.

I hadn’t turned the thing on since taking room 305. Hibernating from reality, I had not wanted to see any news. Now I flipped from channel to channel until a news anchor finally filled the screen. She had hair like Hillary Clinton’s, though she was half Hillary’s age.

“Tell me, Ted,” the woman said to a man off-screen, “as far as experts can tell, is the disease affecting blond and bleach-blond males?”

The next shot featured a man in a suit on the Brooklyn Bridge, its trademark steel wires visible in the shot, the illuminated Manhattan skyline behind him. “Amanda, are you there?” he asked. He had puffy, serious eyes.

The anchor repeated her question, and the view switched to split-screen windows of the two of them.

“No men have been affected yet by what has been called, by some, the Blonde Fury. Others have called it Gold Fever, Suicide Blondes, or California Rabies. But whatever its name, it
is
serious.” Behind him, the reporter said, we could see the location of the most recent attack. There was footage of a bloody bicycle helmet. It was only a couple of hours since a male cyclist had been brutally assaulted after offering assistance to a female cyclist who was unknown to him.

The anchor pressed Ted, the reporter, for details, staring out at the audience as if she were asking all of
us
to reveal what had happened.

I sat on the edge of the bed, my palm sweating around the remote control.

“Amanda, it was a Good Samaritan act gone wrong. A cyclist
spun out, then raged out
. Witnesses say the woman cyclist appeared shaky, then, I quote, ‘spun out’ while crossing the bridge on her bicycle at around seven this evening. A second cyclist, victim Owen Worthington, dismounted his own bike to offer assistance. That’s when the woman flew into a fury and attacked him.” Apparently at some point Worthington’s helmet had come loose, and the woman grabbed his head and bludgeoned him against the rails. “We don’t know much,” Ted said, “but we do know that like all the other attackers today, the woman was blonde.”

I listened without moving as Amanda explained, “The Blonde Fury can affect women of all cultures—with both natural blonde hair and hair that has been stripped to blonde or salon-created. Scientists are being consulted, and although they caution that it is too soon to offer a causal explanation, some
believe
the lack of melanin is what is leaving women and girls vulnerable to this particular disease.”

Amanda and Ted continued to discuss other cases, including that of Eugenia Gilongos and Alexis Hoff from my subway attack. And in the window on my laptop, Larissa continued writing to me:

Did you find it? The whole thing is so surreal …

Five attacks in NYC and 6 in LA …

I would phone but Jay is on it …

You there?

Haze?

My hair felt like barbed wire between my fingers. What was orange but a variation on gold? Red-gold. A thing ablaze.

Owen Worthington had been admitted to New York Methodist Hospital, where he was placed in critical condition, and had since succumbed to injuries, the news anchor, Amanda, was stating in the background. “He is New York’s fifth
rage victim
of sixty worldwide.” Beth Barrett was the name of the female cyclist who had attacked Worthington. The reporters were still using the word
alleged—alleged
attacker,
alleged
disease—even though Beth Barrett had also succumbed to injuries. Shortly after her attack on Mr. Worthington, she had been struck by a transport truck. Barrett, Worthington, Hoff and Gilongos, others too—these would be the celebrities of the coming plague, and their names would soon be bandied about as frequently as those of politicians, musicians, actors.

The news show continued: it was believed nearly two hundred women had contracted and died of the virus, with the largest concentration in the Netherlands and the second largest in the United States. “Scientists and doctors are working to—”

I’m here
, I typed.
I bought a ticket home
.

Meanwhile the TV was cautioning women with blonde hair—whether Caucasian, African American, or Asian American—to shave it to the skull or dye it a dark colour. There were no reports yet on how the virus affected women with mid-toned hair, such as myself, or how it affected men.

Bought just now?
Larissa questioned. I guess she thought I’d gone online right then and snapped one up.
Toronto’s crazy too
.

Bought it yesterday …
I typed.
Home on Monday …

It was true: between bouts of rage I had made an appointment with my doctor in Toronto, whose receptionist said I would be in fine time to “discuss my options.” It was the one meaningful thing I’d done since my meeting with Kovacs. Which meant the only person involved in my dilemma whom I hadn’t phoned was Karl.

Immigration is nuts—they’re locking it down, babe
, Larissa informed me.

Ever since Larissa married Jay two and a half years before, she had developed a habit of talking to everyone as if they were her nearest and dearest, adding
love, dear
, and
baby
to each sentence that fell from her lips. I suppose it wasn’t so different from her teenage pothead days, when every sentence had a tacked-on
man
. But
babe
meant something very different to me right then, and the word did not comfort me. I knew that Larissa had undergone a “procedure” of her own when she was young—but that was
before
. Before Jay. Before-before. It’s hard to ask advice about such things from a happily married young mother at any time, but especially in the middle of an international pandemic.

Still, I was working up my courage to tell her about you, but as I hesitated, my attention drifted back to the news. Ted on the bridge seemed to have disappeared from the broadcast. I watched anchor Amanda bobbing her stiff flaxen head at another man in the studio, a sober expression fastened on her pert face.

Someone behind the desk on TV joked dryly, “And, Amanda, you’ll be getting rid of
your
goldilocks?”

“I can see a stylist waiting in the wings right now. To all the ladies out there, remember: it’s just hair. I’m Amanda Cristobel,” the anchor closed half-heartedly.

You’re wondering how I can recite all this from memory, aren’t you? Don’t forget—this is what I
do
. The language of television is my work. It’s my language. And that moment was also a singular one. Everything changed in that moment. Larissa told me to turn on the TV—and nothing has been the same since.

The chat window on my computer chimed. Isn’t it strange how we live in a world where inanimate things beep and burp at us, asking for our attention like a crying baby? Larissa had to get off the computer, she typed. Her son, Devang, had just asked her where his mother was. She’d told him she was his mother, and he’d said he hated her. He only loved his mother who had hair. She typed
LOL but not really!
I knew this was the kind of thing she would cry about later at a party when she’d had too much to drink.

She promised to phone me in a couple days, and we both signed off with Xs and Os. After she had logged off, I looked at the updates friends and peers and near-strangers had posted online for everyone to see. One group tended to be earnest and aghast, buzzing about the plague and posting links to petitions and news groups, but just as frequently people were carrying on discussions about their cats, favourite foods, season premieres of television shows, alcoholic beverages, where they were going that night or with whom. The meaningless pitter-patter flickered steadily past like tickertape.

I took out my map of New York. The attacks had been building in the past two days. The epidemic, though still nameless, had been announced the previous day when I’d been walking around with my earbuds in, listening to music, writing emails I had no intention of sending.

Now I found there were a few images I couldn’t get out of my head.

One was of Dr. Kovacs exiting the bar. She’d teetered slightly and veered out of my sightline. The next day I had sent her a veiled apology masquerading as a follow-up about how our talk had motivated me, but it remained unanswered on her end. Maybe that’s why the image came to me. But I quickly dismissed it: I was just being paranoid.

The other image was of a woman I’d seen in Central Park. After buying my flight home at a wireless café, I’d gone to sit on the hill and watch the joggers, the women who run with SUV strollers, pushing them like they’re made of paper, their chests jiggling in sports bras and tankinis. A woman who wasn’t attired for jogging came around the corner. I remember she was ordinary looking, fiftyish, vaguely churchy. A speed walker, maybe. She was wearing a floral blouse, beige safari shorts and sports sandals with socks, and she’d muttered something, then weaved to the side of the pavement. There, she announced loudly, “I’ve just got to get this out of my system.” She might have been talking to me. She bent to the curb, her pear-shaped butt in the air, and attempted to vomit, pushing her fingers down her throat, though by that point I had turned my face away. The sounds she made were
gut-swirling, and I quickly moved to a new area of the park. I hadn’t noted her hair colour.

Worst of all was the memory of the woman in the bar bathroom who had punched the stall and the garbage can, then knocked me down. Now I felt myself breaking out in hives, worried she’d infected me. As she’d passed, had she scratched me with one of those manicured polka-dot nails? I checked my arms and examined myself in the mirror. Nothing but the flush of fear.

I spread the map out on the bed and X’ed the subway station where I’d seen Eugenia pulled onto the tracks—I couldn’t bring myself to say the word
die
, as the idea of seeing a human die was too much for me then—and the intersection where the hair salon bleach attack had happened. Those two had occurred within an hour of each other on the same day, twenty blocks apart. The Brooklyn Bridge incident had happened three days later. Larissa was wrong to say that there had been five attacks, then; the number stood at six. A quick spin on the internet revealed the other three New York locations: one in Park Slope, one at LaGuardia Airport, and one on the G line subway in Brooklyn, somewhere between Lorimer Station and Long Island City.

The attack in Park Slope occurred when a real estate agent pulled down a set of kitchen shelves in a house she was showing, then turned on the startled buyers, scratching a man and biting a woman before throwing herself out of an upstairs bedroom window and breaking her neck. The injured couple had been quarantined and placed under observation.
The airport attack involved a flight attendant. She hadn’t attacked anyone in particular, had simply thrown a fit and attempted to overturn a row of benches far too heavy for her stature. She’d been Tasered by airport security and placed in custody before being transferred to hospital, where she remained. The subway scuffle had a hero, one the media nicknamed the Big Guy from Bedford-Stuy. He’d stepped in when two women began to brawl on a moving train. The first woman, a blonde, lit a cigarette on the metro car. Another woman told her she really shouldn’t smoke there—or, as witnesses said, pointedly but politely requested that she butt it out. The smoking blonde flew into a rage, pulled out the other passenger’s hair weave, and burned the woman’s cheek with the cigarette. The Big Guy from Bedford-Stuy intervened, single-handedly pinning the attacker to the floor of the subway car until police and medical help could arrive.

Four of the women were white, the one from the hair salon incident was Thai, and the LaGuardia flight attendant was black with bronzed hair. Two were pushing fifty, three were in their thirties; one was a scant twenty-two. What they had in common: sex, hair colour, and class. They were all middle– to upper-middle-class. But those were only the attackers—the world was just starting to realize that there must be other victims who had succumbed and died in suicides or accidents. And scientists were starting to investigate whether the attacks were indeed the result of a virus rather than a phenomenon of mass hysteria.